by Verónica Ordóñez ||
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of my junior year of college was a rude awakening that I had been ignoring my anxious tendencies and overthinking for years. I was six months into a new relationship and, just like millions of people around the world, I suddenly found myself back at home under lockdown. I was in quarantine with my parents and unaware of how long it would be before I could see my friends and partner again. The first few weeks brought out some of my deepest insecurities, separation anxiety, and need for control. My interactions with my partner and family were strained as I struggled to redefine my personal connections to them, and it took about three weeks of constant worry for me to realize how much of my brain power I was dedicating to wishing I could escape these new circumstances. And I wasn’t alone. The topic of declining mental health in quarantine quickly became coined the “hidden pandemic” among news outlets, and unfortunately we didn’t have a vaccine for this one either.
But if switching to online school in the middle of a global pandemic weren’t hard enough, I was also getting ready to set off on my first ever research project. That meant that among all this chaos, there were looming deadlines for research proposals, thesis statements, and bibliographies. As I sat there in my room staring at the blank Word Document open on my computer, waiting for my perfect research topic to fall into my lap from the heavens, I looked up at the stack of novels on my desk and anguished at how I would much rather be escaping into those pages than writing this thesis statement.
Bingo.
I began thinking about how I had grown my book stack since the pandemic started, and that I really had fallen in love with reading for pleasure all over again with all this extra time at home. I also thought about how escaping into a different world and finding my same anxieties in a character had become a sort of coping mechanism for me during the pandemic. Through some preliminary research, I found an article from Publisher’s Weekly that reported that in the weeks immediately after the U.S. went into lockdown, “[book] demand spiked in such categories as outdoor skills … medical history … and literary fiction (up 10%)” (Milliot), and TheWired.com noted a large increase in “well-regarded novels, both contemporary favorites and canonical books,” or “those books that everybody is supposed to have read but perhaps hasn’t” (Knibbs). I had my guiding question: What is it about reading literature, particularly fiction, that makes us feel better in times of crisis?
I was familiar with the powerful pull of escapism, but I wanted to break it down into its very basic parts and understand what happens in our brain when we escape into a fictional world. My research led me to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of flow state. Flow state is a phenomenon most of us are likely familiar with, that feeling of being “in the zone” while doing an activity. It often comes and goes as a moment of intense focus, losing track of time and space, and great satisfaction and productivity (Csikszentmihalyi). It often requires a steady balance of challenge and skills while engaging in an activity; too much challenge and not enough skill leads to anxiety and causes you to give up the task. Too little challenge and more than enough skills creates boredom and you’ll more than likely lose interest altogether (McQuillan & Conde).
This challenge-skill balance is what fiction literature does very well. In the case of some of the world’s bestselling books, like the Harry Potter series, the challenge as a reader comes in constantly imagining and reimagining a completely fantastical world. From the layout of a Quidditch field to picturing what Buckbeak the Hippogriff might even begin to look like, there is little in our personal realities and experiences that aids us in concretizing those magical elements in our minds. However, the skillset that a reader brings to the table is sufficient life experience to pick out well-known allusions and common themes like fear, loss, friendship, isolation, and coming of age. Most readers who have been brought up in Western education will be familiar with English literary “greats” (Granger) and the Greco-Roman classics. Again in the case of Harry Potter, therefore, the spells and character names would be easily recognized by their Latin roots (i.e. “Lumos” for lighting up the wand, “Severus” for Snape’s severe demeanor, and “Voldemort” as the Dark Lord and bringer of death). And for those not familiar with the Western canon, the books have been translated into countless languages, and the setting, character names, and allusions have been adjusted to make sense to readers worldwide. Similarly, for the millions of people around the world that suddenly found themselves locked up in their homes during quarantine, reading about Harry being locked in the cupboard under the stairs strikes a pretty sensitive nerve. We could only dream of being rescued and whisked away to a world full of magical powers and exciting creatures.
Harry Potter is just one example, but considering that it’s the second bestselling book in the world after the Bible, it’s a rather brilliant case study in well-written fiction (Granger). The key is that literature, specifically fiction, presents our world to us in a way that is familiar enough to understand, yet just different enough to push us to imagine different possibilities for ourselves outside of our current realities. A well-written work of fiction literature is an ideal catalyst for creating a pleasurable flow state experience that makes our times of crisis just a bit more bearable.
As I sit here writing this about a year after the start of the pandemic, my research has come a long way from this initial moment, integrating bits and pieces from literary theory, dance, and even a bit of neuroscience. But this question is still at the root of my research. There is a reason that we escape into our favorite novels and stories when our own world seems out of whack. Not only is the world within the pages new and exciting, but for the moment that we read, we lose track of our own time and surroundings. There is still much research to be done into reading in flow state, but the mental health and wellness benefits are already starting to become apparent. And that in itself is its own kind of magic, isn’t it?
Sources:
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row, 1990.
Granger, John. How Harry Cast His Spell: The Meaning Behind the Mania for J.K. Rowling’s Bestselling Books. 4th ed., NavPress, 2009.
Knibbs, Kate. “The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Changing How People Buy Books.” TheWired.com, 27 Apr. 2020.
Mcquillan, Jeff, and Gisela Conde. “The Conditions of Flow in Reading: Two Studies of Optimal Experience.” Reading Psychology: An International Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 2, 1996, pp. 109–135.
Milliot, Jim. “The Pandemic Is Changing Book-Buying Patterns.” Publisher’s Weekly, Publisher’s Weekly, 24 Apr. 2020.
