by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

Robin Bates’ new book, “Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Our Lives and (Sometimes) History,” presents a fascinating and convincing argument that humankind’s ability to use language, not just to communicate, but to craft stories retelling and reimagining reality fuels humans’ highest-species status. Anchoring his argument in his personal experience, Bates travels the world of stories from ancient times up through the present, examining both the arguments for banning literature and how literature has changed the world for the better and sometimes worse.

A teenager with liberal leaning parents in the racially charged 1960s and labeled an “n***-lover,” Bates found help making sense of the world in books such as “Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “Literature guided me through the pressure points,” Bates said. Bates’ career choices found him teaching literature at St. Mary’s College in Maryland. “I wanted to convey to my students the impact literature could have as survival-kit tool,” he insisted. “I asked them to talk about their own lives as issues came up in the course of discussing the books we read.” The students gave Bates an unexpected gift — “I was constantly seeing literature in a new light.” Bates began collecting the student stories.

The collected narratives became a book set to be published in 2008, but the financial crisis killed the project. Bates’ son suggested he start a blog to share the insights and ideas gleaned from his students’ experiences in literature. The blog “Better Living through Beowulf” debuted in 2009. Bates maintains the blog serves two functions: to communicate ideas gleaned from his students’ interaction with literature and giving his students an opportunity to see their ideas verbalized from someone else’s point of view.

“Better Living through Literature” takes the “literature’s capacity to change history” concept back to book format. Bates acknowledged an intentional “tongue in cheek dimension” to the title of the book and blog, pointing to the propaganda-esqu Dupont Chemical jingle “Better Living through Chemistry.” “If you’re too serious about literature, you lose the entertainment value,” Bates said. “If you just see it as entertaining, it appears frivolous.”

Asked to give an example from the 18th century of literature’s impact on history, Bates cited “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “England, where ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was a huge success, did not intervene on the side of the South in the Civil War, even though their cotton trade was bound up with the South, in part because that book made slavery so toxic.”

But Bates is quick to concede, “There have been some works that changed history for the worse … ‘The Clansman’ by Dixon got made into the film ‘Birth of a Nation’ which contributed to the rise of the Klan and to Jim Crow and the rolling back of reconstruction.” Yet, by way of a footnote, Bates adds, “I don’t see that as great literature.”

Bates distinguishes between “great literature” and “emotional literature.” “I would argue, the greatest literature is never only emotion,” Bates said. “It always gets us to reflect.”

He points to Shakespeare and Tolstoy’s gift for depicting the “three dimensionality” and “full humanity” of all their characters. “In Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice,’ to begin with Shylock looks like the obnoxious Jewish stereotype, the money lender who wants his pound of flesh, and yet Shylock becomes so three dimensional, Shakespeare had to sideline him in Act IV because he was taking over the play.”

Do creators of great literature, literature that changes the world, set out to do so intentionally? “An author’s first obligation is to tell the truth, not to promote a cause or certain outcome,” Bates insisted. “It’s to call reality as they see it. D. H. Lawrence said, ‘An author should never put their finger on the scale in favor of a cause.’ Sometimes authors take really unpopular stances.”

“Better Living through Literature” delves into the historical roots of “censorship battles” which sometimes erupt subsequently. Plato’s “Republic” argued for banning poetry. “Plato thought young men reading the description of Hades in the Odyssey would become so afraid of death, they would become cowards in battle,” Bates explained.

Although “Better Living through Literature” has textbook potential for a senior high school English class or literary theory course in college, Bates stressed, “I wrote it for a general audience.” For Bates, literature opened doors showing him “glimmers” of unseen perspectives on the world. Better Living through Literature answers questions, but raises even more — questions about humankind’s capacity for creating art and where that gift has taken us and what waits just beyond the as yet unimagined. “Better Living through Literature” is available from Amazon and other booksellers soon.