Mrs. L. P. Priyanka M.A., M.Phil., NET

Assitant Professor

Department of English

Jayaraj Annapackiam College for Women (Autonomous), Periyakulam

Abstract:

Art has long been recognized as a powerful tool for emotional expression, empathy, and personal growth. The concept of healing arts encompasses a diverse range of expressive mediums, each playing a distinct role in the emotional and psychological well-being of individuals. This research article delves into the multifaceted dimensions of arts as a therapeutic medium through an analysis of John Green’s acclaimed novel The Fault in Our Stars,with a particular focus on literature, music, games, and poetry. By analyzing how these forms of artistic engagement contribute to the characters’ emotional healing. This study aims to shed light on the inherent therapeutic qualities of literature  and other arrs and its potential to provide solace and guidance.

Keywords: Healing arts, literature, games, poetry, therapeutic medium, emotional healing, John Green, The Fault in Our Stars.

Healing Arts: Exploring Artistic Resonance in John Green’s The Fault in our Stars

Art has its beginning in the caves of stone-age man. From then on it has become a vital ingredient of life. It is mostly defined as a process of deliberately arranging items with symbolic significance. As a result, it influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions and intellect. In art, one can find a diverse range of human activities, creation and modes of expression. Art in its various forms includes music, literature, film, photography, sculpture and paintings.  Healing is often an intricate process, and the utilization of various artistic mediums can significantly impact the emotional trajectories of individuals. John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars has garnered widespread acclaim for its profound portrayal of young love amidst the challenges of terminal illness. Green intertwines literature, music, games, and poetry to underscore the importance of the healing in navigating the complexities of life, love, and loss. This paper explores how the novel exemplifies the healing arts, demonstrating how literature  and varied art can play a therapeutic role in the lives of both fictional characters and real-world readers.

Expressing oneself through various media such as art and literature has been a desire of mankind since the beginning of time. Literature has the unique ability to transport readers into alternate worlds, allowing them to experience a range of emotions and perspectives. Nobody can imagine a life without art. Artists express their emotional world through art and spectators or readers let this world pass through the realm of their sensuality. It is the sphere of feelings and sentiments of a person arising from his direct experience. Emotions in art are special. There are many pros and cons in the feelings of everyday life. In real life feelings and emotions come in a variety of shades, from negative to positive.

Emotions in art have social impact, they are very similar to the feelings of every humans.Through feelings art reaches the inner world of a human being, inspiring him and making him humane, and moulding his personality. Art can go to the extent of solving pedagogical and psychological problems. In addition, art acts as a psychotherapeutic therapeutic tool for the soul, which is capable of relieving psychological and spiritual distress. 

As an art form, literature has been used to express mankind’s deepest emotions and observations, most profound thinking and firm beliefs. Literature encompasses many genres such as drama, poetry, and novels. While both physical arts and literature are a form of self-expression, each also represents a profession. When the world of arts and literature is explored, mankind’s fascination for self-expression can be discovered.

Literature is a work of art in words. It is a writing that carries strong and lasting value through beauty or emotional power. Literature expresses the writers’ thoughts, hopes and fears. Writings become literature only when well written and are of lasting interest to people of many societies and different generations. Literature is a powerful weapon to change the world with its human ideas and emotions expressed through words.

Art has tremendous healing power. Mankind is very much accustomed to spiritual and physical healing through prayer. Concrete experiences of such healing were innumerable through the healing touch of Jesus Christ. Music too is known to bring emotional balance relieving one in distress. Music is the most accessible and most researched medium of art of healing, relieving one of anxiety. Creative writing and reading of literature too are healers in a broad sense.

The healing power of literature has been recognized throughout history, from ancient myths to modern novels. By immersing themselves in the lives of fictional characters, readers can gain insight into their own emotions and struggles. Most people resort to reading as a means of escape from reality. Further, the world seen through books creates awareness and realization of one’s faults when one is caught up in the mean world. In Green’s novel, protagonists Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters navigate the challenges of cancer, mortality, and young love. Their emotional journeys serve as a lens through which readers can explore their own feelings of grief, fear, and hope. Both Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters are fond of reading books. Hazel reads her favourite novel ‘An Imperial Affliction’ by Peter Van Houten. Augustus reads ‘The Price of Dawn’, a brilliant novelization of his favourite video game.

 Hazel describes the book as her personal Bible, because it accurately matches her own experience. She finds relief through ‘An Imperial Affliction’. She says that she loves this book for its honesty. Anna, the main character of ‘An Imperial Affliction’, is a young girl with cancer who does not want to let this fact define her entire life. This parallels Hazel’s situation and causes Hazel to find empathy and connection in the book. Hazel finds this book as a touchstone to her life. She tries to deal with pain honestly and directly and also finds comfort in it.  She recommends ‘An Imperial Affliction’ to Augustus. She tells him that the book accurately reflects the reality of death. One dies in the midst of their life, in the midst of a conversation. But I want to know what happens to everyone else. Both of them are very curious to know about what happens to the characters at the end of the novel. This curiosity made them travel to Amsterdam to meet the author Peter Van Houten. Hazel reads books not to escape from reality but to escape from the eyes of the society that views herself as a cancer patient and not as a human being. Hazel believes and lives in reality. She has no illusions about her health. She comes to a better understanding of life through the novel ‘An Imperial Affliction’. Even though it is a fictional work it has a genuine value in her life. Hazel finds this novel a pain-reliever.

Augustus tends to deal with his pain through humour and sacrifices himself in a video game. He lends Hazel a copy of ‘The Price of Dawn’, a book based on his favourite video game.  Hazel reads the book and then purchases the first two sequels of ‘The Price of Dawn’. In human company Hazel feels the sense of otherness. While shopping with her friend Kaitlyn in a mall she realizes how Kaitlyn sees her as a cancer patient. Hazel says that social interactions were depressing because it was so obvious that everyone she talked to for the rest of her life would feel awkward and uncomfortable around her. So just to escape from Kaitlyn’s eyes Hazel begins to read the sequel to ‘The Price of Dawn’. 

Coming to Augustus and his friend Isaac, video game serves as an escape mechanism. Their interest in the game originates from their need to escape from pain. When Isaac’s girlfriend Monica deserts him, he cries in distress. Just to escape from that hard reality he resorts to playing video game. It is also a kind of healing for him.

 Augustus takes his game-playing seriously. When Hazel questions him as to why he has saved some hostages in the game instead of himself, he says, “All salvation is temporary, I bought them a minute. Maybe that’s the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one’s gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that’s not nothing” (59). The whole life-or-death situation inherent in video games is close to that of Augustus. Like the hostages in the game, he recognizes that he and his fellow cancer kids are working with a limited amount of time, and anytime gained is very valuable and precious. When Augusts is worried about his fear of oblivion, he indulges in playing a video game and feels comforted.

Peter Van Houten, the author of ‘An Imperial Affliction’, is an alcoholic. When Hazel and Augustus meet him at his house in Amsterdam, he is abrasive and drunk. He never reads his fans’ mails. All these are because he has lost his daughter Anna to cancer. After the death of Anna, he became bad tempered and alcoholic and was unable to cope with her loss. He became a writer because of his daughter. Meeting Hazel, he is reminded of Anna and that’s why he behaves in a cruel manner. He refuses to answer most of Hazel’s questions and he is very mean to them. To prove himself an intellectual genius, he replies cryptically, citing the paradox of Zeno’s tortoise. Zeno, a pre-Socratic philosopher was the first person in history to show that the concept of infinity is problematical. Van Houten says: Zeno’s tortoise paradox is renowned for its paradoxical nature. Suppose that you are racing against a tortoise and the tortoise is ahead of you by ten yards. As you run, the tortoise may have moved one yard, and as you make up the distance, the tortoise will move a further distance, and this cycle continues indefinitely. You may be faster than the tortoise, but you will never catch it, you will only reduce its lead. You may simply run past the tortoise without considering the mechanics involved. The question of how to do this becomes extremely complicated. Nobody really figured it out until Cantor showed that some infinity is bigger than others.

Therefore, it shows that fast runners are not always winners. To escape from the present situation, Van Houten takes out his grief on others. Van Houten uses his intellect to escape from the reality. The idea of Zeno’s paradox comes later in the novel, providing Hazel and Augustus a way to understand the time they spent together. Although Van Houten does not provide the answers to the end of the novel, he does provide Hazel a way to imagine her relationship with Augustus. Hazel is happy for her small infinity with Augustus Waters.

            Hazel’s attending poetry classes and reading poetry are a proof that art is really healing. Poetry, through heavy use of imagery and word association, quickly conveys emotions. Poetry is something everyone can love, and it is a great art that can be part of our life. Poems with powerful images can help us retain them in memory and relish them as intellectual treat. Poems speak to us in many ways. A poem helps one express what cannot be said in other forms of writing, to suggest an experience, idea, or feeling. 

A concrete example is seen in John Keats, the Romantic poet, when threatened by consumption which ran in the family and which had already carried off his brother Tom expressed his fear of death through “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (Lall 3), a prophesying of his early death in Shakespearean form. His ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a song of death and despair. It contains the premonition of his premature death: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk” (Lall 153). Through his expression of feelings, fear and pain he achieves psychological healing.                                               

            In the novel, Hazel attends a poetry class at MCC, their community college. When Augustus asks her about her interest, she says that she is interested in reading, “from, like, hideous romance to pretentious fiction to poetry” (33). At once Augustus yells saying, “Hazel Grace, you are the only teenager in America who prefers reading poetry to writing it” (33). Most people love to write poetry in order to express their feelings, but Hazel is fond of reading poetry. She feels very peaceful while reading poetry.

 During the flight Hazel reads the long poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg, which she is reading for her poetry class. The title Howl indicates protest, cry for all exploitation, repression and subjugation. In Howl, Ginsberg describes the desperation, the suffering and persecution of a group of outcastes who are seeking transcendent reality. They love narcotic things because they want to forget their pain. They have repulsion towards life and attraction towards death. Hazel tells Augustus, “The guys in this poem take even more drugs than I do” (152).

            How much poetry means to Hazel is seen in her having poems in memory. Augustus asks Hazel to recite a poem from her memory, and Hazel recites a part of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. At Oranjee Augusts requests Hazel to recite the final lines of the Prufrock  poem. She tells how it ends, “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathe with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (164). The poem reminds her of her own situation. This poem speaks about awareness, water and drowning. Drowning is a clear reference to death by water which Hazel fears.

 After returning from Anne Frank’s house, Hazel recites the poem Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens. She recites the fifth stanza of the poem: “I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendos, / The blackbird whistling /Or just after” (204). While Hazel and Gus are waiting for the ambulance to arrive, Gus asks her to read something, so she recites William Carlos William’s The Red Wheelbarrow until the ambulance arrives. She also makes some modification to the poem to describe Gus:

so much depends 

upon

a red wheel 

barrow

glazed with rain 

water

beside the white

chickens. (246-247)

This poem is an example of a true imagist poem. Red wheelbarrow is important to the farmer and she compares Gus to the wheelbarrow, meaning metaphorically that Gus is equally important to her. Here, she is the white chicken. The form of the poem itself is very symbolic. The wheelbarrow is red to show its power at the farm, and the chickens are white to show their purity. The wheelbarrow is covered with rain water. 

 The lines which Hazel adds to the poem are “And so much depends, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon this observer of the universe” (247). Here, she tries to tell about the pitiable situation of Gus. His survival depends upon the observer of the universe that is God. It is in God’s hand to save him.

Towards the end of the novel, after Gus’s funeral, Hazel recalls the lines, “So dawn goes down to day, / Nothing gold can stay” (278) from the poem Nothing Gold can Stay by Robert Frost. This line symbolizes the idea that all the good and beautiful things in life eventually fade away. Nothing good can last. It shows the cycle of life and death. Hazel also thinks that even if death doesn’t get in the way, the kind of love that she and Augustus share could never last. Hazel’s love for books and poetry in general represents a certain escapism, not wanting to harm or affect other people and so retreating into the world of authors, fiction and poetry for comfort and kinship. Thus she finds healing through literature.

Music as a mechanism for relief is seen in the novel. Music has much significance in human life and people listen to music for different reasons and at different times. Intimate relation to music is one pretty way to make one feel happy or excited. There are many types of music like pop, rock, jazz, classical etc . . In addition to providing entertainment it can purify the mind and give positive energy. Music makes one relaxed and influences one’s mental health significantly. Music, through stimulation can abolish pain, and calm the neural activity in the brain. 

Van Houten is seen relieved from frustration by listening to Swedish rap music. In the early days most wrappers in Sweden rapped in English. Afasi and Filthy was a Swedish hip hop dou from Uppsala, Sweden. Peter Van Houten is a fan of the group and plays ‘Bomfallera’ when Hazel and Augustus meet him. When Hazel asks him to answer her questions, he suddenly brings up Zeno’s paradox of tortoise and quickly connects the theory to Swedish hip hop. When Augustus says that they don’t speak Swedish, at once Van Houten tells: 

Well, of course you don’t. Neither do I. Who the hell speaks Swedish? The important thing is not whatever nonsense the voices are saying, but the voices are feeling. Surely you know that there are only two emotions, love and fear, and that Afasi och Filthy navigate between them with the kind of facility that one simply does not find in hip-hop music outside Sweden. Shall I play it for u again? (188)

Augustus asks if Van Houten is playing some kind of performance on them, to which Van Houten replies that if they cannot hear Afasi and Filthy’s bravadic response to fear, then his work is not for them. He purposely plays the sound track, because he is frustrated by the presence of Hazel and Augustus Waters. To relieve himself from the frustration he plays the Swedish hip-hop rap music.

            To Hazel, like all entertainment the reality television show offers an escape from real life problems. She regularly watches “America’s Next Top Model marathon” (6), a reality show. This show grabs the attention of Hazel even though she is a brilliant young reader too.

Augustus’s house is decked out with inspirational quotes. On every single surface of the house, there are encouraging and inspirational phrases. When Hazel goes to Augustus’s house for the first time, she notices:

“A wooden plaque in the entryway was engraved in a cursive with the words Home Is Where the Heart Is, and the entire house turned out to be festooned in such observations. Good Friends Are Hard to Find and Impossible to Forget read an illustration above the coatrack. True Love Is Born from Hard Times promised a needlepointed pillow in their antique-furnished living room.” (26)

Augustus, on seeing Hazel reading them tells that his parents call them encouragements. Encouragements are a tangible form of comfort. Even though Hazel and Augustus may not agree with them, they know that to some extent it provides comfort and hope to Augustus’s parents. When Augustus dies, Hazel mentions a great quote in his eulogy which she found very comforting: “Without pain, we couldn’t know joy” (272), because she knows that it will mean a lot to his parents. 

            John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars beautifully illustrates how the healing arts, encompassing literature, music, games, and poetry, enrich the human experience by providing avenues for emotional expression, connection, and personal growth. As individuals navigate life’s challenges, these artistic mediums offer pathways toward healing, resilience, and a deeper understanding of oneself and others. As literature continues to play a pivotal role in shaping the human experience, it is essential to recognize and appreciate its potential to facilitate healing and transformation. Each character heals himself or herself by relying on an art such as reading a novel, reciting a poem, playing video game, listening to music, writing and encouragements. The concept of healing is thus intrinsically connected with some form of an art.

Works Cited

 Green, John. The Fault in Our Stars. India: Penguin Books, 2012. Print.

Lall, Ramji. John Keats: An Evaluation of His Poetry. New Delhi: Rama Brothers, 1995. Print.