I started to write this on my Academic Blog, but it isn't really at home there - that's more for stuff which is specifically connected to my current project within the field of Literature-Science-Medicine, material texts, periodicals, the nineteenth century, science fiction, and whatever else it is that I study (I've had four days off, so I forget).Therefore I'm putting it here instead. It's long, but I have very carefully made it as user-friendly as possible, because it's an answer to a question I sometimes get asked or, more often, pointedly not
asked. It has nothing to do with music or FaceOmeter, so you may be uninterested. On the other hand, it kind of has everything to do with music and FaceOmeter, so you may be interested. Above all, I'd love you to read this if you have ever asked me, yourself, or anyone else, the question it sets out upon.The question is, of course, 'why do you study Literature?'For indiscriminate weak-minded arty types, this is a no-brainer. English is the esoteric humanities subject
du jour. Marking is subjective and wooly, bullshitting is far easier than with the more empirical subjects, there are no 'right' answers and the 'work' simply consists of reading 'lots of books' (we hear this phrase a lot). This is all great news if you are the sort of person who is amenable to a more relaxed lifestyle - as an undergraduate I shared my six working hours per week (per
week) with a vast number of people who wanted a degree and a large number of cheap drinks with a minimum of fuss. English answers well.
Of course, there are disadvantages. After your large investment of both time and money, you have no measurably improved skills. You can't save anyone's life, explain the mathematics of a black hole, or make a cool million in the City. You're
less in touch with popularly-read literature than most people, and though you're better with the canon there are still really popular books which everyone will assume you've read, and which you haven't (
Middlemarch is mine). You probably can't even recommend any decent books for your friend's mum's birthday present - Literature is the one thing you know about, and you know too much about it to be of any use to a layperson.
G. H. Lewes - one man, one moustacheSo you're as employable as a school-leaver and you're in debt to the tune of, gosh, whatever it is these days*. What
do you have? Are there any advantages? G. H. Lewes, back in the nineteenth century, suggested that literary study could be usefully compared to vivisection - cutting up animals to see how they work. This was an attempt to convince the scientific community that there needn't necessarily be a fundamental divide between them and the humanities, and you can judge for yourself how successful his argument was. But in essence he was simply saying that if you break down a poem (say) to its constituent parts, you're basically understanding how language can work, and there's profit in that.
And he might be right - but, as you've guessed, there are some holes in this one. GCSE students are taught to break poems down into their constituent parts and see how they can work. Not only can we assume that they get the point, but in my anecdotal experience most of them hate it. Oh, so he's using rhyme there? And
this is a run-on line? Caesura?
Really? Bite me.
Even within English, the vivisection idea has lost a lot of support in the last century or so. It's too clinical - and 'clinical' is opposed to artistic sensitivity. Vivisectors, after all, tend to destroy the organism they are vivisecting. By demystifying the workings of a poem, you rob your audience forever of their ability to be mystified by it - which is surely one of the goals of literary art...
Vivisection remains unpopularLet's put it another way. When someone tells you a joke, you laugh. When they explain why the joke was funny ("you see, 'fungi', the plural of 'fungus', sounds a bit like 'fun guy', you know, a guy who is fun...") you stop laughing, and probably exit the room at a fairly high speed. The perception that we're a bunch of people who sit around explaining why the joke was funny has far from left everyone.
If it's true that decent art needs no mediation (we're making some pretty hefty generalisations here, but whatever, let's run with it) then what the hell do we do? More importantly, what the hell are we
for? Why is society training thousands upon thousands of (mostly) Bright Young People in the art of going 'ohhh, daffodils, lovely'? Even if there are significant
personal rewards in learning to appreciate a great piece of writing, what is the cultural benefit to having a major discipline working away in this area?
A potential answer lies in politics. The various schools of literary theory - which is a posh way of saying 'different ideas about how books should be read' - tend to designate themselves by reading new and old texts in the light of their political convictions. Thus, there is a Marxist way of reading Dickens (see how oppressed all those proletarians are?) as well as an elite, humanist way (consider the simple beauty of this description, and how much closer that takes us to God). There are almost endless others, but you may be worrying that this is a pretty obscure way of practicing politics, and you'd be right to do so. Imagine if Marx himself had just sat around thinking about
Martin Chuzzlewit all day. No communist manifesto for us - just another book about a book that no-one is going to read.
Charles Dickens - or "Chickens" to his friends - had nothing whatsoever to do wtih communismAnd because the only people reading these books about books are the people who write them, we've now got to the stage where there are books about the books about the books. You see the problem immediately, of course. The
original books - the ones that started the whole thing off - go whole chapters without being mentioned. Even if this
is making a political point, who is being addressed, and how does that help?
This is what's at the back of the perception that English is 'irrelevant'; interested only in itself. For those of you who are nodding right now - don't worry. The government agrees with you. Every year, less and less money is assigned to the study of Literature in universities and schools. Graduates are speedily snapped up by PR or consultancy firms interested in personable, cheap employees who have more than two brain cells - or they re-train as lawyers or teachers. The few who pursue the subject further (idiots) will be met at every step by the pressures of funding, and at the end of a doctoral qualification (that's seven years in higher ed) can be very happy on a salary of £24,000 - if they get a job at all (there are far more qualified people than academic jobs in the UK at the moment).
Whilst this is all quite sad for someone like me, we've seen a lot of evidence here that it's far from an indefensible way of doing things. If I just want to lark around with books all day, or spend my time throwing my political inclinations into the void, why should I expect sympathetic treatment? Why is it worth funding an effort to understand these sorts of issues? Why, in fact, do we study English?
Let's up the stakes, and ask a bigger question. Can English save the world?
We all live hereOf course it can't, right? We've seen here that it can barely save itself. And as a reader of overwhelming intelligence, I'm sure you noticed the single biggest flaw in literary theory's approach when I outlined it just now. These totally different ideas are coming out of the
same sources. A Marxist theorist who reads a given book is probably going to find something Marxist to say about it. How surprising! In science this practice - ignoring data that doesn't support your argument - is called 'cherry picking' and it's reprehensible. In English, it's one of the key tools of the trade. How can we advance or change political thinking with a discipline that is this open ended, that has re-interpretability engraved so deeply on its heart? When any political point made by any English academic can almost invariably be gainsaid by any other academic who holds a contrary opinion - in short, when there is
no right answer - how can a discipline ever move forward, save itself from drowning in its own internal discussions, convince the outside world that it has something worthwhile to say, that two hundred years of study have not been for nothing?
Here's my answer - and it's only mine, mark you:
by making this exact point. Literary study, like nothing else, proves to us that the different ways people read affect the ways they perceive. When you read a book, a lot is going on - your own unique preconceptions are being mixed with those of its author; the preoccupations of both the society that spawned the author and the society that spawned you are wrestling with each other; your conscious opinions are being pushed around by issues as major as your core politics and as minor as the size of the book and the picture on its cover. All this is happening, and most of it you aren't even noticing. Language is an imperfect tool for communication, and people are reading the same words and coming to very different conclusions all the time. Nothing demonstrates this better than a quick trip through the history of criticism.
Why is all this important? Because English teaches us one other big truth - not only are people's perceptions affected by reading, but they are
materially affected by reading. The line between truth and fiction is thinner than you assume - Sherlock Holmes is more real to most people than your Dad is, because they will never meet your Dad. He's just some guy. Holmes was the great detective, who they can see in any of fifty-six short stories and four novels any time they want, to say nothing of the countless unofficial books, the TV shows and films, the graphic novels and comics, the spin-off history books, annotated guides, kids versions, internet fan fiction, video games and - the biggest one of all - the untraceable panoply of tiny references to him, huge numbers of them unconscious, which have, since his appearance in 1887, edged their way into every conceivable kind of publication. It means absolutely nothing that the guy was made up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - everyone knows that. But he's real anyway. Ask anyone "who lived at 221B Baker Street?" and the answer will not be "I don't know, but that's the address where Doyle set his fictitious detective stories". The answer will be "Sherlock Holmes".
Holmes is an extreme example, because he's become almost an archetype - interpreted and re-interpreted by hundreds of different pens and millions of different minds in almost every way you can imagine. He was never real, but his legacy has been real - real people have spent real time reading about him, thinking about him, talking about him. Some are very strange, and go to themed dinner parties and affect Victorian accents. But even you, who are not one of those people, are familiar with the phrase "elementary, my dear Watson" - and the nerdier amongst you will know that Holmes never actually says these words in the original stories; that Holmes has grown as a cultural idea beyond Doyle's original vision; that - and here's the important thing - the way people think about Holmes has changed him. Crucially, it has changed us too. Holmes has become a metaphor we all live by. In tiny ways, most of us never thinking about it. But nevertheless.
If I could be within a billion miles of 1% as cool as this guy-If I had to sum up the last few paragraphs - the really crucial section of this little discussion - I'd do it with the phrase "shit is real". Stuff people invent keeps being invented, by all of us. Then it invents us right back. Culture, and society, are constantly changing, pulled in a million different directions by uncountable and often undetectable influences. It's the artistic equivalent of the placebo effect, and it's just as interesting. Only an idiot has failed to realise by now that we're not just talking about books any more - that people 'read' television, film, newsprint, conversation,
their own thought processes themselves just the same. Literary study starts with books, but there's no way it ends there.
The main conceit of Terry Pratchett's excellent Discworld series is that the characters inhabit a fantasy land which is governed entirely by what people believe. His equivalent of Santa Claus is literally real to the other characters, but if enough of them stop believing in him, he will cease to be (this example is from the book
Hogfather, which is one of Pratchett's best). Discworld is also constructed as a 'mirror' of our world, and the comparison is even closer than it looks. Enough of us 'believe in' Sherlock Holmes that he really does exist, as I hope I've persuaded you. He isn't a real guy walking around - he has achieved far, far more than one guy walking around ever could precisely because he exists not as a person but as something more powerful: as a metaphor.
The turtle is called Great A'Tuin, if you're interestedWe live on metaphors. Demonstrating their power is the true potential of literary study. Unconvinced? Think for a second about global warming. Here we have an issue on which there was a scientific consensus in 1989. Just last week, 17 years after the leaders of the world sat down in Rio de Janiero and decided that something really should be done about it, the leaders of the world sat down in Copenhagen and decided that... something really should be done about it. Science has explained to people that global warming is materially real, but because there are huge swathes of us for whom it is not yet a cultural/metaphorical reality - because, in fact, of a dizzying number of different metaphorical tensions which I won't further extend this essay by enumerating - it is still very hard to get anything done about it. In other words, you're going to need people who understand cultural theory working on global warming too, and literature students are as good at this as anybody else. A lot of them are already working in this field but, of course, everyone is ignoring them.
Oh well, better luck next time eh? Oh wait, we'll all be deadSome quick disclaimers to the above paragraph: I am not proposing literature as an alternative to science, technology or political action when combating the vast ecological crisis that hangs inevitably over us. COP15 didn't fail because there were no literature professors there. Moreover, Science is not an enemy here - it is not an enemy of literature anywhere, and people who treat it as one are idiots. They are the most to blame, in fact, because it is this fragmentation of disciplines, this isolation of the different kinds of knowledge, which gave rise to the kind of society which could ignore the scientific evidence on global warming for twenty years and counting. English cannot solve this problem. It can, however, provide learning and understanding of the way people work which will be, I think, essential in any effort to do so.
This is just one example. It's a mighty big one, but there are numerous others; things which are separately both scientific
and cultural products. A colleague of mine at King's is working on the social construction of HIV/AIDS - if the majority of people believe something about a virus, then that belief has power, regardless of whether it's true or not. My own project is about how early science fiction played its part in kick-starting these perceptions of difference (which actuate themselves, of course, into real differences, as you now understand). In fact, there are a growing number of us working in fields like this one, in the hope, and with the intention, that this will eventually trickle into the mainstream - that English in schools might become less about "how does this poem work?" and more about "how does this poem work
us?". If we can make critical readers out of everyone, I really do believe that the world will get better.
I hope you all noticed how I used Holmes instead of God as my big metaphor exampleRichard Dawkins's answer to the question 'can Science explain everything?' was 'we're working on it'. Can English save the world? We're working on it. There aren't as many of us, we don't have any money, we are dogged by unpleasant or unhelpful ways of thinking, ruptured by preposterous internal disputes and considered irrelevant by nearly everyone, including by many of our own. In short, we are the 'good guys' in one of those underdog American sporting movies. There is every reason for us not to succeed, but I will not believe that we can't.
Can English save the world? We can certainly help. And we're working on it.
*something in the low zillions, I believe
