It is quite hard, actually, to step back from academia and citations, and present your own voice unadorned. Unsupported, leaning on nothing but itself. Quiet and frightened octaves, pitches of uncertainty. Sometimes articles demand this mode, but sometimes it is the only mode you have on hand—like a cobbled-together clean-out-the-fridge meal, or a laundry-day outfit, or when the only thing you have to read on a long train journey is a mangled tabloid. The odds-and-ends, the making do, the compromise, the thrown together.
Sometimes you are defeated by the process of writing BIG things. The world of research is cavernous and you reach into it, wondering nervously how you’ll navigate it. Sometimes it is your argument which is wanting. Your thesis was soft from the start—its exoskeleton flimsy enough to dissolve underwater. The frameworks of the article fell away in its genesis: its damp embryonic stages, its kick inside of senselessness. And yet you want more than anything to write. Kafka said:
And what I really intended to say in the end remains unsaid.
But I think a writer needs an especially strong soul to be able to constantly be thinking about the inadequacies of language. Or, less obliquely, and more self-incriminatingly, the inadequacies of the writer specifically. The writer with language overflowing within them. Language forms clumsy, experimental words at every sensation we experience, at every contact with the world. It doesn’t always get things right. We find we can’t always say exactly what we mean.
What was it I had meant to say, after all this?
This fatuous overture.
This is not the article that I had planned to write. In fact it is looking to be rather more of an apology—or maybe a defence, than it is an article. For writing, for literature, for the flinching, restless, half-baked writers. Sir Philip Sidney’s treatise, which sought to legitimise both the composing and the reading of poetry, published a small world away in 1595, is known as both the Apology for Poetry and Defence of Poesy. Are the two words synonyms? The former feels more grovelling, perhaps even plaintive. Self-lacerating. The latter feels bold and undaunted. The former is riddled with guilt, the latter is full of composure, and finds nothing within itself nor inculpated poetry to try and explain away. It finds no need to drop to its damson-bruised knees and genuflect before the bitter public: those who don’t get poetry, so to speak.
Lots of people, it seems, don’t especially like English Literature students. Honestly, fair enough. If I consult my best sources for the opinion of the people, take these choice specimens from the prowling consensuses of Oxfess:
Why are English students so painfully stupid? They have no conception of anything beyond the useless information they ingest… If they do ingest it, that is, English students are the least diligent people I have ever met. Their discipline allows them to coast through life with a vacuous grip of existence. They should raise the entrance requirements or decrease the amount of places so only the BEST can get in: the next Oswalds, Orwells and Amis’s, not the ketamine snorted imbeciles that waddle around half stewed most of the time who can recite their favourite tiktoks but not one single line of poetry. [31st of May, 2021]
oxhate to English students, y’all have the easiest degree with the nicest tutors and still complain about the workload. wonder how many of u will survive in the real world when none of you have ever got any work in on time and get babied for producing bare minimum. such a joke. [11th of February, 2022]
English students are simply uncool [16th of November, 2022]
doing an English degree is just projecting in its most artful form [8th of March, 2022]
Petition to stop literature students writing bollocks about history. [18th of March, 2021]
Am I here, then, to apologise for my degree and my people? I am not sure—I am not sure, even, whether we have reason for contrition. We may well do.
Oft-cited as a great and graceful rejoinder to those who asperse poetry—and literature at large, not to mention those layabout reprobates who while away three years of their life at great expense to study it—are these few lines from Robin Williams’s speech from the film Dead Poets Society (1999):
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
It’s almost irreverent—having the word poetry lie so close to those loud, invincible, capable words medicine, law, business, engineering. No, they are not meant to be bedfellows at all—surely not, separate them at once!
I am sure that if you looked, you would find many convincing pieces of scholarship justifying the study of literature, and would find reasons for it to be celebrated as an intellectual pursuit alongside those subjects we tend to lionise. But sometimes you, an English student (or imagining yourself as one) are asked just why you chose English, and sometimes in that moment—a fresh and raw one—you forget all the feelings you had for English, the reasons you married it. In that moment when you forget yourself due to the sheer embarrassment of having picked such a useless subject you find yourself inconveniently, maybe even laughably, wordless. Words were supposed to be the thing you knew, if nothing else.
If you have not detected an English student by their outfit and sense of style, or the book incubated under their arm like a mother-hen’s chick, I am sure they will make themselves quite known to you through their words. For better or worse: some English students are quite vestigial in their powers (myself included) and find their mouths crowded with words that they mostly don’t know the meaning of, but enjoy nonetheless or think sound nice. Some have delightfully borrowed registers (here you can distinguish your devotees of T. S. Eliot from Keats from Ocean Vuong from Didion). And some just seem glad and grateful to have any particular opportunity to use words at all.
Anyway—the point was—you forget why you chose English as soon as it is slighted, questioned, shamed.
I am not here to tell you rousingly why you might have chosen English, or why you go on choosing English, why you go on believing in and loving literature. This defeats the object. There are certain qualities about literature and its study that have a near-universal truth, things we say emptily—we say cheerfully that English helps us be better and more empathetic people, it shows us human life, it helps us deal with emotion, it helps us deal with more than emotion—with feelings that we otherwise don’t know what to do with, it helps us remember and monumentalise, literature make boring or seemingly ugly things beautiful, literature is art, art doesn’t need explaining anyway. GO AWAY!
I love it when an article references multiple texts. Having a large pool of references gives the article that gorgeous fustian quality of a garment; woven, cobwebbed, patchwork. I could here try and cite as many different places and people as I could, who in their novels or poems or plays or interview pieces explain why they think literature is important, or tell us what literature has done for them. But here I think, too, that that would be redundant: I would be citing only texts that I thought were important (or texts that I was led to believe vaguely that other people thought important) that I thought said something meaningful about literature (and in doing so, gave literature and its study a momentary sense of conviction, purpose.)
You know what makes literature important to you (if you think it’s important). For one of you, it might be literature’s bathos and humour, another, its sense of confiding solace that slices through heavy solitude or loneliness.
Another thing which I will add in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way is that words, even when arranged not to make beautiful or striking things, still form pieces of literature. My sweet STEM student, that medicine article you are reading is literature. English students produce, look after and tend to the structures, the language, the forms that make your knowledge accessible. We have mothered language tenderly. The language that academics and thinkers from all kinds of subjects (STEM and serious humanities like History or Politics) rely upon to describe and set forth their ideas—they have it because we treat it with such care. We have fed and brushed the hair of, ironed the clothes of and put to bed each night the language that other subjects, academics and thinkers rely upon to make sense of their ideas at all.
Some of my favourite chemical blends of vitriol against English are those typically from History students, accusing us of butchering their subject, doing terrible things to it. But I am quite fond of literary interactions with History, because as much as the quantitative, data-obsessed historians would beg to differ, our lives are not statistical. Not always. Certainly there is a great deal of disobedience—when lives and people refuse to lie down genuflecting to data, with their behaviour agreeing with data patterns. There are anomalies amongst us and these are often the people who make change or dare to record life in its transgressions.
‘We belated historians’, as George Eliot describes herself and other novelists, have ‘…much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web [of lives.]’
Yes, George Eliot, she springs to mind. On the one hand, she wrote those quintessential Realist novels delineating the very mundanest particularities of quiet English middle-class life. Yet, as scholars love to remind us, her own personal life (her rejection of marriage with her partner George Henry Lewes) was somewhat behaviourally anomalous for a woman in the middle of the Victorian era. In Middlemarch she records a wonderful study—totally without statistics—of parochial English life in the early 1830s: with a simmering background political scene of the Reform Bill, and a more general cultural ferment of medical advancement. Tertius Lydgate, a young doctor and one of the novel’s protagonists, originally tries valiantly to be a part of this scientific furtherment, but in the end he fails to make the discoveries and the breakthroughs he had envisioned for himself. History, conversely, may only remember and memorialise those people like John Snow (a real-life doctor roughly contemporaneous to Lydgate, who in 1854 discovered the source of a cholera outbreak in London, helping reveal that cholera was water-borne) who succeeded in scientific change, and not those brave everymen who tried to seat themselves amongst the greats.
For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.
Instead these men fell away. Perhaps they instead chose to have children, or were distracted by a lover, or learnt a taste for quieter, lovelier things than the gruelling ardour of desperate study. Telling the stories of these men are tasks that fall to novelists, literary critics and literary historians.
The story of their coming to be shaped after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the furniture ghastly.
Behind every great man (ie. the historian) there is a great woman (a novelist or English student.) Or so the stereotypes lead us to believe: the rational, masculine historian—the paragon humanities student—he is a reader and a cultured man, but a thinker, too. There’s something scientific and progressive in him. Demure, sweet, creative, and perhaps a little too much at the whim of her passions, is the English student—almost certainly a woman.
Lydgate does not live out his medical dreams. But does his life not matter? Does his life of brave but quiet humanity not matter, moreover, because he is fictional? Well, I ask you: does it matter? Maybe yes, maybe not; however much art is in discourse with real life is not easily solvable.
But I worry that over-reasoning the validity of the English degree is not as helpful as it might at once seem. We are hesitant to entertain—to indulge—the idea of our valuable youth spending their time with a subject that does not immediately suggest a career, prospects, a healthy utility. When I raised concerns about choosing an English degree in sixth form, there was a chorus of reassuring English teachers swooping in to remind me of the sought-after transferable skills of an English degree. Not to worry: some employer will still want you! Banish the justifications! Or at least—let those nebulous transferable skills be but one reason of many to encourage a teenager to study English, if they want to; if they want to but don’t want to admit that they want to.
Let the possibilities of an English degree not be about very quickly shaking off all the sticky, clinging remnants of literature. Let the worth not to be found in the English graduate’s ability to work to meet a deadline (this is a nice trait suitably purged of artistic temperament, or any suggestion of an unhealthy enjoyment of the imagination—undesirable symptoms of an English student, a lover of literature). Let the worth be found also the ability to love a character (a bundle of words on a page) so fully. Let the worth be found in the deftness of sewing together History and Philosophy and Theology and Linguistics whenever these wonderful pursuits complement the study of a certain text or author. Let the worth be found in the appreciation, exaltation, and embracing of words and language. The capacity to storytell—or listen to stories being told. The shoals of creative thoughts and passions—and the gentle-handed taming of each, later, to help make our stories and articulations clearer, more relatable. The loving—the beautiful loving—that underpins a literature degree: loving people, loving lives, loving emotions, experiences, time spent listening, time spent creating, time spent with the world—so much loving in English. Let that be cherished, too—let that be a reason for leaving English and English students alone.
If English does not need defending, why then, have I written an article defending it? I grant you I undermine myself. Clearly I thought English did indeed need defending. But I’ve said my piece on the matter—just like we all do, in our essays, week on week – having to hope that someone (maybe even only ourselves) finds it meaningful.
…..for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. [George Eliot, Middlemarch]
…that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. [William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey]