Close Encounters

I keep reading about the decline in the study of the humanities at university level – English literature especially – usually attributed to the shift since the 1980s towards a narrow view of higher education as "credentialisation" for the workplace, plus the ever greater value placed on so-called STEM subjects (essentially anything that might require you to wear a lab coat and/or be able to handle maths). Certainly, it can be hard to explain the relevance of your grasp of Coleridge's theory of the imagination in a job interview, when your interviewers have never heard of Coleridge and are suspicious of imagination, never mind any theories whatever-you-said-his-name-was had about it.

Of course, I'm sure the same could be said for your understanding of stochastic optimization or Fourier transforms, although they do at least sound more impressive. No, what employers want to know is: Are you a team player? Where do you see yourself in five years? Or, in the trinity of job interviewing that I was taught: Can they do the job? Will they do the job? Will they fit in? (see the post Inflexible Attitude, Hates a Challenge for my finely-nuanced take on recruitment as seen from the interviewer's side of the table).

Now, I am biased here: despite my inclination towards visual art, I took English Language and Literature as my first degree, and then did a master's in Comparative Literature, and was on the brink of a doctorate and an academic career when I finally came to my senses. But that was the 1970s. I'm really not surprised youngsters today are losing interest in English as a three-year course of study, now that it has to be considered primarily as an investment: a substantial amount of real capital exchanged for an indeterminate amount of cultural capital. That, plus so few real academic job prospects in a declining field. It was bad enough in 1977; now...

I think there has been a problem with literary study at university for quite some time, however, which is that children who have discovered a love of reading at school do not find themselves doing mo' betta readin' at university, but learning to choose from an assortment of critical pins and probes to stick into the mummified remains of an activity which no longer really exists, if it ever did. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but it is surely simply a fiction that there is a meaningful fraction of the population who still read "the canon" of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Joyce, and the rest of the usual suspects, other than for exam or academic purposes? That includes most English graduates: it's easy to confuse a love of "literature" with the deep joy of being a smart seventeen-year-old exploring your bookishness for the first time, and it's hard to sustain that level of passion into adult life. Besides, reading is a time-consuming activity, and hard to combine with raising children, doing a job, watching films and TV series, and so on. It takes a certain determination to make the time, which you're only going to do if you continue to feel the need for it.

It's also hard to avoid the impression that many of today's literary academics do not themselves get much time for reading for pleasure. Nobody is going to pay you a professional salary for kicking back on the sofa every day with some poetry; papers need to be written, and those essays and dissertations won't mark themselves. No, for academic purposes literary works are there to be mined for evidence in an ongoing series of inquisitorial trials which have little to do with any reading and writing that was or is taking place in the real world – never more than a minority-interest branch of the entertainment industry, anyway – and have everything to do with various arcane theoretical tussles which verge on the theological. "Texts" exist not to be read and enjoyed and discussed, but to have their inky souls examined and those of their sinful creators interrogated, and usually found wanting. "I put it to you that there is not a single mention of the slave-trade or sugar-plantation profits anywhere in Pride and Prejudice, is there, Ms. Austen? No? I rest my case...".

Meanwhile, across the campus someone is working on some STEM miracle – let's say "a cure for cancer" or "green energy" as catch-all placeholders for whatever it might be – and yet is having to waste far too much valuable time and attention scrabbling for funding and lab space. Harassed administrative eyes fall on the humanities departments yet again: what is going on in there? And why is recruitment falling?

Why? Because eventually the word gets out, and kids stop applying to spend three expensive years wandering around lost and confused in what is a peculiarly hermetic and often angry cultural space. Unpopular and therefore underfunded departments go into decline and, in the classic formula, as the stakes get smaller the disciplinary infighting gets more vicious. On the plus side, however, this might mean that at least some of those kids might study something more practical – I always regretted not choosing geography, myself – and carry on reading simply for pleasure, while the dwindling number of academic literary theologians keep sawing away at the branch they are sitting on.

Is any of this really a problem? Some would argue that your "culture" is like your native language: you don't need to learn it, you are already fluent in it without the trouble of grammar lessons or vocabulary lists. Which is, as far as it goes, true. A mumbling idiot speaks a version of the same language, more or less, as that used by the most grandiloquent public speaker. The point of the comparison with language is that what people do or don't do is their culture; there is no higher or lower, it just is what it is. Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone! But, hold on there...This is not an argument you'd want to apply to diet or exercise, is it? And it is a view that too easily excuses passive consumption and cultural complacency, which are a problem, aren't they? If you don't think they are, you might as well stop reading now.

In a well-ordered society, the job of humanities education has surely always been to identify and activate the life-affirming cultural traces that lie latent within us, to help us to see that there is more to life beyond the imaginary bars of our comfy cage, and not merely to equip us for an unquestioning existence within it. But how far does or should higher education really play a part in this? Obviously, just as you don't need to attend drama school to stop speaking like a mumbling idiot – hey, I'm still working on it – you don't need a university degree to enhance your appreciation and understanding of the magnificent literary culture you've had the great good fortune to be born into. You'd think those three years ought to make quite a difference, but they don't seem to: in fact, English graduates are notorious for having had any love of reading trashed at university. 

However, at some point aspiring readers do need to be helped to progress beyond the ABC basics in order to meet the more ambitiously "literary" works halfway. So let's pretend there is such a thing as a poetic license. To earn it, you will need to work on your attention span, to be open to uncomfortable and edgy imaginings, be at ease with obliquity, ambiguity, allusion, and playful obscurity and, to fully qualify at the highest level, have developed the skill known as "close reading". But our universities, it seems, have lost interest in this particular form of credential.

Close reading, like drawing, is a skill that is best built on a foundation of talent – yes, there is such a thing as a talent for reading – and this is best done not at university, anyway, but at school. You will know this, if you have been been lucky enough to grapple with a few well-chosen set texts – a little "difficult", perhaps, but not daunting – and pored over them with a group of like-minded peers, guided (and, if necessary, provoked and goaded) by a good teacher. Not everyone is so fortunate – I was – but there is really no better time or place to awaken a hunger for "the best which has been thought and said", in Matthew Arnold's formula. After that, though, you're on your own.

There's no doubt that in time even the keenest appetites can wane. I find I don't read anything like as much now as I used to; "literary" fiction, in particular, tends to sit unopened and to sink ever lower in my tottering stacks of unread books. As novelist John Banville remarked in an interview:

When I was young I remember arguing with George Steiner about an essay in which he said old men don’t read fiction. Well, I’m an old man and I don’t read much fiction; whatever fiction gives you, I don’t seem to need it any more.
John Banville, interviewed in the Guardian, 12/11/2022

Very true, that. Still, it is now obvious to me that the time I spent at school learning to close-read worthwhile texts – poetry in particular – has had lasting value in my life. The time I spent as a postgraduate grappling with various theoretical-theological speculations? Not so much... Take those speculations of Coleridge on the nature of the imagination I mentioned above, that had once seemed so significant to this sometime would-be scholar. They have now utterly faded from my memory, but his poem "Frost at Midnight" has not. It may not be "the best", but whatever it is that a good poem does, it does for me.

There's an important distinction to be made there. Personally, I rarely crave "the best" in most things: we drive a Skoda Citigo, live in a suburban three-bed semi, I wear the same cheap but practical clothes until they wear out (and sometimes beyond), and generally acknowledge the truth that "the best is the enemy of the good". To argue over what does and does not count as "the best" in any creative field is pointless – fashions change and tastes differ, and quietly eloquent voices are all too easily drowned out by the loudest shouters and their most insistent advocates – which is why all competitions and prizes, from the Nobel on down, are essentially ridiculous. They are looking for the right thing in the wrong place.

Which reminds me of one of the tales of Mullah Nasruddin I read many years ago, which goes something like this:

A man saw Mullah Nasruddin on the street searching for something under a lamp post.
"What have you lost, Nasruddin?" he asked.
"I have lost my keys," said Nasruddin.
So they both got down on their knees and searched for them.
After looking for ages they were still unable to find them, so the other man asked:
"Are you sure this is where you dropped them?"
"No, no – I dropped them back there in my house", said Nasruddin.
"Then why on earth are you looking for them out here?"
"It's too dark inside my house, but there is plenty of light out here under the lamp post".

Or maybe they're looking for the wrong thing in the right place? Obliquity, ambiguity, allusion, and playful obscurity... If that's a problem for you I'm going to have to ask to see your poetic license, sir. Please step away from the lamp post.