Was it once cool to love literature?

A brilliant essay you won't want to miss

Image via IP Callaway

If you love literature, if you grew up regarding it as a pinnacle of human expression and even existence, then HERE IS SUCH A GREAT ESSAY, by James Marriott, that you should really read in its entirety. It’s called “English Literature’s Last Stand,” and it’s a review of a book on the subject by Stefan Collini.

Here are a few bits from the essay, to give you a taste.

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Facts vs. Mysteries: I especially resonated with the idea of there being a dichotomy between studying “mere facts” vs. “the glamorous mysteries of the human heart” - even as I recognize that this is probably a false dichotomy - because, to be fair, the “mere facts” of physics lead straight to the mysteries of the universe (if not of the heart itself):

“English literature – so it seemed to me when I was a bookish zealot of 18 – was the prince of the humanities. When I was interviewed at Oxford and asked why I wanted to study English, I informed my interrogators (I still remember the phrase that I had practised beforehand and considered richly impressive) that “literature shows us what it is or might be to be human”. I believed it. In books, I felt with Tennyson that I had sensed the living souls of the dead flashed on mine…I regarded my peers who had chosen to study mere facts at university rather than to be inducted into the glamorous mysteries of the human heart with some pity (an attitude I have still not entirely shaken off).”

And this passage illustrates the grand problem at the heart of the study of English literature — that its greatest value is to get us to see beauty and to exclaim over it. This is one of life’s most worthwhile, but not necessarily scholarly, pursuits:

Students of English do not expect to emerge from their degrees able to speak a foreign language (save perhaps a smattering of Anglo-Saxon) or code or say anything useful about the differences between arthropods and crustaceans. According to the purest conception of the subject, Collini points out, “the ur-exam question should be something like ‘Isn’t this beautiful?’”. Though surely, “the way to get high marks would not simply be to answer, ‘Yes, it is.’”

Image via IP Callaway

For those of you who are near my age (which is 57), the following explains why you may have had English teachers whose classes were imbued with moral seriousness: they revered literature as the apogee of the human spirit— and the antidote to the dark forces of mass culture and totalitarianism. My teachers had us reading a lot of short stories of the anti-totalitarian “brave new world” genre, which shaped my word view enormously. I had thought they were just teachers who loved words: but now I realize that they were emissaries from a particular moment in political time.

“English was a bulwark against those twin threats to human intellectual freedom most feared by the establishment intellectuals of the Fifties: the totalitarian ideologies of the Eastern Bloc and the stupefying and ominously expanding empire of mass culture.”

And then this: I’m always trying to convince my sons that once upon a time, it was cool to be a literary young man - that literary lions had unique gravitas in the culture. They never quite believe me. But here is Marriott on this point:

“It is no exaggeration to say…that in the late Forties and early Fifties, for the hippest of the young (even among those who were beginning to be beat) the best thing in the world to be was TS Eliot or Edmund Wilson. Literary criticism was the philosophers’ stone. In the US in the Fifties it was possible to watch a regular TV programme… featuring Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and WH Auden”. Literature’s prestige has declined precipitously since then.”

"If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be." — From “Brideshead Revisited,” by Evelyn Waugh (Image via IP Callaway)

I’ve been thinking a LOT about the meaning of the decline of the humanities, and what to do about it, and will probably share with you an essay on this subject…coming soon.

In the meantime, I’m curious to know:

*whether you are or have been a devotee of English literature or similar subjects;

*to what extent the above resonates with you;

*whether you relate to the idea of a dichotomy between “mere facts” and “the mysteries of the human heart”;

*and anything else that struck you!