One of the most urgent skills we develop during a liberal arts education is how to distribute our time among all the problems we are confronted by, both inside the classroom and out. Many of us enter our twenties as undergraduates; some of us leave home for the first time; some of us learn that our parents are capable of being wrong; some of us fall in love; some of us get our first tastes of heartbreak. All the while, mind expanding ideas take root. Abiding notions whither. Life-altering decisions creep up. And the the pestering of the question we’re all brooding on intensifies, what should I be when I grow up? For us undergrads, step one of this question is often to choose a major. I’ve not yet found an answer beyond that, but I thought I’d share the qualities that have cultivated my dedication to the English department.
In a class screening of Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, Blue, I witnessed the prowess of my chosen discipline in action. While it may seem odd to use a film as a means of expressing my love of literature, this film is anything but ordinary. Jarman’s film is a first-person narrative which has no moving image, just a blue screen and an incredible soundscape and voice over, which details his experience living during the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s, becoming himself infected by it, and then acquiescing to his impending death. It is a brutally honest invitation into the questions and confrontations life assigned him.
There is nothing in the world that can prepare an individual to cope with the utter havoc that sort of experience injects into a life, but human suffering is assuaged by community. Producing, reading, and listening to literature allows us to smelt the unbearable tragedy that has been known to accompany human existence and reshape it into something magnificent, with the power to clutch, churn, and reconstruct the sensibility of the masses.
This deeply human ability all comes down to words. Words mediate the relationship between our inner world and the world at large. Our self-conception, our beliefs, our emotions, are all predicated on our acquired language. We view the world through the connections between words and their referents, but words can be slippery, multiplicitous, and deceiving.
In the English classroom, we learn to read texts from a variety of access points, but that skill also maps onto reading the world. When we learn to see words as mediators, we begin to understand that constructing thoughts into sentences is a partner dance in which we must learn how to take the lead, how to direct our words into an effortless sway to create the illusion of unity between our written words and our thoughts. Readers dedicated to the nebulousness of words are uniquely prepared to undress that charisma. They are quick to question dominant interpretations, and equally quick to imagine new ones.
When we read literature, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, poetry or theory, the world becomes slightly more complex, slightly more impossible to categorize. Empathy channels flow more freely. Value judgments happen a little more slowly. Self-expression becomes precise. And the inevitable difficulties of life, become a little more manageable, as we gain a community of writers and readers to share with.
Speaking on the power of feminism, Judith Butler notes it’s original purpose, “My pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally not mine alone…which enables and empowers me in certain unanticipated ways.” In my experience, this same power exists in literature.
As I write this, I think of the memoir by Paul Rusesabagina, An Ordinary Man, in which he details his experience as a hotel manager in Rwanda during the genocide. In the forward to the book, he calculates how many people died per hour during the genocide that lasted 100 days (8,000 lives per day, 800,000 total) and finds that his hotel saved only four hours’ worth. He saved 1,268 people. When he describes what it was that allowed him to save these people, he writes “What did I have to work with? I had a five-story building. I had a cooler full of drinks. I had a small stack of cash in the safe. I had a working telephone and I had my tongue.”
He did not take up arms. He put forth the power of speech in defense of the frightened, endangered, precious lives who found their way to the gates of his hotel. He did so at colossal risk to his body, with a fierce dedication to peace and the value of human life.
Speaking and writing when life is unfathomable, is an act of devotion to mankind. Jarman and Rusesabagina both, in their work and in their lives, lived and created from a place of extreme candor. They spoke the unspeakable, so that we as onlookers might find peace in the extremes of human existence should they appear at our doorsteps next.
I cannot say that I will graduate Carleton ready to put my major to work in Silicon Valley, and I don’t think I’d make it very far in a hospital, bank, or laboratory. I am likely to leave here with far more questions than I arrived with. When I raddled off the different life happenings which often accompany the passage into our twenties, I did so to say that what my English major has provided for me are new eyes that see structures made of words holding society in stasis, new ears that hear and cherish stories of people with experiences utterly different than my own, and a new voice that allows me to vent the contents of my heart and mind into language, so it can be deployed, shared, and used in service of myself and others.
P.S. This is not to say our economy has no place for those of us passing our time on second Laird. Check out this article from The Washington Post arguing the need for English majors in our society.