I will say right now that I am a better literature student than I am an English student. I lacquer up the cracks in my spare time with books, and if I’m not reading, I’m merely taking a break from reading. In my dorm, I’ve got a shelf full of books brought from home, a shelf of library books above my desk and a host of books waiting for me at Steenbock Library.
Call it an obsession, but you can only call something obsessive when it gets in the way of your life. Literature is my life; something that simply is cannot dominate since it is already the sum, the totality. At the least, it is the glue which gives my being a pleasant, humming gestalt.
You’d think those qualities make for a passionate, devout and ecstatic English major. And they do. I enjoy being an English major. I will go ahead and say I am passionate, devout and ecstatic about literature. But I can’t say I feel the same way about English.
That lacquering I was telling you about: The finish is a mélange of books. I’ve got books by the Amis dynasty, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, George R. Stewart, John Updike, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy and John McPhee out from the library. I’ve been culling all my Henry James, Saul Bellow and John Steinbeck from home, along with some books of poetry (Rumi, Whitman, Berryman, etc.).
That’s the sort of variety I don’t really get from English class right now. I will not name names but I’m only getting this vibe from one class, not all of them. Granted, I’m working through all the required classes, with their rigid curriculums and themes. I’m not thrilled at some of the books I have to read, but it’s one of things where you just grit your teeth. You don’t have much leeway.
At the same time, something about this arrangement irks me. Some recoil ebbs from an inner fount. It has everything to do with how the books are taught, I think.
It is the nature of an English major to deconstruct, dissect, delineate. Or it should be. That seems to be the recurrent theme in my classes, and I’m not wholly opposed to it. Literary analysis trucks some manner of respect and dignity, and a career path to boot.
Nonetheless, sitting through lecture and working on essay assignments, I know that something is off. It’s like I put my first perturbation on the back burner and I’ve only just noticed that it’s kicking up noxious smoke from its searing mass. It’s been sending signals the whole time.
Most of our analysis and discussion of literature in this class is geared towards taking passages and detailing all their working parts. We note symbolism, metaphors, certain phrases, vocabulary, even punctuation. This should all be very familiar to you. You likely did the same thing in high school English class.
But what gets to me about this relationship is that, whereas high school English classes were probably more interested in just teaching the fundamentals of literature and having you interact with books on a higher level, appreciate them and (hopefully) find them great for what they are (or know them well enough to pass exams), my classes suggest that a book’s greatness and importance lies in the parts, isolated, identified, cataloged and explained at great length.
I’ll post a sign here and say that the rest of this column is going to be using a lot of mixed metaphors. You’ve been warned.
If this was a biology class, you wouldn’t cut up a pig and sprawl it out and then hold up the sternum as carrying particular significance, as really being the linchpin of the pig as a whole. Are sternums important? Yes. But so is the rest of it. You could make the same argument for the brain or heart. But while the brain and heart of a pig carry more potent physiological significance, they don’t make a pig a pig. A pig makes a pig.
A counterpoint to this would be clockwork. Writing hinges upon words acting upon other words strung together, much like gears and mechanical minutiae. Understanding all the parts that go into a clock, perhaps painstakingly listing and enumerating the pieces, may give you a better understanding of what a clock is, but it’s a dim model for understanding what a clock does.
And it’s the same with literature. Metaphors, symbols, alliteration, anaphora, personification, grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice: These are all very important to the structure of a particular work, but they do not stand in for the work as a whole.
Part of the reason for this obsession, on the part of my professors, is a belief that the books they’ve assigned, and any book of significance, are brimming with secrets; literature is like a puzzle box wherein whoever can successfully crack it will be privy to all manners of enlightenment. They might even go so far as to say they have the key to making great literature, that they have the skills now to make their own puzzle boxes for play.
This is all wrong.
The notion that literature is something so predictable and regimented that one can chart it, outline it, chop it up and then string it all back together is insulting—glaringly arrogant. Or, worse, that by focusing on one particular piece or tangent, you unlock a work’s deeper meaning is equally arrogant and insulting. The brain of a pig or the ass of a pig is not a pig.
Time does not dwell in clockwork alone. It is the force which drives it. Life does not dwell in the structure of a pig. It is the force which moves it. Likewise, meaning and significance do not dwell in the words alone, or the metaphors or the other literary gambits. Writing’s worth is what it does—what surges through its framework—rather than what it is composed of. And in the end, English class alone can’t teach you that. Only literature can.
