Monday
I share today an article I encountered half a year ago by an English professor lamenting the cancellation of English at Holy Names University, along with the decline of the discipline generally. Nina Handler is eloquent as she uses literature to cope with her own grief.
Handler sees herself as Charles Smithson, the protagonist of John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Smithson, she notes,
is a wealthy, idle gentleman who faces the challenge of realizing that he, as a type, is becoming extinct. The novel is set in 1867, and Charles, a devotee of Darwin, considers the recently published On the Origin of Species to be his bible. His social class will cease to exist within a generation, and Charles has both the wisdom to see that he must adapt and the self-awareness to know that he is incapable of it. He is being swept away by evolutionary change but is helpless to change his fate.
It makes sense that Handler would see herself as the victim of larger forces. It doesn’t matter that her students have invaluable encounters with literature that will last them the rest of their lives. As she sees it (and I agree), the major culprit is mounting student debt. When families are shelling out tens of thousands of dollars, they want assurance that their investment will see a return. The fine arts seem too indirect a pathway to financial success.
Because her major has just been cancelled (along with religious studies, philosophy, and music), Handler finds a special poignancy in Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The poet’s grief over his dear Hallam leads to questions about life’s meaning. If nature in her brutal march can erase “a thousand types,” then what is Hallam or Handler or literature or anything else we value?
“So careful of the type?” but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
“Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.” And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?
If we are “no more” than an evolutionary stage, then our image of primal dinosaurs tearing at each other “in their slime” seems “mellow music” compared to our own upcoming destruction:
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.
Tennyson struggles to find hope in religion but will not settle for facile consolation. As Handler notes, like all great authors he struggles for answers to our most profound questions:
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
To which Handler adds,
In the academic struggle for existence, English has lost.
Like all of us who teach literature, Handler has a keen sense of what this loss entails. When she taught In Memoriam one last time, for instance, her students “discussed their own fears, their losses of faith, or the ways in which they kept it — or found it again.” These discussions generally don’t occur in STEM classes.
I’m struck by two other examples shared by Handler since they show how she herself used literature for consolation. With William Wordsworth she feels the “shades of the prison-house” closing about her, and with Matthew Arnold she senses only too vividly that the world at the moment has “neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”:
[My students] also read Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality, which resonated with these not-quite-adults who feel the “shades of the prison-house begin to close” in on them. I know that their discussion of his phrase “the child is father of the man” will stay with them for life.
They read Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach,” after a madman slaughtered 58 concertgoers, as fires were consuming parts of California, and as Puerto Rico was left to ferment in filth and darkness. The poem was written circa 1851, but it spoke to the fears and despairs of 2017: “the world, which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new,/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” It gives us a tool for coping.
Our students, Handler laments, will no longer have literature’s hand extending out to grasp them, as Alan Bennett puts it in The History Boys:
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
In my classroom, I watch students hold hands with writers all the time.
Heartbroken and more than a little afraid, Handler cries out,
Like Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I can see the future and know that I won’t exist in it. I don’t know if I am capable of survival in this new environment. Social Darwinists would say it’s adapt or die, but I don’t know how to adapt to a society that doesn’t want what I hold dear.
I can imagine going through Handler’s emotional turmoil if the same thing had happened at my college. And although I have just retired with my English program still intact, I have a son who faces this new world as he begins the profession. Currently Toby has a renewable lectureship at Georgia Tech, but he supervises senior projects in engineering and the sciences. He doesn’t teach Victorian literature, his specialty.
Handler asks whether we can adapt without the species dying out and I see Toby wrestling with this. The traditional tenure-track literary scholar may be vulnerable at all but the elite schools (where major is less important than the school’s status), but Toby is finding ways to keep literature relevant. He has a podcast (The Stories We Tell Our Robots) where he and his brother link up literature with cutting edge technology, and he has a major project exploring how science fiction authors have paved the way for technological innovation. He is figuring out ways to keep sharing his love of literature with students who need it.
It’s a far cry from seeing the literature classroom as (to borrow an image from Handler’s beloved poet John Donne) a hermitage to which countries, towns and courts make pilgrimages in order to discover higher patterns.
Because literature speaks to such deep needs, I can’t imagine it disappearing from colleges altogether. But the necessary adapting is tough for scholars in mid-career.
I give Handler the last word:
I might have cried last year if I’d realized that it would be the final time I’d introduce students to the mind of John Donne. It’s hard to face one’s own extinction.