Defending English Literature [Essay]

We need this strange degree

Already, the Conservative party leader, Kemi Badenoch, has begun to talk about degrees in terms of economics. The humanities are fading. Enrollment in English Literature degrees is dropping away, and some schools are jettisoning English Literature A Levels thanks to lack of demand. There are reasons for this, not least the impression, given by successive governments, that STEM subjects are the goat.

The popular image of Eng Lit undergrads is of aesthetes leafing through poetry under trees; and there’s a great deal of truth in that. It is immensely indulgent to spend three years sipping at the well of literature. But it’s also immensely indulgent to study anything at all for that length of time.

So why not bathe in our astonishing literary output, which we have, as a nation, produced consistently well for more than a thousand years?

Well, not many want to these days. I can’t help thinking that the subject has hoisted itself by its own petard. Once, undergrads revelled in liberal humanism, philology and close reading; then in gallumphed theory and sociology, squashing everything into neat paradigms, and simultaneously squeezing out the fun.

When I taught at university, I encountered many students absolutely baffled by theory. The academic air always aches with buzzwords, and the word du jour then was post-colonialism. Everything, but everything, was filtered through that lens, even Prince Caspian in C S Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, branded an empire-builder. I knew something was wrong when one of my students argued that the White Rabbit was an oppressor (male, white, clearly middle-class). The thing is, I didn’t blame him.

Other students missed out on what I would consider to be the point of Eng Lit. I asked mine to look at the Carnegie Prize (for best childrens’ books), hoping that they would pick up on the variety of decades of winners. It was not to be. One group gave a presentation demonstrating that there had never been a non-white winner (this was in the mid 2010s: things have, fortunately, changed). Their analysis highlighted an urgent need for more representation: great! but what about the books?

I asked those students if they’d read any of them. The answer, unsurprisingly, was negative. So they’d missed out on Eleanor Doorly’s The Radium Woman (1939) about Marie Curie; on Josh by Ivan Southall (1971), about a sensitive boy dealing with bullies; on Robert Swindells’ Stone Cold (1993), about homelessness; on Aidan Chamber’s Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999), which deals with bi- and homo-sexuality; and so on. That dogged theoretical lens, like Sauron’s red eye, lasered in on one thing alone, and everything else turned to dust.

Theory engenders a feeling of power. Using it is seductive, like you’ve found the key to everything. Applying theory to a text yields instant results. There’s your oppressor, there’s your oppressed. Essay questions leave little room for debate. I remember one student, a Roman Catholic, in despair. She’d been asked to write on the decadent author Jean Genet, and if she answered in the way that her lecturer wanted, she’d contravene her (sincere) beliefs. Should she grit her teeth? Or not? What, exactly, was she learning - to hide what she believed in? Was that good for her? Was it good for the university? I’m not so sure.

When a book is viewed solely as a matrix for ideology, it is made hollow. I remember Ted Hughes dreaming of a fox, which warned him against studying English Literature: I think that’s what the fox meant.

I’m certainly not suggesting that academics should cease using theory. I use it myself. Psychological readings reveal fascinating undercurrents; feminist critiques underline women’s subservience over centuries of literature, and highlight why we (still) need more and varied female voices; and post-colonialism provides much-needed global perspectives. And that’s all fine and dandy, though I still can’t stomach Marxist readings of fairy tales, which see class warfare instead of enchantment. (I will never forget one critic’s suggestion that instead of awful old class-ridden fairy tales, we should tell children stories about Xram - Marx backwards, you see.)

I want Hughes’ dream fox to be wrong. We need English Literature, as a discipline, for many reasons. There’s the all but ignored aesthetic side. There is the linguistic history: how we progressed from “hwaet!” to “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s” and beyond. There are the historical contexts which explain, for example, how Shakespeare and his fellows arose. There are the literary backgrounds: we need to know about Fanny Burney as well as Jane Austen. There’s the development of form: we should know that Lawrence Sterne was experimenting with Tristram Shandy in the 18th century. And yes, we do need to read through various critical lenses. But the lens shouldn’t deceive, distort, and take on the appearance of truth. And - heretical thought! - perhaps theory could be kept waiting for postgrads to feast on.

Nobody teaches English Lit, surely, to propagate a single-minded, political vision, left or right. All English teachers must remember falling under the spell of words: dreaming with Idylls of the King, or marvelling at Virginia Woolf. Recently, I attended a memorial for my Oxford English tutor, Glenn Black. A student remembered Glenn reading out a Vanbrugh poem. On finishing, Glenn simply said, ‘Isn’t that just lovely?’ Is love so unfashionable, so wrong to want to foster?

A plea, then, to the humanities everywhere: show your students how to deconstruct, or post-colonialise, or whatever it is that floats your theoretical boat. But remember, too, your passion for literature. Show them this. Remember why you love Orlando, Piers Plowman, Mrs Dalloway. And remember that your acolytes need to know why you love.

Otherwise, they won’t bother. Then it will be bye bye Beowulf, farewell Finnegans Wake; and Eng Lit will fade, an object of curiosity, filed alongside penny farthings and Sanskrit.

Philip Womack’s latest novel is Ghostlord