a sense of wonder and gratitude

Dear Diane,

Recently Mr. Thompson posted via Facebook this article called "The Ideal English Major" by Mark Edmundson and I was immediately reminded of this "Who Ruined the Humanities?" essay by Lee Siegel published only a two weeks before. 

I remember considering the English major in 10th grade, proudly announcing this to my English class one day, perhaps unfazed by the prospects of living in a cardboard box. It's of course ironic that Mr. Thompson posted this article that idolizes the English major in that he was the one who truly swayed me from choosing the English major -- he warns all his students of the woes that behold English major grads when searching for a job and a comfortable salary to live on. 

I like these two articles because both authors have an unadulterated love for language itself and for the true experience of reading. 

Siegel: My parents might have fought as their marital troubles crashed into divorce, but Chekhov's stories sustained me with words that captured my sadness, and Keats's language filled me with a beauty that repelled the forces that were making me sad.

Edmundson: Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we are reborn into more ample and generous minds. "Life piled on life / Were all too little," says Tennyson's "Ulysses," and he is right. 

Siegel: The literary classics are a haven for that part of us that broods over mortal bewilderments, over suffering and death and fleeting happiness. They are a refuge for our secret self that wishes to contemplate the precious singularity of our physical world, that seeks out the expression of feelings too prismatic for rational articulation. They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive.

Both understand the true value of reading, but they contrast in their intent: Siegel argues the diminishing number of English majors is something to be applauded whereas Edmundson argues all students should consider the English major:

Edmundson: But students ought to resist the temptation of those purportedly money-ensuring options and even of history and philosophy, marvelous though they may be. All students—and I mean all—ought to think seriously about majoring in English. Becoming an English major means pursuing the most important subject of all—being a human being.

Siegel: It is hardly a surprise that in this atmosphere, college students choose to major in fields that are most relevant to the life around them. What a blessing that is on literature. Slipping out from behind ivied prison doors, where they have been forced to labor as evaluative "texts," the great thoughts and feelings made permanent by art can resume their rightful place as a unique phase of ordinary experience.

As to where I stand, I too agree that language should not be beaten with a hose but then I hesitate to completely dismiss the English major and the academization of the English language.

Siegel: Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. 

Edmundson: The English major knows that the water we humans swim in is not any material entity. Our native habitat is language, words, and the English major swims through them with the old fin's enlivening awareness. But all of us, as the carp's remark suggests, live in a different relation to language. I'll put it a little tendentiously: Some of us speak, others are spoken. "Language speaks man," Heidegger famously said. To which I want to reply, Not all men, not all women: not by a long shot. Did language speak Shakespeare? Did language speak Spenser? Milton, Chaucer, Woolf, Emerson? No, not even close.

Again, we wander back to DFW's speech and retelling of the fish-in-water parable. I believe that not all readers are good readers. As if all readers of Shakespeare experience reincarnation. I don't believe in Siegel's claim that being human means you can appreciate literature. English majors are a new kind of breed, a breed that worships language like no other and perhaps understands life far greater than the average college student. The reader should have permission to examine and over-examine language so it neatly aligns with the metaphors she lives her life by and the words she needs to feel whole, even if it were not so much the reader's intent.

What Siegel writes reminds me of JD Salinger's acknowledgements in For Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction:

“If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.”

Siegel advocates this - reading and running. But he fails to realize that those who choose to read and carefully examine the grooves and hills of language… to feel their way through the words slowly… what's so wrong with that? What more, to publish anything is to give the world permission to interpret it as the world pleases, as the readers need the words to mean. 

xoxo,

Elina