Turkey and Steamboats

We’ve all had this conversation, I’m sure. You visit your parents or your friends during a vacation, the table is nicely set, the china has no fingerprints on it, the fork is properly laid next to the knife, sitting on top of a linen napkin, folded and starched, the candles are lit, the local jazz radio station is tuned in, everyone sits down, cuts the turkey, passes the cranberries, sips their wine, and then someone, with a mouth full of mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes or green beans or spinach salad or creamed corn, says, “so, so-and-so, what exactly is it that you do, I mean in school? Why English? What good is that?”

In a moment the Thanksgiving ambiance is drained from the room (at least for you) and suddenly you can hear every tooth gnarl on a piece of turkey, you are in tuned to the knives and forks that suddenly stopped scarping their plates and you watch as napkins brush food off mouths and people straighten up, move their eyes to you, clear their throats, and eagerly await an answer to the same question that they had been thinking about asking, but were to busy eating to do so.

“Well,” You begin, gesturing for the crowd to wait a minute as you chew your food, an action that buys you a moment or so to come up with an answer. “I like stories.” You plainly say, holding out the last syllable of stories, letting the profundity of the simplicity set in. But it doesn’t. Instead a polite guffaw is released from the table.

“But,” Someone else replies, “I like stories also, but I need to make a living. Reading is a hobby.”

“It’s more than reading,” You shoot back, “It’s critical thinking, its theoretically approaching social problems, issues and histories, looking for possible ways to interpret what has happened, what is happening and why it is happening. The stories are ways into an understanding—”

Just as you are about to go on, an uncle or an aunt, or a cousin, or someone no one really invited to the party interrupts you and says, “So, crazy weather we’re having, huh?”

“Oh yeah,” the crowd replies. And suddenly, their somewhere else, and you are off the hook and can return to the possibility of L-tryptophan coma.

As academics in the humanities, people are constantly searching for a justification.
Not only do outsiders, like family members and friends, question the validity of our chosen profession, but we academics, at times, also, in frail attempts of searching for self-confidence, conjure up ways to make our work socially important and relevant.

In Stanley Fish’s January 6th New York Times column he discussed what good publicly supported humanity programs did for society. Fish, an academic and an old Milton scholar, contended in the article that at one time, when college was a place for developing character, the humanities were an important facet; but in today’s society, where students seek a certification instead of an education, there, as Fish says, is little tangible reason for a state to fund the arts and humanities. In a moment of snarky poignancy, Fish writes, “You can’t argue that a state’s economy will benefit by a new reading of “Hamlet.” And he has a point. In a capitalist society, it is hard to justify the humanities. I once heard a story from a professor who taught literature in Shanghai in 1989 that illustrates this point. He said that during 1989, the students in his courses would often read the required texts more than once in preparation for the class. They were engaged with the texts, interested in them and put work in to understanding them. In recent years, the professor returned to the same Shanghai University to again teach literature. This time, he told us, it was a different place. The students in the course did not do the reading, they were not engaged, and they were not interested. He attributed this change to the economic change in China and said that with the rise of capitalism, the society looses interest in books and literature. Maybe that is why those dinner table conversations are so awkward and polemic. In a capitalist society, it’s hard for some to reconcile a profession that is more interested in cultural capital than actual capital.

In a section of Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage he criticizes literary criticism, and those who use it, as something that kills anything it touches. In other words, a career in the humanities (because a career in the humanities requires the use of literary criticsm)is like a career as a serial (no pun intended) killer. Dyer, like Fish, might have a point. For example, there is a story, which I don’t have a clue where it comes from and nor can I corroborate it’s authenticity, that says when Mark Twain was growing up he fell in love with the Mississippi River. Later in his life he became a steamboat captain and had to study the river in order to navigate it. His love, the story goes, was ruined, and the beauty and awe that he saw in the river as a child was tainted by knowing it’s every move, dip and bend. The moral of the story is that when you study something, you, in a sense, kill what it once it was: an experience of aesthetics and not academics. In this, I see Dyer’s point, that the theoretical study of a text can, and probably often does, ruin some part of it. (That said, theory is also illuminate a text, albeit in totally different ways that have nothing to do with aesthetics.)

So, why I am here if I, to some point, agree that theory kills books and capitalism leaves very little room for a secular humanitarian education? Because I like stories. I see the power of them, I see the potential they hold and ultimately, I see the beauty that they often manifest. To me, that’s enough.

Now, can we just eat our dinner without talking about work?