The Ideal English Major

The Ideal English Major

Melinda Beck for The Chronicle Review

By Mark Edmundson

Soon college students all over America will be trundling to their advisers' offices to

choose a major. In this moment of financial insecurity, students are naturally drawn to

economics, business, and the hard sciences. 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.

An English major is much more than 32 or 36 credits including a course in

Shakespeare, a course on writing before 1800, and a three-part survey of English and

American lit. That's the outer form of the endeavor. It's what's inside that matters. It's

the character-forming—or (dare I say?) soul-making—dimension of the pursuit that

counts. And what is that precisely? Who is the English major in his ideal form? What

does the English major have, what does he want, and what does he in the long run

hope to become?

The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her

nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are

readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize

themselves—they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They

read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay—to put a light buzz

on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is

not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but

effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen,

Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games?

English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let

us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than

they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or

James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever

imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive

with meaning than you had thought.

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. Given the ragged

magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once? The English major

lives many times through the astounding transportive magic of words and the

welcoming power of his receptive imagination. The economics major? In all

probability he lives but once. If the English major has enough energy and openness of

heart, he lives not once but hundreds of times. Not all books are worth being

reincarnated into, to be sure—but those that are win Keats's sweet phrase: "a joy

forever."

The economics major lives in facts and graphs and diagrams and projections. Fair

enough. But the English major lives elsewhere. Remember the tale of that hoary

patriarchal fish that David Foster Wallace made famous? The ancient swimmer

swishes his slow bulk by a group of young carp suspended in the shallows. "How's the

water?" the ancient asks. The carp keep their poise, like figures in a child's mobile,

but say not a word. The old fish gone, one carp turns to another and says, "What the

hell is water?"

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.

What does it mean to be spoken by language? It means to be a vehicle for expression

and not a shaper of words. It means to rely on clichés and preformulated expressions.

It means to be a channeler, of ad-speak, sports jargon, and the latest psychological

babble. You sound not like a living man or a woman but like something much closer

to a machine, trying to pass for human. You never know how you feel or what you

want in life because the words at your disposal are someone else's and don't represent

who you are and what you want. You don't and can't know yourself. You don't and

can't know the world.

The businessman prattles about excellence, leadership, partnerships, and productivity.

The athlete drones on about the game plan, the coach, one play at a time, and the

inestimable blessing of having teammates who make it all possible. The politician

pontificates about unity, opportunity, national greatness, and what's in it for the

middle class. When such people talk, they are not so much human beings as tape

loops.

The essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan catches this sort of sensibility in its extreme form

in an essay about reality TV shows. There, verbal channeling reaches an almost

unimaginable degree of intensity: "big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase

fountains of impenetrable self-justification." Yeah, that's about it.

The English major at her best isn't used by language; she uses it. She bends it, inflects

it with irony, and lets hyperbole bloom like a firework flower when the time's right.

She knows that language isn't there merely to represent the world but to interpret it.

Language lets her say how she feels.

The English major believes in talk and writing and knows that any worthwhile event

in life requires commentary and analysis in giant proportion. She believes that the

uncommented-on life is not worth living. Then, of course, there is the commentary on

the comments. There must be, as Eliot says, a hundred visions and revisions before

the taking of the toast and tea—and a few after as well.

But I sometimes think that the English major's most habitual feeling about the

linguistic solution in which she swims isn't practical at all. What she feels about

language most of the time is wonder and gratitude. For language is a stupendous gift.

It's been bequeathed to us by all of the foregoing generations. It is the creation of

great souls like Shakespeare and Chaucer to be sure. But language is also the creation

of salesmen and jive talkers, quacks and mountebanks, hookers and heroic warriors.

We spend our lives, knowingly or not, trying to say something impeccably. We long

to put the best words in the best order. (That, Coleridge said, is all that poetry really

comes down to.) And when we do, we are on the lip of adding something to the

language. We've perhaps made a contribution, however small, to what the critic R.P.

Blackmur called the stock of available reality. And when we do, we've lived for a

moment with the immortals. Poetry has been called the Olympics of language.

I love Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Donne. But I like it when a fellow pickup

b-ball player points to a nervous guy skittering off to the bathroom just as the game's

about to start: "He's taking a chicken pee." Yup—hit it on the head. I like it when, in

the incomparable song "Juicy," Biggie Smalls describes coming up in life by letting

us know that once "Birthdays was the worst days / Now we sip champagne when we

thirs-tay." (And to advertise his sudden erotic ascent: "Honeys play me close like

butter play toast.")

Language, a great poem in and of itself, is all around us. We live in the lap of

enormous wonder, but how rarely do most of us look up and smile in gratitude and

pleasure? The English major does that all the time.

The English major: in love with language and in love with life—or at least hungry for

as much life as he can hold. But there's something else, too. The English major

immerses himself in books and revels in language for a purpose. You might even call

it a high purpose, if you're disposed to such talk. (I sometimes am.)

The English major wants to use what he knows about language and what he's learning

from books as a way to confront the hardest of questions. He uses these things to try

to figure out how to live. His life is an open-ended work in progress, and it's never

quite done, at least until he is. For to the English major, the questions of life are never

closed. There's always another book to read; there's always another perspective to add.

He might think that he knows what's what as to love and marriage and the raising of

children. But he's never quite sure. He takes tips from the wise and the almost wise

that he confronts in books and sometimes (if he's lucky) in life. He measures them and

sifts them and brings them to the court of his own experience. (There is a creative

reading as well as a creative writing, Emerson said.)

He's always ready to change his mind. Darwin on nature, or Wordsworth? Freud on

love, or Percy Bysshe Shelley? Blake on sex, or Arthur Schopenhauer? Or perhaps

none of the above. He doesn't give up his view easily, but it's nonetheless always up

for debate and open for change. He's an unfinished guy, she's an unfinished woman.

Which can be embarrassing and discomfiting from time to time, when he's with the

knowing ones, the certain ones: those who are, often in all too many ways, finished.

Love for language, hunger for life, openness and a quest for truth: Those are the

qualities of my English major in the ideal form. But of course now we're talking about

more than a mere academic major. We're talking about a way of life. We're talking

about a way of living that places inquiry into how to live in the world—what to be,

how to act, how to move through time—at its center.

What we're talking about is a path to becoming a human being, or at least a better sort

of human being than one was at the start. An English major? To me an English major

is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds

of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person. Once you've

passed that particular course of study—or at least made some significant progress on

your way—then maybe you're ready to take up something else.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. This essay is

adapted from his latest book, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, to be

published this month by Bloomsbury USA.