Leave Literature Alone

On Literature's Political Entanglement

There were twelve boys and three girls in my discrete math class sophomore year of high school. That semester, the boys were gathered in a circle playing poker, calculating the strength of their respective hands using the concepts of probability theory we’d learned that fall. I sat off on the side, cradling a copy of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in my lap. Becky Sharp was gambling, too. 

I used to get into quarrels with my math teacher about the nature of people who study literature. Every morning, he would stroll into class with a jab at some teacher in our high school’s English department. As a future English major, I felt it was my duty to speak up. 

The irony was that I had never particularly liked any of our school’s English teachers. They did their part, but there was something peculiar about the way they taught literature. We dissected race and gender, and there were these overarching themes like the failures of capitalism in the Great Gatsby or the proto-feminism of the Canterbury Tales. I didn’t particularly care about such themes, and by senior year, I was notorious for being some strange blend of pretension and rebellion. 

I thought that I was stifled because no one at my high school seemed to care about literature like I did. Life seemed more straightforward for my classmates: equations got you into MIT, Vanity Fair was a magazine, and poker was the noblest intellectual pursuit. But when I got to Columbia University at eighteen, I could sit around my dorm reciting poems to my peers and conjugate Latin verbs in preparation to read Virgil and Ovid. For a fleeting moment, I was enamored: I didn’t have to take a single math class, and my peers had even heard of Dante. 

So the C that I received on my first English paper came as a harsh blow. I sat in my professor’s office dumbfounded by his evaluation of my very simple argument: during times of loss, women in the Iliad found the most solace in their male counterparts. I had poured several days into the paper and wanted him to explain what was wrong with my argument. He glared at me.

“It is incorrect to argue that a patriarchal structure can benefit society's women.” 

Perplexed, I poured my ire into my next paper, where I argued something about subverting gender roles in The Oresteia. In contrast to my first paper, I threw this one together in about two hours. The paper received an A.

Two years later, I fancied myself a Shakespeare scholar and enrolled in a year-long Shakespeare survey course. The professor was a novel hire with little teaching experience, but when she stood before the lecture hall, there was not a single cell phone or slumping senior in sight. She radiated platitudes and themes, spouted all the buzzwords—heteronormativity and racial politics—and put a leftist spin on every play. It all fed my appetite for absurdity until one day I found a messy scrawl at the top of my midterm exam: Don’t forget to mention queer desire in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Disillusioned by the classic epics and Elizabethan dramas, I shifted my focus to the genre that would soon become the subject of my masters thesis: modernist poetry. That semester, there was a course in the directory called “Yeats, Eliot and Auden.” The professor was knowledgeable about the political history of Ireland that was the background to Yeats’ poetry, and as the semester progressed towards Eliot, the role of politics did not diminish: rather than lecturing on the content of Eliot’s work, the professor spent the majority of the class lamenting Eliot’s personal politics. “Just because Eliot was a conservative does not mean that we should not read him…” 

But, surely, the universality of the human experience overshadowed all such petty political considerations, I thought that afternoon in lecture. Surely. 

I wanted to know how we had ended up here and why. Disheartened yet ambitious, I thought it would be fascinating to write my undergraduate thesis on the dimension of lust in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” and was prepared to have my best year yet, immersed in a project that I thought would not be tainted by the ideological bent I soon identified in the teachings of my professors. 

Several weeks later, the department emailed me to call out my misogyny. I was too jaded to come up with a proper response—my thesis would have launched an attack on the prevailing feminist scholarship that enshrines Plath’s work, so of course I could not write it. Barred from the undergraduate thesis program, I enrolled in a masters program at Columbia to ride it out for another year before submitting a PhD application, but the environment was the same: literature was open to interpretation, but only if the interpretation said something clever about oppression, societal injustice, or gender theory… I had figured out the themes I needed to use to succeed in literary study, but I was no longer studying literature.

Shortly after, I decided not to pursue a PhD in literature. 

It’s been ten years since that memorable winter morning in my discrete math class. Vanity Fair sits somewhere in my childhood room beside the thousands of books I have amassed over the years. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to me if I had paid attention to matrices and combinatorics at age fifteen instead of reading fat Victorian novels. My high school math teacher was right. There is something grotesquely wrong with people who devote their lives to English literature—and I have since figured out that it is because they somehow never realize that they’re not doing literature. 

If you tell me that the purpose of literature is to comment on the political dimension of a given social structure or to use language as a means of fighting for justice, I will stand my ground and tell you that literature is, rather, a group of beautiful sentences that provide a universal observation about human nature. The forgotten purpose of literature lies in its relation to the sphere of art and beauty. This is what we call the humanities. 

And if a work of art retains its appeal through its grandeur, beauty, and mystery, should it still be dissected to absurdity, marred by ideologies and themes? 

So maybe it is time that we renew our allegiance to the humanistic tradition—and leave literature alone.