Politics, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Literature

“For our knowledge of man and of his behavior in this concrete world, literature has always been the great organon. And rightly so, for in insight, depth, subtlety, range, and perspicacity, it has no rival among the means to knowledge. The very freedom of literature inspires confidence in it, and hence the literary artist, whether he is working truly or falsely, is likely to produce the influential picture of man.”-Richard M. Weaver, Contemporary Southern Literature (The Southern Essays) 

There are many reasons why I chose English Literature as one of my majors, but I daresay that not one of them was really political in nature. I have found throughout my reading life––from the time that I sat in my mother’s lap and heard her read Tolkien for the first time to the moment as a senior in high school that I first found Eliot’s Four Quartets glowing and smoldering unassumingly amidst the labyrinthine passages of the internet––that literature is the medium through which my own mind is best suited to perceive truth. It has variously comforted me, buffeted me, buttressed my beliefs and torn down my misconceptions.

Literature (and perhaps all art, though through a darker glass) rightly speaks to every facet of human existence. But as an undergraduate student of literature, I have found that the preeminent and predominant concern of English departments is singular and myopic: identity politics. Whether the author under consideration be Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Flannery O’Connor, the only aspects of human existence that get any real play are gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. Furthermore, the political orthodoxy behind these lines of analysis is predictable, and rarely questioned. Literature, it seems, has become a lieutenant and petri dish for the sociologist, himself but the academic advisor to a political machine:

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind–– if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else–– then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”-C. S. Lewis Membership

From within the academic system, it is frightening how far this “deadly disease” has spread, and how distorted has become the “influential picture of man.” I see the challenge facing myself and many like me to be this: to persist in the love and study of literature in spite of the distinctly unlovable distortion that we must tacitly accept in exchange for precious credit hours.