A CURE FOR THE COMMON POEM1

One of the biggest challenges that college English department faculty members face is that undergraduates, especially those in the allied health or business fields, typically characterize the essential texts of English literature as boring, pointless or irrelevant. Students encounter difficulties with the material for the simple reason that they do not like it. Typically, the faculty response is an outraged but largely impotent attempt to instill in their students a love of literature—even when a dispassionate observer would readily confess that there is much in English literature that is wholly unlovable.

Professors try to provide students with the ability to see the beauty of words and images, to give them a firm grounding in culture, and help them to develop an aesthetic that will serve them for the rest of their days. The more callous faculty member will stress to students the importance of being culturally-aware by warning them that seemingly innocuous cocktail party conversations may influence promotions and appointments, or insinuate that a lack of cultural capital can make an otherwise educated person seem ignorant.

These approaches, in my opinion, merely feed the beast, merely serve to further reinforce the idea that English Literature is not a serious subject of study on its own. I doubt that any natural science professor sells titration as a cocktail party skill, regardless of how useful it might actually be. Neither would a physicist tout that familiarity with the Lorenz Transformations is indicative of basic cultural awareness. No. If English faculty members are to defend the texts they study from an accusation of dull irrelevancy, let them steal strategy from their colleagues in the Natural Sciences.

Often, it is simple enough to provide an apologia for literary texts. Anyone who honestly earned his or her doctorate can defend Chaucer’s cultural relevancy, historical persistence and literary merit, if only as a way to reinforce in students the idea that English is a changing and dynamic language. It is not difficult to use Chaucer as a conduit by which students may be convinced that people in the past were not stupid even though they did not have cars, televisions or video games. The same holds true for Shakespeare, for the Romantic Poets, for James Joyce and so on. What wins students over is that the texts of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Shelley and Joyce are good. They are fun to read—yes, even Finnegans Wake is fun to read. No one has ever been bored by “The Franklin’s Tale,” or by Twelfth Night. When taught with passion, “Ozymandias” will infect a student for the rest of his or her life; but what happens when students encounter a wholly indefensible text?

Jude the Obscure: justifiably hated by countless legions of students, it is the pointless and irritating tale of an utter toss pot who is somehow unable to figure out that he is living in the 19th century and that England is awash in universities begging for incoming students already well versed in Latin and Greek. It is the story of a whinging malcontent who refuses to make even modest concessions in order to live as a productive, useful and unmolested member of society. When I first encountered the text, I simply could not wait for Jude to drink himself to death. When faced with two dozen or so profoundly disappointed students—I cannot be blamed for Jude as I had inherited the class when the original teacher suffered a devastating back injury—I was aghast. Jude the Obscure had physically and mentally hurt these students. Reading it had harmed them in ways that I still do not understand, and yet I was supposed to defend this wretched little book from a perfectly just sheet of serious charges.

Amid the stricken faces, I was at a loss for words, and then, quite suddenly, I began talking about frogs. This is more or less what I said:

I approach the study of literature as if I have discovered a new type of frog. Everything starts off in the field. The conditions are appalling, there is little shelter, and the food is inedible. It rains all the time. There are biting insects by the trillion. Exploration may be non-productive, it may yield accidentally duplicate results, it may end in some accidental injury, but sometimes it is successful. Sometimes after suffering through an interminable trek through some leech-infested tropical rainforest, I discover a new type of frog. After the initial thrill of discovery, I settle into the business of science. I measure the frog. I weigh the frog. I describe the frog in intricate detail. I check the GPS. Grids are involved. Photographs are taken. Drawings are made. What color is its skin? What sort of markings does it have? I make a recording of its mating calls. I back up my data. I want to know how this new frog fits in with its environment, what keeps it alive, what it eats, where it lives, how it reproduces. I have to take careful notes because I do not know when I will get another chance to go back into the field. Then I take my frog back to the lab. I build a little terrarium and take good care of the frog to see what it does. I run its vital signs. I try to get it to reproduce. I observe every stage in its life cycle. Then, and with no hard feelings, I insert a needle into its foramen magnum and wipe its little frog brain clean by a speedy lateral and vertical movement within its brain case. Then I cut the frog open and watch its guts in action. Finally, I put it in a jar of formalin and put that jar on a shelf next to countless other pickled frogs. Oh, and I get to write the label, and draft the article that gives the frog its binomial nomenclature.

Nowhere in there, I said to those students, is there anything about liking that particular frog, nor for that matter, about liking any frog.

Seen through the lens of herpetology, Jude the Obscure becomes a delight to analyze. The very features that lead students to despise its characters, story and author, become fascinating positives. Hardy’s book, when properly pithed, is an exercise in pure science.

Thinking about it today, perhaps a better metaphor would be to liken the study of literature with the study of cancer. Poems are like terminal cancer, universities are like hospices, literature professors are like attending oncologists and students are like students. No one would ever ask an oncologist, even an intern, if he or she liked cancer. Nor would an intern ever be upset and refuse to go on rounds because they disliked cancer. At its most elemental, cancer is something fascinating to study, something to examine, to measure, simply to see how it works. At some level, oncology is pure science, but then again, so is the study of literature.

When English faculty members try to convince or to teach their students to “like” the texts they read or when faculty members cite incredibly dubious “real world” reasons for studying literature, they do the field serious harm. Realistically, the study of literature requires no more of an apologia than does oncology. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is all that matters; but within my students’ demand for a likable text is the shadow of a serious concern—their desire implies that they have unsuccessfully encountered what can only be described as a minimally acceptable threshold concept, a seemingly basic mental construct whose navigation is required for even a limited level of proficiency in an academic discipline. In order to progress in the study of literature, they are going to have to be able to read Jude the Obscure. As poorly written and ill- thought-out as Hardy’s novel is, it is well worth researching if only to reassure ourselves that Hardy is currently unable to draft its sequel. Students have to transcend the idea that literature’s sole academic purpose to delight or inspire readers.

English courses frequently address racist and sexist texts, encounter the documents of colonialism and imperialism, and consider jingoistic and xenophobic stories and poems and plays. Many of these texts are not only politically, culturally and socially offensive, but poorly written. Jude the Obscure, at the very least, attempts to forward a very progressive political agenda—although it does so with a ham-fistedness not seen in anything outside an old ABC After School Special.

As is well known, horrible reviews of Jude the Obscure cost Hardy his readership and he spent the rest of his life focused on poetry and drama. Scholarship, on the other hand, soldiers on. A recent search of JSTOR and Academic Search Premier insist that well over 500 articles have been written about Jude the Obscure this past century.

My advice to English Department colleagues, therefore, is to abandon the aesthetic of text as lover and instead forward the idea that poems are cancer. Our discipline is not solely concerned with whether or not a text should be enjoyable, but rather our field of study exists with the open-ended charge to examine texts for their own sake. No more apologies. This term, we are studying Hardy.

Carl James Grindley
English/Instructional Technology

ENDNOTES

1. The title of this paper was taken from a remark made by Randall Bass during “Workshop on Threshold Concepts and Syllabus Design,” Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, The City University of New York, The Bronx, NY, March 28, 2008.