During the dark, early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended one of those live-stream, artist-in-their-living-room events with a group of musicians, and during the talk-back, pointed out a number of references to lines of poetry in their songs, asking “were some of you English majors?” The lead singer and principal songwriter confessed that he had been one at Toccoa Falls College and that the Rilke, T.S. Eliot, and Maya Angelou references in the songs were his fault. A man after my own heart, I thought, and a win for English majors everywhere! But then he quickly disclaimed: something to the effect of, “Yes, I was an English major; it was a pointless waste.” My rising reverie was, as can probably be guessed, short-lived.
His disavowal put me in mind of a comedy sketch I saw earlier in the year that featured a similar distancing gesture. In it, the stand-up comic John Mulaney recounts his decision to major in English in college, saying:
What did I get for my money? What is college? . . . I went to college, and I have no idea what it was. . . . By the way, I agreed to give them $120,000 when I was seventeen years old, with no attorney present. That’s illegal!… They pulled me out of high school; I was in sweat pants, all confused. Two guys in clip-on ties are like, “Come on, son, do the right thing. Sign here and you’ll be an English major.” I was like, “Okay.” That’s right, you heard me: an English major… I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen, and then I didn’t. That’s the worst use of 120 grand I can possibly fathom.[i]
Now, I happen to think, with many others, that getting a humanities degree from a private liberal arts university is one of the wisest investments a person can make, but the irony of Mulaney’s tarnishing his degree thus may be instructive for those considering the present and future of literary studies because I take it to be reflective of the general culture’s recent disposition toward our work. What I mean is, though humanities degrees are not primarily (and thank God) utilitarian, Mulaney is one of those rare cases of a graduate who secures a job in exactly their field of study and makes a fortune from doing so. Here he has built an empire made only of words. He tells stories for a fabulous living. That’s it. He organizes his lived experience into language, polishes the syntax and timing, creates pacing and narrative force and structure, and then delivers his composition in front of people who pay to hear him do it. That’s not only adjacent to his English degree, or a case of his “using his degree” in a novel manner unplanned for by its architects; it’s straight down the middle of the plate. Mulaney does exactly the things we professors of English train people to do. But what’s odd to me is that he uses those skills to say the people who gave them to him conveyed no value.
Obviously, this reminds me of Shakespeare’s Caliban…