Lessons Planned from the teacher's pen: What is the use of studying literature?

MANILA, Pgilippines - My student days have made me keenly aware of a misconception students have: that classes in literature are useless and will not at all help after graduation. Having become a literature teacher, this misconception has become an occupational hazard. I did not wish to stand before a class silently accusing me of wasting their time. I sought to convince them that because the purpose of studying Homer’s Iliad is harder to perceive than, say, the purpose of learning how to build a bridge, this does not mean it has no purpose. Through the course, I hoped my students would realize that rejecting art (which includes literature) by embracing pure practicality — by wanting only to build bridges — is to rebel against their own human nature.

A very basic reason for literature classes begins in the paintings on the walls of Altamira, a cave in Spain. These striking works of art are more than 15,000 years old and created in very primitive circumstances. Despite a harsh world, some of these primitive people chose to expend resources on a thoroughly impractical pursuit. On their cave wall they drew bison and deer and made outlines of their hands. What thoughts passed through their minds as they painted? We cannot know with certainty but they must have expressed simple things — a fascination with the form of the surrounding wildlife, a love for the look of color on a bare rock wall, a need to reflect on and express the experience of living however brutal. Creating these paintings gave no food nor clothing nor shelter, but they did answer a human need as intimate and as necessary.

The artwork in Altamira reveals that there are and always will be in human beings needs other than practical — and literature class is one acknowledgment in education of this very obvious but commonly ignored truth. Today, the goals of practicality are essentially the same as in Altamira: people still need food, clothing, and shelter though they now want these in abundance and refinement. These are legitimate desires, but they should not satisfy our search for meaning.

These classes are also founded on a purpose of art that is implied in Altamira yet became more apparent as humankind progressed, and this is art as a reflection on (or wrestling with) the meaning of life. In art is expressed, sometimes implicitly, those things that we wish to live for. 

Literature courses aim not to tell students what the meaning of life is but to guide their desire to participate in the making of meaning in their own lives. It does this well because great novels, poems, and plays so sublimely describe those life experiences before which we are mute that the teacher is able to put precise questions to life despite the confusion and seeming ineffability of existence. Literature therefore pauses the flux of life, allowing it to be questioned, with itself providing materials for part of the answer.

This careful questioning of life through literature heightens our awareness of the many forces that influence us. Through the Iliad, students confront mortality and evaluate the Greek and Trojan response to it, which was to gain honor as recompense for the shortness of human life. Soon, students realize that unavoidable death makes real the risk of a meaningless life; a risk the ancient warriors understood very clearly and acted on. Students then ask deep and enduring questions: If the time of my death is inevitable, how do I live my life meaningfully? Why haven’t I? These questions are inexhaustible but every person who wishes to mature into wisdom must come to terms with their own answer.

Beginning in ancient Greece, the classes’ train of thought now arrives at their own mortality, our own age, and the countless postponements thrown before us that dull awareness of death. Death today is sold everywhere, is avoided by science, but is nowhere confronted. Students then realize that although we have a finite life, there is hardly a call to honor in popular culture. Everything that matters is in the palpable now, in what you purchase and in what you own. “What then, for myself and my age, is honor?” If taken to heart, their answer to this question will greatly contribute to life’s meaning.

Because it helps the student know himself, literature is one of the few, and fast disappearing, university courses that directly address the elevation of a student’s character. The satisfaction of this goal cannot be ignored if a university aims to produce good persons as it cannot ignore the teaching of anatomy if it aims to produce competent physicians. We must not forget that the university exists not only to train experts in various professions but also to turn children into ennobled men and women.

PHILIP Z. PECKSON teaches Medieval Literature at University of Asia and The Pacific, Pearl Drive, Ortigas Center, Pasig.