Looking at this missive and thinking about how one would have such a conversation, I thought, well, obviously we are meant to make the standard speech about how the English major teaches you writing and communication and critical thinking and all these skills are highly in demand in the job market and all of that is true but really if I was going to tell them a story about what majoring in the humanities has meant in my life I would tell them about Ubu Roi. And then I thought, no way can I tell them that story.
Long long ago in a graduate program far away, in the December of the last year before I was due to go on the job market, I was struck suddenly and violently about the head by a major clinical depression. I had never felt anything like it before and luckily I have never experienced anything like it since. Depression is familiar to many of us who have been through the PhD program; but it was my first experience with it, and it was terrifying. I felt as if my psyche had crumbled into a million different pieces and then been slapped back together by someone who had no idea who I really was. Things I had always enjoyed gave me no pleasure. Things that had always comforted me caused me intense anxiety. Thoughts appeared in my head that were frightentingly and bizarrely unlike me, and then refused to vacate. I could make no sense of my extreme emotional responses to apparently ordinary stimuli.
I got through this terrifying but, in the grand scheme of things, short period of my life with a lot of help from my partner, who was also obviously quite distressed by all this, and a great therapist, who was recommended to me by a friend of mine in the program to whom I will always be grateful. But in December, I hadn't started going to see her yet, and I was waking up in the Pit of Despair every morning, and I felt as if I had been permanently broken and had no idea how I would ever get fixed.
Before this happened, I had noticed that a local theater group called the Rude Mechanicals was doing a staged reading of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. I first read Ubu in one of the drama courses I took in college with Prof. Guicharnaud. Ubu Roi is...well, it is difficult to describe. It's an anarchic journey through a surreal world in which political intrigue becomes a battle of untrammeled libidinal drives. It's presided over by King Ubu, an overgrown childlike monster with gargantuan appetites and strangely naive ambitions. He's assisted by his queen, who might have been Lady Macbeth if she hadn't married this guy and instead had to spend her life trying to control this lunatic with a combination of sexual manipulation and sausages. The excessive, irrational, dismembering violence that explodes all over Ubu's world is beyond cartoonish; it's nightmarishly hilarious. When first staged in Paris in 1899, of course, it caused a massive uproar, and the Rude Mechanicals promised that they were going to stage both the play and the riot. So naturally, being who I was--pre-depression--I had to be there, and my parnter wanted to go too, once I had explained.
Well, between when I bought the tickets and when we actually went, the depression happened. We went anyway, neither of us looking forward to it. I thought that I would never have a pleasant feeling again for the rest of my life, and my partner was very worried and deeply sad about what was happening to me. But we crowded in and sat down. The cast sat up front with the scripts out on music stands. There was a lot of food, including cream pies which we later learned were used in the show: whenever a character was killed, someone would yell "Pie!" and the narrator would give him/her a cream pie in the face. At various points during the show we were invited to throw food at the actors and each other. It was everything Jarry would have wanted.
For two hours we laughed our asses off. And when we left, we looked at each other, and I felt like myself again. And for the rest of that night, I was who I was and I felt the way I felt.
The next morning I was back in the Pit of Despair. But from that point on, I had that night to look back on. I knew that the person I was still existed. Something about going to see that show revived the person who had wanted to take those courses in the first place, the person who responded on some level to France's craziest play of all time (and that's saying summat), the person who had wanted to share that with the woman I loved more than anything in the world. All of the things I had lost--all of the things that make me who I am--were, now that I look back on it, the very things that the marketplace feels most people can do without. It is interesting to me that throughout this whole experience I kept doing my job, and even doing it well. The classroom was the one place where I never felt anxious. In fact, my student evaluations for that horrible semester were higher than they had ever been. The things I had lost were the things that made life valuable to me, which is to say, the very things that capitalism tries to crush because they are not productive. And going to Ubu brought me back into touch with all those things.
It was six months before the depression was over. Now, the savvy reader might look at this story and think, look, it's nice that your undergrad education came to the rescue, but what got you into the depression in the first place? Graduate school, that's what. Isn't this really another cautionary tale about why going on for a PhD is only opening the door to a world of hurt?
I don't see it that way. I know a lot of people who went through depression in graduate school, but then most of the people I knew in my late 20s were in graduate school. I think there is something about the passage into your 30s that typically unsettles people no matter where they are. My mother has told me she went through a depression at around the same time--not because she was in graduate school, but because she was married with 3 kids under five. Her choice of life had become as irrevocable as mine had by the time I hit that age; and maybe there is some kind of psychic defense mechanism that kicks in and starts asking is this what you really want? is this who you really are? I think, personally, that I was lucky to be in graduate school when this crisis hit. I remember, during this period, reading Ann Cvetkovich's Mixed Feelings for the first time, and then sitting in my therapist's office saying, "If I don't like the affect I have, I can construct another." It is, of course, not that simple; but still, being able to think about depression as something which is not necessarily individual and personal, as something which is a gendered social phenomenon produced in part by the uneven distribution of power and the operations of capitalism, was important. Like that performance of Ubu, it helped me believe that I would one day have myself back. And that was important. It is difficult to work toward a goal if you don't believe you will ever arrive there.
The person I became, having gone through it and come out the other side, was different--but different in a way that made sense, different in ways which I believe have made me stronger. But when I think about the value of a humanities major, this is one of the things I think of: that one day, when you are afraid you have lost all those intangible unproductive non-capitalizable things that made you who you were, literature or art or theater or music or history or philosophy or whatever will give them back to you. That one dark day when everything seems black you will open a book or walk into a theater and you will be given back to yourself. That your psyche doesn't have to try to survive all alone in a world that is at best supremely indifferent to it. That you can recruit all kinds of visions of all kinds of worlds for support when your own vision seems to be faltering. And then you can go on, and do your best to put something good back into the world.
All of this, of course, is precisely what public education in our fair city routinely denies children by cutting music and art and by organizing the whole curriculum around standardized testing. But let me not get started on that.
A couple years ago we found out that one of the student groups at our friendly neighborhood university was putting on Ubu. We were there. It was, of course, a completely different experience. It was a full production, staffed entirely by 18-21 year olds who had been advised by one of Chicago's best "alternative" directors (Sean Graney of the Hypocrites). And I was not depressed. But visiting Ubu's universe for two hours was just as hilariously world-changing then as it was before. There are moments that will be right up there with anything I remember from any of the professional shows I've been to--most notably the moment at which Ubu confronts a bear--materialized in this production by an eight-foot-tall blue plush stuffed animal which came wheeling out through the back curtain on a swivel chair pushed by three roaring undergrads. It was a moment of ferocious surprise and perfect delight and it couldn't have been produced any other way.
This cannot be explained to your students in fifteen minutes. It would have to be learned. And so I never did have that conversation with my first-year students about the value of a humanities major. I decided I would instead hope that the course would teach them the value of a humanities major. It did for some of them. Others, based on the evaluation comments, were merely irritated by the fact that I kept bringing up gender issues. Ah well.
Just saw this shared on Facebook by an academic at UCD (University College Dublin). This is very brilliant, and the 11th paragraph in particular is a beautiful (in its grace and logic) justification of the Humanities.
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