by Jamie Millen
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my early twenties, my first real, professional, ‘grown-up job” was counting money and cashing checks as a teller in a mutual savings bank in my Massachusetts hometown. You could always tell who had been behind the teller line the longest by the speed with which they counted a pack of twenties. We referred to banking regulations the way friends discuss their plans for the weekend: Well, we have to place a hold on the funds because it’s Reg C.
When you work in a bank (even in the past tense), friends, family, and acquaintances at dinner parties will share their financial situation and ask questions about IRA accounts and whether or not they should make their credit card payment because they heard once that paying your credit card on time every month has a negative effect on your credit score (it doesn’t!). Everyone has a banking question. To this day, nearly three years after I’ve left the bank, my partner, my brother, friends, all ask questions:
Someone wrote me a check, but they spelled my name wrong. What do I do?
What do you think about my opening an IRA?
My check got jammed in the ATM. What do I do?
While I know the answers to most of these questions, it has become a bit of a parlor trick. When the bill comes at a restaurant everyone looks to me to count the cash. Curiosity is always piqued when people realize how an ATM actually works. When you’re a smiling face behind the teller line, conversations with customers are a common occurrence. During these chats, I’d let it slip that I was a college student at UMass Boston. The next, inevitable, question would revolve around what I was studying. One instance in particular has been on my mind recently. A frequent customer at my teller window would always initiate conversation with me. We’d usually exchange small talk about new movies or shows, but that was about it. One rainy afternoon in 2013, he came in and I mentioned I had gone back to school to complete my bachelor’s degree. Inevitably, he asked me what I was studying, and I responded: Literature and Philosophy.
Literature and philosophy? Not many people are in the humanities anymore. Seems like it’s mostly business or business administration or finance, especially if you’re in a bank. Literature, huh? Good for you.
His tone was pleasantly surprised and encouraging; it was not what I was used to: vaguely accusatory statements with a hint of condescension at the mention of my humanities major. This was the first time I had encountered anyone who had complimented my choices, especially when so many around me (extended family, mostly) were not as generous in the compliments. After that interaction, nearly every time this customer came in, he’d ask how my classes were going and what I was reading for them. He was always polite and kind. This type of reaction to my field of study was relatively foreign to me. When you tell people you’re an English major, that you’re studying literature, the question is always, well, what are you going to do with that?
Despite the capitalist implications that my value is only determined by how much money I make while being exploited for my labor, it’s a question I have been asked more times than I can remember. If I put any stock into the concept of determinism, I’d say this: all roads pointed to the bank job as being my ‘forever job.’ My cousin is a Bank Secrecy Analyst in New York, my other cousin is an IRA specialist, my aunt works in the collections department for the lending branch of a bank in Bayonne, NJ. My other aunt was a Head Teller for 20 years in a bank in New Jersey. Naturally, when I got this job my family was ecstatic: I had a full-time job with benefits in a bank. It was the ultimate “good job.” When I’d expressed my malcontent with this job, I was ungrateful: You’re smart. You could be a manager one day. You should stick with it. Just stay there?. My personal favorite comment from an interloping politician and friend of my family was: You should stick to your extracurriculars or find a new hobby, try to get back into theatre. After all, school’s not going to happen. Not anytime soon anyway.
All of those interactions and connections to banking felt like a weird version of fate, and my going against fate by studying literature felt like an Emersonian mission for self-reliance. What none of the condescending customers or family knew was this: when there was a lull and few customers came in, I’d sneakily read books behind the teller line. Similarly, as a Customer Service Representative, I’d hold my book just under the edge of the desk to read on stolen time. While I was always aware when customers came in in this job, it felt like a rebellious act. I was so frustrated with the job so much and while I willed the hours away, I was voracious in my reading. I’d read Infinite Jest, nearly all of the works by Simon Van Booy, The Dead by James Joyce, nearly everything by Chuck Palahniuk, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, just to remind me that rebels existed. Rebels didn’t play it safe. They did what they wanted. At best, they got in their car to drive out west; at worst, they destroyed themselves in the hope of reaching some grand epiphany. Both options seemed really appealing because I wanted to be that in some way: the one member in my family to study in the humanities, to study literature, to get a master’s degree, to be called “Professor.”
While these visions of my rebellious self were liberating, it was immediately a lonely road. It felt (and still feels) like I was carving myself out of stone with only my hands and one very tried and true chisel. What all these nay-sayers didn’t (and still don’t) know is that literature, reading it, studying, thinking critically about it is, in itself, an act of rebellion. How is studying literature a rebellious act? The me who stashed books in desk drawers behind the teller line was a rebel like the characters in books to which I was inextricably drawn. Under this premise, reading, really reading, is a way to rebel against all those pesky, socially constructed binaries that restrict us. Books are often referred to as an escape from the ‘real world,’ from ‘the job.’ But when you read when you aren’t supposed to because you’re at your job is a bit more of a literal rebellion. However, I was primed and enamored with rebellion in my favorite area of literature: modernism.
When I was first learning about modernism, I was a student at Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and modernism was the one area that I was simultaneously fascinated and frustrated by in my American Literature II course. It was the perfect genre to sustain me while I slugged through the days being the teller line at the bank several months after finishing the course in 2011. Characters were jaded, burnt-out, and disillusioned when the social structures and ideologies no longer held water. The days where older millennials like me were being told to go to college and you’ll get the job, a spouse, a dog, and a house came to an end while I was taking that class. People were jaded, burnt out, and disillusioned from the economic booms of decades prior as we were all faced with a financial collapse that was described as being a “once-in-a-generation” event in 2008-2009.
I had just started college at the beginning of the financial crisis and my family was experiencing the ripples of this crisis. My parents owned a farm stand in my hometown and growing up our family life revolved around the farm. It was during the time of the financial crisis that my dad had to return to his winter employment full-time as a truck driver. While my dad was on the road, my mother ran the farm stand that was already on shaky ground as a new business. Work was all my parents knew how to do and when the financial crisis hit, a string of family struggles, business expenses, a difficult and, often, cruel relative who owned the family farm, and who expected my dad to be in two places at once by two working his physically demanding jobs as a truck driver and on the farm. In the years following the financial collapse, I watched my parents work themselves to the bone and beyond, struggle, and, in short, I was jaded. I’d watched as my parents took so much on the chin over the years and the steep ripples of the financial crisis was just another example. My feeling jaded didn’t end there because months after I began working at the bank in 2011, the first tent cities were being created in the Occupy Movement. During these “once-in-a-generation” events, what was the first place I turned in both of these cataclysmic instances? To my bookshelf. To literature. To modernists.
So, why study literature? Literature is a both labor and rebellion; in that labor there is a feeling of ‘getting your hands dirty.’ There is a labor in reading novels and stories that subvert time, grammar, and syntax, question government, ideologies as a means for us, the readers, to assess them too. While I was certainly jaded and burnt out from my job at the bank, literature and reading were an escape or so I thought. I don’t necessarily view literature as only an escape; I study it because it’s a force that allows me to see parts of the world and perspectives that I may not encounter. It challenges me. Pushes me. Makes me uncomfortable. Literature, then, is a way to look at societal conventions on love, happiness, norms, beauty, among others through a critical lens and rigorously questioning the ways in which our world is stratified and organized. Studying literature is rebellious.
How is studying literature a rebellious act? Well, I’m constantly running to my car, commutes, jobs, errands. Literature is a force that required me to read it slowly, deliberately (especially when reading at work). This slow, deliberate reading flies in the face of the constant pressure to move. To hustle. It seems we’re always running ourselves ragged trying to meet the demands of everyday life. Picking up a book, whether for academic reading or not, reflects the physical act of reading: turning the pages, perceiving the letter, and making meaning out of a seemingly meaningless external world that encircles us. When I started studying literature and philosophy, I was fascinated by the intersections of thought and literature, more specifically consciousness.
As an undergraduate, one of the first courses I took was titled “The Mystery of Consciousness,” where I learned that theories demonstrate that we have competing ideas of what it means to be conscious, to be perceptive beings. Each week during the course, we’d learn the perspectives of Chalmers, Nagel, James, among others and be given though experiments about subjective experiences. In his philosophical essay about defining consciousness, Thomas Nagel says we can talk about the physical characteristics of the bat’s brain, echolocation, the structures and neuropathways in objectives terms; however, we do not know what consciousness means for the bat or what it means to perceive the world as a bat. There are no complete understandings of the ways that each person perceive the world. Faced with that great unknown about what is means to be a perceptive being was formative because it illustrated that there was so much, I wouldn’t be able to know the answers. In conjunction with my literary studies, I had learned that so much of what I read is informed by the mystery of consciousness.
Literature is rebellious in connection to consciousness because it forces us to be humble, open, uncomfortable, immersive in a potentially unfamiliar experience which presents an image of what it means to be and perceive the world that may be drastically different from ours. Virginia Woolf asks a key question in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” While the title is posted as a question, Woolf points to the subjectivity as an inherent element in reading. Woolf writes, “to read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness or imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist––the great artist––gives you” (261). Woolf assess reading as an artform; it’s challenging, incredibly challenging, but she ultimately points to the reader’s labor that must be mold, imaginative, and with heightened perception. As Woolf aptly demonstrates, reading, undoubtedly, requires labor, intensive and, at times, all-encompassing labor. More specifically, a labor that is unseen. I am specifically reminded of the nature of this labor on a constant basis when people ask what I do when I study literature. I still don’t know how to explain how I study literature because I, myself, am not quite sure how I can articulate it because of the inherent messiness of consciousness.
For example, my partner and most of his family are talented musicians: occupations that also require a significant amount of labor that is not seen; however, the end result of that labor is a performance. How do I explain what I do at the dinner table full of performers? Every answer I offer sounds reductive, at best: reading a lot of novels and criticism about those novels. Then, I find specific criticism that kind of matches what I notice about the novel. The claims I make come from reading and thinking about the novel somewhat obsessively. But this answer always feels insufficient. It’s still hard for some of my loved ones to understand the labor of studying literature. A few months ago, at a dinner at my partner’s family’s home, his mother mentioned that she had started reading the copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that I had given to her as a gift for Christmas the year before. She had expressed curiosity in reading the novel as it was the subject for my final project for my graduate program. In explaining her initial experiences with Woolf, she had said, I started it and I realized how slow I had to read it. And I said, ‘Wow, how did Jamie write about this novel? I want to read it and I will. But I think I need to read it slowly.’
While her commentary wasn’t a critique of Woolf’s style, it was a validating experience for me. My partner’s mom is an avid reader, incredibly intelligent, a woman I have an infinite amount of love and respect for. Having this moment of connection showed the depth of my labor in reading Woolf’s novel. In that conversation, it was the first time that someone saw the labor, even if it was brief. She saw not just the labor in reading a novel, but acknowledged my labor, its depth and scope. I was seen––seen in the same way that I was in my conversation all those years ago with the customer at the bank. My discipline was not only valid, but important. The act that I saw as solitary, difficult to explain, enmeshed with my own subjectivity didn’t need to be explained or justified in any way: it just needed to be seen. I just needed to be seen.
Around the time of this conversation between myself and my partner’s mother, I read Zadie Smith’s “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” in which she quotes Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Measure every Grief I Meet.” Dickinson writes: “I measure every Grief I meet / With narrow probing eyes––/ I wonder if It weighs like Mine––/ Or has an Easier size” (lines 1-4).
Smith connects Dickinson’s opening lines to the ways in which she develops characters. Smith emphasizes that Dickinson’s lines “get close to the experiences of making up fictionalized people. It starts as a consciousness out in the world: looking, listening, noticing” (Smith 5). While Smith’s assessment focuses on the ways that listening, looking, and noticing highlight the creation of fictional characters, I think Smith also points out a critical aspect of the specific elements of unseen labor and rebellion in studying literature: listening, looking, and noticing despite the constant thrum of noise. Listen to what the novel is telling the reader and looking for patterns. Noticing is an interesting element of labor that happens while reading a text: readers notice things. Smith echoes Woolf’s sentiment here as well: looking, listening, and noticing are the markers of the great fineness of perception. My noticing something in a text always feels like a quarter rolling around in a dryer: it is loud enough to rattle around in my brain, but my brain is still turning it over and over in my mind. And this is another way that literature is also rebellious: it relies on a process of acceptance about the ambivalence and contradiction. Unlike my “grown-up” job in the bank, connection to others was simply limited to the five minutes a customer was at my teller window. Literature, like truth, requires that work that is not seen: reading, listening, looking, and noticing. Seemingly quiet acts often speak the loudest; to slow down to listen, look, and notice rebels against every contemporary impulse to move faster.
The past several weeks, my conversation with my partner’s mother about the labor of the modern novel stays with me, specifically when she expressed that she was having trouble reading the novel. I gave her the same advice so many literature professors gave me throughout my studies in modernism: modern literature is an experience; it happens to you. As a reader, you have to surrender to the experience. And when all else feels like it fails, just keep turning the pages. The listening, looking and noticing that Smith alluded to in her essay continues long after readers turn the last page in a novel or put it on the shelf. In this, our consciousness expands like the universe that keeps growing and getting much vaster by the nano-second. The universe, like our consciousness, is being pulled and stretched just a bit further every time we read even if we’re not sure what is expanding it.