The Necessity of Arts | Anna Potoczny

Having gone through the struggle of completing our university applications at some point in our lives, most of us have probably already gotten used to the fact that we’re often encouraged to think about our life choices in terms of investments. Those of us who have ever expressed an interest in an education or a career in the arts or humanities know it perhaps all too well: if you’re not planning to become a lawyer, you’d better be prepared for the awkward task of explaining to your family members what your literature degree will contribute to the society and, most importantly – to your future opportunities and finances.

The latter question is by no means unfounded. It’s enough to live a few years as a high school student who’s not that much into STEM to learn about the quite unfavourable perception of arts and humanities, often expressed through some stale and tasteless unemployment jokes. And the world we enter afterwards only strengthens the anxieties that first appeared at some point during our (possibly) rather frail teenage years. I’ll take the liberty to guess that few of us are surprised to hear about the 50% funding cut awaiting British higher education art programmes, justified with the necessity to redirect the funds towards more pressing aims, such as the improvement of nursing or computing.

The reasons behind this decision are undeniably solid. The last year or so has surely made us hyper-aware of the crucial role of a well-functioning, staffed public healthcare system. The absolutely central role of the digital world nowadays makes IT specialists indispensable. As a person who’s always derived moderate to low satisfaction from performing professional tasks that an average person would deem useful, I nevertheless tend to grapple – very occasionally, but still – with the thought that I’ve spent the past years of my life analysing poetry while others have been learning to perform open-heart surgeries.

And yet – and that’s when the idea of education as investment re-enters – reading and thinking about how the UK cuts are just one of the symptoms of arts education becoming a privilege of the wealthy, an indication of one’s higher-than-average social status, makes me a little bit sad. More than a little bit, actually, because my doubts regarding the objective social value of my own preferred field of study are unfailingly and immediately resolved each time they reappear. The arts are necessary. And not just as an additional adornment of an already fulfilling, healthy life, devoid of any serious hardships and hence possible to improve through aesthetic means only. Not as a cherry on top of a generally happy, easy existence. I’ve known all that intuitively for a while now without being able to pinpoint or properly express the idea.

Thankfully, Jeanette Winterson did it for me. Raised in a working-class, impoverished family in the North of England, a lesbian daughter of abusive, controlling, fundamentalist parents, the acclaimed author spent her teenage years seeking solace from the section of her local public library labelled “English literature A-Z”. In her recent memoir, titled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson recalls:

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

That was my illumination, and that’s indeed what literature has always been: not a cherry on top of anything, but the thing itself; a testimony of human struggle, joy, even painful mediocrity. A repository of intimate human experience impossible to excavate through scientific research or convey with the use of data. Not (only) a luxury for the well-off, but (also) a flame of hope for the darker times and a language encompassing all there is to live through.

Anna Potoczny

Cover illustration: Katarzyna Kocur