In the final pages of his book, drawing up the merits of programme writing, McGurl ultimately falls back on the one thing the programme really does teach: technique. Countering Eliot’s dictum that ‘art never improves,’ he proposes that literature might, rather, resemble technology or sport, in which ‘systematic investments of capital over time have produced a continual elevation of performance.’ Hasn’t ‘the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool’ and its systematic training in the ‘self-conscious attention to craft’ resulted in ‘a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period’? It has. If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read.Get a Real Degree by Elif Batuman is a critique of creative writing workshops and a review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Louis Menand wrote a review of the same in The New Yorker which was both more appreciative of the book and creative writing programs. It was discussed previously on MetaFilter.
“New American fiction” is, to my mind, immediately and unhappily equivalent to new American short fiction. And yet I think the American short story is a dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukács once wrote of the chivalric romance, “by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic.” Having exhausted the conditions for its existence, the short story continues to be propagated in America by a purely formal apparatus: by the big magazines, which, if they print fiction at all, sandwich one short story per issue between features and reviews; and by workshop-based creative writing programs and their attendant literary journals. Today’s short stories all seem to bear an invisible check mark, the ghastly imprimatur of the fiction factory; the very sentences are animated by some kind of vegetable consciousness: “I worked for Kristin,” they seem to say, or “Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious.” Meanwhile, the ghosts of deleted paragraphs rattle their chains from the margins.posted by grobstein at 7:16 PM on September 14, 2010
. . .
Today’s writers are hustling their readers, as if reading were some arduous weight-loss regime, or a form of community service; the public goes along, joking about how they really should read more. Oprah uses identical rhetoric to advocate reading and fitness; Martha Nussbaum touts literature as an exercise regime for compassion. Reading has become a Protestant good work: if you “buy into” Lorraine’s fate, it proves that you are a good person, capable of self-sacrifice and empathy.
I’m not sure what motivates Batuman’s fixation upon the question of priority, since it doesn’t have much to do with the concerns of the book she is reviewing. To me it comes off as a reflex of the cultural conservative imagination, in which priority is confused with superiority, and thus can be used as an all-purpose snark generator. When it is cranking, no explanation is even needed for why one would want to use ones limited time to read Stendhal instead of a more recent writer like, say, Philip Roth, who in fact has written seven—okay five, or at least three—novels more rewarding in every respect than The Red and the Black other than the amount of cultural capital they confer upon their readers. Is cultural capital what Batuman is really after? So it appears in her weird and embarrassing bouts of Masterpiece Theater pomposity. Not that I have anything against reading Stendhal, mind you—and neither I assume would Roth. Stendhal has an important place in the history of the novel, and one can imagine critical contexts in which it would be interesting to see Roth’s young male protagonists as descendants, of a sort, of Julien Sorel. But I’m pretty sure that if your goal is to understand postwar American fiction Roth should be higher on your reading list than Stendhal.- From his personal website.
So it’s not surprising that Batuman gets my argument about Ken Kesey completely wrong. Far from doing my best to make Kesey “seem as groundbreaking as he thought he was,” my goal in that chapter is to demonstrate that this famously “countercultural” enemy of institutions was a thoroughly institutionalized (and to that extent, “unoriginal”) writer, as he reveals when he says (in part of a letter fishily omitted by Batuman in her own quotation of it) that “I’m beginning to agree with [my teacher] Stegner, that [point of view] is truly the most important problem in writing.” Thus I document his participation in a larger methodical exploration of narrative form that, on the scholarly side of the department, would eventually see critics using terms like “intradiegetic-homodiegetic narration” with a straight face. (Whether this term is accurately applied to what Kesey is talking about in this letter I’m not so sure, since at this point he seems to have been trying to imagine a narrator who could be a “character” in the novel and yet somehow not be embodied in its fictional world, that is, an intradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator. The narrator Kesey ended up with does “speak as I” and crucially does “take part in the action”.)
In some ways more serious than these errors of comprehension of my book is Batuman’s evidently modest knowledge of the structure of writing programs, which would be fine if it weren’t made the basis of a stream of gratuitous insults to those who attend and teach in them. With her skill at using the internet, she could have quickly learned that most writing programs require students to take several academic literature classes along with their workshops, and the work of novelists like John Barth, whom I treat at some length, as well as Robert Coover, Charles Johnson, Michael Cunningham, and many others is as intimately conversant with literary history as one could possibly wish. My experience of our colleagues who live on Planet MFA has been that they are in general exceptionally well-read in their chosen genres, though the language they use to talk about their reading tends to be different from (and for the vast majority of the populace, infinitely preferable to) that heard on Planet PhD.
Elif Batuman adds in her essay: “In technical terms, pretty much any MFA grad leaves Stendahl in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read.”On Blowing My Load: Thoughts From Inside the MFA Ponzi Scheme by Anelise Chen in The Rumpus:
As if to prove their point, last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carried a review of a slim new novel called All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang. It’s a story, according to the review, of the paths followed by “two budding poets” who come together at “a prestigious unnamed writing school in the Midwest.” Chang, the reviewer notes, is a 1993 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been its director since 2006; she has received fellowships from Stanford, Princeton and Radcliffe; and her new novel poses “provocative” questions: “What is the relationship between talent and craft, genius and mediocrity? Can writing be taught? Does anyone ever improve? Yet the central characters in All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost are neither mad enough, wise enough nor even, so it seems, well-read enough, to dare answer them.”
Elif Batuman reignites the debate in her new article “Get a Real Degree,” by paying special attention to McGurl’s argument that one of the faults of MFA Programs is that it has helped teach technique so well and made so many good writers that we simply can’t read them all. It’s not that the Program has made us worst writers, it’s that it’s made us so good it’s impossible to tell who is bad anymore. Higher education is the great equalizer; but apparently this isn’t the the goal with art.What’s an MFA Got to Do with It? A Response to Elif Batuman by Lincoln Michel in The Faster Times:
I think reviewers, editors and writers (both MFA and non) focus too much on technical competence and not enough on what actually makes literature exciting. When we look at the greatest writers in history, it is often their flaws and eccentricities that make them so exciting and original. A story like Kafka’s “The Judgment” might violate a dozen workshop mantras, but there are few stories as powerful as it in Western literature.Elif Batuman and Mark McGurl by Andrew Seal in Blographia Literaria:
And yet, does an MFA program truly crush out a writer’s eccentricities? I find it hard to think an original writer—see again David Foster Wallace and company—will really allow themselves to be dulled down in this way. By the end of the essay, even Batuman doesn’t seem to think so[.]
Even if Batuman apparently doesn't pay attention to the products of workshop fiction, she knows who likes it: White People. As a running gag, she notes when things which are associated or tangentially connected to writing programs appear in the coffee-table book Stuff White People Like: "Stuff White People Like #44: ‘Public Radio’… #116: ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore.’"She makes some excellent points about the racial dimensions of the authority to speak through an Other, but her reliance on the Stuff White People Like line to drive her point home is more than a little lazy and actually undercuts any serious examination of why "white people" find things like "Being an Expert on Your Culture" so appealing and why program fiction is so successful at supplying it. Batuman shorthands it by saying that it's due to "the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures," but it should be quite obvious that not liking workshop fiction—or any of the things which appear in the Stuff White People Like book—makes no one any the less "white," even in the very limited sense of 'bourgie-quasi-hipster.' Preferring Dunkin Donuts to Starbucks or James Patterson to Toni Morrison makes no white person any the less part of the system of reproducing white privilege. The reasons why William Styron could write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ventriloquizing a black man go well beyond the coffee table.posted by Kattullus at 9:54 PM on October 7, 2010 [1 favorite]
(Additionally, Batuman's essay reveals more than a little deficit in self-consciousness about who the "white people" in the book are; surely a comment like, "I think of myself as someone who prefers novels and stories to non-fiction; yet, for human interest, skilful storytelling, humour, and insightful reflection on the historical moment, I find the average episode of This American Life to be 99 per cent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction" could feature as a highlighted exhibit in the kind of taste that the Stuff White People Like book skewers.)
« Older Night of the Living Trekkies.... | One of the hottest authors of ... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
In other technical news, Stendhal wrote La Chartreuse de Parme in 53 days. So let's not get ahead of ourselves here, eh?
posted by Wolof at 5:10 PM on September 14, 2010 [5 favorites]