(Which includes me.)
“The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions.
Shame also explains the fetish of ‘craft’: an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, perhaps even working-class skill, as opposed to something every no-good dilettante already knows how to do.
Shame explains the cult of persecutedness, a strategy designed to legitimise literary production as social advocacy, and make White People feel better. . .”
It’s long but worth it. I suddenly feel conflicted about so many more things. It’s like I already had white class guilt before but now it’s reached guilt level orange.
7 responses
The essay seems pretty absurd on its face, to me, for reasons innumerable.
Among them: she decries the whiteness of the workshop, but admits that she longs for a time when writing was the sole province of elite white people whose cultural uniformity produced the continuities of memory she exalts as literature. And: (more a pet peeve of mine than anything inherently flawed) her argument seems functionally reducible to “My way or the highway.” She wants writers to be just like Elif Batuman, connoisseurs of the history of fiction who have had many rich and non-white life experiences. But as we know, it isn’t really valid to argue, ever, for perfection, and it’s difficult to argue for large-scale change. Perfection is impossible, of course, and an argument for large-scale change should best come attached to an argument explaining actionability. Why listen to a dream of change if it’s not likely to be able to come to pass? When she comes to name even a single contemporary author who follows the rules of her dreamland, she can produce only a single Dane. Surely, among the hundreds of thousands of serious writers of prose who are now alive in the world, surely she can find some group or movement or even handful more broadly promising than Christian Jungersen, there by himself.
My biggest problem with the essay, anyway, is this one. How, exactly, do the Overlords of the Workshop communicate their many directives to the writerly minds they have so totally enslaved? If one really wants to look at the means of production of contemporary American prose fiction, it seems like it might be wiser to start with the market, or with the industry which directly supplies that market (publishers themselves), or even with the writers who offer their work to those publishers. The teachers of the writers appealing to the publishers who try to appeal to the desires of the marketplace do not seem to me to be the primary determinants of most of what goes on in American letters today. Less so still: the institutions employing the teachers, etc. Whenever I see some new shrieking declamation of PROGRAM FICTION I want to shriek back: How? How!? HOW HOW HOW?!?! Maybe it’s possible to explain how. I would be plentifully willing to listen to arguments about how. But no one really ever bothers to do so.
Not everything in the essay is wrong, of course, but throw ten thousand words on a page and some will ring true. I like the part about the perils of exalting creativity as a value in particular, but, yeah. Ugh.
Well, “programme writing”–as the author calls it–is simply, to use another term, “Industrial Writing”. But this fact recognizes the current subservience of writing as a discipline to the realities of our time; and as such, its mimicry of the larger trends visible in society. Of course in our society this happens to be identical with the predominance of business, and business-think. Hence you have specialization and niche production, as well as brand leveraging. So yes: goal is not so much Great Art as it is Sustained Literary Output. Or, as the author puts it: “excellent fiction”, not “great literature”.
I think the author makes a mistake by assuming “programme writing” to be a failure. Within its own world-view, programme writing is a success–precisely because it IS producing commercially viable output.
As for the rest of the article–the gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing regarding racegendersexualityclass–that’s all totem and fetish from the author’s own Literary Criticism industry, a subsidiary of Academia. Hence his concern about “the… betrayal of higher education”. But of course he’s just worried that his supplier base is going to dry up. 🙂
I was interested in the idea of choosing between a PhD in literature and an MFA. Why would that be your choice? And doesn’t that choice have more to do with what you want to do and be, rather than which program is “better”? As an artist, I would say art historians and artists have wholly different aims, even though they both benefit from knowing the history of art and artmaking. I’m glad my MFA program was part of a larger university, but when I started teaching, even at small colleges, it seemed like artists were constantly having to justify their efforts on terms that were native to other disciplines, and, to my mind, alien to art as a discipline.
I don’t know enough about contemporary writing programs to know how or if they suffer from being attached to the academy, but would guess that they do. I wonder too about how to frame the economic element. Do you get an MFA so that you can teach? Is it the only way to get a few years of focus? I think privilege is bigger than whiteness, and extends to the idea that we are entitled to live out our “calling.” I’m grateful, but of course it produces a glut of work.
I wonder if it is easier to miss the gulf between making and studying when both are writing. I think “visual” artists end up on the defensive constantly, unwilling to claim the territory of making as essentially, in essence, in aim, in practice, in orientation, in being, different than studying things that have been made. And I would say the same for writing. Even writing non-fiction is potentially vastly different than writing scholarly pieces. My academic friends claim creativity and invention in their work, and I think they are right to. But I don’t think they are engaged in creative work. If they were, they wouldn’t get tenure.
Everyone is an artist but not everyone makes art?
Maybe Batuman needs to take a little more blame. That it is actually the discipline of literary criticism that makes McGurl’s book painful, and McGurl’s sense that he needs to analyze MFA programs in that mode. Maybe that’s why Batuman chose the PhD. Too much of a purist, but now unwilling to admit that academic credentials have become necessary to prove one is serious, aware, knowledgeable.
Her points about white people, wound culture and so on are well said, but everything she says about MFA programs seems quite silly. Does she really believe that Iowa is more responsible for “wound culture” than Oprah? MFA programs aren’t producing this stuff, they are responding tot he culture.
But I’m going to write a longer essay response to this soon.
Batuman’s essay falls into two criticism’s most annoying cliches:
1. Hating basically all authors. As far as I can tell, she only likes Stendhal, Eggers (who–merely coincidentally, I’m sure–has published her writing in the past), and Jungersen.
2. Imposing motives, generally negative, onto authors for which she offers no evidence. Criticizing O’Brien for writing about his time in Vietnam instead of his childhood is just bizarre and borderline offensive. I can’t understand the Batuman’s notion that he wrote about Vietnam because he didn’t have an interesting (i.e. too white) childhood. Instead of, you know, because maybe it was a traumatic and highly influential experience for him.
The whole thing is really not worth responding to, in my opinion, but those two points irked me too much.
The short-sighted complaining about the almost-blind.
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