ABlog

I teach creative writing to undergraduates at a certain liberal university in the heart of Greenwich Village (the one that keeps changing its name). It has long been apparent to me that much of this university's thinking about what constitutes good teaching in its writing programs centers on the publication profile of the teacher. It's not just that publishing in and of itself is taken to constitute proof that a faculty member is a "serious" writer (an assumption that is becoming more and more problematic in a market-driven publishing climate where the space for certain kinds of writing is rapidly shutting down); increasingly, the degree of establishment cachet exhibited by the publishing venue also bears on whether the teacher is seen as worthy. I've been appalled (though not surprised) to hear administrators openly state that publishing in a particular prestigious magazine, or working for a particular mainstream news organization, automatically signals the presence of superior qualifications to interact with students and help them become better writers.

What counts from the university’s point of view is enrollment (we are a tuition-driven institution), and enrollment is seen to depend largely on brand recognition. A writer who publishes in a prestigiously "branded" venue is bound to attract students (some of whom may possibly be less interested in what the writer is able to teach them about craft, or challenge them to teach themselves about their own imaginations, than in rubbing up against a literary celebrity who possesses the secret of managing to get published in said venue).

I will be frank: I find it depressing and demoralizing to work in a place where such a notion of the writer’s worth prevails, especially when this atmosphere only echoes, while reinforcing, the scale of values prevalent in the world of publishing. Thus I was heartened to read, at the back of the current issue of Fence (Vol. 8, Nos. 1&2), a “forum” on the current state of fiction in the U.S. (“The Talking Cure: Contemporary Fiction and Its Critics”) that includes a number of writers who not only explicitly reject the market values of the mainstream publishing world but have some intelligent things to say about how to survive the marginalization that accompanies that rejection. Because I have to teach tomorrow, and must unfortunately do so without benefit of any particularly prestigious recent publications to wow my students (which means I will actually have to prepare thoroughly by reading and commenting on their work as well as figuring out how to help them have the best possible discussions of assigned texts by writers like Yasunari Kawabata and Henry David Thoreau, complex and subtle and tonally peculiar works that many of them will no doubt greet as joyfully as a six-year-old does a large helping of steamed kale), I am going to take the liberty of simply quoting from a few of the comments included in the Fence forum:

Anis Shivani: The present American literary stance is to remain determinedly neutral toward any political ideology….The aesthetic of the work of fiction as a self-contained artifact is really conservative in the extreme, despite today’s typical fiction writer’s vaguely liberal pretensions…If the writer doesn’t have the intelligence or education or breadth of experience to engage with the huge changes occurring in postindustrial society, how can he appeal to readers who sense that something new is afoot, something insidious and revolting that is altering the very foundations of the liberal freedoms of the past half millennium?
The writer, corporate employee par excellence of the generous university, is too scared to go anywhere near the great collective transformations of the day. For him, the progress of the individual psyche, abstracted from external events, is enough fodder. A ruinous transaction. (pp. 255-256)

Vince Passaro: The degree to which contemporary fiction dares to say anything truly challenging or unpleasant to the culture about itself is the degree to which that fiction will be marginalized. The degree to which it uses challenging language or takes up challenging narrative forms is the degree to which it will be marginalized as well, for such language and such forms hint at challenging and unpleasant ideas. By “challenging and unpleasant” I do not mean depictions of difficult immigrant backgrounds or of dramatic and graphic moments in the discovery of one’s sexual orientation: all these are narcotic rather than stimulating in their effect, because their essential purpose is to assert that everything is okay (because I can prove in narrative form that I’m okay); what I mean is narrative prose that suggests in compelling and credible ways that almost nothing is okay, that the organism is dying, and the cancer that is killing it, and us, is an hysterical manipulation of lies, produced by us, 24 hours a day, in sound and word and image. There’s simply no money, no glamour, and no good sex to be found in that artistic direction these days. (246-247) [Note: I don’t like this easy dumping on “identity” narratives; I reject the notion that literary explorations of identity are necessarily unchallenging and in fact I think they are more likely to be challenging than narratives by/about people who never have reason to think critically about their identities. But I agree that feel-good identity-based fiction—what I vividly recall certain lesbian feminist cultural commissars requisitioning under the rubric of “positive portraits” of this or that identity—does often get promoted at the expense of the edgier, more discomfiting, probing kind. In the final analysis, a “positive portrait” of X where X is a marginalized subject is likely to be no more honest or illuminating than a positive portrait of Donald Rumsfeld or Laura Bush.]

Robert Glűck: To an astounding degree, our culture does not know itself. That is, we don’t know ourselves, perhaps starting with—and caused by—the effect we have on the world. We can’t seem to unite feeling and event. We can’t look at death, we can’t look at poverty. We are unique—a Western democracy that hates and fears the poor and does not think its citizens deserve a safety net. Another way of saying this is that the horror and splendor of our lives exceeds our threadbare vision. This is an issue that I would like to see addressed in fiction, since writing and art are ways a culture describes itself to itself. (258)

Stacey Levine: I am more concerned about the world staying upon a viable, survivable course than I am about the production of fiction. (256)

Darius James: *What part do you think contemporary fiction plays in culture generally? How do you see art and politics in contemporary fiction?

I will address these last questions by answering this way: America is a cursed land. Americans are fucked. How are you going to deal with it? (231)

And I haven’t read anything by any of these people! (probably because they mostly don’t publish in the types of prestigious venues that would get their work reviewed in the mainstream review media I obviously pay far too much attention to). But now I will definitely be hunting up their books.