Programme
by zunguzungu
In the LRB, Elif Batuman is not a fan of program fiction:
Might the ideal of ‘creativity’, taken as a supremely valuable, supremely human faculty, be harmful to a writer’s formation? It seems ominous that the role of creativity in American education originates, as McGurl observes, in Cold War rhetoric: through creativity, America was going to prevail over its ‘relentlessly drab ideological competitor’ and ‘outdo the group-thinking Communist enemy’. The value placed on creativity and originality causes writers to hide their influences, to hide the fact that they have ever read any other books at all and, in many cases, to stop reading books altogether. One telling result of this value is a gap in quality between American literary fiction and non-fiction today. Many of the best journalistic and memoiristic essays in the world today are being written in America. 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. The juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of literature – the real work of the novel – is taking place today largely in memoirs and essays. This is one of many brilliant observations in David Shields’s recent manifesto Reality Hunger, in which he argues that we had best give up the novel altogether. But I don’t think the novel is dead – or, more accurately, I don’t see why it has to be dead. It’s simply being produced under the kinds of mistaken assumption that we don’t make when it comes to non-fiction. Non-fiction is about some real thing in the world, some story that someone had to go out and pursue. It’s about real people and real books, which are, after all, also objects in the world. Why can’t the novel expand to include these things, which were once – in Don Quixote, for example – a part of its purview?
At his blog, Andrew Seal registers a dissent:
I don’t dissent from Batuman’s debunking because I resent the application of scholarship to literature or worry that it can impede enjoyment (anyone who has read this blog before should surely know I hold the diametrically opposite views in both cases). I dissent because the logic of Batuman’s formalism—if it’s been done before, it’s no longer revolutionary—doesn’t admit of the fact that literary texts interact with the times in which they are written and read, and their revolutionary quality or their hackneyedness isn’t a formal problem but a social one. We can only assess the “newness” of a technique within its social context because “newness” itself is produced by and through the society of any given moment. To fantasize otherwise is to abdicate any responsibility for accounting for why literature matters to people—something I would think the author of a book subtitled “Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” might be concerned about.
For what it’s worth, I found the piece really smart and yet, for all its insight, weirdly uneven. Putting aside her strange tendency to reference a-literary tribespeople stereotypes as a meaningful conceptual tool — they’re not, actually — I have genuine questions about how carefully she read McGurl’s book; whereas Andrew read it scrupulously close, I have my own list of little “huh?” moments, and I didn’t even read The Program Era. When McGurl references the disappearance of the .400 hitter, he’s clearly referencing one of the central figures in Steven Jay Gould’s Full House, which Batuman either misreads for her own purposes or didn’t even recognize. For what it’s worth, the idea that the .400 hitter has disappeared because today’s hitters swing for the fences is one of the first things Gould demonstrates not to be the case. Ah, well…
Updated, 9/16: The Mumpsimus gets with the program.
Updated #2, 9/16: So does Joshua Corey.
zunguzungu 
I found Batuman’s piece really smart too, and I definitely had more than a few “huh?” moments while reading McGurl; it’s by no means a perfect book. And for what it’s worth, I completely sympathize with Batuman’s preference of “great literature” over “excellent fiction,” although I personally think that the Program has produced a work of great literature in Infinite Jest.
What made me decide to respond to Batuman’s piece, though, was the fairly consistent misrepresentation of McGurl’s arguments; she made his arguments extend in ways that he perhaps should have hedged better but obviously never intended (like the stuff about him appearing to be unaware that writers went to college before the late 1940s); there’s a willed desire to read the book as even more than the very ambitious argument it is that I found frustrating. I watched McGurl give a talk (which later became an n+1 essay) here at Yale, and he got very similar pushback in the questions about the book, so to some extent I think the fault does lie with the way he raised the stakes of his book to unusual heights, but I feel a careful reading of the historical arguments he is making adequately qualify and limit some of the more theoretical speculations about the nature or quality of post-war fiction that he presents.
I wonder if it’s a usefully over-ambitious argument? I sometimes wonder if a writer has to make the case 40% too strong for people to take into account 70% of the argument. Metameat below, for example, is able to move past McGurl’s argument — to make a different one — only by accepting and supplementing his sociological structure.
I definitely think you’re right–Franco Moretti is also a pretty good example of being 40% too strong (although I think that generally speaking 70% of his argument is an optimistic assessment of people’s uptake of his argument). But there might be ways of being 40% too strong which give yourself something more concrete to fall back on, and that might be McGurl’s weakness. Being provocative is good, but the types of proof he offers for his hypothesis (those diagrams that no one can figure out and some highly tendentious–if brilliant–readings) could have been supplemented with a little more history and perhaps a little bit of basic journalistic work (g-d forbid, I know)–interviews with MFA directors, some details and statistics about hiring, about admissions, that kind of stuff. Without these things or something similar, I feel like he’s just relying on our intuition that, yeah, the Program is a big deal, etc.
Smart and uneven seems right to me. For what it’s worth, I liked better its earlier incarnation as a 2006 n+1 article, which is more simply an attack on what she doesn’t like in American fiction and doesn’t rely on slanting someone else’s argument.
As a product of the Program, I am all too aware of the institution’s systematic ignorance of literary history, or indeed of anything that isn’t currently being published in the New Yorker. It’s a real impoverishment. But the third term after the writer and the program, which I think McGurl misses, is the publishing industry: agents and editors are constantly, horribly present in the mind of every MFA writer, and their gatekeeping function has a lot to do with producing the homogenization you see at Barnes & Noble or the New Yorker’s current laborious “20 under 40” series – both as psychological pressure and as material fact. I believe the number of conglomerates may be down to five, and I believe that, despite the supposed decline of serious reading etc., they are continuing to do a brisk trade in the stuff white people like. A good Bourdieuvian shouldn’t miss this. Nonfiction sells much better than fiction, and the market pressure is for fiction to become as much like nonfiction as possible.
Point is, I am already looking forward to reading “The Absence of Camels” – even if we all end up publishing our novels on our blogs.
I’m glad you reminded me of what you told me when McGurl’s book first came out. Then, as now, my mind runs in the same predictable direction: we Americans, we love criticizing the stultifying effect of institutions meant to nurture while totally ignoring the systemic effects of over-powerful marketplaces. Don’t know how deeply I would extend that as a real critique of her piece — her points might still be valid on their own terms — but you’re right, a good Bourdieuvian would never miss the powerful homogenizing force of a literary culture trying to respond to intense market pressure.
I think “The Absence of Camels” will need to have soemthing to do with T.E. Lawrence. Beyond that, unsure.
Regarding the importance of publishing — my own reaction was that Batuman hadn’t read enough tedious mainstream fiction from the pre-MFA era. The doldrums were well established before the diploma mill. Similarly, my reaction to Batuman’s n+1 piece was that she hadn’t read enough non-mainstream fiction. Appropriately enough, I guess I just want her to read more. (Or maybe just back off a bit from the Big Blanket Pronouncements — otherwise I like her writing a lot.)
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