A Response to Elif Batuman

Note: Since the London Review of Books only prints very short and heavily edited letters to the editor, I thought I would post this longer response to Elif Batuman’s review of The Program Era.

To the Editors:

Elif Batuman makes a number of interesting and provocative points in her flatteringly maximalist review of my book, The Program Era. She also makes some errors it might be worth correcting.

The charge that a book mainly devoted to an analysis of post-1945 American fiction “occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature before Henry James” might not seem like a particularly serious one, but it is enough to motivate a long train of paragraphs in Batuman’s review designed to demonstrate that, for instance, a fascination with “point of view” in fictional narrative was not original to the period I discuss. This would count as an effective critique of a book that claimed it was, but mine argues something like the opposite—namely that (as I put it in the introduction) the postwar period’s “true originality . . . is to be found at the level of its patron institutions.” This must surely seem the booby prize of historical originalities, and yet it does yield a number of fascinating literary responses to the dilemma of institutionalization, and is associated with an attempt to extend the franchise of literary excellence to new social groups that I refuse to greet, like Batuman, with simple contempt.

My point is that the program era has been the scene not of the invention, but of the codification of a longstanding concern with narrative point of view, and of the dissemination of this newly packaged concern to unprecedented numbers of students in story anthologies with titles like Points of View. So provided, these students did not need the sui generis genius of a Jane Austen to engage in sophisticated thinking about narrative form, and in any case typically chose forms quite distinct from Austen’s magisterially impersonal third person.

 

Similarly, my argument is not that novelists never attended college before 1945, but that it was only after that point that the university began to seem like an obvious or necessary aid to becoming one. This is why, yes, a striking number of major American novelists before 1945 were at best desultory students: Melville never went to college, famously finding “my Yale College and my Harvard” on a sailing ship; Mark Twain went to the public library; the few law classes taken by Henry James at Harvard hardly constituted preparation for his career—they were what he needed to flee in order to enter the mix of continental literary culture that would feed his writing; likewise William Faulkner, who lasted barely a year at Ole Miss, and Hemingway, who never came near a college as a student. And we can add to them virtually every woman writer in history--hardly a minor caveat when one is talking about the history of the novel. By contrast, their postwar successors increasingly saw college (and indeed graduate school) as exactly the place they would begin their careers as novelists, perhaps by taking a writing workshop, and where they could best continue those careers as writer-teachers.

Nor do I claim that the fictionalization of the slave narrative is original to postmodernism. Rather, I argue that the fictionalization of the slave narrative in a work like Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada takes on a meaning (counter-factuality as a sign of liberated consciousness) specific to its time and institutional place. Something similar can be said of my account of shame in literary minimalism, an emotion I’m proud to say I know predates 1945, as well as many of the other claims I make about postwar American fiction to which Batuman responds with sometimes interesting, sometimes coherent, but always more or less irrelevant samplings of her old notes from graduate seminar. 

I’m not sure what motivates Batuman’s fixation upon the question of precedent or 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, in which whole nations find themselves condescended to. Not that I have anything against reading Stendhal, mind you. He 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.

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, Batuman could have quickly learned that many 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. For what it’s worth, 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.

That there are also plenty of postwar writers who have suppressed (or even managed not to acquire) this knowingness in search of a more immediate or “innocent” purchase on contemporary experience only proves one of my broader claims, which is that the familiar revulsion at writing programs reprised so energetically by Batuman is a weak foundation upon which to build a scholarly account of the program era. The size and complexity of the phenomenon requires that one do some actual research. As a result, one might notice the long-standing antagonism within creative writing between overtly brainy and learned writing and its intellectually humbler (at times anti-intellectual) opposite; and one might see that the concern for craft in creative writing with which Batuman quarrels has always been in dialogue with its contrary, the kind of unkempt maximalism one finds in a work like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In this context, praise is a far more powerful dialectical instrument than blame, if only for its novelty.

But for the most part my book doesn’t even do that, engaging rather in 400-plus pages of frequently painfully unflattering critical analyses of the bad faith of postwar writers with respect to their own institutional position, which is compromised not by the nature and quality of its aesthetic output but by its participation in the increasingly direct orientation of higher education to the values of the market. That I love postwar literature all the same is, I gather, my own affliction, but that passion does help to motivate a close attention to the facts of the matter.

Mark McGurl

10/01/2010; material added 10/10/2010