Get a Real Degree

Eli Batuman, for London Review of Books, takes a look at postwar fiction and the rise of the Creative Writing degree.

From the piece...

The most exhilarating pages of The Programme Era sketch a dialectic between Carver, the father of minimalism, and Joyce Carol Oates, the great graphomaniac who ‘during some periods of her career … has produced “40 to 50 pages [of fiction] each day” for a total of “well over 500 published stories, companion to the 40 or so novels and other books”’. While Carver’s stories are characterised by a ‘relative invisibility of racial self-consciousness’, Oates, it turns out, has always manifested guilt about ‘the unjust advantages of a white skin’. The heroine of I Lock My Door upon Myself, walking through a black neighbourhood, realises that the residents’ ‘immediate ancestors had been owned … Like me they are outcasts in this country. Not like me: they are true outcasts.’ In this persecution contest, the winner isn’t predetermined. Who is the real outcast? Oates literally dramatises the contest, which acquires the mesmerising, morbid fascination of a hot-dog eating contest between a human and a grizzly bear. Is the real outcast the professor’s grieving widow alone in the empty house in the college town, or the paranoid Bosnian graduate student threatened with deportation? Which estranged cousin is the real outcast: the German girl who survived Auschwitz and became a successful but caustic and solitary anthropology professor; or the American girl who narrowly avoided being murdered by her own father, then became a good wife and mother, but ended up getting cancer? Oates is the rare and admirable programme writer who never forgets that every unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.

The brilliant insight in McGurl’s chapter on Oates and Carver is the determining role played in their work by shame. Shame engenders both Carver’s taciturnity and Oates’s graphomania, which is really a compulsion to restage the outcasts contest, doing everyone justice, and constituting a proof that writing, too, is real work. I disagree with McGurl, however, that the shame shared by Oates and Carver is produced by the writing programme in particular, or school in general. ‘Shame and pride are the affective fuel of the school, the motive force of its everyday machinations,’ McGurl observes, plausibly enough – except that people were going to school for hundreds of years before the Iowa workshop. In his fascination with the GI Bill, McGurl occasionally conveys the impression that writers didn’t go to college before 1945, as when he draws our attention to

the seemingly banal fact that virtually all contemporary American fiction writers … have attended college … In previous generations this would not likely have been the case, both because fewer individuals of any kind went to college before the postwar advent of mass higher education and because a college education was not yet perceived as an obvious … starting point for a career as a novelist. Rather, as the uncredentialled, or rather press-credentialled, example of the high school graduate Hemingway makes clear, the key supplementary institution for the novel until mid-century was journalism.

The GI Bill dramatically increased the percentage of college-educated Americans, but did it really affect the percentage of college-educated American writers? According to the internet, writers have, in fact, been going to college for hundreds of years.[*] The claim that the GI Bill produced a generation of unprecedentedly shameful young people, meanwhile, is weakened by the fact that outsiders, from Balzac’s parvenus to Proletkult, have been joining the intelligentsia for nearly as long as there has been an intelligentsia to join.

To my mind, the real cause of shame here is the profession of writing, and it affects McGurl just as much as it does Carver and Oates. Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn’t directly cure disease, combat injustice, or make enough money, usually, to support philanthropic aims. Because writing is suspected to be narcissistic and wasteful, it must be ‘disciplined’ by the programme – as McGurl documents with a 1941 promotional photo of Paul Engle, then director of the Iowa workshop, seated at a desk with a typewriter and a large whip.