On Friday, Slate.com published a fantastic piece by Chad Harbach titled “MFA v. NYC : America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last?”
The question he should have asked was “Which one can last?” because the MFA culture he describes clearly exhibits characteristics of the same sort of inadvertant pyramid scheme I have already described in regard to the consumerization of writing.
An assertion we often read on book trade blogs is that the process of selecting a book for representation and publication is subjective. I have to confess that this idea raises major red flags for me, not necessarily as an author, but as writing professional who has worked as both a writer and an editor.
From The Social Structure of Revolutionary America
The prejudice against novels shown by North Carolina farms was not shared by men of education. Many such books were advertised in the newspapers, and when a Yale class disputed “Whether reading of Novels be advantageous,” the President himself decided “that it is advantageous in some measure, if not much attended to.”
Today I want to perform a philosophical genealogy, tracing today’s deluge of aspiring authors to the political and theological underpinnings of the Modern age.
Roll with me on this one; I rarely get to use my formal training in comparative religion here, and I promise this isn’t going to be a conversion blog or an Anne Rice-style rant. So, let me state up front that this is more about tracing the path of an idea popular among present-day book enthusiasts than promoting or dismissing any of its religious or political ancestors.
Ah finally! After the weak and weirdly constructed assaults on literature by Lee Siegel and Philip Roth, finally I read a critique of modern publishing I can pass on as insightful rather than insipid.
Anis Shivani skewers the MFA system*, a major player in the “writer as consumer” model that’s turning publishing into a pyramid scheme. But, Shivani’s beef isn’t with the upturning of the business model of publishing, but with the institutional dynamics that select for mediocrity:
The ascent of creative writing programs means that few with critical ability have any incentive to rock the boat–awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation. The writing programs embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there’s no incentive to call them out. (A politically fecund multiculturalism–very desirable in this time of xenophobia–is the farthest thing from the minds of the official arbiters: such writing would be deemed “dangerous,” and never have a chance against the mediocrities.)
The MFA writing system, with its mechanisms of circulating popularity and fashionableness, leans heavily on the easily imitable. Cloying writers like Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, and Charles D’Ambrosio are held up as models of good writing, because they’re easy enough to copy. And copied they are, in tens of thousands of stories manufactured in workshops.
The rest of the critique, including Shivani’s list of the Top 15 Most Overrated American Writers, is equally scathing, and equally valuable for anyone who wants to understand how the publishing biz is eating itself alive.
_
* I was well on my way to the MFA track when I transferred from WVSU to UVA, which would not accept my writing transfers as major credit, forcing me to choose a new major. This happenstance may have scuttled, or hindered, my chances of being published, but in retrospect I am glad to have had years of outward-looking experience in the military and intelligence communities rather than years in a literary Hall of Mirrors.
I first became aware of the slippage of the idea of a mash-up when I found songs on the iTunes store identified as “mash-ups” which were in fact merely remakes or sample-derived songs.
A mash-up is, as its name implies, a work created by blending two or more existing works. It is not a refashioning of a single existing work, nor is it an existing work altered primarily by adding original material to it.
One can forgive musicians for being imprecise with language, but when the publishing community does it the imprecision tells a different story. It speaks of sloppy thinking, sloppy decision making, and sloppy art.
This recent trend of books that add material to classics — like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and now Dick and Jane and Vampires — is not a “mash-up” trend. A literary mash-up would be combining passages from, say, Moby-Dick and The Old Man and the Sea to create a new, derivative work.
Plain and simple, this trend is about sampling and remaking for the purpose of parody.
If today’s Telegraph interview with The Passage
But, beyond the tale of how he constructed his best-selling novel during bike rides with his daughter, Cronin offered up some excellent insights into the literary-genre divide.
The literary world is abuzz with news that author Anne Rice has abandoned Christianity. In the name of Christ. Or something like that.
I’m not going to take a position for or against the religion or the political and moral issues Rice cites as her reasons. However, I would like to take a stab at the logic of her controversial revelation to see if another, more professional motive might explain it better than the stated one.
When I first read the headline of the latest salivation for Tom McCarthy’s eagerly awaited novel, C
God help us, another pretentious twit comparing the absence of whatever he or she deems as true literary fiction with the downfall of rational civilization. If the “avant garde” is identified with Darwin, could the comparison of genre fiction with Creation Science be far behind?
But, ever curious about the state of literary theory, I gave the article a go. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found there, much more nuanced and fair that the above Guardian headline would lead you to think.
Oh where does the time go? Is it Thursday already?
This has been quite a busy week in my pay-the-rent job, which goes a long way toward explaining why the blog is a little slim this week — and shifted one day to the right, as they say in business speak. (At least in English, they say this. I wonder if Arab businessmen postpone events ilá yasár or “to the left” …)
Enough chitterchat. On to the publishing links!
