Let’s pretend the MFA isn’t an unstoppable force and needs defending by me…

This review got me all in a tizzy.  I read it this morning and thought responding to it would be a great blog post, but then I started reading through it again, and there were just so many points I wanted to make, and I was having such a hard time sifting through which were the important ones and which not, and I also found myself defending ‘the writing program’ as an institution more than I wanted to, that I stopped with my detailed response (if you can believe it—there’s a detailed-response draft in a folder on my computer) and decided to write this instead.

Elif Batuman wrote a book called The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, about, well, what the subtitle says.  It’s been well received and sounds interesting.  I’ve heard her interviewed, and she’s very personable and not shy about staking out her position.  She says in this review of The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl, that she wanted to be a writer and chose a PhD over an MFA.  She’s reviewing a book written by a PhD about the MFA phenomenon.  She not only analyzes the book, but also uses it as an opportunity to complain about MFA programs.  I tried in this post to separate those two different critiques—of the book, of what she calls “the writing programme” (its’ from the London Review of Books, hence the English spelling in any of her quotes) but what I’ll usually call “the MFA”—but it’s hard to know if I succeeded.

I think some of her criticisms are dead-on.  For one, I agree that there is a limited historical perspective in the writing program mind-set (though I don’t think it’s as bad as she does).  Another thing I agree with is the following quote, which I think is the sentence I agree with most: “Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with writing about persecution, for either the persecuted or the non-persecuted, there is a genuine problem when young people are taught to believe that they can be writers only in the presence of real or invented sociopolitical grievances.”  I think she weakens her point, though, when she discusses Tim O’Brien’s focus on his time as a soldier in Viet Nam and as a vet in the United States, and implies that he writes about this time because it was the only “period of his life when he – like the conscripted Native Americans, like the napalmed Vietnamese – was the victim of the murderous policy of the White Man.”  If the work is powerful—and what I’ve read of O’Brien’s is emphatically powerful—why worry about the subject at all?

She writes, “Literature is best suited for qualitative description, not quantitative accumulation.  It isn’t an unhappiness contest, or an unhappiness-entitlement contest.”  Now, I’m not sure what that first sentence means, and though I am often guilty of doing it, I get edgy when someone starts talking about what literature is best suited for anyway.  But I agree completely with the second sentence.  And later in the review she’ll bring up the pro-fiction, anti-nonfiction bias of the creative writing program, which I can’t really agree with.  Perhaps it’s because I’m having a hard time separating the ‘creative writing program’ from the rest of the industry involved in the publication, dissemination, and evaluation of the kind of literature studied and created in MFA programs.  I’m not going to claim I’m right, because I want to avoid being like Glenn Beck, but my perception is that where it counts—sales—non-fiction is kicking literary fiction’s ass.  (Are we in an age when literally everyone sees her- or himself as a part of an oppressed minority?  How is that possible?)  And while I wouldn’t hurl this accusation at any nonfiction writer in particular, the memoir market does seem to have a whiff of the unhappiness-entitlement contest about it, particularly when it can provide an uplifting ending to boot.  Nothing about Batuman’s book sounds like it has this quality, but if she’s going to throw a whole subset of literature under the bus in one big bunch—literary novels written by MFA grads—I think she should be willing to stand with her non-fiction compatriots in front of the firing squad.

She talks about content vs. style, and it leads her to this: 

If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years.  In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust.  On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read.  This reflects, I believe, the counterintuitive but real disjuncture between good writing and good books.

I think she has stated well a common criticism of the MFA program—it can only teach people how to write better, not what to write about (nor can it teach genius, which I’m glad she avoided).  There is a whole cartload of responses to this accusation, but I think the most important aspect of it is often overlooked.  I don’t think the MFA was designed to do that.  I think of the MFA program as essentially a trade school.  It’s a studio art that isn’t necessarily done in a studio.  That’s why it’s an MFA and not a PhD (and this is one of my problems with Creative Writing PhD’s, not that I haven’t thought long and hard of getting one).  And I think it works really well as a trade school.  There’s a long part of her review where she discusses craft, and she (perhaps with her tongue in her cheek) says the emphasis on craft is “an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, perhaps even working-class skill, as opposed to something every no-good dilettante already knows how to do.”  And here’s where we differ.  This is not an evasion or a rhetorical trick or a ‘legitimising technique’—it is an honest attempt to describe what it is the MFA process (not the degree) can give you—and it can’t even promise to give you that.

By talking about sentence rhythm (maybe the first thing I was taught to think about), story structure, balance, or scene vs. summary you are helping the diligent student become a better writer.  While that’s not the only thing that goes on in a workshop or a writing program, I believe it’s the most important thing.  And if students leave able to write compelling sentences about boring, unimportant, self-indulgent, whatever-criticism-you-want-to-throw-at-them subjects… at least they’re good sentences.  This isn’t the freemasons—we don’t have a secret ceremony where we make each writer swear to uphold the humanist values of the enlightenment and only write interesting stories before we teach them the secret handshake.  It’s a relatively open world, and MFA programs are there to teach everyone they deem worth teaching, and some others who can simply afford it.

Just because you don’t have to be in a creative writing program to become a great writer doesn’t mean getting an MFA has nothing to do with it.  It may not be the best way or the most interesting way (I tried drinking, which was very interesting but didn’t do a damn for my writing), but it’s a way.  And I am one of those people who thinks there is such a thing as a workshop story, and I don’t like any but the best of them, but I just think this is a new manifestation of an age-old problem, and we only think it’s new because we compare today’s average to the best of the past, and I also think that—just as in the past—the best writers are going to work through that.  And if, after your two-year commitment is up, you decide to read the whole of the Western canon, no one’s going to stop you, and it will probably help.  Even at its worst, to think that two-years of indoctrination in ‘craft’ is going to kill the genius that would have flowered otherwise seems to me ridiculous.  Something about all this reminds me of the people who criticize AA because it might not be the best way to quit drinking.  Quitting drinking, when drinking is a serious problem, is a good however you approach it, just as becoming a better prose-stylist, sentence-writer, or novel-structurer is a good whether you figure it out with Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Austen or in an MFA program.