Masters of the Typewriter, Doctors of the Whip

Elif Batuman's provocative article, "Get a Real Degree," in September's issue of the London Review of Books has produced even more pencil-gnawing in the MFA blogosphere than usual. Batuman's opening premise, "Even within the seemingly homogeneous sphere of the university English department, a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing," is one that us weirdos in Creative Writing-English PhD programs might immediately shelve in the "no-duh" section of our mental libraries. We are all too familiar with this schismy schism; with one foot in Creative Writing and another foot in the Literature, we try not to think about a full-blown case of departmental war breaking out where the two intersect.

But Batuman goes on to offer a brilliant critique of Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. McGurl's book proposes to interpret the rise of the MFA program "not as an occasion for praise or lamentation but as an established fact in need of historical interpretation." Batuman uses McGurl's dry aims as a springboard for her own deliciously unambivalent inquiry into institutionalization's effect on American fiction. While some of Batuman's critiques of program-fiction are stale (making fun of "show-don't tell" is now as ubiquitous as the slogan itself) her fearless dive into the shark-filled waters of the socio-political-grievance-novel is breathtaking to observe, not least because you are waiting for a team of politically correct white men to swim over and club her over the head with accusations of insensitivity or worse.

To get the full brilliance of Batuman's walk through this minefield, you really need to read the article, but for a taste, consider her take on McGurl's dialectic between Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates, which Batuman uses to launch the question of "Who is the real outcast?" What she's really talking about here is program-fiction's preference for the narrative of the outsider. The problem, for Batuman, is that programs often tell their writing students that one can only be an outsider (and therefore fiction writer) by virtue of one's minority class, race, gender, religion, personal history of war or trauma, etc. According to Batuman, the my-life-is-worse-than-yours-contest between fiction writers is like:

"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 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?"

Batuman's argues that the real cause of this preference for outsider-narrative is "shame," specifically, the shame of the profession of writing:

"Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn't directly cure disease, combat injustice...Because writing is suspected to be narcissistic and wasteful, it must be 'disciplined' by the program--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."

At this point in Batuman's article, I was thinking, "Enter nonfiction to the rescue!" Nonfiction doesn't cure cancer either, but it can draw the reader's attention toward cancer in a way that fiction cannot. While novels can offer a heightened reality that nonfiction can't always achieve, at the end of the day, real cancer is, well, real. Indeed, Batuman goes on to mention the "gap in quality between American literary fiction and non-fiction today." (Guess which is of better quality!) But as an example, Batuman points to This American Life--nonfiction, sure, but is a radio/TV program really the only example of great nonfiction she can come up with? Batuman is clearly brilliant and a pleasure to read, but I was disappointed when she dropped her line of inquiry right when she got to nonfiction--an obvious antidote to at least some of the problems she has argued inherent in program-fiction. Hey Batuman! Over here, in the nonfiction section! The nonfiction novel is waving at you! The memoir is jumping up and down, trying to get your attention! The Personal Essay just Facebook-friended you! Over in this section, we don't worry about all this false-ventriloquism of the artificial outsider. We declare who we are at the door! I'll be writing a memoir from the perspective of Jessica Hindman, who is many things, but has never been and will never be a pregnant Vietnamese woman (unlike, say, Robert Olen Butler). If I want to know what a pregnant Vietnamese woman's life is like, I'll go find one and ask her. Then I'll transcribe my notes and begin the same narrative craft process that fiction writers undertake, with slightly different rules.

Some would say that the memoir is facing similar problems in terms of privileging outsider narratives (indeed, during a recent Q&A at UNT, Kathryn Harrison said something along these lines) but I still believe nonfiction allows an escape from the smell of shame emanating off the pages of outsider narratives ventriloquized by insiders (Batuman's looking at you, Dave Eggers!). But as Batuman points out, even Eggers began as an outsider (in his trauma memoir), and his fiction increasingly reads like nonfiction.

So why not just write nonfiction? Given the shame that, as Batuman argues, writers feel about their elitism, isn't it better to state it up front as nonfiction requires (see Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - both nonfiction masterpieces concerning black life written by white women who don't/can't disguise their whiteness) rather than smuggle it under the skimpy blanket that fiction writers call "creativity" (see James Franco's debut. You know, James Franco - that total outsider who writes about slavery). Isn't it more interesting to know that even the James Francos of the world understand, or at least want to understand, all this outsideryness? Is there any reason we need to fictionalize these narratives? Personally, I think Mary Karr's voice rings truest in the debate over nonfiction's relationship to fiction: "God is in the truth." If made-up stuff can no longer express truth, then why not give the old truthy-truth a go?

But regardless of whether program-writers deal in fiction or nonfiction, my biggest contention with Batuman's examination of shame in the writing-program world is that I believe this shame is somewhat well-justified. Whether you're a student on Planet MFA or Planet PhD - the classrooms of each are, yes, shamefully lacking a representative number of students of color, students from working-class backgrounds, students from rural areas. For this and many other reasons, we Creative Writing PhDs should heed Batuman's article as a call to arms: We know the typewriter, we know the whip - it would be shameful if we didn't write about both.