Divine comedy (2)

[Dave Monroe]

CONT'D ...

It would be useful to look at a representative cross-section of the
finest young novelists of the US, the largest and most diverse of the
English-speaking nations. A big job, but luckily Granta has just
carried out the task for me, and announced its Best of Young American
Novelists 2, a list of 21 talents. In his summing up, the chair of the
judges, Granta editor Ian Jack, mentions death, sorrow, uncertainty
and anxiety. "All I know is that we read many books infused by loss
and a feeling that present things would not go on forever." (These
writers are mostly in their twenties and early thirties!) At the end,
Jack regrets the absence from the list of Joshua Ferris, "whose first
novel… had the singular distinction among all these writers of making
me laugh aloud quite often."

No loud laughter in the whole top 21. Twenty-one Apollos, and not one Dionysus.

"Why so sad, people?" as Zadie Smith asks.

Well, it's just a habit by now. It's so ingrained in our culture that
it has become an unexamined default position. What makes it much worse
is that it is now being coached, reinforced. All of the writers on the
Granta list attended university creative writing programmes. All, in
other words, have submitted to authority. This is a catastrophe for
them as novelists.

The novel cannot submit to authority. It is written against official
language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed form the
novel has begun to take—it is always dying, and always being born.

If the literary novel has calcified into genre, the new novelists need
to break its underlying, often unspoken rules. To not just question,
but to overthrow authority. The novel, at its best, cannot even submit
to the authority of the novelist: Gogol burnt his follow-up to Dead
Souls because, on reading the book he had just written, he was shocked
to find that he profoundly disagreed with it.

But the universities are authority or they are nothing. As the west
has grown secular, the university has, quite organically, taken over
from the church as a cross-border entity claiming universality,
claiming to influence the powerful but not to wield power. "Education"
is the excuse for a self-perpetuating power structure now, just as
"religion" was the excuse then. The modern universities could claim to
have no single ideology, but the same could be said of the Vatican
under the Medicis, or the Borgias.

The problem is not that the universities are malevolent; they are not.
They have no sinister intent in taking over the novel,
professionalising it, academicising it. Like most of those who
colonise territories that were getting on fine without them, they
believe they do no great damage, they believe it's for the novel's
good, they believe they are benign, idealistic and quite a bit
cleverer than the natives. As ever, none of these beliefs is entirely
true.

The literary novel, by accepting the embrace of the universities, has
moved inside the establishment and lost contact with what made it
vital. It has, as a result, also lost the mass audience enjoyed by
Twain and Dickens. The literary novel—born in Cervantes's prison cell,
continued in cellars, bars and rented rooms by Dostoevsky, Joyce and
Beckett—is now being written from on high. Not the useful height of
the gods, with its sharp, gods'-eye view of all human classes, all
human folly, but the distancing, merely human height of the ruling
elite, just too high up to see what's happening on the street below.

Luckily this situation is self-satirising. Campus authority generates
campus comedy. The senior academic novelist is trapped in the small
world of the university, cut off from the big world, embodying
authority yet still driven to write. In this situation the novel, if
it is to live, must turn against the novelist. Malcolm Bradbury and
David Lodge, writing novels at night, attacked their day-selves, their
academic selves, as absurd buffoons whose work was meaningless. And
the novelist in them was right.

The university model, any teaching model, of necessity implies that
there is a Platonic ideal novel in some other dimension, which has all
the characteristics that make for novelness and that the more of these
attributes a novel has, the more like a perfect novel it is. This
concept works for the tragic, it works for the epic, it works (less
well, but it works) for the lyric, it does not work for the novel
because, as Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, the novel is the only
post-Aristotelian literary form. It is not bound by classical rules.
It is not bound by any rules. The novel is not a genre. The novel is
always novel. The novel is always coming into being. The novel cannot
be taught, because the novel does not yet exist.

This professionalisation will make poor writers adequate. And will
make potentially great writers adequate. Great novelists write for
their peers. Poor novelists write for their teachers. If you must
please the older generation to pass (a student writing for an older
teacher, a teacher writing to secure tenure), you end up with
cautious, old-fashioned novels. Worse, the system turns peers into
teachers. Destroyed as writers, many are immediately re-employed,
teaching creative writing. This is a Ponzi scheme.

During their second year, students are offered teaching appointments
to teach introductory undergraduate creative writing workshops (ENL 5F
or ENL 5P) in their genre or are hired as literature TAs or GSRs.
(From the website of the English department at the University of
California, Davis)

The damage this is causing to novel, writer and audience is
particularly advanced in America. The last 30 years have seen the
effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a
career path. As they became professional, writers began to write about
writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write about
writing.

And the language of the American literary novel began to drift away
from anything used by human beings anywhere on earth. Thirty years of
the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary
prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible.
Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out.
This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe
for novelists, and the novel.

Lastly, a series of thesis units, which is your writing time guided by
your thesis committee members, will fulfil the required 36 units.
(From the website of the English department at the University of
California, Davis)

Much of their fiction contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety.
Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none, to generate
suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to
frown rather than smile; and their work fills with a self-indulgent
anxiety that could perhaps best be called "wangst."

To teach is to imply that one would not otherwise learn. Do we teach
children to breathe? The illusion that there is a solution comes from
the illusion that there is a problem. There is not. The forest is
open. Strike out.

TO BE CONT'D ...

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9276