For Christmas last year I was given a subscription to Prospect, a magazine whose guiding principle each issue seems to be to make itself even more British than it was the previous month. As a result its articles, though undeniably thoughtful, are often stultifyingly intellectual and snobbish in a way that only British people of a certain age and inclination can truly appreciate (one of its cover stories this month — COVER STORIES! — was a several-thousand-word reflection on the similarities between psychoanalysis and cricket, which would be a hilarious piece of satire about British intellectual life if it weren’t written completely in earnest).
Still, in amongst all the rhetorical opiates, they do occasionally have some very interesting opinion pieces from month to month, and this one on the American literary scene is a particularly good example.
Partly, of course, it’s a long-winded explanation of why British intellectuals are better than American intellectuals (otherwise it wouldn’t belong in Prospect, natch), but along the way author Kamran Nazeer makes two points that I think are worth bearing in mind as members of said American literary scene.
One, we’re very lucky in the States to have so many bajillions of literary journals in which we can (with any luck) place our work; as Nazeer puts it, lit journals are
important less as a means of getting paid than as a way for [writers] to persuade [themselves] that [they are] on the way to success and recognition. These magazines are camping points on the route to the summit—places to recover a sense of psychological security. Being published in them is an achievement to point out to other people when explaining what you do with your life.
What Nazeer doesn’t do, at least not explicitly, is trace the consequences of that security: complacency. When it’s so easy to build up a mountain of credits in small lit journals, people are less likely to put in the effort required to get in the big ones — or to write an entire book.
Nazeer’s second point is that because the American literary scene is so well established and institutionalised, the stories it produces reflect a fairly homogenous, insular world:
The writing and postgraduate industries [in America] represent a market large enough to sustain a self-reflective reading community. But [they don't] set out to appeal to anyone else . . . and [aren't] interested in any part of the world outside the American postgraduate slop between apartment and faculty and then the inevitable entry into New York City.
Nazeer’s actually talking about one book in particular here, and obviously not everything that gets published in lit journals is quite so predictable, but I think it’s still a valid point. The gatekeepers in the American literary scene are increasingly members or alums of MFA programs around the country — and even if they say they want a variety of styles and voices (even if they DO want that), the writers competing for publication are going to write what they think will appeal to those gatekeepers, their peers, and so forth.
In short, they’re going to write for other MFA-ers, rather than the reading public. That’s not necessarily a problem, I guess, but I don’t think it’s an coincidence that some of the best-selling literary fiction in this country is written by people who haven’t come from MFA programs; what’s interesting to MFA-ers is probably not as interesting to everyone else, and I think we should all bear that in mind as we’re writing our magnum opera…
Tags: Andrew · British intellectuals · getting published · literary magazines · literary taste · Prospect · vicious circles4 Comments
Interesting post and article. I like that you used the phrase “magnum opera.” A quick question. You wrote:
“When it’s so easy to build up a mountain of credits in small lit journals, people are less likely to put in the effort required to get in the big ones — or to write an entire book.”
Say someone writes 10 short stories, intending to submit them to the Paris Review (or Granta, etc.). Are these stories going to be of higher quality than if the author intends to submit them to smaller magazines, due to the “complacency” of oh-it’s-only-the-bean-street-review?
Also, although it may be possible, I’m not sure that anyone composes fiction thinking “I’m writing this for the masses” or “I’m writing this for critics in the American literary scene.” I think many people simply write, then look for an appropriate publisher. The American literary scene is quite diverse, as are MFA programs. They range in focus from realist to highly experimental. I’ve heard the argument (usually from people without an MFA) that creative writing programs are causing literature to become standardized–that’s ridiculous and impossible to prove.
Here’s a quote from a June New Yorker article you’ve probably seen (Show or Tell: Should creative writing be taught):
“McGurl argues that, far from homogenizing literature or turning it into an academic exercise, creative-writing programs have been a success on purely literary grounds. ‘There has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period,’ he says, and he offers the same proof that Barth offered in his Times article: there is more good fiction out there than anyone has time to read. The system must be doing something right.”
Yes, yes, fine, we’re all artists and we just write whatever best allows us to express ourselves. But look, if you’re *not* thinking about who your audience is when you’re writing something, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. You’re shooting yourself in the LEG. If you want to get published in Paris Review or Granta, that comedy-sci-fi novella you’re working on just isn’t going to cut it. And regardless of whether or not a journal is open to everything (in theory or in practice), if you’re desperate to appear in something that publishes mainly realist literary fiction, you’re probably going to send them realist literary fiction — it’s tilting the odds in your favour to do so, so why wouldn’t you?
But none of this is meant to suggest that writers do or should goof off when it comes to submitting stories to small or experimental journals — obviously I would hope that any writer submitting to any journal would always submit what they felt was their best work. My point is that a writer who has a gazillion credits in journals like “Jilted Fangirl Review” will probably think of themselves as successful writers (and why shouldn’t they?), and when you have that sort of feeling of success, you have less motivation to really push for something better, even if you’re still producing work that you feel is your best.
And, finally, of course it’s impossible to “prove” that MFA programs lead to standardisation, and it’s just as impossible to “prove” that they’re not, and I raise the point merely, as I said, as something worth bearing in mind. I would say, however, that MFA programs are certainly making the American literary scene more insular, at least insofar as they’re adding an extra set of hoops for any hopefuls who wish to break in.
(By the way, I haven’t read the New Yorker article you mentioned, but I’m not sure it’s that surprising that established members of the American literary scene are such eager apologists for MFA programs — how do you think they get paid?)
“But look, if you’re *not* thinking about who your audience is when you’re writing something, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. You’re shooting yourself in the LEG. If you want to get published in Paris Review or Granta, that comedy-sci-fi novella you’re working on just isn’t going to cut it.”
Well, agree to disagree then, because it seems to me that if you *are* thinking about who your audience is when you’re writing something, then that is akin to shooting yourself in the foot. This is of course a personal thing, but I find it impossible to consider my audience when writing. It would be too distracting. I think the work should come first, because “audiences” are fickle, and their reaction is impossible to predict. Many writers don’t write for anyone else, though if they have high personal standards of excellence, they will find an audience. There is such a thing as considering the market *after* writing.
It strikes me that the idea of “thinking about your audience” is not the same as “writing for a particular audience or demographic.” You can write pages and pages of a character trimming his toenails because that’s what you’re really FEELING that day, but that doesn’t mean you should publish it. (Nor does it necessarily mean you shouldn’t, though I’m not sure I could sit through Toenails: The Novel.)
And I think it’s definitely a valid point that people in or recently out of MFA programs tend to have certain preoccupations that much of the general population does not have, Nabokov for example. Writers in general may share these kinds of preoccupations, but if the idea of writing is to explore humanity in all its variety, then perhaps by limiting ourselves to the experiences we go through as young people attending workshops with other young people obsessed with things like cliched language and narrative arcs, we are somehow missing out on that variety.