The New York Press, an alternative weekly, printed two stories last week which provide interesting bookends to our debate on Orientalism. In the first, a columnist uses Calcutta in the City of Joy sense, as synonym for grinding poverty:
The mayoral election was still fresh in everyone’s mind… “The billionaires have won,” Ken said. “They’ve been given a billionaire’s mandate…”It’s time to start making New York City more homeless-friendly again… Before the rest of us are completely shoved out of Manhattan, we do our part to repopulate the streets with smelly, drunken and drug-addled bums. We turn street-level New York into Calcutta. Doing that will destroy the property values these people have worked so hard to build up. Multimillion-dollar real estate isn’t worth shit when it stands along Calcutta streets. [Link]
That will come as a surprise to homeowners in posh South Calcutta, I’m sure. In the second, Sam Sacks begins an essay on modern American short stories with a 40-year-old tale by R.K. Narayan, a self-referential parable about writing which foreshadowed works like Adaptation:‘Multimillion-dollar real estate isn’t worth shit when it stands along Calcutta streets’
In R.K. Narayan’s novel The Vendor of Sweets, a young entrepreneur pushes his father to invest in what seems like a dubious venture: a short-story machine. How the machine works exactly is never made clear, and the hapless man squanders the family savings.Still, if Narayan floated the idea ironically 40 years ago, today a short-story machine is probably within technology’s grasp. Given a set of common parameters… a literate engineer could surely create a serviceable program. [Link]
It’s already been done. This post was generated by our AutoBlogger™: works day and night, doesn’t demand the abuse meted out to interns, and is just as repetitive as our own writing. I’m actually kicking back in Ooty right now. If you get too many M.I.A. posts, tweak a checkbox or two.
Sacks criticizes the bland homogeneity of stories from writers’ workshops:
… I was reminded of Narayan’s machine recently while reading the Best New American Voices 2006… Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator’s difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible…
Even the style of writing displays a numbing verisimilitude. The first-person voice is always a lazily generalized vernacular… most of these stories end with a symbolic “moment of clarity” in which nothing happens, but a change has been imperceptibly arrived at… “It’s a little after midnight when the phone rings again. It seems as if it’s ringing forever, but finally it stops, abruptly and absolutely. And it’s quiet again, and I’m alone.”It should be no surprise that every one of the writers in this anthology have one more thing in common: They have attended writers’ workshops… [Link]
He pays special note to the most well-known, Iowa, where Bharati Mukherjee has taught:Doctrine is imposed. It grades down the spiky brilliance of the talented and elevates the hacks
In the passing generations Iowa’s rich bloodline has become increasingly anemic, and the truth is that, with the possible exception of Marilynne Robinson, who teaches there, no major writer has come out of the Workshop in decades. [Link]
Hmph. Keep your eye on a certain Sepia reader who’s also an Iowa alumnus. Sacks sounds a lot like Bill Deresiewicz on Jhumpa Lahiri, quoted again below:
Interpreter of Maladies… exhibit[s] a high degree of competence, but it’s the kind of competence that makes you want to call for the abolition of writing programs… The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted–no, machine-tooled–to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices–the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany–arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock. [Link]
He concludes that writers’ workshops breed formulaic checklists…
… Show Don’t Tell becomes one of the rules in a standardized how-to checklist… These rules aren’t exactly arbitrary. Having a character gaze into a mirror is evidently an involuntary reflex for amateurs and writers without talent. But the rule makes no allowances for the possibilities of a mirror scene in the hands of a writer with talent….This gets to the crux of the danger of the workshop: Doctrine is imposed with the working assumption that everyone is a mediocrity. If obeyed, it grades down the spiky brilliance of the talented and leads to the limited elevation and refinement of apprentice hacks… [Link]
… and drowns ambition:
A popular anecdote… has F. Scott Fitzgerald, fresh out of Princeton, saying to his fellow alumnus Edmund Wilson, “I want to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, don’t you?” There is naiveté in the statement and there is hubris, but the boast also expresses a serious pursuit of greatness… But today, such a statement would most likely be met with muffled embarrassment in a workshop, which values the practical ends of publication and employment over this sort of dreaming…… we can only wonder what is being lost amidst an institution that, unintentionally but inexorably, conspires to discourage daring greatly as both irregular and impractical. [Link]
hmmm.. my mind slippeth to a review i heard of lynn truss’s ‘Talk to the hand’ book – one of her pet peeves – no one admits to being wrong – “Something happened” – “I didnt do it… SOMEthing happened” – … – (i’m going somewhere old chap. bear with me) – my mind slippeth again – must be dotage or cranial feces – the point i make is – I for one am overawed by the sheer immensity of the man-made institutions – i can NOT admit to error if the ‘system’ crashes – cant bear the weight of a billion dollar institution on my shoulders – (are you still with me) – similarly a writer just can NOT cater to a target market that is constrained by comprehensibility – we’re talking goobles of poopheads out there – with varying tastes and passions – as a writer i can comprehend an audience of a few hundred or may be a few thousand – but it doesnt make sense for a publisher to print for that volumes – there are demands to mandibulerize the works for the undistinguishing palates – ergo the watering down of ambition to cater to the masses – and SO!!! what does this prove… that i’m tired and need to turn in. G’nite y’all.
Sacks’s criticism isn’t particularly unique among a lot of the critiques of MFA programs/writing workshops. While I think some of his commentary is totally misplaced and disjointed, his criticism of writers’ workshops is part of a larger trend in major MFA programs, in my opinion. Most of it is still pale, stale and male and completely dependent on connections and how much ass you kiss. With the limited success of publishing, many of the “big name” programs reorient towards job placement and teaching opportunities, not necessarily fostering new voices or a new outlets in writing, ESPECIALLY for “non-traditional” (i.e. non-white) writers. And there’s an awful lot of imitation in writing programs, but in some ways this is how it’s always been. And of course, there is tons of crappy writing being published that doesn’t come from writing workshops and is formulaic, derivative and uninspired.
I’m bummed about the Jhumpa Lahiri quote, though. I really like her 🙂
So would it be accurate to say his essay is… blandly homogeneous? 😉
Do desi writers really count as non-traditional any more? Even the 2nd genners (Americans) are still only writing what they know will sell, tales of their parents and the homeland.
Bharati Mukherjee has taught at Iowa–indeed she studied there and met her husband there–but it seems odd to associate her with it as as “School” as opposed to a physical university. Her stories are pretty dramatic. I mean, the only time I heard her read from a novel, the scene included a firebomb or somesuch. Not your typical middle class lifestyle novel.
There’s a good critique in the intro to McSweeney’s Thrilling Tales, by Michael Chabon–I think that’s where I first read the phrase “bloodless prose” applied to the classic New Yorker school of writing.
Do desi writers really count as non-traditional any more? Even the 2nd genners (Americans) are still only writing what they know will sell, tales of their parents and the homeland.
🙁 Sad. I guess we should write more.
I really hope this doesn’t post 800 times just b/c I am inept with a touchpad.
[Disclaimer]: I don’t have really good phrases to describe a lot of my thoughts w/o relying on the usual frame/discourse/dichotomy of white/not, so I’m going to default even though I think this is an imperfect way of approaching things.[/end disclaimer]
I think desis do count as “non-traditional” writers when they’re writing in the metropole, although I don’t think their writing is particularly “non-traditional” 🙂 There are similar trends among African American and Latin@ writers, and my personal hypothesis is that many MFA programs make it difficult to deviate from tropes, whether you’re an “ethnic writer” or not. Like I said before, part of the reason these [non-white] writers are just as boring/homogenous is because they’re encouraged to be boring/homogenous.
Can you imagine dropping $80K for a 2 year program where you can’t even get published? I feel like MFAs trade being adventurous or new for getting a job or buying into the standard market. I mean, what’s chick lit? An awesome example of an area that has some funny writers, but mostly is derivative, repetitive and kind of obnoxious.
Ultimately, isn’t it just safe to rely on what sells? Before The Kite Runner came out, how many people were publishing and promoting Afghani and Afghani-American writing? Now you see tons of crappy novels written by all sorts of self-appointed experts on the “real Afghanistan.” I feel it’s the same among desi writers. A few exciting voices are published, and suddenly everyone emulates what’s already popular and out there, but it’s all such a poor imitation.
P.S. I took so long to write this that the title of the post changed! So sad.
no, dear girl…that’s just manish. 😉 he and i are both inveterate, compulsive re-writers.
Ah bugger.
I don’t really know much about
anythingliterature, so all this talk of workshops and whatnot is new to me, I’ll believe whatever you tell me. But I wondered about this:Maybe you’re right, but are there NO authors of SAsian origin who just write stories unrelated to the themes you mention? I think I’ve answered my own question in that I can’t think of any, but I thought perhaps someone with a wider knowledge base could answer. They may slip under the radar as they wouldn’t be classed as ‘Asian literature’ so those on the lookout for desi writers may miss them? I can think of science writers in the UK who are brown, but no fiction-mongers.
Bongsie, I thought this book wasn’t TOO horrible and stereotypical. Yeah, the main character is a 2nd-gen Brit Asian girl, but I felt the book was different mostly because it focused on her dad’s mental illness (as opposed to her being in conflict culturally with her parents or British society), and was written in a slightly surreal stream-of-consciousness style. Then again I’m biased, as half my friends have been in mental hospitals for suicide attempts or on pills for manic depression, so the topic interests me more and I may have been more blind to fictional devices which offend the brown (and half-brown) writerly types. 😉
(p.s., I see you have plenty of time to blog, but not attend my b-day. This has been duly noted.)
Talking of communist Calcutta, here is a blurp:
Oh, Calcutta, ill-fated Calcutta! Rarely in history has a city been so vilified by its famous visitors. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once called it “the home of everything in the world worth hating.” American film director Woody Allen noted, “They have 100 unlisted diseases.” V.S. Naipaul, a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, said, “I know not of any other city whose plight is more hopeless.” Naipaul’s German literary colleague Günter Grass went even further, coming up with the worst insult of all after living in the city for several months: “It’s a pile of crap dumped by God.” And even former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi called it a “dying city” and wished, back in the 1980s, that it would simply disappear from the face of the Earth.
All this inspite of 30 years of dictatorship/communism – the pro people/poor agenda!!!
Bongs, I mean no offense 🙂
I get what Sacks is trying to do with mentioning everyone’s favorite TamBram in the beginning and following with his views on “non-traditional” writers today. I get it.
small nitpick however- every 13 year old who ever read Roald Dahl knows that the story about a machine that churns out short stories and takes over the publishing industry – its been done. The Great Automatic Grammatizator.
I do appreciate the attempt at the ethnic parallel, but it doesn’t entirely work.
These critiques of workshops tend to overlook the role played by the fiction editors of magazines like the New Yorker (Deborah Treisman) and Atlantic Monthly and Esquire. These are the gatekeepers who set the tone for what gets published, and their focus is often not the best or most innovative writing, but writing that fits the polished tone and mood of their magazine, stories that won’t stick out like a sore thumb among the journalism and celebrity profiles.
ZZ Packer and Nathan Englander are a couple of good writers out of Iowa. David Foster Wallace is innovative and an MFA grad. Maybe these are exceptions. The best and most innovative young writer now (my opinion) is Aleksander Hemon, who seems to disdain workshops.
Among desis, Akhil Sharma is impressive. (He’s got a JD, not an MFA, I think.) Although he writes about “the homeland,” he does so in a shocking and new way.
Maybe it will take more time for us to produce our Phillip Roth, someone really focused on the contemporary scene. Maybe we’re still a little too close to the moment of immigration to shake off our obsession with it.
Give me a break woman, I’m miles from London in some godforsaken bakwaas joke of a town! I said I’ll try…
I’m not sure about that book, having ‘INDIAN’ in the title disqualifies it from my non-Indian Indian list.
No offence taken hammer_sickle, I’m from New Delhi. I have plenty of family in Kolkata, but we lost all our land (the initial subject above) in Partition.
I feel like MFAs trade being adventurous or new for getting a job or buying into the standard market.
That’s what happens when you harness the daemon; turn creative writing into another middle-class profession.
Well, here is one desi gal who didn’t attend an MFA program and got a major book deal. I am not sure if the omniscient sepiates (sepoys? sepists?) blogged about her before.
New Yorkers seem to have a fascination with Calcutta and never spare a chance to use it as a synonym for all that is filty and rotten and crawling with hobos.
This is part of La vie Boheme, from Rent.
No, it’s not, I wanted to shout out when I watched it on the Great White Way. This is just plain mucky old East Village with druggies from the 80s. Calcutta is about as diverse economically as New York, from the very wealthy to the abjectly poor.
And everyone knows that South Calcutta is better 😉
I’d definitely say that Hari Kunzru (Transmission, The Impressionist) strays a bit from that territory.
I said Americans. The Brits are ahead (don’t forget Meera Syal).
I feel like MFAs trade being adventurous or new for getting a job or buying into the standard market.
Creative writing MFAs, by definition (and like most advanced degrees), are for getting jobs in academia and, in this particular instance, also the literary market. Of course, most people go to the programs to meet authors (and depending on the school, agents), learn from published faculty, get funding and ultimately, be published. But when the last part doesn’t occur, just about everyone falls back on their degree and into a job (or at least tries to), which was more-or-less the original purpose of MFA programs–to make writing an academic art and subsequently, an “institution” that could support writers. Thus, MFA programs never really traded being “adventurous” or “new” for anything, it’s just that readers saw adventurous and new authors coming out of Iowa and other places and then set the standard at that and heretofore have expected nothing less.
Of course, every writing program boasts the “best” new writers and strives to produce them, but most often the programs generate writers of popular mediocrity, (who enjoy middling success before passing out in literary ether), one standout writer and then, artists who still have generations to write before they become “great.” However, if you look throughout most of history, you’ll find similar situations in every literary culture and they’ve all occurred with or without writing programs. In other words, most art is mediocre and mimicry, that’s not a newsflash, bad writers and artists have always outnumbered the good ones and just because we’re getting used to having everything in the blink of eye, that doesn’t mean we’re going to get good art and writing the same way…
In the end, the criticism of writing programs is justified, but it’s citing the obvious because if you look at, say, engineering departments at different universities, they all look pretty similar and most often, produce the same output, which is of course what happens when you make any kind of art or intellectual pursuit an institution. Morever, the criticism’s also short-sighted because it blames writing programs for homogeneity and literary shite, which seems a bit like saying Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are solely responsible for so many crappy startups that popped-up & blew-out in the last ten years or that it’s the singular fault of journalism schools that there are no Murrows or Capotes (or whomever else has been in a movie recently), nowadays. Much depends on the environment outside the institution, as that’s what’s feeding the writer and story and thus, if there’s an absence of skill, finesse and ultimately, talent, it’s not just because the institution is that strong, but it’s also because the society surrounding it is just that weak.
Regarding desis, South Asians, 2nd-genners…. Honestly, I think editors would be more interested in hearing us talking about ourselves as Americans instead of desis, South Asians, 2nd-genners; all these stories about foreignness are fine, but they’re losing their complexity and oftentimes, as an over-extended metaphor, losing their humanity and emotional impact. Fine to write about it if it’s done well, but as a “people,” if we can’t escape it then our writing becomes one-dimensional and eventually, unimportant.