#28: to move from the street into the forest
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the twenty-eighth one.
Boredom. I love memoirs about the “creative writing world,” people getting their MFAs in poetry or fiction and going to writing residencies and schmoozing with creative writing professors at fancy schools. My favorite is probably Ann Patchett’s mournful fairy tale Truth and Beauty, which all but demands that you read Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face next. But Lit by Mary Karr, which is also about a lot of other stuff, could probably fit inside this category too; it gives both a run for its money.
And I try never to miss a novel about the creative writing world, though I find them almost invariably less successful. Gimmicky. Like Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, the Original of the World, about a guy who writes another guy’s poems for him, or Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, a novel-in-recommendation-letters. In a glowing review of Loudermilk and Mona Awad’s Bunny (which, like most books, I haven’t read), Hermione Hoby in The New Yorker said something interesting:
On the one hand, the satirical tone of these novels tips us off that the institutions being portrayed are fundamentally defective. And yet the pages in our hands are tangible counterfactuals! Because isn’t the published novel—the material proof every candidate longs for—evidence of these institutions’ success?
This seems to me an excellent articulation of the fundamental problem with these novels. I don’t understand how Hoby can write that and then go on to heap praise on these books! The point she’s making makes me think of Jean Baudrillard’s book Forget Foucault, where he says to Foucault, what you’re doing is not history but myth: you are producing the very same power you claim to critique, and on some level, you must know it; “Foucault’s discourse,” Baudrillard writes, “is a mirror of the powers it describes.”
That’s what these books are, mirrors of the power they describe, reflections of the very structure and culture claim to satirize. As Hoby notes, by getting nice book deals to publish these books, they’re burnishing both their reputations as creative writers and the reputations of MFA programs from which they graduated.
Horror. The splashy new novel about the creative writing world is The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. I’m in the middle of it, and I think it has a huge plot twist that I haven’t gotten to yet, so I’ll try to hold off on any judgment. (I’ll let you know next month.) The central conceit of the book is that there’s a plot so great, one writer is compelled to steal it from another. But what’s wrong with them both writing the plot? Why would that be bad?
This brings me the worst article I’ve ever read in Slate, which is really saying something. “‘Cat Person’ and Me,” is by Alexis Nowicki, who is under the impression that the plot and characters of Kristen Roupenian’s story “Cat Person” (which, being the smash-hit-viral only-short-story-most-people-have-ever-read thing that it is, likely needs no introduction) rightfully belong to her. She explains:
Some of the most pivotal scenes—the sexual encounter and the hostile text messages—were unfamiliar to me. But the similarities to my own life were eerie: The protagonist was a girl from my small hometown who lived in the dorms at my college and worked at the art house theater where I’d worked and dated a man in his 30s, as I had.
I felt something like rage as I read this. As Nowicki notes later in the piece, “About half of ‘Cat Person’ is a sex scene.” So the “sexual encounter,” which was “unfamiliar” to her, constitutes half the story. And yet…“I’ve wondered a lot about the line between fiction and nonfiction, and what license is actually bestowed by the act of labeling something as fiction,” Nowicki writes. This is such vapid MFA language: “I’ve wondered…” she writes vaguely. But the implication is clear: Nowicki is saying Roupenian stole from her by writing “Cat Person.”
Toward the end of the essay, the two writers communicate. Roupenian apologizes (in matching MFA language):
I’ve spent the past several days struggling with the question of how to balance what is right for me with what I owe you. … In retrospect, I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details, especially the name of the town. Not doing so was careless.
I would not even want to try to get into the mind of a writer who apologizes for —excuse me, “struggles with”— looking at another person’s life. One might even argue that she, as a writer, has a responsibility to look at other peoples’ lives.
Glory. I guess what I find really depressing and alluring about creative writing world novels is that they’re about the thing right in front of creative writers’ faces, the most obvious, familiar thing to write about in a world of endless mystery, where our whole lives can out of nowhere be jumbled by a pandemic, a pandemic, would you ever have imagined? Like a waiter tripping and bringing the whole tray down! And these people are writing about an MFA program, arguing over who has the right to say the words “Ann Arbor”?
I love everything Rikki Ducornet writes, but she has this essay, “The Deep Zoo,” in a book of the same name, that has had an enormous, deep effect of me. She writes about the divine, playful, intimate, personal, labyrinthine qualities of words: “To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and to reveal its potencies.” She tells us:
the work of the writer to move beyond the simple definitions or descriptions of things—which is of limited interest after all—and to bring a dream to life through the alchemy of language; to move from the street—the place of received ideas—into the forest—the place of the unknown.
Using words, just words, that’s all you need, “to bring a dream to life”—to take yourself, and other people too!, into the forest—the place of the unknown.
If that place is open to you—and it is, it’s open to all of us—why choose Ann Arbor instead?
Sincerely,
Lucy