Forum / The Provenance of Being in an Age of Academic Captivity

• 
  strannikov

  Oct 10, 03:58pm

  Since writing this essay about two-and-a-half years ago, I've sent it out to six or seven reviews, journals, and online venues, earning a rejection each time (this perhaps might have told me something, yet I don't recall that any of the recipients were affiliated directly with any college or university).

  It first went out on 28 April 2023. Milan Kundera died not long after (11 July), and though he is not responsible for the views I express, I still think his essay "The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes" well worth reading or re-reading, even if the reader does not or cannot draw the conclusions I drew or provide the applications offered in my essay.

  Because it took me almost two years to gain the six or seven rejections, I post the essay here because it might barely retain some passing relevance, if not to any historical era we remain in then to a distinct period we might now be in the process of emerging from (time itself might tell).

  Apologies for any/all formatting errors. (Further apologies to holders of MFA credentials as to anyone who has taught or lectured within any MFA program, all of whom are invited to note that my critique focuses on the institutional aspects of the MFA industrial complex.)

  = = = = =

  The Provenance of Being in an Age of Academic Captivity

  In “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes” (1983, the introductory essay of the 1986 collection L’Art du Roman, translated by Linda Asher for the Grove Press English edition of 1988), the late Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera began a thoughtful survey of the tradition of the European novel. The collection of seven essays is notable in part for having next to nothing to say about the tradition of the American novel (or: the American tradition of the novel [or: the American tradition of the European novel]), with not one essay formally dedicated to American novelistic practice and with only fleeting allusions to American novelists William Faulkner and Philip Roth.
  
  To this day Kundera’s essays collected in The Art of the Novel raise apt questions for American writers and fiction devotees, among them: have American novelists ever participated in “the tradition of the European novel”? Whether they ever did, has participation in or cultivation of “the European literary tradition” become (more) attenuated or (more) pronounced across recent decades? —and of course: can American fiction writers today (self-designated “novelists” or no) make any credible claims or cultivate legitimate aspirations to the “European spiritual identity” that Kundera cites in the opening passage of his opening essay?

  Here is Kundera’s first paragraph in its entirety:

  “In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective ‘European’ meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in History, apprehended the world (the world as a whole) as a question to be answered. It interrogated the world not in order to satisfy this or that practical need but because ‘the passion to know had seized mankind’.”

  (Were I a literary scholar or an employed academic, I might possess the discipline and the energy to commence a comparative reading of Kundera’s observations with the contemporary views of European commentator Italo Calvino [see both his 1982 essay collection The Uses of Literature (English translation 1986 by HBJ) and the posthumously published Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988, English translations 1988 and 1993 by Patrick Creagh, 2016 by Geoffrey Brock): but since I am neither and possess neither the discipline nor the energy for such an undertaking, I leave those labors to others.)

  (Perhaps I lack further qualifications insofar as I am no novelist and have never made a serious, mature attempt at writing a novel, whether an American fiction aping European practices [an academic production exhibiting the traits and charms of American cosmopolitan provincialism, let’s say] or a provincial American extended prose narrative aspiring to European sensibilities or “spiritual identity”. I concede that apologies may be due for my being a devotee and practitioner merely of “flash fiction” and that I am wading into deep waters the more my word count here adds up: but surely if I am to drown in prolix depths of my own making, readers might delight, albeit briefly, in spasms of schadenfreude.)

  Having only a dilletante literary practitioner’s practical awareness of literary history, foreign and domestic, I continue this essay with what might be regarded properly as “provincial American parochialism” keen as I am to celebrate the genuine provincialism to which I shall ever be captive and which in my perversity I shall never be able to disown or willing to denounce. (Permit me to interject here that, while in my provincial innocence I coined the term “cosmopolitan provincialism” at least two decades ago following a decade or so divided between New York City and Chicago, only as I began to investigate the career[s] of Alfred Jarry a decade and more ago did I come across Roger Shattuck’s informed study The Banquet Years, where he alludes on the second page of his second chapter to a “cosmopolitan provincialism” he attributes to the Paris of the era of Rousseau, Jarry, Apollinaire, and Satie. My usage concurs roughly with Shattuck’s, since if even Paris in its glory was not immune to the condition, surely less so can either New York City or Chicago today be judged immune.)

  Returning to Kundera’s opening paragraph, let us note that he begins with no explicit statements concerning literature, literary practice, or even his chosen subject “the tradition of the European novel”: when he has the opportunity, he does not begin with Homeric epics nor does he spend overmuch time on Petronius or Apuleius. No, Kundera invokes “philosophy” (and History, impressively capitalized), specifically the tradition of “European philosophy” (modern and phenomenological in the case of Husserl, ancient Greek in the other). I am not faulting Kundera for his European practice or perspective, since a later essay in his collection is devoted to Hermann Broch’s “Sleepwalkers Trilogy”, regarded by many as a set of novels integrating long-form fiction with acute and substantive philosophical rumination. (Attentive readers will have noticed by now that I am no philosopher, either. While commenting within parentheses, I may as well continue to observe that, a product of American public education, I am fluent only in English.)

  I pause here, or digress, to take up three aspects that with my spotty education I deem characteristic of American literary history and practice, let’s say at least up to the decade of Kundera’s and Calvino’s respective essay collections: 1) American literary history has been affected and shaped at least a bit by American dabbling in political isolationism (most prominent, perhaps, in the period 1919 to 1940, when many Americans objected and were hectored to object to overt American involvement in European affairs, just as many had been prior to 1917); 2) the enforced dominance of English monolingualism in the U.S. (a continuing expression of the foregoing); and 3) the lack of an enduring and unifying philosophical tradition (American pragmatism, whatever its appeal to America’s intellectual classes and however representative of America or Americans, was never cultivated to any great depth or to any extensive breadth among Americans themselves): the American tradition of anti-intellectualism is much better attested than is the popular embrace of any academic intellectual fashion, no matter the intensity of devotion among American academics or intellectuals themselves. “Intellectualism” in American affairs (literary and otherwise) remains an aberration, however well tolerated.

  The one clue that Kundera does offer to the distinctiveness of American literary practice concerns not his assessment of America’s prior literary history but his prescience concerning where American literary enterprise has traveled since about 1980—which at least provisionally we can characterize as an era of “the academic captivity of American letters”. What I mean by that is this: just as Kundera invokes “philosophy” from the very beginning of his treatment of “the European novel” (philosophy ostensibly conferring intellectual respectability and substance to otherwise meagre literary efforts), so American academicians and cosmopolitan provincial American novelists (and editors, literary agents, and publishers) since c. 1980 seem to have learned to prefer front-loading literary effort with “intellectually respectable theories” (many or most not overly concerned with developing literary effort and practice as with making extraneous and gratuitous polemical points). —which is to say: American writers coming of age in our academy-dominated era of post-modernism seem to have been pleased to allow revered or valorized philosophic theories (even mere sophistic opinions) to frame and dictate the terms, substance, and forms of both their prose fictions and the pedagogy surrounding prose fiction, often and too often to the exclusion of pedestrian literary matters. Academy-driven post-modern philosophy-laden theories, when privileging overt (“relevant”) political or social content, were permitted to marginalize and displace “literariness” from compositions and curricula alike in order to better guide literary tastes and practices prescriptively. The advocates and proponents of post-modern theories were hardly satisfied to let their intellectual commitments serve literature in terms of offering mere descriptive afterthoughts— they seem to’ve been far too impatient to allow literary history first to occur. These comparatively recent adjustments of the institutional commitments proffered in university undergraduate, graduate, and MFA writing programs, in promoting fashionable political and social and quasi-sophistic and pseudo-philosophical criteria as a necessary preamble to literary effort, seem to have helped only lower American literary aesthetics in exactly the ways Kundera goes on to vilify.

  (I carp, of course, since apart from being no academic, I also am no graduate of any American MFA writing program [please do not mistake my candor here for a lame attempt to curry sympathy]. Only by accident have I managed to discern anything much about American novels of the post-modern era: I’ve not read a single one since 1987. Disagreements can immediately ensue as to whether the bulk of American novels composed since c. 1980 suffer from philosophy-laden preconceptions or whether the bulk of MFA programs have pushed agendas stuffed with dogmatic and apodictic political and social imperatives. [The answers to two questions could begin to address such disputes: 1) are entrants to MFA writing programs expected to have fulfilled philosophy prerequisites as undergraduates as part of their formal English literature coursework? 2) can a philosophy minor suffice, or is a double undergraduate philosophy major with English necessary for admission to any MFA writing program?])

  With the prominent exception of the Bible (its sui generis epic content aside), Americans across their history never have been a conspicuously bookish people. The only vindication of this notion that might be needed here would be the briefest cursory glance at the sad history of public education in the U.S. since c. 1980. As of this essay’s writing, some forty percent of U.S. freshmen embarking on their undergraduate careers are obliged to take remedial coursework in their first year to compensate for what they never learned in secondary or primary schools. If we hesitate to accord accuracy or legitimacy to these statistics, they at least possess the virtue of conforming to those statistics suggesting that some twenty percent of American adults are functionally illiterate, another ten percent of American adults are distinctly sub-literate, and a further ten percent attain functional literacy only just barely. (This state of affairs must suit America’s elite academic classes just fine, since our top-tier academic class itself supervises top-down the entire practice of instruction and “education” in the U.S., from the management and staffing of the accreditation agencies that grade state and local district policies and practices to the setting of standards for administration, curricula, pedagogy, and teacher training in the post-secondary “schools of education” they staff and operate, et cetera.)

  (It is a flaming wonder that Americans, even the sixty percent of adults boasting literacy, read fiction at all, no matter how poorly their tastes have been cultivated.)

  Kundera makes a fine case in both his opening essay and in the remaining essays of his collection for the scope and trajectory of the tradition of the European novel. Europeans, we can infer from his essay, perhaps being generally better educated, likely comprise a more literate audience for novelistic fare than Americans ever have been or ever will be. (As I’ve not come across any other Kundera essays on European or American novelistic practice since I picked up the cited title, I don’t know whether or how his thinking might have changed or what elaborations of his views of American practice may have taken shape in a subsequent essay.)

  I repeat: I am no novelist, have never been one, still cherish no ambition to become one. In my mere provincialism I am persuaded that the American novel is as divorced from European sensibilities as American film is distinct from European film (Americans typically evince as little interest in epic and foreign films as in epic and foreign literature). American practitioners of most arts generally are well pleased to model aesthetic standards congenial to the marketplace as they understand its appeals (“the marketplace”, that is, not “the marketplace of ideas”), striving energetically to maximize commercial returns for their sincere and/or lame efforts. (Being no European and no scholar of European arts, I cannot say just how European novelists and writers view the economics and business of fiction—though I have heard that both Maupassant and Simenon did not fare poorly by their domestic readerships in their respective centuries, but then, look at the high quality of their work.)

  I myself believe that “the novel” is not inherently an organic form for American fiction insofar as the American novel was not preceded in the Colonial Era by any native or even transplanted tradition of “the epic”, certainly never by any work(s) that could be deemed legitimately “a national epic”. American sectionalism through the Colonial Era and into the Antebellum Era saw to it that no novel, not even Melville’s Moby Dick, enjoyed a “national audience” but only a subdued regional enthusiasm. This likely owes to a relative lack of mobility for writers across the first half of the nineteenth century, yet this also makes the career of Edgar Poe all the more striking, since he is practically the only antebellum writer whose career took him up and down the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Charleston and back, with residencies in Virginia, New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. (Poe might be said to qualify as the only “American” author of his age, since he steadfastly refused to be tied to any one of his country’s regions.) Subsequent American literary ambitions aspiring to epic status arose only comparatively late, and of these, precious few have attained anything close to popular national acclaim. Because Americans more typically than Europeans are possessed of short attention spans (in terms both of history and of any contemporaneity occurring along the way), American readers as a class do not possess the focused and sustained attention necessary to cultivate a deep and enduring love for the novelistic tradition of Europe as Kundera has defined it, philosophy-injected or not, theory-laden or not.

  The only fiction apt to show any ability to penetrate an appreciable number of American readers’ skulls or to grab anything remaining of American souls in numbers to justify American possession of a “literary culture” is short fiction. Period.

  In point of fact, Kundera in his essay does a fine job pointing out specific traits of the addled American mind: its enchantment and misplaced trust with mass media narratives, its facile belief in the vapid substance of public discourse, the reductionism it both exhibits and embraces, its habit for “forgetting being” (Heidegger’s construction, amended), and (by implications I impute to Kundera’s argument) the naïve credulity with which it greets the innocuous philanthropy claimed to be innate to technophilia and to the numerous playthings and baubles that technocrats peddle.

  Kundera even comes out with frightening words and thoughts that we can take to illustrate contemporary American literary aesthetics. Permit another quote from the closing pages of his essay:

  “As a model of this Western world, grounded in the relativity and ambiguity of things human, the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe.”

  I argue here that American academic practice of the past four decades or so, however well intended it may once have been, constitutes a series of efforts to impose “aesthetic totalitarianism” upon American writers and readers. Across the acclaimed decades of post-modernism and the simultaneous age of the academic captivity of American letters, university MFA writing programs
  have been designed and managed to promote seamless economic connections between American academia and American publishers in exactly the same manner that the NCAA has cemented post-secondary “amateur athletics” to each domain of professional sports. Whether enrollment in their writing programs is itself economically exploitative, MFA custodians and commissars have inflicted their fashionable political tastes and dubious intellectual fashions upon the unsuspecting, making dogmatic monocultural pronouncements while indulging in apodictic monocultural sermonizing, within the narrow intellectual horizons permitted to academic discourse, on the assumption that they alone understand what Americans want or need to be writing and reading.

  This assessment of recent American literary history is derived no doubt both from my ignorance of actual American post-modern literary practice across recent decades and from the neo-Callimachean literary aesthetic I have begun to cultivate for myself by reading as deeply and as exclusively as possible (in capable translations) in national literatures well outside the U.S. (in terms of language, geography, and history)—typically, short fiction, but with concessions to actual epics (Iliad) and works born of actual epic traditions (Commedia). Somehow, I have convinced myself concerning American novels of the past forty-odd years (as Kundera says of Russian novels of the closing decades of the Soviet era) that “these novels add nothing to the conquest of being. They discover no new segment of existence; they only confirm what has already been said; furthermore, in confirming what everyone says (what everyone must say), they fulfill their purpose, their glory, their usefulness to that society.” (The Russian locution for this kind of aesthetic totalitarianism that Kundera decries is at least a nineteenth-century coinage, “vsemstvo”, which Dostoevsky employed in the sense of “all-of-us-ism” in his novella Notes from Underground.)

  While as his essay closes Kundera is not speaking explicitly of late twentieth century American literary practice, his words resonate nonetheless: he might well have been implying forcefully that American novels published after and since c. 1980 “reduce man’s life to its social function, the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle.” He continues to bewail: “alas, the novel is too ravaged by the termites of reduction, which reduce not only the meaning of the world but also the meaning of works of art. . . . [T]he mass media . . . amplify and channel the reduction process; they distribute throughout the world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by the greatest number, by everyone, by all mankind. And it doesn’t much matter that different political interests appear in the various organs of the media” (partly because, as Kundera did not say forty years ago, the tech tyrants and media totalitarians of c. 2025 are above petty domestic squabbling insofar as their powers of manipulation and management of public and political discourse remain virtually uncontested). “This common spirit of the mass media, camouflaged by political diversity, is the spirit of our time”, a time when political theatre has long since replaced any serious, substantive politics that American citizens can be invited to participate in themselves, seriously and substantively.

  “The spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only.” Need we any other damning assessment of the contemporary American capacity for ignoring or disowning history, even or especially among our trained literary practitioners?

  “[C]hasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty.” Sign alas alack: Kundera’s prescience here seems to have been wholly neglected for four critical decades—many Americans today (fiction writers and fiction readers among them) are so enamored of avant-garde intellectual fashions and the latest gadgetry coming from the workshops of their tech overlords, tech tyrants, and tech totalitarians that they commonly believe themselves to be living in the future already, in spite of the palpable nonsense of such a perspective.

  Over the two most recent decades of the past four, American universities and the MFA industrial complex they operate seem to have been disowning any Eurocentric focus on the aesthetics of novels and of fiction generally, out of remorse for a perceived (when not imagined) Europe-wide history of colonial enterprise, even while adopting outworn or overwrought European intellectual fashions (untethered idealism, somnambulant psychoanalysis, vampiric nihilism, zombie Marxism among them). Ostensibly, the search is on for “authentic” American voices treating “authentic” American themes, addressing specific American readers in specific American contexts—at least as long as everyone abides by whatever mix of “philosophically respectable” academic diktats are enunciated in the classrooms of American post-secondary schools and MFA writing programs.

  (Well—maybe. Or: maybe not. Perhaps the sign that American literary practice is not yet a lost cause would be the candid concession that former academic cultivation of “the great American novel” for the sake of the domestic literary awards industry has been a largely misspent effort.)

  Had American academics of literature and composition since c. 1980 read more deeply in and listened more closely to the history of the European novel itself, instead of dabbling in dazzling philosophy that very few literary arbiters have ever been equipped to understand or wield (except insofar as it seemed somehow to support their enlightened views of politics, history, social relations, and book marketing), they could have turned the page on post-modern-isms decades ago.

  Had they been content to attend to literary matters in literary terms, American readers and writers might have advanced by now to a fresh era in poetry, an era quite likely now necessary and increasingly overdue irrespective of academic calendars. Instead, we have been left to wonder with Kundera whether “the depreciated legacy of Cervantes. . . the founder of the Modern Era” is or is not a legacy whose end “ought to signify more than a mere stage in the history of literary forms: it would herald the end of the Modern Era.”

  Kundera ends his essay proclaiming his own (European) commitment to the novel as perhaps the sole literary force capable of disarming any threatening totalitarianism, with the novel’s
  intrinsic capacity for recognizing “complexity,” for acknowledging “the elusiveness of truth,” for
  championing “the spirit of continuity” with writers of old who met the challenges of their times and
  who can never be judged the inferiors of any writer working in any contemporary era (no matter
  how “post-” an age or era it may be, even temporarily), for its habits of enjoining sublime “laughter” at the pretenses of ambitious totalitarians in order to undermine their ridiculous and humorless severity and to deny them the satisfaction of imposing severe obedience.

  If Kundera has been right about the need for the novel in the European context for waging such wars, perhaps it would do for American novelists to begin work on American novels in their own context—but only as long as they work well outside the enforced aesthetics and the imposed institutional authoritarianism of the MFA industrial complex. —or perhaps instead the chief prose exemplars of American literary imagination remain the tale and the short story, as they have been for almost two centuries in spite of maybe one American novel a decade acquiring or deserving broad, national American readership. Perhaps whenever writers of American fiction learn for themselves that MFA credentials far too often impair their vision and their expression according to the tastes and dictates of untethered and aloof American academicians and elite patrons, American literary practitioners will find the strength necessary to challenge the semantic, axiological, and aesthetic dogmatisms that already are choking both us and our waiting readers.

  -END-

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