What’s an MFA Got to Do with It? A Response to Elif Batuman

In Search of Real Degrees

The MFA debate seems to spring up, like a hyperactive phoenix, every five months or so. The same arguments are rehashed and almost always MFA students are told that they should have done something “real” like work on an oil rig, travel, get out in the world, become a doctor and write on the side like Chekov—in short live life. (As if taking a handful of classes for two years prevents one from doing anything else in life.) Real writers, we are told, are not forged in the cold halls of academia.

So I was a bit taken aback to see Elif Batuman argue, in her essay “Get a Real Degree,” that aspiring writers should spend even more years in academia getting a PhD.

Elif Batuman is a very interesting and talented writer who published a fascinating memoir/essay collection earlier this year titled The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. That she is a talented writer makes it disappointing to see her drop into another rehashing of MFA complaints.

Batuman has talked many times about her decision to get a PhD in literature over an MFA in fiction as if this was some dichotomy. But one doesn’t get a PhD in literature in order to become a fiction writer. It seems like saying that instead of going to art school you should study art history or instead of buying a fender guitar you should start a record review blog. Studying and critiquing an art form isn’t the same as practicing it. The stance is odd from the start since so many MFA students go on to get PhDs anyway.

The Death of the Art

Batuman does have some interesting things to say in her essay, ostensibly a review of The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl. The middle in particular has a meaty discussion of the state of writing and even of mainstream white culture in general. Her essay is well worth reading for these middle segments that talk about the role of shame in modern writing and the dangers of feeling that privileged people don’t have stories to tell. (She could have spent more time talking about the flip side for non-white writers: the way it makes it hard to simply be a writer who is of an ethnicity, you must be a writer who writes about that ethnicity. An issue that Percival Everett has explored expertly in his novels.)

The law of ‘find your voice’ and ‘write what you know’ originates in a phenomenon perhaps most clearly documented by the blog and book Stuff White People Like: the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures. Hence Stuff White People Like #20, ‘Being an Expert on Your Culture’, and #116, ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore’. Non-white, non-college-educated or non-middle or upper-class people may write what they know, but White People have to find the voice of a Vietnamese woman impregnated by a member of the American army that killed her only true love.

I think Batuman could go a little further. You can certainly write what you know if you are white and college educated, but you probably need to have had a horrible drug addiction, have enforced poverty on yourself as a literary experiment or in some other way be involved in the “wound culture” (as McGurl phrases it). This is all interesting stuff to discuss, but what does it actually have to do with MFA programs?

As my colleague Adam Wilson points out, markets and publishers drive publishing trends more than MFA programs and the issues Batuman describes are just as common in non-MFA fiction. Stuff White People Like, which Batuman references several times, isn’t about MFA students. It is a parody of a broad segment of middle to upper class mostly urban white liberals. This is a question of the culture at large (or rather a large part of it). Doesn’t Oprah have more to do with “wound culture” than Iowa? Doesn’t Hollywood hold more sway than John Hopkins?

Even if we are going to narrow the discussion to publishing, isn’t the memoir industry a better example of this “wound culture” in action? And yet Batuman declares that “many of the best journalistic and memoiristic essays in the world today are being written in America.” (Who is producing the best fiction, if indeed any modern fiction excites Batuman, is left unsaid.) But not only does her critique apply even better to American non-fiction, but the influence of non-fiction MFA programs has never been stronger. Shouldn’t American non-fiction be getting worse if the MFA is such a

toxic influence?

This is basically my issue about her entire essay. Even when I agree with her on a specific point, I’m unclear how “program fiction” is the culprit. Almost all of her points seem to apply to either all fiction, all modern literature or American culture in general. The MFA’s influence seems vastly overstated.

The Tradition and the Fury

The center of Batuman’s argument seems to be that MFA writers have no sense of literary tradition and hide all their influences, acting as if they’d never read any other books. This is almost the inverse of the normal complaint, that MFA writers are too obsessed with their influences, merely cranking out obvious imitations of Carveresque minimalism, Pynchonian post-modernism or whatever trend is hot at the moment.

This commitment, this sense of writing being produced in a knowledge vacuum, is what turned me off the programme to begin with. Contemporary fiction seldom refers to any of the literary developments of the past 20, 50 or a hundred years. It rarely refers to other books at all.

And later:

Why can’t the programme be better than it is? Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, and not just about adverbs and themselves? Why can’t it at least try?

Batuman rhetorically needs to reduce the various MFA programs to a single monolithic caricature, but it is hard not to get the feeling that she didn’t bother to talk to people who’ve actually been to one. MFA programs almost certainly focus more on contemporary literature, but to cite my own experience at Columbia we hardly focused only adverbs or ignored literary traditions. I studied Edmund Wilson, Robert Burton, Virginia Woolf, Saul Bellow, Isaac Babel, Dostoevsky and countless others in my various seminars and lectures. Most MFA programs also allow you—and sometimes force you—to take classes in the literature departments.

The question of literary lineage and the benefits of writing in or referring to traditions and influences is an interesting one. I would have liked to see Batuman make an argument for why it is essential because I’m not sure it is self-evident. As Andrew Seal says:

What really bugs me about this comment is that, despite her distaste for the literature of “developing nations,” she holds up Don Quixote as a great beacon of literature when, if there is any single work of literature which justifies a belief that an extraordinarily talented writer can invent a new fully-fleshed form almost ex nihilo, it is Cervantes’s novel.

What bugged me more is that Batuman takes the easy way out by simply disparaging seemingly all modern fiction, or at least all modern American fiction, without doing the work to contrast it with someone else. It is much easier to wave away everything than take a positive stake and defend something.

The MFA is a Lonely Job Hunter

The most bizarre aspect of the standard anti-MFA tirade—and Batuman seems to fall into this—is that it wants to paint the MFA experience as simultaneously pointless and almost impossibly profound. Let’s be clear here: in most MFA programs you take one workshop a semester and another class on craft (my program at Columbia is an exception where we took many more classes.) You probably turn in three stories a semester to your workshop. After four workshops and four classes you write a thesis and graduate. Are we really supposed to believe that a mere eight classes over two to three years is going to radically change everyone’s writing for the rest of their lives? That these two years deprive a writer of the world’s literature, of living a real life, and of ever having a unique literary idea?

Part of this is the idea that MFA writers write in some unique way that is different than literary writers without MFAs. The supposed differences are never really elaborated upon. It is far easy to say that all MFA writers are clones than to explain how Denis Johnson writes just like David Foster Wallace, how George Saunders writes just like Rivka Galchen, or how Nam Lee is really a clone of Ben Marcus. I’ve worked for many literary magazines and read countless submissions from aspiring writers, MFA and non-MFA alike, and I have, of course, also read many books from writers of all stripes. My contention is this: MFA writers and non-MFA writers write pretty much the same.

Sure, MFA students on average may have more polished work, but the types of stories and the styles of telling them are more or less the same. And why not? Writers are likely reading the same writers, buying the same magazines and responding to the same publishing trends. If Raymond Carver or Lydia Davis or George Saunders are being aped in workshops, they are probably being aped by aspiring writers outside of workshops.

Batuman would likely say that this is because the MFA programs are influencing even non-MFA writers. She may well be right. But again, we need to consider the markets and publishing houses in any discussion of modern literary trends.

I do like what Batuman has to say about the overemphasis on “technique” and the way so much modern fiction is competent but boring:

In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read. This reflects, I believe, the counterintuitive but real disjuncture between good writing and good books.

I think reviewers, editors and writers (both MFA and non) focus too much on technical competence and not enough on what actually makes literature exciting. When we look at the greatest writers in history, it is often their flaws and eccentricities that make them so exciting and original. A story like Kafka’s “The Judgment” might violate a dozen workshop mantras, but there are few stories as powerful as it in Western literature.

And yet, does an MFA program truly crush out a writer’s eccentricities? I find it hard to think an original writer—see again David Foster Wallace and company—will really allow themselves to be dulled down in this way. By the end of the essay, even Batuman doesn’t seem to think so:

As for literature, it will be neither made nor broken by the programme, which is doubtless as incapable of ruining a good writer as of transforming a bad one.

If the MFA system is not ruining the good writers, then what exactly is the problem? Merely that there is more competent but boring fiction in the world, likely languishing in small-circulation literary magazines? This seems a silly thing to complain about. The fact that most literature produced in an era is mediocre has been true for as long as books have been published. Indeed, it is true of every art form in every era since the dawn of art.

Addendum

I’m not sure if I come off as a big advocate for MFA programs. I don’t think I am. I had a great time at my MFA program, read a lot of interesting books, made a lot of friends and learned some things that will hopefully help me down the road. It was worth it for me. But I don’t think an MFA is by any means necessary nor do I think it radically changes you. It is simply a dedicated set of time to try and do this thing you want to do.

I once heard George Saunders, who holds an MA in fiction writing and heads the Syracuse MFA program, describe a good MFA program as a frozen pond in the middle of the woods. The writer is a on a journey through the forest and it is slow going because he has ice skates strapped to his feet. But when he hits the pond he gets a relief and cuts some time out of his journey. The writer gets to his destination quicker, but his direction doesn’t change. The MFA program helps a writer master the same skills he might well learn on his own, but in a shorter time.

I think that sounds about right.