Semester 1 of Bennington's MFA program
23 books, 146 pages, 45,000 words. A look back at five difficult months.
My approach to writing has long wavered between a vulgar Marxist faith in productive technique and a romantic notion that art, while produced by skilled labor, is only possible with a degree of uncontrollable, unpredictable inspiration. This semester the romantic impulse prevailed.
I tried four or five times to start a Novel About Society, trusting in the workman’s prose to carry me to a point where the story acquired an inner logic. This never happened. And I decided instead to write what felt fast and fun in hopes that I would find something I couldn’t stop. I now have a project, out of superstition I will not describe it here, that I think is an interesting enough story to be worth writing beyond about 10,000 words.
So my fiction output this semester was limited primarily to significant revisions of existing stories, writing one completely new story, and working through the distorting haze of social realism. We will return to the social realism question and romantic impulses below, but first a few words on Bennington’s process.
MFA students at Bennington send packets to their professors once a month, these are structured as letters and include a mix of reflection on process, literary criticism and work in the chosen medium (fiction for me). My four packets totaled 146 pages (about 45,000 words), of which 76 were fiction pages, including 38 totally new fiction pages and 38 pages of revision.
My critical works consisted of eight short essays about books, one draft critical paper and one final critical paper (which you all had a chance to read last week.) My professor and I had worked up a list of books to read ahead of the semester, but we diverged sharply from that list as I worked through it and as the professor responded to my fiction pages, suggesting thematically similar, formally interesting or stylistically related works.
I read the following books this semester (in rough order):
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The Dubliners by James Joyce
If I Survive you by Jonathan Escoffery (which I wrote about here)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison
Daddy by Emma Cline (which I wrote about here)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt
Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor (which I wrote about here)
Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry
Last Days of the Dog Men by Brad Watson (which I wrote about here and here)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (which I wrote about here)
Second Place by Rachel Cusk (which I wrote about here)
Letters to a Writer of Colour (an anthology of essays)
I am not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley
Lost in the City by Edward Jones (which I wrote about here)
Eveningland by Michael Knight (which I wrote about here)
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
The Cactus League by Emily Nemens
Out of these my favorite three were: I am not Sidney Poitier, Last Days of the Dog Men and If I Survive You. My least favorite were By Night in Chile, The Hours and Pure Hollywood (this last by a wide margin).
During this semester I read several other books for fun, including A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Face of Battle, The Rising Sun (by John Toland), The Gunslinger (by Stephen King), and What Hath God Wrought? That most of these are fairly substantial history books is no accident, I find the best way to unwind after a long day marinating in the ambient stupidity of Washington is to remind myself that the world once was different and shall be again. Sci-fi fantasy also serves that purpose.
My professor’s responses to my packets were very patient and helpful, and the feedback pushed me to be more precise, more clear and more ruthless in my own work, to avoid what is easy in favor of what is interesting and original.
And this brings me back to the romantic impulse of the writer.
In my own experience, I have never encountered a project much longer than 5,000 words that I could simply force my way through. You can noun-verb-object your way out of most technical problems, but you can’t escape the lack of a central idea. So where do ideas come from?
One answer is unpredictable aesthetic obsession—more or less how I stumbled into writing a parody of Victorian Military History when I was 19. Another answer, which is disturbing for reasons discussed below, is real life.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with borrowing a little against one’s principal of personal experience. But I think that practice opens the door to a shoddy justification: the seldom verified notion that to write one must sit and bleed,* and that writing, therefore, is a generative act which requires one to tap into the essence of the self. Writing then is the pain and suffering of self-destructive creation rather than the monotonous pain of skilled labor. The bleeding idea of writing is closely related to, but distinct from, the romantic inspiration tenet with which I opened this essay. If the romantic inspiration school stakes the modest claim that one’s heart must be in one’s work, the bleeding idea, its ideologically extreme cousin, posits that one’s heart must be one’s work.
I think this is an invitation to sloppy work. See the bleeder school of writing is premised on the idea that personalist narratives, things that actually happened or things that reflect specific personal fixations, make for interesting work. What is deeply felt by one individual is communicated through the medium of prose to another, with some irreducible fragment of personhood at its core. But this is, I think, a stupid, dangerous and illiterate way to approach fiction.
Implicit in the bleeder school is the idea that personality structures work and that it can be perceived therein. Biography, then, becomes criticism, and in an extreme version of Bleeding as Writing, any sufficiently astute psychoanalyst would be able to divine the origins and course of works yet to be written by a relatively brief conversation with a writer. That’s not fiction, it’s memoir.
Every work of fiction starts with a lie. Once there was a place and people in it, this is what it meant. Fiction is the deliberate construction of untruths that, by their structural relationships, are truer than truth. Reality (history, that is) is not a narrative. The flume on a wave knows the crashing shore. It cannot see the moon. So too are individuals divorced from a meaningful ability to see the world in its total existence—fiction is an attempt to cross the chasm between our objective insignificance and the experience of individual meaning.
Conditions of production, ideological background, biographical detail all matter when a story is constructed. But by reducing it to the replication of feeling (or, worse, Trauma!) the bleeding idea of the writer misses the motive power of fiction and mystifies the process by which literature is actually produced, transforming the living labor of the writer into the therapeutic regurgitation of lived experience. But books are not transcribed case files.
That the great mass of readers, anecdotally, seem to believe that Biography is Criticism is of no interest to me except to the extent that I can use the reader’s identification of a protagonist as the author against the reader’s desires in the text. Instead, the real problem with ‘Sit at a typewriter and bleed,’ is what it does to writers.
When writers themselves come to believe in bleeding, they give themselves permission to do biographical writing or writing that consists mainly in working through fixations. You know what this looks like: the addiction novel, the childhood trauma novel, the last three hundred pages of It. The return of the return of the returning motif; symbol and situation wearing a deeper channel each time until, like a drying stream in a canyon bed, there is no escape for the text.
Or, to use yet another tortured metaphor, the author walks the narrow circuit of his prison yard, varying the taunts he calls to his captors, yet never thinking to make his tin spoon into a weapon.
My prison is Social Realism. I have long suspected that if I could write a novel that accurately reflected the political and economic conditions of American life, I would be able to situate my own life within it. This is an effort to work through a past which is available to me in fragmentary memory, in Google Earth Street View images, in Bureau of Labor Statistics data and in interviews.
I have written through my other fixations, have overcome them and butchered them and put the pieces to good (and ill) use. But the political question of the novel has eluded me. Why is America the way it is? Can a book change it?
I tried quite hard to answer those questions this semester. I started and abandoned several interrelated attempts at writing a Novel About Society. But I now consider the whole project foolish, primarily because American society (meaning here the part of America wealthy and lucky enough to participate in something resembling civic life, say 10% of the country) is not a society in any real sense, but a personal alienation death cult.
How, exactly, does one write about thirty or forty million people whose lives are dedicated to offloading all cognitive labor to machines that generate baroque, personalized religions indistinguishable from psychotic delusions? How, exactly, does one write seriously about a country where all major political factions are explicitly pro-genocide?**
America is not a place that can be described directly—any attempt to do so fails before the profound immorality of public life. This is not a country, it is a rabid dog with 5,000 nuclear warheads.
That is a subject for polemic, not literature.
Or, if it is a subject for literature, it calls for the indirect approach, not the frontal assault. Such a task requires clinical perspective rather than a personal search for meaning in the failures of the AFL-CIO to remake itself and society in the opening decades of this century.
I do not reject art as political critique. I am no vulgar aesthetician. But I do reject art as reflection of the self, and my self is too bound up in American politics for me to write about it well.
The challenge of fiction is to move beyond the self. Incidentally, that’s something good autofiction accomplishes by making the author master of his own neuroses, a process requiring extreme clarity about and detachment from personal fixation.
This semester I have fought each day to renovate those stories which I Found it Personally Necessary to Write. This work of undoing and redoing removes the lazy elements, the trite, the easily replicable, or it should.
So I believe in killing authors. In criticism, yes, but in the work of writing too.
Once, maybe twice, when very young, a writer should sit at the keyboard and bleed. The rest of a career is spent mopping up blood.
Note: I plan for next week’s essay to be the first for paid subscribers. It will cover the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There are few such subscribers, so if you’re interested in reading it but can’t afford to contribute, message me here on Substack and I will email you a PDF of my final draft. After that, approximately every 4-6 weeks, I will publish one essay for paid subscribers. I think, generally, this will cover movies that I watched before beginning my MFA program, since I am dedicated to keeping the intellectual work of my program free for all readers.
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*It appears, per Quoteinvestigator.com, that this phrase was not a Hemingway phrase and may be a blend of distinct sportswriting phrases, each of which varies dramatically in its meaning. Cliches, like victory, have many fathers. Fiction, like defeat, only one.
**Anyone who claims that your ballot matters one iota must answer the following question: “What political work do you do during the ~1,461 days that separate general elections?” If the answer is “work to empower the party that pretends to feel bad about genocide while arming the genocidaires,” you can feel free to ignore their moral judgement until they repent publicly; subscribing to Völkischer Beobachter rather than Der Stürmer is not a mark of moral superiority.