If I had to leave just one comment, it would be: come on over to Timeless to hear me bash the art cabal at every opportune moment! :D God I despise the institutionalization.
Seriously though, I think this is my favorite article you've written. It's the question of our times, the great philosophical premise behind the oversaturated literary present. And you handle it superbly. I tend to lean toward a narrow church personally, but with the caveat that I don't think it's as narrow as the term implies. I don't think the term includes much "lowbrow" culture, apart from that which has transcended its humble origins. And also I don't think it's constructive to tell people they shouldn't write, though the tradeoff is that critics shouldn't be just nice and smiley either since the oversaturation has to be reduced at some point. And critics are perhaps some of the few who can make a difference, even if it's infinitesimal.
I think the premise of the broad church is flawed in that 1) egalitarianism is a value, not a scientific fact, and projecting egalitarianism onto something doesn't make something true, any more than wishing for egalitarianism among, say, engineers makes everyone suddenly capable of being an engineer: if we understand that engineers are exceptional people then why can't we extend that understanding to artists of a certain caliber?; and 2) the broad church perspective is, in many respects, a negative backfiring consequence of the writer's mythos. A lot of people envy the writers mythos, so they have sought to deconstruct it; ergo, all the anti-writers-mythos arguments, especially from academia. But also because of that envy they want to be writers and can be as long as the writers mythos doesn't make them feel like interlopers for being less like Hemingway. You mentioned mediocrity, and that's an issue; but I would take it a step further and say that it's more like a professional "migrant crisis."
But like I said: I don't think it's productive to tell people not to write. Anyone and everyone should try their hand. And Whiplash, by the way, was a hilarious movie. I laugh at it the way Kafka's friend circle laughed at his stories. And call me cruel, but there are times when I think what that drummer kid went through would really do more to give us a great artist than a heap of stupid prizes. You hit the nail right on the head with that one!
As for self-love, Jesus said it best: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these." The 'as thyself' is the clincher: it's perfectly fine to love ourselves, just not only ourselves.
This >> “2) the broad church perspective is, in many respects, a negative backfiring consequence of the writer's mythos. A lot of people envy the writers mythos, so they have sought to deconstruct it; ergo, all the anti-writers-mythos arguments, especially from academia. But also because of that envy they want to be writers and can be as long as the writers mythos doesn't make them feel like interlopers for being less like Hemingway.”
I see a lot of this deconstructing and am often annoyed by it. I think your analysis is spot on.
Thanks man! What I detest about the deconstructionists is how it's automatically assumed that the writer behind the myth is some kind of petty, evil little man who only lives and breathes to pull a fast one on other people. That's postmodern cynicism for you.
I saw a thread in notes about this a while back and took screenshots of some comments because I was so annoyed by them and wanted to write an essay about it, which I never did and probably won't. Maybe after giving the subject more thought, I'll weave the topic into something. Your input has shed new light on it for me. Thank you.
The tricky thing here would be that neither the broad church nor the cabal quite know what to do with people who make art not caring particularly about competition or being the best or being driven or even with a sense that they mean for what they make to be compared to, owned by or seen, but whose work, once either the people in the pews of the broad church or the cabal happen upon it by chance, seems extraordinary. That alone documents that there is perhaps a broader church still in which notions of "best" or "great" are helpful neither as motivators nor as tools, not really. Perhaps as Felix Purat suggests in his comment, neither is an assumption that everyone can make art, or that all art is equal, but that the differentiators in artistic work can't simply be some great chain of being that sorts great, good and mediocre into their proper placing.
As for the cabal, it seems to me that despising the cabal has to be first and foremost about the superintending of *markets* rather than mere dominion over taste or aesthetics. Which is why I think a cabal around literature is not especially threatening in this respect: it does not really gate off or protect a narrow market any longer, for the most part. Visual art, on the other hand, is entirely a different matter.
I think I disagree with this, but I'd have to hear more to know for sure: "Which is why I think a cabal around literature is not especially threatening in this respect: it does not really gate off or protect a narrow market any longer, for the most part. Visual art, on the other hand, is entirely a different matter." There is an incredible amount of gate-keeping in literature at the moment, perhaps as there always has been. But I think the basis for importance has shifted away from craft.
I think the gate-keeping either pertains to narrow markets that provide particular kinds of prestige (small literary journals, poetry) or a small handful of legacy publications that have disproportionate weight (the Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc.)--but that in a more general sense, the problem that the market for writing has now is that there is so much writing and so many ways to disseminate it and so much of it is free or nearly so that readers are much more capable of building up their own preferred canon--though it's also now incredibly hard to make a full-time career out of writing as well. If you compare it to where literature was in 1975 or so where a small handful of print editors were overwhelmingly powerful in controlling what was available, the gates today are wide open. But a visual artist who wants to make that their primary livelihood simply has to go through the gallerists, and the gallerists are working pretty closely with other kinds of taste-makers.
Here's where I disagree: "but that in a more general sense, the problem that the market for writing has now is that there is so much writing and so many ways to disseminate it and so much of it is free or nearly so that readers are much more capable of building up their own preferred canon--though it's also now incredibly hard to make a full-time career out of writing as well."
Literary journals and those legacy publications offer more than prestige. They are inextricably linked from unofficial canons associated with awards, such as the Best American series. I don't think you can submit a Substack essay for The Best American Essays, for instance. But you can submit your own essay from The Missouri Review (or rely on the fact that the Best American editors read some of those elite journals. The New Yorker is represented far more than any other publication in that series.
Sam's point might be that writing with the goal of making it into a prestigious curated volume or into The New Yorker has that crass competitiveness to it. But this is inextricably linked to livelihood. Writers who can successfully pitch The Atlantic or New Yorker not only get paid better for freelance work, they get the kind of visibility that attracts social media followers, which is the chief currency in attracting a quality agent. So, sure, there might be open gates, but the people who are leveraging Substack for primary incomes are largely people who have already made it through the traditional literary gates. So I don't think the gates are wide open for prose writers. The gallery dynamic is alive and well here, too.
I left academe in Dec 2021 to be more present to my kids and to write independently. I'm now going through a divorce and will be single-parenting my three kids as part of a shared custody arrangement, so the livelihood question is not a frivolous part of how I'm thinking about my writing future. Even before that, I was wondering whether my time was better spent in crafting longform essays for those literary gatekeepers, hoping to leverage publication for other opportunities, or in writing for my Substack following. My kids come first, so I'm not going to be aspiring to greatness. But I'm going to have to make some difficult choices about wise investments of my time, and I won't be able to afford for those to be purely self-satisfying. I don't think these practical considerations disqualify me from caring about craft or art in the spiritual sense that Sam invokes. But I'm quite aware that the curated gates are not wide open to me, and neither are the more figurative gates (such as unencumbered time). So this is why I disagree with the notion that a cabal around literature is not threatening. I think it's still just as threatening to inclusion and diversity in the writing life as it was in 1975.
My editing I will be looking at the wordy thing for the last time with 12 more pretty words to say eclipse them by guessung would i want to take the time to explain this and like a moral decision doesnot go down if it was too rude. Forvwhich i am grateful. You do it by writing brave characters. You are adjacent to Gorgeus Yorgas Lanthimos he runs every fim like a political thought experiment. Both if you have these normally high adventurers simply enough drawn. And then move on reciprocally enough.
Great essay. I'm definitely in the broad church and completely aligned in despising the cabal. The making of art an individual pursuit that each person should enjoy and I see no value in putting barriers and guardrails around such a lovely activity.
The market will determine if one's pursuit of art will coincide with the earning of a livelihood. Maybe the cabal plays a role in that commercial marketplace, but I don't see them as deserving an honored seat at the table.
"Art is, again (I believe), more than anything else, a spiritual exercise — a way of understanding the true self in a fictive space unencumbered by normal societal restrictions. And, in that sense, it is also a theological high-wire act, in which you discover if (to put it dramatically) you are dedicated to celebrating God’s world and the divinity in yourself — to push yourself in the direction of that divinity as much as possible — or if you just collapse into self-love, self-regard, the ego covering for itself." Expertly put, Sam.
Very thought-provoking, Sam, and ironic since I'm preparing to write next week about Phillis Wheatley as an American genius. You make me wonder what you think of Emerson's "The Poet," because I've always loved his idea of the poet as representative of the masses, as a kind of artistic emancipator. If we write for the reasons you describe, then we read for those same reasons: in hopes of hearing an echo of ourselves in another, and sometimes in hopes of expansion through another's art. I really think Wheatley serves that purpose.
I used to wrestle with a historical double standard while teaching survey courses. There were clear distinctions, it seemed to me, between the great writers and the middling ones in early literary periods. The only reason anyone taught Michael Wigglesworth, so far as I could tell, was because there was some hint in his journals that he might have been gay. But his poetry pales in comparison to Bradstreet's and Taylor's. There was this sense, with the expanded canon, that aesthetics didn't matter as much as theme, and if there was a text that could flog a race, gender, or class trope, then it could/should replace a more classic text on the syllabus. This may have contributed somewhat to the melt we're seeing in the humanities, because there is almost nothing duller than slogging through some of those recovered works of literature. "Life in the Iron-Mills" isn't terrible, but it does not stand up against "Rappaccini's Daughter." Similarly, I have not found Sinclair Lewis's novels (though decorated at the time) to have aged very well, even though Lewis often addresses class issues that are more urgent than ever. (This may well be because Lewis's ego got in the way of his art. He represents the frequent meaninglessness of major literary prizes as measures of achievement, including the Nobel.)
This would be a separate essay, and I lack your confidence to make any broad proclamations about it, but there was a point -- maybe in the 90s or 00s? -- when that pattern I saw in syllabus-making translated to commercial publishing. And it became increasingly difficult for me to know how to populate the last section of my contemporary American literature survey. I had a pretty clear sense of the heavy hitters in Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and early Postmodernism. But there were a lot of more recent Pulitzer-winners that I didn't think would be aesthetically enjoyable or even thematically interesting to teach. Someone like Louise Erdrich, I believe, fits in the Hawthorne category -- her works aren't dull, you can read them for plot, but they also have many passages that require close reading, and they are often beautiful, which makes them teachable. But I also added voices like Brian Turner -- a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and poet. His debut book, "Here, Bullet," held up well in class and was enjoyable for me, too. I wasn't just teaching it to make a point.
Maybe it's as simple as Horace's dictum that literature ought to both "delight" and "instruct." We are living in a time that leans heavily on the didactic side of that formula. Maybe the "broad church" you describe leans more heavily on the other. Much of the work that sustained my teaching split the difference, and I find myself still aiming at something similar in my own writing, and seeking out models of it in my reading: enough aesthetic craft to be pleasurable, but some conceptual heft, as well.
One of the defining qualities of the Cabal is elitism. Take a look at the bios of writers. It seems like half of the most celebrated writers have an MFA from Iowa. As publishing has grown more diverse over the last five years, it just means there are more and more celebrated brown and black writers with Iowa MFAs are being published. This is also the case even in the small press world. When I started publishing in the small press world in the late 80s-early 90s, there were tons of writers who were not university-affiliated and didn't have MFA degrees. That is not the case now.
Wow, such interesting discussions in the comments! A lot of this goes far beyond what I addressed in the initial post. Somebody (Elle Griffin?) was saying this recently, that this is the best part of Substack - and something that you really don't get anywhere else - looking forward to hearing from people you like and respect every time you post something (and anticipating what they might say).
I can't reply to everything but a few points:
@Justus, I've become very preoccupied recently by the idea of "guilds" and their deleterious effects on all kinds of civic exchange. It turns out that it can be very narrowly beneficial for industries to create a sense of artificial scarcity and then to have a limited number of people in the position of high priests. This is nowhere more true than with doctors. Simply put, we have too few doctors - they make way too much money (average=$400,000) and meanwhile nobody can get affordable health care and doctors are too busy to more than a glance you if you actually get an appointment. Something similar happens in art markets with narrow and often arbitrary aesthetic criteria administered by self-appointed high priests. These sorts of artistic guilds completely took over visual art sometime around the 1960s and poetry not long after that.
I agree with @Timothy Burke that literary fiction has been a little better (more responsive to the market, and with more points of entry than a pure artistic guild), but agree also with @Sherman Alexie that the presence of universities and MFA programs in fiction has done much to drive fiction towards guilddom. There's a sense that the only entry point into publishing fiction is through a handful of MFAs and the yield of all MFA programs are a set of thin, PC novels about misunderstood young people that look startlingly like one another.
I agree with @Josh Dolezal that it's not necessarily as if gatekeeping in literature has gotten worse. Think back in time to say 1960 and it's actually staggering how closed literary worlds were (for decades, the sole entry point for getting fiction published in the New Yorker was to win the approval of Roger Angell - when he could take time off from one of his baseball essays) and it's not as if there weren't lots of people writing then as well. Probably there have always been some version of these dynamics - with a very closed literary world promising profits and credibility; and outsiders waving the banner for intellectual freedom.
What I would say regarding @david roberts' question regarding Substack is the internet for really the first time since the advent of the printing press in the 15th century (or maybe the advent of cheap printing around the 18th) creates the possibility for a revolution in publishing. Column inches are no longer at a premium, and the "artificial scarcity" of limiting who gets published in books or newspapers starts to seem really silly. There's a different currency - which is winning attention (as opposed to authority) - and I think we've only started to discover what that looks like. @Josh Dolezal, Something about the shape of the internet really lends itself to the mindset of Emerson or especially Whitman - "houses and rooms are full of perfumes / The distillation would intoxicate me also but I shall not let it" - and is all about the "broad church," the "open soul," the idea that time and space can be found for anyone to have a hearing. I totally agree with @Felix Purat that egalitarianism is a "value" not a scientific fact and can sympathize with anyone, including it seems Felix, who emphasizes an ethic of self-improvement to which a certain elitism is a natural corollary. I've chosen to raise my banner with "egalitarianism" (the "broad church") but that's just personal preference.
What I find most important in this exchange is the idea - @david roberts - that the internet signals a very new way to take in writing and that we're just starting to grapple with what that can be. I'd submit that it's possible to undo a number of the competitive ideas we have about art (a fossil of the days of limited column inches) and to really just try to luxuriate in how much is out there.
Imagine your lifes without Ballard or R Bolano I add about the stakes at play. Both of those were liable to be mechanically cut from any kind of distribution for being mistaken for mannerists. And then you have Mr. Kahn who wrote that Melancholy of punctuation. Or Anatomy of Speculation about puncttn when he kills by apparently considering using offbeat punct'n and always usually using the straightest. And of course neither Bolano nor Ballard are mannerists, but rather craftsmen from extra to the guild, viva the crafted sentences, because they spit on propaganda and many very visceral kinds of worksploitations, w respect to you Going to-be Carson Mc Cullers, Sherman who already is writing lately with service workers in mind, abysses of absurd words abound and all the people walk on the precipices.
Holy cow this is brilliant. So well expressed and thought out. I feel this but doubt I could have been as eloquent about it. Substack astonishes me on a daily basis. thank you
If I had to leave just one comment, it would be: come on over to Timeless to hear me bash the art cabal at every opportune moment! :D God I despise the institutionalization.
https://timelessfelixpurat.substack.com/
Seriously though, I think this is my favorite article you've written. It's the question of our times, the great philosophical premise behind the oversaturated literary present. And you handle it superbly. I tend to lean toward a narrow church personally, but with the caveat that I don't think it's as narrow as the term implies. I don't think the term includes much "lowbrow" culture, apart from that which has transcended its humble origins. And also I don't think it's constructive to tell people they shouldn't write, though the tradeoff is that critics shouldn't be just nice and smiley either since the oversaturation has to be reduced at some point. And critics are perhaps some of the few who can make a difference, even if it's infinitesimal.
I think the premise of the broad church is flawed in that 1) egalitarianism is a value, not a scientific fact, and projecting egalitarianism onto something doesn't make something true, any more than wishing for egalitarianism among, say, engineers makes everyone suddenly capable of being an engineer: if we understand that engineers are exceptional people then why can't we extend that understanding to artists of a certain caliber?; and 2) the broad church perspective is, in many respects, a negative backfiring consequence of the writer's mythos. A lot of people envy the writers mythos, so they have sought to deconstruct it; ergo, all the anti-writers-mythos arguments, especially from academia. But also because of that envy they want to be writers and can be as long as the writers mythos doesn't make them feel like interlopers for being less like Hemingway. You mentioned mediocrity, and that's an issue; but I would take it a step further and say that it's more like a professional "migrant crisis."
But like I said: I don't think it's productive to tell people not to write. Anyone and everyone should try their hand. And Whiplash, by the way, was a hilarious movie. I laugh at it the way Kafka's friend circle laughed at his stories. And call me cruel, but there are times when I think what that drummer kid went through would really do more to give us a great artist than a heap of stupid prizes. You hit the nail right on the head with that one!
As for self-love, Jesus said it best: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these." The 'as thyself' is the clincher: it's perfectly fine to love ourselves, just not only ourselves.
This >> “2) the broad church perspective is, in many respects, a negative backfiring consequence of the writer's mythos. A lot of people envy the writers mythos, so they have sought to deconstruct it; ergo, all the anti-writers-mythos arguments, especially from academia. But also because of that envy they want to be writers and can be as long as the writers mythos doesn't make them feel like interlopers for being less like Hemingway.”
I see a lot of this deconstructing and am often annoyed by it. I think your analysis is spot on.
Thanks man! What I detest about the deconstructionists is how it's automatically assumed that the writer behind the myth is some kind of petty, evil little man who only lives and breathes to pull a fast one on other people. That's postmodern cynicism for you.
I saw a thread in notes about this a while back and took screenshots of some comments because I was so annoyed by them and wanted to write an essay about it, which I never did and probably won't. Maybe after giving the subject more thought, I'll weave the topic into something. Your input has shed new light on it for me. Thank you.
It's definitely a topic worth writing about!
The tricky thing here would be that neither the broad church nor the cabal quite know what to do with people who make art not caring particularly about competition or being the best or being driven or even with a sense that they mean for what they make to be compared to, owned by or seen, but whose work, once either the people in the pews of the broad church or the cabal happen upon it by chance, seems extraordinary. That alone documents that there is perhaps a broader church still in which notions of "best" or "great" are helpful neither as motivators nor as tools, not really. Perhaps as Felix Purat suggests in his comment, neither is an assumption that everyone can make art, or that all art is equal, but that the differentiators in artistic work can't simply be some great chain of being that sorts great, good and mediocre into their proper placing.
As for the cabal, it seems to me that despising the cabal has to be first and foremost about the superintending of *markets* rather than mere dominion over taste or aesthetics. Which is why I think a cabal around literature is not especially threatening in this respect: it does not really gate off or protect a narrow market any longer, for the most part. Visual art, on the other hand, is entirely a different matter.
I think I disagree with this, but I'd have to hear more to know for sure: "Which is why I think a cabal around literature is not especially threatening in this respect: it does not really gate off or protect a narrow market any longer, for the most part. Visual art, on the other hand, is entirely a different matter." There is an incredible amount of gate-keeping in literature at the moment, perhaps as there always has been. But I think the basis for importance has shifted away from craft.
I think the gate-keeping either pertains to narrow markets that provide particular kinds of prestige (small literary journals, poetry) or a small handful of legacy publications that have disproportionate weight (the Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc.)--but that in a more general sense, the problem that the market for writing has now is that there is so much writing and so many ways to disseminate it and so much of it is free or nearly so that readers are much more capable of building up their own preferred canon--though it's also now incredibly hard to make a full-time career out of writing as well. If you compare it to where literature was in 1975 or so where a small handful of print editors were overwhelmingly powerful in controlling what was available, the gates today are wide open. But a visual artist who wants to make that their primary livelihood simply has to go through the gallerists, and the gallerists are working pretty closely with other kinds of taste-makers.
Here's where I disagree: "but that in a more general sense, the problem that the market for writing has now is that there is so much writing and so many ways to disseminate it and so much of it is free or nearly so that readers are much more capable of building up their own preferred canon--though it's also now incredibly hard to make a full-time career out of writing as well."
Literary journals and those legacy publications offer more than prestige. They are inextricably linked from unofficial canons associated with awards, such as the Best American series. I don't think you can submit a Substack essay for The Best American Essays, for instance. But you can submit your own essay from The Missouri Review (or rely on the fact that the Best American editors read some of those elite journals. The New Yorker is represented far more than any other publication in that series.
Sam's point might be that writing with the goal of making it into a prestigious curated volume or into The New Yorker has that crass competitiveness to it. But this is inextricably linked to livelihood. Writers who can successfully pitch The Atlantic or New Yorker not only get paid better for freelance work, they get the kind of visibility that attracts social media followers, which is the chief currency in attracting a quality agent. So, sure, there might be open gates, but the people who are leveraging Substack for primary incomes are largely people who have already made it through the traditional literary gates. So I don't think the gates are wide open for prose writers. The gallery dynamic is alive and well here, too.
I left academe in Dec 2021 to be more present to my kids and to write independently. I'm now going through a divorce and will be single-parenting my three kids as part of a shared custody arrangement, so the livelihood question is not a frivolous part of how I'm thinking about my writing future. Even before that, I was wondering whether my time was better spent in crafting longform essays for those literary gatekeepers, hoping to leverage publication for other opportunities, or in writing for my Substack following. My kids come first, so I'm not going to be aspiring to greatness. But I'm going to have to make some difficult choices about wise investments of my time, and I won't be able to afford for those to be purely self-satisfying. I don't think these practical considerations disqualify me from caring about craft or art in the spiritual sense that Sam invokes. But I'm quite aware that the curated gates are not wide open to me, and neither are the more figurative gates (such as unencumbered time). So this is why I disagree with the notion that a cabal around literature is not threatening. I think it's still just as threatening to inclusion and diversity in the writing life as it was in 1975.
You have a much more lived-in knowledge of this than I do, and I completely see the point you're making.
My editing I will be looking at the wordy thing for the last time with 12 more pretty words to say eclipse them by guessung would i want to take the time to explain this and like a moral decision doesnot go down if it was too rude. Forvwhich i am grateful. You do it by writing brave characters. You are adjacent to Gorgeus Yorgas Lanthimos he runs every fim like a political thought experiment. Both if you have these normally high adventurers simply enough drawn. And then move on reciprocally enough.
Great essay. I'm definitely in the broad church and completely aligned in despising the cabal. The making of art an individual pursuit that each person should enjoy and I see no value in putting barriers and guardrails around such a lovely activity.
The market will determine if one's pursuit of art will coincide with the earning of a livelihood. Maybe the cabal plays a role in that commercial marketplace, but I don't see them as deserving an honored seat at the table.
If you haven't done so already, it would be fascinating to deploy this analysis on the world of Substack.
"Art is, again (I believe), more than anything else, a spiritual exercise — a way of understanding the true self in a fictive space unencumbered by normal societal restrictions. And, in that sense, it is also a theological high-wire act, in which you discover if (to put it dramatically) you are dedicated to celebrating God’s world and the divinity in yourself — to push yourself in the direction of that divinity as much as possible — or if you just collapse into self-love, self-regard, the ego covering for itself." Expertly put, Sam.
Very thought-provoking, Sam, and ironic since I'm preparing to write next week about Phillis Wheatley as an American genius. You make me wonder what you think of Emerson's "The Poet," because I've always loved his idea of the poet as representative of the masses, as a kind of artistic emancipator. If we write for the reasons you describe, then we read for those same reasons: in hopes of hearing an echo of ourselves in another, and sometimes in hopes of expansion through another's art. I really think Wheatley serves that purpose.
I used to wrestle with a historical double standard while teaching survey courses. There were clear distinctions, it seemed to me, between the great writers and the middling ones in early literary periods. The only reason anyone taught Michael Wigglesworth, so far as I could tell, was because there was some hint in his journals that he might have been gay. But his poetry pales in comparison to Bradstreet's and Taylor's. There was this sense, with the expanded canon, that aesthetics didn't matter as much as theme, and if there was a text that could flog a race, gender, or class trope, then it could/should replace a more classic text on the syllabus. This may have contributed somewhat to the melt we're seeing in the humanities, because there is almost nothing duller than slogging through some of those recovered works of literature. "Life in the Iron-Mills" isn't terrible, but it does not stand up against "Rappaccini's Daughter." Similarly, I have not found Sinclair Lewis's novels (though decorated at the time) to have aged very well, even though Lewis often addresses class issues that are more urgent than ever. (This may well be because Lewis's ego got in the way of his art. He represents the frequent meaninglessness of major literary prizes as measures of achievement, including the Nobel.)
This would be a separate essay, and I lack your confidence to make any broad proclamations about it, but there was a point -- maybe in the 90s or 00s? -- when that pattern I saw in syllabus-making translated to commercial publishing. And it became increasingly difficult for me to know how to populate the last section of my contemporary American literature survey. I had a pretty clear sense of the heavy hitters in Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and early Postmodernism. But there were a lot of more recent Pulitzer-winners that I didn't think would be aesthetically enjoyable or even thematically interesting to teach. Someone like Louise Erdrich, I believe, fits in the Hawthorne category -- her works aren't dull, you can read them for plot, but they also have many passages that require close reading, and they are often beautiful, which makes them teachable. But I also added voices like Brian Turner -- a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and poet. His debut book, "Here, Bullet," held up well in class and was enjoyable for me, too. I wasn't just teaching it to make a point.
Maybe it's as simple as Horace's dictum that literature ought to both "delight" and "instruct." We are living in a time that leans heavily on the didactic side of that formula. Maybe the "broad church" you describe leans more heavily on the other. Much of the work that sustained my teaching split the difference, and I find myself still aiming at something similar in my own writing, and seeking out models of it in my reading: enough aesthetic craft to be pleasurable, but some conceptual heft, as well.
Brilliant, Sam. But I can’t believe they let you publish this!!
One of the defining qualities of the Cabal is elitism. Take a look at the bios of writers. It seems like half of the most celebrated writers have an MFA from Iowa. As publishing has grown more diverse over the last five years, it just means there are more and more celebrated brown and black writers with Iowa MFAs are being published. This is also the case even in the small press world. When I started publishing in the small press world in the late 80s-early 90s, there were tons of writers who were not university-affiliated and didn't have MFA degrees. That is not the case now.
Wow, such interesting discussions in the comments! A lot of this goes far beyond what I addressed in the initial post. Somebody (Elle Griffin?) was saying this recently, that this is the best part of Substack - and something that you really don't get anywhere else - looking forward to hearing from people you like and respect every time you post something (and anticipating what they might say).
I can't reply to everything but a few points:
@Justus, I've become very preoccupied recently by the idea of "guilds" and their deleterious effects on all kinds of civic exchange. It turns out that it can be very narrowly beneficial for industries to create a sense of artificial scarcity and then to have a limited number of people in the position of high priests. This is nowhere more true than with doctors. Simply put, we have too few doctors - they make way too much money (average=$400,000) and meanwhile nobody can get affordable health care and doctors are too busy to more than a glance you if you actually get an appointment. Something similar happens in art markets with narrow and often arbitrary aesthetic criteria administered by self-appointed high priests. These sorts of artistic guilds completely took over visual art sometime around the 1960s and poetry not long after that.
I agree with @Timothy Burke that literary fiction has been a little better (more responsive to the market, and with more points of entry than a pure artistic guild), but agree also with @Sherman Alexie that the presence of universities and MFA programs in fiction has done much to drive fiction towards guilddom. There's a sense that the only entry point into publishing fiction is through a handful of MFAs and the yield of all MFA programs are a set of thin, PC novels about misunderstood young people that look startlingly like one another.
I agree with @Josh Dolezal that it's not necessarily as if gatekeeping in literature has gotten worse. Think back in time to say 1960 and it's actually staggering how closed literary worlds were (for decades, the sole entry point for getting fiction published in the New Yorker was to win the approval of Roger Angell - when he could take time off from one of his baseball essays) and it's not as if there weren't lots of people writing then as well. Probably there have always been some version of these dynamics - with a very closed literary world promising profits and credibility; and outsiders waving the banner for intellectual freedom.
What I would say regarding @david roberts' question regarding Substack is the internet for really the first time since the advent of the printing press in the 15th century (or maybe the advent of cheap printing around the 18th) creates the possibility for a revolution in publishing. Column inches are no longer at a premium, and the "artificial scarcity" of limiting who gets published in books or newspapers starts to seem really silly. There's a different currency - which is winning attention (as opposed to authority) - and I think we've only started to discover what that looks like. @Josh Dolezal, Something about the shape of the internet really lends itself to the mindset of Emerson or especially Whitman - "houses and rooms are full of perfumes / The distillation would intoxicate me also but I shall not let it" - and is all about the "broad church," the "open soul," the idea that time and space can be found for anyone to have a hearing. I totally agree with @Felix Purat that egalitarianism is a "value" not a scientific fact and can sympathize with anyone, including it seems Felix, who emphasizes an ethic of self-improvement to which a certain elitism is a natural corollary. I've chosen to raise my banner with "egalitarianism" (the "broad church") but that's just personal preference.
What I find most important in this exchange is the idea - @david roberts - that the internet signals a very new way to take in writing and that we're just starting to grapple with what that can be. I'd submit that it's possible to undo a number of the competitive ideas we have about art (a fossil of the days of limited column inches) and to really just try to luxuriate in how much is out there.
Really appreciating the discussion!
- Sam
Imagine your lifes without Ballard or R Bolano I add about the stakes at play. Both of those were liable to be mechanically cut from any kind of distribution for being mistaken for mannerists. And then you have Mr. Kahn who wrote that Melancholy of punctuation. Or Anatomy of Speculation about puncttn when he kills by apparently considering using offbeat punct'n and always usually using the straightest. And of course neither Bolano nor Ballard are mannerists, but rather craftsmen from extra to the guild, viva the crafted sentences, because they spit on propaganda and many very visceral kinds of worksploitations, w respect to you Going to-be Carson Mc Cullers, Sherman who already is writing lately with service workers in mind, abysses of absurd words abound and all the people walk on the precipices.
Holy cow this is brilliant. So well expressed and thought out. I feel this but doubt I could have been as eloquent about it. Substack astonishes me on a daily basis. thank you