The Elite and the Effete: From Access to Egress

Allen Ginsberg dressed up for working at his Market Research job, Berkely, 1954, Allen Ginsberg Project

by Joe Linker

When did literature become an elitist game? When we started writing? Literature both reflects and influences culture, society, and the individual, but there are many things that reflect our values (what we want; not to be confused with what’s good for us) and influence our thought and action (the automobile; lawns; college), but not everything that reflects and influences our lives is literature. There appears to be an argument afoot, to wit: “I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun.” This from Elif Batuman’s review of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era, “Get a Real Degree.”

All cultures experience literature, but only an elitist can afford to read purely for fun. What Elif is talking about when she says “literary tradition” is the tradition of literary criticism, which is a kind of self-consciousness about one’s literature. Part of Elif’s complaint is that the programs (code for the MFA writing programs) lack literary tradition and subscribe to an artificial fabrication called creative writing. But as Eliot said in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “It [tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” One gets the feeling that Elif does not consider “creative writing” to be literature, and it may not be, in the same sense that painting by numbers is not art. D. G. Myers seems to agree. Myers values writers not on but in location. Using this rubric, Bukowski, who filled the Los Angeles Basin with alcohol, makes the grade, as would Flannery O’Connor, who filled the South with grace, and Joyce, who filled Dublin with Dubliners, giving them a chance to talk to one another unencumbered by the Church’s program. Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy is another example rooted in place. But people move, and move on.

If, as Buckminster Fuller explained, specialization leads to extinction, where does literary elitism lead? Literature from the “programmes” sounds a little like the physicists’ string theories, which Robert B. Laughlin unraveled for us some time ago: criticizing string theory in his book A Different Universe, Laughlin says “A measurement that cannot be done accurately, or that cannot be reproduced even if it is accurate, can never be divorced from politics and must therefore generate mythologies” (p. 215). One problem, as described by Batuman, has to do with the program reverence for what it calls craft. Plumbing is a craft; writing is something else.

Again we find funding the antagonist: “…people on the West Coast work,” Kenneth Rexroth said. “Ginsberg when he came out here, as he said in interviews, was working as a market researcher, which is just a shit job. It’s like being a floorwalker in a dime store. I said, ‘Why don’t you work? How much are you making? Forty-five dollars? You can’t live on forty-five dollars in San Francisco. That’s not money. Why don’t you go to work, get a job?’ Ginsberg said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Ship out…’ You come back with more bread than you know what to do with!’ In the East people don’t think like that” (Meltzer, 1971, p. 12*).

Elif’s London Review of Books review would still be going out with the tide were it not for McGurl’s tardy response in the May 11th Los Angeles Review of Books, “The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative Writing.” But what is elite? The truly elite do not go in for literature; they go where the money is, finance, or health care, or both, which is insurance, and surely if we can agree on anything it’s that there’s no money in literature. The elite that do go in for literature we might call the mal-elite, the black sheep of the elite, for as Jerzy Kosinski said, “Reading novels—serious novels, anyhow—is an experience limited to a very small percentage of the so-called enlightened public. Increasingly, it’s going to be a pursuit for those who seek unusual experiences, moral fetishists perhaps, people of heightened imagination, the troubled pursuers of the ambiguous self” (Kosinski, Paris Review Interview, 1972).

Kosinski was no elitist, nor is Elif’s example of a writer she values, Dave Eggers. His prose is characterized by practical matters; his publication efforts (The Believer, which does not publish fiction, but which has been publishing poetry of late; 826 Valencia) take the word to the street, Samizdat-style. William T. Vollman might be an even better example of the non-elitist, non-programmed writer, engaged in some cross-fertilization of fiction and non-fiction, a new prose for a new time. For the University cannot grant access to literature; it can only grant access to degrees. And the egress of disappearing readers from literature suggests that we must start to look for our literature in unexpected places.

Piece originally posted at The Coming of the Toads |