Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

David Foster Wallace

Note: I ﬁrst discovered this essay through its mention in Steven Moore’s essay The First Draft Version of

Inﬁnite Jest, in which he wrote:

[. . .] I had read The Broom of the System when it was published in 1987 and had been

very impressed; even if not an entirely successful novel, it struck me as written by someone

possessed of genius. A few months later I was invited to guest-edit a special issue of the

Review of Contemporary Fiction to be called “Novelist As Critic.” It amounted to little more

than inviting my favorite novelists to contribute an essay on any literary topic, the working

assumption (which I still hold) being that novelists write better criticism than most profes-

sional critics. Since all of the authors I invited were well along in their careers, I thought I

should have at least one emerging writer, so I wrote to Wallace in care of his publisher and

invited him to submit something, an offer he found “intriguing” (he had never written an es-

say for publication before). His “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” appeared

in the fall 1988 issue and conﬁrmed my impression that he was brilliant. (Our typesetter,

on the other hand—a wonderful middle-aged woman who had her doubts about much of the

stuff we published—thought he sounded snotty.)

[http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8175/ij_first.htm]

I immediately began searching online for this“brilliant” essay, but found even the University of Washington’s

large libraries only had electronic copies dating back to the early nineties. Undeterred, I borrowed the

archived paper copies, OCR’d them, and then painstakingly re-typeset the document to match the original.

I provide this not to steal from the Review of Contemporary Fiction, but merely because I don’t think most

people would have access to it any other way.

— Evan Martin, March 2004

THE METRONOME OF literary fashion looks to be set on presto. Beginning with the

high-proﬁle appearances of David Leavitt’s Family Dancing, Jay McInerney’s Bright

Lights, Big City and Bret Ellis’s Less Than Zero, the last three-odd years saw a ver-

itable explosion of good-willed critical and commercial interest in literary ﬁction by

Conspicuously Young

writers. During this interval, certain honored traditions of star-

vation and apprenticeship were inverted: writers’ proximity to their own puberties

seemed now an asset; rumors had agents haunting prestigious writing workshops like

pro scouts at Bowl games; publishers and critics jockeyed for position to proclaim their

own beardless favorite “The ﬁrst voice of a new generation.” Too, the upscale urban

young quickly established themselves as a bona ﬁde audience (and market) for C.Y.

ﬁction: Ellis and McInerney, Janowitz and Leavitt, Simpson and Minot enjoy a popu-

larity with their peers unknown since the relative popular disappearance of the sixties’

hip black humor squad.

As of this writing, late 1987, the backlash has been swift and severe, if not wholly

unjustiﬁed. Many of the same trendy reviewers who in the mid-eighties were hail-

ing the precocity of a New Generation now bemoan the proliferation of a literary Brat

Pack. The Village Voice, which in 1985 formalized the apotheosis of McInerney in a

gushy cover story, this autumn uses a scathing review of some McInerney disciples as

occasion to headline the news that THE BRAT PACK SPITS UP, with crudely cut-out

Hereafter abbreviated “C.Y.”

faces of Janowitz, McInerney, Ellis et al. pasted on photos of diaper models. Nine-

teen eighty-seven saw the staff and guests of the New York Times Book Review sud-

denly complaining of a trend toward “world-weary creative writing projects,” a spate

of “Y.A.W.N.S. (Young Anomic White Novelists),” an endless succession of ﬂash-in-

the-pan “short-story starlets.” In its October 11 issue, no less an

eminence grise than

William Gass administers “A Failing Grade For the Present Tense”:

You may have noticed the plague of school-styled [writers] with which

our pages have been afﬂicted, and taken some account of the no-account

magazines that exist in order to publish them. Thousands of short-story

readers and writers have been released like ﬁngerlings into the thin main-

stream of serious prose. . . . Well, young people are young people, aren’t

they . . . Adolescents consume more of their psyches than soda, and more

local feelings than junk food. Is no indulgence denied them? . . . I read [a

recent Leavitt-edited anthology of C.Y. ﬁction] as a part of my researches.

It is like walking through a cemetery before they’ve put in any graves.

What’s caused this quick reversal in mood? Is it capricious and unfair, or overdue?

Most interesting: what does it imply?

In my own opinion, the honeymoon’s end between the literary Establishment and

the C.Y. writer was an inevitable and foreseeable consequence of the same shameless

hype that led to many journeyman writers’ premature elevation in the ﬁrst place: con-

descending critical indulgence and condescending critical dismissal inhabit the same

coin. It’s true that some cringingly bad ﬁction gets written by C.Y.’s. But this is hardly

an explanation for anything, since the same is true of lots of older artists, many of

whom have clearly shot their bolts and now hang by name and fashion alone.

More germane is the frequent charge of a certain numbing sameness about much

contemporary young writing. To a certain extent anyone who reads widely must agree

with it. The vast bulk of the vast amount of recently published C.Y. ﬁction reinforces

the stereotype that has all young literary enterprises falling into one or more of the

following three dreary camps:

(1) Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, declaimed via six-ﬁgure Uppies and their salon-tanned,

morally vacant offspring, none of whom seem to be able to make it from limo door

to analyst’s couch without several grams of chemical encouragement;

(2) Catatonic Realism, a.k.a. Ultraminimalism, a.k.a. Bad Carver, in which suburbs

are wastelands, adults automata, and narrators blank perceptual engines, intoning

in run-on monosyllables the artiﬁcial ingredients of breakfast cereal and the new

human non-soul;

(3) Workshop Hermeticism, ﬁction for which the highest praise involves the words

“competent,” “ﬁnished,” “problem-free,” ﬁction over which Writing-Program pre-

and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without

Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description;

no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a

dramatized scene to “show” what’s “told”; no denouement prior to an epiphany

whose approach can be charted by any Freitag on any Macintosh.

Mean, but unfortunately fair—except for the fact that, like most generalizations,

these apply validly only to the inferior examples of the work at hand. Ironically for

the critic who wants both to bemoan invasions and pigeonhole the invaders, the very

proliferation of C.Y. ﬁction, with its attendant variety, raises the generation’s cream

above stereotype. The preternatural smarts with which a Simpson or Leavitt can render

complex parental machinations through the eyes of thoroughly believable children; the

gritty white-trash lyricism of Pinckney Benedict’s Town Smokes; the wry, bitchy humor

of a good Lorrie Moore or Amy Hempel or Debra Spark story; the political vision of

William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels; the conscientious exploration of mo-

tive behind Yuppie dissolution in McInerney’s Bright Lights—these transcend Camp-

following and, more important, merit neither head-patting nor sneers. See for yourself.

Among the C.Y. writers who do, yes, seem to crowd the last half of this decade, there

are some unique and worthy talents. Yes, all are raw, some more or less mature, some

more or less apt at transcending the hype the hype-mills crank out daily. But more than

a couple are originals.

But it’s weird: all we C.Y. writers get consistently lumped together. Both lauds and

pans invariably invoke a Generation that is both New and, in some odd way, One. Un-

familiar with the critical fashions of past decades, I don’t know whether this perception

has precedent, but I do think in certain ways it’s not inappropriate. As of now, C.Y.

writers, the good and the lousy, are in my opinion A Generation, conjoined less by

chronology (Benedict is twenty-three, Janowitz over thirty) than by the new and sin-

gular environment in and about which we try to write ﬁction. This, that we are agnate,

also goes a long way toward explaining the violent and conﬂicting critical reactions

New Voices are provoking.

The argument, then, is that certain key things having to do with literary production

are radically different for young American writers now; and that, fashion-ﬂux aside,

the fact that these key things affect our aesthetic values and literary choices serves at

once to bind us together and to distance us from much of an Establishment—literary,

intellectual, political—that reads and judges our stuff from their side of a . . . well,

generation gap. There are, of course, uncountable differences between the formative

experiences of consecutive generations, and to exhaust and explain all the ones rel-

evant here would require both objective distance and a battalion of social historians.

Having neither at hand, I propose to invite consideration of just three speciﬁc contem-

porary American phenomena, viz the impacts of television, of academic Creative Writ-

ing Programs, and of a revolution in the way educated people understand the function

and possibility of literary narrative. These three because they seem at once powerfully

affective and normatively complex. Great and grim, tonic and insidious, they are (I

claim) undeniable and cohesive inﬂuences on this country’s “New Voices.”

Stats on the percentage of the average American day spent before small screens are

well known. But the American generation born after, say, 1955 is the ﬁrst for whom

television is something to be lived with, not just looked at. Our parents regard the set

rather as the Flapper did the automobile: a curiosity turned treat turned seduction. For

us, their children, TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We quite

literally cannot “imagine” life without it. As it does for so much of today’s developed

world, it presents and so deﬁnes our common experience; but we, unlike any elders,

have no memory of a world without such electronic deﬁnition. It’s built in. In my own

childhood, late sixties, rural downstate Illinois, miles and megahertz from any center

of entertainment production, familiarity with the latest developments on “Batman” or

“The Wild, Wild West” was the medium of social exchange. Much of our original play

was a simple reenactment of what we’d witnessed the night before, and verisimilitude

was taken very seriously. The ability to do a passable Howard Cosell, Barney Rubble,

CoCo-Puff Bird, or Gomer Pyle was a measure of status, a determination of stature.

Surely television-as-lifestyle inﬂuences the modes by which C.Y. writers understand

and represent lived life. A recent issue of Arrival saw critic Bruce Bawer lampoon

many Brat-Packers’ habit of delineating characters according to the commercial slo-

gans that appear on their T-shirts. He had a scary number of examples. It’s true that

there’s something sad in the fact that Leavitt’s sole description of some characters in,

say, “Danny in Transit” consists of the fact that their shirts say “Coca Cola” in a for-

eign language—yet maybe more sad that, for most of his reading contemporaries, this

description does the job. Bawer’s distaste seems to me misplaced: it’s more properly

directed at a young culture so willingly bombarded with messages equating what one

consumes with who one is that brand loyalty is now an acceptable synechdoche of

identity, of character.

This schism between young writers and their older critics probably extends to the

whole issue of strategic reference to “popular culture” in literary ﬁction. The artistic

deployment of pop icons—brand names, television programs, celebrities, commercial

ﬁlm and music—strikes those intellectuals whose consciousness was formed before

the genuine Television Age as at best frivolous tics and at worst dangerous vapidities

that compromise ﬁction’s “seriousness” by dating it out of the Platonic Always where

it properly resides. A ﬁne and conscientious writing professor once proclaimed to our

class that a serious story or novel always eschews “any feature that serves to date it,” to

ﬁx it in history, because “Literary ﬁction is always timeless.” When we protested that,

in his own well-known work, characters moved about in electrically lit rooms, pro-

pelled themselves in autos, spoke not Anglo-Saxon but post-WWII English, inhabited

a North America already separated from Africa by continental drift, he amended his

ruling’s application to those explicit references that would date a story in the transient

Now. Pressed by further quibbling into real precision, his interdiction turned out really

to be against what he called the ”mass-commercial-media” reference. At this point,

I think, trans-generational discourse breaks down. For this gentleman’s automobiled

Timeless and our F.C.C.’d own were different. Time had changed Always.

Nor, please, is this stuff a matter of mere taste or idiosyncrasy. Most good ﬁction

writers, even young ones, are intellectuals. So are most critics and teachers (and a

surprising number of editors). And television, its advertising, and the popular culture

they both reﬂect and deﬁne have fundamentally altered what intellectuals get to regard

as the proper objects of their attention. Those cognoscenti whose values were formed

before TV and advertising became psychologically pandemic are still anxious to draw

a sharp distinction,

a la Barbara Tuchman, between those sorts of things that have gen-

uine “quality” and are produced and demanded by people with reﬁned tastes, on one

hand, and those sorts of things which have only “popularity” or “mass appeal,” are

demanded by the Great Unwashed and cheerfully supplied by those whom egalitarian

capitalism has whored to the lowest of denominators, the democratic market, on the

other. The enlightened older aesthete, erudite and liberal, weaned let’s say between

1940 and 1960, is able to operate from a center of contradiction between genuine re-

ﬁnement and genuine liberalism, advertising scholars like Martin Mayer had already

begun to deride by the ﬁfties’ end:

The great bulk of advertising is culturally repulsive to anyone with any

developed sensitivity. So are most movies and television shows, most pop-

ular music, and a surprisingly high proportion of published books. . . . But

a sensitive person can easily avoid cheap movies, cheap books, and cheap

art, while there is scarcely anyone outside the jails who can avoid con-

tact with advertising. By presenting the intellectual with a more or less

accurate image of the popular culture, advertising earns his enmity and

calumny. It hits him where it hurts worst: in his politically liberal and

socially generous outlook—partly nourished on his avoidance of actual

contact with popular taste.

I claim that intellectuals of the New Generation for whom C.Y. writers are supposed

to be voices can no longer even wrap their minds around this kind of hypocrisy, much

less suffer from it. Not that this “enlightenment” is earned, or even necessarily a good

thing. Because it’s not as though television and advertising and popular entertainments

have ceased to be mostly bad art or cheap art, but just that they’ve imposed themselves

on our generation’s psyches for so long and with such power that they have entered into

complicated relations with our very ideas of the world and the self. We simply cannot

“relate to” the older aesthete’s distanced distaste for mass entertainment and popular

appeal: the distaste may well remain, but the distance has not.

And, as the pop informs our generation’s ways of experiencing and reading the world,

so too will it naturally affect our artistic values and expectations. Young ﬁction writers

may spend hours each day at the writing table, performing; but we’re also, each and

every day, part of the great Audience. We’re conditioned accordingly. We have an

innate predilection for visual stimulation, colored movement, a frenetic variety, a beat

you can dance to. It may be that, through hyper- and atrophy, our mental capacities

themselves are different: the breadth of our attentions greater as attention spans them-

selves shorten. Raised on an activity at least partly passive, we experience a degree of

manipulation as neutral, a fact of life. However, wooed artfully as we are for not just

our loyalty but our very attention, we reserve for that attention the status of a commod-

ity, a measure of power; and our choices to bestow or withhold it carry for us great

weight. So does what we regard as our God-given right to be entertained—or, if not

entertained, at least stimulated: the unpleasant is perfectly OK, just so long as it rivets.

As one can see popular icons seriously used in much C.Y. ﬁction as touchstones for

the world we live in and try to make into art, so one might trace some of the techniques

favored by many young writers to roots in our experience as consummate watchers.

E.g., events often refracted through the sensibilities of more than one character; short,

dense paragraphs in which coherence is often sacriﬁced for straight evocation; abrupt

transitions in scene, setting, point of view, temporal and causal orders; a surfacy, ob-

jective, “cinematic” third-person narrative eye. Above all, though, a comparative indif-

ference to the imperative of mimesis, combined with an absolute passion for narrative

choices that conduce to what might be called “mood.” For no writer can help assuming

that the reader is on some level like him: already having seen, ad nauseum, what life

looks like, he’s far more interested in how it feels as a signpost toward what it means.

The technical coin, too, has a tails. For instance, it’s not hard to see that the trendy

Ultraminimalism favored by too many C.Y. writers is deeply inﬂuenced by the aesthetic

norms of mass entertainment. Indeed, this ﬁction depends on what’s little more than a

crude inversion of these norms. Where television, especially its advertising, presents

everything in hyperbole, Ultraminimalism is deliberately ﬂat, understated, “undersold.”

Where TV seeks everywhere to render its action either dramatic or melodramatic, to

move the viewer by displaying constant movement, the Minimalist describes an event

as one would an object, a geometric form in stasis; and he always does so from an emo-

tional remove of light years. Where television does and must aim always to please, the

Catatonic writer hefts something of a ﬁnger at subject and reader alike: one has only to

read a Bret Ellis sex scene (pick a page, any page) to realize that here pleasure is nei-

ther a subject nor an aim. My own aversion to Ultraminimalism, I think, stems from its

naive pretension. The Catatonic Bunch seem to feel that simply by inverting the values

imposed on us by television, commercial ﬁlm, advertising, etc., they can automatically

achieve the aesthetic depth popular entertainment so conspicuously lacks. Really, of

course, the Ultraminimalists are no less infected by popular culture than other C.Y.

writers: they merely choose to deﬁne their art by opposition to their own atmosphere.

The attitude betrayed is similar to that of lightweight neo-classicals who felt that to be

non-vulgar was not just a requirement but an assurance of value, or of insecure scholars

who confuse obscurity with profundity. And it’s just about as annoying.

Not that the Catatonic’s discomfort with a culture of and by popularity isn’t under-

standable. We’re all at least a little uncomfortable with it—no?—probably because, as

technicians like Mayer foresaw thirty years ago, escape from it has gone from impos-

sible to inconceivable. That is, since today’s popular TV culture is by its nature mass,

pan-, it’s of course going to impact the styles and choices and dreams not just of a few

ﬁngerling artists and their small readerships, but of the very human collectivities about

which we try to write. And this impact has been overwhelming; the new Always has

changed everything. I’m going to argue that it’s done so in ways that are bad and have

costs. “Bad” means inimical to many of the values our communities have evolved and

held and cherished and taught. “Costs” means painful changes and losses for persons.

Because, see, a mysterious beast like television begins, the more sophisticated it gets,

to produce and live by an antinomy, a phenomenon whose strength lies in its contradic-

tion: aimed ever and always at groups, masses, markets, collectivities, it’s nevertheless

true that the most powerful and lasting changes are wrought by TV on individual per-

sons, each one of whom is forced every day to understand himself in relation to the

Groups by virtue of which he seems to exist at all.

Think, for instance, about the way prolonged exposure to broadcast drama makes

each one of us at once more self-conscious and less reﬂective. A culture more and

more about seeing eventually perverts the relation of seer and seen. We watch various

actors who play various characters involved in various relations and events. Seldom do

we think about the fact that the single deep feature the characters share, with each other

and with the actors who portray them, is that they are watched. The behavior of the

actors, and—in a complicated way, through the drama they’re inside—even the char-

acters, is directed always at an audience for whom they behave . . . indeed, in virtue

of whom they exist as actor or character in the ﬁrst place, behind the screen’s glass.

We, the audience, receive unconscious reinforcement of the thesis that the most sig-

niﬁcant feature of persons is watchableness, and that contemporary human worth is

not just isomorphic with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching. Precious distinc-

tions between truly being and merely appearing get obfuscated. Imagine a Berkleyan

esse-est-percipi universe in which God is named Nielsen.

Then consider that well-known, large, “ignorant” segment of the population that be-

lieves on a day-to-day level that what happens on televised dramas is “real.” This, the

enormous volume of mail addressed each day to characters and not the persons who

portray them, is the iceberg’s extreme tip. The berg itself is a generation (New) for

whom the distinction between (real) actor artiﬁcially portraying and (pretend) charac-

ter genuinely behaving gets ever more tangled. The danger of the berg is badness and

cost—a shift from an understanding of self as a character in a great drama whose end

is meaning to an understanding of self as an actor at a great audition whose end is

seeming, i.e., being seen.

Actually there are uncountable ways in which efﬁciently conceived and disseminated

popular entertainment affects the existential predicaments of both persons and groups.

And if “existential” seems too weighty a term to attach to anything pop, then I think

you’re misunderstanding what’s at stake. You’re invited to consider commercial dramas

that deal with violence and danger and the possibility of death. There are lots, today.

Each drama has a hero. He’s purposely designed so that we by our nature “identify”

with him. At present this is still not hard to get us to do, for we still tend to think of our

own lives this way: we’re each the hero of our own drama, others around us remanded

to supporting roles or (increasingly) audience status.

But now try to recall the last time you saw the “hero” die within his drama’s narra-

tive frame. It’s very rarely done anymore. Entertainment professionals have apparently

done research: audiences ﬁnd the deaths of those with whom they identify a downer,

and are less apt to watch dramas in which danger is creatively connected to the death

that makes danger dangerous. The natural consequence is that today’s dramatic heroes

tend to be “immortal” within the frame that makes them heroes and objects of identi-

ﬁcation (for the audience, VCR- and related technology give this illusion a magnetic

reality). I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters

for whom death is not a signiﬁcant creative possibility has real costs. We the audience,

and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of

teleology, live in a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or

end and quite literally eternal. If we’re the only animals who know in advance we’re

going to die, we’re also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to

the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth. The danger is that, as

entertainment’s denials of the truth get even more effective and pervasive and seduc-

tive, we will eventually forget what they’re denials of. This is scary. Because it seems

transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we’re going to forget how to live.

And if you think that contemporary literary artists, of whatever stature, are above

blinking at a reality we all ﬁnd unpleasant, consider the number of serious American

ﬁctional enterprises in the last decade that have dealt with what’s acknowledged to be

the single greatest organized threat to our persons and society. Try to name, say, two.

Maybe the real question is—how serious can people who have a right to be enter-

tained permit “serious” ﬁction to be anymore? Because if I claimed above that the C.Y.

writers’ intellectual fathers held dear a contradictory blend of cutting-edge politics and

old-guard aesthetics, I’m sure most of us would gladly trade it for the contradictions

that are its replacement. Today’s journeyman ﬁction writer ﬁnds himself both a lover

of serious narrative and an ineluctably conditioned part of a pop-dominated culture in

which the social stock of his own enterprise is falling. What we are inside of—what

comprises us—is killing what we love.

Hyperbole? It’s important to remember that most television is not just entertainment:

it’s also narrative. And it’s so true it’s trite that human beings are narrative animals:

every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-

economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable

series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative

like we need space-time; it’s a built-in thing. In the C.Y. writers today, the narrative

patterns to which literate Americans are most regularly exposed are televised. And,

even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It’s a nar-

rative art that strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient—not necessarily

even to “entertain”—but merely and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end—

openly acknowledged—is to ensure continued watching. And (I claim) the metastatic

efﬁciency with which it’s done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the

level of people’s tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of

which narrative art is art.

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding.

One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in

all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely

because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal

helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good

and very good serious ﬁction writers at work in America than ever before, an American

public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of

its reading time and book dollar on ﬁction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash

ﬁction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being

demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinis-

ter phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated

by—has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and proﬁt, our own

history is chock full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect impor-

tant, lasting contributions from a narrative art that under- stands itself as being about

considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can

divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transﬁgure. Today’s trash

writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But televi-

sion aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented

popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not

only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all

narrative art. This would be a disaster.

I’m worried lest I sound too much like B. Tuchman here, because my complaints

about trash are different from hers, and less sophisticated. My complaint against trash

ﬁction is not that it’s plebeian, and as for its rise I don’t care at all whether post-

industrial liberalism squats in history as the culprit that made it inevitable. My com-

plaint against trash isn’t that it’s vulgar art, or irritatingly dumb art, but that, given what

makes ﬁction art at all, trash is simply unreal, empty—and that (aided by mores of and

by TV) it seduces the market writers need and the culture that needs writers away from

what is real, full, meaningful.

Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to bear personal

ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a

bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish

them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all

too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else

the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or re-

sponsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human

enterprise. The prostitute “gives,” but—demanding nothing of comparable value in

return—perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a trans-

action. The writer of trash ﬁction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a

narrative structure and movement that engages the reader—titillates, repulses, excites,

transports him—without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artis-

tic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or

even real activity. So when our elders tell our graduate ﬁction class (as they liked to

do a lot) that a war for ﬁctional art’s soul is being waged in the 1980s between poetry

on one side and trash on the other—to this admonishment we listen, at this we take

pause. Especially when television and advertising have conditioned us to equate net

worth with human worth. Sidney Sheldon, a gifted trash-master, owns jets; more peo-

ple in this country write poetry than read it; the annual literary budget of the National

Endowment for the Arts is less than a third of the U. S.’s yearly expenditures on mil-

itary bands, less than a tenth of the three big networks’ yearly spending on Creative

Development.

Sidney Sheldon, by the way, was the Creative, Developing force behind both “I

Dream of Jeannie” and “Hart to Hart.” Oprah Winfrey asks him in admiration for

the secret behind his success in ”two such totally different media.“ I say to myself,

”Ha,” watching.

It’s in terms of economics that academic Creative Writing Programs

offer their least

ambiguous advantages. Published writers (assuming they themselves have a graduate

writing degree) can earn enough by workshop teaching to support themselves and their

own ﬁction without having to resort to more numbing or time-consuming employment.

On the student side, fellowships—some absurdly generous—and paid assistantships in

teaching are usually available to almost all students. Programs tend to be a sweet deal.

And there are more such programs in this country now than anywhere anytime be-

fore. The once-lone brow of the Iowa Workshop has birthed ﬁrst-rate creative depart-

ments at places like Stanford, Houston, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Virginia, Michigan,

Arizona, etc. The majority of accredited American I.H.E.s now have at least some

sort of formal academic provision for students who want vocational training in ﬁction

writing. This has all happened within the last ﬁfteen years. It’s unprecedented, and so

These words are capitalized because they understand themselves as capitalized. Trust me on this.

are the effects of the trend on young U.S. ﬁction. Of the C.Y. writers I’ve mentioned

above, I know of none who’ve not had some training in either a graduate or undergrad-

uate writing department. Most of them hold M.F.A.’s. Some are, even as we speak,

working toward a degree called a “Creative Ph.D.” Never has a “literary generation”

been so thoroughly and formally trained, nor has such a large percentage of aspiring

ﬁction writers eschewed extramural apprenticeship for ivy and grades.

And the contributions of the academy’s rise in American ﬁction go beyond the ﬁs-

cal. The workshop phenomenon has been justly credited with a recent “renaissance of

the American short story,” a renaissance heralded in the late seventies with the emer-

gence of writers like the late Raymond Carver (taught at Syracuse), Jayne Anne Phillips

(M.F.A. from Iowa), and the late Breece Pancake (M.F.A. from Virginia). More small

magazines devoted to short literary ﬁction exist today than ever before, most of them

either sponsored by programs or edited and staffed by recent M.F.A.s. Short story col-

lections, even by relative unknowns, are now halfway viable economically, and pub-

lishers have moved briskly to accommodate trend.

More important for young writers themselves, programs can afford them time, aca-

demic (and parental!) legitimacy, and an environment in which to Hone Their Craft,

Grow, Find Their Voice,

etc. For the student, a community of serious, like-minded

persons with whom to exchange ideas has pretty clear advantages. So, in many ways,

does the ﬁction class itself. In a workshop, rudiments of technique and process can

be taught fairly quickly to kids who might in the past have spent years in New York

lofts learning basic tricks of the trade by trial and error. A classroom atmosphere of

rigorous constructive criticism helps toughen young writers’ hides and prepare them

for the wildly disparate responses the world of real readers holds in store. Best of all,

a good workshop forces students regularly to formulate consistent, reasoned criticisms

of colleagues’ work; and this, almost without fail, makes them far more astute about

the strengths and weaknesses of their own ﬁction.

Still, I think it’s the Program-sword’s other edge that justiﬁes the various Establish-

ments’ present disenchantment with C.Y. ﬁction more than anything else. The dark

side of the Program trend exists, grows; and it’s much more than an instantiation of

the standard academic lovely-in-theory-but-mangled-in-practice conundrum. So we’ll

leave aside nasty little issues like departmental politics, faculty power struggles that

summon images of sharks ﬁghting for control of a bathtub, the dispiriting hiss of

everybody’s egos in various stages of inﬂation or deﬂation, a downright unshakable

publish-or-perish mentality that equates appearance in print with talent or promise.

These might be particular to one student’s experience. Certain problems inherent in

Programs’ very structure and purpose, though, are not. For one thing, the pedagogical

relation between ﬁction professor and ﬁction student has unhealthiness built right in.

Writing teachers are by calling writers, not teachers. The fact that most of them are

teaching, not for its own sake, but to support a separate and obsessive calling, has got

to be accepted, as does its consequence: every minute spent on class and department

business is, for Program staff, a minute not spent working on their own art, and must to

a degree be resented. The best teachers seem to acknowledge the conﬂict between their

vocations, reach some kind of internal compromise, and go on. The rest, according to

On these, too: they are to Programs what azan are to mosques.

their capacities, either suppress the resentment or make sure they do the barely accept-

able minimum their primary source of income requires. Almost all, though, take the

resentment out in large part on the psyches of their pupils—for pupils represent artistic

time wasted, an expenditure of a teacher’s ﬁction-energy without ﬁction- production.

It’s all perfectly understandable. Clearly, though, feeling like a burden, an impediment

to real art-production, is not going to be conducive to a student’s development, to say

nothing of his enthusiasm. Not to mention his basic willingness to engage his instructor

in the kind of dynamic back-and-forth any real creative education requires, since it’s

usually the very-low-proﬁle, docile, undemanding student who is favored, recruited,

supported and advanced by a faculty for whom demand equals distraction.

In other words, the fact that creative writing teachers must wear two hats has un-

happy implications for the quality of both M.F.A. candidates and the education they

receive in Programs. And it’s very unclear who if anyone’s to blame. Teaching ﬁc-

tion writing is darn hard to do well. The conscientious teacher must not only be both

highly critical and emotionally sensitive, acute in his reading and articulate about his

acuity: he must be all these things with regard to precisely those issues that can be

communicated to and discussed in a workshop group. And that inevitably yields a

distorted emphasis on the sorts of simple, surface concerns that a dozen or so people

can talk about coherently: straightforward mechanics of traditional ﬁction production

like ﬁdelity to point-of-view, consistency of tense and tone, development of charac-

ter, verisimilitude of setting, etc. Faults or virtues that cannot quickly be identiﬁed or

discussed between bells—little things like interestingness, depth of vision, original-

ity, political assumptions and agendas, the question whether deviation from norm is in

some cases OK—must, for sound Program-pedagogical reasons, be ignored or discour-

aged. Too, in order to remain both helpful and sane, the professional writer/teacher has

got to develop, consciously or not, an aesthetic doctrine, a static set of principles about

how a “good” story works. Otherwise he’d have to start from intuitive scratch with

each student piece he reads, and that way the liquor cabinet lies. But consider what this

means: the Program staffer must teach the practice of art, which by its nature always

exists in at least some state of tension with the rules of its practice, as essentially an

applied system of rules. Surely this kind of enforced closure to further ﬁctional possi-

bilities isn’t good for most teachers’ own literary development. Nor is it at all good for

their students, most of whom have been in school for at least sixteen years and know

that the way the school game is played is: (1) Determine what the instructor wants; and

(2) Supply it forthwith. Most Programs, then, produce two kinds of students. There

are those few who, whether particularly gifted or not, have enough interest and faith

in their ﬁction instincts to elect sometimes to deviate from professors’ prescriptions.

Many of these students are shown the door, or drop out, or gut out a couple years dur-

ing which the door is always being pointed to, throats cleared, Fin. Aid unavailable.

These turn out to be the lucky ones. The other kind are those who, the minute fanny

touches chair, make the instructors’ dicta their own—whether from insecurity, educa-

tional programming, or genuine agreement (rare)—who row instead of rock, play the

game quietly and solidly, and begin producing solid, quiet work, most of which lands

neatly in Dreary Camp #3, nice, cautious, boring Workshop Stories, stories as tough

to ﬁnd technical fault with as they are to remember after putting them down. Here

are the rouged corpses for Dr. Gass’s graveyard. Workshops like corpses. They have

to. Because any class, even one in “creativity,” is going to place supreme value on not

making mistakes. And corpses, whatever their other faults, never ever screw up.

I doubt whether any of this is revelatory, but I hope it’s properly scary. Because Cre-

ative Writing Programs, while claiming in all good faith to train professional writers,

in reality train more teachers of Creative Writing. The only thing a Master of Fine Arts

degree actually qualiﬁes one to do is teach . . . Fine Arts. Almost all present ﬁction

professors hold something like an M.F.A. So do most editors of literary magazines.

Most M.F.A. candidates who stay in the Business will go on to teach and edit. Small

wonder, then, that older critics feel in so much current C.Y. ﬁction the tweed breeze

that could signal a veritable storm of boredom: envision if you dare a careful, accom-

plished national literature, mistake-free, seamless as ﬁne linoleum; ﬁction preoccupied

with norm as value instead of value’s servant; ﬁction by academics who were taught

by academics and teach aspiring academics; novel after critique-resistant novel about

tenure-angst, coed-lust, cafeteria-schmerz.

Railing against occluded subject matter and tradition-tested style is one thing. A

larger issue is whether Writing Programs and their grinding, story-every-three-weeks

workshop assembly lines could, eventually, lower all standards, precipitate a broad-

level literary mediocrity, ﬁctional equivalents of what Donald Hall calls “The McPoem.”

I think, if they get much more popular, and do not drop the pose of “education” in favor

of a humbler and more honest self-appraisal—a form of literary patronage and an oc-

casion for literary community—we might well end up with a McStory chain that would

put Ray Kroc to shame. Because it’s not just the unhealthy structure of the Program,

the weird creative constraints it has to impose on instructors and students alike—it’s the

type of student who is attracted by such an arrangement. A sheepheaded willingness to

toe any line just because it’s the most comfortable way to survive is contemptible in any

student. But students are just symptoms. Here’s the disease: in terms of rigor, demand,

intellectual and emotional requirement, a lot of Creative Writing Programs are an un-

funny joke. Few require of applicants any signiﬁcant preparation in history, literature,

criticism, composition, foreign languages, art or philosophy; fewer still make attempts

to provide it in curricula or require it as a criterion for graduation.

Part of this problem is political. Academic departments of Creative Writing and

“Straight Literature” tend to hold each other in mutual contempt, a state of affairs that

student, Program, and serious-ﬁction audience are all going to regret a lot if it contin-

ues to obtain. Way too many students are being “certiﬁed” to go out there and try to do

meaningful work on the cutting edge of an artistic discipline of whose underpinnings,

history, and greatest achievements they are largely ignorant. The obligatory survey of

“Writers Who Are Important to You” at the start of each term seems to suggest that

Homer and Milton, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Maupassant and Gogol—to say noth-

ing of the Testaments—have receded into the mists of Straight Lit; that, for far too

much of this generation, Salinger invented the wheel, Updike internal combustion, and

Only considerations of space and legal liability restrain me from sharing with you in detail the persistent

legend, at one nameless institution, of the embalmed cadaver cadged from the medical school by two deeply

troubled young M.F.A. candidates, enrolled in a workshop at their proxy, smuggled pre-bell into the seminar

room each week, and propped in its assigned seat, there to clutch a pencil in its white ﬁst and stare straight

ahead with an expression of somewhat rigid good cheer. The name of the legend is “The Cadaver That Got

a B.”

Carver, Beattie and Phillips drive what’s worth chasing, Forget Allan Bloom gnash-

ing his teeth at high-school students who pretend to no aspirations past an affordable

mortgage—we’re supposed to want to be writers, here. We as a generation are in dan-

ger of justifying Eliot at his zaniest if via a blend of academic stasis and intellectual

disinterest we show to the dissatisfaction of all that culture is either cumulative or it is

dead, empty on either side of a social Now that admits neither passion about the future

nor curiosity about the past.

The fact that we Aspiring Voices as a generation show so little intellectual curiosity is

the least defensible thing of all. But it could well be that the very thing that makes our

anti-intellectualism so obscene renders it also extremely temporary. Thing in question:

our generation is lucky enough to have been born into an artistic climate as stormy

and exciting as anything since Pound and Co. turned the world-before-last on its head.

The last few generations of American writers have breathed the relatively stable air

of New Criticism and an Anglo-American aesthetics untainted by Continental winds.

The climate for the “next” generation of American writers—should we decide to in-

hale rather than die—is aswirl with what seems like long-overdue appreciation for the

weird achievements of such aliens as Husserl, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Barthes,

Poulet, Gadamer, de Man. The demise of Structuralism has changed a world’s out-

look on language, art, and literary discourse; and the contemporary artist can simply

no longer afford to regard the work of critics or theorists or philosophers—no matter

how stratospheric—as divorced from his own concerns.

Crudely put, the idea that literary language is any kind of neutral medium for the

transfer of

from artist to audience, or that it’s any kind of inert tool lying there

passively to be well- or ill-used by a communicator of meaning, has been cast into rich

and serious question. With it, too, the stubborn Romanticist view of ﬁction as essen-

tially a mirror, distinguished from the real world it reﬂects only by its portability and

mercilessly “objective” clarity, has ﬁnally taken it on the chin. Form-content distinc-

tions are now ﬂat planets. Language’s promotion from mirror to eye, from organikos

to organic, is yesterday’s news (except in those two lonely outposts, TV and the Cre-

ative classroom) as the tide of Post-Structuralism, Marxism, Feminism, Freudianism,

Deconstruction, Semiotics, Hermeneutics, and attendant -isms and -ics moves through

the (“Straight”) U.S. academy and into the consciousness of the conscious American

adult.

The crux being that, if mimesis isn’t dead, then it’s on life-support courtesy of those

who soon enough will be.

And what a row C.Y. writers can see among its heirs! Only about eighty years after

visual-arts movements like Dada and Cubism supplanted “referential” art (no camera

inventions to threaten the sovereignty of literary mimesis, see), the literature of the

referent, of “psychological glow,” of illusion has ﬁnally come under constructive at-

tack from angles as disparate as they are dazzling. The refracted world of Proust and

Musil, Schulz and Stein, Borges and Faulkner has, post-War, exploded into diffraction,

a weird, protracted Manhattan Project staffed by Robbe-Grillet, Grass, Nabokov, Sor-

Take your pick of Tolstoy, Schopenhauer or Richards and insert “feeling.” “freedom from phenomena,”

or “relevant mental condition,” respectively, in the space provided.

rentino, Bohl, Barth, McCarthy, Garc

ıa M

arquez, Puig, Kundera, Gass, Fuentes, Elkin,

Donoso, Handke, Burroughs, Duras, Elkin, Coover, Gombrowicz, LeGuin, Lessing,

Acker, Gaddis, Coetzee, Ozick. To name just a few. We, the would-be heirs to a gor-

geous chaos, stand witness to the rise and fall of the nouveau roman, Postmodernism,

Metaﬁction, The New Lyricism, The New Realism, Minimalism, Ultraminimalism,

Performance-Theory. It’s a freaking maelstrom, and the C.Y. writer who still likes to

read a bit can’t help feeling torn: if the Program is maddening in its stasis, the real

world of serious ﬁction just won’t hold still.

If one can stomach a good dose of simpliﬁcation, though, there can be seen one deep

feature shared by all the cutting-edge ﬁction that resonates with the post-Hiroshima

revolution. That is its fall into time, a loss of innocence about the language that is

its breath and bread. Its unblinking recognition of the fact that the relations between

literary artist, literary language, and literary artifact are vastly more complex and pow-

erful than has been realized hitherto. And the insight that is courage’s reward—that it

is precisely in those tangled relations that a forward-looking, fertile literary value may

well reside.

This doesn’t mean that Metaﬁction and Minimalism, the two most starkly self-con-

scious of the movements that exploit human beings’ wary and excited new attention

to language, compose or even indicate the directions in which the serious ﬁction of

“whole new generations” will move. Both these forms strike me as simple engines of

self-reference (Metaﬁction overtly so, Minimalism a bit sneakier); they are primitive,

crude, and seem already to have reached the Clang-Bird-esque horizon of their own

possibility—self-reference being just a tiny wrinkled subset of aboutness. I’m pretty

convinced, though, that they’re an early symptom of a dark new enlightenment, that

quite soon no truly serious C.Y. writer will be able to pretend anymore that the use of

literary expression for the construction of make-believe is a straightforward enterprise.

We are the recipients of a knife unprecedentedly vulnerable to its own blade, and all

the Writing Program prizes and “Mary Tyler Moore Show” reruns in the world can’t

hide what’s in our hands forever.

Exciting is also confusing, and I’d be distrustful of any C.Y. snot who claimed to know

where literary ﬁction will go during this generation’s working lifetime. It’s obviously

true that the revolution I’ve just gushed about has yielded changes in outlook that are as

yet primarily destructive: illusions exposed, assumptions overturned, dearly held prej-

udices debunked. We seem, now, to see our literary innocence taken from us without

anything substantial to replace it. An age between. There’s a marvelously apposite

Heidegger quotation here, but I’ll spare you.

The bold conclusion here, then, is that the concatenated New Generation with whom

the critics are currently playing coy mistress is united by confusion, if nothing else.

And this might be why so much of the worst C.Y. ﬁction ﬁts so neatly into the Three

Camps reviewers consign it to: Workshop Hermeticism because in confusing times

caution seems prudent; Catatonia because in confusing times the bare minimal seems

easy; Yuppie Nihilism because the mass culture the Yuppie inhabits and instantiates is

itself at best empty and at worst evil—and in confusing times the revelation of some-

thing even this obvious is, up to a point, valuable.

Well, but it’s fair to ask how valuable. Of course it’s true that an unprecedented num-

ber of young Americans have big disposable incomes, ﬁne tastes, nice things, compe-

tent accountants, accessto exotic intoxicants, attractive sex partners, and are still deeply

unhappy. All right. Some good ﬁction has held up a mercilessly powder-smeared

mirror to the obvious. What troubles me about the fact that the Gold-Card-fear-and-

trembling ﬁction just keeps coming is that, if the upheavals in popular, academic and

intellectual life have left people with any long-cherished conviction intact, it seems as if

it should be an abiding faith that the conscientious, talented, and lucky artist of any age

retains the power to effect change. And if Marx (sorry—last dropped name) derided

the intellectuals of his day for merely interpreting the world when the real imperative

was to change it, the derision seems even more apt today when we notice that many

of our best- known C.Y. writers seem content merely to have reduced interpretation to

whining. And what’s frustrating for me about the whiners is that precisely the state of

general affairs that explains a nihilistic artistic outlook makes it imperative that art not

be nihilistic. I can think of no better argument for giving Mimesis-For-Mimesis’-Sake

the chair than the fact that, for a young ﬁction writer, inclined by disposition and voca-

tion to pay some extra attention to the way life gets lived around him, 1987’s America

is not a nice place to be. The last cohesive literary generation came to consciousness

during the comparatively black-and-white era of Vietnam. We, though, are Watergate’s

children, television’s audience, Reagan’s draft-pool, and everyone’s market. We’ve

reached our majority in a truly bizarre period in which “Wrong is right,” “Greed is

good,” and “It’s better to look good than to feel good”—and when the poor old issue

of trying to be good no longer even merits a straight face. It seems like one big echo of

Mayer the ﬁfties’ ad-man: “In a world where private gratiﬁcation seems the supreme

value, all cats are grey.”

Except art, is the thing. Serious, real, conscientious, aware, ambitious art is not a

grey thing. It has never been a grey thing and it is not a grey thing now. This is why

ﬁction in a grey time may not be grey. And why the titles of all but one or two of

the best works of Neiman-Marcus Nihilism are going to induce aphasia quite soon in

literate persons who read narrative art for what makes it real.

And, besides an unfair acquaintance with many young writers who are not yet Con-

spicuous and so not known to you, this is why I’d be willing to bet anything at least a

couple and maybe a bunch of the Whole New Generation are going to make art, maybe

make great art, maybe even make great art change. One thing about the Young you can

trust in 1987: if we’re willing to devote our lives to something, you can rest assured

we get off on it. And nothing has changed about why writers who don’t do it for the

money write: it’s art, and art is meaning, and meaning is power: power to color cats,

to order chaos, to transform void into ﬂoor and debt into treasure. The best “Voices

of a Generation” surely know this already; more, they let it inform them. It’s quite

possible that none of the best are yet among the Conspicuous. A couple might even

be . . . autodidacts. But, especially now, none of them need worry. If fashion, ﬂux and

academy make for thin milk, at least that means the good stuff can’t help but rise. I’d

get ready.