The Oracular Outsiders and the Homework Doers
For a few years after college, I had a friend I'll call Paul. Paul had a beard, long hair, and always wore a beatific expression. Paul was the center of a loose network of hipsters and Bohemians who would gather for 60's-style "Be-Ins," or as he called them, "Beehives." At parties, he would often find a corner and play John Lennon songs. Paul was very creative, writing poems, screenplays, and stories, and his work was rich and visionary, reminiscent of Alejandro Jodorowsky. I liked Paul a lot, and we hung out frequently.
Paul also suffered from mental illness. A few years before I met him, he had suffered a psychotic episode that left him hospitalized. His mental illness made it difficult for him to get a job or live on his own, and so he lived with his parents. Paul had lived a lot of life even though we were only in our early 20's. His perspective was both humane and spiritual, enriched by his struggles and supported by real artistic gifts. Eventually, I moved away to earn an MFA, and we fell out of touch. It has been almost a decade now, and as far as I can tell, Paul has released a few low-fi albums, but his writing has never seen the light of day.
This essay is about Paul, and the Pauls of the world. Recently, the short story "Hatchling" by Rucy Cui went viral, with a screenshot of the first few paragraphs spinning up a blizzard of online opinions. They read:
My white boyfriend and I are newly returned from holiday travels, tanned and aching at the joint-seams, stuck with over ten dollars in foreign currency. I was due to start my period last week. He locks the front door. In our entryway, suitcases are strewn all around.
It was a difficult trip, one in which shopkeepers ignored me and he happened to speak up for me. This evolutionary adaptation came easily to both of us, yet troubled only me. We argued about whether it was safe to drink the tap water or if there were pickpockets on public transportation. We fucked on every flat surface available to us, including the vertical ones—bathed in equatorial sweat and pheromones, slick as babies. It was our anniversary. Still I worried I was earmarking myself for extinction. Our final evening, we broke a wicker lawn chair and threw it in the hotel pool. Despite his indifference, I never stopped brushing my teeth with bottled water.
The reaction was extremely polarizing. People hated much of her phraseology ("joint-seams," "we fucked on every flat surface," "slick as babies"). Others immediately identified the genre cliches of Asian-American diaspora literature. With the story's first three words being "My white boyfriend," it seemed like a parody of the form. What very few people did was read the story in the screenshot. If you did, you would find that it was conceptually interesting, but still woven throughout with genre cliches endemic to the form. The narrator, a young Asian-American woman, lays an egg, which (spoiler alert) her White Boyfriend carelessly makes into an omelet at the story's end. In between, the story checks off several shibboleths of the genera: how much stress her immigrant parents put her through, how white people can't tell Chinese people apart, the cultural insensitivity of her boyfriend's parents.
As I mentioned, many people who encountered the story (or at least the story's first two paragraphs) had a visceral reaction to the prose. As I said, I didn't hate the prose, but anybody with exposure to it would recognize it for what it is: the house style of MFA fiction programs. The detached narration, arrhythmic variation in sentence length, and penchant for linguistic innovation ("aching at the joint seams," as opposed to, say, "aching in our joints") are all a dead giveaway. They are the result of stylistic preferences propagated in MFA-level writers workshops all across the country. MFA stories are also often character-driven, avoiding cinematic plots in favor of a narrow focus on the character's interior life. They are often accused of being plotless, where "nothing ever happens." These criticisms have been commonplace for at least 20 years now, but since nobody reads literary fiction, whenever an MFA story breaks containment people are confused and enraged anew.
What seemed to really set people off about "Hatchling," however, was the fact the Rucy Cui is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a two-year, $75,000 per year fellowship given to five poets and five fiction writers a year. The fellowship seems similar to a postdoc, in that it is meant for people after they have earned their MFA. Unlike many people, I don't think that she doesn't deserve that fellowship. In fact, this is exactly the type of fiction you would expect to be produced by a writer at this level. This isn't bad writing at all. In fact, it's extremely competent writing. And that is the crux of the issue—an issue that haunts the entirety of American fiction.
MFA programs are populated by very competent people. 2/3rds of the people in my program were privately-educated women, with undergraduate degrees from Princeton, Stanford, Amherst, Northwestern, Bennington, and so on. But the downsides of the MFA-ification of American fiction is that publication now selects for these people who can go to a good college, then to a prestigious MFA program, then a fellowship program like Stenger. All of this is an exercise in making your artistic work legible to institutions. You must be able to package up your creative work and sell it to the powers that be. Getting in to an MFA program, for instance, requires three letters of recommendation, usually two pieces of fiction, a personal statement, and a review of your academic transcript. Every step thereafter requires picking up a healthy number of fellowships, writers conference scholarships, and residencies, all of which require further paperwork to attend. To play the game requires building spreadsheets with hundreds of opportunities to keep track of deadlines, entry fees, letters of recommendation, and which stories get sent where. (EDIT: for more on the "programmization" of American writing, the ur-text here is The Program Era by Mark McGurl)
This entire process selects for homework-doers, personal entrepreneurs, and individualistic bureaucrats. It's why, like I said, the oracular outsiders, the Pauls of the world, who can't conform to society's expectations to check boxes and become legible to the powers that be, aren't in these programs and aren't getting the opportunities that are downstream of them. It's why you end up with tons of fiction about "my white boyfriend" and "everyone online is mad at me" or "anxious strivers in NYC" or "my annoying polycule." These are the obstacles this class encounters. You can't spend time, like Cormac McCarthy did, living in an unheated cabin in the Smokies, or embedding with the Mujahideen like William T. Vollman, or working as a psychotherapist like Olga Tokarczuk. You must move from strength to strength, always turning in your homework on time, and certainly never suffering a psychotic break.
All of this is downwind of the growth of university MFA programs, beginning with the Iowa Writers Workshop founded in 1936. These programs grew, and universities hired writers to staff them, often writers trained at other MFA programs. In this context, what is "Hatchling," and what is The Georgia Review? Universities, with their writers newly on staff, needed a way to track progress that was institutionally legible. Scholars and scientists had peer-reviewed journals, like Nature and The Journal of Asian Studies and Journal of Political Economy, which were the means by which they demonstrated their work. But fiction writers couldn't be expected to write a bestseller every year. Enter the university literary journal. Staffed by MFA students, poets and fiction writers had a way of "publishing" that was precisely equivalent to a scientist publishing a peer-reviewed study in Nature. Short stories like "Hatchling" and journals like The Georgia Review are academic publications. Success, tenure, prestige, fellowships, and so forth is judged by your ability to get published in these venues. They are, like everything else, another box to check.
As a self-identified "homework-doer" with an MFA, I can identify how to play the game as well as anybody, but I can also recognize that, when fiction becomes the exclusive domain of people who are very good at completing schoolwork, something vital is lost. Lots of fiction is written these days, and not very much is read. Maybe it's because that fiction is being written for the people already bought in. Art that is made for the purpose of institutional legibility and approval is dead on arrival. Writing must stand on the outside, viewing the world at a tilt. Our world is being eaten by word machines that can imitate us perfectly. Unless American letters find the courage to welcome back in the oracular, it will disappear, replaced by machine that can conform to the demands of institutional legibility—really, the demands of capital—better than any human ever could.
