This book emerges from George Saunders’ experience leading a class in Syracuse University on writing the short story form. The texts which have shaped his understanding, as laid out here, are all Russian. Seven stories from Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev appear in the edition, followed by a chapter in which Saunders lays out the lessons it offers.
I have never undertaken an MFA programme but I have attended a couple of creative writing classes both in and outside of a university context. The bulk of the information I have sourced on how they function come from articles or books, parts of the syllabi which appear online, reading novels written by, or conversing with people who have completed, been employed on them. One such is Anne Enright who spoke in an interview on the question of whether or not writing can be taught. As a graduate of the prestigious University of East Anglia creative writing programme herself, Enright’s chosen analogy was athletic; when making a throw one can be told how to tuck one’s elbow in. Enright also spoke about her hubris as a young writer, studying under Malcolm Bradbury while at the same time being certain that he had nothing useful to impart to her, a genre of student she has since encountered a number of times since taking her post up. Relationships friends of mine have had with their creative writing lecturers have tended towards the adversarial as their responsibility is often to turn young writers away from their favoured vice — over-writing — which appears to the young writer as a figure of authority trying to domesticate or homogenise those aspects of their style which seem most principled and vital. I have known them to concede, years later, that their lecturers had a point.
I would truly love to construct a dataset of prose produced by a set of authors before and after completing an MFA programme — as well as a control set of texts produced by writers whose applications for entry were rejected — and produce a comprehensive analysis of what MFAs do to writing, but lacking this infrastructure I will outline what I saw happen to a friend’s story, a first draft of which I read eight years ago, and a second when he was two months into an MFA. The story was about a man and his wife or partner in their suburban house. A corpse turns up in the garden and the man dies. I do not intend for this two-sentence summary to create the impression that the characters, setting or plot were underdeveloped, but even if they were this would be beside the point. Four phrases or descriptions have remained in my mind in the years since I read it. It was a perfect object, a mind-to-mind system for the delivery of these four images. Its status as such was typographically and syntactically emphasised; one or two of them had been set apart from the text’s body and appeared in the form of a list.
A year later I read another version that had been through the workshop. The corpse had been accounted for. It became the source of a petty resentment between the man, his wife and the next-door neighbours. There was information pertaining to who knew what about it and the staggered delivery of same was used to up the ante. The images were re-integrated into paragraphs. They remained suggestive but had become functional. The story was no longer a static — and I use this term non-pejoratively — object, it had assumed the shape of the short story as conceived by Saunders, a temporal unfolding, engaging the reader by pulling them forward, sentence by sentence, with non-trivial detail. It had also, as a consequence, been integrated into a ‘chloroformed world’ populated by ‘clockwork cabbages’, to draw on Beckett’s description of Balzac’s novels. According to any honest inventory of the field of play here, rightly so. The number of people who pay thousands of euro with a view to publishing a manuscript with Dalkey Archive must be wholly insignificant in comparison to those looking for guidance on producing a commercially viable work of literary fiction.
Saunders, and I presume anyone useful who teaches creative writing, are not dictating what literature has to be. Each ‘what have we learned here?’ section is followed by Afterthoughts which partially roll back his recommendations in emphasising the importance of informed intuition. I think this is really crucial. Though anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time reading fiction and has put the hours in at the desk can write a banger paragraph, this cannot be taught. However one can be graded on their ability to sculpt a credible representation of a human being being punished for aspiring to be fully human, experiences a mental event in which they grasp their smallness relative to the universe, or realises how a flaw in their character has led them to commit enormous and harmful errors in their personal or professional lives.
If arguing that naturalism is the dominant generic strain to emerge from the Programme Era would be too generalising we can at least say that it is fundamental to Saunders’. Joe Cleary’s means of differentiating naturalism from realism rests on the position of the reader relative to the writer and the narrator. In naturalistic fiction the reader and the narrator share a sense of superiority over their object of study.
The social predicates which would lead to the emergence of a genre which attempts to conceive of human agency, when everything around you seems to confirm your meaningless, powerlessness and, in the words of Richard Seymour, whether you even are alive are not far for to seek, least of all in Russia, where a disaffected petty-bourgeois intelligentsia found itself caught between absolutism and a rural idiocy bolstered by the orthodox church. We can accommodate British, French and USian naturalism to this model with the addition of a more generalised experience of a squalid and debased urban lifeworld, its dangers and indignities correlating with a growing and brutish working class population.
Naturalism’s high point was towards the end of the nineteenth century. After World War I’s appearance in the chronology and onwards, authors and critics look to a less representative set of writers, who sacralised naturalist detail by locating it relative to symbolic frameworks and / or incarnating it within a high stylistic logic. This was the last historically consequential European literary project before its subordination to the culture industry and American imperial hegemony. Naturalism is therefore the last time literature is intelligible, in the sense that one can qualitatively apprehend a set of guidelines which we can be confident in our ability to convey, in a way that we would not about, for example, Finnegans Wake or a story written by Donald Barthelme.
I got the idea for the short story I am currently writing after reading a hostile review an Irish historian wrote of a collection of research papers. Some of them were written by his peers, others older and more established than him, still more were graduate students. I have a decent hold on the successive interpretative and methodological waves in Irish historiography following the post-revolutionary period, how the war in the north raised the fortunes of a school which emphasised the illegitimacy and sectarianism of the Irish revolutionary tradition, how the Decade of Centenaries has given a larger public profile to feminist critiques of the Saorstát dispensation and the ways in which Sinn Féin’s electoral ascendency in both of the island’s statelets has rendered a post-political perspective focusing on ‘shared history’ or Irish complicity in Empire seem more embattled than in previous years.
From Saunders’ point of view, a set of petty and interpersonal feuds, character sketches of the eclectic set of people one gets in academia, imbued with that specific oddness that derives from being extreme in one’s interest in a particular subject, give us some of the raw materials, but we are still looking for an engine. One way Saunders proposes of getting yourself out of a rut of this type is to write the sentence ‘and then something happened which changed everyone forever’ then figure out what justifies it. What would this be here? The occasion of the review ruining a scholar’s career? The protagonist reflecting on the promise of the empty page feeling at the end that he has betrayed himself and his chosen field? How would one use Saunders’ book to write a story about thought?
This is an important question. One of the most notable features of these programmes is that their defining critical mode is appreciative. It strikes against every theoretical development in literature departments over the past century, which have been, for better and for worse, characterised by a subsumption to vibes-based sociology. An attention to plot, craft, character and language should not be left to those who are seeking to understand literature in order to write it.
Pulling on the strengths both of historical grounding and informed intuition (to leave the issue of the destruction of humanities departments in general to one side) seems particularly urgent since Saunders manifests the aesthete’s lack of interest in social life. He refers to one character’s critique of feudalism as ‘emotional Bolshevism’, uses the word ‘bourgeoisie’ in places where he should be using the word ‘bourgeois’ and cites Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the effect that Stalin lowered people into vats of acid.
So, worth reading, but should have included excerpts from Lenin’s book on the development of Russian capitalism.
Chris Beausang 