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\title{Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young}
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\centerline{\Large \it Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young}

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\centerline{\large David Foster Wallace}

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\footnotesize
\noindent \textit{Note}:  I first discovered this essay through its
mention in Steven Moore's essay \emph{The First Draft Version of
\emph{Infinite Jest}},
in which he wrote:
\begin{quote}
\footnotesize
[$\ldots$] 
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 \cite{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 professional
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
essay 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.)

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\end{quote}
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 \cite{Review of Contemporary Fiction}, but merely because
I don't think most people would have access to it any other way.

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{\hspace{6.5cm} --- \href{http://neugierig.org}{Evan Martin}, March 2004}
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\noindent \textsc{The metronome of} literary fashion looks to be set on
\textit{presto}.  Beginning with the high-profile appearances of David
Leavitt's \cite{Family Dancing}, Jay McInerney's \cite{Bright Lights,
Big City} and Bret Ellis's \cite{Less Than Zero}, the last three-odd
years saw a veritable explosion of good-willed critical and commercial
interest in literary fiction by Conspicuously Young\footnote{Hereafter
abbreviated ``C.Y.''} writers.  During this interval, certain honored
traditions of starvation 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 popularity 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 hailing the precocity of a New Generation now bemoan
the proliferation of a literary Brat Pack. The \cite{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 faces of Janowitz, McInerney, Ellis et al.\ pasted on photos of
diaper models.  Nineteen eighty-seven saw the staff and guests of the
\cite{New York Times Book Review} suddenly 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'':

\begin{quote}
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
mainstream of serious prose. $\ldots$  Well, young people are young people,
aren't they $\ldots$ Adolescents consume more of their psyches than soda,
and more local feelings than junk food.  Is no indulgence denied them?
$\ldots$ 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.
\end{quote}

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: condescending 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 \emph{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:

\begin{enum}
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\item 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;

\item 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;

\item 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.
\end{enum}

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 \cite{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 \cite{You Bright and Risen Angels}; the conscientious
exploration of \emph{motive} behind Yuppie dissolution in McInerney's
\cite{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. Unfamiliar 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 singular 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 $\ldots$ well, generation gap.  There are, of course, uncountable
differences between the formative experiences of consecutive
generations, and to exhaust and explain all the ones relevant 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 contemporary American phenomena, viz the impacts of television,
of academic Creative Writing 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.''

\vspace{\baselineskip}

\noindent 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
\emph{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
\emph{Arrival} saw critic Bruce Bawer lampoon many Brat-Packers' habit
of delineating characters according to the commercial slogans 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 foreign language---yet maybe more
sad that, for most of his reading contemporaries, this description
\emph{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, propelled 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 genuine ``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
refinement and genuine liberalism, advertising scholars like Martin
Mayer had already begun to deride by the fifties' end:

\begin{quote}
The great bulk of advertising is culturally repulsive to anyone with any
developed sensitivity. So are most movies and television shows, most
popular music, and a surprisingly high proportion of published
books. $\ldots$ 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 contact 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.
\end{quote}

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 themselves 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 \emph{attention}, we reserve
for that attention the status of a commodity, 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 \emph{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, objective, ``cinematic'' third-person
narrative eye. Above all, though, a comparative indifference 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 \emph{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
emotional remove of light years.  Where television does and must aim
always to \emph{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
neither 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 understandable. 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 impossible to inconceivable. That is,
since today's popular TV culture is by its nature \emph{mass},
\emph{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
contradiction: 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 \emph{individual persons}, 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 \emph{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
\emph{watched}. The behavior of the actors, and---in a complicated way,
through the drama they're inside---even the characters, is directed
always at an audience for whom they behave $\ldots$ 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 significant feature of persons is
\emph{watchableness}, and that contemporary human worth is not just
isomorphic with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching. Precious
distinctions between truly being and merely appearing get obfuscated.
Imagine a Berkleyan \textit{esse-est-percipi} universe in which God is
named Nielsen.

Then consider that well-known, large, ``ignorant'' segment of the
population that believes 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) character 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
\emph{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 narrative 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 identification (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
\emph{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 seductive, we will eventually
forget what they're denials \emph{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
entertained 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 \emph{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
narrative art that strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or
reorient---not necessarily even to ``entertain''---but merely and always to
\emph{engage}, to \emph{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 \emph{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 sinister phenomenon. For while television has
from its beginnings been openly motivated by---has been
\emph{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 important, 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 television 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 \emph{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 complaint 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 \emph{unreal},
\emph{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
\emph{is} real, full, meaningful.

Even the snottiest young \textit{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 responsibilities 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 transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with
admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement
that \emph{engages} the reader---titillates, repulses, excites,
transports him---without demanding of him any of the intellectual or
spiritual or \emph{artistic} responses that render verbal intercourse
between writer and reader an important or even \emph{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 people 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 military bands, less than a \emph{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.

\vspace{\baselineskip}

\noindent It's in terms of economics that academic Creative Writing
Programs\footnote{These words are capitalized because they understand
themselves as capitalized.  Trust me on this.} 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 before. The once-lone brow of the Iowa Workshop has birthed
first-rate creative departments 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 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 undergraduate
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 fiscal. 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 emergence 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 collections, even by relative unknowns,
are now halfway viable economically, and publishers have moved briskly
to accommodate trend.

More important for young writers themselves, programs can afford them
time, academic (and parental!) legitimacy, and an environment in which
to Hone Their Craft, Grow, Find Their Voice,\footnote{On these, too:
they are to Programs what azan are to mosques.} 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 Establishments' 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 their capacities, either suppress the resentment or
make sure they do the barely acceptable 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 \emph{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, \emph{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 unhappy 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 fiction 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
\emph{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
character, verisimilitude of setting, etc. Faults or virtues that cannot
quickly be identified or discussed between bells---little things like
interestingness, depth of vision, originality, political assumptions and
agendas, the question whether deviation from norm is in some cases
OK---must, for sound Program-pedagogical reasons, be ignored or
discouraged.  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
\emph{enforced} closure to further fictional possibilities 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 during 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,
educational 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.  \emph{Here} are
the rouged corpses for Dr. Gass's graveyard. Workshops \emph{like} corpses.
They \emph{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.\footnote{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.''}

I doubt whether any of this is revelatory, but I hope it's properly
scary.  Because Creative Writing Programs, while claiming in all good
faith to train professional writers, in reality train \emph{more
teachers of Creative Writing}. The only thing a Master of Fine Arts
degree actually qualifies one to do is teach $\ldots$ 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
\emph{careful}, \emph{accomplished} 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-\textit{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 occasion 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 unfunny 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 continues 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
\emph{You}'' at the start of each term seems to suggest that Homer and
Milton, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Maupassant and Gogol---to say nothing
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 Carver, Beattie and Phillips drive what's worth
chasing, Forget Allan Bloom gnashing his teeth at high-school students
who pretend to no aspirations past an affordable mortgage---we're
supposed to want to be \emph{writers}, here. We as a generation are in
danger 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.

\vspace{\baselineskip}

\noindent 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
inhale 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 outlook 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 \underline{\hspace{1cm}}\footnote{Take your pick of Tolstoy,
Schopenhauer or Richards and insert ``feeling.'' ``freedom from phenomena,''
or ``relevant mental condition,'' respectively, in the space provided.}
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 essentially 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 \textit{organikos} to organic, is yesterday's news (except in
those two lonely outposts, TV and the Creative 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
attack 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, Sorrentino, Bohl,
Barth, McCarthy, Garc\'\i a 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 gorgeous chaos, stand witness to the rise and fall
of the \textit{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 \emph{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 powerful than has been realized hitherto. And the
insight that is courage's reward---that it is \emph{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
% XXX we force a break here to fix an overfull hbox, which cascades
% to another below.
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.

\vspace{\baselineskip}

\noindent 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 prejudices 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 something 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 number of young Americans have big disposable incomes,
fine tastes, nice things, competent accountants, access to 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 \emph{explains} a nihilistic
artistic outlook makes it \emph{imperative} that art \emph{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 vocation 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 \emph{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.''

\emph{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 \emph{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 Conspicuous 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
 $\ldots$ \emph{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.

\end{document}