Am I really trolling HuffPuff again for a session of counterpunching? I am. Ming Holden ruminates on teaching writing workshops that The goals of the creative writing classroom as (a) a space wherein political, incendiary, sexual, and/or disturbing pieces of work are welcomed and workshopped as pieces of literature (as those characteristics are often traits of great literature); and (b) a space wherein students of a more conservative nature and background feel safe sharing, writing, reading, and critiquing, might be incompatible goals right now in America.
Holden, like many people who don't pay very much attention to the world around them, locates the difficulty with reconciling a) and b) in the left-right "culture war." There is certainly a left-right culture war, though both sides are on the right. In my experience in the classroom however, the gap between a) and b) boils down to the simple ability to read on a sophisticated level, which conservatives and liberals tend to share in equal amounts.
That is, my workshops I've been in and in workshops I've taught, the "conservative" objections against "incendiary, sexual, and/or disturbing pieces of work" come not most often from political conservatives, but from people who just can't read well enough to tell the difference between portrayal and advocacy, and in the case actual (or close seeming) espousing-of-the-disturbing lack the sophistication to approach a text as text. Basically, the struggle in the classroom is the cosmopolitans versus the conventionals. There are right-wing cosmopolitans—Celine and Gene Wolfe aren't exceptions to some broad and otherwise universal rule, and there are many left-wing conventionals. Plenty of people who identify themselves as some species of "left" involve themselves in linguistic activism—my own first workshop experience in my MFA program involved a good Hillary Clinton-supporting liberal denouncing a story I workshopped and soon after published, even going so far as to suggest that no woman should read the story. (The several women in the class didn't object to this man declaring my story off-limits to them, interestingly enough.)
Many on the left worry about being "offensive" and indeed worry even more when other people are being "offensive." Many on the right—conservatism being a sort of machismo these days—are pleased to offend, of course. This doesn't make them any good as readers or writers. I'm always amused when I run into a young conservative fellow who signed up for a class or writing program after reading a left-wing and homoerotic book like Fight Club. It touched them somehow, but not in any way they could understand, so they just take the stuff Groundlings always take away from some piece of art: spectacle and antinomianism. Antinomianism is part of why so many middle-class white dudes see themselves as victims; they can't be tough rebels if they acknowledged that they're actually already Empire.
There are plenty of instances when aesthetic and political conservatism dovetail. One friend of mine told me about a workshop she was in that was plagued by "A man named..." stories. Do you know it? It's about a woman with many troubles: a man who has done her wrong, poverty, perhaps disease, oppression, and personal problems as well with drink or anger. And then she meets a man who loves her for what she is, and that man helps her make it all better. And that man was a man named...Jesus. I guess that throughout the semester several people handed in more or less the same story, with the major innovations being just how awful the woman's predicament (AIDS being an aesthetic WMD) was at first before Jesus saved her. Then, in the horror field we have the "child molestor" story—a young girl with curly and brilliant blonde hair is accosted by a smelly gross stranger with molestation on the mind, and then she uses some supernatural means to consume him utterly. The moral here for readers in need of such instruction is: don't rape children. I hope you've all been persuaded.
But the left's brand of conventionalism is hardly any different. Whenever the big book of the day—Left Behind, Twilight, etc.—has a right-wing theme plenty of leftists go into a tizzy over it, sure that it is brainwashing the people reading it into conservatism. They're immune to such things, of course, of course, and can read anything without fear of influence as all their ideas are already fixed. (Would Jon Stewart lie to you?) This same ethos shows up in conventional left-wing writing—one can't discuss the Bad Things because someone out there might be persuaded by it. When I edited West Bloc Dissident, a memoir, its author was pleased that I didn't try to make him excise the discussion of his hiring of prostitutes as other left-wing presses that had considered the book wanted him to do. It was a perfectly interesting part of the story and the author's personality, but was just somehow considered bad to have in the text.
Right-wing conventionals see moral instruction as paramount in a story, and left-wing conventionals see immoral instruction as paramount to avoid in a story. Both positions can only come from the heads of poor readers. It is useful to point out "preachiness" on the one hand and potential offense on the other, especially when the author may not even realize that they are either preaching or offending, but conventionalists rarely stop at the text. Every story in a workshop is some sort of ethical litmus test, and even when there is no outrageous content there is often outrageous aesthetics. Is first-person fascist because it TELLS the reader WHAT TO THINK?? Certainly not, but I've heard this declared from liberal nitwits. Is anything other than third-person objective point of view in past tense told with "plain language" somehow sign of a homosexual/Communist plot? Anyone who has ever read one of the rambling semiliterate editorials in Tangent knows the answer to that! And let's not forget the tyranny of "story" which conventionals always chirp abut. The morons even go on about Shakespeare as some sort of populist cartwheeler, as if people still look at Romeo and Juliet for the plot, which is "spoiled" by the author himself anyway in the Prologue. ("From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life.")
Amazingly, this crisis in the workshop continues despite it being a very simple one to solve. Exclude dummies who can't friggin' read from the classes. If I wanted to take a music performance class in school, I'd have to audition. If I wanted to take advanced studio art classes, I'd need a portfolio. But really, any moron can wander in to most creative writing classes, and a fair number of MFA programs, thanks to both demand and competition, have thrown open their doors to anyone with the ability to write...a check. One might ask how it is possible to tell the cosmopolitan from the conventional, and the answer is that like knows like: if one's MFA program is full of nitwit conventionals, look to the instructors and you'll find King High Nitwits, generally of the P.Q. Obamavote hand-wringing variety. So first kill all the workshop instructors...
Holden, like many people who don't pay very much attention to the world around them, locates the difficulty with reconciling a) and b) in the left-right "culture war." There is certainly a left-right culture war, though both sides are on the right. In my experience in the classroom however, the gap between a) and b) boils down to the simple ability to read on a sophisticated level, which conservatives and liberals tend to share in equal amounts.
That is, my workshops I've been in and in workshops I've taught, the "conservative" objections against "incendiary, sexual, and/or disturbing pieces of work" come not most often from political conservatives, but from people who just can't read well enough to tell the difference between portrayal and advocacy, and in the case actual (or close seeming) espousing-of-the-disturbing lack the sophistication to approach a text as text. Basically, the struggle in the classroom is the cosmopolitans versus the conventionals. There are right-wing cosmopolitans—Celine and Gene Wolfe aren't exceptions to some broad and otherwise universal rule, and there are many left-wing conventionals. Plenty of people who identify themselves as some species of "left" involve themselves in linguistic activism—my own first workshop experience in my MFA program involved a good Hillary Clinton-supporting liberal denouncing a story I workshopped and soon after published, even going so far as to suggest that no woman should read the story. (The several women in the class didn't object to this man declaring my story off-limits to them, interestingly enough.)
Many on the left worry about being "offensive" and indeed worry even more when other people are being "offensive." Many on the right—conservatism being a sort of machismo these days—are pleased to offend, of course. This doesn't make them any good as readers or writers. I'm always amused when I run into a young conservative fellow who signed up for a class or writing program after reading a left-wing and homoerotic book like Fight Club. It touched them somehow, but not in any way they could understand, so they just take the stuff Groundlings always take away from some piece of art: spectacle and antinomianism. Antinomianism is part of why so many middle-class white dudes see themselves as victims; they can't be tough rebels if they acknowledged that they're actually already Empire.
There are plenty of instances when aesthetic and political conservatism dovetail. One friend of mine told me about a workshop she was in that was plagued by "A man named..." stories. Do you know it? It's about a woman with many troubles: a man who has done her wrong, poverty, perhaps disease, oppression, and personal problems as well with drink or anger. And then she meets a man who loves her for what she is, and that man helps her make it all better. And that man was a man named...Jesus. I guess that throughout the semester several people handed in more or less the same story, with the major innovations being just how awful the woman's predicament (AIDS being an aesthetic WMD) was at first before Jesus saved her. Then, in the horror field we have the "child molestor" story—a young girl with curly and brilliant blonde hair is accosted by a smelly gross stranger with molestation on the mind, and then she uses some supernatural means to consume him utterly. The moral here for readers in need of such instruction is: don't rape children. I hope you've all been persuaded.
But the left's brand of conventionalism is hardly any different. Whenever the big book of the day—Left Behind, Twilight, etc.—has a right-wing theme plenty of leftists go into a tizzy over it, sure that it is brainwashing the people reading it into conservatism. They're immune to such things, of course, of course, and can read anything without fear of influence as all their ideas are already fixed. (Would Jon Stewart lie to you?) This same ethos shows up in conventional left-wing writing—one can't discuss the Bad Things because someone out there might be persuaded by it. When I edited West Bloc Dissident, a memoir, its author was pleased that I didn't try to make him excise the discussion of his hiring of prostitutes as other left-wing presses that had considered the book wanted him to do. It was a perfectly interesting part of the story and the author's personality, but was just somehow considered bad to have in the text.
Right-wing conventionals see moral instruction as paramount in a story, and left-wing conventionals see immoral instruction as paramount to avoid in a story. Both positions can only come from the heads of poor readers. It is useful to point out "preachiness" on the one hand and potential offense on the other, especially when the author may not even realize that they are either preaching or offending, but conventionalists rarely stop at the text. Every story in a workshop is some sort of ethical litmus test, and even when there is no outrageous content there is often outrageous aesthetics. Is first-person fascist because it TELLS the reader WHAT TO THINK?? Certainly not, but I've heard this declared from liberal nitwits. Is anything other than third-person objective point of view in past tense told with "plain language" somehow sign of a homosexual/Communist plot? Anyone who has ever read one of the rambling semiliterate editorials in Tangent knows the answer to that! And let's not forget the tyranny of "story" which conventionals always chirp abut. The morons even go on about Shakespeare as some sort of populist cartwheeler, as if people still look at Romeo and Juliet for the plot, which is "spoiled" by the author himself anyway in the Prologue. ("From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life.")
Amazingly, this crisis in the workshop continues despite it being a very simple one to solve. Exclude dummies who can't friggin' read from the classes. If I wanted to take a music performance class in school, I'd have to audition. If I wanted to take advanced studio art classes, I'd need a portfolio. But really, any moron can wander in to most creative writing classes, and a fair number of MFA programs, thanks to both demand and competition, have thrown open their doors to anyone with the ability to write...a check. One might ask how it is possible to tell the cosmopolitan from the conventional, and the answer is that like knows like: if one's MFA program is full of nitwit conventionals, look to the instructors and you'll find King High Nitwits, generally of the P.Q. Obamavote hand-wringing variety. So first kill all the workshop instructors...