Jonathan Franzen, Elif Batuman, and the MFA Debate

The internet lit blog topic du jour is Jonathan Franzen’s op-ed in the New York Times, which distills his Kenyon College commencement address. Franzen sets up a clean division between the rewards of technology (the narcotizing ease of its satisfactions, one might say) and the hard-earned rewards of real relationships (they are difficult, but more meaningful!), and urges us to make the harder but more rewarding choice. (Choose life!)

I enjoyed reading this essay, and I agreed with Franzen’s sentiments, but in the end I wished it presented more of a challenge to conventional assumptions about the internet. Kristen Iskandrian, for example, makes a nice case that things are not as simple as Franzen writes.

Which brings me to what I like so much about Elif Batuman’s work. It is consistently, delightfully surprising.

A few weekends ago I spent a Sunday writing a response to Mark McGurl’s delayed response to Batuman’s LRB review of McGurl’s book. Yes, my life is sometimes that fascinating. I wrote a lot of words, but it all boiled down to this: McGurl didn’t address Batuman’s basic point. She argued that creative writing programs don’t educate students in the history of literature, which leaves them ill-equipped to do what novelists should do (in Batuman’s argument), which is to re-invent the novel by writing against the received literary tradition to express what it means to be a human being. This is my quick summary of her argument.

McGurl’s answer, in a nutshell, is that creative writing programs are good social policy (Who could criticize programs that promote reflection and literary study?) and anyway the flood of contemporary literature that Batuman decries is really pretty good. My little essay argued that McGurl missed Batuman’s larger point. It wasn’t worth sending anywhere (another 100 kilobytes gone on the hard drive!), but I figured that someone, somewhere, should maybe point out that, for all of his fury (McGurl called Batuman the Anne Coulter of literary criticism — c’mon, man!), McGurl’s response left Batuman’s arguments untouched.

So I was confounded to discover, upon reading Batuman’s blog, that not only does she not intend to respond to McGurl, she hasn’t even read his response to her review.

I thought: What: She’s not even going to read McGurl’s response?

No, Batuman writes, she will not. Why not? Because, as she explains in a typically brilliant and hilarious blog post, and in a response to one of the comments it generated, literary arguments may be taken up or abandoned by anyone who wishes to advance them or let them lie. The conversation continues, or dies, depending on whether anyone is willing to take up the arguments given to them by their writerly colleagues and predecessors. If she doesn’t want to keep conversing with McGurl, that’s her right. The conversation itself will continue, or not, depending on whether others want to continue to have it, which in turn presumably depends on its merits, and who has time to bother with it, and whatever other things there are to do.

I love this because it so well captures the sense in which the literary world is not like the real world. It’s a kind of virtual party, where one can join or leave the conversation or change the subject at will, everything is written down, and as long as something stays in print its author never dies.

Elif Batuman is always doing this — taking an assumption you held (she owed McGurl a response), turning it upside down, and making you see it anew. Often the new insight she offers up is liberating.

It’s why we read, I think, to have that experience.