Eric Bennett’s recent book, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (Iowa 2015) deals with the founding and funding of creative writing programs in Cold War America. What happened turns out to be a microcosm of what happened in many other fields. American writing had previously bathed in a wide-open, let’s-give-it-a-try atmosphere in which success was largely based on personal contacts (think Thomas Wolfe—Maxwell Perkins). Creative writing programs signaled the replacement of this shambolic non-system with a well-managed meritocracy in which serious achievers could be identified and certified by higher authorities by the time they were 25 years old. The oldest and most prestigious of these credentials were (and are) bestowed by the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
As in other fields, the certification process required government and private institutions to work together, because writing programs needed to get funding from a variety of government agencies and private foundations. And as in other fields, the funding came with a political price. The result was a Cold War aesthetic that included basic principles of both form and content.
Consider the formal maxim, “Show Don’t Tell.” Bennett argues that this was a core principle of good fiction writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and passed over from that prestigious height into American fiction generally. Notice that it trades, consciously or not, on the distinction between showing and telling made in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “creative writing” can almost be defined as writing that shows rather than tells. All the important things for Wittgenstein have to be shown, rather than told, but showing for (the early) Wittgenstein is paradigmatically accomplished by true propositions. “Creative showing,” as we may call it, differs from Wittgenstein’s concept in that it dispenses with the truth-requirement; it shows for the sake of showing, and is the purest form of writing possible.
Though Bennett’s book does not mention Wittgenstein, his views were in the air and suggest that “Show Don’t Tell” was not merely a pragmatic maxim but was deeply rooted in the philosophy of the time. But for all its philosophical abstraction, “Show Don’t Tell” has a politically dark side. First of all it is not, Bennett argues, a truism; it is not even a universally-applied maxim, for novelists and poets have often told their readers about things that cannot be shown. I would suggest that this includes, first, their own thoughts: where would Proust or Tolstoy be if they couldn’t use their authorial voices to reflect upon and evaluate their characters and their actions?
The second result is the suppression of reflection in characters, whose thoughts, in line with this particular aesthetic, have to be immediately inferable from their actions. Like all unreflective people, unreflective fictional characters simply float from incident to incident. Hence, I suggest, the subgenre of the “Creative Writing Novel” that we all know so well. When they are written by a man, its exemplars (unnecessary to mention any by name) portray how lack of reflection passes over into inarticulateness and then into violence. Such a novel is one incident of senseless violence after another, all in the service of Showing it Like It Is. When written by women, such novels show one incident of human caring after another, all in the service of Showing It Like It Should Be. Better, of course; but still Cold War.
Most American literature, and certainly the first-rate stuff, did not fall prey to this. But it had to fight against it. Mindless violence and unreflective caring constituted the default content of Cold War fiction. Why? Because reflection, the attempt to articulate what one has just done or just been, is a prerequisite of critical thinking. No reflection, no critique; problem solved. (Philosophy had an interesting application of this principle for those who, like me, confused reflection and self-reference: Russell’s paradox made both impossible. But self-reference is an atemporal notion and thus impossible long before you get to its logic.)
As to content, male Artists became hypermasculinized: their works stood for the “natural man—” the exaggeratedly roisterous, but free, individual battling some sort of Machine. Again, this naturalness applied both to artists themselves and to their characters (think Pollack throwing paint on a canvas, Kerouac spitting out a novel onto an improvised roll of tracing paper). Artists thus became, to their good fortune, the very kind of person whom Communism sought to repress. This image found its way into fictional characters, resulting in a type-character—call it “Randle P. McMurphy,” after its unsurpassable depiction by Ken Kesey— a cultural counterpoint to the cold, calculating rational chooser propounded by philosophers (see Scare, chapters 3 and 4).
American literature in the Cold War thus became would-be McMurphys writing about fictional McMurphys. But there is a fundamental dishonesty in this conmprehensive rejection of reflection, because it takes a lot of reflection to produce a work of art. Even the most unreflective painter or poet is continually monitoring their work, making (often highly constrained) choices as they go along. So while the literary character McMurphy retains even today his freshness and vigor, the artist McMurphy turns out to be a sham.