personally I could not distinguish his stories from many, many others I had read in many other workshops. Nor did the fact that they seemed so similar to so many others bother him at all, since—as he claimed—competition was not the point.
Once he used the term “classical” about what he wanted to achieve in his own stories. “But,” I said, “your model doesn’t seem to be the great classical stories of the past, but rather the averaged banality of the present.”
“Well,” he said, “perhaps that is today’s classical.”
I couldn’t take the argument much beyond that point. As a teacher, for me to say too much more would have been unnecessarily insulting—and I felt I had already come close to crossing a line I didn’t feel was good for purely pedagogical reasons. I decided to let him have the last word.
In the same class was a young woman of twenty-nine, from a working-class background. She was no slouch either as a practical critic, but she had nowhere near the self-confidence of the first student. Her GREs were eccentric: high in math, low in English. Her written grammar was occasionally faulty. Often she seemed at sea when critical discussions moved into the abstract. Several times, in several descriptions in her stories, however, she had struck me as talented—that is, she had made me see things and understand things that I had not seen or understood before. Interesting incidents were juxtaposed in interesting ways in her stories. Her characters often showed unusual and idiosyncratic combinations of traits. Words were put together in interesting ways in her sentences. But it was also clear that her stories were pretty much an attempt to write the same sort as most of the other students in the class, which tended to be modeled on those of the first young man—in her case with the sexes more or less reversed. When I asked her what she wanted to do with her writing, she said she’d like to go on and “be a writer” and “publish books,” but she offered it with all the hesitation of someone confessing to a history of prostitution.
At one point, after we had just read the story for class, I mentioned that Joyce had written “The Dead” in 1907, when he was twenty-five, though it was not published till 1914. I told them I would like to see their stories aspire to a similar level of structural richness and a similar richness of description of the various interiors, exteriors, and characters.
Immediately the young man objected: “You can’t tell us that! That just paralyzes us and makes us incapable of writing anything.”
But three weeks later, the young woman handed in a story she had gone home and begun that same night. It was far more ambitious than anything she’d done previously: incidents in the story had thematic and structural resonances with one another, and the physical description of the places and characters was twenty-five to thirty-five percent richer than anything she’d previously handed in. When I mentioned this to her after the workshop, she said, “I guess I went back to my math—that’s what my degree is in. I made a little geometric picture of how I wanted the parts of the story to relate to each other. Has anybody ever done that before?” I said I often did it myself, but that it seemed too idiosyncratic to talk about in a general workshop. (Her comment is one of the things, however, that convinced me to write about it in the essay “Of Doubts and Dreams.”) As well, it was the first piece I’d seen from her that was not basically a disappointed romance about a graduate student with no mention of how she supported herself. (The woman was happily married to a very successful and supportive engineer.) Instead, she had taken another hint from Joyce and mined her own childhood material for her tale, in her case the Pittsburgh foundry where her Hungarian father had worked and the men and women who’d worked with him (I’d never known women worked at foundries before), whom she used to know when she was a child. She’d based her main character on a young woman, a few years older than herself, who’d had a job there, something that seemed to my student exciting and romantic. When she’d been twelve she’d desperately envied this young working woman of seventeen. A few years later, however, when she herself had reached twenty, she now realized this wonderfully alive young woman was actually trapped in a dead-end job by family and social forces, which led nowhere. Speaking to me privately after class, she said, “When you pointed out how old Joyce was when he’d done it, I realized there was no reason I couldn’t do it, too.” Though the fact was, her story shared nothing with Joyce’s save the jump in descriptive and structural richness.
I have said most of the news about writing is bad. But much of the news—such as the age writers were when they wrote this or that work—is neutral. However neurotic its basis, Begeisterung or its lack is what turns these neutral facts into good news (Hey, I can do that!) or bad news (Nobody can do that!). Perhaps you can see from these last examples why the usual translation of Begeisterung—“inspiration,” without the added energy of enthusiasm—doesn’t quite cover the topic.
The idea that everyone can have a turn at publication is unrealistic—nor, outside a carefully delineated student context, do I think it’s desirable. When our current-day democratizing urge works to render the competition fairer, I’m for it. But that is not the same thing as art without competition. Today many young writers see self-publication as a way to sidestep what they also see as the first round of unfair competition. Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane (1871–1900), and Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) all self-published notable works—just as Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) self-published some commercially successful ones (the Tarzan series, for example). But that is only to say that, for them, the competition began after publication, not before.
The other important fact—important enough that I would call it the second pole of my personal aesthetic, as Begeisterung is the first—is that literary competition is not a zero-sum game with a single winner, or even a ranked list of winners—that all-too-naive image of the canon in which, say, Shakespeare has first place and the gold cup, followed by Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) with the silver, in second place, Milton (1608–74) with the bronze, in third, with Spenser (c. 1552–99) and Joyce competing for who gets fourth and who gets fifth … The concept of literary quality is an outgrowth of a conflictual process, not a consensual one. In the enlarged democratic field, the nature of the conflict simply becomes more complex. Even among the most serious pursuers of the aesthetic, there is more than one goal; there is more than one winner. Multiple qualities and multiple achievements are valued—and have been valued throughout the history of the conflicting practices of writing making up the larger field called the literary. That multiplicity of achievement can value Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), and Samuel Beckett (1906–77), G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), and Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996), George Orwell (1903–50), and Joanna Russ (b. 1939), Nathanael West (1903–40), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), and Nella Larsen (1891–1964), Edmund White (b. 1940), and Grace Paley (b. 1922), Junot Díaz (b. 1960), Vincent Czyz (b. 1963), John Berger (b. 1926), and Willa Cather (1876–1947), Susan Sontag (1933–2004), J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940), Dennis Cooper (b. 1953), Amy Hempel (b. 1951), Michael Chabon (b. 1964), Ana Kavan (1901–68), Sara Schulman (b. 1958), and Kit Reed (b. 1954), Josephine Saxton (b. 1935), Erin McGraw (b. 1957), Harlan Ellison (b. 1934), Luiza Valenzuela (b. 1938), Mary Gentle (b. 1956), Shirley Jackson (b. 1919), JT Leroy (b. 1980), Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), Linda Shore (b. 1937), Amy Bloom (b. 1953), Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), Vonda N. McIntyre (b. 1948), Carol Emshwiller (b. 1921), Leonora Carrington (b. 1917), Lynn Tillman (b. 1947), L. Timmel Duchamp (b. 1950), Richard Yates (1926–92), Andrea Barrett (b. 1954), David Foster Wallace (b. 1962), Heidi Julavitz (b. 1968), Ben Marcus (b. 1967), Michael Martone (b. 1955), Hilary Bailey (b. 1936), Christine Brooke-Rose (b. 1923), Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947), Adam Haslett (b. 1970), Anita Desai (b. 1937), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), and Raymond Carver (1938–88), Malcolm Lowry (1926–66), and Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), Tillie Olsen (b. 1912), and Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), Robert Glück (b. 1945?), and André Gide (1869–1951), Chris Offut (b. 1958), and Denis Johnson (b. 1959), James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), Lewis Carroll (1832–98), and Chester Himes (1909–84), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and Wilson Harris (b. 1921), and Jean Rhys (c. 1890–1970), and John Crowley (b. 1943), Rikki Ducornet (b. 1943), Richard Wright (1908–60), and Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), Walter Pater (1839–94), Olive Shreiner (1855–1920), Thomas M. Disch (b. 1939), and Paul Goodman (1911–72), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Honoré