The Retreat

The Invite

What was Charles up to?!? When he called to invite me to Callaloo’s literary and cultural retreat in New Orleans, I remember thinking that I was one of the worst people to bring in to discuss the gap between literary critics and creative writers in African-American studies because I don’t see the two groups (admittedly not always mutually exclusive) as naturally or even needing to be connected. I teach in an English department, and the first reaction that comes to mind when thinking about creative writers vis a vis literary theorists is the raw deal the former have when they are housed in the same department as the latter—as they often are.

Through observation and discussion—admittedly non-exhaustive—I have formed the following opinions about this raw deal. First, in order to be hired, creative writers must publish more; their work must be read and reviewed more widely than those of their lit/ crit colleagues. The reward is a tenured/tenure track job security (yay!) . . . with colleagues who teach students that the “author is dead” and gaggles of undergraduate students in Creative Writing 101 who assume that whatever they drivel out of their laptops is necessarily brilliant (“I meant for it to be boring and incomprehensible—that’s my style!”) After all, we ain’t France, where novelists and poets discuss politics and philosophy on primetime television. For many Americans, including too many of our undergraduate students, creative work is supposed to be fun, not a craft or discipline, and that means not thinking too rigorously, not editing or revising too deeply or too much, and above all else not reading too broadly or boldly. (The most common complaint from students taking creative writing? The professor is trying to ruin their style, corrupt the purity of their voice by forcing reading on them, by forcing experiences and thoughts they don’t want to have).

I have also floated the idea to my own students that the literary critic/analyst and the creative writers are often oppositional, and this is largely unavoidable: one builds, the other tears down. While there are many different kinds of literary analysts, and many do teach about aesthetics and technique, I do belong to the gang that “kills” the author in order to perform textual analyses. Nonetheless, I do believe that despite their frequent oppositionality, both the writer and the analyst attempt to follow a moral imperative. Both seek, I would argue, to be “true to the story.” I admit I do damage when I analyze a text, I do subvert its carefully crafted “wholeness,” and in doing so I must believe that such damage is warranted.

In order to prevent students from reading a text as no more than the unconscious of the author, and/or nor more than a story about life, meant to uplift or simply transliterate life onto the page, I insist they focus on the text, not authorial intentionality, not their own lives and personal values. Without question, those methods are equally legitimate, but they are also navel gazing and I believe that the first thing students must/should learn in college is to learn to listen and engage with others, to learn to defend their ideas by using a shared methodology with their interlocutor so that the argument doesn’t disintegrate into “well, I just feel that way!” Textual analysis, I think, can do that: students learn to seek out what the text is arguing and, more often that not, discover that texts are dialogic, they carry several arguments and philosophies, compelling constructions about all the things we all care about: the nature of evil, the personality of justice, the origin of bigotry and tolerance . . . in sum, the meaning of our existence.

Complicating this further is the fact that African-American literature—like any minority literature—is hard pressed to occupy wholly the category of aesthetic object. When the majority of your assumed readership comes from the dominant culture, you must anticipate your novel/poem/short story will at least partially be read as pure anthropology, a glimpse into black life, black culture, as...