McSweeney’s and the School of Life

Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, about the rise of the creative writing program since World War II, has had an instant, and galvanizing, effect on the way we talk about contemporary literature. Though John W. Aldridge had documented in part, and lamented in full, the dominance of writing programs in the production of contemporary fiction (in Talents and Technicians [1992]), it was not until The Program Era that we had a detailed history and theoretically capacious account of the impact that creative writing programs have had on American fiction. The power of McGurl’s analysis lies in its inevitable applicability. The very sense of what counts as “the program” in McGurl’s analysis reaches well beyond the limited precincts of the creative writing classroom; the program era includes the English departments that sponsor, or set themselves against, creative writing programs, the universities that house both, and the larger metaphor of “the school” as it relates to reading and writing, to the encouragement or perceived suppression of creativity. Any fiction not produced in the academy in the period since 1945 was likely written by a person who spent time in a university, and if not, it may yet be read there, and what is not read there may be read by people educated there, and so even a book of unschooled provenance can be enrolled in the Program Era without much struggle.¹ McGurl generates these connections with impressive scholarly thoroughness in the different cases he engages fully; the implied connections between writers and writing programs beyond the cases at the center of McGurl’s chapters are of necessity incompletely documented, and the connections that his readers now enthusiastically make as they follow his lead—in conversation and dissertations and talks—vary widely in evidential underpinning. Some leaps are long.

It is the broader claim about the centrality of institutions as such to the production and reception of literature that sets McGurl’s work apart from narrower and more polemical work on writing programs such as Aldridge’s and that encourages the admiring reader to leap. With the Program’s tenets working their way down to the primary and secondary level of schooling, it is perhaps only the true autodidact reading old science fiction or porn who can claim a picnic spot outside the Program. This is what it means for McGurl to identify his method, at the highest level of abstraction, with the totalizing claims of systems theory. Perhaps the most impressive manifestation of the argument is McGurl’s discussion of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, figures whose urge to “drop out” represents the desire to find genuine creativity outside of the school but whose history—from their psychedelic school bus to their continuing, if intermittent, university affiliations—demonstrates the totality of a system that can contain even its own outside. McGurl unearths the historical links between these droppers-out and the institutions they dropped from, but he does more than this, showing how Kesey and those in his circle imagined the psychic interdependence of institutions and creativity. That combination of historical density and psychological acuity, of large-scale system and individual expression, registers how much of Michel Foucault’s approach McGurl has absorbed, and made good on, in his ambitious book. Like Foucault’s work, McGurl’s tills fertile ground for other thinkers—of which I am one.

This essay, then, attempts to think concretely about how the Program Era is lived and imagined today, and to do so in such a way that we can see the difficulties, as well as the fertility, of the broadest version of McGurl’s claims—most particularly, the book’s central commitment to the continuity of the writing program and “the culture of the school,” and of the deep ties it suggests between actual schools, with their particular historical conditions, and works that invoke school as a metaphor. “My thesis is not,” writes McGurl, “that creative writing programs preclude all other forms of literary patronage or venues for a career, but that these programs are the most original production of the postwar period, its...