State-Funded Fiction: Minimalism, National Memory, and the Return to Realism in the Post-Postmodern Age

Writing on the 40th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship Program, Bobbie Ann Mason was characteristically self-effacing. Discussing her first novel, the best-seller In Country (1987), which she wrote with the aid of a government grant, Mason explains:

I wanted to do something that would be rich and lasting, but I never expected it to have such popular appeal and tangible social effect. Yet [In Country] was a surprising commercial success, and it has affected the lives of many people. The NEA grant helped me write the novel, which I did for my own artistic reasons. I report these unexpected benefits that In Country brought to the community—from the classroom to the veterans’ group to the economy to the morale of my own hometown—because I think they are significant in reminding people that what may look like self-indulgence in its beginnings can turn out to have long-reaching, positive effects on the culture.

(NEA Literature 30)

Mason is referring to the afterlife of In Country in US culture. The novel, which uses a teenage girl’s coming-of-age story to explore the effects of the Vietnam War, proved quite popular: a “surprising commercial success,” it was adapted for a movie featuring A-list actors, and it encouraged Mason, with the help of the National Endowment for the Arts (the NEA), to launch writing programs for returning veterans. All positive developments, of course, but Mason’s choice to highlight them so that these public benefits surpass her “own artistic reasons” for writing the novel raises several questions for the literary historian: Why is Mason wary that “artistic reasons” may appear self-indulgent? And why might the NEA commission her to testify about the “social effect” of her art, and its “popular appeal,” rather than its aesthetic innovations? What may we infer about the standards for state-funded fiction, such as the novel that Mason produced, from this brief, occasional essay?¹

These questions, and Mason’s remarks in the above passage, nicely sum up the changing expectations for writers publishing in the era of state patronage, a moment in which “social effect” and “popular appeal” became crucial factors in achieving a version of artistic success. Starting in 1967, the federal government began supporting writers through the NEA Literature Fellowship Program, an institution that has remained almost entirely invisible for American literary historians. This absence, however, should not be all that surprising. As an agency founded during the cultural Cold War, the NEA had a vested interest in remaining invisible to avoid even the slightest basis for a comparison with the censorious and propagandistic Soviet Union. Likewise, artists interested in preserving the appearance of autonomy have been ambivalent about receiving state support, although in recent years, some of them have been vocal supporters of federal funding for the arts. Nonetheless, the NEA was, and continues to be, an important form of institutional support for US writers, funding them at early stages of their careers, and, like university teaching positions, freeing them from dependence on an unstable, mostly unrewarding literary marketplace.²

But artistic autonomy is never without limits, and neither is the NEA’s freedom to fund whatever art it happens to admire. Historically, changes in the executive branch and in Congress have influenced the NEA Literature Program, which has at times been charged with preserving the most exciting, innovative examples of US writing, and at other times been warned away from supporting inaccessible, difficult, or controversial art. This essay tracks changes in the NEA’s agenda from the 1970s to the 1980s in order to understand how and why the agency went from funding formally dense, politically dissident literature—the kind of literature unlikely to find success in the literary marketplace—to funding formally conventional, thematically populist, fundamentally integrative fiction that would appeal to the average reader and achieve commercial success.³ Put simply, in the 1980s, state sponsorship stops operating in opposition to the market and begins working in tandem with it. I contend that this perhaps unsurprising...