Who Owns Our Imagination?
Who IS Telling the Best Stories? Are They Winning? How Can You Tell? Who Are the Scorekeepers? And is the Crisis in Humanities a Deliberately Manufactured Crisis of the Imagination?
1
As I write this, a million species hover on the edge of extinction. Children shrivel in detention camps along the Texas/Mexico border, and Ukraine continues to suffer under Russia’s ruthless assault. Millions are leading subsistence lives in refugee centers on the edges of Europe, throughout Africa, and on islands around Australia. Too much (though far from all) of this misery was triggered by my country’s unwarranted, multiple invasions of Iraq, as well as by our interventions in Libya and Afghanistan. At the same time, the Koch brothers (how many of them are still with us?) mint money by raping the earth, while our former president fulminates from a parallel reality that threatens to engulf our own. And that’s not the half of it… Futurologists threaten bigger changes on the horizon as the globe warms and a new generation explores the possibilities of transhumanism.
It’s easy to get carried away cataloging catastrophes, past and imminent. “At a time like the present,” noted M. de Norpois, “when the ever-increasing complexity of life leaves one scarcely a moment for reading… when so many new and threatening problems are arising on every side… at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner.” As this observation arises in the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past, one of the world’s longest novels, we might be forgiven for taking the words with a grain of salt. And yet they taste of truth nonetheless. The world is burning (no matter what Steven Pinker or Bill Gates might think), and the novelist responds how? By writing more novels? Some nerve.
Most writers I know at one time or another question the value of their “interventions.” On the one hand, we’re right to doubt ourselves — especially now that the very notion of “story” has been appropriated by… just about everybody. “Whoever tells the best story wins” is a central mantra of our age. There it is again, the philosophy of the victor. What exactly do you win, though? And who are the judges? Business schools teach students to craft narratives as persuasive devices for selling products. It’s enough to turn one against the notion of narrative. Fellow artists in other media are similarly wondering how to maintain a relevant sense of mission in the face of relentless commercialization; before the fervor of money, does the fever of art stand a chance?
The stories that are dominating are those told by big business. They own the airwaves, after all. The crisis in Humanities, with its plummeting enrollments and diminishing institutional support, is no more inevitable than the ecological crisis. Both have been stoked by the same forces.
2
Now more than ever it’s essential that the literary arts acknowledge the seriousness of their intentions. And I can think of no better amicus brief than Michael Schmidt’s compendious The Novel: A Biography.
Imagine a book with the inventiveness of Cervantes, the verbal panache of Joyce, the grounded moral insight of Orwell and Morrison, a Dickensian expansiveness, a realist’s eye for detail, and a fabulist’s willingness to grant imagination flight: imagine all this, and a lot more, and you will have imagined a tiny part of the grandeur of Michael Schmidt’s magisterial volume, The Novel: A Biography. If I were to recommend just one book by a contemporary to a literary-minded tourist from another planet, this would surely be it. Those curious about how to distinguish the literal from the literary will find answers here.
For readers, amateur and professional alike, it is the best kind of guide, hybridizing the comprehensive virtues of an old-fashioned Baedeker with the sleekly styled delights of the popular Eyewitness Guides. Schmidt is that rare fortunate traveler capable of appreciating the widest possible range of landscapes and geographies, transitioning seamlessly from Sterne to Singer, Aphra Benn to Richard Ford, Mandeville to Morrison. His book has the pacing of a great adventure story, providing readers unfamiliar with the terrain enough of a GPS that they can continue off the grid with confidence, while offering readers somewhat acquainted with the landscape (no one I have ever met knows it with the fullness Schmidt evinces) new ways of looking at old vistas.
To the practicing writer he offers a trove of ideas. Scarcely a page passes without an insight or an inspiring notion, belonging to Schmidt or one of the 210 writers he cites, to make a practitioner reach for his notebook. That means you are guaranteed to reap at least 1,106 ideas from this volume (not counting the ones you might generate for yourself simply by perusing the Table of Contents with its unusual groupings of writers). He has not only read the novels, but the biographies, and the letters: “The meaning of our redemption is that we do not have to be our history,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. Everyone knows Kafka’s line about literature needing to be an ax for the frozen sea within us. I didn’t, however, remember the sentences that precede it: ‘We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide…”
Reading it, I learned so much. I noted Trollope’s warning against the use of the first person narrator: “The reader is unconsciously taught to feel that the writer is glorifying himself, and rebels against the self-praise… In telling a tale it is, I think, always well to sink the personal pronoun.” I was surprised to learn the minimal research Toni Morrison did on Margaret Garner, the prototype for Sethe, in Beloved: “Though she’d killed her child, she was not foaming at the mouth. She was very calm; she said, I’d do it again. That was more than enough to fire my imagination.” “Too much knowledge,” notes Schmidt, “would have stopped the novelist’s mouth.” Then he quotes Morrison again: “There would have been no place in there for me. It would be like a recipe already cooked.”
One need not, should not expect to, agree with all of Schmidt’s assessments. There would be something unsettling about his project if one did. For instance, I was as startled to read his dismissal of Michael Ondaatje’s marvelous The Cat’s Table, which is a pure joy of a novel, thanks to Ondaatje’s ever-supple prose. And Schmidt misses most of the literature from my family’s part of the world. He includes the Russians, of course, who get their own chapter. But you won’t find Krasznahorkai or Gombrowicz or Bartis, never mind Khvyolovy or Lesia Ukrainka or Wasyl Barka. Like most historians, Schmidt remains partial to his own neighborhood — and that’s fine, commendable, and given the sheer numbers of what’s out there, inevitable. That he’s not merely read but has reflected on as much as he has is an astonishment and gift enough.
How is it such that, with such a rich history behind us, we find ourselves facing, as we seem to be told every day, a “crisis in the Humanities”?
3
Reading Merve Emre’s spry observations about John Guillroy’s new book, “Professing Criticism” in The New Yorker recently, I couldn’t help but be puzzled by all this hand-wringing among humanists. One so rarely hears comparable expressions of self-doubt from disc jockeys (or actual jockeys for that matter). Nor do we hear similar breast-beating among political pundits, politicians, actors, golfers, lawyers, gamers, programmers, pole dancers, etc. — all of whom one might hope would wonder now and again about the inherent value or social utility of their work.
Appearing on the heels of Emre’s piece, we have Nathan Heller’s deftly turned essay (again in The New Yorker) on that collapsing star known as “the Humanities.” We accompany Heller as he wanders the halls of Harvard’s latest shiny, high tech heaven in Allston, Massachusetts, musing that, had such a facility been around in his day, so long Pynchon, high-five Mark! We hear Stephen Greenblatt purring his love of “The Wire,” that utterly absorbing television series, in the same breath as he celebrates that tendentious cult fave “Better Call Saul.” That’s where he thinks the real story-telling action lies. We never do learn what novels he’s recently read or how he might compare the experience of reading say Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart to the thrills of a night passed in the company of Slippin’ Jimmy.
Thank goodness for the kids, especially the last two students Heller cites, both of whom have high hopes for the arts.
I confess I’m surprised by how willing and eager literary scholars have been over the last decades to turn away from the study of literature (“news that stays news,” as Ezra Pound put it) and focus instead on the stupefactions of mass culture and the infinite distractions of technology. The study of these epiphenomena has its place, for sure. But is it within the potentially noble field of literary studies? Is it possible this crisis of conscience has been exacerbated by the vocabulary scholars themselves have appropriated to describe their work? Are they really engaged in “knowledge production” rather than in a never-ending yet essential quest for knowledge and wisdom? Is knowledge something manufactured, mass-produced for sale to our students? Is the importation of that vocabulary one of the consequences of raising the cost of higher education, and so putting it out of reach of so many who might benefit from it?
The number of students pursuing the Humanities has decreased even as a generation of humanists has done all it can to cater to students’ favorite pastimes, so many of which involve cell phones. Do bus drivers weep when their buses are empty, as they so often are in Boston, outside of rush hour? Maybe. But if you’ve ever found yourself at a bus stop alone at night in the rain, you might remember the relief you experienced when at last it arrived and you heard the whoosh of its doors open, inviting you to step into its light and warmth. It arrived when you needed it most, ready to carry you home. The irrationality of what society decides to reward with extravagant compensation (hundreds of millions of dollars to one man for playing a game? and even more to the game’s owner?) is surely what’s deserving of our scrutiny. As William Carlos Williams put it, “you can either make dollars, or make sense.”
And here’s the rub. If we follow the money, we begin to see the way in which an elite business class is manipulating and solidifying class divisions and firming up a social hierarchy in which one group of students is invited to revel in “elite” pursuits — studying the arts, reading Whitman declaim “I loaf and invite my soul” — while another group prepares to manage and be managed by AI. Here we find more than a little evidence of deliberate design. The business class is of course abetted by their politicians, including even, to my sorrow, the Obamas with their mantra of “STEM, STEM.”
Several years ago I wrote about “The Lincoln Project,” a report issued by the Academy of Arts and Sciences examining the state of public research universities in the US. While I have not met a single colleague teaching at a public research university who has read it, it is nevertheless a significant document. It offers the reader a glimpse of the way administrators and policy makers at the highest level see our future. Here’s what I wrote then:
“I spent several months reflecting on the report, comparing notes with friends, and reading other thoughtful assessments. Having taught at both private institutions (Boston University, Bennington, Harvard) and at a public university (UMB), I’ve had a chance to see and participate in the different cultures of each.
The study succeeds at identifying both the problems faced by public research universities and the mainstream approaches to responding to them. By putting my experiences at UMass Boston in a larger context, the report suggests a deeply troubling anti-democratic trend which, I believe, undermines values I once took as foundational to our national identity.
From my perspective, the report is potentially disastrous for public research universities. It is ideological in the extreme. It seems to surrender to a destructive status quo which it has only superficially analyzed. At times, it reads as though it had been commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce. While it claims to offer a blueprint for achieving excellence in, and expanding access to, public higher education, it reads more like a template for accelerating its privatization, dismantling what many of us have always regarded as one of this nation’s most glorious achievements. I used to boast to friends from abroad about the quality and availability of our institutions of higher ed. I fear those boasts now sound like PR.
What’s missing in the report is an analysis of why exactly the “traditional financial model for funding…is now outdated.” The absence of a more probing examination of how and why, in such a strong economy, state support for education in general, and higher education in particular, has dropped so precipitously points to what I’m guessing is one of the report’s undeclared agendas: to push public institutions into ever closer relationship with private entities, which is to say, ultimately, corporations. I have witnessed the progress of that trend in small ways as well as large. When a well-intentioned administrator described students as customers, the characterization concretized how radically the attitudes toward and understanding of the goals and purpose of institutions of Higher Ed had changed in the last several decades.
There are some things the report seems to take for granted, and others it seems to avoid. Here is the opening paragraph of the report’s conclusion: “As the financial model of public research universities changes, driven primarily by diminishing contributions from the states, these institutions must find ways to respond to their pressing needs while also building for the future. The Lincoln Project has focused on the universities as the principal actors….”
Let’s consider that paragraph’s opening sentence: “As the financial model of public research universities changes….” Why exactly has the financial model changed? And why has it changed in this way? The material and formal causes of the change may have been the financial collapse of 2008, as the report suggests, but the efficient and final causes surely reflect the desires of the wealthy to shape society according to their preferences. If followed, the report’s recommendations will tend to solidify rather than erode class distinctions.
Tiered dormitory housing for students wanting more amenities is becoming commonplace. Suddenly the opportunity the college experience used to provide, of giving kids from different class backgrounds a chance to mix, was supplanted by an undergraduate version of a gated community.
While lip service is paid in the recommendations to an increase in support from the state and federal governments, the primary burden is indeed put on the institutions themselves. But these institutions are called public for a reason. They are creations of the state. The report encourages them to emulate — and therefore, unavoidably, imitate — private institutions. This is comparable to a gradual privatization of Medicare or Social Security. It sets a dangerous precedent. The public good is not always the first thing on the mind of private investors and stockholders.
Instead of emphasizing the importance of maintaining high academic standards and a curriculum that promotes what liberal arts institutions once proudly declared as their mission (the creation of an educated citizenry capable of independent, critical thinking), in its recommendations for how public research universities should respond to the dramatic decrease in state and federal support, the report focuses almost entirely on financial issues. It emphasizes first of all “establishing cost efficiency targets” and the importance of forming alliances with other institutions. It then urges public universities to explore new revenue streams (the report adds: “consistent with the fundamental values of public research institutions,” yet I don’t see those clearly articulated anywhere; indeed, given the report’s touting of a successful collaboration with Raytheon, the weapon’s manufacturer, I had to wonder just what those values might be); it also suggests an enhancement of “advancement and development activities within the institutions…” (a push toward seeking public/private partnerships); and it invites them to “signal to the business community that universities are willing partners” in their enterprises. The recommendations also “encourage governing boards to pursue the expertise needed to adjust to new funding models” (i.e., let MBAs do to universities what they have done to the medical field with HMOs?). Finally, universities should “provide comprehensive financial aid to low-income in-state undergraduate students,” (which, it would appear, can only be done after doing all of the above, and more).
When the report recommends that state and federal agencies work “together with philanthropic partners” to “provide transformational support for university faculty,” I think of the Koch brothers making decisions about who does and does not receive tenure at George Mason University (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mason.html). After all, if donors endow a chair, why shouldn’t they decide who sits in it? The Times story goes on to say: “In academia, such influence is viewed as inappropriate, partly because it may pressure professors to produce biased research, undermining the credibility of their work and spreading incorrect information to students. That may be particularly problematic in the interpretation of data and construction of models in areas of economics that affect federal tax policy or regulation.”
I am a little surprised that our national experiment in privatizing prisons (or the power grid in Texas) did not become more of a cautionary tale for educators and higher ed administrators. Far from leading to efficiencies, the privatization of prisons has resulted in raising both the cost and the rate of incarceration. Some contracts require states to pay penalties when prison cells remain empty. I can imagine comparable abuses not so much by universities but by lending institutions which profit from student debt. It’s hard for many of us working in academia to keep from concluding that the current remodeling of public research universities is driven by the same interests which have remodeled our national tax structure, and which are working steadily to unbraid what remains of our frayed social “safety net.”
Speaking of tax structures… the solution to the perpetual crisis in higher education is simple enough and doesn’t involve charter schools which tend to take advantage of a faculty and staff bereft of the protections offered by a union. The answer has been in front of us all along: Exeter! Andover! Miss Porter’s! Crystal Springs! Let all public schools be modeled on our finest private schools. Let kids in the poorest neighborhoods feel they have as much right to brood with Hamlet, frolic with Sterne, grieve with Bronte, worry with Woolf, celebrate with Woodson, wax lyrical with Torres and seize the day with Vuong. Provide the campuses of public schools with museums and athletic fields and lower the faculty-student ratios. Recognize how essential aesthetics and access to beauty are to human growth. Permit students to choose their path forward not out of fear of winding up in the poorhouse but rather in response to their souls’ secret summons. And that’s something they’re more likely to discover by hearing the galvanizing visions of Blake, the whispered truths of Dickinson, the insights of Brooks, the recognitions articulated by Howe, Brock-Broido, Jackson, Forche. Poetry is not a luxury today any more than it was when Audre Lorde asserted it a decade ago. Bringing readers into closer contact with literature, by which I mean with those books which “affect us like a disaster” All it would take would be a return to the income tax brackets prevalent in the fifties and sixties.
Fortunately, there are still readers, writers, and even critics whose faith in the value of fiction seems unshakable: “If there’s somewhere today where an echo of the ancient mysteries can be heard,” writes the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “it is not in the liturgical splendor of the Catholic Church but in the extreme life resolutions offered by the novel form….(T)he novel places us before a mysterium in which life itself is at once that which initiates us and that into which we are initiated.” In fiction we not only witness and overhear characters wrestling with intimate matters, trivial and profound, we also see the context out of which they sprang. Able to know them from without and within, we watch them weep and know why — and from that understanding we gain both perspective and a language for understanding our own lives. And that’s not nothing.
“The honest currency of art,” writes Jeanette Winterson “is the honest currency of the imagination.” She further notes: “We know we are dissatisfied but the satisfactions that we seek come at a price beyond the resources of a money culture. Can we afford to live imaginatively, contemplatively? Why have we submitted to a society that tries to make imagination a privilege when to each of us it comes as a birthright?”
It is precisely the unquantifiable nature of the value of reading which ultimately saves it from falling into a sociological category, where it would be leached of vitality, transformed into a statistic proving so and so. Not everything can be turned into numbers, into ones and zeros, digitized, or transformed into an algorithm. Not everything is data to be mined for polling or more nefarious purposes. Some things must be experienced in and for themselves. We are phenomena: now try to name us.
Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, appeared in 2021. His four novels have variously been named a New York Times Notable, an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian Writers. His published translations include work by Oksana Zabuzhko, Marjana Savka, Bohdan Boychuk, Ivan Drach, and Skovoroda. His shorter work, including essays, stories, and reviews, have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Missouri Review, The Times Literary Supplement (London), The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review and elsewhere. He’s received a three-year Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction, the McGinnis Award in Fiction, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his contributions to the literary community. As founding editor of Agni he received PEN’s Magid Award for creating “one of America’s, and the world’s, leading literary journals.” Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Most recently he has been organizing readings in support of writers in Ukraine, as well as interviewing writers for his For the Record series which appears online at Agni Online (https://agnionline.bu.edu/blog/for-the-record-conversations- with-ukrainian-writers/), as well as on Arrowsmith Press’s website.