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| Hearsay: |
Do novelists have a duty to write more about contemporary social dilemmas? Try to be more like The Wire, says this guy. I guess that’s a tv show of some sort. And I guess it’s pretty good. I suppose you might want to work your way up to it though, through Married with Children and that show with Hugh Laurie sporting an American accent.
Walter Benn Michaels, the punchy professor of American literature and theory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, came to New York last week and delivered an emphatic message to novelists: Please start writing more about class issues and the social order of contemporary life! It was a rainy evening, and Mr. Michaels spoke as part of a panel at the New York Public Library. At the center of the evening’s discussion was a brief, polemical essay that Mr. Michaels had recently published in BookForum in which he argued that the leading voices in American letters had, in their work, rendered “the reality of our social arrangements invisible.”
In his essay, Mr. Michaels implicated three groups of writers: those who traffic narcissistically in memoir and self-examination; those who write fiction about past horrors like the Holocaust and slavery; and those who focus in their work on the tribulations of individual characters while ignoring the societal pressures that determine those characters’ lives.
None of them, Mr. Michaels argued, would ever produce great art unless they reversed course. What novelists need to do, he said, is take a cue from David Simon, the creator of the The Wire, a show that portrayed over the course of five seasons the inner workings of Baltimore.
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April 23rd, 2009 at 8:52 am
i think novelists have been doing fine on their own, without advice frmo Mr. Michaels.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:15 am
With no offence intended toward narcissists, Holocaust storytellers, or individualists, I heartily encourage Walter Benn Michaels to begin what I can only assume will be a skyrocketing literary career, seeing as he knows exactly what we need to create “great art”. I bet he’s drawn an algorithmic formula to back up his claim too. Awesome – it’s going to be such a great book.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:27 am
the Wire is amazing. I wish I could fund books like it.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 am
I have to say that I agree with Monica. The vast majority of novels that I’ve read of late have been just fine without the constant whine of contemporary society weighing them down.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:40 am
Don’t forget to include the Simpsons in the literary education. Honestly, I’ve thought myself that there ought to be more discussion about class, which seems to have disappeared from the mental horizon though it has more impact than ever with the rich-poor divide being broader than it has been in a 100 years. But somehow what I think ought to be written, and what I can actually write well, aren’t the same. There are many kinds of great art. And I can assure you that, at least so far, my earnest intentions of what should be written haven’t produced any. However I hope that hard work and an openness to my inner voice (plus some guidance from above & below)has produced some art.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:17 am
I write novels about social issues….then the protagonist and antogonists blow the crap out of each other till there are no more social ills.
See, problem solved.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Note to self, write novel about class set in Canada.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:45 pm
All writing is political. Leaving out politics is a political choice. Perhaps there will be time to reflect in a FEMA camp somewhere. They can think about manufacturing consent there. I’d say it was a full time job for most writers to ignore the lies told by their governments. The publishing vacuum that embraces this ethos is part of what leaves room for the vanity press. An isolated propaganda tract distributed on a street corner ranting about a political issue has a greater decorum than most published novels. And oh yeah…the upper class are fucktards. There isn’t a member of Parliament that doesn’t belong in a jail cell. Why hasn’t the Mulroney family been stripped of all their assets and left to wander the streets? They live on the proceeds of crime according to ‘On The Take’ and recent court testimony.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:53 pm
While I don’t think I’d ever suggest she write anything like The Wire, I am currently reading a WWII novel by a Canadian author whose first two books were short story collections about contemporary Canadians living contemporary lives. They were amazing! And now? Well, this novel is alright, I suppose, but I find I just don’t give a damn. I feel like I’ve read this book fifty times already. Maybe it will be up for the Giller.
The Wire is one of the finest dramatic programs to ever air on television, if not the finest, and not just for the reasons mentioned in the article. In turn, it’s partly based on David Simon’s two books, Homicide and The Corner, as was it’s fine spiritual precursor, Homicide: Life on the Street. David Simon’s book, Homicide, is the finest piece of long-form journalism I’ve ever read. Authors could do much worse than take inspiration from Simon. They could, for example, write a hundred variations on Fugitive Pieces or In the Skin of a Lion (something that, in this country, they seem more likely to do–in fact, many seem to feel themselves morally obliged to do that).
April 27th, 2009 at 11:41 am
On The Job. Balconville. Neil Cream. Without A Parachute.