Adjusting to the Program Era: Gender and Abundance

In 2002, David Bowie told the New York Times that the musician’s way of making a living was about to change markedly. Noting that his new deal with Sony was only for a short period of time, he said, “I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way.” The legal structure of copyright and intellectual property probably wouldn’t last ten years, he went on.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity… So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.

Bowie was entirely right in predicting that artists would make most of their money from touring: unless you’re Adele, that is almost certainly true of every artist from Taylor Swift to the most obscure indie rock band. But what caught my attention about Bowie’s vision was the comparison of music to running water and electricity. There are some problems with that simile, but under one kind of light, that seems to be a thrilling description of the way streaming music enters our lives—instantaneously, plenteously, reliably, and also increasingly indifferently. Perhaps I am just indulging in a kind of early-digital nostalgia, but the ability to access any song or album that pops into my head has made me far less careful, less curatorial, less invested in what I am listening to. Even making playlists seems an increasingly pointless exercise: it is so easy to jump from one song to another in the moment that I almost forget what excruciating pleasure it was trying to figure out how to squeeze one more killer track on an 80 minute CD. Thanks, Spotify.

The problem of abundance is an old topic in the study of the United States, and the principle that plenitude and malaise go together spiritually has been a frequent diagnosis of the national soul. And it may not even be a true diagnosis: abundance has also frequently been moralized as connected to insatiability, to avarice and gluttony. Certainly the abundance of land—occupied but deceitfully categorized “free” or “open”—engendered avidity rather than indolence among white settlers and their governments. Nonetheless, perhaps thanks to an old Calvinist streak, there is an ingrained suspicion of any claim that quality can maintain itself when amplified, extended, or multiplied—if all bands sound pretty good, it must mean that they are actually all mediocre, not that they are all, in fact, pretty good.

That view still holds, I think, in some critical circles, although there are certainly countervailing, celebratory tendencies of music’s surfeit, sometimes going by the clever name of poptimism. Within literary criticism, some of the same arguments about quality and abundance—more often framed in terms of (rare) experimentalism and (more commercial) realism—persist, often in the shadow of the “Program Era,” as Mark McGurl dubbed it in a study by that name from 2009.

Although both experimental fiction writers and more conventional realists have found solid homes in English departments teaching creative writing, the general assumption in these debates has been that the overwhelming numerousness of these graduate programs has not accelerated literary experimentation but instead has routinized a certain kind of sensuously lush, formally uninventive prose that fits well within the domestic plots of “literary fiction.” Thus, bookstores, publishers, readers are all inundated with more gorgeous prose than anyone could ever digest, more “quality” fiction than anyone could count, much less read, much less enjoy.

McGurl actually defended this state of affairs in the afterword to The Program Era, arguing that to look this particular gift horse in the mouth was really to take sides in a larger argument about the purpose and value of higher education.

Of course, we can only measure literary excellence on our own terms, and the task of elevating individual authors high above their numerous accomplished peers has become increasingly difficult. This may have produced, as with the disappearance of the .400 hitter in professional baseball, a kind of optical illusion of encroaching mediocrity: being the dominant figure in Shakespeare’s or even Pound’s time was, by comparison to today, easy as pie. But laying aside our anachronistic prejudices for the One over the Many Ones, moving our minds from the Pound Era into the Program Era, do we not bear daily witness to a surfeit of literary excellence, an embarrassment of riches? Is there not more excellent fiction being produced now than anyone has time to read?

What kind of traitor to the mission of mass higher education would you have to be to think otherwise? (410)

McGurl’s argument, however, is directed to his fellow literary critics—not to practicing authors of fiction. It would be understandable if the problem that McGurl acknowledges—the increasing inability of the literary establishment to fulfill the “task of elevating individual authors high above their numerous accomplished peers”—bothers the more ambitious among them a bit more than it bothers the critics. After all, a lack of critical consensus just gives critics more to talk about, but it makes the novelist’s struggle for recognition almost Sisyphean—write a brilliant novel, earn torrents of praise, then see a new, equally brilliant novel the next month entirely supplant your ‘destined to be a classic’ novel in those critics’ memories. Repeat. The boulder slides back down to the bottom of the hill.

This is perhaps not such a new development, as anyone who has read George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) would acknowledge. But the problem of abundance certainly exists at a scale that is unprecedented in fiction. Some television critics talk about “Peak TV”—the sense that even professional critics cannot keep up with all the “quality” television on offer. The situation is much more unworkable for fiction, even though there appears to be a new surge in journalistic coverage of fiction. Perhaps to compensate, the purpose and tone of that coverage tends now to be more indiscriminately enthusiastic—“7 Novels You Must Read in July,” “12 Great Beach Reads for Your Summer Vacation”—than analytical.

This is all a very long wind-up to a fulfillment of my intention from last week to talk about the way that post-recession culture has been shaping fiction written by young men. I spent most of that post talking about the figure of the “failson” and ended by diagnosing a peculiar combination of self-aware unworthiness and entitlement—“that he doesn’t deserve something but feels he should be given it anyway.”

One of the many reasons why someone might feel this way is the realization that talent is not so scarce, that even if you are a pretty great writer, there are a lot of great writers, and your claim to literary preeminence is not so much stronger than anyone else’s. And yet, even acknowledging this parity, some people of course continue to believe that they are entitled not just to their turn in the literary limelight but to an extended and exclusive perch on top of the hierarchy of the republic of letters. There may—even in the depths of that person’s heart—be no justification made for this claim. Entitlement doesn’t really need justification and often acts in the absence of even a gesture at making one. It is not, “everyone is excellent, but I’m somehow better,” but rather, “everyone is excellent, but I want what I want.”

Now, this may seem to be in conflict with the idea of the failson, but it is important to recall that the failson need not be an objective failure. One can be quite successful, quite talented, and still be a failson, still be a “disappointment” to one’s parents.

Generational conflict is not, however, the main plotline of the genre that I think of as the Betungsroman, novels which tell the story of a talented but underachieving young man who is often defined characterologically by his lack of assertiveness (especially toward women) and diffidence about his artistic ambitions. These traits—especially the former—contrast strongly with the generation of alpha male writers who dominated the postwar literary scene—Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Styron, Updike, et al. I am not original in drawing this contrast; in fact, I’m taking some inspiration from a piece I disagree strongly with by Katie Roiphe in which she defends those old goats against what she considers the excessive prudery of writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers.

Roiphe’s piece made it sound as if younger male authors were afraid of sex—or afraid of writing about it. That is not always true of the Betungsroman; in some, there is actually quite a lot of sex, and as with their careers, the problem is not usually that the protagonists are unsuccessful with women but that they seem to lack a consistent conviction about what success is and whether they want to pursue it heedlessly, perhaps at great cost to themselves and to others. They are not sexual adventurers like Roth or Updike, whose characters were interested as much in the story of a conquest as the act itself, and unconcerned with whether the other person(s) involved were having any fun.

What is true about the Betungsroman is that it often vibrates with a kind of muted or suppressed ambition. Their authors, it seems, cannot figure out how to draw a male character who is openly ambitious and yet not basically repellent. The males who name and claim their ambitions typically are exaggerated alpha males, predatory, lecherous, and venal. The one recent novel I can think of that features vocally ambitious young men who are also intended to draw the reader’s sympathy is by a woman—Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. (The My Struggle books of Karl Ove Knausgaard is perhaps another example, although it’s debatable whether the reader’s sympathy is ever sought during the course of the work.)

The Betungsroman makes room for ambitious and sympathetic women, however. There is often a dynamic between the protagonist and his partner in which he is overshadowed by her competence and straightforward approach to fulfilling her career goals—this is certainly the case in the novel I recently read that led to these thoughts, Andrew Martin’s Early Work.

This positive portrayal of women’s ambition mirrors the directness and matter-of-factness with which women authors have expressed their (formal/aesthetic and career) ambitions in their fiction over the past decade or so. Martin’s protagonist reads Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song during the course of the novel, and he also professes admiration for Rachel Cusk, one of the writers whose books have been praised lavishly (and wholly reasonably) for their frank audacity. One might also add writers like Yanagihara, Lisa Halliday, Sheila Heti, Otessa Moshfegh, and, of course, Elena Ferrante among many others.

I want to break off here, but by asking a question: what is causing this divergence among men and women in terms of their willingness to admit openly to cravings for literary success, to own their ambitions? My answer—or an attempt at an answer—is implicit in the first half of the post: men and women are responding differently, I think, to the problem of abundance, with men finding it more difficult to find a place in a crowd of peers.