First, lets see who "us" is in the current context.
"We, the barbarians at the gate, the descendants of Caliban, the ones who have no choice but to speak in the language we have — we come bearing the experiences and ideas the [writers] workshop suppresses. We come from the Communist countries America bombed during the Cold War, or where it sponsored counter-Communist efforts. We come from the lands America occupied, invaded or colonized. We come as refugees and immigrants, documented and undocumented. We come from the ghettos, barrios, reservations and borders of America where there are no workshops."
The paragraph goes on from there, but I'm sure you get the point.
And of course Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Sympathizer" considers himself one of the "us." He arrived in the U.S. with his family at age 4 as the Vietnam War ended and didn't re-visit his homeland for 27 years, but he nonetheless clearly doesn't see himself as an American -- unless things change.
Who is the enemy then? Well, as per Pogo, it turns out that it is in fact a "he" -- and none other than the white male. Seems to be a refrain these days.
What's going on here?
Nguyen, a professor at the University of Southern California, is attacking an institution known as the "writers workshop" where wannabes typically go to learn how to do it, and, in effect, become certified as practitioners of the writing profession. Such workshops often go hand-in-hand with securing an MFA, or Master of Fine Arts degree, and, along with how-to-do it instruction, workshops and MFAs are all about acquiring legitimacy.
Writers workshops, Nguyen argues, stress "craft" over content, emphasizing the notion of "show, don't tell," and are often hostile environments for women and people of color. The result is a celebration of individualism at the expense of politics, history, theory, philosophy and ideology and because of that, workshops compromise literature's role in social movements, revolutions and the struggle for power, he claims.
"As an institution, the workshop reproduces its ideology, which pretends that “Show, don’t tell” is universal when it is, in fact, the expression of a particular population, the white majority, typically at least middle-class and often, but not exclusively, male," Nguyen says.
Interestingly, "The Sympathizer" reads very much as if it were written by a white male -- not in terms of content, but in terms of style, or if you will, "craft." The prose is a tough-guy, film noir style of writing that at times reminds one of Raymond Chandler. While largely devoid of the more "artsy" forms of workshop-influenced prose, Nguyen is careful to maintain the style he has chosen throughout the entire book. This is more a work of art than he would apparently want to acknowledge.
I'm with him on the notion that craft is overdone -- not infrequently, writers seem to sprinkle it through their work more in an effort to let you know they are the real thing than because it adds to what they are trying to say -- but as a white male, I'm more bemused than offended by the rest of his article.
And as for "show, don't tell," people often have trouble identifying which is which.
I'm with him on the notion that craft is overdone -- not infrequently, writers seem to sprinkle it through their work more in an effort to let you know they are the real thing than because it adds to what they are trying to say -- but as a white male, I'm more bemused than offended by the rest of his article.
And as for "show, don't tell," people often have trouble identifying which is which.
No comments:
Post a Comment