According to the Weekend Australia (Feb 9-10) thirty-three out of thirty-eight Australian universities now have programs in creative writing. This grim piece of news brought to mind something Flannery O’Connor said. Asked whether she thought universities stifled creative writers she replied that they didn’t stifle enough of them.
OK, Tim Winton learnt something from Elizabeth Jolley, Ian McEwan went to East Anglia (in the first intake, when Malcolm Bradbury presided). Does anyone believe that either writer would have withered and died unless nurtured in the groves of academe? No, the saving remnant won’t save this argument.
We live in a culture saturated, sodden, rotten with stories and swarming with people who want to add more. Most of these people won’t get published. Most of what’s published will be forgotten within a year (and sometimes remaindered within three months). Not to mention the torrent of books published elsewhere in the Anglosphere, and not forgetting the Rest of the World. Enough already.
Especially because, although there’s a rough justice in the system, there’s also a raw deal for good writers. Someone who publishes a couple of well-received novels should have no difficulty finding a publisher for number three, right? Wrong. Increasingly, publishers are looking for the $Big Book. Once it’s obvious that you’re not Bryce Courtenay, you’re gone.
What possesses our universities to decide to turn out, year after year, a small army of people to join this ratrace, and to add to it that distinctive trait of our time, a sense of entitlement? Those grave elders who make the decisions in universities, surely they know these things?
Nope. This is what they know. Student numbers in humanities must be kept up, otherwise there’s less government money, staff cuts and general woe. It doesn’t much matter what the student numbers actually do, since in the humanities there’s no direct connection between course and career. So if creative writing will get ‘em through the doors, creative writing it is. The system is insulated against any vulgar intrusion from the market, because there is no market. Or rather (see above) there is one in which supply massively exceeds demand.
And there’s more, but not tonight.