The literary landscape

We have a culture with more skilled creative writers than it knows what to do with. Many, with limited relevant opportunities, turn to teaching and thereby train and release even more skilled creative writers into the culture, which has no relevant use for them. MFA programs have exploded in the last half century, producing more and more skilled writers. What do we do with them?

At the same time, literary intelligence in the culture has declined.

When I was a young writer in the 1960s, "the literary novel" was a badge of honor. Everyone was writing one. You struggled to write literature. Publishers published them hoping to break even. It was their duty to the literary culture to publish them. All that pop lit stuff could make the money to support this more honorable responsibility.

Today "the literary novel" is a pejorative term. Tell an agent you have a literary novel and watch her run away.  Publishers are no longer guardians of the culture. Indeed now most of them are minor companies owned by large corporations, where the goal is not literature but profit. It has always made bad business sense to publish novels knowing they would make little or no money, and now accountants call the shots to end such travesties.

Anyone striving to write a serious novel faces a declining audience, declining interest, a shrinking marketplace.

A few years ago I had occasion to quote W. H. Auden in my class. From the blank stares I got, I asked if anyone was familiar with Auden's work. No one. Did anyone know who he was? No one. Had anyone ever heard or read the name before? One hand went up.

More and more writers with fewer opportunities for serious writing and a shrinking lost sense of their own literary history. This, it seems to me, is where we are today.

Thank the gods I'm in my 70s!