CULTURE Let there be light
Books of the month: Andrew Hook
Claire Askew: in both collections
Be the First to Like This: New Scottish Poetry, edited by Colin Waters
Vagabond Voices, £11.95
New Writing Scotland 32, edited by Gerry Cambridge and Zoe Strachan
Association for Scottish Literary Studies, £9.95
Roots and Fruits of Scottish Culture, edited by Ian Brown and Jean Berton
Scottish Literature International, £9.95
A generation ago the central issue in English studies was crystal clear. ‘Theory’ had emerged as the one topic confronting – and dividing – English departments everywhere. Based on the work of a group of European scholars – Jacques Derrida, Robert Barthes, Paul de Man, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, are among those most regularly cited – ‘theory’ seemed to offer literary studies a new and demanding intellectual rigour which would replace the mere opinionated subjectivity of past approaches.
Theory became intensely controversial. In the 1970s and 80s and into the 90s, its exponents and opponents struggled to take or maintain control over how English was studied. More recently, however, that culture war has lost much of its intensity. Scholars and critics now can pick and chose whatever aspects of ‘theory’ they happen to prefer.
So if the theory war is over, what has taken its place? To my mind the answer is clear – even if no-one could have predicted it in the post-theory world. The most striking aspect of the teaching and study of what we used to call ‘English’ is the rise and rise of ‘Creative Writing’. Having joined the Glasgow University English literature department in 1979, I was surprised to learn that honours students in their final year could choose to replace one of their nine final honours exam papers with a piece of creative writing of their own. In fact this option was very rarely taken up, but in my previous universities – Edinburgh and Aberdeen – no such option even existed.
I don’t know when Glasgow instituted its creative writing option, but a decade before my arrival in Glasgow, the University of East Anglia had become the first British university to teach a course, and offer a postgraduate MA degree, in creative writing. Established by Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury, both members of the university’s department of English studies, the East Anglia course soon gained a good reputation. The conventional position in British universities, however, remained – that literary study and literary creation were two entirely distinct activities. University English departments focused on the former, and had nothing to do with the latter.
No doubt there were people who were aware that in the United States some English departments had begun to teach creative writing: the hugely successful Iowa Writers’ Workshop had been set up as long ago as 1936, and its participants and graduates made up an impressive list of major American poets, novelists, and dramatists. But even with the emergence of the East Anglia programme in 1970, in succeeding decades there was little sign that the conventional absence of such courses in the English departments of British universities was about to change.
The contrast with the present position could not be sharper. Today creative writing courses rule. So much so that in some institutions ‘creative writing’ has moved out of English departments altogether and gained a wholly independent existence as a subject in its own right. For a time there was a debate over whether creative writing should be available (as at East Anglia) only as a postgraduate qualification, or whether undergraduates should be able to study it as part of their first degree. Next came an argument over whether it should be possible to obtain, not just an MA, but the ultimate accolade of a PhD in creative writing. Today, both in this country and the US, in almost all colleges and universities, creative writing courses are available for most students at every conceivable level.
To meet the demand for such courses, there has been a parallel, huge increase in the number of teaching posts in the area. In a recent year, the American Modern Languages Association reported that there were more appointments across America in creative writing than even in 20th-century English literature. In fact creative writing has become the new main source of what used to be called ‘patronage’ for today’s writers. Publish a novel, a book of short stories, a play or two, and the chances are that a part-time or full-time post teaching creative writing will guarantee you an income and a continuing role as an author. Outside academia, publishers, literary agents, and newspapers are offering writing courses of their own.
Why has creative writing boomed in this way? Student demand is the answer at the academic level. The funding of the humanities in our university system is now wholly determined by student choice. Once it was clear that creative writing was a popular option, it was inevitable that courses would be provided. Of course there is still a question over exactly why creative writing has proved so popular with contemporary students. Some have suggested that the dominance of ‘theory’ in the teaching of English departments is partly responsible: ‘theory’ had become a self-enclosed world, its texts more important than literary texts. At least in creative writing courses students study in detail actual stories by Hemingway or Fitzgerald or whoever. But there has to be a more comprehensive reason for the boom in creative writing. Has it to do with contemporary society’s focus on the individual – on his or her right to self-expression? Is writing a possible route to celebrity status? Even if success cannot be guaranteed in career terms, creative writing seems to help to define and empower the individual.
What has triggered these speculations is two collections of contemporary Scottish writing: ‘Be the First to Like This: New Scottish Poetry’ edited by Colin Waters, and ‘New Writing Scotland 32’ edited by Gerry Cambridge and Zoe Strachan. The work of 38 poets appears in the first volume, 26 in the second. Clearly this is a good time to be a poet. The number of small publishers apparently willing to publish volumes of poetry is quite extraordinary. Never have there been more poetry competitions, prizes, and awards. Spoken-word events involving poetry in performance, music and film have become part of the contemporary cultural scene. (The editor of ‘Be the First’ is an enthusiast for this development.)
Those who take part in creative writing courses have good reason for hoping that success can actually lead to becoming a published writer.
Here is the evidence. Of the 38 poets in ‘Be the First to Like This’, as many as 14 are creative writing course graduates, while another eight have degrees in English or Scottish literature. They are ‘new’ in the sense that none have published more than two collections of poetry, and the great majority are under 40 years old. In the Association for Scottish Literary Studies’ volume, the proportion of creative writing graduates is not so high, but then they are not all ‘new’ and quite a number of contributors are teachers of creative writing.
So are today’s professionally- trained young writers any different to young writers in the past? It is a difficult question to answer. Is there emerging any kind of conventional orthodoxy about how to write a poem or story? (‘New Writing Scotland 32’, like the previous volumes in the series, includes prose as well as poetry, and as before I remain unconvinced that the constant switching between genres does justice to either.) I suppose not, but perhaps certain trends or emphases are recognisable. Most of these young poets do indeed seem committed to the view that the essence of poetry is self-expression. Engagement with the world beyond the self is much less common. So what do they write about? In a poem called ‘Bad moon’, Claire Askew, one of only two writers who make it into both collections, comes to the not untypical conclusion that ‘Nobody wants to read poems about this’ – that is, about the unconventional ‘bad’ things the moon also shines down upon.
‘Roots and Fruits of Scottish Culture’ is a collection of papers on contemporary Scottish literature delivered at a conference in France, attended mainly by European scholars, edited by Ian Brown and Jean Berton. At the conclusion of his summary introduction, Ian Brown writes: ‘Contemporary Scottish literature continues to insist on the complexity of histories, myths, fictions and identities, and that these all include ambivalence rather than certainty, dark as well as light, and potential for corruption as well as genuine enlightenment’.
It strikes me that most of the young writers in these two anthologies have been encouraged to think and write along similar lines – with their emphasis tending to fall on the ‘ambivalence’, ‘dark’, and ‘corruption’. The result for the ordinary reader may be a longing for a little more in the way of simple light – and the pleasure it can provide. In all, 82 writers are represented. Given such a huge number, and the brevity of individual contributions, I find myself unable to pick out any future Joyce or Yeats or Eliot.
In conclusion, however, let me draw attention to what strikes me as the most fascinating, and perhaps the most important, piece that appears here. As it happens, it is not the work of a new or young Scottish writer. Christopher Whyte has a well-established reputation as a poet and translator working in both English and Gaelic. ‘A Face That Won’t Be Etched Along The Crest Of The Cuillin’ is a poem in Gaelic, translated by Niall O’Gallagher, exploring in moving detail Whyte’s complex relationship with the most famous of modern Gaelic poets, Sorley MacLean. It is easily the longest poem in the volume, but the editors must have felt privileged to print it. The following passage comes in the poem’s section 5:
he reflects that no human authority
at all can bestow the gift of new speech,
the gift of a golden tongue and skilled words,
that it’s a fish, inhabiting the darkest
waters, hiding the golden gleam of its scales
until they are ready for the light.
No creative writing course can teach that golden gleam.
By Andrew Hook | February 2015