Many writers speak about the experience of creativity as bringing into being something they didn’t know was there when they started (1). Many creative writing teachers, on the other hand, have to spend a lot of time uncoupling creativity from such ideas of inspiration or genius, because they imply to the novice writer that creativity is a special faculty or originating moment out of which the work arrives fully-formed, complete in itself, freely obedient to its own laws of construction, and thus cannot be improved by some decent editing. However, I hope the experience of seeing your original poem transformed by somebody else may suggest a different aspect to creative surprise. In reading what the other person has done to your poem, you’ve seen what the other person does and doesn’t understand of your intentions in writing it, and also seen that your three lines may have something in them which you weren’t aware of. Some of your little poem’s creativity has become evident through its transmission, rather than simply in relation to the special experience of its beginning in your intentions and authorship. My suggestion is that thinking of creativity as something which can operate through the processes of response, rather than merely pre-existing it, may help us to think about a difficult question for English in Higher Education, namely, how do we integrate creative writing into the general critical aims of an undergraduate curriculum? For wonderful as creative writing is, several critics have noted that its pedagogy often operates on tacitly formalist, art-for-art’s sake principles which are at odds with the way the rest of the discipline works. I agree with them, but I also think there are also some good reasons why creative writing is the way it is, and I’m interested in how we might bridge the creative–critical gap without simply collapsing one side into the other.
Creative Writing classes across the country have mushroomed over the last 20 years, and the battle against the notion that creative writing cannot be evaluated in any justifiable way is mostly over. But as a result of having to fight for its corner, my sense is that creative writing is too often still in that corner, not really integrated into the rest of the average English curriculum on an intellectual level. Any critic trying to publish an article simply discussing Bleak House in terms of character interaction or analysing the placing of the line-breaks in The Cantos for aesthetic effect would get stern readerly questions, because the critical consensus is that a text’s meaning has to have some reference to its social status and historical circumstance. But on a curriculum level, this is how we often teach creative writing. The questions asked at workshops, as Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities forcefully remarks, tend to be about the new poem’s rhyme and metre or a novel’s development of character, and they ask how the work may develop, find its inner logic, truly become itself (2). They do not tend to be about an awareness of the social networks of power and history which the new work’s words are performing. By teaching as if the rules for ‘good’ writing were ahistorical and universal, creative writing is at methodological odds with approaches practised in the rest of the curriculum, and we are encouraging double-think in our students.
‘By teaching as if the rules for ‘good’ writing were ahistorical and universal, creative writing is at methodological odds with approaches practised in the rest of the curriculum, and we are encouraging double-think in our students.’ If you tend to be suspicious about the cultural politics of the creative workshop, your suspicions will only be deepened by talking to the students themselves. The overwhelming reason to choose creative writing, according to Greg Light’s recent study of British student attitudes, is that it offers a chance to ‘be myself’ or ‘do my own work’ in a way that ordinary literature classes do not (3). Students are attracted to creative writing because it offers ‘freedom from the non–personal, external demands of facts and other people’s ideas, comments and forms’ (4). Of course, much of the creative writing teacher’s time is spent getting new writers to abandon such self-flattery and to concentrate on the work itself, with its requirements of readership and genre, and Light suggests that the marking of creative writing rightly rewards them for doing so. And yet if the students’ assumptions show only too clearly the persistence of Romantic notions of genius, they may unwittingly point up a little more clearly just why it is genuinely difficult to bring creative writing criteria smoothly into line with the English or Humanities mainstream, or indeed, the aims of any university curriculum. As is well-known, the word ‘genius’ changes its meaning over the course of the 8th century, from being the spirit of a particular place to a quasi-transcendental creative person, a shift which comes to a head in Kant’s identification of the creative artist with a uniquely free kind of activity in the modern world. ‘By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom’ begins section 43 of the Critique of Judgement, and Kant goes on to stress the difference between the ordinary craftsman who creates through following predetermined rules and the creative genius who creates his own rules (5). True creativity, in the sense that Kant bequeathes to modern aesthetics, does not simply fulfil some pre-arranged criteria, but freely creates its own standard, a standard which will then be a beacon for other lesser artists. Now even if most creative writing teachers would want to deny that anything can be perfectly original and pour scorn on the myth of the lonely genius, there is still an important sense that aesthetic creativity means changing the rules of the game. If a work is really creative, it is not simply going to fulfil the criteria we already know about: it cannot be wholly predictable, nor necessarily useful, fitting or productive, because this would imply that we already knew before the work existed what it would be about. This principle, though, bedevils easy attempts to make creative writing produce the kind of writing that literary criticism wants. Creative writing workshops which aim to cross the creative-critical divide by producing writing that is an attack on the bourgeois centrality of the author, say, or demonstrates the hybridity of post-colonial identity, will always smack of being an example: an embodiment of a truth about the nature of writing or racial identity which the author knew elsewhere in other circumstances, and which they are performing now. Like poor Little Chandler in Joyce’s Dubliners, dreaming of the praise his as–yet–unwritten poetry will receive for sounding the true Celtic note, such creative writing is trying to live up to its own criticism. And any attempt to escape by inventing a would-be Derridean creative writing whose aim is to produce something ‘other’ to all embedded critical or conceptual mastery simply twists the problem round still further, for it is still operating on the territory of the theory. Literary theorists are the ones who get excited by the way writing troubles conceptuality, and so the creative text which expressly knows this is by defi- nition creating itself as such theory’s other, which promptly makes itself not ‘other’ at all.
‘to subsume creative writing wholly to external criteria is to forget the original dream of anti-instrumentalist freedom behind it.’ This resistance to academic instrumentalism is an important aspect of Kant’s insistence that the creative work must not be subsumed under a concept. For the students in Light’s survey, it translates into the feeling that creativity must have a chance to determine its own aims, and so cannot be criticised according to an wholly alien, in- flexible and impersonal standard of judgement. However problematically, creative writing offers the possibility of their work being recognised, as opposed to merely evaluated, in a way which cannot happen in other subjects. So while it may be worthwhile to criticise the workshops which prop up the more egoistic versions of such recognition – creative writing as an exercise in self-indulgence or cheap therapy – to subsume creative writing wholly to external criteria is to forget the original dream of anti-instrumentalist freedom behind it. For students almost perpetually pigeonholed by a fateful combination of competitive exams, young people’s tribalism and demographics- based marketing, these attractions are understandable. If creative writing is taught with formalist criteria, it may be less because we are unreconstructed anti–theorists or anti–historicists, and more because we want to do some kind of justice to creativity, even as the creative-writing session in the university promptly institutionalises that freedom.
‘if art’s true creative freedom comes to be visible not at a single moment of origin, but through varying historical conditions of judgement, then a work’s creativity is not separable from its re-interpretions’ This dilemma between creative freedom and social conditions reappears in Paul Dawson’s thought–provoking account of the problem and his solution. Dawson rejects D. G. Myers’s idea that the original and best aim of creative writing is to be part of general humanities education, since this makes creativity merely ‘an adjunct or pedagogical tool’ to literary studies, and worse, a New Critical version of literary studies (6). Arguing instead that ‘aesthetic or craft–based decisions of a writer are always the result (consciously or otherwise) of ideological or political choice’, Dawson believes we need to think of creative texts as ‘directly active components in the organisation of social relations themselves’ and run creative workshops which examine how a new work participates in those social relations (7). This means challenging the story which is beautifully-written sexist claptrap, for example, or working on confessional poetry which is less about self-declaration and more an interrogation of the genre and its links with Romantic genius, insanity or women’s writing. Exciting as this sounds, it is still a bit unclear why his programme is not keeping creative writing as ‘an adjunct or pedagogical tool’, only with Cultural Studies replacing New Criticism. The problem is the phrase, ‘directly active’, which leaves no room to consider why a text’s indirection or inactivity might be important for its social relations. The problem is not simply to show that aesthetic choices are really disguised social relations, but also how the particular cultural construction of realms of ‘fiction’ or ‘art’ or ‘poetry’ or ‘creative workshops’ produces distinctive kinds of social relation, in which certain things may be said and felt which are impossible elsewhere. And a quick look at the history of creative writing suggests that this has always been an aim. Dawson makes his indictment of formalist teaching by tracing several key phrases of workshop lore – ‘show, don’t tell’, ‘reading as a writer’ – back to the principles of New Criticism, and behind them, T. S. Eliot and his impersonal poetics. Creative Writing is shown to stand in a tradition of aesthetics which makes art deny the writer’s social identity or its political resonance. But as Mark Jancovich and others have shown, it was politics which made the New Critics and Eliot celebrate the autonomy of art, because they thought it a way to resist the dominance of industrialised rationality and capitalist homogenisation (8). In fact, I think the politics of creative autonomy go back much further to one of most important and unacknowledged sources for Eliot and modern aesthetics generally, Schiller’s 795 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. There, Schiller argues that the ‘aesthetic’ means a special kind of experience of non–domination. In true art, there is no division of means and ends, no separation between the sensual and rational understanding, the concrete particular of content and the abstract universal of form. Instead, art’s specific way of relating tale and teller or form and content means that as spectators or readers, we think and feel as united beings in a way that the specialisation of modern economies or rationalist philosophy disallows:
Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual. All other forms of perception divide man, because they are based exclusively either upon the sensuous or in the spiritual part of his being; only the aesthetic mode of perception makes him a whole (9).
But in a fragmented society, art can only do this by being itself autonomous, a realm of ‘play’ in which all the oppositions which organise practical life or moral duty are suspended. Far from being unconcerned with politics, the ‘play’ of powers involved in aesthetic experience becomes the only way to imagine a politics without hierarchy. As Jacques Rancière notes in an extended and brilliant commentary on this passage, Schiller’s idea of the ‘aesthetic’ appears ‘in a specific experience which suspends the ordinary connections not only between appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, active and passive, understanding and sensibility’, and it is this suspension which ‘promises, then, a community which will be free in the measure that it will no longer know these divisions’ (10). But Schiller also confesses in his letters that we never can experience this perfect unity and freedom in a work of art. Instead, we can imagine aesthetic freedom ideally because we only experience it partially, over time and by making comparison between artworks of different types and times. Now this admission of failure has confirmed many suspicions that Schiller cannot make the aesthetic as wondrously free an experience as he claims. But I think Schiller’s failure could also be an important way of imagining how the freedom of creative writing might be related to historical criticism. For if art’s true creative freedom comes to be visible not at a single moment of origin, but through varying historical conditions of judgement, then a work’s creativity is not separable from its re-interpretations, and may come to reveal more of itself through them. As readers, we always read new works with a particular awareness of what situations those words have already been used in; we are historically and theoretically- situated in our judgements and have to see the work within our multiple and overlapping social frame- works. But the more we understand the situatedness of those judgements, then the more we may become aware of how those judgements and the structures to which they belong may require recalibration in our encounter with the work’s creativity. That is, the freedom of creative work may come to happen in its repeated exceeding of any particular scene of reading. Derek Attridge’s wonderful book The Singularity of Literature puts it like this:
If the work of art can retain or renew its alterity and inventiveness across temporal gaps – if, indeed, this power is what constitutes it as a work of art – … works of art… depend on their resistance to accommodation across time; and it is through this resistance that they make further artistic invention possible (11).
But such resistance to complete judgement can only be known through understanding what criteria of judgement are operating, and this might help us make links between creative writing and the rest of the curriculum. Rather than saying that the work can only be judged here and now on its own terms – and hence back to ideas of formalist autonomy – we might say that it establishes those terms as its creativity comes to be visible through a series of situated readings, but that its freedom is always established through its re-readability.
What might this mean in practice? Let’s imagine a creative writing workshop where students are reading each other’s work, and are fairly comfy doing so. Then imagine a parallel series of seminars in which their creative reading of each other’s work is guided into a discussion of the cultural categories they found themselves using in encountering it, and how the new work fits or resists them. For example, what were their expectations of the piece, its cues of genre or form or marketplace niche? Were those expectations fulfilled; were the readers up- ‘the freedom of creative work may come to happen in its repeated exceeding of any particular scene of reading’
set, or moved, or bored, and why? This then opens the question of the cultural conditions of audience expectations and how our ‘aesthetic’ emotions may be tied up with something like Raymond Williams’s socially-derived structures of feeling – while at the same time keeping visible how the work challenges those structures. Noting how the value of self-expression (‘being who you truly are’) tends to be a catch-all Good Thing for the modern West, for instance, might lead into an interesting history of how historically-variable this value is, and the kinds of work and genres it promotes or erases, and thence to questions of canon-formation and re-formation. Or to take a real example, a student once remarked to me that the creative piece in question was all about cars and had effectively naturalised their existence, but felt that in the light of environmental pressures we’d look back in 2050 on casual references to the internal combustion engine with same degree of distaste now reserved for casual racism. This then unfolded into a discussion about Kipling, how much a work belongs to its era and whether it can be more than some of the values of its time, and also into some ironical awareness about the bias of our age’s own critical questions.
Or alternatively, such a seminar might pick up on the feeling many new writers have that their text is apparently gaining a life of its own as it is being read and queried by others. Hearing one’s own words in someone else’s mouth seems to bring out connotations and perceptions the author did not ostensibly intend. This might lead to the issue of self–fictionalisation and how different the ‘I’ on the page is from the ‘I’ sitting at the table, and which will last longer. Equally, it might lead to the question of what such public circulation does to identity- based criticism of the author. Did the new author think she wrote as a woman, say, or was being read as a woman, and did her text say more than its author’s gender, race, or class? In my limited experience, students do often feel this, and it leads to questions as to why we feel uncomfortable applying the same kinds of critical categories to ourselves as we do to Toni Morrison or Geoffrey Chaucer. Asking the author about what they felt of people’s reading of their work, too, opens up the question to what extent aesthetic content is extractable or paraphraseable in critical summary, and what we think we are doing when we say, ‘This passage means…’ What does a passage’s particular form do to our experience of the text, and how might the letter of the work resist the ideal critical evaluations we make of it, as an event being read rather than just an object to be dissected?
Even if you wouldn’t want to teach like this at all, thinking of creativity as something which takes place over time is often very helpful for nervous students to realise that the judgements given by creative writing classes can’t be the fi nal arbiter of their value, since the work may always come to matter to more people than are currently reading it. Still, I know many of us are asking these sorts of critical questions in our literary teaching. My hope is that rethinking the way that a work’s creativity comes to happen might help us relate what happens in the workshop to those seminars in a way which improves them both.
Notes
1. Brilliantly discussed in Tim Clark, The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester University Press, 1997).
2. Creative Writing and the New Humanities (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 116ff; cf. Morton and Zavardaseh’s older polemic, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop’, Cultural Critique 11 (1988–9), 155–73.
3. Gregory Light, ‘From the Personal to the Public: Conceptions of Creative Writing in Higher Education’, Higher Education, 43:2 (2002), 257–276.
5. Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 170.
6. Dawson, Creative Writing, p. 164.
7. Dawson, ibid., p. 211. ‘Directly active’, p. 208 (quoting Tony Bennett).
8. Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Programme of New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 20–30.
9. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed and trans. by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 215 (Letter XXVII).
10. Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthetique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p. 45, 52 (my translation).
11. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 49. This passage, I suspect, will mark a crucial difference with Rob Pope’s Deleuzian Creativity (London: Routledge, 2005): Pope identifies creativity with autonomous otherness, a self–organising pluralism construed as evolutionary diversity or infinite game, whereas Attridge’s focus is on the way that the otherness of the singular work is always constituted in relation to situated categories of judgement. Cf. Sean Matthews’ article in this Newsletter.
