Early this week, PEN American Center named six new table hosts for its annual dinner on Tuesday, substituting for the six who opted out to protest the organization’s decision to present its “freedom of expression courage award” to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Nonetheless, an additional 198 writers have joined the initial six dissenters, Peter Carey, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, and Taiye Selasi. The 204 writers (so far no doubt understand that their vocation depends on the First Amendment. Of course they believe in freedom of speech, and it’s awful that 12 people were executed in Paris in January, but from their perspective that’s no reason to celebrate a bunch of cartoonists and writers who’ve made a habit of picking on a dispossessed minority still suffering the depredations of European colonialism.
It’s true, as critics of the PEN dissidents charge, that the letter and subsequent comments show that they don’t know much about the magazine itself—for instance, that it makes fun of sports more often than it does of Islam Nor do they understand the role Charlie Hebdo plays in Parisian cultural life, as a pillar of the institutionalized nostalgia for May 1968. It’s not even clear how many of the PEN dissidents are able to read the left-wing French weekly.
But their gesture in reality isn’t about Charlie Hebdo or Islamist terror—rather, it’s about something much closer to home. It’s about literary politics: professional networks and advancement, ambition, jobs, money, and prestige—in other words, the sociological exigencies that are part of any industry, in this case, the American literary establishment.
It’s also about real politics and how the progressive camp in the Democratic party is advancing against the party’s liberal camp. The progressives have a huge advantage since their standard-bearer is the president of the United States.
Presumably, there were even more reasons for signing the letter than there are writers who signed it. The one all 204 share, both the name writers and the most obscure, is the desire to be relevant. It takes a long time to write a book, even a bad one, and it’s especially hard on novelists. If you’re a short story writer or poet, you probably publish a few pieces a year in between books, which signals to colleagues (agents, editors, and publishers as well as other writers) that you’re still grinding away. It’s much tougher if you’re a novelist and years away from delivering a manuscript—and hundreds or thousands of miles away from the New York publishing scene. Signing a protest letter reminds everyone you’re still out there, even if it’s somewhere in the Midwest teaching undergrads. I am sure I am not the only one surprised to learn that the author of Endless Love is still writing books—in the horror genre, no less.
Sure, there are some big names who signed the letter, like Russell Banks and Janet Malcolm, but notably absent are big-name writers who not only get large advances but also, and more importantly, earn lots of money for their publishers. Jeffrey Eugenides, for instance, isn’t among the PEN insurgents, nor is Donna Tartt or Jonathan Franzen. It is their success that helps convince publishing’s corporate owners that while potboilers and self-help books cover the rent, literature also sometimes pays off. In other words, the big-name writers who are not on the list make possible the careers of the big-name writers who are. Presumably the latter are consoled that while the former may earn real money, they have real politics. The letter then is a passage in a story about a family that like all families is scarred by jealousy and resentment.
For those at the very bottom of the literary food chain, the letter is a resume builder, which is why so many of the names are unfamiliar to anyone who doesn’t have a subscription to Prairie Schooner or Zyzzyva. Some of these writers are just a few years out of grad school, apprentices, and now they’re rubbing elbows with Peter Carey—or at least their names are in the same column at the bottom of the same letter. Maybe now, they dream, that opening at Yaddo next winter isn’t out of the question. Maybe they’ve got a shot at that job at Iowa, after all. Maybe Andrew Wylie will represent their novel and sell it to Sonny Mehta. At the very least, history will show they were on the right side of history.
Many of the people who signed the letter have spent their entire adult lives on university campuses. I know one writer on that list, a man of exquisite literary taste, who has never had to earn a living. These peculiar social conditions shape not only the literary ethos of the era, but also the Democratic party’s contemporary political climate.
The chief complaint about MFA programs—registered even by teachers, administrators and students themselves—has always been that they produce writers whose work all too often reflects the fact that they know very little about the world outside of writing workshops. The people they spend most time with are teachers, fellow students, and fictional characters. It’s hardly a coincidence that Francine Prose, one of the original six, is best known for a novel about sexual politics in the academy.
The MFA program bubble is nearly fifty years old—two generations’ worth of writing teachers and writing students engaged in the same conversation. The fashions are different, but the fundamental structure is the same. Anyone who has read through submissions to literary magazines or publishing houses can tell you who are the most fashionable writers of the moment in any given genre because a high percentage of the submissions read like imitations of those writers. There are fresh voices who manage to break out of the system, and are rewarded with big advances, but the rank and file of the literary establishment—the majority of the people who signed the Charlie Hedbo letter—consists of people re-circulating the same air.
The political form this kind of literary mannerism takes is academic progressivism, a dispensation rooted in identity politics. This is the dominant force that shaped Barack Obama’s worldview.
It would not be hard to compile a list of the books and writers that mattered to the president during his college years because everyone who studied the liberal arts and humanities in the ’80s and ’90s read the same thing. There were important novelists, like Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, two of Obama’s favorites, but the real stars were the theorists, like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. I bet Obama has a copy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus he still means to read someday, right after he gets to Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
I am certain Obama took to heart Edward Said’s 1978 masterwork Orientalism because it helps explain why the leader of the free world didn’t go to Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacre to march arm-in-arm with other world leaders. And thus it also explains why 204 American writers oppose presenting PEN’s courage award to a magazine whose staffers were gunned down where they work. Oppressing Muslim and Arab subalterns through cultural representations, as Charlie Hebdo's staff did, is a textbook case of orientalism. To honor them would not only exonerate a culprit of colonial violence against Third World peoples, but also undermine the foundations of their own political power.
Texts are not just literary constructions, but also symbols and sources of power. This is true not only for Islamists, say, but also those who distrust all religious fundamentalisms. The point is not that the PEN 204 believe that Islam is superior to Christianity or Judaism, say, or more worthy of sympathy. It’s just that Muslims as colonial subjects play a central role in one of the foundational texts of identity politics, Orientalism. Those nurtured in the academy over the last several decades cannot help but rebel against PEN’s decision to honor Charlie Hebdo because their ideology leaves them no other choice.
The First Amendment is someone else’s central text—in the Democratic party, it belongs to the liberals and the press. But the latter is losing its institutional clout, and the former are becoming increasingly irrelevant. To be sure, part of this is because of the Internet and the rise of social media platforms like Twitter that tend to level out media. However, much of it is also is also the fault of journalists themselves.
For instance, when in the wake of the Paris attack New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet chose not to reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoons mocking Muhammad, lest it offend “the Muslim family in Brooklyn,” he not only undermined his profession but also signaled that the institutional power of the Democratic party was shifting—from the press to that body whose power derives from identity politics and a half-century-long near monopoly on cultural indoctrination, the academy. It’s certainly understandable that Times management would be worried about the safety of its employees—threatened not by Brooklyn families, but rather by terrorists carrying automatic weapons—and yet the only way for a free press to protect the First Amendment is by exercising it, especially when it is perilous to do so. If you don’t defend the sources and symbols of your power, you lose your power.
And that’s why the PEN insurgents seized the advantage and opposed their own organization. It has yet to dawn on much of the liberal wing of the Democratic party that the progressives they see as allies are in fact making a run at them. So liberals are scratching their heads, wondering what’s happened to their colleagues: __Don’t these writers believe in standing in solidarity with other writers and artists? Aren’t they at least decent enough to leave the dead in peace? What’s the harm in a roomful of wealthy New York donors who probably haven’t read a book in the last year anyway applauding a dozen murdered Frenchmen, including two Muslims? The PEN 204 doesn’t understand the bill of rights? Don’t these guys remember the fatwa against Salman Rushdie?__
Sure, they know all that—and if they don’t, it doesn’t matter anyway. They’re protecting the sources of their professional and political power, symbols drawn not from the Constitution but identity politics.