We Came Along with a Hammer

Excerpt from a New Yorker article by Louis Menard on creative writing programs that mentions N. Scott Momaday:

The absorption of fiction writing into the university has a lot to do with the emergence of robust traditions (as opposed to scattered works) of so-called multicultural literature. As McGurl notes, virtually all the major figures in Latino literature have been American academics. The same is true of Asian-American novelists, many of whom have held university appointments, and of Native American writers. N. Scott Momaday was a student of Stegner’s at Stanford, which is where he began work on his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “House Made of Dawn” (1968).

These writers have a special relation to the “outside contained on the inside” feature of academic creative-writing programs, and many of the most celebrated have been accused of inauthenticity. McGurl tells the story of the attack on Momaday’s “House Made of Dawn” by Karl Kroeber. Kroeber is not a Native American; he is a professor of English at Columbia whose many interests include Native American literature, and he criticized Momaday for attempting to “evoke an ‘Indianness’ for his readers (the majority of whom will presumably not be Indians) through an Anglo-American literary structure that must prohibit any authentically Indian imaginative form.” Native American literature can be taught in a university, in other words, but Native American literature should not be written in a university.

Authenticity is a snark—although someone will always go hunting for it. McGurl’s response to Kroeber is sensible: since Momaday is a Native American, and since he developed his literary style by studying white modernist writers at Stanford and other universities, “rather than being contaminated by modernism, Indian art now includes modernism as one of its elements.” As McGurl points out, the horses that the Plains Indians rode when they hunted, so picturesquely, the buffalo were European imports.

And though some readers are devoted to fiction about ethnic minorities because it tells “their story,” there is a degree to which such literature is for outsiders, a variety of anthropology in which natives “inform” on their own cultures to literary tourists. The rest of the natives are often not thrilled to find their practices paraded before the gaze of outsiders. “To celebrate one’s family to the maximum, to put them proudly and visibly into print, might require betraying them to the eyes of an alien observer we might call ‘America,’ ” as McGurl puts it. “Portnoy’s Complaint” is a case in point. All literature about an ethnic minority by members of that ethnic minority is, potentially, a shanda fur die goyim. More striking is that writing of this kind coming out of creative-writing programs today is the subject matter of literature and ethnic-studies departments tomorrow. Universities have become restaurants that bake their own bread.