McGurl, McCullers, and the failure of the postwar institution

In “The Program Era,” Mark McGurl uses the example of Phillip Roth to discuss the anxiety of a certain kind of writer in the face of institutionalized creativity, arguing that while Roth writes about universities and works within them to write and teach, he also believes in a “drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership” (Roth quoted in McGurl 116) which can be traced in part to the way the postwar American university engages with literature. McGurl’s argument about the effect of institutionalization on postwar American fiction rests on the anxious reflexivity of writers like Roth whose work internalizes the system as they decry it, and it also depends on the university’s attachment to “excellence” as a sought-after but ultimately meaningless quality that creative writers bring to campus. Just as Roth can’t reconcile the ways he hates and uses the institution, McGurl can’t reconcile the university’s attachment to an empty excellence with the fact that programs do indeed produce large quantities of “excellent” writing. As a result the article ends on an unsettling note, with a series of questions meant to be read in two registers simultaneously. “And isn’t postwar American fiction, after all, unprecedented in its excellence? If I could, I would ask this concluding question with two voices in counterpoint, and only one of them sarcastic” (128). And shortly after: “Is there not more excellent fiction being produced now than anyone (especially considering the excellence of television) has time to read?” (129).

            I want to argue that McGurl’s inability to articulate the result of postwar American fiction’s interaction with institutions without resorting to this odd mixture of irony and sincerity is a symptom of a problem that runs through Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946). Because it asks the wider question of what institutions mean for individuals, McCullers’s wartime American novel can help us comprehend McGurl’s postwar problem.

            Member’s protagonist Frankie Addams comes of age as the U.S. emerges from World War II, and her struggle for a sense of belonging is driven by fear in the face of a world that is “fast and loose and turning, faster and looser and bigger than it ever had been before…cracked by the loud battles and turning a thousand miles a minute” (McCullers 32). Frankie wanders through most of the novel trying to successfully perform masculinity and femininity, adulthood and childhood, worldliness and domesticity, in order to belong to one of these categories because “To the think about the world for very long made her afraid. She was not afraid of Germans or bombs or Japanese. She was afraid because in the war they would not include her, and because the world seemed somehow separate from herself” (20). But her performances are confused, unconvincing, and too loosely defined, as the boundaries of gender, age, and geography refuse to remain stable. Finally Frankie arrives at a shaky sense of comfort by attaching herself to the idea of the wedding. For Frankie, the function of an institution, in this case marriage represented by the wedding, is to offer a sense of security by mediating interaction between the “unjoined” individual and the “fast and big and strange” world (20). But the wedding turns out to be an empty signifier, suggesting possibilities that can never be fulfilled. Since the institution of marriage remains out of Frankie’s grasp—we never see a marriage in the novel and Frankie can barely imagine what it might mean—its function is meaningless.

           As McGurl recognizes when he writes that Roth is in part “staunchly upholding high modernist literary values” (McGurl 117), the longing for art unsullied by institutions is a form of pre-war nostalgia. Writers like Roth dream of art that engages directly with the fast and big and strange world, and only grudgingly acknowledge their inability to participate in such a world.  McCullers’s Frankie does not show us the development of institutions, but rather the development of a longing for their solace. Indeed I suspect that the story of the rise of creative writing, which McGurl leaves out, is a chapter in that larger story of the desire to tame what comes to seem faster and bigger and stranger by the decade.

            So Member suggests to us that one role of the institution is to mediate and thus to comfort. But Member also suggests that institutionalization is a failure: “The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was supposed to have no part” (McCullers 129). Institutions don’t do their job, and they exist as façades that only offer false comfort. Perhaps this can account for the unsettling sense that McGurl applauds and denounces the work of the institution simultaneously. If we understand ourselves as participating in institutions that fail us all the while, how can we not remain unconvinced?