Henry James and the Value of Craft

From 1905 to 1909, Henry James curated, and often significantly revised, his corpus for Scribner's twenty-four-volume New York Edition, properly titled The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Looking back in 1915, the aging master noted that “from the point of view of profit either to the publishers or myself,” the project had been “a complete failure; vulgarly speaking, it doesn't sell” (Henry James: A Life in Letters 558). From the point of view of literary posterity, however, the New York Edition, especially the critical prefaces James composed for these volumes, now represents an iconic and profoundly influential articulation of modern narrative technique. In his new prefaces, James emphasizes “the challenge of economic representation,” of constructing a narrative perspective fit for rendering the dramatic material at hand without excess or waste, such that every element of a story participates in “an organic form” (Art of the Novel 87, 84). He defends “the very short story” as an ideal genre for honing such technique: “one of the costliest” for an artist in terms of labor yet “one of the most indestructible . . . forms of composition in general use” (240). James also foregrounds how this economic challenge—turning the material costs of the “artist-life” into the durable value of art—appears thematically in his fiction, calling “the conflict between art and ‘the world’ . . . one of the half-dozen great primary motives” (70). That his grand edition failed to sell, then, ironically confirmed an opposition that James expresses throughout his prefaces, between the vulgar economics of everyday life and the subtler, if less immediately rewarding, economics of literary craft.

Though James never really emphasized the term craft, it was inextricably pinned to his legacy with Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921). Lubbock's book expanded on “the narrative theory developed piecemeal across Henry James's prefaces to the New York Edition,” and its recapitulated message, “that the technical question of narrative perspective has profound aesthetic consequences for the work,” helped alter the direction of American fiction for “the rest of the twentieth century and beyond” (McGurl, Program Era 49). Creative writing programs—first at Iowa and then, by 1975, at some fifty other academic institutions—turned these Jamesian values into systematic practice, encapsulated in touchstone aphorisms about experience (“write what you know”) and creativity (“find your voice”). Together, these cardinal values promise that anyone can produce meaningful narrative so long as they also embrace a third mediating value, craft (“show don't tell”), as a template for honing self-expression into professional authorship (McGurl, Program Era 23). James's economic representation—achieved through third-person limited narration and a dramatic method focused on action and dialogue rather than extended description or world building—provided this mediating platform, an adaptable technical standard cultivated through meticulous revision. In his history of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Wilbers notes how Iowa promoted these core ideals through the success of early pupils such as Wallace Stegner, Paul Engle, and Margaret Walker Alexander, who gained recognition as writers and often as writing program administrators (51). Iowa also added the emerging New Critics Austin Warren and René Wellek to its faculty in 1939, and the “New Criticism,” remarks McGurl, “put the point of view of the artist at the very center of postwar literary studies” (Program Era 133). Enshrined in textbooks like Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks's Understanding Fiction (1939), which the Iowa graduate Flannery O'Connor called her “Bible,” and Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate's The House of Fiction (1950), which takes its title from the New York Edition preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James's narrative ideals eventually became guiding standards for modern writers and readers alike (Wilbers 133).

Wilbers's history of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and McGurl's Program Era join several other, more anecdotal volumes in documenting the personalities, careers, and output of the program era, such as David O. Dowling's A Delicate Aggression, Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer's We Wanted to Be Writers, and Frank Conroy's The Eleventh Draft.Footnote ² Yet none of these engaging books examines how the program era's guiding aesthetic ideals first emerged from James's struggle with the market—an economic prehistory of craft.Footnote ³ This elision began even earlier, with the revival of James in the 1930s and 1940s. Lionel Trilling, F. O. Matthiessen, and R. P. Blackmur helped reframe James's career as a lived commitment to the ideals of his famous prefaces, marshaling his late claims about art's removal from “the world” into a defense of their own modernist reading practices (Anesko 6). In fact, James was made financially secure by his writing only at intervals, notes Michael Anesko, and his “dependence on the magazines makes his career representative rather than exceptional” for the age (123), one of many writers who moved cannily “to sell his precious wares” in “the marketplace of letters” (7). In private writings, James did not express the same reverence for controlled, organic form as in his late prefaces, but rather displayed a “characteristic tension between his honest desire for success and a fear of appearing too clamorous for the tangible rewards that the marketplace could confer” (Anesko 11). James, it seems, recognized the need for what Bourdieu calls “position-taking” in the modern literary field, those concrete commercial choices that, as much as narrative technique, determine an author's reception (30). A writer may claim autonomy from commercial interests, yet this claim itself represents but another position within the modern field of cultural production. James knew as much, even if, by the end of his life, his critical writings often recast his own choices as an absolute conflict between art and society, providing later critics a resource for promoting their aesthetic ideology of modern art.

Taking a sociological view of the history of craft requires foregrounding the pivotal commercial experience that led James to his late claims about literary form: his famously disastrous efforts at writing for the theater. By the late 1880s, James was composing stories such as “The Lesson of the Master” (1888) and The Tragic Muse (1889–90), exploring “the extent to which an artist must be prepared to make his compromises with the market-place; and whether life itself wasn't a sell” (Edel 347). Life was imitating art: The Tragic Muse, along with The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, had all been “three-decker failures” (Horne 11). It would be a decade before James wrote another novel. Even more troubling from a financial standpoint, American magazines, including the stalwart Atlantic, were growing less interested in his work by 1890, a development that Ellery Sedgwick notes had as much to do with “changes in the magazine market for fiction” as with James's increasingly difficult style (312).Footnote ⁴ When he “turned to the theater after completing The Tragic Muse,” remarks Anesko, James “was unusually frank about his motives,” telling his longtime friend William Dean Howells that it was not “the love of art and the pursuit of truth that have goaded me into such miry ways,” but rather “the definite necessity of making, for my palsied old age, more money than literature has ever consented or evidently will ever consent, to yield me. My books simply don't sell” (qtd. in Anesko 141). James did score a modest success converting his 1877 novel The Americans into a play, which ran some seventy nights, but he withdrew his second effort, Mrs. Jasper's Way, after witnessing an embarrassingly poor rehearsal (Edel 385). The final blow came on 5 January 1895, when Guy Domville premiered at the St. James Theater in London.Footnote ⁵ “Jeers, hisses, catcalls” descended on the playwright when he appeared before his audience, and James “escaped as soon as he could” from this devastating scene (420, 421). He had earned but £275, a mere “token of the prosperity that would have awaited him had he succeeded” (426).

It took some time to recover from these theatrical failures; James's notebook from December 1895 records how personal finances finally drove him to return to the short story:

James would praise the short story in his New York Edition prefaces as a vehicle for the writer to refine technique, and indeed it would eventually become “the privileged genre of the creative writing program,” offering the chance to fashion “an aesthetic whole” within the constraints of an academic calendar (McGurl, Program Era 339). Yet James's own “scientific trial of the form,” as he insists, originated from “economic necessity.” The late Jamesian technique did not appear overnight, remarks Leon Edel, but rather “proceeded by trial and error”; James “had abandoned all hope of box-office earnings; but he had gained an artist's grasp of what narrative fiction might be if he had a plan, a design, a method” (434).Footnote ⁶ “After his trial in the theater,” concurs Anesko, “James shrewdly sensed that being unpopular, unsalable at any price, had a cachet of its own—one that publishers, curiously, might bid for,” and that “smaller, more discriminating publics existed in tandem with [mass audiences] and might be capable of supporting writers of distinction” (143). Hearing only aesthetic guidelines in the word craft overlooks this economic history, the way that market failure first gave rise to the aesthetic guidelines and authorial values later idealized for modern fiction. James defined his aims for narrative fiction not simply to purify his technique but also as a means to revalue literary production, to substitute success in an economy of representation for success in an economy of market goods. Craft, then, denotes not only a set of technical procedures but the means by which a modern writer might aim to bypass commercial judgment for the higher judgment of art, substituting symbolic for economic capital—while also crucially reframing this calculated position-taking in the literary field as a matter of stylistic principle.

In several short stories from the 1890s, James captures this growing rupture between what Bourdieu calls the large-scale and restricted literary fields. This rupture describes both the increasing differences between elite and popular literary cultures as well as “two opposing images of the criteria of success” (Bourdieu 101). In “The Middle Years” (1893) we follow a novelist named Dencombe, who has “preferred single volumes and aimed at a rare compression” yet now worries over his “sense of ebbing time, of shrinking opportunity” (337). He discovers in Dr. Hugh a devoted reader, “the greatest admirer” he might possess: someone “enamored of literary form” (342). When Dencombe falls ill, Dr. Hugh stays by his bedside, breaking with his patron, a countess, who cuts him off in response. As in other tales, James uses a climactic death to explore what values should inform one's life. “The Middle Years” closes with Dencombe fading, supported by one true admirer; with his final words, Dencombe reaffirms art as a practice unencumbered by commerce or recognition: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art” (354). James, notes Edel, “was beginning to feel that the greatest art is not that which creates a sensation or a success” (375). Commercial writers aim to produce immediate economic gain, epitomized by the best seller, but the modern artist, exemplified in tales such as “The Middle Years” and “The Death of the Lion” (1894), instead claims indifference to such material ends. This new position within the literary market (not outside it) enables the writer to pursue a different temporality for judgment. The true artist, eschewing contemporary recognition, rejects the best seller as “here today gone tomorrow” and instead aims to produce a “classic,” a work whose future cultural capital will redeem sacrifices of the past and present (Bourdieu 100).

Only with this culturally salient conflict between market success and artistic success does the charge that a writer “sold out” their art gain any coherence. Other versions of selling out were of course legible far earlier: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces references to those who “betray (a person, cause, country, etc)” for gain back to 950 (“Sell, V”). But to sell out one's art, qua art, first requires the artistic field to have relative autonomy, to exist as a sphere of action with its own rules and motives. As long as elite consecration can coexist with popular esteem—Shakespeare entertaining king and shopkeeper alike—material recompense does not represent a cultural demerit. Only with the rise of mass, popular culture do elites come to see “temporal failure as a sign of election and success as a sign of compromise” (Bourdieu 40), a shift seen in the OED, whose entries on “sell” and “sell-out” as nouns begin in the middle of the nineteenth century (“Sell, N.2”). This stark opposition in values appears clearly in James's story “The Next Time” (1895), wherein our narrator mediates between two writers: Mrs. Highmore, a “voluminous” and “emotional” popular novelist, and Ralph Limbert, a brilliant yet unrecognized talent (486). Each decides to try to write for the other's market. Despite their efforts at crossing over, however, the two authors remain anchored to their respective fields. Mrs. Highmore's novel, “which she was prepared not to care a rap whether or no it should sell” (487), meets with “the hard doom of popularity” (488); her “fond consumers,” which James renders into an amorphous animal body, “wagged their great collective tail artlessly for more” (488). Meanwhile Limbert's novel, heralded by our discerning narrator as “a great success” in technique and theme, “shrank to obscurity in the account of sales” (500). A true artist, it seems, cannot sell out even when he tries. Our narrator suggests “the perversity of the effort . . . had been frustrated by the purity of the gift,” a talent that sounds more like innate distinction than the “scientific” effort to refine form James described in his notebooks, later rebranded as “craft” by writing programs (510).

James may not be the earliest American author to address the divided structure of the modern literary field, but his stories show an acute awareness of its antithetical values. Despite his own engagement with the market, moreover, later critics made James's life and work into totems for art's integrity against the corrosive popular demands of commercial modernity. Beginning in the 1930s, New York intellectuals, writing for little magazines such as Partisan Review, canonized James as an exiled, alienated modern artist rather than a canny commercial operator.Footnote ⁷ His reception helped frame literary modernism as a noble commitment to technique against the crass vicissitudes of the market, an adaptable and enduring investment in formal autonomy against the fleeting pecuniary rewards of popular success. Essays such as Clement Greenberg's “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and Dwight Macdonald's “Mass Cult and Midcult” (1960) reified the division between restricted and large-scale fields in James's fiction into stark cultural dichotomies, which envisioned art as a desperate holdout against the viral growth of a banal mass culture. By establishing what Andreas Huyssen calls the discourse of the Great Divide, which “insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture,” this era's stratification not only occluded James's lifelong entanglement in the market but also established an aesthetic ideology surrounding literary modernism, which imagined true art as somehow free from popular life and commerce (viii). During these same transformative years, however, the United States was also experiencing a tectonic shift in the sociology of authorship, as “the academic institution—professors, the college English classroom, the textbook market—had begun to play a crucial part in” literary consecration, eventually replacing dissident little magazines like Partisan Review (Morrisson 14). Whereas selling out had meant market success for those critics who canonized James as an emblem of modern alienation and narrative technique, for the universities that turned his claims about craft into a systematized practice for producing creative writers, it would come to mean something else entirely.

Selling Out in the Program Era

In his capacious study, The Program Era (2009), McGurl has shown how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop propagated a massive new institutional network for training professional authors, one that transformed American literature in the twentieth century. Writing programs elevated the Romantic focus on individual identity into a progressive educational platform, directing students to discover their expressive potential by fashioning their distinctive experience into a narrative voice. From Syracuse to Stanford, these programs have helped generations of writers hone their craft, those standards for fiction codified by James, while also securing employment for new talents as teachers, in a feedback loop that continues to generate countless novels, short stories, and memoirs of demonstrable quality. For minority writers, McGurl notably argues, the workshop system has offered an unprecedented opportunity to metabolize social precarity into aesthetic value; at Iowa, he proposes, Sandra Cisneros could “convert her disabling sense of otherness into a valuable, because relatively scarce, form of cultural capital,” emerging as the widely championed Chicana author of The House on Mango Street (337). Publicity and sales, which James increasingly saw as abhorrent for the writer, gain a newfound political currency as a means to promote multiculturalism in American life. The governing aim “for postwar American fiction” has been “to adapt modernist principles of writing, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” to the “bureaucratic institutions of higher education,” enrolling the nation's “cultural difference” into the literary market (x). Commerce and craft, imagined by James as antitheses, now cooperate as the program era produces “voices” at scale, converting diverse ethnic identities into a diverse array of written commodities. Minority writers might thereby engage in some degree of “self-commodification,” McGurl concedes (337), yet his decidedly enthusiastic book does not dwell on the anxieties that might arise from this effort to fuse individual market success and shared ethnic identity.

This section does dwell on those anxieties, examining how the meaning of selling out has shifted as writing programs have encouraged minority writers to commercialize their identities. While market success no longer carries the same cultural stigma, the program era's privileged values—creativity and experience—do produce two attendant worries: being unoriginal and being inauthentic.Footnote ⁸ I mean to stress the second problem, but it bears noting that critiques of program fiction usually focus on the first. In Talents and Technicians, John W. Aldridge complains that the workshop model leads to “a uniformity or homogenization of effects,” in which “distinctions are washed out or considered taboo” (24). The program writer, he charges, “may have acquired a certain technical proficiency, but he is unlikely to have developed an individual style or a distinctive point of view” (26). James's scenic method offers writers an endlessly generative means to render personal experience and perspective into narrative form, but once it has been adopted as a house style by dozens of programs, this method risks producing stylistic carbon copies, betraying the key value of creativity. Writers describing their workshop experience invariably address this fear of “a homogenizing effect” (Dowling 23). Sometimes the commentary tends toward polemic, as with Eric Bennett's “How Iowa Flattened Literature.” Sometimes it tends toward personal lamentation, as when Rita Dove remarks that “‘what everybody says is true’ about ‘an Iowa Writers’ Workshop poem’ being a stock product created with factory-like efficiency” (qtd. in Dowling 210). Most often, however, graduates evoke uniformity or banality as a well-known, if spectral, foe in the workshop environment. Schaeffer recalls Stanley Elkin lifting up a manuscript in class “like a foul dishrag” and “predict[ing] the balance of the book, chapter by chapter” (Olsen and Schaeffer 9); the students realized it was “[c]raft without tongue, bereft of evocation or novelty” (10). George Saunders suggests that every writing teacher remains “on the watch” for this pitfall, conscious of “the trope about ‘producing writers who all write alike’” (32, 31). David Foster Wallace, a bit more cynical, simply accepted that most students will only ever produce “nice, cautious, boring Workshop Stories, stories as tough to find technical fault with as they are to remember after putting them down” (78).

In one of the few negative reviews of The Boat, Hari Kunzru levels similar charges at Le, suggesting that his writing evokes “a kind of empty virtuosity,” a familiar “product of the increasingly formalized milieu in which American writers train.”Footnote ⁹ For Kunzru, this familiar form leaves Le's readers feeling detached from any real experience, “far away from Iowa, and Vietnam,” a complaint that hints at the second fear facing program writers: being inauthentic. Whereas the term unoriginal implies a failure of personal autonomy, inauthentic connotes a betrayal of group identity, a story about Vietnamese people that seems “far away from” Vietnam, from some shared ground or essence. This question of authenticity, crucially, represents the new terrain within which the accusation of selling out appears in contemporary American letters. Precisely because the program system creates an ongoing demand for experiential diversity and minority literatures, it also creates a pressure for writers to sell their identity by fashioning a marketable essentialism. Doing so risks betraying not only the authenticity of their autopoetic product but also the group identity that authors would be turning into personal capital. For “any writer with a non-WASP name,” laments Kunzru, “it's all too easy to feel one is being pimped for one's ‘background and life experience’ (real or imaginary),” a phrase that depicts ethnic writing as a kind of degraded sexual labor—perhaps the oldest of all metaphors for selling out. Minority writers, proposes Kunzru, must worry whether they are “colluding in the production of a crude, essentialized version of oneself in return for an advantage over ethnically uninteresting peers.”

While the program era's “high cultural pluralism” may aim to fuse modernist reflexivity with “the authenticity of the ethnic voice,” Le's work shows how some fiction this category would seemingly describe might express a salient worry over such easy labeling of minority fiction (McGurl, Program Era 32). “Love and Honor” suggestively stages its reunion of father and son as a confrontation between speech and writing, between the ethnic “voice” and writerly “craft.” At the story's outset, Nam awakens from a dream in which sound and word are unified: he “was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter's keys punching out the letters.” For a moment, Nam continues groggily composing the poem in his head, working on the “tum-ti-ti, a dactyl, end line.” But his father's speech interrupts this work. “It felt strange,” Nam thinks, “after all this time, to be speaking Vietnamese again” (3). “Love and Honor” repeatedly foregrounds Nam's discomfort with his father, and the Vietnamese heritage he represents, by juxtaposing a foreign orality against Nam's writerly practice. He has “written only three and a half stories” after more than a year in Iowa, and now, to fight off “writer's block,” reads “absurdly formal Victorian poetry” and drinks “Scotch neat” (8). Nam's father, meanwhile, has a “habit of speaking in Vietnamese proverbs,” which Nam “had long since learned to ignore,” dismissing at once the proverb's implicit unoriginality and its ties to ethnic tradition (4). His father, moreover, has “come at the worst possible time,” when a “final story for the semester was due in three days”; at this anxious time, the sky itself looks to Nam “gray and striated as graphite” (4). In this opening scene, it seems as if “Love and Honor” aims to unify father and son, speech and writing, allowing Nam to join in some version of the ethnic identity he has shunned. But no reconciliation arrives.

Instead, Le depicts the program era's cardinal values, creativity and experience, as existing in ineluctable tension for minority writers. As Elif Batuman observes, The Program Era “never quite articulates the law that enjoins some writers to write what they know and others to find their voices” (243). Whereas white writers get to “assert the privilege of other-narration” by creating various personalities, Batuman suggests, “minority writers . . . have typically been asked to slot themselves into a single ethos,” expressing their “authentic” (which is to say representative) voice through first-person narration (244). Nam's position at Iowa enables him to recognize this market desire for first-person pluralism; with all the “polished writing around,” some “visiting literary agents” explain, you should “ask yourself, what makes me stand out. . . . Your background and life experience” (Le, “Love and Honor” 9; italics in original). Hearing about his struggle to compose a new story, Nam's friend tells him to tap into those prepackaged narratives that must exist within his ethnic body: “How can you have writer's block? Just write a story about Vietnam” (8). “For writers of color,” McGurl suggests, the dictum “to find your voice” means claiming “a racialized and gendered body with ‘bloodlines’ or ‘roots’ in an organic community or culture,” yet McGurl never questions the pressures attending this project (Program Era 236). Does this constitute an option or a necessity for minority writers? Does the need for collective identity and “organic community” interfere with a writer's originality by precluding experiments in other voices? Influenced by literary agents and his “white classmates” at Iowa, remarks Yoonmee Chang, Nam sees “ethnic literature” as “a sell-out genre,” wherein “[o]ne need only possess an ethnic body that channels an ethnic story in order to gain professional accolades and good sales” (201). Lan Samantha Chang, the current director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, recalls as a student “Frank Conroy advising her in no uncertain terms that if she did not want to be typecast, she should avoid writing stories with Chinese characters” (qtd. in Dowling 318). Nam's friend similarly praises him for avoiding any reductive but commercially appealing stories about identity: “You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing,” he says. “But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans—and New York painters with hemorrhoids” (Le, “Love and Honor” 10; italics in original). The minority writer appears to face a choice between an ethnic essentialism, promising commercial rewards, or individual originality, consigned to perpetual writer's block.

Selling out in the program era, in sum, gains a newfound meaning and salience because of friction between two potentially competing valences of identity politics. Adapting the title of a seminal exchange between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, I would term this a conflict between a politics of recognition and a politics of remuneration.Footnote ¹⁰ The former names an urge, famously identified by Hegel, to have one's identity affirmed, especially when one belongs to what Charles Taylor calls “minority or ‘subaltern’ groups” historically subject to misrecognition (25). By the “politics of remuneration” I mean a desire—widely cultivated under contemporary neoliberalism—to have one's personal experience valorized by converting it into financial capital and to see this commodification of selfhood as a form of empowerment. At first glance, these two urges might seem allied. After all, does not a Nepalese American writer publishing a best-selling novel help draw attention to the Nepalese American experience while also supporting the writer financially? On one level, perhaps. But it also raises questions about just what one means by “the Nepalese American experience,” a phrase whose singular form exposes how commercial pluralism always risks reinstating an ethnic essentialism. Any minority writer applauded for an “authentic” narrative gains representative status, raising complex and contentious questions about how they define and depict this group identity and, quite likely, about the identity of the author, as the controversy over American Dirt has recently illustrated.Footnote ¹¹ “Love and Honor” adroitly dramatizes how the urge to recognize ethnic heritage can end up feeling crassly commercial and inauthentic. The program era's cultural politics depends on legible ethnic identities, yet anyone whose success appears to have been gained through a reductive or totalizing portrayal of that identity risks being labeled a sellout—no small problem, given the perennially contested nature of ethnic and racial categories today.

Scholars in Asian American studies have grappled with this problem for decades. Consider Frank Chin's infamous essay “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” which opened a revised version of the iconic anthology, The Big Aiiieeeee! (1991; first published in 1974). Chin accused Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, and Amy Tan of selling out to white American readers, offering comforting but denigrating stereotypes that “fake all of Asian American history and literature” (3). Chin's claims, explains Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, hinged on his exclusionary view of Asian American identity: “non-Christian, nonfeminine, and nonimmigrant” and limited to “three subgroups—Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino” (8). Because of his restrictive yet coherent notion of Asian American authenticity, Chin could establish clear lines for group betrayal and treat Kingston's “feminism simply as a sellout to anti-Chinese racism” (McGurl, Program Era 262). Later critics overwhelmingly disputed Chin's ideas, but as Susan Koshy observes, their growing “invocations of ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘plural identities,’ or ‘border-crossing’” in the 1980s and 1990s have left “Asian American Literature” seeming to many a nebulous, overdetermined term, unanchored by the “material, cultural or historical specificities of the various Asian American experiences” (316).Footnote ¹² The cultural politics of program era fiction appear to produce equally constraining alternatives for critics as well: either reject the coherence of marginalized group identities, an obvious political problem for most, or else advance coherent group identities, which necessarily creates an axis of authenticity and betrayal that some will seek to police for “sellouts.” Yen Le Espiritu, for instance, praises “panethnic entrepreneurship,” wherein Asian American writers might gain a foothold within the cultural field through the strategic embrace of labels (166). Viet Thanh Nguyen, however, argues that the “concept of panethnic entrepreneurship, with its basis in race as a product or function of economic capital and its connotations of ‘selling out,’ is antithetical to Asian American academia” (5). Such debates about the relationship between ethnicity, authorship, and commercialism remain far from settled.

Selling Fiction in a Global Market

Until now, I have used “Love and Honor” to clarify key concerns in program era fiction, yet Le's personal history complicates any reading that would position his writing only within the space of Iowa, or even the United States. Le's family fled Vietnam for Australia when he was just one; after briefly honing his craft at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Le moved back to Melbourne. Some critics have therefore argued that Le should not be viewed as an Asian American writer, in the American literary field, but an Asian Australian or a “world” writer. The Boat includes not only “Halfhead Bay,” a story of adolescent love, rebellion, and violence in Australia, but also, as attentive readers can hardly fail to note, the stories about Colombian assassins (“Cartagena”), New York painters with hemorrhoids (“Meeting Elise”), and Hiroshima orphans (“Hiroshima”) enumerated in “Love and Honor,” stories that clearly violate Iowa's dictum to “write what you know.” Le's book moreover ends with “The Boat,” a harrowing tale of Vietnamese boat people escaping from war—precisely the type of autopoetic “ethnic” story that “Love and Honor” denies its protagonist.Footnote ¹³ Given this geographic, cultural, and aesthetic hybridity, Brigitta Olubas calls The Boat “an exemplary Australian text” for the way it shows “Australia is not so much a definite topography as a node for the flows of globalization and mediation” (190, 191), a notion echoed by Nicholas Jose, Eleni Pavlides, and others.Footnote ¹⁴ In his provocative essay On David Malouf, however, Le insists that “being non-white, I've always been—will always be—an outsider in Australia” (90). Race, Le insists, prevents readers (and himself) from seeing his work as Australian national literature.

This ongoing debate about how to describe, interpret, and valorize Le's transnational authorship reveals another key limitation to The Program Era: its inattention to the increasingly global networks that have produced, circulated, and promoted anglophone fiction since World War II. “The Program Era ascribes,” in Bennett's words, “too much to the inner story of an institution so profoundly affected by outside influences” (163). Several scholars have shown how Iowa played a major role in establishing early pathways for literary recognition in a decolonizing world, especially through the International Writing Program (IWP), which Paul Engle founded with his wife Hualing Nieh in 1966. “Between 1966 and 1979,” observes Richard Jean So, “more than 80 writers from East Asia came to the IWP” (“Invention” 511), where they were “strongly encouraged to read and study the masterworks of writers, such as James,” and to adopt free indirect discourse (513). Iowa's pedagogical effort to redefine “modernism as pure technique” contributed to “the Cultural Cold War” described by Frances Stonor Saunders, Greg Barnhiesel, and others, within which institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Congress for Cultural Freedom promoted a stylized expression of personal autonomy as uniquely available under democratic capitalism (Barnhiesel 65). By cultivating individual literary voices in foreign writers through modernist craft, Engle and the IWP provided a cultural platform for reinforcing Cold War ideas about the “modernization” of Asia.Footnote ¹⁵ In Workshops of Empire, Bennett notes that Engle's travels across the Pacific were financed through “the Asia Foundation, the State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation,” and, he postulates, some “covert and relatively benign” CIA funding (107, 65).

Such global circuits of culture, commerce, and politics, which began to play a vital role in establishing literary value in the second half of the twentieth century, require us to rethink once again the questions of identity, authenticity, and selling out developed by my two previous sections. Critics in postcolonial and global modernist studies have insisted that Bourdieu's notions about the modern field of cultural production—if foundational for a literary sociology—do not adequately capture the uneven and varied dynamics of exchange between metropolitan centers and postcolonial peripheries.Footnote ¹⁶ Pascale Casanova has instead proposed a “world literary space” constituted by competing nations and organized around publishing capitals, wherein Paris has operated as a dominant model for subsequent centers (11). Yet as English points out, by the 1970s globalization had begun “fracturing and dispersing the centers of literary power” even more than Casanova's “long view on world literature” allows (388). In The Economy of Prestige, English shows how awards like the Nobel and Booker Prizes, increasingly used by Western elites to draw postcolonial writers into the fold of a “world” anglophone literature, exemplify complex contemporary “tensions between local and global, domestic and foreign, indigenous and imported” (263). Some view the “symbolic capital of prizes” as a “potentially powerful counter-currency” to Western economic domination, yet others impugn them as “a mere shadow form of money” (297). Are writers from the Global South who gain literary recognition in the Global North selling out, turning their indigenous traditions into commodities for export to white, metropolitan readers? Or does their recognition instead promote and defend such folk traditions against a corrosive “modernization” by reaching out to committed anticolonial readers around the world? Surveying the manifold critics on either side of this dispute, Huggan labels this “site of discursive conflict” the “postcolonial exotic,” a struggle that emerges from two “contending regimes of value” (28). One regime envisions writing from the periphery as a form of resistance to Western hegemony, to empire and its enduring ideologies; the other views such writing as the “commodification of cultural difference” in late capitalism, which promotes a spectacle of marginality as “multiculturalism” to feed its ceaseless demand for novelty (12).Footnote ¹⁷

These concerns haunt Nam in “Love and Honor.” Years after his family was displaced by an American imperial war, Nam has traveled to America in search of literary recognition; when he imagines publishing a book of stories on Vietnam, he envisions himself commodified on the cover, “standing in a rice paddy, wearing a straw conical hat” (9). The West's market for “ethnic” writing, suggests Lee, imposes a form of “coercive mimeticism,” which Rey Chow coined to name the process in “which those who are marginal to mainstream Western culture are expected . . . to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them” (Lee 33). “As long as a Chinese writer writes about Chinese people,” Nam's friend avers, their story will sell (Le, “Love and Honor” 9; italics in original). Just before this friend goes on to insist that “ethnic literature” only needs “an interesting image or metaphor once in every this much text,” Nam says, “Look. . . . Those guys have guns” (9; italics in original). Nam's alert anticipates his friend's remark about titillating images, yet it does so precisely by foregrounding a discomforting gap between Nam's experiences and those of his father, who survived American gunfire at My Lai. After hearing a “sudden sharp crack behind them,” which sounds to Nam “like the striking of a giant typewriter hammer,” he discovers the perceived threat only a simulacrum, a “faux-wood air rifle” (11). This ironic episode simultaneously expresses discomfort with and accedes to the idea of converting historical violence against Vietnamese bodies into the writer's aesthetic spectacle of sights and sounds. Such “expressions of self-consciousness,” observes Brouillette, are “a constitutive feature of the postcolonial field,” a strategic exoticism through which an author signals their anxiety about market forces with a metafictional narrative that still remains “eminently saleable” (Postcolonial Writers 1). This same self-consciousness pervades the story's ending. Le cannot allow his stand-in to claim his father's experience at My Lai, but he also cannot deny him the impulse to try. So our protagonist writes his “Ethnic Story,” only to have his father burn the manuscript; “Love and Honor” retains the impulse to commodify Vietnamese identity but (symbolically) negates the commodity (Le, “Love and Honor” 17).

Nam's friend notably contrasts such “ethnic literature” against Faulkner and his Nobel Prize speech, where he “said we should write about the old verities. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” (10). Faulkner's award was a key early moment in the Cultural Cold War, elevating a still-neglected southern novelist into a representative for humanity's shared existential condition (Schwartz 35–37). Despite the superficial contrast offered by Nam's friend, moreover, Faulkner's consecration provided a template for the way the Nobel Committee and other postwar institutions—from the University of Iowa to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—would privilege modernist form as a means to elevate local literatures into one democratic “world” literature. When Richard E. Kim's novel The Martyred became a best seller in 1964, for example, Engle wrote a New York Times essay, “The Story of Kim,” explaining how this Korean War veteran and Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate had fled communist persecution for American freedoms. For years after, Engle touted The Martyred as proof of “modernism filtering into the Asian world” and of his “vision for the international presence at Iowa” (Bennett 109). Brouillette has likewise shown how UNESCO “conscripted literature into the project of supporting liberal cosmopolitanism” by translating and republishing novels like Snow Country (1956), Yasunari Kawabata's stylized “lament over commercialism and the destruction of authentic cultures” (UNESCO 59). This newfound international prestige helped Kawabata become Japan's first Nobel winner in 1968 (38). By adopting Faulkner's “verities” as his title in “Love and Honor,” Le claims the right to evoke “universal” human values through his own transpacific experience. Yet his story's self-conscious narrative also crucially acknowledges how these purportedly universal values have historically been used by Western institutions like Iowa to promote certain “ethnic” writers from the periphery, helping them craft “modernized” narratives and then sell these commodities in a global literary market for cultural difference.

In Commonwealth of Letters, Peter J. Kalliney has shown how collaborating with metropolitan institutions, such as the BBC, provided some late colonial and postcolonial writers with a form of aesthetic autonomy, a haven from overt racism, and a platform for wider recognition. Yet Kalliney concurs with English that, by the 1970s, writers and critics of global anglophone fiction increasingly expressed “suspicion or distaste” for commercialism, rooted in a “far from irrational suspicion that cultural ‘globalization,’ no less than economic globalization, is a mere alibi for world domination by U.S.- and European-based conglomerates” (English 306). For example, when Keri Hulme's The Bone People (1984) won New Zealand's Pegasus Prize, which celebrates Maori literature, critics at once impugned the prize's notorious corporate sponsor, ExxonMobil, and accused Hulme of “racial inauthenticity” for being “at most one-eighth Maori,” twinned attacks against her representative status for an indigenous community (English 316). This essay has shown how, even absent such a controversy, critics continue to disagree sharply about how to reconcile Le's Australian citizenship, Vietnamese heritage, American accolades, and transnational fiction. Wenche Ommundsen calls The Boat “a typically Asian Australian text” for its “deconstruction of diasporic identity and the cultural politics it represents and enables” (507, 503–04). Like scholars in Asian American studies, Ommundsen seeks to capture the salience of ethnicity without preserving any essentialist foundation; she notes that “few have more forcefully rejected the stereotypes and politics of representation associated with the ‘Asian boom’ than Asian Australian writers,” who have mobilized the “complexity, contradiction, and doubt” of their “personal and cultural histories” to “reveal fault lines in received and coherent narratives of self, past, and nation” (509). Having rejected his status as “Australian,” however, Le likewise rejects “Asian-Australian—bandwagoning ‘Asian-American’” as “little more than fuzzy, clumpy identarianism” (On David Malouf 67). Identity, he maintains, must remain “infinitely complex—a network of tangled lines” (64); Le identifies himself, along with David Malouf and J. M. Coetzee, as a “multivalent writer who happens to be Australian” (48; italics in original).

Despite his eloquent defense of a fluid conception of identity, however, Le nonetheless recognizes how his success has been “complicit in common reference to my ethno-nationality” among reviewers, institutions, and readers, “as though no estimation of the work could keep without the seal of the author's status as ‘Vietnamese-Australian’” (37). To make cultural commodities legible, the market—including publishers, award committees, and literary critics—demands its labels. “There's a place,” Le can concede, “for strategic essentialism, for the use of identity to create community, to centre sidelined voices” and “redress structural inequality. As a person, a citizen, a comrade, I get it”; yet “[a]s a writer, I find it profane. Writers shouldn't be joiners, shouldn't be boosters or censors or mouthpieces—representatives—of anything but their own truths” (49). Le, in other words, remains committed to the modernist view of aesthetic autonomy cultivated by Iowa's writing pedagogy from its early role in the transformative canonization of James to its later work in the Cultural Cold War. But as this essay has insisted, Le's success with The Boat has placed him at the center of trenchant questions about identity, authenticity, and commercialism that inform contemporary discourse about global anglophone fiction. Though he may refuse to countenance “identarian” thinking, Le still justly admits its salient role in a world literary market that has lavished considerable rewards on his writing so far. The “strategic exoticism” he deftly maintains in The Boat does not, finally, represent a solution but rather a symptom of “cultural representation under late capitalism,” with its “spiraling commodification of cultural difference” (Huggan 33). For any emerging writer—whether being told to “write what you know” in American MFA programs or seeking to enter Western markets from more peripheral world spaces—reverting to established, if also essentialist, views of group identity for commercial recognition must remain an enduring temptation and, for critics, a live problem. Le's eponymous protagonist captures this enduring concern in a deceptively naive moment of self-reassurance: “If I write a true story, I'll have a better chance of selling it” (“Love and Honor” 25). When the “truth” of anyone's individual experiences, shared identities, and geographic ties are in fact a plurality of truths—and are, as this essay has shown, so fundamentally contested—then the urge to sell one, simpler “truth” in the form of fiction will necessarily continue exposing some contemporary writers to the charge of selling out.