Where Are Our Prophets?

“…things do seem to have changed in literary fiction, and you don’t have to go back far to see it. The year? 2006. The people? Those the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg called the “Conversazioni group” for their joint attendance of a 2006 literary festival in Italy (called Le Conversazioni), interesting fragments of which have ended up on YouTube. The members of the group were Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Jeffrey Eugenides. All were in their thirties or forties: Smith (31), Franzen (47), Wallace (43), Eugenides (46). All were public-facing artists, and their debates were on the form and function of writing itself: who could forget the term “hysterical realism” or “contract vs. status” novels?”

Erik Hoel, “How the MFA Swallowed Literature: On the Total World Domination of Workshopped Fiction”

The complaints in this excellent article echo that about literary criticism as well, and I suspect there are similar articles about the other arts as well.

But what I find interesting is, in the midst of a lamentation about the deadening effect of the MFA on literary fiction is this seeming longing for, well, a conversation like the one in Italy, like the public-facing conversations had by Franzen, Smith, Wallace, and Eugenides.

I have certainly felt the same about theater. Where are the artists who are discussing ideas, values, principles? Where are the manifestos? They seem missing, and I think it is because large theaters don’t want anyone to rock the boat, protesting that it’s hard enough to keep things afloat without dealing with Big Ideas and rabble rousers. What we have instead are kvetchers.

The theologian Walter Breuggemann, in his classic book The Prophetic Imagination said there were two elements of prophetic speech: strong criticism of the status quo, and an inspiring vision of a new world that is possible. Theater seems to have only the first part; we’re in desperate need of second.