Aleksandar Hemon wrote yesterday in Slate about the
NEA’s Operation Homecoming project, which aims to get soldiers returning from service in the Middle East together with authors like Bobbie Ann Mason and Mark Bowden and writing about their experiences there. Hemon’s piece seems off-target and, just below the surface, unhelpfully territorial about the arts. Hemon fears Dana Gioia’s innovative program will turn out nothing but patriotic fables, and he seems to wish to pre-emptively discredit the participating soldiers’ work on this basis. His fear seems unwarranted, though, by anything the NEA has said about the project:
It is impossible to predict what stories will appear in this anthology. Much of it may be personal in importance — a soldier’s or spouse’s attempt to capture and clarify a singularly challenging moment in life. Some of it may rise to literature — vivid accounts of experience that arrest the reader’s attention and linger in the memory. All of it will have historical value as the testimony of men and women who saw the events directly. Operation Homecoming will capture these individual accounts and preserve them for the public record. American letters will be richer for their addition. [my emphasis]
Surely we should wait to judge the program until we see what fruit it bears, no? To my ear, Hemon’s piece seems directed less at appraising the potential of the project than at making extra-literary arguments about the U.S. in Iraq. Without actually considering any writing that has come out of them, Hemon treats the workshops as little more than a suspicious-looking arm of an administration he loathes. The whole piece seems animated by paranoia–“What is the real purpose of the project?”–and possessiveness.
Nathalie Chicha is raising excellent questions about some of the dubious literary premises of Hemon’s argument over
at Galley Cat:
Hemon’s claim reminds of me Stanley Crouch’s recent (and widely reviled) attack on The Plot Against America for focusing on anti-Semitism instead of “the brutal anti-black bigotry that actually existed.” As a letter-writer put it: “The cheapest shot a critic can take is to criticize an author for the book he didn’t write.” To return to Hemon’s contention that “any account … that does not include testimonies of … Iraqis cannot avoid being a lie,” I have to ask: is any story, by this criteria, not a lie?
Well, now that you mention it, no. And it’s odd that such a practiced and decorated novelist would contend such a thing. If fiction and criticism since James has obsessed over any single literary issue (fantastically productively sometimes, into dead ends at other times), it has to be the inescapability of point of view. A point of view is not a lie unless it pretends to be objective, and Operation Homecoming looks to all appearances to be encouraging self-conscious subjectivity (I’ve never known a writing workshop that didn’t). My guess is that when reviewing a personal narrative, whether essay or novel, by an established author, Hemon would never dream of making so naive a demand as that she present all sides of the story. So why would he impose it on these men and women? We twenty-first century readers know enough to read their accounts as points of view; in fact, that’s exactly what will make them valuable.
Nathalie, by the way, is looking for reader feedback on the Hemon piece. Email her at galleycat@mediabistro.com.
UPDATE: Old Hag and Ms. Tingle Alley, in Old Hag’s comments, throw in their own four cents.