Every few months, someone on Twitter hears that the CIA helped fund the Iowa MFA program in the 1960s and soon the discourse has decided that all creative writing advice stretching back to Aristotle is a “CIA psyop.” This is only a slight exaggeration.
"Anyway, like many literary scuffles the whole thing feels oddly quaint in 2021. It’s hard to imagine the government caring about little poems published in small magazines when the most dominant entertainment is militaristic (and near fascistic) superhero films with global reaches and billions in revenue. If I was a time-traveling CIA art operative, I’d be implanting myself at Disney not Iowa…"
What's even more quaint is to believe that the Cold War ever ended. A list of prominent Hollywood films which were produced with "assistance" from the Pentagon can be found here, including blockbusters from 2022:
The Chekhov quote regarding "show, don't tell" also has a totally different meaning from the view widely propagated in creative writing courses:
'"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." What Chekhov actually said, in a letter to his brother, was "In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball."' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show,_don%27t_tell) Interestingly, this quote comes from a book of Chekhov's untranslated work—first published in English in 1954.
Chekhov here is advocating for specificity of detail, not to avoid ideological commentary in writing. In modern contexts, "show, don't tell" means that we are supposed to focus on the senses and avoid authorial commentary. It *can* mean specificity of detail ("He was sad" versus "His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops From eaves of reeds") but it *definitely* means that we should avoid explaining things to the reader—like, for instance, that characters in novels which take place in the modern imperial core are miserable because they are bourgeois parasites, not necessarily just because of their own individual atomized problems.
Assuming this comment isn't deleted, I recommend that curious readers have a look at this article (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/04/how-creative-writing-programs-de-politicized-fiction). It states, notably, that the Iowa Writers Workshop—the model for all other workshops, which are themselves often founded by IWW graduates—was funded by CIA front organizations. Years before Engle's CIA-funded trips abroad—I wonder why they decided to give him so much money in the first place?—his work at the IWW was also funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature/?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in), whose ideological goals are indistinguishable from those of the CIA, and which—like the CIA—is also closely linked to Nazism. Interestingly, the IWW was far from the only organization affected by the Cultural Cold War. The Paris Review—which has published some of your work—was founded by a CIA agent.
But what was the effect on American literature? Let's see...
"When I was first studying literature in college, I started putting a dividing line between literary novels written before and after World War II. It seemed like the books from the before times were good at doing lots of things. They could world build and philosophize. They could be love story, adventure novel, and satire all in one. Books written after the war, however, could only do one thing at a time. Mostly that one thing was soul-searching or introspection. Serious postwar fiction, whether it was what I was being fed in school or read in the pages of The New Yorker, was about sad white people with relationship problems."
The CIA—an organization staffed by Nazis rescued from Europe at the end of the Second World War, and their ideological descendants—fully admits to involving itself heavily in virtually every aspect of society. The quaintest thing of all is the fact that liberals know this and don't care.
Certainly the CIA and government is involved in producing mass entertainment, and certainly much of it is jingoist propaganda. And of course the CIA has been awful. Most of the rest of your claims were addressed and you're linking to the articles I linked to so you don't need to worry I'm going to censor you lol.
Our disagreement here isn't about how shitty the CIA is but that I do not believe "show don't tell" means "don't have ideological commentary." That's simply not what it commonly means in creative writing classes, at least in my experience. In creative writing classes, it means that specific details are more effective than abstract statements. Your "he was sad" < "His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops From eaves of reeds" example. That's exactly how it's taught most of the time. Or having two characters have an ideological debate in dialogue and in embodied scenes is better than having the author summarize the two ideological positions of two characters in summary. That's it.
(I also think one could hardly say that 60s/70s literary fiction or contemporary MFA-graduate fiction is free of political or ideological commentary! It may not be the commentary that you or I prefer--mostly pretty liberal--but it's certainly present. The stereotype of the "sad white people with relationship problems" New Yorker story is more of a Reagan-era phenomenon--e.g., Raymond Carver, although he's misread a bit there--and probably says more about larger cultural currents in 1980s America than conspiracies about creative writing advice CIA agents are supposed to have given Engle in the 50s.)
I think your article is a bit misleading as are other articles liberals write when pressed about CIA involvement in the arts. The CIA doesn’t invent, it promotes. The historical record is clear that the CIA looked for stuff to promote in the culture to counter Soviet propaganda. The Iowa program was only one of hundreds of things they funded or promoted. It also tracks with the writing style promoted in the US over what is usually critiqued as being “overly expositional” when social/political issues are brought up. This same criticism is not applied to material that waxes on about the human condition, human experience or some existential crisis.
I'm not a liberal. But I do not think "overly expositional" tracks with the writing of literary fiction in the 60s and 70s. That's more true of the 80s/90s--e.g. Raymond Carver and the rise of domestic realism and minimalism--but people get their timeline confused. The Carver style was itself a reaction to the postmodern, dense, political work of the previous decades. But yes I agree it was mainly the CIA promoting work to counter Soviet work.
Fair enough, I think my point is that are we not dealing with the fallout of this today? You know more about this than I do so perhaps you can help clarify some of my questions.
I think the late 60s and 70s were a period of profound self reflection, counter culture and anti-war/anti-imperialism, no?
As a screenwriter, I guess, I get a little perplexed as to how we are told social/political writing is practically verboten but go buck wild on the human condition. Expositional dialogue meant to convey a social/political message is always criticized as being too unnatural, but then little is said about the long tirades in films about internal conflicts. That reads unnatural to me but to the majority who come out of these 101 workshops it’s more the standard.
Why is this? Did it have anything to do with the promotion of one kind of work over another during the Cold War, or is that too reductionist a take?
"Anyway, like many literary scuffles the whole thing feels oddly quaint in 2021. It’s hard to imagine the government caring about little poems published in small magazines when the most dominant entertainment is militaristic (and near fascistic) superhero films with global reaches and billions in revenue. If I was a time-traveling CIA art operative, I’d be implanting myself at Disney not Iowa…"
What's even more quaint is to believe that the Cold War ever ended. A list of prominent Hollywood films which were produced with "assistance" from the Pentagon can be found here, including blockbusters from 2022:
https://www.academia.edu/4460251
What's more, Call of Duty, an extremely popular video game franchise, is also produced with assistance from the Department of Defense:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/22/call-of-duty-gaming-role-military-entertainment-complex
The Chekhov quote regarding "show, don't tell" also has a totally different meaning from the view widely propagated in creative writing courses:
'"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." What Chekhov actually said, in a letter to his brother, was "In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball."' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show,_don%27t_tell) Interestingly, this quote comes from a book of Chekhov's untranslated work—first published in English in 1954.
Chekhov here is advocating for specificity of detail, not to avoid ideological commentary in writing. In modern contexts, "show, don't tell" means that we are supposed to focus on the senses and avoid authorial commentary. It *can* mean specificity of detail ("He was sad" versus "His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops From eaves of reeds") but it *definitely* means that we should avoid explaining things to the reader—like, for instance, that characters in novels which take place in the modern imperial core are miserable because they are bourgeois parasites, not necessarily just because of their own individual atomized problems.
Assuming this comment isn't deleted, I recommend that curious readers have a look at this article (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/04/how-creative-writing-programs-de-politicized-fiction). It states, notably, that the Iowa Writers Workshop—the model for all other workshops, which are themselves often founded by IWW graduates—was funded by CIA front organizations. Years before Engle's CIA-funded trips abroad—I wonder why they decided to give him so much money in the first place?—his work at the IWW was also funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature/?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in), whose ideological goals are indistinguishable from those of the CIA, and which—like the CIA—is also closely linked to Nazism. Interestingly, the IWW was far from the only organization affected by the Cultural Cold War. The Paris Review—which has published some of your work—was founded by a CIA agent.
But what was the effect on American literature? Let's see...
"When I was first studying literature in college, I started putting a dividing line between literary novels written before and after World War II. It seemed like the books from the before times were good at doing lots of things. They could world build and philosophize. They could be love story, adventure novel, and satire all in one. Books written after the war, however, could only do one thing at a time. Mostly that one thing was soul-searching or introspection. Serious postwar fiction, whether it was what I was being fed in school or read in the pages of The New Yorker, was about sad white people with relationship problems."
The CIA—an organization staffed by Nazis rescued from Europe at the end of the Second World War, and their ideological descendants—fully admits to involving itself heavily in virtually every aspect of society. The quaintest thing of all is the fact that liberals know this and don't care.
Certainly the CIA and government is involved in producing mass entertainment, and certainly much of it is jingoist propaganda. And of course the CIA has been awful. Most of the rest of your claims were addressed and you're linking to the articles I linked to so you don't need to worry I'm going to censor you lol.
Our disagreement here isn't about how shitty the CIA is but that I do not believe "show don't tell" means "don't have ideological commentary." That's simply not what it commonly means in creative writing classes, at least in my experience. In creative writing classes, it means that specific details are more effective than abstract statements. Your "he was sad" < "His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops From eaves of reeds" example. That's exactly how it's taught most of the time. Or having two characters have an ideological debate in dialogue and in embodied scenes is better than having the author summarize the two ideological positions of two characters in summary. That's it.
(I also think one could hardly say that 60s/70s literary fiction or contemporary MFA-graduate fiction is free of political or ideological commentary! It may not be the commentary that you or I prefer--mostly pretty liberal--but it's certainly present. The stereotype of the "sad white people with relationship problems" New Yorker story is more of a Reagan-era phenomenon--e.g., Raymond Carver, although he's misread a bit there--and probably says more about larger cultural currents in 1980s America than conspiracies about creative writing advice CIA agents are supposed to have given Engle in the 50s.)
I think your article is a bit misleading as are other articles liberals write when pressed about CIA involvement in the arts. The CIA doesn’t invent, it promotes. The historical record is clear that the CIA looked for stuff to promote in the culture to counter Soviet propaganda. The Iowa program was only one of hundreds of things they funded or promoted. It also tracks with the writing style promoted in the US over what is usually critiqued as being “overly expositional” when social/political issues are brought up. This same criticism is not applied to material that waxes on about the human condition, human experience or some existential crisis.
The first commentator is right
I'm not a liberal. But I do not think "overly expositional" tracks with the writing of literary fiction in the 60s and 70s. That's more true of the 80s/90s--e.g. Raymond Carver and the rise of domestic realism and minimalism--but people get their timeline confused. The Carver style was itself a reaction to the postmodern, dense, political work of the previous decades. But yes I agree it was mainly the CIA promoting work to counter Soviet work.
Fair enough, I think my point is that are we not dealing with the fallout of this today? You know more about this than I do so perhaps you can help clarify some of my questions.
I think the late 60s and 70s were a period of profound self reflection, counter culture and anti-war/anti-imperialism, no?
As a screenwriter, I guess, I get a little perplexed as to how we are told social/political writing is practically verboten but go buck wild on the human condition. Expositional dialogue meant to convey a social/political message is always criticized as being too unnatural, but then little is said about the long tirades in films about internal conflicts. That reads unnatural to me but to the majority who come out of these 101 workshops it’s more the standard.
Why is this? Did it have anything to do with the promotion of one kind of work over another during the Cold War, or is that too reductionist a take?
Thank for the swift reply too!