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. I don’t want to call individual Tweeters out, but it’s easy to find people claiming “show don’t tell” and “write what you know” are CIA propaganda or that “MFA-style” fiction (whatever that means) is a form of social control.
"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.
"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.