The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 Book

The penultimate and ultimate paragraphs of the afterword lift D. G. Meyers' laborious, scholarly piece of literary criticism up Jacob's ladder from three stars into higher ground: a fourth star appears, shining forth under the kingdom of heaven's banner and banqueting table of love incarnate, love come down. However, upon further reflection and rumination, the fourth star disappears for two reasons: Meyers seems to repeat the mistakes of modernism without directly addressing and considering the pressing problems that postmodernism presents between "You and I" but instead simplifies subjectivity and objectivity as mere dichotomy. Allow me to quote this lit critic's ultimatum in its entirety: "Creative writing might offer another kind of knowledge, teaching how the strongest stories construct human possibility, but to do so it would have to abandon subjective satisfaction as the sole measure of creative accomplishment and begin to answer to objective facts outside the self, where other people might possibly live. Again, the best writers already know this. When an outstanding novelist who teaches in a front-rank writing program separates herself from the prevailing ethos to affirm values anchored in an ultimate reality, she is less likely to write essays about creative writing than to reclaim human civilization by returning to "the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them," because she is concerned to begin the process of reform at a much more basic level. And that may finally be the problem. Creative writing may not be able to reform itself from within. A value system that transcends the subjective needs of individual expression may be necessary to produce good writers or even public intellectuals. In the mean time, the workshops will go on." As an addendum, afterthought, short answer, and suggestive antidote to the postmodernist problem of creative writing, Meyers alludes to essayist and novelist Marilynne Robinson as one of today's boldest and brightest lights, one of modernity's most resplendent reformers of creative writing. There are also others writing on and underground.