We should be grateful. Dartmouth writers and those who love them have a new home in town, the “Literary Arts Bridge.” Thanks to an anonymous gift of $1.75 million, the English and creative writing department has inaugurated a space “for writers at the forefront of their creative practice — and for students who aspire to join them.” Rarely does such a noble goal earn a cent of funding. We are more likely to see a new “Center for the Accumulation of Wealth” or “Program for the Study of Winning the Rat Race.” But no, this is money for writers. So, again, we should be grateful.
In their 7 Lebanon St. office, the Bridge has a suite of bright, usually empty rooms for writers, a podcasting studio and a theory-heavy library. It hosts conversations with MFAs, publishing industry experts, contemporary poets and blind writers. It also has an active Instagram page, populated by the requisite reels, indicating that this space is au courant.
The feeling one gets inside the Literary Bridge, looking at its website, its Instagram and its emails is one of safety and comfort. Everyone seems friendly; talks and Q&As are replete with respectful head-nods and mild questions like “what recommendations do you have for young writers?” or “how can we make Dartmouth more disability friendly?” Such questions generate dutiful answers, and everyone leaves calmly smiling. If there is no energy or vitality, at least people are nice, or so I have observed.
The Literary Bridge sees literature as a calm morphine drip. “Do not worry,” the Bridge whispers, “your writing is great.” And in standard Dartmouth fashion, they bring in publishing industry experts alongside the affirmation circle. While you write a first person narrative about your identity, make sure to submit your MFA application by next month.
But is that what literature really is? Pick a quote:
Franz Kafka: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us … a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.”
Philip Roth: “Fuck the middle ground. You don’t stand on the middle ground … the rest of them back in Essex County are straightening teeth. That’s the middle ground.”
Flannery O’Connor: “You shall know the truth and that shall make you odd.”
Literature, or at least any literature worthy of the name, is not kind nor reasonable. It does not contain the “right” opinions, nor does it advance political messages. It is radically ambiguous, or sometimes just nasty. Mean people write great literature. Kind people often produce drivel. I would rather read Celiné a thousand times than Colson Whitehead once. The polite and buttoned-up are better served in H.R. roles.
The Literary Bridge suggests that Melville and Conrad would have been better served had they completed a master's degree rather than their actual choice of sailing. It acts as if we read Emily Dickinson and wish she had done a Ph.D. Yet the currency of respectability and professionalism, so important to Dartmouth, is the enemy of good literature. The sleepy kindness of the Literary Bridge is that same stupor that has ruined much of contemporary literature. Literature is unprofessional, offensive and unsustainable, not some virtuous, soul-improving activity. We don’t expect readers of Nabokov to act the nicer for it. We just expect them to read him.
The anonymous funder of the Literary Bridge should retract all their money, or at least the money they can still retract. Literature would be better served by a “society for the hatred of English departments” or by paying students to drop out. They should give “The New Critic” money, for our writers to travel to Greenland and report on Trump-induced chaos, or to throw an absinthe party for Zohran Mamdani staffers and write about what’s happening. Still better, light the money on fire and write about that.
Until then, we have the Literary Arts Bridge, where one can always find snacks. Because the only thing stopping great literature is the absence of Fritos.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
