The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

by Mark McGurl

The intensely—but in my account predictably—ambiguous ontological status of this text as an “autobiographical fiction” is reinforced by the particular quality of its third person narration, a mode that might have heightened the distance between the narrator and the central focalizing character, Eugene. This distance is minimized, however, in Look Homeward , and insofar as it is maintained, it becomes the space not so much for an ironic accounting of mistakes made, signs missed, or lessons learned, but for narcissism: writing in the third person, that is, Wolfe can more effectively take “himself” as an object of narrative desire. “In this strange place Eugene flourished amazingly”; “he was an irregular person”: note how the narrative cannot decide whether it is the place that is “strange” or Eugene that is “irregular”; whether his “flourishing” is amazing in the sense of having been improbable, or rather his flourishing is the sign of an amazingly good fit between young man and institution (which would suggest that he, too, is a “fine flower” of sorts). “Well, thought they benevolently, we need some such”: here the narrator apparently breaks with the perspective of Eugene, momentarily channeling the collective consciousness of the institution that affectionately patronizes Eugene’s arty unconventionality—a jagged shift in focalization that gives voice to the conventionality so tightly braided with that unconventionality.