But that's the point, why is it so ridicuous? Because these writers are too good, and there was never a point in time where they were young and learning their craft? Kafka got those questions anyway, I'm sure, and I'd like to think that he had enough vision to take them for what they were worth and move on. The point of workshop is not to appease the other members. Any good workshop instructor says that on the first day.

Nobody has a problem with the idea of Michelangelo studying painting and sculpture under Florentine masters, and nobody would dare say that because he didn't teach himself to do these things that his Pieta is any less beautiful, or that he is any less a great artist. What's the difference?

It must certainly be true that MFA programs are not the source of all evil, or even of all the bad writing in American today. (MFA programs are more detrimental to the teachers, I think, than to the students). But the suggestion that Franz Kafka would have benefited from being in a writer's workshop is one of the most absurd ideas I've heard in a long time. "What do you mean, he turned into a cockroach? I don't think you've adequately prepared the reader for this? I think we need to know more about WHY Gregor and his father don't get along..." In fact, it's dreadful to imagine any great writer--Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Stevens, Frank O'Hara--having to endure a workshop. In fact the impossibility of imagining such writers happily getting their MFAs is perhaps the best argument against workshops.