Idiot’s Fare

Dear George Szanto, 

I write in answer to your let­ter describ­ing your dif­fi­cul­ties in find­ing a pub­lisher for your new novel. As you know, I have been read­ing your books for a long time now, and I admire your work, but I am not sur­prised by your plight. Your let­ter fol­lowed a num­ber of other let­ters from well-known writer friends who find them­selves in the same sit­u­a­tion — writ­ers who, some­times after a life­time of admirable work, dis­cover now that their pub­lish­ers are turn­ing them down for any­thing but lit­er­ary rea­sons. I think the prob­lem can be out­lined as follows. 

Sometime in the Age of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, English-speaking read­ers became igno­rant. First, trans­la­tion into English was prac­ti­cally stopped: today, less than 0.1 per­cent of every­thing pub­lished in English is a trans­la­tion, and that includes Japanese com­puter man­u­als. Having once been the keen dis­cov­er­ers of Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Unamuno, Neruda, Dürrenmatt (in the first half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, for instance), English-speaking read­ers locked them­selves into some­thing worse than an impe­r­ial men­tal­ity, since at least the Empire forced them to look out­side England: a state of stolid con­tent­ment. (See Stephen Henighan’s col­umn, “The Insularity of English,” in Geist 61.) 

Readers and writ­ers in English today know prac­ti­cally noth­ing of what is tak­ing place in the cul­tures of the rest of the world. Step into a book­store in Bogotá or Rotterdam, Lyons or Bremen, and you can see what writ­ers from other coun­tries are doing. Ask in Liverpool, Vancouver or Los Angeles who António Lobo Antunes or Cees Nooteboom are (two of the great­est liv­ing authors, the first Portuguese, the sec­ond Dutch) and you will be met with a blank stare. But such a ques­tion would prob­a­bly not be asked, because English-speaking read­ers have became pris­on­ers of their own lan­guage, liv­ing off what­ever the pub­lish­ing indus­try chooses to feed them. 

Even the lit­er­a­ture writ­ten in English has become, by and large, watered down to can­teen fare. Of course there are many excep­tions, and great writ­ers are writ­ing superb lit­er­a­ture all the while, but they work in an atmos­phere of intel­lec­tual numb­ness. And while it has always been true that a new author has dif­fi­culty in find­ing a pub­lisher, now (as you, dear George Szanto, have found out) even authors with notable careers are hav­ing trou­ble find­ing a home for their books. In the English-language pub­lish­ing world of today there is no mid­dle ground for lit­er­a­ture: for­mu­laic fic­tion and bland non-fiction occupy the shelf pre­vi­ously des­tined for lit­er­ary works, which have moved either to small “exper­i­men­tal” pub­lish­ers (as they used to be called) or to uni­ver­sity presses. Doris Lessing’s English pub­lish­ers told her last year, after her eighty-fifth birth­day, that she wrote “too much” and that they found it dif­fi­cult to con­tinue pub­lish­ing her work; her American pub­lish­ers first turned down her new novel The Cleft on the advice of their mar­ket­ing depart­ment and then reluc­tantly accepted to bring it out “as a kind­ness.” Bloomsbury, the pub­lish­ers who once boasted Nadine Gordimer and Margaret Atwood on their list (though those now “safe” mod­ern clas­sics are still pub­lished by them), bring out Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in edi­tions for an illit­er­ate audi­ence with cute intro­duc­tions by best­selling “chick-lit” nov­el­ists such as Meg Cabot, of The Princess Diaries fame. Cabot writes: “OK, so I’ll admit it: I saw the movie first … But, as I had dis­cov­ered from read­ing Peter Benchley’s book Jaws, some­times there are scenes in the book that aren’t in the movie … The movies always leave some­thing out. Which is what makes Pride and Prejudice such a joy to read over and over. Because you can make up your own movie about it — in your head.” The Bloomsbury edi­tion also includes spoof inter­views with the author: “My first book to make it into print was Sense and Sensibility …” Novels pub­lished under the Vintage imprint of Random House now include a how-to guide at the back, vis­i­bly intended for book clubs. These guides are demean­ing cat­e­chisms that tell the reader what to think. Book club par­tic­i­pants are usu­ally not idiots, and have no need for arti­fi­cial guides to lit­er­ary conversation. 

Like most things in our cul­ture today, the pub­lish­ing indus­try tends to under­mine our belief in our own capa­bil­i­ties. I am cer­tain that the vast major­ity of peo­ple are capa­ble of intel­li­gent read­ing if they are not made to feel infe­rior through the­o­ret­i­cal jar­gon and argu­ments of author­ity; they have the expe­ri­ence and curios­ity to ask intel­li­gent ques­tions and sug­gest thought– pro­vok­ing answers. And if not every­thing on the page is obvi­ous to them on the first read­ing, then (as my own teach­ers told me to do when I was lit­tle) they can look it up. However, the pub­lish­ing indus­try is say­ing to its read­ers: “You’re not capa­ble of under­stand­ing on your own, you’re not clever enough to enjoy a book with­out our help. Therefore, we will pro­duce ‘easy’ books for you and assist you along with ‘easy’ answers.” It used to be a tru­ism that a mea­sure of dif­fi­culty added to the plea­sure of an under­tak­ing. Now dif­fi­culty is a fault to be avoided at all costs, espe­cially at the expense of our intel­li­gence. The key­word of our cul­ture today is stupidity. 

Not that the read­er­ship is stu­pid. But an orga­nized pub­lish­ing indus­try wants us to believe that we are not suf­fi­ciently gifted. Notice that I say “pub­lish­ing indus­try” and not pub­lish­ers. There used to be a time when pub­lish­ers (though tra­di­tion­ally reviled by writ­ers) were edu­cated, lit­er­ary peo­ple with a love for books. If they made money from their authors — and sev­eral did — it was more a ques­tion of happy chance than ruth­less method. But since the 1980s, pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies, bought up by large inter­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions, began to apply indus­trial meth­ods to the mak­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion of books. Having dis­cov­ered that books are sold and bought, these entre­pre­neurs rea­soned that books could be bought and sold like any other arti­fact, from pizza to sports cars. This con­clu­sion is based on a mis­un­der­stand­ing — and here I know I will be accused of elit­ism, an ancient insult tra­di­tion­ally cast at read­ers. Books are indeed sold and bought, but that is a cir­cum­stan­tial fact of their exis­tence, not their defin­ing essence. Unlike the mer­chan­dise on which our soci­eties build their economies, books are intel­lec­tual repos­i­to­ries, the hold­ers of our expe­ri­ence, imag­i­na­tion and mem­ory. We have decided to exchange and share the prod­ucts of these abstract qual­i­ties (lit­er­ary cre­ations) by means of ordi­nary com­mer­cial sys­tems, because in some remote past we deemed this to be the sim­plest method of trans­mis­sion. But that does not mean that we actu­ally buy and sell a text, merely its recep­ta­cle. When you buy Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, you are not buy­ing the story of Pride and Prejudice, you are buy­ing a pile of bound paper con­tain­ing a sys­tem of ink stains in which we have agreed to encode Austen’s story. I’m reduc­ing the trans­ac­tion to an almost absurd sim­plic­ity in order to make my point: that we con­fuse con­tents and con­tainer, another unfor­tu­nate char­ac­ter­is­tic of our soci­ety today. 

To feed this con­fu­sion, the multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions have turned pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies — as well as book­stores — into super­mar­kets and imposed super­mar­ket rules on the com­merce of books. Whether or not a book is to be pub­lished is now decided not by the edi­tor (more or less trained to read man­u­scripts and assess their lit­er­ary value) but by the mar­ket­ing staff, whose lit­er­ary skills are at best not proven. Decisions are made based on pro­jected sales, an eco­nomic tool that does not apply to lit­er­ary books, only to man­u­fac­tured fake books — that is to say, to books cre­ated accord­ing to for­mu­las for a spe­cific mar­ket and a spe­cific time. Somerset Maugham once said that to write a good novel there are three rules, but that unfor­tu­nately no one knows what they are. The admin­is­tra­tors of these pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies believe oth­er­wise: since there are rules for impos­ing a cer­tain brand and type of soft drink on the mar­ket, why not apply these rules to impose a cer­tain author and a cer­tain book? Books now have “sell by” dates, like boxes of corn­flakes, since book­sellers can­not stock an infi­nite num­ber of titles and pub­lish­ers force them to take their ready-mades. Backlist titles (the clas­sics old and mod­ern on which our civ­i­liza­tion is based) tend to dis­ap­pear in a cir­cu­lar rea­son­ing that argues that since they are not much requested they shouldn’t be stocked, and they shouldn’t be stocked because they’re not much requested. Furthermore, a huge invest­ment in these fake books is made in tv chat shows, tar­get­ted adver­tis­ing, pur­chased book­shop dis­play space, etc., to ensure that a book will sell (though even these block­bust­ing tac­tics do not always work). 

Bookstore chains have joined this scam. In old-fashioned book­shops (most of which have dis­ap­peared in the wake of the takeovers), book­sellers rec­om­mended what they liked and judged appro­pri­ate for a cer­tain reader; but in chain out­lets, employ­ees must dis­play books in hier­ar­chi­cal spaces for which pub­lish­ers have paid. Readers are thereby duped into think­ing that what they are offered by the book­seller is the best, while it is merely the most richly promoted. 

Why are we not up in arms about this? Imagine that sports fans were given only flip­per games and table sports on the week­end instead of the live event. Would they accept it with­out protest if they were told that they would find real soc­cer and hockey “too dif­fi­cult” to fol­low? Why are we read­ers such cow­ards? Perhaps we think that this onslaught of idiot’s fare will not affect us indi­vid­u­ally, that it is the other, that imag­i­nary beast we call “the masses,” who will be the vic­tim, the dumb con­sumer. But that is sim­ply not true. No writer writes in a vac­uum, no artist cre­ates in an echo­less room. Literature, art, exist through inter­changes, from author to reader to author, along gen­er­a­tions, so that Homer speaks to us today by means of a mul­ti­tude of respond­ing voices, and we, the read­ers, enrich Homer every time we open the Iliad. If the process is inter­rupted (as hap­pens dur­ing dic­ta­tor­ships, for instance, when read­ers lose their books and writ­ers are silenced), even though a few brave souls may carry on, it takes a very long time for the major­ity of read­ers to recon­nect with the cir­cle of voices that pre­ceded them. The great prob­lem is that the destruc­tion of any­thing — in this case, the pres­tige of intel­lec­tual knowl­edge and the respect for our cul­tural achieve­ments — is a ter­ri­bly fast process; its recon­struc­tion (because I believe the time will come when we will have true pub­lish­ers and book­sellers once again) is heart­break­ingly slow. 

Perhaps we will be lucky and the great multi­na­tional com­pa­nies who have seized upon the book as another means to make money, will real­ize what read­ers and writ­ers, edi­tors and book­sellers have always known: that if you want to make money, don’t deal with books. Be an indus­tri­al­ist, a cos­metic sur­geon, an invest­ment banker, a real estate pro­moter, a high-powered politi­cian, but don’t bother with lit­er­a­ture. Perhaps they will real­ize that their real for­tune comes from the sale of weapons (as in the case of the Lagardere Group, owner of Warner Books and Little, Brown, among many other imprints), not of the nov­els of Vladimir Nabokov, and they will let the whole messy lit­tle busi­ness drop. Perhaps a period of cat­a­stro­phe will fol­low, but (allow me a clichéd lyri­cal end­ing) a new, truer pub­lish­ing world will emerge from the ruins, no doubt from the con­tin­u­ing efforts of the small, per­sis­tent edi­tors and book­sellers who have some­how man­aged to sur­vive. And then, dear George Szanto, you will be hon­ourably pub­lished and faith­fully read.