The State of the Art by Thomas Hubschman
Once upon a time I attended a writer's conference. Kurt Vonnegut, Tony Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Cynthia Ozick and Sol Yurick were all in attendance. Vonnegut spoke about the impossibility of making a living as a writer if you had entered the profession after he did, back in the 1950s. Barthelme made wisecracks about what he considered Cynthia Ozick's excessive Jewishness. Tony Morrison spoke wisely but, for some reason, not memorably. It was Yurick's remarks that stuck with me.He said that literature bifurcated after the heyday of the 19th century novel. One fork turned into the popular novel as we know it, the Harold Robbinses and Tom Clancys. The other branch became the small press movement, a community of about 10,000, Yurick estimated, who live off the university and essentially write for each other. This bifurcation has made for a very schizoid and unhealthy situation because, with the "common reader" being offered only mediocre fiction while academic writers chase their own tails, literature, the stuff of Dickens and Trollope, is being denied its audience.
Contrast this with the way it was in the 19th century. Novels were serialized in the daily newspapers. Only the best got to see print later in book form. Literature was the popular art, satisfying an appetite which today is catered to by movies and television and increasingly by computer entertainment. Most of what was printed in those pre- electronic days was unremarkable, just as most of what we see in movie theaters and on TV is best seen and forgotten, if seen at all. Yet we are now rediscovering in that period a great deal that is still worth our attention--women writers who raised entire families off their royalties, neglected African Americans, good genre material as well as a multitude of other talents who may not have been up to the standard of a Melville (himself "undiscovered" until the beginning of this century) but who produced durable journeyman work nonetheless.
And yet, even in those glory days only a small percentage of the population read fiction, about the same percentage that do so today. The real best-sellers were and continue to be 1) the Bible and 2) self-help and religious books. Today the primary market for those types of books is via mail order. When we look at the list of top sellers in the Sunday paper we don't realize that the real blockbusters never appear there because they are not sold in bookstores and are therefore not calculated. Such books are not advertised in The New York Times but on Christian talk radio and in the back of inspirational periodicals alongside ads for toe separators and ginseng supplements and over television home-shopping networks. Titles range from apocalyptic diatribes to fast-and-easy ways to make big money off government contracts. Even a Judith Krantz could salivate at the kinds of balance sheets produced by such sales.
But the audience Sol Yurick was talking about, habitual readers of non-genre fiction, remains a small pie cut up in many different ways. To get an idea of how small, consider that one year's advertising budget for a major toothpaste manufacturer exceeds the total revenues generated by the entire book publishing industry in that same period of time. Even compared with movies and TV, books are small potatoes, the preoccupation of an elite.
In the heat of the moment we forget that the members of any artistic generation represent just a single season in the long history of story-telling and that the average reader doesn't give a hoot whether someone writes in a "naturalistic" or "existential" style. What he or she wants is a good read.
But novels and short stories do more than provide plots for films and television mini-series. They drive the moral and esthetic agenda for the society as a whole. Hollywood has been notorious for skimming off some of the best fiction writers, squeezing them dry and then leaving them to rot in an alcoholic haze, just as it appropriates the work of the best composers to generate the appropriate mood for a kiss or a car chase. TV does the same. But rarely does any originality evidence itself in the scripting, direction or scoring of those ventures. Literature and the other arts may be indispensable resources for Hollywood, but the written word's imitators hardly ever achieve, or even try to achieve, the quality of the originals.
Yet despite the triumph of celluloid and videotape, people have gone on reading fiction and in just about the same proportional numbers as they did before Edison's revolutionary invention. Hollywood may have helped to redefine the focus and purpose of the novel, but it has not rendered it redundant. In his famous "Crackup" essay of the 1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented the capitulation of the printed word to the silver screen. And yet a new Fitzgerald in the person of J. D. Salinger, despite the siren call of the Bijou, had been reading The Great Gatsby the way other boys read the box scores and was already beginning his own career. The post-war years produced a burst of talent that hasn't been surpassed. No one in his right mind would claim today that the novel is any more dead than it was in the 1920s--or the 1820s, for that matter.
But there certainly have been changes. Starting with Joyce, who allowed Ph.D.s to follow him around like groupies trailing a rock star, the novel and to a lesser extent the short story began to turn inward, apparently ceding to the camera the high ground of plot and character which it had always been able to claim for itself. Literature became as much concerned with literature itself as with ordinary life. Freud helped things along by drawing attention to the subconscious, the primal, the inarticulate.
A similar phenomenon occurred in the graphic arts. With realism dead, painters began to look behind the object itself for a reality not apparent to the naked eye. Of course, artists and writers had always done this. The new technology merely drove them to do so in a more obvious manner.
These developments made for some interesting experiments. They also created an academic industry for profs who could confidently put it forth that any writer who practiced the craft after the publication of Ulysses could no longer do so in a pre-Joycean fashion, and ordered the university bookstores to stock their shelves accordingly. Faulkner obliged with a couple "experimental" novels. Hemingway did not and paid the price on campus, though not among the larger reading public who, with a little media hype, made him into a folk hero on a par with Frank Sinatra and Betty Grabel.
But professors tend to take a short-sighted view of these things. Romanticism, realism, naturalism...right up thorough postmodernism or whatever the current academic jargon calls for, it is as if art only exists to provide employment for doctoral candidates. Meanwhile, the novel, like life itself, goes blithely on, largely ignoring the literary fads, like the man who didn't realize that all his life he had been speaking "prose."
In the heat of the moment we forget that the members of any artistic generation represent just a single season in the long history of story-telling and that the average reader doesn't give a hoot whether someone writes in a "naturalistic" or "existential" style. What he or she wants is a good read. The best writers oblige by managing to both entertain and to exalt, and they do so without pandering to the ephemeral urgings of the academy or the dictates of the commercial publishing industry. In the end, good literature, like all good art, is the expression of the inexplicable, a view of the human soul. Nevertheless, art is first and foremost entertainment. Anyone who produces it, from the greatest genius on down to the most quotidian hack, knows this. If you stop thinking of yourself as a performer and begin to fancy yourself something more rarefied, you may please a few academics, but any intelligent reader will see you for what you are--a pretender who would have done better to go into law, the university or astrology. Ask a real writer whether she or he would prefer to have for readers three old ladies under hair dryers or half a dozen postdoctoral candidates, and the beauty parlor will come in first every time. You can flatter and fool a Ph.D. with a few well-placed literary allusions, but if you can't deliver the real goods to the wash-and-set crowd, you're dead.
This doesn't mean that a writer has to be popular to be good. Most popular writers are, in fact, pretty bad. And if someone writes in a difficult style and does so honestly, his audience may be limited but it needn't be eliminated entirely or relegated to the bonepickers of academe. We can't decry the talking-down of TV and most movies, insisting that if only the public were given something better to watch it would rise to the occasion, and then deny that same opportunity to the consumer of the printed word.
One of the most dysfunctional aspects of the situation in publishing is the way it apes the larger market it is part of. Free agency reached the literary scene at about the same time that it appeared in professional sports. The result has not just been a game of musical chairs for writers and editors but the cultivation of a "star" system such as Hollywood adopted. More recently it has come into its own in venues where you would least expect to find it--the university itself. Hot professorial talent can demand and receive six-figure salaries and other perks that match the contracts of topnotch outfielders. The phenomenon applies mostly in scientific disciplines, which are especially prone to corporate rustling, but even as far back as the 1960s some universities decided to pay outrageous sums for the privilege of having someone like Marshall McLuhan grace one of their endowed "chairs" for a semester or two.
The racks at Barnes and Noble, Borders and other chain and even independent bookstores are stuffed not with the best books available but with titles whose shelf space and position is rented out according to a procedure that would do any Mafia don proud.
We seem to have a need for such icons whether or not these godlings live up to their billings. Each generation must have its Hemingway, its Updike, its Carl Sagan. Sometimes they actually produce work worthy of their places in the pantheon, but it doesn't much matter if they don't. The important thing is to keep the vacancies filled. Advertising will do the rest. Meanwhile, though, an entire army of talent only slightly less luminescent--and sometimes a good deal more so--never get to claim their places in the sun. And just as baseball's minor leagues have shrunk radically from what they were forty years ago, the competition for the publishing industry's limited resources becomes more intense every time a hefty check is cut for Steven King's latest harum-scarum or Norman Mailer's newest tome. The same thing is going on in the other arts.
I once read through some old issues of my high school literary magazine. It was remarkable how much the fiction I found there mimicked the literary celebrities of their time: Fitzgerald in the 1920s, Hemingway in the '30s. Today's "post-modernism," while generated out of the universities rather than from popular taste, will doubtless prove just as ephemeral. What seems necessity today, a historical imperative as ineluctable as plate tectonics, will in just a short decade or two be regarded as quaint, our present immortals demoted to mere footnotes.
Perhaps one reason why academics fail so miserably at seeing beyond their own noses has to do with the nature of the critical mind itself. For those who see language as a "tool" and literature as a "discipline," it seems only natural to group writers into schools and movements and to view art itself as an historical progression. For such people the rational aspect of the mind is paramount (however much they may protest to the contrary), so emphasis is always on what can be explicated and desconstructed. Their real business is applied science, though a science rife with subjectivity and imprecision.
Meanwhile, art goes on recreating itself out of the underlying human need for metaphor or whatever we choose to call our incorrigible proclivity for mimicry and representation. Academics may indeed use language as a "tool," an instrument with which they earn their daily bread and brie. But writers are used by language, the source of their creativity owing little to the ten percent of the human mind managed by the critical faculties. To paraphrase Joseph Campbell, who in another context was talking about the purpose of religion, what writers and their readers are after is not so much the "meaning" of life as they are in pursuit of life itself experienced more intensely.
Given our current values, it's no wonder that publishing is in the thrall of MBAs and sales departments. The racks at Barnes and Noble, Borders and other chain and even independent bookstores are stuffed not with the best books available but with titles whose shelf space and position is rented out according to a procedure that would do any Mafia don proud. When the only game in town is the bottom line, the arts have to play according to the same rules as everyone else.
It will be interesting to see how all this shakes out on the Internet. So far, publishing on the Net seems remarkably democratic. Some "zines" offer a product that no print magazine of quality should be ashamed to publish. Others cater to a less demanding audience, or to genre or even fetish material. But, most importantly, no one is attempting to hold a seal of approval for any of it. And since none of the established electronic quarterlies are controlled from the academy, there is a refreshing lack of gravitas, an air of offering a good story or poem just for the sheer pleasure of it rather than to show how important the publication itself is or how well-connected are its editors. The very nature of the Internet will make that kind of snobbery difficult to assert. Even when the "prestige" quarterlies make their presence felt, they will have to compete on a level playing field without benefit of sixty-pound laid stock and a preferred display position.
The rise of new publishing technologies for print media also hold some promise for breaking the academic/corporate stranglehold. High-speed laser printers that can print, bind and trim an individual volume at a cost comparable to high-volume offset printing will displace traditional distributors, sales reps and the other bottom-feeders of the traditional publishing industry. It will soon be feasible for a small independent bookstore to stock tens of thousands of titles on CD or in some other digital form and to produce to order individual books on the premises.
Think of what this could mean for small presses.
Of course, if the new technology becomes coopted by the corporate world (as the Internet itself stands in danger of being) we could end up no better off than we are now, with the large trade houses and mega-bookstores in control. But however it develops, the publishing and distribution not only of books but of all kinds of traditionally print media is undergoing a revolution that will prove as radical as anything it has seen since the invention of movable type.
