From Aimé Césaire’s DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM (1950)

"Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies – loftily, lucidly, consistently – not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress – even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress – all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action.

And sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook. And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally – that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul – they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism."

"The Face of a Rat"

Wallace Shawn on New Yorker subscribers:

"No, I'm trying to tell you that people hate you. I'm trying to explain to you about the people who hate you.

Why do you think that they all love you? And what do you think they would love about you? What are you? There's no charm in you, there's nothing graceful, nothing that yields. You're simply a relentless, unbearable fanatic. Yes, the commando who crawls all night through the mud is much less of a fanatic than you. Look at yourself. Look. You walk so stiffly in your kitchen each morning, you approach your cupboard. You open it, and reach for the coffee, the coffee you expect to find on its shelf. And it has to be there. And if one morning it isn't there — oh, the hysteria! — the entire world will have to pay! At the very thought of the unexpected, the unexpected deprivation, you begin to twitch, to panic, to pant. The shortness of breath! Listen to your voice on the telephone, listen to the tone that comes into your voice when you talk to one of your very close friends and you talk about your life and you use those expressions — 'what I need to live on . . .' — 'the amount I need . . .' — solemn, quiet, no histrionics — the tone of hysteria, the tone of the fanatic — well, yes — of course — it makes sense. You understand your situation. Without a place to live, without clothes, without money, you would be like them, you would be them, you would be what they are — you would be the homeless, you would be the comfortless. So of course, you know it, you will do anything. There are no limits to what you will do. Without the money, your face would become the face of a rat, your hands would be paws — sharp, nimble, ready to scratch, ready to tear."

*******

(from his play, The Fever)

"The Landlords of Fortune": The Publishing Industry and the Bolaño Myth

Back in January 2009 I wrote the following in a post called, “Gutless Realism:  James Wood’s Housebroken Bolaño,” about the ideological intentions (i.e., myth making) behind James Wood’s review of Savage Detectives:

We’ve seen how Wood, in his review of Death with Interruptions, turned the long-time communist Saramago into an advocate of Original Sin and ‘fallen’ human nature.  It’s in a similar spirit that Wood transforms The Savage Detectives into a story about growing into an adult ‘maturity’ after being disabused of adolescent enthusiasms such as aesthetic and political radicalism.  Bolaño in the 1970s was “an avant-garde poet bristling with mad agendas,” and so are the characters who make up the narrative’s “gang of literary guerillas,” says Wood in his summary of the novel.  Yet Savage Detectives, he goes on to affirm, “is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth.”  In other words, zany antics involving things like avant-garde agendas and guerilla gangs are fine as long as they are seen (or can be portrayed) as properly childish preoccupations; a book is “good” and merits a positive review to the extent that its pretty sentences are “about” the putting away of childish things.  Wood, you see, likes a book with a healthy “message” – it needs to be “about” something that will keep children and servants in line with middle-class morality.  And if the book is not really “about” that at all, then like any good media pundit he will spin it, cherry-picking the two or three examples that might best support his thesis.  Here’s one:  “A painter, interviewed in Mexico City in 1981, says that Belano and Lima weren't revolutionaries: ‘They weren't writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don't think they were poets either’.”  See how this works?  Here are a few more:

An Israeli friend of Ulises Lima's says that the importance of the poets' lives had nothing to do with visceral realism: "It has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it and what we can regain." He continues, and says that what we have lost we can regain, "we can get it back intact." Can we? Minutes after delivering this wisdom this same man dies in a car accident. A Mexican academic, interviewed late in the novel, says that hardly anyone remembers the visceral realists anymore. Many are dead. Lima, he says, is living in Mexico City. "About Arturo Belano," he says, "I know nothing." This is finally how the novel makes good on its playful, postmodern impulses.

I love that last touch – a novel with “playful, postmodern impulses” is OK as long as it ends in sackcloth and ashes (i.e., “realism,” but not of the visceral variety).  Reading Wood’s review, in fact, you would actually think that Savage Detectives was a book about apostasy.  Wood even includes, apropos of very little, a quote from that arch-apostate Wordsworth: “We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”  Superficially the quotation is supposed to apply to the sad fates of Belano, Lima and their cronies in the novel, but Wood is completely aware of its full resonance and has no doubt chosen it with that in mind.  Bolaño and Wordsworth – it’s hard to think of a less suitable literary association; it tells us little about Bolaño’s sensibility or the book’s, although it speaks volumes about the reviewer.

Now, let’s turn to some excerpts from Horacio Castellanos Moya’s article, “Bolaño Inc.”, published in the latest issue of Guernica.  It is written as a personal amplification of some points made in Sarah Pollack’s “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States,” in a recent issue of Comparative Literature.

The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S.  I say this because the central idea of Pollack’s work is that behind the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the North American cultural establishment is now selling to the public.

[…..]

The key idea is that for thirty years, the work of García Márquez, with its magical realism, represented Latin American literature in the imagination of the North American reader. But since everything tarnishes and ends up losing its luster, the cultural establishment eventually went looking for something new. It sounded out the guys in the literary groups called McOndo and Crack, but they didn’t fit the enterprise—above all, as Sarah Pollack explains, it was very difficult to sell the North American reader on the world of iPods and Nazi spy novels as the new image of Latin America and its literature. Then Bolaño appeared with his The Savage Detectives and his visceral realism.

[…..]

The stories and the brief novels of Bolaño were being published in the United States very carefully and tenaciously by New Directions, a very prestigious independent publisher with a modest distribution, when all of a sudden, in the middle of negotiations for The Savage Detectives, appeared, like a bolt from the blue, the powerful hand of the landlords of fortune, who decided that this excellent novel was the work chosen to be the next big thing, the new One Hundred Years of Solitude, if you will. And it was written, what’s more, by an author who had died a little earlier, which facilitated the process of organizing the operation.

[…..]

The novelty for the American reader is that he will come away with two complementary messages that appeal to his sensibility and expectations: on one side the novel evokes the “youthful idealism” that leads to rebellion and adventure. But on the other side, it can be read as a morality tale, in the sense that “it is very good to be a brazen rebel at sixteen years old, but if a person doesn’t grow and change into an adult person, serious and established, the consequences can be tragic and pathetic,” as in the case of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Sarah Pollack concludes: “It is as if Bolaño were confirming what U.S. cultural norms tout as truth.”

In other words, James Wood, as a functionary for the landlords of fortune in the publishing industry, was just serving his myth-making and marketing role in “confirming what U.S. cultural norms tout as truth.” 

What I been sayin’ all along.

BAD PAPER: Bursting the 'Literary Fiction' Bubble

by Edmond Caldwell

(first printed as Correspondence Pamphlet #2, New Delhi, India, in August 2009) 

Part 1. 

In the early days of the current economic crisis, the Treasury Department demanded from the U.S. Congress a 700 billion-dollar bailout to buy up the “bad paper,” a term for all the junk assets owned by the banks and mortgage companies.  Bad paper – the phrase is evocative, and one might be forgiven, while gazing at the stacks of unsold “bestsellers” on the display tables of the nearest Barnes & Noble, for imagining the CEOs of the Big Six publishing companies frantically scurrying to D.C. to demand their own big slice of bailout pie.  After all, who could have more bad paper to unload than Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Harcourt, the Time-Warner Book Group, the Penguin Group, and Macmillan? 

In the weeks that followed, the sub-prime mortgage crisis became a credit crisis, the credit crisis a financial crisis, the financial crisis an international economic crisis – until finally the d-word loomed.  Through it all, that phrase continued to ring in my mind – bad paper, bad paper, bad paper . . . A huge bubble of paper claims on profits whose value was not based on any tangible, productive assets, on any “really-existing” capital, had finally popped – a bubble of “fictitious capital.”  Fiction again!  Come to think of it, didn’t the word “credit” itself come from credare, the Latin for “to believe,” as if the financial system operated by asking from us the same “willing suspension of disbelief” that fiction asks of its readers?  What was this sudden, weird synergy between the economy and fiction?  Maybe the veils were finally being torn away from both, and just as the economy was turning out to be a fiction, so contemporary fiction was turning to be – having plummeted from the airy realms of Art – a thing of squalid calculation.  

The crisis caught up with the publishing companies on 3 December 2008, a day which industry observers were soon calling Black Wednesday.  Under the euphemism of a “staff reduction,” heads started to roll in all divisions of Simon & Schuster, while the Random House Group announced a major “restructuring,” consolidating less-profitable imprints in a move widely seen as a prelude to downsizing some of them and liquidating others.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced an unprecedented “buying freeze” – a hold on acquiring new manuscripts – and laid off a slew of employees, including several big-name editors.  Not too many more days passed before Macmillan followed suit with big layoffs of its own.  And the squeeze was being felt all down the line, affecting the distributors and major retailers as well, with the Border’s chain – Barnes & Noble’s main competitor – hemorrhaging money and foreseeing the shuttering of many of its stores and a radical “inventory reduction.”  All of these euphemisms really pointed to one thing:  unloading that bad paper.  

Crisis has a way of accelerating social processes already under way.  People are now beginning to talk about the disappearance of the current publishing regime and its replacement by a different model, one based more, perhaps, on Publishing-on-Demand (POD) technologies and the spread of e-books and e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.  Whatever happens, it looks like a major change is in the offing, perhaps has even been developing – under our very noses, so to speak – for some time.  As Gramsci once wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”  Given that we are in such an interregnum, what morbid symptoms can we diagnose in the field of literature?

full text of "Bad Paper" here  

(and thanks to Anirudh Karnick & Correspondence)

List Lust, or, The Banalities (Updated)

Recently a literary blog or site or whatever calling itself The Millions posted for the edification and entertainment of its readers a list of “The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far).”  The judging-process was set up along American Idol lines – a panel of literary Simon Cowells and Paula Abduls coupled with a poll of the faceless audience, culled from Facebook.  

The resulting lists generated the type of discussion that you would expect:  expressions of pleasure over the presence of favorite titles along with much quibbling about who was left off – behavior which, essentially, reproduces the work of the list itself, “playing along” even where the participant has differences over this or that selection. 

Therefore I was happy when at least one litblog commentator, Andrew Seal, sounded like he was going to go beyond mere participation in the spectacle.  As he wrote in a September 25 post: 

“The inclusions and placements of the list are not really worth quibbling about, and itemizing the good books that were left off is about as easy as falling off a log.  I'm not really interested in specifics, because there's a much bigger issue which the list raises—”

Ah, I thought, now we’re getting somewhere!  He continues:

“—if ordered lists like this must exist, to whom should we be listening to fill them?”

Oh.  A critique of the make-up of the celebrity-judges panel, in Andrew’s view too heavily skewed to young and US-based creative writers, with not enough critics, editors, and academics, so that perhaps the panel was too narrow or not expert enough.  He may or may not be right on that score, but we haven’t gotten to any “much bigger issues” yet if we’ve just moved from quibbling about the selection of books to quibbling about the selection of judges.  That’s playing the same game at one remove, when what we need to do to get to “bigger issues” is to examine the game itself.

For starters, let’s not neglect the way that the list itself – and in fact the whole game of this and other literary lists – was “pre-judged” to begin with, and by an even bigger and more influential arbiter of taste and culture than writers, critics, editors, and academics:  corporate sales and publicity departments.

Publishing is currently dominated by the “Big Six” media corporations:  the Random House Group (owned by the Bertelsmann corporation), Simon & Schuster (owned by ViaCom), HarperCollins Harcourt (Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation), the Penguin Group (Pearson), Macmillan (Holtzbrinck), and the Time-Warner Book Group.  The readers polled by The Millions – whether the “pros” of the first panel or the Common Readers of the second panel – are making their judgments based on an array that has already been selected and set before them, largely by this corporate monopoly.

How largely?  The Millions’ lists pretty much reflect the market share.  Of the 30 titles represented on the two lists (20 titles in each list, with 10 overlapping), 27 are published by imprints belonging to 5 of the Big Six conglomerates, leaving a whopping 3 titles published by “independent” houses.  In other words about 90% of the titles come from the corporate majors.  That’s interesting, isn’t it?  And here I thought the list was supposed to reflect “quality” and “taste”!  If Andrew Seal is disturbed by the fact that 70% of the judges are young U.S.-based creative writers, what kind of response does this 90% figure merit?

Of the 27 corporate offerings, Random House/Bertelsmann wins big with 14 titles – almost half the list – and runner-up goes to Macmillan/Holtzbrinck, with 8.  Penguin/Pearson comes in third with 3 titles, while Simon & Schuster/ViaCom and HarperCollins Harcourt/News Corporation get 1 each.  The independent presses are represented by Bloomsbury (Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell), Soft Skull (Lynne Tillman’s American Genius), and Small Beer Press (Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen).  

Of course the picture is a little more nuanced than this.  On the indie side, Bloomsbury can hardly be considered a plucky, against-the-odds upstart – they’re the fifth largest house in the UK, having made a dime or two over some boy-magician franchise.  On the corporate side, Farrar Straus & Giroux, while now owned by Macmillan, still has a lot of indie street cred, as does the author of the FSG title on the list, Lydia Davis.  And while Sebald’s Austerlitz and Bolano’s 2666 are both published by imprints belonging to majors (Random House and Macmillan), the works of these authors first had to “make their way” in the independents (New Directions) before being sharked up by the bigger fish.  

Someone might even argue that this proves that “quality” can still win through in today’s corporate publishing environment, that the sales and publicity departments sometimes respond to genuine demand, that the “bottom line” doesn’t rule everything, etc.  After all, Random House is hardly publishing Sebald because he’s performing like Dan Brown.  In other words we can still separate questions of quality and the making of discrete literary judgments from a general critique of “literature” as an institution (so that we can all safely go back to being consumers and spectators). 

But as far as Random House is concerned, Sebald is just the other side of the Dan Brown coin.  The type of commodity the majors produce still relies (although less so than in previous decades) on a varnish of “literariness,” and having a Sebald or a Bolano on the list serves, for this season at least, as the incidental guarantor.  Nobody is making the argument that the books on The Millions’ lists and the millions of lists like them are “really all just crap.”  Rather, the genuinely good or interesting or significant books that make their fitful appearance alongside the middling mediocrities by McEwan, Lethem, Eugenides, Russo et al. are there in a way that is tokenistic and totemistic.  As totems they vicariously impart their aura of quality and seriousness to the larger pool of mediocrities and hence to the field as a whole (ah, literature!  The “higher things!”  Or as James Wood would ejaculate, “the soul!”), and what the publishers might sacrifice in profit they gain back in cachet, an ostensible “relevance,” and credibility with the high end of their audience.  As tokens, however, such titles relieve publishers of the costly burden of being actually in the business of bringing readers quality fiction in any but this most limited way.  Bolano now “stands for” Latin American Literature, and if a few further interesting Latin American authors make it into translation and out of the independents into the majors for the next five years it will be on the strength of “If you liked Savage Detectives, you’ll LOVE _______!!!”  Similarly, W.G. Sebald “stands for” a kind of overcast Mittel-European “high seriousness” and fills a Survivor Porn niche, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grabs the Nigerian-of-the-Decade baton from Ben Okri, and so on.  Austerlitz and 2666 are good books brought to us in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the type of atmosphere in which good books might be much more broadly produced, understood, and enjoyed.[1]  To come up with Best Books lists in this environment is little more than an exercise in pecking the least maggoty bits from carrion.

But the listing and ranking game goes on – and on and on – as if all sectors of society were afflicted with a kind of mass obsessive-compulsive disorder or species of autism.  “If ordered lists like this must exist,” stipulates Andrew Seal – but why must they?  Why should we submit to such fatalism?  Where do these lists come from, whom do they benefit, and what ultimate ideological function do they serve? 

Back in January I addressed this topic in a post called “The Best-Dressed Books of 2008,” and I’ll stand by what I wrote there:         

The end of the old year and the beginning of the new one – yes, it’s the season of those tiresome, compulsory Best of! and Top Ten! lists, including, alas, ‘literary’ lists.  These bullet-point bonanzas are the expression of a marketing sensibility, which means that book-lists bear the same relationship to literature as a Hallmark Valentine does to love.  Yet participation in this annual ritual serves to reinforce certain ideological practices that are crucial to the reproduction of the current culture.  Here – for your post-holiday pleasure – are the top five ideological practices these lists reinforce:

·      the fashion-system (obsession with small differences in the context of a large but unremarked sameness; the importance of being “up-to-date,” of knowing what the “trends” tell us about our irresistibly fascinating selves, etc.)

·      the star-system (which items are common to most lists? which item will “win”?)

·      the construction of a social and personal identity as the sum of market choices

·      manifest populism (anyone can do it – it’s fun!  Who’s on your list?)

·      latent elitism (the last word goes to the cultural arbiters)

There’s a spectrum, however, and some types of lists are more honest about functioning in the above terms (Best Dressed/Worst Dressed, for example) while others are more dishonest about it (Best Books lists).  Generally, the higher up the scale of cultural “quality,” the greater the dishonesty.

With that in mind, here’s the winner of the “The Best Fiction of the New Millennium (So Far).”  Look, you can see your own reflection on the shiny surface!

Random House Towers, New York.

UPDATE:

Some excellent additional points from Helen DeWitt at paperpools:

I got an email a while back from The Millions asking me to nominate my top 5 books for the new millennium, with the following constraints: they must be fiction, they must be available in English. The idea was, The Millions would then tabulate all votes and come up with a top 20.

So. If some of the most interesting writing I've read has been in a blog, or a pdf, or a webcomic, or just in emails, I can't mention it - it has to be writing that been legitimised by a book deal. Also, if I've read someone brilliant in a language other than English - someone who hasn't happened to sell English-language rights - I can't mention that either. So I can't use this to give interesting writers a better chance of attracting notice and getting an English-language book deal, I just have to endorse the status quo. 

Well, let's say I play the game and I just pick 5 novels published in English since 2000; I might still think this was a chance to draw attention to undeservedly neglected writers. Fact is, it can't work that way.

The only writers who stand any chance of making it into the top 20 are going to be writers a significant number of other contributors have also noticed - which means they are wildly unlikely to come from the undeservedly neglected. They will come from the pool of writers who got promoted, who won acclaim, in other words from the much smaller pool of writers many of us have happened to hear of. 

And over at Blographia Literaria, Andrew takes umbrage.

UPDATE 2:

A couple of great quotes from Chad Post on the restrictions of corporate publishing in the US when it comes to writers in translation (via Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading).  Here's the first, an instance of what I called "tokenism" above:

Post-Garcia Marquez, it’s been near impossible for a non-magical realist from south of our borders to get published in America. A certain Isabel Allende-tainted vision of what “counted” as good Latin American literature came into being, and anything that didn’t fit that mold wasn’t marketable.

The “Crack group” (Jorge Volpi, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, etc.) rose up as a response to this situation, this sort of pre-marketing that filters out certain types of literature in favor of more “marketable” books. And it would be foolish to pretend that marketing doesn’t play a role in which authors get published—especially in translation.

But hey, 100 Years of Solitude made it onto a lot of "Best Books" list in the meantime, and we should just be happy with that, right?  Here's the second quote of Chad's:

A good example of American publishing arrogance is what Scott Moyers said about W. G. Sebald on a “buzz panel” a few years back. I wrote about this at the time but his comment about how Sebald had been “getting his name out there a bit” thanks to New Directions, but that it was Random House’s publication of Austerlitz that put the “stamp of authority” on Sebald as one of Europe’s great writers still makes me vomit in my mouth a little bit.

Yeah, I know the feeling.

---

[1] And to produce such an atmosphere, such oxygen?  A necessary basis would be a more equitable and democratic mode of producing and distributing society’s resources (including in the fields of cultural production).  And as its corollary:  a system of education that aims to do something more and other than transform a third of the population into professional-managerial bureaucrats, a third into service-sector wage slaves, and a third into prisoners.

A Review of “How Fiction Works” and Just About Everything Else

I realize I’ve been remiss – here James Wood’s How Fiction Works has been out in paperback for weeks now and I haven’t posted anything to mark the occasion!  And it reminds me of my remissness on another score:  that here amid all the piss-taking I’ve never really offered a positive example of what genuine, serious literary criticism “at the present time” should be. 

Fortunately I find that I’m able to kill both those carrion at one throw and get back to the other much more important and interesting things that have been occupying me lately.  I’m reposting, in full, the splendid September 14 offering at Fafblog.  I just found out about this blog (thanks, comrade Augustine), don’t know anything about the blogger, and doubt that the post was written as any kind of direct response to Wood, but I immediately recognized how well it works as a review of How Fiction Works, and in fact of Joseph O’Neill’s Nitherland or Netherparts or whatever it was and Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and for that matter just about any work of contemporary “literary fiction” as well as pretty much all the “criticism” and reviews you’ll read in venues like New Yorker, The New Republic, Entertainment Weekly, Etcetera, Ad Nauseam …

We need less like that, and more like this: 

storytime

"Once upon a time there was a fafnir and a giblets, and their names were Fafnir and Giblets," says me. 

"Giblets can't relate to these characters," says Giblets. "Who do they come from and where are they going and what are their hopes and their dreams and their dark and buried pasts? Giblets demands backstory!" 

"And they were pirates and spacemen and industrial chemical mixers who sailed the sea and tilled the land to get the girl and win the big game and ride the road of truth and self-discovery and of course the American Dream," says me. 

"Giblets does not believe in this story," says Giblets. "Where is the dirt and the dust and the gritty grainy gunk of the everyday? Giblets demands verisimilitude!" 

"And they dragged their straw-thatched huts and their earthenware mules and remembered the sweet-smelling spices and the warm baked bread of Grandma Stolchi's industrial meat-packing plant," says me. 

"Giblets is uninspired," says Giblets. "Where is the greatness and the grandeur and the daring doing of deedly deeds? Giblets demands a sense of the epic!" 

"And the mountains crunched and the thunder groaned and the wind and the war and the singing of songs and the angry angry sea," says me. 

"Giblets is detached," says Giblets. "Where is the warmth of the heart of the fiery fires of the human experience?  Giblets demands more feeling!" 

"And though their love was deep and fierce and right and true it was doomed from the start," says me, "for she was only a lowly scullery maid, and he had been trampled to death by elephants." 

"Giblets is confused," says Giblets. "Where is this going and what does it mean and how does it contribute to the advancement of the art of American letters?  Giblets demands a theory of storytime!" 

"And they all lived happily ever after," says me, "except for the ones who were squashed or exploded or eaten by bees." 

"Tell me another one," says Giblets.

And James Wood Shall Lead Them

China Mieville on the "LitFic Praetorians":

**************

iii) LitFic Praetorians

Every new mess mainstream politics and culture gets us into should be its last, but never understimate its staying power.  It's an ironclad, and the burgeoning econopocalypse, despite causing a little wobble here and there, is not yet putting paid to it.  For the novel, this will be illustrated by a declaration of war by the lions of good taste against those sceptical of its claims to investigate the contours of The Human Condition (tm), or some such.

Unlike much previous soi disant Literary Fiction, the LitFic Praetorians will understand i) that they are a genre among many, ii) that their esteemed position is under attack.  And they will decide to take the fight to the enemy.

Accordingly, this movement will continue to privilege those aspects of fiction that have come, for some, to be the sine qua non of literature itself -- a celebration of 'interiority' and a particular propagandist conception of 'character'; a prose that claims to be 'spare' and 'precise'; a striving for a horizon of metaphor to perfectly express some 'human truth' in terms of a more concrete thing (crockery, paint, a particular animal, a meteorological condition, etc, preferably referred to in the book's title); a dynamic of artful recognition; and so on. However, unlike its less self-conscious predecessors, it will do so overtly, courageously taking the battle to exteriority, militancy, estrangement and alienation, and aggressively foregrounding its concerns on such seemingly unfriendly literary turf.

Thus, for example, the redemptive power of art will be affirmed in the bloody imperial rubble of Iraq; musings on the melancholy of age and the rediscovery of life-affirmation in the arms of somewhat younger women will unfold before a backdrop of polemical dream-logic; and poignant stories of family betrayal and infidelity among academics will be set during alien invasions.

Influences include all winners of the Booker prize, particularly Ian McEwan, particularly his book -- claimed by the school as its foundational text -- Saturday.

What to say: 'Great literature transcends everyday concerns.'

What not to say: '"Literary Fiction" is a marketing category.

'

**************

From Mieville's guest-blog post at Omnivoracious, "Neither a Contract nor a Promise:  Five Movements to Watch Out For," which he offers as "a few modest proposals . . . to fulfil the moment's cultural needs."

Via Kick Him, Honey