Augury

Over at 2Blowhards, Michael Blowhard has a post up on the phenomenon of “Literary Fiction.” Literary Fiction and its general “emptiness” is a common theme at 2Blowhards, and the post is just one of many in a more extended conversation about it.

Quoth Michael:

… despite its intending-to-awe name — “literary fiction” represents nothing more than another shelf in your local bookstore’s Fiction section. It’s one menu option among many, and nothing more.

This is a pretty common but very important realization. It’s rare for me to encounter people outside of my close circle who really enjoy reading frequently — But when I do it’s even rarer to find someone who sees through the cloud of marketing to realize the fiction world’s tastemakers are just glorified advertisers, selling books in a genre whose sole purpose is to be exclusive club. If you’re the right sort of person with the right aesthetic sensibilities, the right opinions, and the right connections you too could join the club.

More Michael:

There’s a problem with thinking of lit fic as a legitimate genre. It’s this: Real fiction-genres arise out of something alive. They’re the result of an informal collaboration between audiences, publishers, and writers. They’re based in live tastes, live markets, live creative urges, and live audience enthusiasm.

They arise semi-naturally, in a word. “Literary fiction” has no such organic basis. It’s a willed creation, one that has been given form from the intellect on down. Its audience is largely made up of students, educated people who attend creative writing classes themselves, and people who are still young and credulous enough to read what the magazines tell them is important. … Lit fic is an artificial world, without any vitality or pulse of its own, and in need of ever-renewed artificial respiration. Which is also to say that it’s constantly on the verge of collapse and annihilation.

There’s some insightful comments to the post itself. A commenter named BTM has this to add:

Now you bookish types know what we painters have had to deal with for the last 100 years. Don’t think for a minute that this artificial distinction will disappear. On the contrary, it will only grow, and the “highbrow” types will continue to heap praise, major prizes, and media coverage on those “serious” writers, at the expense of their far more talented, readable, prolific, and “middle-to-low brow” peers.

I find it a fascinating, and apt, parallel to draw. It goes to show that the same sort of rot that has set in the art world has pervaded literature as well. BTM writes another comment on how the status quo came to be:

A lot of it revolves around money. In the painting world, there is a system of influential galleries, critics, high money collectors and museums, government-funded academics, and so on. Since painting really isn’t popular anymore, public input doesn’t act as a corrective influence. So the insiders tend to pick out who they want to become a big shot, buy the early work, rave it up, award the new big shot prizes, and then sell the early work later for big money. Its really kind of corrupt. Of course, there is always a market for the smaller collectors who really love stuff. But the art market is manipulated to a degree by insiders, like any other. And they use the same modern advertising techniques to get money out of moneyed, but ignorant collectors-the appeal to celebrity, obsessive concern with the “new and improved”, the appeal to supposed “authority”, etc. I don’t think its a coincidence that so-called “modern” art sprang up at around the same time the Industrial Revolution was taking off. Modern advertising was developed to distinguish and sell the surplus goods that were available from mass production. Now the cultural world has the same problem of tons of product, with relatively fewer buyers.

The real question is how to solve this issue. How can it be that we’ve let a country club of self-promoters become the premier cultural authorities for art and literature, and how can we fix it? I’m hoping the internet’s worldwide advertisement will serve as the advertising and distribution mechanism for artists of all stripes, but it strikes me that we’ll never rid ourselves of this art-elite subculture, even if they decline in relevance even further than they already have.