The great project of literature has been to describe the relationship between the individual and society. This is most notable in the novel; in fact, it is almost a definition of the novel. In poetry, the relationship is more complex. Poetry often seems to be the individual testing how far they can remove themselves from society.
The situation now, it seems to me, is one in which the particular individualism that literature has depicted (and, in large part, created) is in the process of breaking down. There are a number of reasons for this: changes in society and advances in science are the most important. ^
As the book publishing industry continues to hide how badly it is doing, many of us who want to write for a living find ourselves in the awkward position of wondering if the publishing industry will be around for us. While anyone who has ever stared at a residual check has mixed feelings about the death of the overhead-intensive record or book publishing industry, the truth remains that large, centralized corporations are the best way of concentrating power and getting books out to the rest of society.
It’s kind of like your liver, in a way. Somewhere in the body there needs to be a central chemical processing unit, and if there’s not one, it has to go on in each of the cells but this means that you trade efficiency for localization. While I like the idea of localization, I know it doesn’t apply universally. We need some form of “book liver” to spread the best of our works to the world.
There’s no polite way to say what most people who are not employed by the book industry are thinking. Books lately have very little to offer us. They’re a lot like the mass media, which seems to “miss” big issues like climate change while it’s busy covering Britney Spears, as Carl Bernstein just noted.
He said more resources are being devoted to the lifestyles of celebrities such as Donald Trump and Paris Hilton.
“The problems we have in news and journalism are about us not doing our job well enough,” Bernstein said. “The ideal of providing the best available version of the truth is being affected by the dominance of a journalistic culture that has less and less to do with reality and context.”
Bernstein, 63, said he believes an “idiot culture” is partly to blame for the dysfunction of political life in the United States.
“You can’t separate the appetites and demands of the people themselves and what they are given,” he said. “The blame simply can’t all be put at the feet of those who present news.”^
Books now are written like blogs. They are generally about the author. We can justify this in terms of postmodern theory, but when every book is written in this style, it becomes less of progress and more of an excuse to do what is easy. Books now are not relevant to our lives, in that they do not explain the role of the individual in society, or even the individual in any context except a glorification of our neurotic little pleasures and pains. No big topics are covered. This makes books with a few exceptions totally irrelevant to their audience that isn’t looking for the literary equivalent of Paris Hilton.
If literature and sci-fi want to continue existing, they have to get more relevant to their readers’ lives. This means we have to get over all the social bullshit that we think is really important when it has caught us up in it, but years later we realize was just a distraction. We as writers must return to writing about the important issues in life, like our moral direction as individuals, the direction of our civilization, the future decisions we must take to make sure there’s beauty in our lives. This doesn’t mean I’m endorsing what Tom Wolfe calls “realism,” which is books that try to be gritty and realistic and end up being self-obsessive and neurotic. You can write about problems and complain about society all day long but unless you’re offering a different theory about how things should be done, your book is about life’s failings incoveniencing you, not changing your soul.
I have found that whenever a book comes out that rewards the experience of struggling for something that is not convenient in life, it sells in droves, and the publishers never expected it. They have become so accustomed to catering to the ethic of convenience that seems to propel our time, thinking it is what the audience demands, that they have forgotten what people have rewarded in stories for millennia. We want a sweet story. We want someone tackling life in an allegorical way, learning, growing as a result, and then returning to have success. We want the hero to get the girl and the lone artist to succeed, we want the mountain to get climbed, we want the single mother to rise above her circumstances and triumph. But you don’t get that kind of triumph without a metaphysical and moral learning that you find in the literary classics.
Publishing has failed because it has taken a detour into “realism,” forgetting that realism can be an aesthetic and not a topic. We don’t want to hear about every detail of life. We know. We want to see life’s details swept up in a tempest of metaphor that makes clarity of them, and gives us a reason to move on. Just like in sci-fi, we don’t want to see another post-apocalyptic world where everything is miserable. We want a reason to make our world better than that otherwise inevitable fate.
There are those clueless people who think that literature is stagnating because we have not developed the form of the novel enough. Form? Joyce went overboard with form, and few can read it, and among those that can read, few of them want to. The form of literature has changed little over the last three thousand years, because literature will always be first and foremost about the story. What happened, who changed, how’d they get the strength to do it, and finally did they triumph or fade away. That’s literature, no matter if it’s told by a talking postmodern unicorn made of unassociated string theory automata or an ancient Greek sailor with mud in his beard.
Almost all of the people I see published in book stores should not have been published, at least in literature and science fiction. They’re getting to enjoy rock star treatment for filling our minds with the neurotic self-indulgent ramblings of people who have never known moral struggle, or wanted something better for the world as a whole. It’s no surprise that people aren’t buying this stuff. If literature is to survive, it needs to reverse this direction and strike out again for the greatness in stories.