In her review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, Hilary Plum contends that the flaw in the book’s analysis of contemporary American fiction “arises out of the genre of scholarship,” suggesting that literary scholars are inclined to stick to “what scholarship is supposed to be about, which is what scholarship has already been about.” Thus Sinykin focuses his attention on the corporate book business, which is where “scholarship” can reveal the social and cultural processes at work in “literary production,” the orientation to both literature and culture that today’s scholarship is almost always “about.” The kind of non-conglomerate, non-commercial writing published by small presses, Plum points out, is more or less irrelevant to this analysis.
Plum is certainly right that by far most formally adventurous work that resists the homogenization of fiction (a state of affairs that Sinykin collapses into the broader economic concept he calls “conglomeration) is published by smaller presses—smaller than the non-profit presses Sinykin presents as the primary alternative to conglomerate publishing—and that Sinykin almost completely ignores them. I would also agree with Plum that the constricted attitude toward both writers and readers—neither of which count for much in the book’s consideration of the broader circumstances in which a “book” comes to be—in Big Fiction is a direct function of the work of literary scholarship as it is currently practiced. But scholarship as we find it in Big Fiction is not, in its relationship to works of literature and to literary history in general, inherently the manifestation of “what scholarship is supposed to be about,” at least not simply as the extension of what it “has already been about” unless scholarship of literature came into existence only in the 1980s.
While it may indeed be the case that academic literary scholarship in its current form has entrenched itself firmly enough that it seems the authentic expression of the scholarly approach to what we call literature, some of us received a literary education under entirely different circumstances, in which the object of the scholar’s attention was not (or not only) the various contexts of literary activity but literary art itself. Literary history focused on the first term, not the second: history as the means to assess the different manifestations of the literary through time, not to subsume it to historical inquiry. Historical, political, and cultural context could serve as disparate avenues of approach to the study of literature, but all of the avenues were assumed to converge on a shared destination where the distinct views offered by these different approaches might be synthesized. This unifying, if unstated, assumption no longer obtains, mainly because literary academics lost confidence in literature as a self-sustaining subject suitable to academic study. Securing literature as the center of literary study in the first place had required the displacement of interest to criticism rather that simply “literature itself,” but over the past forty years academic literary critics have inexorably excluded literature as an artistic practice or as aesthetic experience from their understanding of “criticism” so they might focus instead on more consequential concerns, as if conceding to the original resistance to literary study as something too lightweight for serious scholars.
Hilary Plum is correct in her perception that Big Fiction is quintessentially a scholarly book as literary scholarship is currently defined in that it situates an ostensibly literary subject in an external context—in this case, economic—that is of greater interest to the author than what makes the subject literary. It is true that Sinykin often enough includes extended passages of close reading, but it is close reading of the sort academic criticism has appropriated from the New Critics without including the New Critics’ insistence on the aesthetic autonomy of the literary text. Sinykin shows how the literary works he examines reflect\ the economic context that is his overriding concern. His readings do offer interpretations, but they are interpretations that reduce the fiction of several prominent writers (E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison) to the material conditions of their publication. If Sinykin’s readings provide an angle by which we might approach an understanding of Doctorow’s Ragtime or Morrison’s Beloved, they do so by implicitly cutting off other angles as at best naïve in their failure to appreciate the determining influence of those material circumstances.
Sinykin isn’t really hesitant to assert a very wide scope for the interpretive lens afforded by the concept of “conglomerate fiction.” The term doesn’t just denote the dominance of corporate capitalism in the acquisition and dissemination of books but should be understood to encompass the actual authorship of the fiction written in the last 50 years. So pervasive is the ethos of conglomeration and so extensive are the tentacles the big five publishers send out to all the stages of book production that the writer can be seen to serve as something like the point of origin in a process that goes well beyond the scene of writing itself—which Sinykin believes has been overly romanticized—and involves so many participants under the corporation’s command that it should be said that conglomerate publishing itself is the true author of the fiction it publishes. Although Sinykin attempts to avoid interpretive overreach by emphasizing that with writers such as Morrison and Doctorow the conglomerate outlook is indirect, manifested allegorically rather than literally, it is finally difficult to know just how seriously we are ultimately to take his conceit. As a rhetorical exaggeration used to underscore the extent to which contemporary literature is subjugated to the needs of high-stakes commerce, it perhaps has some force; as a concept that accurately captures the reality of contemporary writers’ situation, it is, of course, absurd.
Sinykin’s critique does seem more justly applied to the career of Cormac McCarthy (perhaps explaining the frequent mentions of Sinykin's discussion of McCarthy in the initial reviews of Big Fiction). Sinykin justifiably notes that McCarthy’s first five novels (through Blood Meridian gained the writer increasing acclaim as a distinctive stylist but very meager financial rewards. When McCarthy, almost in a gesture of desperation, acquired an agent and a new publisher, both of whom encouraged McCarthy to alter both his style and his Southern settings (essentially extending the Western backdrop of Blood Meridian), McCarthy’s novels, beginning with All the Pretty Horses, broke through and achieved substantial commercial success. It could indeed plausibly be said that McCarthy’s later fiction bears the imprint of conglomerate influence, but in fact McCarthy’s case seems more an instance of capitulating to commercial imperatives—old-fashioned “selling out.” No doubt there are numerous enough writers who would be willing to sell out if the financial rewards were sufficiently reliable, and probably even more quite willing to produce conglomerate fiction entirely to order at the right price. It seems improbable that many good writers are trying to create artistically credible fiction but just can’t avoid giving over their sincerely held objectives to the all-powerful hand of the publishing conglomerates.
This imprisonment in the assumptions of conglomeration is an especially inapt way to envisage the efforts of writers whose work not merely appears in small presses but can be described as adventurous or experimental. There was a time not so long ago when academic critics took a keen interest in such fiction—it could be argued that the arrival of contemporary fiction as a reputable subject of academic inquiry coincided with the rise to prominence of such fiction (eventually called “postmodern”) in the 1960s and 1970s—but the current scholarly preoccupation with sociological and cultural criticism has led to the virtual disappearance of academic criticism of experimental fiction written during the period (1980s to present) witnessing the triumph of what Sinykin now calls conglomerate fiction.
If “autofiction” and fiction written by “previously marginalized voices” do merit attention in Sinykin’s book, it is because they are assimilable in subject and theme to conglomerate expectations—both have some proven appeal to identifiable readers, and increased publication of the latter, at least, credits a degree of social conscience to the commercial publishers that softens perceptions of their otherwise mercenary business model. Innovative, challenging fiction may at one time have brought publishers a semblance of literary respectability that could be valuable, but this sort of respectability, rooted in the recognition of aesthetic complexity as a primary literary value, is now considered dispensable by mainstream publishing and dismissed by literary scholarship as irredeemably subjective and elitist.
Recognition of aesthetic achievement may indeed by subjective (although surely the concept of the “aesthetic” itself is not), but it has never been clear to me why this is perceived as problematic. While there are certainly “objective” features of literary writing and history with which the scholarly study of literature might be concerned, ultimately the purpose of a work of fiction or poetry is to engage the reader in a distinctive experience. It is entirely possible for a critic to describe the experience honestly and deliberately, but finally the experience can only be reported, not repeated among all other readers—even if we thought such a thing was desirable in the first place. This solitary nature of the reading experience (and the experience of art in general) has always caused literary scholars ambivalence: if finally a work of literature in its most essential expression doesn’t result in shareable “knowledge,” what is the point of devoting “study” to it? Even New Criticism, which was partly an attempt to meet this objection by making the method of study just as important as the texts examined, was eventually judged as too implicated in the mere aesthetic appreciation of literature, and its provisional attempt to produce something like knowledge of literature has been superseded by more radically “objective” approaches such as computational analysis and the various kinds of cultural analysis drawing on empirical description, such as Sinykin’s sociological criticism.
Given the specialized, technical, and often esoteric knowledge applied to and derived from literary texts through these approaches, it is hard to regard seriously the charge that the purely aesthetic response to works of literature is elitist. Literary academics are proficient at interrogating a literary text for its relevance to the critic’s preferred theory or extra-literary concerns, but it is clear from most “readings" by contemporary academic critics that reading closely for the qualities of artistic expression that bring literature into existence to begin with and that motivates most readers is no longer a skill much practiced, although presumably it is a skill no longer much learned (or taught) in colleges and universities. If this is so, it can hardly be regarded as an “elite” practice.
Needless to say, the disinclination to consider the formal and stylistic features of literary texts in general would make serious inquiry into those features as they are extended and transformed in experimental fiction even less urgent. And, indeed, perhaps no change in my own perception of the priorities of academic literary studies has been as noticeable as the seeming loss of interest in the consideration of formally innovative fiction (except when the apparent innovation can be made to serve as a political gesture: challenge to literary form=challenge to the political order). When contemporary fiction started to become acceptable as an academic specialty, much if not most of the scholarly criticism that began to appear concerned the generation of experimental, postmodern writers that seemed to be offering the literary variation on the rebellion against established norms that characterized the 60s more generally. The confluence of the dissident impulses of the times and the heterodox practices of the postmodernists perhaps led to the current tendency to politicize perceived experimental strategies, but neither the first generation postmodernists nor many academic critics accentuated the political: for the writers, the political implications of their work were secondary to the work’s challenges to inherited techniques—challenges that represent an attempt to revivify literary form, not to enlist form in a political gesture. For the critics, while the parallels between the audacious breaking of rules among the insurgent postmodernists and the general disregard of conventional assumptions occurring in the 60s were tacitly acknowledged, what occupied their attention was the sheer variety of the experimental methods these writers employed and the expansion of possibilities in literary form they seemed to promise. If the immediate postwar period had featured a return to pre-modernist realism as a default expectation in American fiction, the adventurous fiction of the 1960s and 1970s augured a return to the innovative spirit of modernism.
By the time I became aware of these writers and wanted to read their work more comprehensively, they were not longer so new or notorious, and the idea that one could devote “academic study” to the--as well as other branches of contemporary fiction, including those which came to overshadow postmodernism--was no longer so novel. I earnestly aspired to be become a scholar of postmodern American fiction, and to that end published a few scattered articles about writers I especially admired, although I fully intended to write more and made assorted plans to write various books in my “field,” but even before I could actually commit to a particular project I could tell that the trends in that field were shifting away from explication, formal analysis, or thematic surveys to a kind of critical writing whose ultimate object of interest lay “outside the text.” I was not an enemy of all forms of critical theory or cultural analysis, but keeping up with the changing fashions of academic criticism was not after all why I aspired to be an academic critic.
The only way to continue practicing the kind of criticism to which I was most naturally inclined was to acknowledge that it would no longer pass muster in the academic journals devoted to contemporary literature. To me it seemed that contemporary literature would not continue to be afforded the kind of critical elucidation given by modern literary study to all previous periods of literary history, at least by academic critics. It would at best be exploited for its utility in advancing other causes. It would not be allowed to advance its own cause: its value as verbal works of art. This might be still accomplished, but not through academic programs of literary study. Academic criticism had a more or less guaranteed audience, however small and confined mostly to other academic critics, although the jargon and deference to certain rites of scholarly decorum that make most current academic criticism unappealing to most readers were not then so pervasive, and much of the critical work still useful. If I was to continue to be a literary critic, and to extend my interest in experimental fiction, I would need to find a different audience,
In my subsequent efforts to do this, I have found that, first of all, interest in pushing against the limits of acceptable practice as illustrated in most seriously-minded fiction—what has come to be called “literary fiction”—by writers themselves is still quite keen. The postmodernists provided a template for literary exploration that has continued to inspire subsequent writers who are not content merely to apply the inherited methods of “craft,” but wish to modify the concept of craft to mean the artful transformation of form or style in fiction –art is not to be found in the skillful repetition of known strategies, but the discovery of alternate strategies employed with equal skill. Indeed, there might be more writers attempting this latter approach than in the immediate wake of the original postmodern era, although the very success of the earlier writers in offering new variations on fictional form requires the critic to recognize when these later writers are themselves contributing something new or inventive, or are merely reiterating an innovative move made by their experimental predecessors. Such moves can easily enough become as standardized as the conventional devices experimental writers ostensibly want to question, and, while I certainly do not set myself up as the judge of all that is worthily experimental in experimental fiction, I have increasingly focused my critical attention on assessing works of unconventional and adventurous fiction with the underlying assumption that these works are the continuation of the project to open up the art of fiction to perpetual invention and re-invention.
There do seem to be readers interested as well in critical engagement with this project (if not always my own expression of it), and there is certainly an audience for critical engagement with fiction published by smaller independent presses in general, which by necessity are the primary publishers of experimental fiction but of course do not restrict themselves to this single mode (although there are several estimable publishers whose lists are weighed more heavily toward experimental fiction than otherwise). Neither the writers nor most readers of the work supported by these presses, I would argue, are prompted by the concerns that Sinykin seems to suggest motivate those who choose conglomerate fiction. They want from literature a stimulating aesthetic experience, not bland entertainment or therapeutic comfort. They expect criticism to be of some assistance in reflecting on this experience, not be preoccupied with analyzing the commercial machinations of big publishers as emblems of the capitalist system. They are interested in literature, not the tawdry spectacles of culture.
Although Hilary Plum is entirely persuasive in her assessment of the limitations of Sinykin’s book, even she wants finally to frame these limitations as a failure of sociopolitical diagnosis. Sinykin doesn’t see (or want to see) the existence of this dissident corner of publishing as the noncommercial resistance to commercial dominance. It is that, but the real alternative these indie presses provide is not to the profit-driven motives of capitalism but to the non-literary (even anti-literary) attitude toward writing and reading that permeates conglomerate fiction as it has totally surrendered to the imperatives of the bureaucratic corporate system. Considerations of art or knowledge no longer play a role in this system at all (except when someone within it consciously ignores its strictures).These are the considerations that still influence what is published and discussed in the milieu surrounding small presses, and, for me, at least, they loom largest in the discussion of experimental fiction, the kind of writing that stands in the starkest contrast to conglomerate fiction.
Just how mercenary conglomerate fiction has become is made clear not just in Sinykin’s book but also very plainly in a recent essay that closely examines the court proceedings in the antitrust case brought against Penguin in its attempt to purchase Simon & Schuster (Elle Griffin, “No one buys books.”) The impression that emerges from this scrutiny of the testimony is of a corporate publishing business that both yokes itself to the logic of finance capitalism and demonstrates the utter insanity of that logic when applied to the writing of books. Why anyone who takes writing seriously would conclude that this business is worth the time and effort to “study” it escapes my comprehension. If it is necessary to regard this appalling entity as the co-creator of current literary work in order to understand culture more broadly, then I’d prefer to discount culture altogether and stick to literature. Even now, I know where to look for that.
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