The Literary Impenetrable

I've been late getting to the Guardian Review these last two weeks. I usually flick through it immediately on Saturdays, picking out the interesting bits and scribbling down notes and titles to track down, but other reading, not least Patrick O'Brian's Post Captain, has had sidetracked me recently. And so I've only just stumbled across two very interesting articles in the March 3rd edition - so interesting that I mean to write two posts covering the thoughts they raise.  

First up, Giles Foden wonders why 'literary' is a dirty word for Amanda Ross, one of the most influential women in British publishing.  Ross, who chooses the books for the extroadinarily successful 'Richard and Judy Bookclub', was asked who she considered the greatest living author in the UK and somehow ended up declaring that she didn't 'like to label anything 'literary'.  She went on, quite vehemently: 'In fact, I really hate that word. For our readers, if we said a book is literary, it might put them off... To the public 'literary' means inaccessible, or full of classical references, or with long passages in French.'

In his turn Giles Foden gives a spirited defence of 'literary' novels, peppered with pleasantly disparaging snipes at the perma-tanned pair, whose 'pronouncements aren't worth so much as a pile of stale vol-au-vents (citoyens, you do know what a vol-au-vent is?)'.  He points out that many of the books Ross chooses for R & J are, themselves, literary: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun for example,  plus the three Booker nominees - Julian Barnes' Arthur and George, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson.  And he denies that 'literary' is synonymous with 'esoteric', or with 'difficult'.  Which is all perfectly true but, nevertheless, I think he misses an important implication of Ross' statement. What riles me most is not her definition of what is 'literary' (although it is ridiculous - I can't remember the last time I read a contemporary novel with an untranslated passage in French) but her sweeping disbelief in the reading public.  If the avid followers of R + J can read Cloud Atlas or Arthur and George, both intensely literary novels in their way, and enjoy them, then surely they can cope with calling them just that.   If they're not literary, what are they?  Perhaps Amanda Ross would call them something vague and saleable like 'good reads', tagging them with catchwords like 'accessible' (although they're not really) or 'page-turners'.  But surely this is downright insulting to the members of the club - they can tell the difference between The Da Vinci Code (also an R + J pick) and Cloud Atlas.  What is that tangible difference, the interest and otherness that that latter has, if not literaryness?  What's worse: I'm sure Ross sees the difference clear as day.  So why make such a statement in the first place?

Personally I think that by denying literaryness, Ross is actively limiting her audiences' reading remit.  By collating 'literary' with inaccessible, and denying that at least some of her bookclub choices are part of that frightening world, she discourages her always-growing following from branching out and trying other 'literary' authors.  Afterall, there is no reason why anyone who enjoys Julian Barnes or David Mitchell shouldn't also revel in Ali Smith, or Kazuo Ishiguro, or Ian McEwan... the list is endless and long and lovely.  If Ross championed the literary, and called a literary novel what it is, she would probably do us all a much better service. She would be doing what a book club should do.  That is: widen readers' horizons and introduce them to books (and types of books) they wouldn't ordinarily have lighted upon.  Admittedly, the R + J club does this to an extent...  But at the same time it serves to reduce the pool of potentially readable books to a tiny few and draws an arbitrary line between what is and is not accessible to its 'public'. 

In my opinion there are very few novels being written today that are properly impenetrable to a moderately confident reader - i.e. exactly the type who likes Ross' R + J selections - and there are not even that many unriddleable 'classic' novels either.  Again and again people pick up a classic or a 'literary' work for the first time and are shocked by how exciting and accessible and modern-seeming it is.  They wonder what it was that daunted them in the first place.  Surely it is reputation that stalls them - the beliefs and superstitions that grow up around a novel and its author.  And the bizarre 'us' and 'them', 'literary' and 'accessible' dichotomy that people like Ross perpetrate.  I don't think any such dichotomy properly exists in fiction - they're not mutually exclusive qualities.   Its true that literature can be read in all kind of ways and thus with divergent results - the reader armed with 6 years of training in literary theory might read a very different Pride and Prejudice, for example, to someone who has never heard of Harold Bloom, or Northrop Frye, or Julia Kresteva and doesn't care one bit for marxist feminist interpretation.   They might come away with entirely different impressions of Austen as a story writer, a stylist and a woman... but the novel is capable of letting both of them in.  It is equally as 'accessible' while still being traditionally 'literary' (no matter how many times we're told its Regency chicklit)!

I suppose, at the end of it all, fear of the 'literary' is Ross' bread and butter and the reason that R + J is so popular -  it never requires that you leave your reading comfort zone. It socialises and normalises excellent literature (at least some of the time) and makes it safe for the 'public': it remodels the precise post-modern frenzy of Cloud Atlas into 'a page-turner' or 'a rollicking good read'.  Something for your average man or woman in the street.  It doesn't want you to know that what you're reading is literary, just in case, gods forbid, you went out to your local bookshop and bought something else at random or at will, something that hadn't been sanitised.  If the R + J audience started asking itself: 'What about that book, or that one there instead...' and began developing a taste of its own, it would no longer be so entirely dependent on recommendations and a TV book club.  That would surely be bad news for Amanda Ross, but it wouldn't it be excellent news for the publishing industry, both large and small presses, and for the reading public in general?

I think so.

~~Victoria~~

Comments

[Martin]

Did you see M John Harrison's short comments on Foden's piece?

http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/03/03/flamebait-emma-bovary/

[citronyella]

How are you liking Post Captain?

[Danielle]

It's interesting reading about these literary arguments--"literary is good" (Bloom), "literary is bad" (the label anyway--I'm guessing she just means the label not the books). I do think she does a disservice to her viewers/readers if she is implying that certain books are not accessible. I always had that feeling when I was younger that certain books were simply too hard. Now I read what I like, and most books really are not that difficult. Maybe it is partially my age, and I am understanding or appreciating them better now that I have more life experience. It is sort of a fine line she is walking between not wanting to put readers off yet wanting to expose them to new books.

[Dorothy W.]

What a great post. Your point is excellent that people are often afraid of books but then give them a try and are pleasantly surprised. Why do we fear books, indeed? And I like your answer, that it's in some people's interest to make readers feel uncertain and insecure, and then to provide them with the "guidance" they think they require -- and to make some money along the way. This reminds me of a book I read a while back about how the Book of the Month club became successful by soothing people's anxieties about their status as educated people.

[Marianne]

"I can't remember the last time I read a contemporary novel with an untranslated passage in French"

Well, for what it's worth, I just read A.S. Byatt's _The Biographer's Tale_, published in 2005, and there were untranslated French bits in it. I rather enjoyed them, actually.

I do think that it is tiresome that genre labels always seem to slip from 'useful descriptor' to the whole us vs. them thing.

[Nic]

"Again and again people pick up a classic or a 'literary' work for the first time and are shocked by how exciting and accessible and modern-seeming it is."

Definitely! As I've found in the last year with the likes of _Don Quixote_ and _Vanity Fair_. The desire/ability to get into the worldview of the time in which a work was produced helps immensely in the connecting-with-a-classic stakes - but the things that struck me most about DQ, in particular, were its infectious energy and apparently postmodern experimentation... no need for explanatory footnotes to get those!

The dismissal of 'literary' or 'classic' works as inaccessible, and/or the province of the pretentious, irritates me deeply (almost as deeply as the dismissal of genre books as inherently shallow ;-)). And even if some books *are* difficult, it doesn't remotely follow that they are therefore unengaging - there are many different types of entertainment, after all...

[Becca]

Headline from the Guardian in 2002:

"Book Clubs are nothing to do with reading
They are just get-togethers for sad middle-class women"

There's quite a bit of scholarly work out there on book clubs, and the concept of 'middlebrow' literature.
Janice Radway wrote an article or a book on the American book clubs that rose up in the 1920s. They were regarded with horror because they blurred the boundaries between serious, literary fiction, genre fiction and more lowbrow offerings. The term 'middlebrow' seems to have arisen in order to be able to categorize this type of reading so that it could be dismissed by the guardians of high culture, who felt threatened that their territory was being invaded. And Danielle is right - book clubs have long provided a way for uncertain, 'less-educated' readers to get some guidance as to what to read - I think that Radway's book talks about this as well, though it may have been someone else in a response to this book.

I have a couple of points.
First,I think that Amanda Ross's attempt to distance the Richard & Judy bookclub from 'literature' or 'literary fiction' is bound up with this anxiety. She is concerned that readers are comfortable with the choices presented to them, that they aren't threatened by them. Though as Nic points out, it's rather unfortunate that Ross has equated difficult with literary. It also means that I, in a pretentious mood, might decide not to buy a book because it has a Richard & Judy sticker on the cover, even though I had previously intended to read it. In other words, it paves the way for R&J and their readers to be looked down upon by some kind of elite of readers. (I'm slightly horrified at myself when I do this, by the way!)

Second, I think it's worth noting that we all receive guidance on what to read from somewhere. For some people it is from Richard & Judy, for others it is from the Books pages of the Indie or Times, or the TLS. Or you might read the back cover of the book, or just pick up the vibes from the cover artwork. My point is that we're all being fed information from publishing companies and media, and we all belong to a certain 'market' that is being 'marketed to' just as the R&J consumers do.

I think that the good that the R&J book club does is encourage a large number of people to read, and gives them a variety of literature with which they can engage - some of which these readers would otherwise never consider picking up.
The bad side is that these are books that publishers have paid trillions (some big number, anyway) to get onto this list - they're not necessarily the best books around. I'd like more variety out there too, Victoria, and it is documented that Waterstones now stocks a smaller range of titles in its stores than it used to. But that's partly because of the pressure of Amazon.
I have no satisfactory conclusion.
I like independent publishers a lot, but my opinion is coloured by one of them forgetting that I had made an appointment to see them (Gary Pulsifer from Arcadia) and another failing to give me a job (Canongate - I was 1 of 2 at second interviews, and they gave the job to the other person!). There's as much dross out there among independent publishers as there is among the big conglomerates - but at least when you read it you don't feel like you've been conned into buying it by the '3 for 2' offer on the front.

-End of wittery, inconclusive post-

[Becca]

Whoops, I wrote a short essay :o(