Filed under: General
I’m writing an opinion piece for Vulpes Libris and, as usual with any writing I ever do, I’m drastically over-shooting the word limit. Simultaneously, I’m short of time for writing this blog. So let me present the outtakes from the former as entries for the latter.
”Every year it becomes less and less possible to find an independent bookshop or an independent publisher or an independent minded author and every book is fine tuned to appeal to Richard and Judy’s editor or whatever cultural trend is currently riding high in the collective unconscious. But what about the writing? What place is there in all of this for the difficult, edgy, elitist experimentation that has to be fostered despite its failure to be accessible or to appeal to a broad audience, or make money? Writing that offends in its desire to be superior, that doesn’t care if it’s not liked or understood or marketable? Where is this work to find a haven when its traditional home – the subsidised mid-list – is being gradually put out to grass and the resources that once paid for it are streamlined into paying for cardboard cutouts and window displays for an ever decreasing number of books?
The answer is nowhere.
There is a failure of will when it comes to resisting the commercialisation of writing where even those who write under the banner of ‘literary’ fiction feel they have to apologise for stretching their readership and the notion that James Joyce is superior to N1ck H0rnby is frowned upon. So we come back to the question of what is the writing for? James Joyce is better than N1ck H0rnby at being literature. Whether it’s better at being entertaining is a matter of personal choice, but if your notion of being entertained precludes being challenged then, perhaps, the idea that writing should be ebtertaining is one that needs to be questioned, because at the moment it is, in the market place, almost unassailable and it is suffocating everything in its path.”
NOTE: I use this spelling of N1ck H0rnby to dodge his Google Alert. I haven’t got the energy to argue with him/his publisher/his agent/someone he knows at UEA about why I don’t think H1gh F1delity is as good as Finnegan’s Wake.
