What do we mean by 'literary'?

In the week when this year's Booker judging panel chooses a wideranging longlist, biased towards the off-beat but nevertheless embracing the apparently traditional farce of Michael Frayn's Skios, Daniel Green alerts me on Facebook to an article on The New Inquiry blog in which Rob Horning denounces the term 'literary'. It might seem from this last that Horning is taking a similar liberal approach to that of the Booker judges, but - although I find the real thrust of his argument hard to tease out  - his position seems, on the contrary, partisan.

He doesn't like the term 'literary', he begins by saying. My initial reaction is to agree (although I often find myself using the term). My reasons are these: while 'literary' can refer to a wide range of kinds of writing, from plain if heightened realism and the well-turned familiar to the wildly experimental and dissonantly innovative, it is too often taken as conjuring up the latter, against which there is a general prejudice. Any use of the term can cause people to assume with no other foundation, and often wrongly, that a book will be too difficult, or unenjoyable, or elitist, and put them off. 'Literary', in consequence, is too often used nowadays as a term of denigration. Secondly, this usage of the term is arbitrary, since forms that are unfamiliar when they first appear - non-linear narrative, for instance - can become familiar (and thus lose their 'difficulty') over time.

Initially, Horning appears to be saying exactly this last. He says that although we think the term defines 'particular formal characteristics', it doesn't really, since what is considered literary changes over time. But here his argument takes a different course, and his article turns out to be based on the assumption that, far from being used as a term of denigration, 'the literary' is a term still embraced as a positive accolade.

The reason for changes in notions of what is literary, he says, is that the literary is a matter of fashion. And the fashions are dictated (not by external factors in society, as I'd contend) but by a 'gate-keeping' literary community intent on 'asserting social power'. It's used, he declares, as 'an alibi for the status aspirations of the people who use it, who want to control its meaning'. 'The literary is what literary people say it is, which is what makes them literary people.'

It's the snobbery of the literary he's objecting to. There's something in this, of course: I remember feeling as child that maybe I could never be the writer I wanted to be, as those novels considered literary - ie given acclaim by reviewers - were set in worlds about which I knew nothing (except from books), middle-class drawing rooms peopled by doctors and lawyers or Bohemian artists. And when my novel The Birth Machine was first published it was hard to get it taken seriously as literature/art rather than propaganda because of its subject matter. It's certainly true that there are changing prejudices around what we consider literary. But it's the use of the term we are apparently talking about, and Horning seems at this point to overlook the fact that 'literary' has in recent years become a term of abuse, that publishers and agents are drawing their hands away from novels in any danger of being considered 'literary' as from hot bricks, and authors have been turning to familiar genres as the only way of surviving. I'm not sure that professing a 'literary' identity has recently given authors much power, social or literary.

Not that Horning purports to be talking about authors. 'The literary never really refers to books but to readers', he says. The point is that 'literary works flatter audiences... lets them pat themselves on the back by rejecting pleasure'. Well, there can't be many readers wanting to be flattered and patted on the back this way if publishers' enthrallment to the market is anything to go by, or if there are, the industry is mistaken and neglecting them sadly. And here we come up against a glaring inconsistency in Horning's argument. To Horning, it seems, 'the literary' does after all mean a specific 'formal characteristic' that is apparently unchanging. He began by asserting that the literary is not the same as the good, that 'any overlap may be entirely coincidental', but here he joins the ranks of those who use the term as an insult and equates the literary with the bad: 'The literary,' he says, 'never lets you forget how literary you are by reading it', implying not only that it always has a certain self-consciousness of tone but that this tone is directed towards nothing but flattering the reader's vanity (and so the author is implicated after all). This doggedly overlooks the possibility that prose designed to defamiliarise can have worthier aims: to draw readers' attention to certain truths about language, story-telling or life (see, for instance, my reading group discussion of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat). But then Horning has covered that base: 'Such goals are nonsensical, impossible,' he asserts, but in any case, since the literary is a matter merely of fashion decreed by an elite interested only in their own status, literary fiction is unfit to point to the truth. As a result, he says, literary books are never a force for social change and are only ever transient in significance.

Well, I don't know where George Orwell's novels, for instance, or nineteenth-century literary classics come into this. The example he chooses to prove his point is John Updike's Couples. I thoroughly enjoyed his hatchet-job on Updike's overblown prose, but can't agree that the fact that this is how it now seems is simply the result of 'the need for evolving sumptuary laws of culture to fix people in what seems to be their place' rather than wider changes in our social attitudes and consequent changes in the way we use language.

It turns out, though, that Horning isn't ignoring the current state of the market and its effect on so-called literary fiction, but for him it's another illustration of the way that literary fiction is lost up its own upturned nose: those he sees as claiming the badge of the literary he sees also as using the current marketing situation for 'just another mystification of the capitalist value form that orients production not toward generating more material wealth but generating distinction. It justifies poverty amid plenty on the basis of effort directed at shadows — in this case the alleged superiority of some socially coded type of language use'. For me this comes too close to blaming the victim, and his savage description of what he calls the newest literary moves towards endorsement of popular prejudiced and narrow conceptions of the literary: 'arid avant-gardism, formal difficulty for its own sake, genre experimentation, or really anything that the right readers can tell themselves is powerful and new and thus enjoy their own perceptiveness'.

Towards the end of the article, however, there's a change of tone, and Horning becomes almost wistful:  'I used to think you could salvage the term literary by ignoring its marketing usage and reserving it at least personally for those unique artifacts that appear perfect in themselves.' And he ends with what I take as self-irony: 'The reader who purports to be beyond the literary may be the most literary of all, claiming the perfectly camouflaged cultural capital whose value therefore can’t be questioned.' Which makes it all the more mystifying to me that he has expended so much effort in attacking a straw man.

Booker Longlist

Congratulations all on the Booker longlist, and especially to my publisher Salt, for the inclusion of Alison Moore's The Lighthouse, and to the two other small independent publishers on the list, Myrmidon and And Other Stories.

Here's the whole list:

The Yips by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)
Philida by André Brink (Harvill Secker)
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books)
Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber)
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories)
Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (Salt)
Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury)
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (Faber & Faber)
Communion Town by Sam Thompson (Fourth Estate)


See here for Justine Jordan's assessment of the list and  here for an article reporting comments by chair of the judges, Peter Stothard. Personally, I'm pretty pleased by Stothard's statement that 'Who published a book, and indeed even the author, is of very little concern to Man Booker judges. We were considering novels not novelists, texts not reputations' and that a key criteria for this year's panel was that 'a text has to reveal more, the more often you read it... We were looking for books that you can make a sustained critical argument about, and when you read them again, you can make a different critical argument.'

When is postmodern not postmodern?

Our reading group discussion of The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark.

It's the words on the page...

Our reading group discussion of A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Filling the page at all costs

Here's a good article by Jenny Diski on the LRB blog, reacting to a vogue for apps to combat 'writer's block' and keep the words tumbling onto the page, including Write or Die, an app which apparently starts deleting the words you've already written if you stop writing for more than 45 seconds. 'Don’t write any words,' she suggests, 'and the bastard app can’t delete them. That’ll show it.' Her tone may be joky but her message is deadly serious. She goes on:

If you think you’ve got writers’ block after 45 seconds of not writing, you don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing.

Personally I'd get rid of that 'maybe' and that parenthesis. As she says, writing really is all about waiting and gelling. It's bad enough the book industry turning its back on thoughtfulness and subtlety and complexity, without writers adopting practices likely to spell their doom.

Women just have to do men down, don't they?

A little belatedly (I'm busy writing), here's an article on gender bias in the fiction industry, by Joanna Trollope, chair of this year's Fiction Prize for Women (as we must now call it, since Orange have pulled their sponsorship to concentrate on film, and a new sponsor is being sought).

The vicious comments beneath prove her point, I think.

The dangers of overwriting

Our reading group discussion of Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald.

Review: The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall

Reading this book, a first collection of short stories by novelist Sarah Hall, underlines for me what I really want from my reading, and makes me realise how seldom I get it. I don't want to be simply entertained, diverted, informed or even satisfied, although all of these are good things to experience. No, what I really want is my deepest sense of the world confirmed and reignited, to feel raw yet healed with the truth of it, and buoyed with excitement. I want language so sharp and glittery and plump with that truth that the book is a taste, a texture on my tongue, a sensation in my gullet and gut. Above all, I want a pulse.

This book had all of these things for me. Via seven long stories set in places as far apart as Hall's native Cumbria and South Africa, it pulses with damage and sensuality. The first story, 'Butcher's Perfume', deservedly shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize, presents, in a prose punched with dialect ancient and modern, the first-person account of a Cumbrian schoolgirl's fascination with the Slessor family, grim fighters and sensual horse whisperers in a land drenched in a bloody history, 'burnt-farm, red-river raping territory', and in which, due to her unwitting involvement, that 'smoulder of years gone by' flares into a terrible act of revenge. Other stories, by contrast, present modern young women in contemporary situations or couples on exotic foreign holidays, but every one peels away the metropolitan surface to reveal, shockingly, a vertiginous precipice of uncertainty and pain. In the title story a successful writer has an assignation with her younger lover in a hotel in a busy tourist city. It's not long, however, before we're aware of the primitive and the animal beneath the city's slick veneer, and of the fact that this is a scenario of sexual dysfunction and deep emotional pain. The protagonist muses that pleasure and discomfort are 'so closely aligned', and images of fleshly danger and vulnerability swill the prose like the wash of pink around the venison arriving on the plate of the lover, a doctor currently forced by his medical rotation to work on the psychiatric wards, and regretting the loss of opportunity to conduct 'procedures'. While the protagonist finds his way of eating 'erogenous', there are inverted hints of the cutthroat:

He went very carefully through the dense tissue with his knife... He would put the knife in his mouth if anything stuck to it ... closing his lips over the blade, slipping it harmlessly along his tongue. 

Amputation is an image occurring in this story and in 'She Murdered Mortal He', a masterpiece of narrative tension in which, on arrival in a South African township as yet unspoilt by tourism, a couple's relationship, sparked and nurtured in the cosmopolitan city, immediately implodes. In a development reminiscent of M R James's 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You...' the female protagonist sets out in the dark to walk the narrow strip of sand on the beach and encounters not the physical dangers of which the travel brochures have warned her, but something more horrifying: her own animal nature. The cloak of civilisation similarly unravels in 'Vuotjarvi', in which a couple holiday beside a remote Finnish lake, the bottom of which is 'no more than a black imagining'. In the story with the most potentially conventional scenario, 'The Agency', the longings of an unfulfilled wife and mother turn out to be not so conventional, and concerned, once again, with that fine line between pleasure and pain.

'Bees', narrated in an internalised second person, presents a woman beginning a new flat-sharing life in London, but in contrast to the optimism usually suggested by such a situation, she sits in the garden surrounded by the mysteriously massacred bodies of bees, and eviscerated by the violence she has had to escape and the loss she paradoxically feels:

Your heart ... might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him.

'The Nightlong River' takes us back to ancestral territory, to an early-twentieth-century but also timeless world of hedgerows 'ruddy as a battle' with hawthorn and with 'a brown rot to the moors', where narrator Dolly's friend Magda is ailing, menstruating pathologically and developing tumours. Dolly determines to make her a coat of mink pelts, for which she joins the mink hunt. But the philanthropy of the gesture gives way to a primeval thrill in the hunt and the natural world:

But my dreams were not of Magda... What remains are the moors and the mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions.

A beautiful indifference indeed.

A warning for publishers

Nick Harkaway issues a Cassandra-like warning to publishers regarding e-books.
Thanks to Canongate's Jamie Byng (via Facebook), who agrees with him.

The blind of fine writing: reading group discussion of The Book of Evidence by John Banville

Some contention in our group about this novel. Here.

(Personal) Kindle update 2

Well, there's no doubt in my mind that Kindles are brilliant for travelling! I'm still frustrated by the inability to skip back and forth in a novel, but my partner tells me he has no such trouble: I just need to learn some techniques. And, contrary to my earlier prejudice, I've found the highlighting feature to be superior to the practice of underlining in a print book: it didn't take me long to be able to do it swiftly, and then rather than having to search back through a whole book for my underlinings (or note them down as I go), I can now simply press a button and call them all up, and press again to see each one in its whole context. And as for the dictionary: no more putting the book aside to check up on the meaning of a word; just press a button and it's there right away at the bottom or top of the screen. I was in Germany and stupidly hadn't taken a German phrase book or dictionary: no problem; I could get one straight down on my Kindle for very little expense, and nothing further to carry around with me! (I did find it fiddly to use at first, but quickly got used to it.)

I'm looking at all those books on our groaning shelves - the old falling-apart paperbacks, the (not so old) hardbacks with their browning paper, all piled two-deep and higgledy-piggedly because we long ago ran out of space, so we can't even find books any more when we want them, and I'm seeing them with different eyes....

Surely not, no... My whole life has been wedded to the physicality of books and their shelves, the way they sat beside my bed on the little white bookcase my parents bought me, or on the planks and bricks I set up in my first-ever flat; the way, on my many moves, I'd pack them carefully into tea-chests before anything else...  What would I be without them?

Literature as comfort blanket

An interesting post by Danuta Kean, which relates to the issues discussed in my last post, below. She asks why some books become bestsellers, however badly written, often without much of a marketing campaign (Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, she tells us, received only £5,000 advance, 'guarantee of little or no marketing', and I understand that the first Harry Potter had a similar kind of introduction to the world). Kean's conclusion, which seems to me correct, is that they 'tap into contemporary anxieties about our lives' and yet are 'overwhelmingly reactionary', providing a literary comfort blanket (rather than any political challenge).

Gutless culture

Aditya Chakrabortty, spurred by a weekend he's just spent at a festival to celebrate the life of the Bengali artist and thinker Rabinfranath Tagore, writes an impassioned complaint about the lack of political dimension in the fiction being produced in the West today. Partly, he says, it's because 'economics and politics have been cordoned off from the rest of society: as stuff best left to the experts and careerists', an argument put forward by Zoe Williams not so long ago. More importantly he sees it as a matter of the logistics of the contemporary writing life:

'...literature too has been professionalised, so that authors now go from their creative-writing MAs to their novels to their relentless promotional work. Contemporary literary writers, it sometimes seems to me, are so tightly wedged behind their Apples that they have no time for politics.'

Personally, I'd say the problem is more radically the fact that economics is at the centre of our so-called cultural thinking, and the way this impacts on the kinds of novels that find publication and that writers are encouraged to write or discouraged from writing. And in a similar way to Chakrabortty I returned yesterday from an experience - in my case a visit to the horrendous former Stasi prison in Berlin - which left me pondering these issues, and in particular chilled by the thought that while our government wants to seize the kind of power to snoop on its citizens that was used by the Stasi, our publishing companies turn down novels for not being commercial enough - which all too often means 'too political'.

(Personal) Kindle update

I still haven't used my Kindle again, but I'm off to Berlin for Easter and I've downloaded in readiness the novel we're reading for the next reading group: John Banville's Book of Evidence. I also downloaded The Great Gatsby, as, although we already had a copy in the house, my partner and I and a friend are re-reading it simultaneously to discuss it.

Well, my partner was ready to read the Banville before me, so, never having even held a Kindle before, he tried it on mine. He didn't like the experience much, and he hated the book, and was left wondering if the problem was the medium. That was it for Kindles as far as he was concerned...

But then I was hogging our print copy of Gatsby, a book we both love, and he turned back to the Kindle. Guess what, he now loves Kindles!!! He's going to get one himself!

Well, I have always said it's the words, not the format/medium...

Calling foul

Paul Magrs has finally called foul and pulled out of a literary festival for which he agreed to do workshops over four days for no fee whatever, because he has now discovered they are not even prepared to pay his travel expenses! On his blog he replicates the excellent email he sent delineating the reasons why this is simply just not an acceptable way to treat the primary providers, the writers.

Sheenagh Pugh elaborates on her blog, unpicking the fake reasons of economics with which we are insulted on such occasions by festivals charging huge ticket prices to the public.

I urge you to read both blogs.

The literary establishment

Last week in the Guardian Geoff Dyer questioned the whole concept of the 'literary establishment'. He makes some good points, but, in view of MsLexia's recent experiment to find undiscovered talent and the shocking results (which I wrote about here), as I read Dyer's piece a thought was lurking in my mind which is best expressed by a response from Paul Bilic in this week's Review Letters, who says:

What he fails to address, however, is that to huge majority of non-metropolitan types who are not journalists or celebrities it is nigh on impossible to get a manuscript read by an agent, let alone a publisher. For these people, the notion of an establishment still means something, and, I would contend, more so now than ever before.

Not yet kindled...

Joanna Trollope, chair of this year's Orange Prize, has said that she found reading all the books on her Kindle or iPad a most unsatisfactory experience:

The machines homogenised everything. No matter how striking the prose, the little grey screen subdued everything to sameness... The sheer heft of a book in your hand ... is not only pleasurable but informative. You can tell a great deal just by the look and the feel. (Guardian - can't find a link, I'm afraid)

I've so often said that it's the words that matter, not the trappings with which they're conveyed, but now I'm thinking I agree with Trollope about the Kindle. I got mine for Christmas but, although I've done a fair bit of reading to say that I've also been writing hard, I can't say I've used it much.

I must say I had a bad experience to begin with: I downloaded a PDF I needed for research, and it was hopeless: when the screen showed the whole page, the print was impossibly tiny, and zooming in gave me a frustrating section of a page only, whereas if there was one thing I needed to do with this document, which was the report of a tribunal, it was scan whole pages and skip. I ended up printing out the whole hundred A4 pages, which gave me the chance physically to divide it all up, and put together the sections I really needed, and mark bits with different coloured highlighters according to order of importance. Well, that was a PDF, but then when I came to download a novel next, I discovered that that ability to skip back and forth is crucial to my reading of novels, and it wasn't so easy on a Kindle. Get to a point in a novel which refers you back to an earlier moment which you then want to glance at again quickly, and with a paper book you can usually do it in an instant by remembering how far the book was physically open at the time. Try that on a Kindle, and you're pressing one button after another, and your reading experience is suspended and clotted... And I know some people think it's sacrilege, but I like to scribble copious notes in the margins at top speed...

Maybe I'm just not used to it yet, and maybe I'd be thinking they weren't problems by now if most books since Christmas hadn't however presented themselves to me in print form. I've been sent several print novels for review and comment (and offered a sackful more). I read two books for my reading group, but I had both on my shelves already - and only one of them was available on Kindle in any case. I've read a beautifully produced new hardback - just the opposite of an ebook, with its carefully appropriate artwork, and its creamy pages with good black print so easy on the eye - and I've since been sent the paperback edition. I've been working on proposals for drama adaptations of novels: only one of those books was available on Kindle, and I already had a copy of its print edition. As for those I didn't have, I was back in that old sweet-smelling world of the second-hand bookstore, and the joy of the cover artwork of earlier eras.

On the whole, I can say that the Kindle simply hasn't yet entered my life. However, as Joanna Trollope concedes, 'A Kindle is a brilliant tool, a clever adjunct to reading on the move.' I'm going away at Easter, and I've downloaded a novel ready. We'll see...

A big disagreement

My reading group discussion about Douglas Coupland's Generation X. A near fight.

Hidden treasure

Mslexia dropped through my letterbox this morning. Always good for the latest industry trends and issues of interest to writers, this morning it held a special treat for me: the news that my friend Rosie Garland (who once thrilled audiences as Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen poet) has won the Mslexia competition for an undiscovered novel, with her novel The Beast in all her Loveliness. Not only that - another of her novels is on the 9-strong shortlist! The Beast... garners huge praise from judges Jenni Murray, who compares her to Angela Carter, and Sarah Waters, women who know their stuff when it comes to good writing, and fellow judge agent Clare Alexander says it has 'so much energy and exuberance, it glued me to the page.'

There's no way, at this rate, that Rosie is not now proved to be the fine and exciting writer I have always known her to be, yet in the 'How I Did It' section she describes the struggles she has encountered in a commercialised publishing industry. Such struggles are all too common now for literary writers who are however hardly free to air them before achieving this kind of success, and so the difficulties lie hidden. Mslexia, however, hearing 'rumours from agents that the market for fiction was in freefall, publishing deals were harder to come by, advances were decimated, and established authors were being tossed on the scrap heap' and noting that 'it's a sad fact that many agencies employ junior staff to sift submissions' and that in such a situation success depends on contacts, launched their competition to test how much good debut literary fiction has been left lying by the wayside. Their results appear to be spectacular: they say they were 'seriously impressed by the standard of the writing on show'. To find out why so much good writing was lying hidden they contacted the hundred (!) longlisted authors. It wasn't that the writers weren't sending their stuff out; far from it, but only 15% had managed to get an agent. Amongst the rest Mslexia encountered a tale of 'near misses', agents recognising the merit of manuscripts, even working for long periods with the authors on manuscripts, but ultimately feeling unable to sell them. Rosie herself writes of an agent who sent her winning book out only once, leaving it languishing after a single rejection before finally confessing to her that 'the market was so dire at the moment, he had been told by the agency to concentrate on non-fiction.'

God help us, is all I can say, and I'm not just talking about us writers but our so-called civilisation.

Faber Academy Online

Last year this blog hosted a most lively Faber Academy discussion about the value of creative writing and the teaching of it as a subject. One point which is often raised about creative writing courses is that they are available only to those who can afford to take time out from work to attend, and, for those at a distance, the expense of travel and accommodation. Many will therefore find welcome the news I've just received from Faber Academy's Ian Ellard of the launch of Faber Academy Online, 'a brand-new web-based creative writing platform powered by Moodle 2', creative writing courses in which 'chatrooms, topic forums and specially commissioned video content from Faber editors will be combined with one-to-one Skype feedback and podcasts to create a unique learning experience.' The whole thing kicks off with a 28-week online course in novel-writing, based on their existing face-to-face course, beginning April 11th and taught by novelist Kris Kenway.
Application deadline midday 28th March. Details here.

Crossposted to Elizabeth Baines