[Y]ou read an artist’s book not with
your heart [or] brain alone, but with your brain and spine. ‘Ladies and
gentlemen, the tingle in the spine really tells you what the author
felt and wished you to feel’. I wonder if I shall ever measure again
with happy hands the breadth of a lectern and plunge into my notes
before the sympathetic abyss of a college audience.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
The State of Things
Books are definitely still being published.
Somewhere over a hundred Canadian novels alone each year. And, with no
little thanks to the Internet, people of all ages are reading, and many
are reading books. The Kindle and other electronic books really are
encouraging people to read more. But they are reading fewer titles. And
the real readers, the serious readers, are now often reading nonfiction.
We’re in a nonfiction cultural atmosphere at the moment. I remember
fifteen years ago telling a group of Taiwanese writers visiting the
University of Alberta that the future of fiction lay in reading like
nonfiction. They frowned at this. But I do think that even before 9/11,
the shift toward nonfiction was underway.
Perhaps the world was already beginning to feel
stranger than fiction. Or perhaps fiction has reached the limits of its
current conventions. Lifelong fiction readers often switch, late in
life, to nonfiction. Fiction can be like classical music: eventually
you’ve heard it all, and the new music sounds strictly for the young.
Besides, the conventions of fiction are largely there to make credible
the kinds of details that nonfiction is full of. After a while, as a
reader, either you turn to highly conventional fiction such as detective
fiction or you run out of authors using the conventions skillfully
enough not to distract you, and so you turn to nonfiction.
There is the strangeness out there, there is
possible reader fatigue with conventions, and there is the fact that
most literary fiction is based on the idea that there is such a thing as
character and that character can change in comprehensible ways, i.e.,
moral ways, according to “right” and “wrong” choices that characters
make. In this sense, literary fiction is moral, in what is essentially a
psychological way. In times of war, or when politics dominates, this
idea, this kind of thinking, is marginalized the way the individual is
marginalized, in preparation for sacrifice or death.
Anyway, as everybody knows, and feels, after
9/11 the cultural climate changed, radically, and one of the victims has
been the sales of literary books in Canada, the UK, and the US.
Advances for literary fiction in Canada and the US are a fraction, at
best perhaps a third, of what they were ten years ago. And this decline
is reflected in the press. How many Canadian reviews can the average
Canadian literary novel now expect to receive? Four. One in the Globe if the book has already been deemed good and important enough. A review in Quill and Quire, to
give the booksellers a heads-up whether to buy it or not. And one or
two in those few city papers that still publish book reviews, written by
underpaid journalists, writers, and amateurs.
At the same time, the fashion of international
interest in Canadian books as such has, for now anyway, all but
disappeared. One thing the war on terror has done is given new life to
American xenophobia. Maybe a Canadian novel will be picked up in one of
France, Germany, or Italy, but not so often in the US or the UK. The
incomes of most Canadian agents are currently down about 50%.
The future lies with e-books, but currently the
rate for author royalites for e-books, usually 25%, results in a little
more than half the income from royalties of 15% for hardcovers. (E-books
currently account for 8% of total book revenues. This is up from 3-5%
last year. By the end of 2012, they are expected to account for 20-25%
of total sales. Their effect on the book will resemble the effect of the
digital downloading of music on CD sales.)
But the reality is that the literary market, by
and large, never has been very large. Literary writing has always been a
kind of cottage industry, its image embodied in a few big names—Roth,
Atwood—while it waxes and wanes in the public eye. About ten or fifteen
years ago, Nan Talese, Atwood’s editor at Doubleday in New York, said
that a good literary book in the US without exceptional hype could sell
at best (including libraries) 4,000 copies. Now she says (and I quote):
“You better have another source of income.” Some weeks in the UK, a book
on the bestseller list will sell five copies in the entire kingdom. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian when
first issued in hardback in Canada sold 27 copies. Recently in the UK,
the British book chain Waterstone’s ordered 25 copies nationally of
a new novel by a major literary author. Last winter in Montreal,
Jonathan Safran Foer was asked what it was like for a writer to be so
famous, and he said, You know, this isn’t really fame. Nobody recognizes
me on the street.
Literary publishing is a small world, a coterie
world. Actual sales numbers are shocking, out of all proportion to the
image readers have of famous writers, but they’ve always been shocking.
Publishers know the numbers are small. It’s why they need to throw
enough junk at the wall so that something will stick and they can stay
in business. The reality is that Canadian writers earn on average around
$16,000 annually from their writing work.
And then there is the fact of Indigo/Chapters.
Twelve years ago, independent bookstores accounted for one-third of the
book market. Now they account for one-tenth. One woman (the national
buyer for Indigo) chooses 45% of the fiction titles on Canadian
bookstore shelves. If she doesn’t like your book, it’s not going to be
visible in the majority of retail venues in this country. One thing this
Indigo/Chapters virtual monopoly means is that if you’re an author
wanting a large market you had better be insider-savvy about the needs
of the marketing department. After all, your acquiring editor has to
sell to the marketers first if she is to buy your book at all. And
later, if the marketing and sales people—or the buyer for Indigo—don’t
like it, it’s not going to get onto the shelves.
Here is another thing this decline in interest
in Canadian fiction means. This past spring my agent suggested that I
transpose the setting of my new novel (which I had already submitted to
her) from Southern Ontario to upper New York state. She said it in a way
that suggested the idea had come from my editor. When I checked with my
editor, she said it hadn’t, but she wasn’t appalled or surprised. She
could understand why my agent would want me to do this. So we’re back to
where we started, in the sixties, trying to pass as Americans in order
to succeed as Canadian artists. And as you know, and as Stompin’ Tom
says, the next step is leaving the country.
In many ways, it’s only what we deserve. Last
year, the Giller board put an American and a Brit on the Giller jury,
with one Canadian. In a March 17, 2009, editorial The Globe and Mail declared this “a wonderful idea.” We had run out of qualified Canadian writers to serve, the Gobe said.
This will increase the cachet of the Giller even further. No one, to my
knowledge, objected. I wrote a calm, sane letter of objection, which
the Globe refused to print. Everybody, apparently, thought it
was a wonderful idea. So wonderful that they’ve done it again this year,
with the difference this year that there is no Canadian fiction writer on the jury at all. The only Canadian on the jury is a broadcaster.
Now, I ask you, what other country in the world
would be pleased to have its literature judged by a jury with a majority
of foreign authors on it? Or not one of its own authors on it at all?
The Griffin Poetry Prize (which is mentioned in the Globe editorial
as setting a precedent) has foreign authors on its jury because they
are awarding an International Prize as well as a Canadian Prize. You
won’t find a Canadian or Brit on any recent U.S. National Book Award
jury, and you won’t find a Canadian or American on any recent U.K. Man
Booker Prize jury. The reason the Australia-Asia Literary Award includes
non-Australians on its jury is that it is open to non-Australian
authors. When are we going to have the confidence of our own cultural
judgments? Are we crazy, pathetic, or just still deeply colonized? I
think it’s the latter, and consequently the correct answer is the middle
one: pathetic.
About the Griffin Prize I have nothing bad to
say. I think it’s a remarkable thing Scott and Krystyne Griffin are
doing, and I do not think they would have done more for Canadian poetry
if they had put the money into a fellowship, which would have been far
less visible. Do you remember what Scott Griffin said to the reporter
who asked him, Why such a big prize, for poetry? He said, Because of a
question like that. The other thing about Griffin is that he actually
loves poetry. He reads it and it stays in his head. This is an act of
love as well as generosity, and it shows.
But back to the Giller. The Globe editorial
said that having an international jury was preferable to having
non-writers on the jury, and it’s true that non-writers on literary
juries tend to be disasters, in literary terms. But the big prizes are
designed not necessarily to choose the most accomplished literary books
of the year but to choose those likeliest to sell well and still at
least pass as literary, in some cases, one suspects, to be just
unpleasant and hard to read and sufficiently good for you to pass as
literary. The Giller has with surprising consistency been a prize
designed to choose a book that will appeal to the greatest number of
people likeliest to read only one or two works of fiction in a year.
Beyond these people are the book clubs, who read more, and they must be
appealed to as well.
What this big-prize mentality, combined with the
rise of the book clubs, the falling away of the independent
booksellers, and the collapse of the international market for literary
fiction means is that books are still being read in healthy numbers, but
it’s now mostly 10% of those being published, rather than the previous
20-30%, and that 10% is not often what could by any stretch be described
as literary fiction. Even when the Giller anoints it as such.
Everybody knows how painful it is to to see an
intelligent person pushing herself through a so-called ‘good, literary’
book, at least a book that’s been declared such by some prize jury,
knowing in her spine—i.e., with her real intelligence—that this isn’t
really very good but thinking the fault must lie with her, she doesn’t
get it, she doesn’t read enough literature, she doesn’t keep up to the
trends, it’s her fault. Whereas the truth is that the woman has been
shanghaied. As William Burroughs once said, You can’t fake a good book
any more than you can fake a good meal. Not everybody can recognize a
good meal, of course, but that doesn’t mean there is no such thing. People know. Readers know.
They know it in their spine if no way else.It’s not just writers who
know a good book when they see one, it’s anyone with an aesthetic sense.
Never underestimate the importance of the reader’s aesthetic sense to
the success or failure of what you do as a writer. Literature, like
theatre, is an extraordinarily powerful form of art. But the economics
and the culture of the times in this country are on the side of its
emasculated imitations. They always have been, of course. But somehow,
without the independent bookstores and with prize juries and reading
clubs leading the charge, like politics generally nowadays, the forces
of darkness seem more brazen, more barefaced, than ever.
Do you know the derogatory U.S. publishing industry adjective for a literary book? Written.
The problem, of course, is bigger than a
Canadian one. There was 9/11, but before it, starting (like the push for
a Canadian literature) in the sixties, the universities began to turn
against the presumed elitism of literature in favour of the elitism of
theory. Since then, university English departments have gone through
many fashions—cultural studies was part of the backlash against
deconstruction, and now history has been put back into the mix—but what
has not been put back in 98% of English departments is literature.
I witnessed this all over again as I watched my
son take English in high school and university. As he approached
graduate school, he admitted that he’d always assumed that along the way
he’d discover a writer or a literary period he could really get into.
But it never happened. In university, his primary texts were
theoretical. Quite a few of his English courses had no literature on
them whatsoever. In others, literature, when it was brought in at all,
came in bits and pieces, usually from lesser-quality literary works,
because they make for clearer examples. My son, who is now doing a Ph.D,
still enjoys his education. He has found theory to be a useful cultural
tool, but its materials are cultural texts universally. Of these,
literature is one small, marginal part.
In one of his books, David Lodge tells the
story about the academics playing the game of
who-can-name-the-most-shocking-great-work-they-haven’t-read. When the
new hire names Hamlet, he has gone too far. This joke no longer works. I know a handful of young English professors who have never read Hamlet and
can’t understand why they should. The bottom line is, it’s far easier
to master a handful of key theoretical texts—Foucault, say, or Marx, or
Lukacs—than a canon, or the thousands of texts that canon has been
distilled from. It’s easier, and there’s more power in it for the
teacher, and for the student. The problem is, that as those who know the
literary texts themselves continue to retire and die, the theory
increasingly floats free of its supposed referents. There are no
controls exerted by the infinitely greater complexity of the texts
themselves.
The same is happening across the academy. This
summer an archeologist friend at Memorial University told me that young
archeologists are gravitating to theory, while the work of those who
have spent their life in the field is being discontinued and lost. The
actual facts, the details, the material evidence of how people actually
lived is being lost, while new theorists theorize. This year the
University of London required its entire teaching staff to reapply for
their own jobs. It was a way of cutting back. Paleography was cut
altogether. How can you theorize about ancients texts after there is no one around who can read them?
The thing about so-called great literature,
questions of aesthetic quality aside, is that it is complex, and it’s
that complexity that theory, understandably, given human nature, shies
away from. This is what Flannery O’Connor understood. The world will
always aspire to abstraction. It’s simpler and cleaner and it doesn’t
hurt as much. A real writer needs to get dirty. To get down into the
dust and the dirt.
But forget the academy: I want to say that the Western world has gone off literary fiction, in a bigger way than it has gone off Canadian
literature. For a while the novel held its own while the cultural
spaces for the short story got filled by TV. It was easier to watch a
half-hour TV show than to read a short story, and this is why short
stories disappeared from the big-circulation magazines. Simple as that. I
used to think that the cultural staying power of the novel lay in the
fact that it would continue to offer an extended narrative that
submerges the reader in an imagined world for hours, days, weeks at a
time, a world the reader can enter into and come out of freely. Nothing
else in the culture did that—until, that is, the TV boxed set: Sopranos, Ten Feet Under, The Wire, Lost, Treme, and
so on. Like the Internet, the boxed set offers ready entry and exit at
any time. Unlike the Internet, it offers immersion in an imagined world
over an extended period of time. As that kind of TV gets better, and
more convenient (as with the iPad), I fear the novel will continue its
slow drift to the margins.
This Is Where We Come In
As we all know, in the last twenty years,
creative writing instruction has taken off in universities and colleges
in Canada, the US, and the UK, at both the undergraduate and the
graduate level. This is because students want to take these classes.
They will always fill up. If you’re setting up any new program, put in a
creative writing component and you will have students long before you
have put in place any other dependable courses to draw them in.
It’s often said: the irony is that this
proliferation should be continuing at precisely the same time as the
collapse of literary publishing. (It’s a little like the irony of
Canadian literature taking off simultaneously with the appearance of
theory, which precipitated the disappearance of the teaching of
literature in the universities.) But of course, now as much as ever,
some young people are going to want to write, and many of them are going
to want to write well. Some of them will continue to respond to the
aesthetic power, the hairs lifting on the back of the neck, of good
literature, and many of those will devote their lives to trying to
achieve that power themselves. Why not? It’s called being an artist.
There is another reason creative writing courses
are popular, and I’m sure you’ve heard this one too, but I think it’s
true: they’ve become the primary places within the university where
literature is taught as what it actually is: art. Rather than in aid of
some cultural or political theory. People’s aesthetic response to
literature is real, whether they want to become or ever do become
writers. For years this was the basis of the teaching of literature in
the university, as a means of engaging the student’s sensibility with
those complex works of literary art formerly known as great.
Now this is being done in creative writing
courses, which is fine. While I think we do underestimate the importance
of the aesthetic response of readers of literature, perhaps it makes
more sense, in this age of specialization, to concentrate on the
aesthetic response of writers to literature. Or at least of
people, young or old, who feel the tingle in the spine a book can give
them and would like to find out if they can or should be writers. There
is still the problem that there is diminishing cultural space for the
education of readers, but maybe this will come back, or maybe
literature itself will need to educate readers, as it has always done,
when the interest is there. Or maybe, as for music, the market for
literature will continue to fragment. Meanwhile, we have the
extraordinary opportunity that comes of potential future creators of
that literature still being addressed within the institution.
I am saying that creative writing courses in
colleges and universities are currently providing an otherwise discarded
but crucial educational function for the young: the consideration of
literature as the art that it is. I’m not saying by this that
we should recreate the old English literature lecture or seminar mode in
creative writing classes, with the ‘great’ texts at the centre of the
discussion. I do believe in the centrality of the workshop for teaching
creative writing at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels—just
not without reference, when appropriate, to the ‘great’ texts. My point
is simply that writers need models, and they need good ones; that
writers should always be reading other writers who interest them; that
the good writing of others is a writer’s daily nourishment;
that an instructor needs to be able to refer her student to the writers
who are doing best the sort of thing that the student appears to be
trying to do; that students should understand that the form and content
issues that they are wrestling with have almost certainly been wrestled
with by other writers in whom they will recognize a kindred spirit and
from whom they can learn a great deal, very quickly, because this is
information they need; and I am saying that students learning to write
need to look at all literature from the inside, as it were, from the
point of view of the artist constructing it, of the artistic process,
because that is what they will be doing themselves.
As for the workshop situation more specifically:
What I have learned is that the instructor, in being the workshop
leader, marker, and grader, already has more than enough authority in
the situation, as least in regard to pronouncements on the right and the
wrong way to do something. Creative writing teaching is like any
teaching: eventually you learn that there is what the student needs to
understand but there is also when the student will be ready to
understand it. It’s this second consideration that separates the good
teachers from the bad and that makes good teaching more like
psychotherapy, in a way, in that it’s all about sensing what the student
is ready to know. This is particularly true of creative writing
teaching, because the student is very likely to have an emotional
investment in what is being discussed. Bad writing is a set of
strategies for containing, distancing, walling off that emotion, for
rendering it safe for the author. A large part of teaching writing is
communicating to a writer the hard fact that that emotion is going to
need to be reexperienced if it is ever to be experienced by the
reader—which should be the primary reason for the story, or the poem,
being written in the first place.
What is also true of the workshop, in my
experience, is that students learn best not from the instructor, no
matter how good his or her timing, but from the best among themselves,
from their peers around the table whose work they admire most, whether
they would like to admit it, and the instructor’s primary function is to elicit from the best students that feedback that will be of most use to the others. As I see it, the goal of a good workshop leader is, by the end of the term, to be saying very little. As little as possible. You already have authority enough.
That said, I think it’s important that at the
end of, or at some point in, the discussion, the instructor make his or
her response as clear as possible (as well as doing this in his or her
written comments). That the instructor not pretend his or her standards
are so high that an honest appraisal would somehow be unfair to someone
just “starting out.” An instructor who feels this is not taking the work
on its own terms, he or she is importing other standards
inappropriately. The purpose of good literature in the context of a
writing workshop is to provide material that can be learned from, not to
provide a model that cannot or should not be aspired to. It’s there to
be disconstructed from a writer’s point of view, not put on a pedestal,
with the instructor up there with it.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I have been talking about the dire state of the
market for literary writing and at the same time arguing for the crucial
continuing importance of it both in colleges and universities and in
the larger culture. It’s where you get the emotional truth and
particularity that people will always hunger for and that the media
egregiously fail to provide. Because art is not about information, it’s
about emotional choices (that is to say, choices made by one’s larger
intelligence). Specific emotional choices that signify.
That said, I do think that at this historical
moment, literary writing is in need of a breakthrough into a new mode
that will re-connect with readers’ spines. I would compare this current
period we are in with the wheel-spinning of modern physics since the
early twentieth century. Modernism has got old. The Post is by and large
now fizzling, and we’re into a new age of quirky-autobiographical
sincerity, e.g., Dave Eggers and the whole McSweeney’s phenomenon, early
Yann Martel, David Mitchell, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lydia Davis, and so
forth. (Pretty much what, come to think of it, I saw coming, to the
displeasure of the Taiwanese.) But in my view, not enough is being done
with the language as a transformer of perception. Just as physics has
stepped back from the true imaginative implications of relativity and
therefore failed to move, literature has stepped back from more than
merely cerebral innovation and seems at a loss where to go next.
I think this is how we should be thinking when
mentoring our students, conducting our workshops, and supervising our
creative writing theses. We should have the conscious goal of
discovering, uncovering, unleashing, this new, long overdue,
breakthrough of linguistic energy and narrative truth. This means that
the great works are treated as sources of inspiration and as technical
resources, not as (remote and unattainable) models for imitation. This
means that not all students should be required to conform to, say, the
Alice Munro or the New Yorker or the Chekhovian model of the
short story. Not all creative writing students, even at the
undergraduate level, should be forced into an apprentice mode. Not that
there is anything wrong with an apprentice mode . . . .
This means that all students must be taught that
central to the achievement of good writing is the awareness that a
human mind that is not their own needs to be able to move with its full
intelligence through their text with interest and engagement. This other
human mind will be a projection of the student’s own best editor or
self as reader (as educated and informed, to some extent by the voices
and the insights of their peers), and that is the mind whose real and
genuine interests must be met, because knowing where that mind is at any
particular moment is the only way an artist can come into what I would
call creative writing. This means that students will learn that
a first draft will often read more like an explicit memo to the writer
about what he or she intends to say than like something being said in
any way like the way it needs to be said. That creative writing is a
process of drafting and redrafting until another mind, by reading that
same passage, revised, can come into that meaning or something close to
it for itself, without its being made explicit.
This means that we must never forget that in
every class there will be ignorance, but in every class there will also
be at least one finer intelligence than one’s own, and that that
intelligence must not, at any cost, be discouraged. It should be given
the tools and the encouragement to speak, if it doesn’t have them
already, because that is the voice the class will listen to. This means
that our unofficial motto (adapted from Conan Doyle!) in the Writing
Studio at the Banff Centre should be universal in creative writing
courses: “Talent recognizes genius, but mediocrity knows only itself.”
This means that our task is to do everything to encourage and nothing to
discourage those among the ranks of our students who feel the tingle in
the spine, because who can tell which of them will one day write the
book that tingles the spine of a generation and does not feel written but
rather immediate and necessary, like all true literature. This means
that the whole ugly commercial story of prizes and book club tastes and
big-publisher big-sale expectations and dwindling advances and
fragmented audiences and digital erosion of reading time should not be
allowed to sully the endeavour. It’s the honest, felt,
intelligently-crafted work that makes a good book. Commercial success is
a crapshoot, a mug’s game. Writing courses are about good books. The
tingle in the brain and spine. Period.
CODA
You’re probably aware that Barry Hannah, who
taught creative writing at the University of Mississippi for many years,
died this past March. As a creative writing teacher, Mr. Hannah is
perhaps best known for once drawing a gun on his class. To commemorate
Barry Hannah, Harper’s magazine printed a recent commencement
address he gave. At the end of it, Hannah offers a fantasy of a survivor
of civilization shuffling through the ashes and kicking up a scrap of
paper with writing on it. What the hell is this? He starts to read. Hey, this is pretty good.
Greg Hollingshead
Keynote Address at the founding meeting of the CCWWP (Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs)
Calgary, October 2010
Footnote:
1.
The historian G.M. Young says something about doing historical research
that I think also applies to writing fiction: “[G]o on on reading until
[you] can hear the people talking.” All writing is voice. All writing
comes out of other writing.