Chrononautic Log: Writers' paradigms: Beowulf, Dante, Kafka

Writers' paradigms: Beowulf, Dante, Kafka

12 o'clock, October 21, 2004

This Neal Stephenson interview, brought to my attention by Brandon for other reasons, has an interesting and, I think, somewhat new take on the “genre ghetto” issue.

Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I doubt that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a collection of legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral tradition — which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point perhaps there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few such tales together and fashioned them into the what we now know as Beowulf. Maybe there was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused the tale to be written down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at the behest of a king. It was created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn. And there was no grand purpose behind its creation, as there was with the painting of the Sistine Chapel.

The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn’t need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally different from other types of artists.

Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It’s conventional to refer to these as “commercial” novelists, but I hate that term, so I’m going to call them Beowulf writers.

But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called “literary” as opposed to “commercial” but I hate that term too, so I’m going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak of a bifurcated system.

Like all tricks for dividing people into two groups, this is simplistic, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But there is a cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between them — hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer’s conference. Because she’d never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer — one so new or obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn’t be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.

All of this places someone like me in critical limbo. As everyone knows, there are literary critics, and journals that publish their work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But they are also performing an economic function by making judgments. These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who’s deemed worthy of receiving fellowships, teaching appointments, etc.

(Because Slashdot, obnoxiously, doesn’t have anchor tags for individual questions, you’ll have to do some scrolling. It’s question two.)

(Also, you should read the bit about Bruce Sterling crashing a liquified natural gas tanker into William Gibson’s pleasure barge.)

Then there’s that large collection of us who fall in between — whose writing is not fully supported either by patrons or by the public. I think that once upon a time most of us — in SF, at any rate — expected to become Beowulf writers. For whatever reason [insert favorite ill-conceived rant about the decline of literacy, or the consolidation of publishing, or the end of the small independent bookstore, or whatever, here] that no longer seems to be as attainable a goal as it once did. It seems like there’s an interesting and, I think, fairly new thing going on right now in SF (groups like the SLF and Interstitial Arts come to mind, not to mention many individual SF writers on the MFA track): A shift from the dream of being a Beowulf writer to the dream of being a Dante writer.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate what those folks are doing. (All-Star Stories is a member of the SLF’s Small Press Co-op, for instance.) But I do understand now, I think, why it’s always seemed to be a little bit at an angle from what I’m doing. I’m not counting on being a Beowulf writer, and I don’t particularly want to be a Dante writer — I’ve got a day job, and it pays better than teaching freshman comp.

Maybe I’m a Kafka writer. Kafka was in insurance.

I liked the account of the second fight best:

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone.

Hee hee.

It's interesting to wonder what a "long tail" world of fiction writing would look like.

Assume the long-tail scenario: Production and distribution costs are very, very low. The publishers have the information and access that let them market to all the likely consumers virtually for free. In that scenario, I suppose the publishers could make good money selling a thousand different titles to the dozen or two readers who are interested in exactly that sort of odd, odd book.

But what of the author? Fun as it may be to sell a book that would otherwise have gone unsold, I don't think it's going to be an economic success for the writer. The publisher can make it up in volume of titles, even if sales of individual titles remain very low. It will be much harder for the writer to do the same.

There have been times in the past when the circumstances of the publishing business made it make sense for certain writers to crank away writing vast quantities of fiction, at low per-word rates, but a very good chance of selling everything they wrote. Maybe the long tail-world will be a great place for that sort of writer and his or her readers: The writers get to write full-time and make enough money to live on, the readers to get read lots and lots of just what they like to read.

My prediction is that we'll see a large increase in the number of writers who make hundreds of dollars a year from their writing. That's a good thing, I suppose. With a bit of luck, maybe we'll return to the days when a writer's backlist will remain easily accessible. That's good. Even better, publishers will have the tools to continue marketing it, so we may see sales continue at a steady (albeit low) level year after year. I suppose even the non-super-prolific writers might eventually get to the point where they were making a living off their royalties, with tens of titles each returning hundreds of dollars a year. That wouldn't be a bad thing.

Maybe I'm just getting hung up on his use (which he immediately quasi-rescinds) of "literary" and "commercial." But as far as I can tell, there are books of "literary fiction" that sell for quite a lot of money, certainly plenty to support a writer full-time on. I wonder if the person he was talking with had just been indoctrinated from an early age (as I was) with the "almost nobody makes a living from writing" idea.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see exactly that conversation happen between a successful author of literary fiction and a less successful genre writer whose day job is academia. As I learn whenever I go into a bookstore with Susan G, there are extremely well-known and successful literary-fiction authors who I, being fairly genre-bound, have never heard of; if I met them at a conference, I would probably assume they were academics too.

I guess what I'm really saying is that the Dante/Beowulf distinction he proposes doesn't really make sense to me. There are also books that connect with a big enough audience to make a living for the author, but that have Literary Values and aren't smash bestsellers in the Stephen King/Tom Clancy mold. (Perhaps less so now than there used to be; death of the midlist etc. But my impression is that this still does happen.) And there are still lots of genre books that don't connect with a mass audience. So I think he's drawing the distinction in the wrong place.

Jed, I beg to differ. His use of "literary" and "commercial" makes plenty of sense if you don't try and force it to somehow map it to "genre" and "non-genre".

I think you are misapplying the sfnal definition of "literary" (loosely, "having no aliens/robots/magic..."), whereas he actually means a kind of text-centric, art-for-art's-sake academic fiction in which almost all the practitioners really are tied to the prestige economy. "Commercial"/Beowulf fiction includes James Michener, John Irving, John Updike, Anne Tyler... writers who write for the people purchasing their books, whose editors and agents have more power over them than do their grants boards and department heads.

If you parse it this way, his argument makes a lot of sense. Sure, there are people who start in the patronage economy and break out into commercial success, and there are people who start out on a New York publishing schedule, in genre or out, who end up with academic appointments. But not that many in either case.

He's talking about professional writers -- about two different ways to live off writing. In this sense, a "day job in academia" isn't relevant unless academia is paying you to write, or at least teach writing. The successful "literary" writers you see in the bookstore, if their actual living comes from royalty statements from a New York publisher, are Beowulf writers.

I don't think he says anything about Literary Values mapping to one sort of author's work any more than anothers.

The distinction is much clearer in the visual art world, where Fine Art is an almost totally Dante system, and the commercial arts, like illustration and comic books and so on, are almost totally decoupled from it. There aren't even the ten or twelve crossover events a year that the book world has.

I'm happy with the Kafka option so far, myself.

Thanks for the clarifications, Ben. But I'm still not sure I understand. It sounds like you're saying that there are fiction authors whose writing income comes entirely from grants boards and department heads; true? If so, who's publishing their books? Are they being published by small and/or academic presses that don't pay royalties?

I guess I've seen that in the world of academic literary magazines that publish short stories but don't pay. But is there an equivalent for novels? Can you give me examples of writers who are part of the patronage economy but not the "commercial" economy? (I suppose by the nature of the system, it's very unlikely that I would ever have heard of them, but I think examples would help me wrap my head around the idea anyway.)

Chrononautic Log

Writers' paradigms: Beowulf, Dante, Kafka

12 o'clock, October 21, 2004

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