Christmas Editorial
However, Hensher’s statement also gives some indication as to why the kind of fiction represented on this site is largely ignored by the literary establishment. It is because it isn’t modernist. While it incorporates an understanding of modernism, it is not in itself modernist. It no more gives the ‘right’ signals than a graphic novel, which is equally difficult for those unfamiliar with the conventions of the comic book to ‘read’. The unfamiliar, even when it is trying to fit in, is therefore rejected. It is the easiest response. It saves examination. It maintains your status quo. Anything else would involve learning a whole new set of rules when you have already learned those which got you this far in your career. A mild accomodation with a few iconographic names—Dick, Ballard, Vonnegut—is about as far as you go.
Academic careerism ensures that only modernist fiction is accepted as ‘central’, even though, strictly speaking, it is marginalised in comparison to the best-selling fantasy blockbusters filling the charts. Must of us are now familiar with the phenomenon of long articles by books editors and well known critics complaining that modern fiction doesn’t deal with modern life and then they quote the modernists to prove it. Nothing in young Amis, nothing in McEwen, nothing in Byatt or even Carey. Those of us who are doing our best to write about modern life and using contemporary methods are often left gasping as we are told to our faces that what we write simply doesn’t exist. This is particularly amusing to Iain Sinclair for instance. A while ago he was asked to write a piece for The Independent on some of these ‘obscure’ writers he favoured. He wrote his article and sent it in. A day or two later he was phoned by the sub-editor who was preparing the piece for press. ‘Could we leave out all these names, do you think? Most people have never heard of them.’
The realities are that literary fiction, except where it is highly publicised through such corrupted methods as the Booker Prize, never sells as well as popular fiction and popular fiction obeys certain rules. The closer literary fiction mirrors those same rules, the better it does. It doesn’t much rock the conventional boat, it reflects the pieties and values of the day, it makes people feel good about themselves, it makes them, perhaps, feel superior, it delivers a hefty dose of escapism and reader-flattery. You, says the middle brow writer, are as smart as me. Middle brow writers like Kingsley Amis, for instance, also manage to get away, rather like his son, with reflecting the prejudices and snobberies of the day in a way which further flatters the reader or at least makes them feel comfortable about their prejudices. This is why such writers are bought in large numbers, why they understandably become self-impressed, though it is probable, of course, that the kind of advance offered to Amis reflects the publisher’s wish to enhance his prestige rather than his bank account, whereas advances paid to the likes of J.K.Rowling are recovered almost immediately.
Originality is not a very commercial quality. While Ronald Firbank might be Evelyn Waugh’s superior in almost every way, it was Waugh’s dilution of Firbank that caught the public fancy. Equally the writers we at this site tend to admire are idiosyncratic and maintain a somewhat edgy relationship to society. They are not comforting or flattering. They are, if they are successful, satrisfying our curiosity, our desire to see the world from as many different angles as possible. But our mind candy is the general public’s poisoned apple. It makes them feel queer. Therefore it is unrealistic to expect the increased popularity of Lord of the Rings, which is more on the lines of a modern Gone With The Wind than a modern War and Peace, to do much but threaten increased marginalisation to this form of fiction. The only thing it is doing for us is establishing a readership which, as it matures, will look to more substantial imaginative fiction for its satisfaction. It will understand the vocabulary. It will not have to learn how to read on more than one level. It will come to understand that language can in itself act as narrative, as well as image, as well as ‘story’ and that good fiction can work on a dozen levels at the same time, if we know what we’re about when we put it together. But I suspect there will be no immediate mass sales for Gene Wolfe, John Crowley or Jonathan Carroll, all of whom are in some way at odds with conventional attitudes. It is the secondary and particularly the tertiary writers in the same vein who popularise a form successfully. The writer of an original disposition is forever having to abandon method which has been distorted by imitation and find fresh narrative devices. This maintains considerable internal vitality to the medium, though it isn’t of much comfort to the authors.
What we will see, partly thanks to simple demographics, is a slowly growing literary readership which is so familiar with the forms it reads that it can make sophisticated judgements within them. Commercially, it is a large enough audience to support the less conventional writers (if a little more modestly than Stephen King).
All the writers I like are to some degree alienated, and are, by their nature, subversive. They find fault, they point fingers, they celebrate the extraordinary and the unnoticed, and sometimes their anger and their vision rises on flights of language to impress even the most cautious modern critic. But to expect them to benefit from Harry Potter’s success is, I suspect, a misreading of the commercial realities. Ultimately the best of what we celebrate will outlast commercial fashion, but it would be naïve to believe it is, in anything but the most superficial ways, the ‘same’ as that fiction which satisfies the demands of the mass market. The mass market demands suitably faded xeroxes.
