Self-Expression

After listening to a BBC program on the decline of book culture, Robert McCrum seems to have experienced an astonishing turnabout:

Too many books are being published, it argued; we are drowning in a fetid froth of trash. Reading has become merely chic entertainment. Writers are no longer to be looked up to. There are no more classics. . .

Full disclosure: from time to time, this column has expressed weedier versions of these stirring sentiments. But what I discovered, when confronted with the charge sheet of cultural vandalism as a whole, was that not a single part of it stands up to a moment's scrutiny.

Too many books? It's true that Britain alone publishes about 120,000 new titles a year, a 10-fold increase on 1905. So what? Most of these new books have the shelf life of yoghurt and get recycled into lavatory rolls and wallpaper quicker than you can say The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Notwithstanding how easily McCrum is convinced to renounce his previous "weedier versions" (had he really not considered the anti-trash argument "as a whole"? He has distaste for garbage only on the local level?), it's remarkable that he doesn't realize he's answered his own question. That most of the 120,000 titles disappear down the toilet and into the wallpaper is itself the primary reason why they ought not to have been published. Since it's almost as if they never were anyway, why prop up a system that indulges in such a colossal waste of paper and ink? Moreover: How much more usefully might the money expended on getting these books printed in the first place--most of it siphoned off by agents, publicists, and other assorted hangers-on--have been spent if it had been spread around, in some other, more rational dispensation, among writers truly seeking out a sympathetic audience?

McCrum adds:

Too many writers? Are we seriously going to argue that ordinary people should be denied the right to self-expression? Milton wrote a little book about this in 1644, in defence of 'the liberty of unlicenc'd printing'. Areopagitica says all that needs to be said about people who propose the limitation of print freedom.

It does not follow from the argument that too many books are being published by incompetent publishers that there are "too many writers." I have never maintained anything of the sort, even though I have taken a position close to the one offered on the BBC. Indeed, "ordinary people" should not be prevented from expressing themselves, although I don't see why such expression necessarily needs to take place between two hard covers, in a form that by McCrum's own admission is being trivialized through the ineptitude of big publishers themselves. And McCrum is only loading the dice by referring to "print freedom." Does this exclude online publication? Self-publishing? Publishing in short forms rather than exclusively in books? Surely these modes are still available to "ordinary people" who understand that the "book industry" finally has nothing to offer them but neglect.

McCrum concludes:

No, the barbarians are not at the gate. It's an age of awesome variety we are living in. English in all its thrilling, international forms, from romance to rap, is finding more colour and expression than at any time since Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson.

Indeed, the kaleidoscope of English and American publications today is probably closer in spirit and self-expression to the Shakespearean extravaganza, offering a medium of limitless potential and surprise, in a language that media corporations such as the BBC should be grateful for.

Even if one were to accept McCrum's hyperbole and agree that English is in as fine a shape as he apparently believes, he has nevertheless just changed the subject further still. He now seems to agree that "self-expression" can occur other than in books. "English and American publications" covers a lot of territory, much of it a deliberate attempt to avoid what in yesterday's post I called the "Bizzaro world" of book publishing. It is a Bizarro world: trash is rewarded and quality ignored, success is measured in "business and promotional opportunities" and not by how many good books find readers. And as long as people like Robert McCrum continue to implicitly endorse the weird logic that currently pervades the "book industry," the longer its destructive influence on what gets published and what doesn't will last.

Comments

[amcorrea]

"Are we seriously going to argue that ordinary people should be denied the right to self-expression?"

So rejecting a MS is an act of censorship? I tend to think that having a book accepted for publication is a "privilege," not a "right."

I also have problems with equating "self-expression" with literary art. Works of art are not mere extensions of one's personality--they are (or should be) fully-realized works that stand alone.

(This cloudy reasoning may tie in with the current fixation of attempting to understand the author in order to understand the work.)