Anything But Literature

Tom McCarthy on the difference between "art people" and "literary people":

A few years ago I was invited to a dinner for young British novelists at the ICA. The other guests were for the most part successful published writers – unlike myself back then. The talk was of lucrative three-book deals with major publishers, review coverage, agents – anything, in fact, but literature.

When I steered the conversation with a couple of my neighbours that way, I discovered why: they were both indifferent to, and largely ignorant of, literary history. Sure, they’d read a book or two by E. M. Forster or Jane Austen back at college – but Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Sterne, Cervantes? Forget it. . . .

. . .unlike their counterparts in the publishing world, [art people] read Burroughs and Nabokov, and know about the important role that Antigone plays in the thought of philosophers from Hegel to Derrida to Zizek.

Art people are literate. When Margarita Gluzberg, who recently exhibited to much praise at the Paradise Row gallery, describes the thought behind her drawings, she turns to Madame Bovary. Rut Blees Luxemburg, discussing her photographs hanging in Tate Modern, talks about Hölderlin. I know at least two artists who have done work based on Huysmans’s Against Nature, and countless others whose images grapple with the labyrinthine architecture of Robbe-Grillet’s novels. The art world, it seems, is the place not just where literature is understood, but also where it is creatively developed, carried forward.

This paradox played out for me directly. By the time I did my ICA cut-up project, I’d finished writing my novel Remainder. But no mainstream press would touch it, deeming it “too literary”. . .

. . .While artists and curators still draw inspiration from writers, publishing has dumbed itself down. Marketing departments, not editors, rule the roost. . . .

McCarthy is wrong only in implicitly suggesting that if editors ruled the roost, things would be different. Today's editors are just as ignorant of literature and literary history as the writers McCarthy encountered. They let the marketing departments control things because they clearly don't know what an alternative to that might be.

As a sidenote, I'm now reading McCarthy's Remainder. I think it's awfully good, but I'm going to post a more extensive review once I've finished it.

Comments

[Richard Grayson]

Having spent the past few days trying to teach Antigone to art students (photography majors), I question whether young American artists are as interested in literature as their British counterparts.

[Steven Augustine]

*Very* interesting post.

[Edward Williams]

An interestiing, but futile distinction. By the title of this post you seem to be only aggravating and cementing a personal feeling, that you are an outsider, looking in on a process that you don't quite fathom.

[Dan Green]

"looking in on a process that you don't quite fathom."

If you're referring to the "book business," you're right. I don't fathom it in the least.

What's "futile" about the distinction?

[Roy Rubin]

Well Dan, Here's the deal: the publishing business is in business to make money. Art books depress the public. They are remote, elitist, and require hours if not days of attention. Nobody buys them. The truth is, lit books are now sort of like opera, enjoyed by a small group of true appreciators and wannabe's. America goes to HBO.

[Dan Green]

"require hours if not days of attention"

Heaven forbid!

[Steven Augustine]

Thank "god" there are Naveen Kishores out there to counter-balance the cynic's (not exactly newsworthy) literary realpolitik re: what sells and doesn't. It's obvious that the future of literature, even *English* literature, rests somewhere among the billions of non-Americans who can't afford cable.

[Edward Williams]

What's futile in the distinction is that the opposite is equally true (and futile), ie. writers draw inspiration from artists; while neither distinction has anything to do with the publishing world. It is kind of an interesting non-point, a distraction in a pretend discussion. Familiar?

[Dan Green]

Whether some writers draw inspiration from artists or not was not the point of McCarthy's essay. It was that most of the writers he met knew nothing about the history of their own medium.

[Edward Williams]

Making his essay disingenous, since it is obviously not true that writers by in large are ignorant of literature. You could claim that artists are ignorant of art history, just as easily, and that would be a facile distinction also. Hence my point: McCarthys thesis, and more imporantly your hyping of it, are examples of self-serving complaints by critics who are apparently jealous of writers and artists who have ability, and/or success. Sorry to be so harsh; but a false intellectual discussion does not address what remains the consuming subject of your blog: the mainstream publishing industry and its apparent failure to find a vibrant underground literature. Which I know does exist.

[John Baker]

Thanks for posting this. I also believe it is important that these things are said.

[Dan Green]

"McCarthys thesis, and more imporantly your hyping of it, are examples of self-serving complaints by critics who are apparently jealous of writers and artists who have ability, and/or success."

This is a complete non sequitur. Read McCarthy's novel Remainder and decide for yourself if he has "ability" or not.

"Underground" has nothing to do with it. "Above ground" and aesthetically satisfying would do.

[Chris]

If I may: "art people," at least based on my own experience as an art student over twenty years ago, still are required to complete, (prior, at any rate, to entering the multidisciplinary catacombs of contemporary art) a fairly rigorous course of study that acquaints them with the history of fine art as well as with formal, compositional, and theoretical concepts. These are almost necessarily linked to parallel developments in literature, music, etc., particularly those of the last hundred and fifty years or so. While the visual arts community, if I may use so general a term, would find an arts landscape uninflected by those developments unimaginable, much of the academic creative writing world would like very much to deny that any such changes have taken place in fiction and poetry. The holder of a terminal writing degree can emerge from even a prestigious university program ignorant of pretty much any way of thinking about writing that he or she finds intimidating or objectionable, and can get through two years of graduate work without ever once thinking about writing in a way that countenances its formal or linguistic aspects -- thinking, that is, of it exclusively in terms of plot, character, setting, and theme. To second and supplement McCarthy's claim, I often find that the undergraduates I teach who are most receptive to structured exercises that do explore writing qua writing, as opposed to storytelling or, God help us, confession, are fine arts and music students -- those, in other words, who are acquainted with the idea of art as something other than self-expression.