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Sender: Open discussions on the writer's craft <[log in to unmask]>
From: Kent Graham <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 17:46:59 -0600
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Reply-To: Open discussions on the writer's craft <[log in to unmask]>
Parts/Attachments: text/plain (16 kB) , text/html (18 kB) , The lack of respect.pdf (30 kB)
Silent listmember Vicky Woodward forwarded this thoughtful piece by
author Neal Stephenson.  It's kind of long, so I've attached a PDF
version if you want to save it and read it at your leisure.
(You may find the full "interview" at Slashdot.org.
<http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/04/10/20/1518217.shtml>  The
following is just one of Mr Stephenson's answers to questions from
Slashdot readers.)

I would really like to hear your thoughts about Mr Stephenson's thoughts
-- and certainly some discussion about whether you see yourselves in the
Dante camp, or over there with Beowulf.

Scribite!
kent
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
2)  The lack of respect... - by MosesJones
<http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/04/10/20/1518217.shtml>

Science Fiction is normally relegated to the specialist publications
rather than having reviews in the main stream press. Seen as "fringe"
and a bit sad its seldom reviewed with anything more than condescension
by the "quality" press.

Does it bother you that people like Jeffery Archer or Jackie Collins
seem to get more respect for their writing than you ?

Neal:

OUCH!

(removes mirrorshades, wipes tears, blows nose, composes self)

Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view.

(the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the "back" button...)

First of all, I don't think that the condescending "quality" press look
too kindly on Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer. So I disagree with the
premise of the last sentence of this question and I'm not going to
address it. Instead I'm going to answer what I think MosesJones is
really getting at, which is why SF and other genre and popular writers
don't seem to get a lot of respect from the literary world.

To set it up, a brief anecdote: a while back, I went to a writers'
conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically
acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never
heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me
"And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask
another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say,
since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make
money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She
wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort
of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different
creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I
began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists
is by to whom they are accountable.

The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to wealthy
entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In many
cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one Sistine
Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint on the
ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist and give
him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he was allowed
to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable to the
Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure that
would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the Christians who
walked into it, and they had to make sure that Michelangelo would carry
out his work accordingly.

Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished from
Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example. And if
you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the opening
pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the authors to
their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it says "this work
was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."

Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters,
for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In
other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at universities
or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases there is a kind
of accountability at work.

A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not
like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that
if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to
get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that
price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived
value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function
of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So art
criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also economics.

There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer
who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university
have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not
the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily
reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the
composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those
intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics,
musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are
performed by symphony orchestras, for example.

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.

The relationship between that critical apparatus and Beowulf writers is
famously awkward and leads to all sorts of peculiar misunderstandings.
Occasionally I'll take a hit from a critic for being somehow arrogant or
egomaniacal, which is difficult to understand from my point of view
sitting here and just trying to write about whatever I find interesting.
To begin with, it's not clear why they think I'm any more arrogant than
anyone else who writes a book and actually expects that someone's going
to read it. Secondly, I don't understand why they think that this is
relevant enough to rate mention in a review. After all, if I'm going to
eat at a restaurant, I don't care about the chef's personality flaws---I
just want to eat good food. I was slagged for entitling my latest book
"The System of the World" by one critic who found that title arrogant.
That criticism is simply wrong; the critic has completely misunderstood
why I chose that title. Why on earth would anyone think it was arrogant?
Well, on the Dante side of the bifurcation it's implicit that authority
comes from the top down, and you need to get in the habit of deferring
to people who are older and grander than you. In that world, apparently
one must never select a grand-sounding title for one's book until one
has reached Nobel Prize status. But on my side, if I'm trying to write a
book about a bunch of historical figures who were consciously trying to
understand and invent the System of the World, then this is an obvious
choice for the title of the book. The same argument, I believe, explains
why the accusation of having a big ego is considered relevant for
inclusion in a book review. Considering the economic function of these
reviews (explained above) it is worth pointing out which writers are and
are not suited for participating in the somewhat hierarchical and
political community of Dante writers. Egomaniacs would only create trouble.

Mind you, much of the authority and seniority in that world is
benevolent, or at least well-intentioned. If you are trying to become a
writer by taking expensive classes in that subject, you want your
teacher to know more about it than you and to behave like a teacher. And
so you might hear advice along the lines of "I don't think you're ready
to tackle Y yet, you need to spend a few more years honing your skills
with X" and the like. All perfectly reasonable. But people on the
Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life. They
just tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write whatever
they please, and let the chips fall where they may. So we may seem not
merely arrogant, but completely unhinged. It reminds me somewhat of the
split between Christians and Faeries depicted in Susannah Clarke's
wonderful book "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." The faeries do
whatever they want and strike the Christians (humans) as ludicrously
irresponsible and "barely sane." They don't seem to deserve or
appreciate their freedom.

Later at the writer's conference, I introduced myself to someone who was
responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and said,
"Ah, yes, you're the one who's going to bring in our males 18-32." And
sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males 18-32,
looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival crowd.
They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one question
after another while ignoring the Dante writers sitting at the table with
me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they seemed to
have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the organizers wondering
whether they should summon the police. But in the end they were more or
less reasonable people who just wanted to talk about books and were as
mystified by the literary people as the literary people were by them.

In the same vein, I just got back from the National Book Festival on the
Capitol Mall in D.C., where I crossed paths for a few minutes with Neil
Gaiman. This was another event in which Beowulf writers and Dante
writers were all mixed together. The organizers had queues set up in
front of signing tables. Neil had mentioned on his blog that he was
going to be there, and so hundreds, maybe thousands of his readers had
showed up there as early as 5:30 a.m. to get stuff signed. The
organizers simply had not anticipated this and so---very much to their
credit---they had to make all sorts of last-minute rearrangements to
accomodate the crowd. Neil spent many hours signing. As he says on his blog

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp <about:blank>

the Washington Post later said he did this because he was a "savvy
businessman." Of course Neil was actually doing it to be polite; but
even simple politeness to one's fans can seem grasping and cynical when
viewed from the other side.

Because of such reactions, I know that certain people are going to read
this screed as further evidence that I have a big head. But let me make
at least a token effort to deflect this by stipulating that the system I
am describing here IS NOT FAIR and that IT MAKES NO SENSE and that I
don't deserve to have the freedom that is accorded a Beowulf writer when
many talented and excellent writers---some of them good friends of
mine---end up selling small numbers of books and having to cultivate
grants, fellowships, faculty appointments, etc.

Anyway, most Beowulf writing is ignored by the critical apparatus or
lightly made fun of when it's noticed at all. Literary critics know
perfectly well that nothing they say is likely to have much effect on
sales. Let's face it, when Neil Gaiman

So what of MosesJones's original question, which was entitled "The lack
of respect?" My answer is that I don't pay that much notice to these
things because I am aware at some level that I am on one side of the
bifurcation and most literary critics are on the other, and we simply
are not that relevant to each other's lives and careers.

What is most interesting to me is when people make efforts to "route
around" the apparatus of literary criticism and publish their thoughts
about books in place where you wouldn't normally look for book reviews.
For example, a year ago there was a piece by Edward Rothstein in the New
York Times about Quicksilver that appears to have been a sort of wildcat
review. He just got interested in the book and decided to write about
it, independent of the New York Times's normal book-reviewing apparatus.
It is not the first time such a thing has happened with one of my books.

It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along
and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate them
and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave them
alone (think mitochondria) and sometimes I get the feeling that
something similar is happening with these two literary worlds. The fact
that we are having a discussion like this one on a forum such as
Slashdot is Exhibit A. publishes Anansi Boys, all of his readers are
going to know about it through his site and most of them are going to
buy it and none of them is likely to see a review in the New York Review
of Books, or care what that review says.


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