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..."the reason she'd never heard of me
was because I was famous."
|
Neil Stephenson, writer and honorary Showman. |
{from
an online interview (slashdot)
with the author Neal Stephenson. It touches on the intersection between art and entertainment, writers as Showmen and about Showman/writer and Crowd. It is about what Stephenson calls Beowulf writers writing not for church or wealthy patrons but directly for the Crowd and masses. He speaks up for Illuminated Showmen everywhere by giving a fiery defense of creating art for the masses. He refuses the word Commercial artist and calls them Beowulf artists...}
[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.
|
Dante holding his most famous book. |
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.
|
Beowulf |
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. "
It is well worth clicking over to
Slashdot and read the full interview.
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