Are Corporations, Society or Writers Killing Literature?

This post is about three writers offering differing views as to why literature appears to be dying.

"The Big Five publishing houses are located within a few subway stops of each other in Manhattan; that rich island which represents 0.000887 percent of our country’s surface. This is not benign. Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?"

So says Matthew Neill Null, a prize-winning author and native of West Virginia.

The lengthy quote comes from an article published by "Literary Hub" wherein Null complains that publishers aren't interested in stories based on the lives of real people, especially if they are situated in rural communities.

If they were alive today, writers such as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe might as well forget it.


In one sense, Null's argument sounds weak. Hasn't the arrival of the electronic age and with it, the ease of self-publishing, both electronically and on paper via print-on-demand outlets, made it easy for writers to avoid the gatekeepers, who are increasingly interested in publishing only books that will make a lot of money?

Well, yes, as the current flood of self-published titles amply demonstrates.

But how can readers tell what is wheat and what is chaff? What will be of interest, what won't?

There's that review in the Times, for instance -- cited by Null as all-important. Not that a whole lot of people read the Times.  But other opinion leaders keep a sharp eye on what is said there and the views of Times reviewers proliferate in what might be called "the blurbosphere."

Although the Times now in principle reviews self-published works, in practice it largely does not.

(As for the blurbosphere, if you are interested in learning more about the role played by what are known as blurbs, I have a post on that topic, which can be found here.)

Maybe it's not the concentration of the Amazon-diminished publishing industry that is the problem as much as it is the change in culture -- what the public values, and why.

For instance, another writer, Lydia Millet, has a different take on the situation, arguing in a Salon article that literature is dying because Americans are no longer interested in [or perhaps have time for] subtlety. When subtly is gone from every other aspect of American life, why is literary fiction the only holdout, she asks, declaring her intention to turn to the only form of writing that sells: sex.

Tongue in cheek, or elsewhere?

Lastly (for now at any rate), Irish author Edna O'Brien, in a Guardian article entitled "Is Literature a Dying Animal?" argues that writers themselves are to blame (or perhaps it is how they are taught).

"It may be because of our unhinged and fractured times, but some modern fiction seems to lose its way because of a glut of language, a whole smorgasbord of it, as if words were not enough to convey the prevailing frenzy. ... Oceans brim, skies bleed, nights are wrought with drugs, sex and slaughter, but such is the inundation that we get repetition rather than revelation and crucially the private transaction between unknown reader and unknown author is lost."

This, one might argue, is a product of the proliferation of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs in creative writing and a flood of writer workshops, many of which emphasize what's known as the craft of writing over having something to say, or a story to tell.