Classic vs. Modern Fiction, part 4

A conversation with Joseph Harris

It is in the nature of conversations to diverge. Each response raises multiple issues, each of which we would like to respond to. In speech, perforce, all but one gets dropped in each exchange and so the conversation makes its way from the broad estuary of theme upriver, choice by mostly random choice, to some niggling little rivulet of factual dispute and then peters out in pointlessness. What were we arguing about, we ask each other, and half the time we can’t remember.

A written conversation, in the form of an exchange of essays, suffers a similar but not identical problem. We won’t forget the subject, Classic vs. Modern Fiction, but we will generate many different points, each one of which might provoke its own exchange of essays. And thus I find myself with several points to respond to in Joseph Harris’s last essay in this series:

1. The definition and timeline of “modern fiction” in this context

2. The McLuhanesque question of whether you can regard form and content as separate concerns

3. The meaning of “show vs. tell” in fiction (as opposed to in movies)

4. The question of whether my characterization of modern fiction as “cinematic” is adequate or definitive (it’s not)

5. The question of whether Harris is right that “older writing included more moralizing and philosophizing about life” (statistically hard to prove, but let’s not forget that most older writing disappeared from view long ago, and the stuff that remains in view remains for a reason)

6. Whether genre is modern or ancient, and whether it is a blessing or a curse (a little of both)

7. What the heck I meant by, “Give me the riot of those who wrote by genius, not by formula.”

No one would thank me for writing an essay on each of these questions individually, but I think I can group them into two essays, as follows:

• 1, 5, 6, 7 into an essay I might call, The Age of the Editor

• 2, 3, 4 into an essay that I might call, Form and Fiction

This will be the first of those essays. Quite how I will fit the second into this conversation remains to be seen.

The Age of the Editor

What do we mean by “modern?” We should begin by noting that if “modern” here denotes a distinct style or program for literature, that program lacks a name. By “modern” here we just mean what is being commonly done at the moment. Literature already has a named “modernist” school with its period running from the late 19th century into the middle of the 20th. It is associated with the works of specific writers, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, and Joseph Conrad. It has its own manifesto, published in Poetry in 1912.

Similarly, there is Postmodernism, associated with authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth; realism, associated with authors like Henry James, Mark Twain, and George Eliot; and the Beat Generation, associated with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. In each case, these are movements initiated and defined by authors.

There is nothing similar for the thing we are here calling “modern fiction” — the stuff that is being published today. The break with the past is clear and plain, and yet I cannot think of any prominent literary voice that proclaimed and defended the idea that this break should occur, let alone a movement with a manifesto. And the reason, I believe, is that the thing we do now was not conceived of or defined by authors at all, but by editors. In literary terms, we are no longer living in the age of the writer, but in the age of the editor.

For example, Erik Hoel asks, Why are famous writers suddenly terrible when they write on Substack?

Almost everything in The New Yorker is good, and it all sounds the same, and that’s because it’s pretty much the voice of the editors, not the writer. That sort of uniformity doesn’t happen by accident.

Indeed, everything I read in The New Yorker, or The Atlantic, for that matter, sounds the same. (No, I don’t subscribe to these august publications, nor to their creed, but their articles show up in Google Now from time to time.)

More broadly, as Alex Murrel points out, we are living in The age of average. All cars look alike. All coffee shops look alike. All book covers look alike. All pop songs sound the same, and all pop stars look alike. We live in the age of consumer testing, and it turns out that when you test consumers on their preferences, they, or, at least, the average of them, are broadly similar across the world.

This is the thing about averages, of course. They are precisely and intentionally the thing you get when you smooth out all the anomalies from a data set. Any variation of taste will be eliminated from the averaging of taste. And the larger the data set from which the average is taken, the larger the anomalies that will be eliminated from it. Great chunks of specific taste will be factored out of the data set in favor of bland commonality.

When I said, “Give me the riot of those who wrote by genius, not by formula,” therefore, I was not expressing a desire for novelty per se, and certainly not novelty for the sake of novelty, but a desire for work that had not had all the corners rounded off, that had not been smoothed out and made featureless and average.

This averaging of writing is insidious and self-reinforcing. Since taste is shaped by what we experience, using the average of taste as a guide for design creates a feedback loop that pulls design ever more towards the average. And because authors themselves grow up reading this averaged literature, their own work becomes more and more uniform before the editors ever set to work with their rasps and sandpaper cutting all the variety out of it. If all we ever see is one kind of coffee shop. If all we ever hear is one kind of pop song. If all we ever see is one kind of pretty face, we will soon come to prefer that kind of coffee shop, pop song, and pretty face. It will soon cease to matter whether taste is leading culture or culture is leading taste; they will be following each other, grinding culture into an ever-finer paste with each turn of the millstone. It is not just novelty we lose in this process, but variety.

Harris says,

I do enjoy novelty and creative connections, but I also enjoy the pursuit of perfection, of seeing a concept polished to its ideal form. I enjoy watching a new technique invented by Author A, modified by Author B, and brought to its full potential by Author C.

If that was what was going on here, I would agree. But the averaging of fiction is not about the ideal form, but the common form. Genius is often difficult. But more than that, it is often eccentric. It isn’t the eccentricity of it we should value (that is the trap that modern art has fallen into). Eccentricity is an accidental property. Genius takes the road less trodden and that road is often stony and set about with thorns. But the hardness of the road is not the point. It is that it leads us to some profound revelation. The view is worth enduring the roughness of the road. But if our reading and writing habits have become too refined, if we are always producing and consuming the same consistent fare, we lose our capacity to deal with the eccentric; our feet become too soft and our muscles too lax for the hard journey and we lose the capacity to appreciate genius. And thus we lessen the chance that a new technique will be invented by author A in the first place, or that author B will notice and improve upon it.

Secondly, when it comes to art, I am not sure that “ideal form” is an appropriate goal. Refinement of technique is useful, certainly, but the ideal form is a Platonic concept in which every instance of a thing is an imperfect imitation of some ideal form that exists only in conception. But there is a necessary particularity to art. It is concrete and individual. It is not the ideal form of a lion that the artist sets out to capture, but a particular lion. Yes, the essential characteristics of lion-ness should be captured in that portrait, but the individuality of the particular lion should be foremost. Philosophy may deal in ideal forms. Art deals in particular examples.

But thirdly, and most importantly, the refinements today are not coming from authors, they are coming from editors. And editors are not, by their nature, creators. They are refiners and shapers. At their best, they take the particular individual creation that the artist has created and help the artist perfect their own vision. But more typically today, they define the shapes in abstract beforehand and then bend and squeeze and chop the artist’s creation until it fits that shape.

I want to make it very clear here that I think that when an editor is helping an author realize the perfection of their own vision, they are supremely valuable to the development of art. Authors will seldom bring their own vision to perfection without aid. The fact that editors are now largely engaged in shaping work to fit predefined market categories not only means that we are losing the variety of style and subject that we used to enjoy, but that authors are now much less likely to find the kind of help they need to bring their own vision to perfection.

I’ve just watched Top Gun: Maverick. It is a good movie. (Spoilers ahead!) Top Gun: Maverick is a good movie because Star Wars is a good movie and Top Gun: Maverick is Star Wars. The mission: fire missiles into a ventilation shaft in the enemy stronghold by flying through a maze of canyons with anti-aircraft batteries on either side and enemy fighters buzzing above. It’s a story about an elite band of warriors, the best of the best. It’s a story about the aged mentor and the young apprentice with a chip on his shoulder. But really, at its heart, it’s about fathers and sons. The secret to success is not to think but to trust your instincts. In the moment of crisis, the young novice pauses and invokes the spirit of his dead father before suddenly finding focus and confidence and performing maneuvers previously beyond his skill level. One can almost hear Anthony Edwards in voiceover saying “Use the force, Rooster.” There is then a scene at an enemy airbase which is lifted straight from Goldeneye (if I am keeping my Bond movies straight) but then back to Star Wars again as our heroes, having completed their original mission are beset by enemy fighters and seem certain to meet their deaths when out of the clouds comes the loud brash Han Solo — I mean Hangman — to blow away the enemy fighters and save the day. (Yes, both names begin with “Han.”) Top Gun: Maverick is the best Star Wars movie since Star Wars.

I’m not the first to notice this. Google “top gun maverick is star wars” and you’ll find several videos comparing the scenes side by side, including this one.

All the conflicts are familiar. You know exactly how the plot will play out. You know exactly how each of the conflicts will be resolved. And you want them all to be resolved exactly the way they are. They are a collection of carefully orchestrated set pieces designed and honed to produce a specific emotional response. Is this high-quality movie-making? Sure it is. Is it a concept polished to its ideal form? Maybe, or maybe it is simply another instance of a well-defined and researched average. Does it broaden our horizons or make us see human life differently than we did before? Absolutely not. It wasn’t designed to do that. Indeed, it was carefully designed not to do that. The last thing it wants to do is to develop its audience’s taste. If it did, the same tricks might not work so well next time.

But whether this refinement leads to ideal forms or merely averages, the question is, where does all this refinement end? Whether you refined the techniques of art to their ideal forms or to their averages, once you get there there ceases to be room for advancement. What happens then? The audience sees less and less value in new work, which often seems like old work warmed over — because it is old work warmed over. And if one is going to watch old work warmed over, it is more comfortable to watch either the old work itself or a revival of the old work with the old characters, the old sets, the old actors. This is what has been happening to TV and movies for some time now, with endless remakes, franchises, and series revivals.

It is happening in music too, as Ted Gioia reports:

Is Old Music Killing New Music?

Is the publishing world so far behind? The same names dominate the best-seller lists as did 20 years ago — Stephen King, John Grisham, etc. The secret of success, as any independent author will tell you, is writing a series with ten or twenty books released very fast. And those books must follow well-defined formulas, adhere to well-defined tropes. They don’t build, they don’t surprise, they repeat.

Books are no longer aimed at a broad general audience of people who might read a dozen novels a year, along with many other pursuits, but at a narrow cadre of voracious readers who might read a dozen novels a month, or even a week. In everything, in food, in music, in movies, in books, we have all been turned into gluttons. Many readers, indeed, boast of their gluttony. I used to think of myself as an avid reader until I met the voracious readers of the Web. Beside them, I am a slow and occasional reader, an absolute piker of the page turns. A book truly worth reading should leave you a little shattered. You should need a break to catch your breath and cleanse your palate. When it comes to reading fiction, my style is to sip and savor, not to chug and binge.

But there is less money to be made selling small numbers to many people. It is much more efficient, and therefore profitable, to sell large numbers to few people. In the modern publishing world, the editor is the agent of average and the servant of gluttony.

Now, let me say at once that if one is going to be a glutton, I can’t think of any better fare to be gluttonous about than novels. I would simply urge the literary glutton to vary their diet as much as they can. It is a healthier way to binge.

But that is not what the publishing industry wants for you. When you are supplying the glutton, your best commercial strategy is to refine your product down to the most swiftly digestible form, and that means jettisoning many techniques that older writers used to great effect. What is now called, “head hopping” — attending to the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in a scene — is verboten, (but don’t tell that to Larry McMurtry who won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove, which head-hops constantly among its cowboy cast). Close third-person or first-person shooter narratives are strongly preferred while anything that gets labeled the dread “omniscient point of view” is anathema. Protagonists are to be likable so that the reader can “identify” with them, which seems to mean imagining themselves as the character. Characters should be like their target audience (or at least what their target audience imagines themselves to be). Literature is no longer about the other but about the self, no longer a window but a mirror. Simple prose is required. Strong verbs are in (whatever the word “strong” may mean when applied to the word “verb”), adjectives are frowned upon and adverbs are crimes against humanity. Even some verbs are forbidden. The verb to feel, for instance, is forbidden as it is a “telling verb.” (I kid you not!) Dramatization is everywhere to be preferred to narrative. No dogs must be harmed (harming children is okay). Endings should be happy. A novel must belong to a well-defined genre and obey all the laws of that genre. Series are to be preferred to stand-alone books. The list goes on and continues to grow.

On the issue of genre, in particular, Harris is right that at its base it is simply an expression of a particular way of communicating or a particular preference for certain kinds of communication. Genre defined analytically by scholars, or genre defined with intentionality by writers creating a literary movement, does no violence to the variety or sophistication of literature. But genre defined prophylactically by editors to prevent the exchange of DNA between one market and another is indeed the enemy of variety and sophistication.

Can you obey all these rules and stay within the walls of genre and still write a good book? Probably, yes. My issues with modern literature have as much to do with theme and content as with form. But is it limiting? Certainly it is. Does it lack variety? Certainly it does. Are there exceptions? I’m sure there must be. Tell me about them. Seriously. Tell me about them. I can’t find them. And this is what happens when the commercial motive, laudable in itself, is not balanced by a confident artistic motive.

Do these strictures, and the many more that editors routinely enforce actually make for a literature that sells more consistently? In other words, are the rules devised in the service of gluttony and uniformity actually serving it well? I’m not entirely certain that they are. I see evidence that established bestselling authors can get away with ignoring them without losing sales. I suspect that it is, at least in part, that editors, having been handed the keys to the kingdom without much in the way of artistic criteria to balance the commercial criteria in their commissions, have developed, and continue to add to, a checklist that simplifies and unifies their decision-making. It is, after all, very difficult to trace the effects of individual rules and practices on reader engagement, and editors are not blessed with a well-funded research organization to actually study these things. Some of them derive from the personal peeves of individual writers. Stephen King hates adverbs so no one may use an adverb. Mark Twain hated the word “very”, so no one may use “very.” (This last one isn’t even true. The famous quote on the subject actually came from an obscure midwestern newspaper editor. Twain used “very” a lot. I counted.)

A lot of these rules also come from the popular how-to-get-rich-writing-novels books. These books are popular because everyone wants to be a novelist. It is the authors of these books who are getting rich. The editors are making a steady if not sumptuous income. Most writers are making a pittance at best. Many are significantly out of pocket and will probably never break even. Some part of modern editorial and publishing practice clearly comes from this services-to-writers industry in which everybody but writers is making money. It is the simplicity and the plausibility of the rule that makes it profitable in this industry, not its service to literature, or even to gluttony.

That is not the whole story, certainly. The publishing industry works on the same principle as many other industries: try a bunch of things, repeat the ones that work. It’s a reasonable strategy. The problem is to determine what features of the thing that worked should be repeated. In looking for repeatable elements, one naturally looks for those elements that are easy to recognize and define, which may or may not be the elements that actually enthralled the audience of a successful work.

Readers looking for more of something they like will work on the same principle. For example, several reviewers of my novels have said something along the lines of, readers who enjoy novels set in the Anglo-Saxon periods will enjoy these books. I hope that’s true, and I certainly welcome that audience. But personally, I don’t think that is the most significant element of my novels, and I don’t tend to write exclusively about that period, or even exclusively historical fiction. What is the common thread that runs through my work? What is the value of X in the statement, “If you enjoy X, you will enjoy my novels?” That’s the problem. I don’t know how to answer that as a clear and measurable property. I would like to say that X = “serious popular fiction.” But that’s not a property that is easy to define and measure.

The point is, this kind of measure and repeat approach, which makes perfect commercial sense, is also narrowing. You are looking for the most successful formulas, the most repeatable products. Put men in tin suits and women in catsuits and give them goofy superpowers and make it loud and colorful with clear rights and wrongs and add just a pinch of pathos and enough self-referential humor that we don’t feel embarrassed for watching this silliness, and you have not only the Marvel and DC cinematic universes but half the world’s sci-fi and thriller franchises as well. If Shakespeare had brought The Tempest or Midsummer Night’s Dream to a modern publisher, they would have told him, “Will, you write history plays. Richard III was a hit. Give us Richard IV. Leave the fairytale stuff to Neil Gaiman.” This is no joke. Writers, even successful ones with large audiences, hear this kind of thing from their publishers all the time. Having a few product lines that sell reliably is an excellent business model. Some variety is necessary, but in excess it is just unnecessary expense.

Why should we care? It’s a multichannel universe. There are more books being published than you could read in a thousand lifetimes. Surely everyone is entertained? What’s not to love? Well, first of all, greater quantity does not necessarily mean greater variety. As modern manufacturing took over clothing manufacture from individual tailors and dressmakers, quantity soared and variety declined. The decline of variety is at very least a side effect, if not a precondition of an increase in quantity.

But there is more at stake than mere variety. There is breadth of experience. Ultimately, it is breadth of experience that justifies the arts. Breadth of experience makes us more sophisticated, more sympathetic, wiser, more appreciative, more patient, and more open to joy. And where breadth of experience is concerned it is not just a matter of how much variety is technically available to those who seek it. It is a matter of how actively a society cultivates that breadth of experience, and the capacity for it, especially in the young.

If there is a single feature that marks the age of the editor it is that we have ceased to inculcate a breadth of experience in the young. It has become all about meeting their present felt needs as efficiently as possible. It used to be universally acknowledged that it was important to develop children’s tastes in literature, in music, in art, in food, in dancing, in everything. Tastes do not magically mature and become more broad or sophisticated by themselves. They have to be trained and developed. But our loss of cultural confidence has become so profound that we are no longer willing (and perhaps no longer able) to develop children’s tastes in a systematic way, either in the home or in the schools.

On the other hand, our commercial confidence is sky-high. Publishing is and should be a commercial as well as a cultural enterprise. But with cultural confidence so low, commercial considerations are bound to dominate the boardroom. Even if the board does feel that the company has a cultural mission rather than only a commercial one, they will interpret that today entirely in political terms.

This is not to suggest that there are no parents that take the time to develop the tastes of their children, or that there are no schools or teachers that dedicate themselves to this task, or that there are no individuals who set out to find the resources and guidance to develop their own taste. Indeed, we have seen a growth in great-books degree programs and in homeschooling which seems to have this broadening of taste among their several aims. Corporate hegemony is not yet so complete that, as in the movie Demolition Man, every restaurant is Taco Bell. The fact that we are having this conversation at all is evidence that this trend is not complete, and I have great confidence that it will never be so. Even in 2032, I believe, it will still be possible to find a Burger King.

But the development of taste is not in the mission statement of mainstream publishers today. It is not part of the task they set for their acquisition departments. To do so would be to imply a hierarchy of virtue in cultural expression that is politically anathema today. With other criteria in suspension, therefore, commercial criteria rule the day. Don't blame capitalism for this. Blame our loss of cultural confidence. There were capitalist publishers who worked for the development of taste, back when we had confidence in that enterprise.

And if it is true that we see less discussion of philosophical and moral questions in modern literature, that may be a reflection of that lack of cultural confidence, as well as the crushing weight of ideological conformity that lies over much of the industry. If philosophical or moral questions are to be broached at all, it can only be to affirm the accepted doctrine of the day, never, certainly, to discuss.

In the age of the editor, a confluence of commercial and ideological demands for conformity and uniformity creates a narrowed literature with a narrowed range of narrative styles. To be clear, this is not a situation that the editors designed or can be blamed for. It is the job they were hired to do. There are some brave souls among them that try valiantly to widen the scope, to broaden taste, to bring more variety to the literary scene. But they are at the bottom of the totem pole. There is only so much they can do.

In the end, a new literary movement, with a restored sense of cultural confidence, will have to begin with writers. With all the respect in the world to editors, it is a new age of the writer that we need. I erect “serious popular fiction” as a signpost in that direction, though I know that greater talents than mine, coupled to greater energy and will than I possess, will be required to jolt our literature out of its current rut.