Recently Seen

Zbigniew Brzezinski interviewed by Joe Scarborough on the latest of the Israeli-Palestinian wars.

[via Nattering Classes]

Adam Bellow -- publisher, editor, author [part one]

Adam Bellow of the New Pamphleteer and HarperCollins:

Note: This is the first part of a longer interview, which I shall post in weeks to come. An abridged version of it appeared at The Brooklyn Rail.

CBT: The philosophy behind the New Pamphleteer is that, where published text is concerned, shorter is better. Yet the current trend of the publishing industry seems to be an almost blind faith in the artistic and/or intellectual superiority of the Big (that is, Long) Book. Furthermore, this inclination in favour of the Big seems to be reinforced by the book reviewing apparatus, which also gives "major" works a conspicuous amount of attention.

Can pamphlet-length books really count of being judged on their content alone? Or has the fetishization of the Big Book become so entrenched that what one is fighting is not so much just a struggle for fair attention, but an ingrained prejudice?

AB: think we should take up first your premise of whether the book industry is biased toward the bigger or longer book. From a certain point of view of course it is, and for structural reasons that have to do with the emergence of large-scale corporate publishers. I’ve been twenty years a book editor at MacMillan, Simon and Schuster and Random House, and what I’ve seen arise is a true mass market for hard-cover non-fiction books. Naturally publishers and book-sellers alike make more money on a book they can charge 30 dollars for. But buyers are somewhat price conscious, and intellectual non-fiction cannot normally be published much above 26 – 27 dollars.

On the other hand, if you have a big fat biography of Teddy Roosevelt or John Adams, you find this price sensitivity is not such a great issue. So what I see is a continuing preference for books that can be published at a high price because the margins are better and the big publishers have, as you know, enormous bureaucracies and hierarchies filled with marketing, sales, publicity, financial, and legal departments. And they have to be paid for by profits from books, and book publishing is not famously a high margin business, which is why we don’t spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising.

At the same time, I would point out something I really began to notice in the early ‘90s, not long after I came into publishing, and that is what I would describe as the attempt – a struggle if you will – in which the pamphlet is struggling to return or re-emerge. I began to notice in the early’90s, really at the peak of the domestic culture war, books started to appear like Arthur Schlesinger’s Disuniting of America or Philip Howard’s Death of Common Sense. They were books about 160 – 180 pages, priced about 19, 20, 21 dollars, and they all became enormous best sellers.

Now it took me a while to realize that these books were essentially pamphlets. The reason you don’t recognize them as such is that they’re published in hardcover and priced pretty high as opposed to being published as trade paperbacks. The reason they’re not published as paperbacks is twofold. First, paperbacks have to be priced considerably lower, and so the margins are even smaller for the publisher. Also because paperback books don’t get reviewed. So if you have a polemical argument that you think is timely, as a publisher you really want it in hardcover.

Take Robert Kagan’s book about Europe and America. It grew out of an article, as many of these pamphlet-style books had done, and was published in hardcover almost instantly by Knopf and became a very big success. And here’s what I would describe as the attempt by large-scale corporate publishers to speed up their response time – to be more reactive. Because typically it takes, as you know, a couple of years for a book to be written and then another year for it to work its way through the production and marketing process.

So as the tempo of events has picked up, particularly, I would say, after the end of the Cold War in ‘89, publishers are really trying to act a little more like magazine editors. But they still have the constraints imposed by their lumbering bureaucracies and publishing processes, and so my conclusion – sorry about the length of my answer, but my conclusion is, there will always be a place in the market for the big book. This is what I term the “fat book” theory. There are some books that need to be published – that readers in fact want at length. As I sometimes say, there will always be readers who want to know how many pairs of spectacles Teddy Roosevelt had in his vest pocket when he charged up San Juan Hill. (The answer is twelve.) And that is the kind of interesting fact that, you know, you wouldn’t get that in a 150 page life of Teddy Roosevelt.

So there are always going to be people who want that. But particularly when it comes to current affairs and political controversy, people want faster interventions from the intellectual class, if you will. They want more of what I would describe as a French publishing culture, in which you have high-level intellectuals like Bernard Henri-Levy firing off a book on his summer vacation, and it’s in print a couple of months later. This is what’s necessary, because to continue my broader cultural analysis, after the end of the Cold War, clearly the West entered an ideological crisis. And then we have the outbreak of the age of terror. And so the world is changing rapidly, and the pace of change has accelerated, and people have a need for illumination and knowledge of the dark world outside their little Hobbit villages. And so they naturally turn to the intellectual and journalistic class. But they’re also demanding more substance in a shorter format, delivered faster, and book publishers are struggling to deliver this, but the industry is not suited to do it.

CBT: One of the great paradoxes of contemporary literature is that while the reading public generally has less time for reading, books that are critically lauded as major have become longer. It seems (again speaking generally) that they contain a lot of "stuff writing" -- i.e., passages that in earlier decades serious writers would have been inclined to cut. And the word count of contemporary major novels is sometimes noticeably very high.

Any comments? Has the contemporary novel become too long and self-indulgent? Or is length an irrelevant concern to the writer of vision?

AB: I like the phrase "stuff writing." It captures well the digressive tendencies bordering on self-indulgence of certain major writers -- Roth, DeLillo, Wallace, and Tom Wolfe to name a few whose books (and editors) have been criticized along these lines. However, in my view the readers of such books don't mind and may in fact prefer their novels large and all-embracing. People who do read seriously like to be fully absorbed by a book. The novel was originally meant to be a reflection of human society and a broad repository of knowledge -- look at Middlemarch, or Moby Dick, or Gravity's Rainbow. I think the taste for such books, as well as for lengthy historical novels, may be part of a healthy reaction against the constrained, minimalist, and overly 'personal' fiction of recent decades.

CBT: It's not uncommon for contemporary successful novelists to have little experience of regular, non-literary work. Is this a problem for the culture?

American writers used to come from all strata of society, from the patriciate to the working class. Now writing has become a white collar occupation, and most writers come from the affluent middle. Moreover, just as regional cultures have been dissolved in the acid of mass culture, today's writers are no longer autodidacts but products of the modern university system. After graduating from Ivy League colleges where they receive virtually the same education and acquire the same social views, they pass through professional degree-granting programs and are fed into a network of well-funded academic and nonprofit institutions that serve to further insulate them from the realities of American life. That I think explains the insular, self-referential feel of so much modern fiction, and why such writers must do "research" when they turn to topics other than themselves. On top of all this there is a natural tendency for writers to marry one another (like Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman) which tends in turn toward caste formation and dynasticism, as it has most visibly in Hollywood. Under the circumstances a general economic collapse might be the best thing that could possibly happen to American literature.

CBT: In your opinion, will the current economic crisis have a more deleterious effect on books sales than past recessions? If so, is there anything publishers can do to weather the storm?

AB: This is a grim topic for someone like me who works in the New York publishing industry. Publishers are indeed being hit hard by the collapse of consumer spending and a general contraction has begun with significant layoffs and restructuring at a number of companies. But as in other sectors, this has been coming for a long time and there is no reason publishers should be insulated from broader economic forces. Plus to a large extent they brought it on themselves, insofar as books have been priced very high and are essentially now luxury goods. This is a natural result of rising costs, combined with conglomeration and the transformation of publishing into a mass market phenomenon--all well-documented trends. Some recent commentators have predicted that books will henceforth be read by an elite coterie of esthetes and that publishing itself should go back to its pre-corporate days as a vocation for the rich. I doubt that will happen but there could be a major wave of technology-driven differentiation wherein big houses will concentrate on the mass market, competing fiercely for sure things -- i.e. bestselling authors and writers with media platforms -- while smaller houses pick up the slack, publishing the literary novels and mid-list nonfiction that are no longer cost-effective from the corporate point of view. The New Pamphleteer is part of this trend toward new-media based micropublishing, which is already well underway.

Bio: Adam Bellow is, with his partner David Bernstein, publisher of the New Pamphleteer. He is also an editor with many years experience at houses such as MacMillan, Simon and Schuster, Random House and HarperCollins. Finally, he is an author in his own right, and has written several articles as well as the book In Praise of Nepotism. He is working on a new book.

STILLS WITHOUT SCRIPTS

Adam Bellow - full interview upcoming

When Blogger stops causing me grief, I shall post the first part of my extended interview with Adam Bellow.

Catheryn Kilgarriff -- publisher (Marion Boyars)

Catheryn Kilgarriff of Marion Boyars Publishers:


1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of increasingly narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?

Literature is not in trouble. Film adaptations help literature, blogs spread the word of good books (both private and ones like The Guardian Unlimited,) video clips on YOU TUBE are used to promote novels, writers are seen as cool people.

The one area that is intensely dangerous is the discounting of books in the UK by the chains – the 3/2. There are only so many books a person wishes to read, so if they have bought 3, they will not buy again for another month. But I am hoping that very soon, internet buying direct from publishers web sites will replace the power of amazon, and the availability of books in shops. Ie – if you read good publishers web sites, and buy directly from them, you should never have to hunt for a book in a large chain fruitlessly again. But the chains run the danger of only being visited by people looking for a bargain, and I am afraid the blame for this lies at their doors.


2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the novel be considered the prime example of it?

Literature is anything which challenges the status quo – so Riverbend’s blogs, Baghdad Burning, published by us in two volumes, are an excellent example of good literature.


3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.

Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?

I think book buyers are capable of making choices – they do not buy every prize winner. But certainly, books they would not have noticed come to their attention, and this is a good thing. Prizes are important.


4. Literary publishing has always been a marriage of art and commerce. But in recent years, the Cult of the Deal has become more influential, with agents demanding larger advances and marketing people paying especially close attention to sales figures. Is the "art" side of the business being pushed out?

The art side of the business has to co exist with the business side. Neither should be ignored, and the books published to make money will be different from the ones published because an editor or publisher loved them. It is just that some books loved by an editor will not see light of day since sales just cannot be envisaged, and the publisher does not wish to lose money and disappoint the author.

Some advances are silly – they are so large. But this just does not apply to the literary independent.


5. Many major publishers now refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?

We have only taken one novel from the slush pile – a very good Irish writer living in Canada called Gerard Beirne. His novel, THE ESKIMO IN THE NET, sold a respectable 2000 copies. If it had got onto a good prize long list, it would have done better. So, we look at our slush pile properly, but it rarely produces the goods.


6. Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience? Or are the major houses introducing an overly corporate, overly aggressive mentality to the book trade?

There is no reason for a good small house to be squeezed out by the large publishers. With head offices at the chains taking the buying decisions, the role of the rep in the large houses has diminished. Penguin now has 10 reps, HarperCollins UK, about 12. We have 6 plus myself, which makes 7. There is hardly any difference between how our books are presented to the trade and how the lead titles from the main houses are. The only difference is that we are more often breaking new authors, since we cannot afford large advances. Ie, when we have made the name of a new author, we often lose them to a large house. BUT – the authors often come back to us, since we work harder for our authors (we have fewer front list books a year) and we achieve better sales for them, better publicity, and we tour them at the major literary festivals. We also enter them for prizes – and, please note, each house is limited to 2 or 3 entries per prize (Booker, Orange). So, any author at a large house is LESS likely to be entered than if they are published by a small house.

In the area of rights, big and small houses work closely together. The big houses acknowledge our skill at finding new talent and they often want to buy the mass market paperback rights from us. This whole system benefits everyone.


7. Returning to the question of agents -- are they too powerful? If so, in what ways? Or are they a largely beneficial and necessary element of contemporary publishing?

I’d love to see an agent negotiate with Waterstone’s or Borders over discounts and 3/2 promotions. That’s the area agents have no idea of. They choose to ignore it, try to raise advances and change terms, and all that happens is that the author gets let down by too high expectations coming from their agent.


8. Does Britain have too many publishers? Or too few?

Probably too many. New houses start all the time. I wish them well, but it’s a tough business.


9. In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?

Not as much as people think. The 3D book is transportable, user friendly and lasts over time.


10. Putting aside the hype, does the Internet provide a real opportunity to publishers? If so, how?

As said before, it’s a wonderful promotional device and hopefully soon a lot of book sales will be direct from publisher’s web sites.


11. And what role can traditional, venerable institutions such as libraries and English Departments play in reversing the decline in sales of literary fiction?

English teachers will always be hugely influential on young minds. Young people hardly use public libraries as they have personal computers. So entertainment is already at the flick of a button. But parents can be influential. I bring back 4 books a month from my local library for my two teenage daughters who are as lazy as they come. But, shock horror, they run to the pile and read these books very fast. One day they will manage to walk two blocks to the library themselves…probably when they are at university and I am not there.


12. What projects are you working on now that you are excited about?

Chocolate and Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier May 2007

Builds on the success of recent books from blogs, including Julia and Julie by Julie Powell which won the Lulu blog award in 2006, and of course, Baghdad Burning

Probably the first cook book with international appeal for the new generation which uses the net as their networking base. High profile launch at the Institut Français with food.

“Not some wronger-than-wrong fusion cooking site, but a blog (in English) built around the twin culinary passions of its 27 year old Parisian writer, Clotilde Dusoulier: fresh, healthy eating and, as well, the magical dark stuff. It is real escapist, drool-on-your-keyboard stuff as Dusoulier drifts around Paris on a waft of sugar-scented air, stumbling across delicious delicacies.’ The Guardian

‘You can just see Audrey Tatou playing her in the movie as she traipses all over Paris, finding the bakery supply store that her mother shopped at, eating out, cooking and writing down recipes and shopping tips along with insights into French life.” Los Angeles Times

Enlightenment by Maureen Freely. March 2007

An investigative journalist returns to Istanbul, the scene of her early love affair with Sinan. She has to overcome her qualms when she is asked by his ‘honeypot’ wife to help her regain her son, taken away by the American authorities when Sinan is arrested on entry into the States.
A thriller involving a retired intelligence operative, a mysterious ‘trunk’ murder, and a group of young people involved in subterfuge, but now tackling a real crisis, Maureen Freely’s novel shows how in Turkey nobody is who they are and everyone is suspect.
Maureen Freely writes widely for several newspapers, and is a respected authority on the current situation in Turkey. She is a controversial writer who is not afraid to criticise the Turkey she loves.

Touba and the Meaning of Light by Shahrnush Parsipur
An epic and challenging novel about one woman’s lifetime covering eight decades of Iranian history
Winner of a PEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION AWARD 2007.
Banned books are a major draw, and one of the broadsheets is running a promotion so reviews guaranteed. Tour highlighting other banned and prosecuted authors on our list, Elif Shafak, Hong Ying and Hubert Selby Jr.
‘Parsipur…endured jail and torture to preserve her sense of dignity and integrity, and as a writer and innovator… Her protagonists are women whose rebellions are not merely political but existential.’ Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
‘Initially published in Iran in 1989, this ground-breaking novel – which juxtaposes reality and mysticism, becoming especially fantastical toward the book’s conclusion – was quickly banned by the Islamic Republic.’ Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)A new novel by an author who left us and has come back (still confidential but highly commercial)


Statement: Firstly, Marion Boyars was my mother who died in 1999 so she will not be answering any questions. The eminent back list, with the novels of Hubert Selby Jr, the UK rights for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, the works on John Cage, Heinrich Boll and Georges Bataille, these are all her work. Our recent publication of novels by Hong Ying, Elif Shafak, and the Iraqi blogs by Riverbend, Baghdad Burning – all of which have attained world wide fame, are my work. So, it’s a kind of combination of both of us.

Recently Read

In the Shadow, in the House by John Emil Vincent

Recognition Failure Horror by John Kinsella

LOVEOGRAPHY 1: INSIDE HAEMI FORTRESS

EXT. A SMALL KOREAN VILLAGE. AN EARLY SUMMER EVENING, MID-WEEK.

A WESTERN MAN is walking down the city's main street. To his left is Haemi Fortress, a medieval Korean fort. Its wall is built of unevenly-matched stones, each lightened by age to a gentle ochre, as if the stone itself has softened.

The MAN walking beside this wall has a peaceful expression on his face. But from his body language we can tell he's lonely.

VO: Those were the days before I met you.

SFX: A light breeze.



EXT. THE INNER COURTYARD OF THE FORTRESS. MOMENTS LATER.

The Western man sees a group of CHILDREN. They are giggling and playing with each other. Then one of them spots the man.



CHILD: 의국인! [Foreigner]

SECOND CHILD: [sing-songy] Hello!

MAN: [smiling] Hello.

ALL CHILDREN: [gleefully] Hello! Hello!

MAN: [speaking slowly] Can you speak English?

The CHILDREN suddenly start to giggle uproariously. But their amusement is more a symptom of shyness than a desire to carry the game any further. They run away, still laughing.

The MAN continues walking. He makes his way through small, sad, empty streets.




V.O.: Chris Marker once asked how we can remember thirst. What I want to know is, how can we remember loneliness? It penetrates not just oneself but the world. Reality itself appears changed. The side-streets suck themselves empty, their noise vacuumed behind shuttered store-fronts. The sky pulls itself as taut as a blue drum. The clouds starve themselves and harm themselves, like self-loathing anorexics.

And as the world seems to change, so does the self: feel lonely enough, and that juncture of soul and body that comprises what you think of as you becomes as parched as cracked soil. The lonely individual is ancient, he is dirt.


INT. AN EVANGELICAL CHURCH. TEN MINUTES LATER.



The MAN enters. He is somewhat surprised to see a CROWD OF WORSHIPPERS. They are very involved in their prayers.

The MAN walks cautiously forward.

A MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN spots him.

CUT TO: CLOSE UP of MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN.

MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN: 하느님! 하느님이 자를 사랑하습니다! [God! God loves you!]

The MAN pulls back, alarmed.


EXT. A STREET. MOMENTS LATER.

The MAN is walking by himself again. He looks even sadder than before. A DIFFERENT CHILD spots him.

DIFFERENT CHILD: [especially enthusiastically] Hello!

V.O.: I don't know what it is was about that kid's voice. It went to my heart -- pierced it, like an exquisitely fine spear, the sharp end of sweetness. And it was this strange combination of sensations -- the needle's prick and the blood's sunny melt -- that suddenly transported me (there's no other phrase) to a different time. It was a time in the more recent past, when I still felt the residual parch of loneliness. But it was a time when I started to feel.

I mean, it was a time when I started to feel again.

Screenplay-novel FAQs

note: this is a re-post of a piece that was originally put online in 2005, then re-written throughout 2006 to 2008.

What is a screenplay-novel?

It's a novel. But it's written in the form of a screenplay.

How did you get the idea of writing a screenplay-novel?

Over time, it dawned on me that I treated movies the way I treated novels: I would appreciate their stories in a similar way, and talk about them afterwards the way a person might talk about a novel. In fact, I do this more often with movies ... mainly, I think, because nowadays movie-watchers vastly outnumber novel readers and so there are many people you can have a conversation with about a particular movie -- even a very serious movie. It's a lot harder to do that about a particular book.

The epiphany occurred when I was reading the published screenplay of the film version of Out of Africa (I'd read the Karen Blixen original many years before). My wife had a copy of it, and it was lying around the house.

I live in South Korea, and these kinds of scripts are enormously popular here. They're marketed as an English learning tool (English script on one page, with Korean-language "key points" on the other). But as I read the script I found I really enjoyed it in and of itself. And then I thought, if this works as a book form of an existing movie, why wouldn't it work as a book form of a movie that's never been made? In other words, why not use the same combination of stills and script?

[N.B. It's worth noting that some time after reading this book for the first time, I noticed it didn't in fact contain stills plural, but the same photo from the movie over and over. However, the point still stands -- an artistic experience similar to that of a movie can be created in book form.]

And then there's the creative process involved: Unless writing autobiographically, I like imagining scenes as if they were in a movie. My imagination seems to naturally work that way.

Has this idea been done before?

There's a long tradition of writing satire in the form of a screenplay -- you know, some comic scene, for example, an inane conversation in the White House. And there is a tradition of teleromans in some countries. These are basically comics made of photographs, not drawings.

But there are no examples of a literary novel written in screenplay form that I've seen. At least, this was true when the idea first came to me. Since then, people have given me examples. One was a script by Michael Turner entitled "American Whisky Bar". I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it. But some time after it was published, it was produced by CITY-TV and Bruce McDonald as a live television drama. I saw that broadcast. The broadcast was really more like a 1950s-style televised play than anything else. So I don't know if it qualifies.

Personally, I think people will come up with other examples and this will turn into a long-running debate over who was first. And I doubt it will ever be satisfactorily resolved. Instead, what I'd like to emphasize is I'm calling for the screenplay-novel to exist as a distinct form of novel. In other words, I'm hoping that many serious writers will adopt this way of writing novels -- at least, for some of their work.

So it's a good idea because it's new?

Ideas aren't good simply because they're new. I might be the first person to invent chocolate-flavoured cheddar cheese. That doesn't mean it's worthwhile. Instead, I think this idea is good because it has the potential to be artistically effective. It solves problems for the writer, and solves problems for the audience. Although it should be written with care and craft , because its word count tends to be lower than in a traditional novel, it's quicker to produce and quicker to read. Yet at the same time, it keys into people's imaginations. It is a very effective way of creating the vividness necessary for certain types of narrative, especially those emphasizing dialogue.

Of course, some people don't feel the same way. For them, the screenplay-novel is not a particularly evocative way of writing. They need more in the way of description -- both of the environment and of interior consciousness. I understand this. Because the screenplay-novel is stripped-down, it seems to have certain inherent shortcomings, one of which is less physical description and the other which is the apparent disappearance of interior consciousness.

So it's important to underline the first quality can still exist in a screenplay novel. As in a regular screenplay, there is no necessary restriction on the number of descriptive passages that exist. There are simply conventions about this, just as there are conventions in what might be called traditional screenplay writing; screenplays tend to be very minimalist. However, a screenplay-novelist doesn't have to follow this convention. He or she can include as many descriptive passages as he or she wants.

Evoking interior consciousness is more of a problem. Interior states of mind don't "disappear" in a screenplay-novel. Instead, they have to be evoked mainly by the characters' dialogue. (This is one reason why I tend to use more description of gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice in my dialogue than you'd find in a regular screenplay.)

The screenplay-novel form is not perfect. It has strengths and weaknesses. But let's be honest: the traditional novel has short-comings, too, not the least of which is its increasing tendency these days toward self-consciousness and overripe writing (or over-write writing; a lot of books suffer simply from being longer than they need to be). It is a sad irony of contemporary fiction that just as the novel is facing so much competition from other narrative forms -- from movies to video games -- so many novels that are published are either strait-jacketed by convention or so self-indulgent and flabby that they fall into the category of books that can be opened but not finished. This is one of the real strengths of the screenplay-novel: it is designed to be finished. It is designed to succeed in keeping its audience's attention. There is something shameful and affected in insisting this is an irrelevant goal for the serious writer to keep in mind.

(And I cannot keep repeating often enough: the screenplay-novel does not have to eschew fine writing; belles lettres can exist within its pages -- it is just that belletristic description is kept to small proportions, unless those belles lettres arise naturally in a character's speech.)

You mentioned interior consciousness. This is exactly what I like about novels. How can a screenplay ever compete with that?

This is probably the most complex aesthetic question that one can ask of the screenplay-novel as a form. As I suggest above, interior consciousness does not "disappear" because putative descriptions of it disappear. In other words, interior consciousness -- or rather, consciousness generally -- when evoked in art can be revealed many different ways. A good stage play tells us a lot about characters' interior consciousness; it does this through dialogue that takes place in more-dramatic-than-one-finds-in-regular-life situations. In other words, even though a stage play generally does not attempt to "show" interior consciousness, it can quite effectively evoke enough of the characters of various dramatis personae that we, the audience, develop a sense of both the outer and inner life of the people on stage. (Furthermore, just as staged theatre can, to a degree, and through the artistry of well-written dialogue, tell us something about the interior consciousness of characters, so traditional novels can fail at successfully evoking it. It's also worth noting that a fair percentage of "interior consciousness" that one finds in works of conventional fiction is simply not very convincing. More on this in a moment.)

When we talk about interior consciousness in art, we are not talking about something that reflects with absolute accuracy an already existent state(s) of mind. Instead, we are talking about a mimetic process; an attempt on the part of art to capture something that is "real" -- if consciousness can be said to be real in the way we normally understand that word. Quite often, this mimetic process falls short.

All this would be fine if literary people could reach some kind of genuine consensus about when writers succeed and when they fail at depicting interior consciousness. But they can't. What this means for defenders of traditional literature as a repository of "something that movies can't do" because, so their argument goes, only literary fiction can evoke interior consciousness, is a need to re-think just what it is that allows a work of literary fiction to tell us about various characters' inner lives. Showing inner life is not as simple as claiming one shows it; a work of art has to do more. And this is something screenplay-novels can succeed at doing as well, if they are written well enough.

I've read other screenplays, and they're a lot different from yours. Why?

Those aren't screenplay-novels, they're screenplays. They are meant to be produced into movies. What I'm doing here is a novel meant to be imagined as a movie.

But it's just words. What I like about movies are the pictures.

Books can contain pictures, too.

Why don't you just write a regular novel?

I do. I have. But recently I have become interested in this approach to -- this form of -- writing. It's a method of writing that works for me; that re-inspires me after years of increasing frustration with traditional literary techniques.

So you hate traditional fiction?

No. When it is well done I admire it just as much as I ever did. Traditional fiction (which could be called conventional fiction, but here I really mean to say literary fiction in the form in which we usually find it) has been what formed me: this is true from 19th Century geniuses like John Keats, Charlotte Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Gosse, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, to the extraordinary richness of 20th Century literature -- including giants such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Theodore Dreiser, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Leonard Cohen to lesser knowns such as Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski, Knut Hamsen, Ole Edvart Rolvaag, Sigrid Undset, Violette Leduc, Elizabeth Jane Howard, David Plante, Daniel Jones, Harry Sonny Ladoo, and Britt Hagarty, to artist/writers such as R. Crumb, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucette, Chester Brown and David Collier, to recent discoveries among Korean writers such as Chai Man-shik, Oh Jung-hee, Chae Yun, and Yun Heung-gil ... the list goes on and on.

In the period described above, there's such an enormous quantity of good writing that at times one might be forgiven for thinking that "good writing" is for the recent historical period like "progress" was in the late 19th Century: something we can take for granted. The early days of the 21st Century, however, indicate an opposite trend. Much fiction that is getting published and praised these days has a tired, predictable quality.

If I were the only person who felt this way, I'd blame myself. But many people who are serious about reading feel the same way. When best-of-year reading lists are drawn up, one often hears the comment that a particular book which won major prizes or was promoted by establishment taste-makers was a disappointment. There is a malaise affecting contemporary fiction, and this malaise is corroding the faith that people at all levels of the literary enterprise have in the process of producing literature. Agents are taking on less literary fiction than they used to, publishers are publishing less of it, and writers are finding their careers stymied when the sales of one book just don't materialize and they find it difficult to sell their next manuscript. (Or else, their careers are stymied by not being published at all -- and yes, this happens to good writers.)

But being a writer has always been difficult. Why complain about that?

It's not so much a complaint as an observation that the cultural landscape is in the process of changing rather drastically. This isn't news. The readership of fiction, especially literary fiction in its traditional form, has been declining for years. Recently, this decline has become alarming. By all means, read traditional novels, and, if they move you, venerate them. But we have to face the larger cultural reality. We have to think in new ways.

So why don't you just watch movies and TV?

I like movies ... TV I'm not so sure about, although there are good programs out there.

The problem with movies and TV is this: they cost a lot to produce. No, let me rephrase that -- they cost an astronomical amount. Apart from the indie movie scene, which tends to be perpetually marginalized, no one individual can make them. They are group efforts, and while this gives them some strengths, they suffer from the near-inevitable tendency of group creations to lose any singular voice. And it's the singular voice that has to survive. It's the individual consciousness, not the group, that maintains contact with life.

And this is one of the great strengths of books: because they're relatively cheap to produce, they can still be made by individuals. (The contemporary trend toward "packaging" a book is pernicious on so many levels, as the Kaavya Viswanathan incident showed. Whether this scandal will be enough to stop the general trend to package books and turn even them into bland, committee-made products remains to be seen.)

Mass culture, with its converging technologies such as TV-receiving cell phones and ubiquitous WiBro reception, keeps moving more and more toward post-literacy. We are in desperate need of narrative forms that both can reach an audience but also allow the artist to retain his or her individuality. The screenplay-novel is a way of "writing a movie".

So you're suggesting we just give up? That because mass culture is so pervasive we are obligated to mimic it?

The screenplay-novel is not a selling out. Think of it this way: there are good movies. There is good TV -- especially outside a North American context. In other words, both mediums are capable of producing genuine works of art, despite their group-made natures. If you write a screenplay-novel, you should try to make something that also has artistic merit. Obviously, it won't possess descriptive passages to the same degree that great traditional fiction does. But this does not mean the screenplay-novel must diminish a good writer's requirement to produce (or good reader's requirement to be sensitive to) linguistic originality. The screenplay-novel is intended, above all, to re-invigorate the relationship that exists between writer and audience.

When reading a screenplay-novel, people can read it as a director might. This is one of the broad-based effects that movies have had on the modern mind: it is possible -- even natural, it sometimes seems -- to think "cinematically". In other words, our minds have already been conditioned to imagine narratives as if they were movies. Maybe everyone doesn't do this. But many people do, and they do it effortlessly. In this sense, we are all directors now.

The trick is to be a good director -- an auteur, if you will. The need for this is especially pressing these days as the role of the auteur has been severely diminished within the movie industry generally. And that's an irony that stands in favour of the screenplay-novel: movies are becoming too expensive and formulaic for auteurship to genuinely thrive within movie-making itself. Therefore, a creative individual with the sensibility of an auteur needs the book. He or she needs the artistic freedom that the book still can provide.

It's worth noting that the best movies and TV that squeeze through the system are often made in opposition to mass culture. The screenplay-novel is another way of doing that.

But what about reading? If everyone is "being a director", won't reading suffer even more?

People are still reading lots these days. The trend among readers, however, is to buy more non-fiction than fiction.

What's wrong with that?

Nothing in the sense that non-fiction has always been popular, and now simply is more so. However, we still need fiction. It's not a luxury. It's a necessity, as well. It's something of a cliche to observe that cultures rise and fall based partly on the stories they tell themselves. It might be more accurate in a 21st Century context to point out that cultures wage wars -- or passively witness them -- according to the stories they tell. (This, incidentally, is one theme of TRUTH MARATHON.)

I still think screenplays suck. Traditional novels are more interesting to read.

Then read traditional novels. I do. But consider the possibility that the screenplay-novel idea is a relatively new one, and part of your antagonism to them may be the result of being conditioned to read fictional narrative one way and not another. Remember that: the screenplay novel is just another form of narrative. One of the main reasons it exists is to re-connect author with audience. If you want an extremely short summary of why the screenplay-novel is worth taking seriously, that's it: it is a form of literary fiction many people will read.

In Memoriam

In memory of all those who have recently lost their lives, by whatever means.

Bellow Interview

My interview with Adam Bellow is now up at the Brooklyn Rail.

Idea Anniversary

It has now been a little over three years since I started my first site, The Screenplay-novel Manifestos. As the site's name suggests, what I wanted to do was promote the idea of the screenplay-novel: a novel written in the form of a screenplay but retaining the depth -- the accretion of detail, the slow but artistically necessary build-up of event, dialogue and characterization -- that makes the novel a singular narrative form. As well, it seemed to me that traditional novels had become too top-heavy with what I like to refer to as "stuff writing" -- the literary equivalent of the stuff painting that was considered obligatory in court and salon art until the end of the 19th Century, and that, while pleasing to the eye (a certain kind of eye; or perhaps the eye in a certain frame of mind), was swept away as unnecessary by Impressionism, a mode of painting that possesses a vigourous and intelligent species of minimalism.

I didn't have to blog on the subject of the screenplay-novel. Even when I started that first site, the activity of blogging was already the centre of a 21st Century kulturkampf, with certain writers (often representing institutional interests) eager to denounce the unevenness and occasional amateurishness of any wholly democratic medium. But blogging was easy ... easy to start up, at least. It was a genuinely new mode of expression using a new form of technology, and its capacity to be instantaneous -- its push-button publishing, as the little promotional doohicky on my Blogger page says -- was both a blessing and a curse. That phrase, push-button publishing, possesses a degree of profundity, because that is, literally, what one is doing; one is presenting written or visual work to the world, and it is, in its availability, truly published, even if the Internet does not yet provide any serious workable model (that I know of) to make any money from what appears on it. (For those of us without independent incomes, this is a, ah, not inconsequential problem.) However, that didn't seem relevant at the time, because I had a new idea that came to me in a flash and I wanted to publicly stake a claim on it.

I live in South Korea, and published screenplays are very popular here. They are sold in bookstores as movie tie-ins, obviously, but are also used as educational tools; since the spoken English employed by cinema can be of a particularly difficult kind -- filled with idioms and method-acting mumblingness -- published scripts are necessary for non-native speakers to make sense of them. My wife had a book of this kind lying around the house, Kurt Leudtke's script for Out of Africa. I'd already been toying with the idea of writing short stories in script form, but then I thought, why not write an entire book this way? At the time, I thought the concept of the screenplay-novel was so original yet so necessary that it would only be a short matter of time before the larger world started paying attention.

As those whose creative work (whether intellectual or creative) appears online already know, it isn't quite that simple. Push-button technologies lead to push-button attention spans and push-button discardability. No one was all that enamoured by the idea of the screenplay because no one except a very small audience was reading my blog. And it turned out there were other precursors of the screenplay-novel. These weren't really what I was doing. Two were labelled by their authors "screen-novels"*, and one of them, by the screenwriter Darrian Scott Cole (entitled "The Priest of Sales") was a screenplay written in novel form -- the opposite of what I wanted to do. Another, "The Lost Woman", by Rick Ferreira, was a screenplay which was published. It retained the minimalism of the screenplay as an existent artistic form but did not build on it. (Ferreira's book, which can be purchased online, has an average word-count of 100 words a page and a little over 170 pages, giving it an approximate word-count of 17,000, compared to the minimal word-count of a novel intended for adult audiences, 50,000.)

Then there were writers whose work wasn't registering with English-language audiences because they weren't writing in English. For example, a writer from France named Claude Chounlasane, was kind enough to mention my site as an inspiration for a "scenaroman" he was working on -- a work available at his site of the same name. (Chounlasane, in turn, distinguishes between the qualities of the screenplay-novel and the scenaroman.) And finally, there was work by writers who were incorporating screenplays into larger, conventionally written narratives. One example that was mentioned to me by a fellow writer (Gordon Sellar) was Michael Turner, whose "American Whiskey Bar" is a screenplay-within-a-novel. (I haven't read the book yet, but I saw a live television production of the screenplay's script on City television in Toronto.) Sellar mentioned the Turner comparison because he, Sellar, had seen Turner at a reading at which Turner mentioned no one had ever written fiction in this form before. Turner's pride in breaking new ground is understandable; many if not most artists want to be seen as the creators of things that are utterly new. This impulse has its sources, as just said, in pride, and also is sourced in the economy of contemporary canon-formation -- newness is a currency; it can be interpreted, using the crass discourse of ad-speak, as a way of branding oneself. (This eagerness -- almost a fever at times -- to be perceived as doing new work is particularly prevalent in the visual arts, where the dominant ideology for several decades now has been that of an institutionalized avant-garde; I mention this not to approve of or condemn the contemporary art scene, but simply to observe that newness itself can become both goal and fetish. This dual characteristic is perhaps a little more pronounced in the larger galleries of contemporary art in Seoul, which industriously add big names, primarily from New York and London, to their collections, than in North American galleries, where newness for-its-own-sake-by-big-names is now viewed with some skepticism. The tragedy for some contemporary Korean artists is their work, which is often just as fine as that from the West (sometimes better) can be shouldered aside and ignored, until they, too, go to the stadiums of Art Fame Accrual, and carve out reputations of their own in the gladiatorial combat that takes place on a weekend-basis in Soho, Tribeca, the Bowery and the East End.)

Newness is not an inherently virtuous quality. But it is a necessary quality when the old way of doing things has become dysfunctional. And this, perhaps, is one of the strongest arguments in favour of the screenplay-novel: in a time when people are turning away from reading, the novel, for the sake of its own survival, needs to develop new narrative strategies. The decline in reading among the population at large is a statistical fact borne out on a daily basis by subjective observation. Its causes are a little more complex than the explanations that are commonly given. Usually TV and something called "digital technology" are blamed. I have yet to see a serious discussion of whether one reason why people read less fiction these days is because ... a lot of it isn't especially good. The screenplay-novel is an artistic strategy for cutting through the heavy fabric and tonnages of verbal silk -- the stuff writing -- which weigh a lot of contemporary novels down. It is also a way of holding the attention of readers who have become acculturated to the language of movies. It's worth noting that any writer, no matter how obscure, needs an audience. It is not the audience's size which is as important as its enthusiasm. Art forms which cannot acquire genuine audiences whither as certainly as plants without water. The metaphor is almost palpable in its description of cause-and-effect. It is snobbery of the worst kind to insist that great art can be created over the course of a entire career without thought for its audience.

But the screenplay-novel, as I envision it, has another aspect as well. It is a way of making the novel more visual. This can be accomplished through its use of language. At this point, the strengths of the conventional novel also must be mentioned: good writing is by its very nature "visual" when it is not musical (another virtue of fine language). The arts have an interplay, and good writing in conventional novels has to be visual in some of its effects just as good writing must remain a self-conscious artistic aim in screenplay-novels; screenplays that are written for actual production are not only very short, but they tend to use a language which does not even possess the power of minimalism well-written (think Carver or Hemingway). Instead, actual screenplays are all too often hobbled by language that is lazy, even ugly, writing. The screenplay-novel has to avoid this. (Tad Friend once profiled a well-established screenplay writer whose success was founded on a writing style that was so militantly cloying it was vomit-inducing: it included lines of this type: "And then she takes his hand. And holds it. Looking at him. Longingly." This isn't writing, or even, as Capote called it, typing. It's a form of imbecilizing.) So the screenplay-novel allows the writer to minimize, to reduce, stuff writing. However, it must never descend to crap writing. Its usage of language to create visual effects must always retain its source in the same artistic labour that all good writers engage in.

And, of course, the visual can be accomplished through the use of ... the visual. Screenplay-novels are a form of narrative that can integrated very effectively with visual art. This art can be in the form of "stills" -- photographs taken from the screenplay-novel, which, in turn, is a movie that only exists in the studio of the mind. Or this art can be in the form of drawings -- "storyboards" -- that create a hybrid form that owes a considerable debt to comics.

I started blogging on screenplay-fiction three years ago. Since that time, I have continued going to book stores as often as I ever did (a lot). (And perhaps it's worth mentioning here that my wife and I don't currently own a TV and I've watched very little TV over the past twenty years; this would be neither here nor there, except that the antagonism which is sometimes directed toward the mere suggestion of writing novels in the form of screenplay-novels is often is based, I think, on the knee-jerk presumption that this is a polluting idea only a TV-addict could dream up.) And I have surfed the literary sites of the blogosphere, the small-mag-o-sphere, the e-book-sphere, and even though I have come across examples of screenplay-inspired fiction writing such as the ones mentioned above, I have yet to see work that is quite like what I am doing at this site.

This is an idea with parallel ideas. The screenplay-novel is similar to the screen-novel, but it is written with different aims. It is intended to be a novel; not a screenplay with literary language, nor a screenplay that is published in book form. It also has its progenitors: writers who use screenplay-like scenes within larger, traditional narratives. It even has a fairly significant sources in the satirical "screenplay shorts" of Mad magazine and Monty Python. In the end, though, it is not quite like anything that is, as yet, found elsewhere. It is a new idea, and I write that claim with the knowledge that its worth as an idea will ultimately be not merely be in its newness, but the artistic calibre of each particular screenplay-novel. In other words, the screenplay-novel is a form that deserves to be given a chance within the larger world of literary creation . But its success or failure will be as it should with any novel: its worth as a work of art.


*It's worth noting I originally thought of calling my idea the screen-novel as well, but decided against this when I realized the term had already been taken and meant something different from what I intended to do.

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STILLS WITHOUT SCRIPTS

BARAM WRITER

[note: this originally appeared in Dark Sky Magazine]

BARAM WRITER

EXT. AN URBAN WOODLAND. WINTER. LATE AFTERNOON.

Wind blows through trees, rustles dead leaves, makes branches sway in a creaking, slow dervish.

VO [male]: The wind has its own tone, its own feeling. It’s like … coldness, thinness.

It’s like hunger.

The wind has a body. The wind is someone.

JUMPCUT

EXT. A HIKING TRAIL IN THE URBAN WOODLAND. A MOMENT LATER.

A married couple walks along the trail. We see the wife, walking ahead.

VO: You’re someone. I’m someone.

Your body: petite, a source of warmth. A body to whom love is directed.

My body?

Wind.

That is, has been wind. Still feels like wind, but sometimes feels warmth.

I think this is the final state of love.

JUMPCUT

EXT. THE HIKING TRAIL. A MOMENT LATER.

A view of nearby apartment buildings. Several of the apartments, while still in somebody’s possession, lie empty. The buildings look spectral and aristocratic: the second homes of the well-to-do. The empty homes of the well-traveled.

The couple on the hiking trail, dressed in their simple clothes, look at the buildings.

HUSBAND [in accented Korean]: 열령 집. [”Ghost houses”]

WIFE: They go somewhere, maybe to Swiss.

HUSBAND: We should go on a trip sometime. Get away.

WIFE: I can’t. I have too much stress at hospital.

HUSBAND: I know. That’s why we should go. Your job is too difficult.

The WIFE looks at her HUSBAND. She sadly shakes her head.

JUMPCUT

EXT. THE HIKING TRAIL. A MOMENT LATER.

The HUSBAND follows his wife. He follows her along the trail as the cold sun sets.

VO: You walk along the trail, together today, but tomorrow, Sunday, you have to work an evening shift.

EXT. THE HIKING TRAIL. THE NEXT DAY. DUSK.

VO: I’m alone.

I walk along the trail. My daily exercise.

The scene is still, quiet. Thoughts pour through my head.

I’m worried about you. Your job is too hard. It’s affecting your health.

The sensation is like wind, a stress-wind, blowing the chemistry of the mind in circles.

Worries swirl like brittle, dry leaves.

A new sensation comes to me. It’s a sensation that combines worry and love. It is a sensation in the bones. It radiates through muscle, through organs, through eyes. It’s a reverse heat, as if the body burns from its core.

It’s more than heat. It’s an impact, evanescent in the world, it collides with our lives: an interior shake, an earthquake of marrow. It’s the wind of reality. And it has made an impact.

The body must withstand this impact. The body must marry the mind, tell itself the wind is weak, not the person it shakes.

JUMPCUT

EXT. THE HIKING TRAIL. A MOMENT LATER.

VO: The sun sets behind trees. Blackness descends upon the world.

The sun sets and the wind dies. It retreats to its apartments, its clouds.

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Philip Marchand -- writer, critic (The Toronto Star)

Philip Marchand -- writer, critic (The Toronto Star)


1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?

I'm not sure how much "trouble" literature is in. The age of Tennyson was the last period in literature when "serious" literature found a mass market. Ever since, we've had a very small minority of readers for "serious" stuff, and a fairly large audience for thrillers, romance novels, detective novels, and so on. Then there's the Da Vinci Code phenomenon in which everybody, from your dentist to your car mechanic, is reading a certain book - in order to be able to join in discussions about the book on social occasions, if for no other reason.

There is no doubt that electronic media are the dominant entertainment and cultural media in our society. But this was also true of the 1920s, with the development of radio and cinema. Perhaps the only difference between then and now is that television, sometime around 1962, definitely killed the popular short story, as a distinct genre that once flourished in magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Maclean's, and so on. (Or the Toronto Star Weekly, for that matter.)

Kids certainly have been affected by video games as a component of their entertainment. Yet I'm told that many kids still read - still read a lot, as a matter of fact. The only problem is that what they read are these massive multi-volume fantasy epics, etc. I suppose that's a problem. But literature as such is not going away, any more than stamp collecting, playing acoustic guitars, and so on.

I actually think the biggest threat to literature is not electronic media but a corrosive intellectual climate of "theory" that works against any ambitious piece of literature nowadays.


2. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.

Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?

I've been grousing about literary prizes for years and nobody pays attention to me. There are so many problems with them - the foremost problem being to get good jury members. To get three good jurors is quite a feat, and it only takes one unfortunately chosen juror to drive the whole process off the rails. Even with a reasonable jury, Giller Prize winners and their like always turn out to be compromise choices, and sometimes they make your heart sink, thinking of an average literate person reading some of these prize novels, under the impression it's the best our writers can do. There has been a high percentage of mediocre works of fiction that have won the Giller. It's also punishing to authors - prizes being one more way for writers to fail, as one of them put it to me. But the worst effect is the corruption of literary publicity. I just wish we could have more periodicals devoted to accessible but rigorous critical examination of new novels, instead of this hoopla.


3. Many major publishers now refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?

I remember the publisher Jack McClelland once commenting, some time around 1970, when his publishing house, McClelland & Stewart, was the first port of call for unpublished authors with their manuscripts, that it was simply not true that there was a substantial body of good literature out there in the hinterlands that was being unfairly neglected or overlooked. If something was really good, it eventually found a publisher. Nothing has changed in that regard. It is true that agents are now the first gatekeepers of literature, as it were, but that's not an insuperable barrier for a writer who truly has something to say and can say it well.


4. Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience?

It's very hard for any author to win an audience. It is also true that it is harder for small press authors to win an audience, since they don't have the publicity machine behind them that larger publishers do - although it's a very creaky machine at best. But a remarkable talent will almost always eventually get broader exposure and make the transition from small press to more mainstream press. It is important to have half a dozen good literary presses going at any time, and unfortunately it does require some assistance from granting agencies, and so on.


5. Does Canada have too many publishers? Or too few?

Canada could use a few more publishers. It wouldn't hurt.


6. In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?

So far technologies such as the e-book and the audio book have had zero effect on the basic format of the book. That format is just too good and convenient a technology to be replaced or seriously modified. Interesting developments such as print on demand and the whole internet e-bay phenomenon will affect the marketing and distribution of books but the basic product will remain the same.



7. And what role can traditional, venerable institutions such as libraries and English Departments play in reversing the decline in sales of literary fiction?

Some libraries, anyway, certainly take their mandate seriously, hosting readings, hiring writers-in-residence, and so on. As a writer, I wish they would buy more books than non-book items, such as CDs and so on, but they have a wide community to service and these choices are always difficult. If I were ruler of Canada I would certainly spend more money on public libraries generally. English Departments also have a tricky balancing act - giving English majors a solid grounding in canonical literature - Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, as they used to say - and presenting them with some contemporary literature. Unfortunately, many literary academics proved to be traitors to the cause, subjecting their students to gaseous clouds of "theory" as opposed to helping students pay close attention to actual texts and to analyze them with both clarity and rigour. A student who has learned to examine George Eliot or Nathaniel Hawthorne with almost microscopic attention is more likely to have a discriminating interest in contemporary literary fiction than a student who has mastered theory.



8. Recently you remarked that Toronto lacks a great chronicler -- a great novelist who focuses specifically on Toronto. But again, given the realities of the fiction market and the fact Canadian authors often depend for their financial success on foreign sales, and the fact that contemporary Toronto as a topic does not elicit as much interest as London or New York, is there really an audience to sustain this kind of work these days?

I think American and British readers will give Toronto a chance if a novel set in this city is good enough.


9. In response to the same article, Catherine Bush remarked part of the problem is Canadian critics/academics not paying enough attention to the work that has already been published. Is this true? Do Canadians tend to forget their own literature?

This goes back to the question about literary prizes. If there were more serious and widespread critical discussion about literature in our culture, rather than all the fuss about one day wonders, or television panels about Giller Prize winners, then those books that deserve permanent attention, no matter how long ago they were published, would get their due of attention.


10. Finally, you are a writer yourself. You've written popular history mixed with memoir (Ghost Empire: How The French Almost Conquered North America), cultural studies/biography (Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger), criticism (Ripostes) and a crime novel (Deadly Spirits). But you are probably best known as a critic. Does the hard -- and necessary -- work that a critic does tend to get overlooked, especially given North America's (as opposed to Europe's) sole veneration of the author as the locus of literary achievement? In short, is the critic engaging in a form of literary writing, too?

A serious critic certainly tries to "engage in a form of literary writing" by making his or her writing lucid, intelligent, lively and above all passionate. If these qualities are present in the writing, then some criticism will have a long life. It will also be criticism that will contribute to deeper understanding of literary works in general, which I think authors would be happy about. But there's no doubt that purely imaginative writing - fiction, poetry, and so on - will always be the main focus of readers' attention. Great imaginative literature just burns deeper into the mind. I don't care if critics take a back seat in that respect. But it's always nice to be recognized for contributing to the cause, and there may be some deficient appreciation of that fact in literary circles.

As a critic, the only hope of longevity I have is that remarks I have made about various novels will turn out to be useful for students of those novels years hence. That would make me happy.


Bio: Philip Marchand is one of the best-known and most influential critics in Canada. He is also an author (see question 10, above), his most recent book being Ghost Empire: How The French Almost Conquered North America. For several years, his literary column appeared regularly in the books section of The Toronto Star.

Fic-Blogosphere Manifesto

My piece, The Fic-Blogosphere Manifesto, is now up at Experimental Fiction and Poetry.

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LOVEOGRAPHY 1: INSIDE HAEMI FORTRESS

EXT. A SMALL KOREAN VILLAGE. AN EARLY SUMMER EVENING, MID-WEEK.

A WESTERN MAN is walking down the city's main street. To his left is Haemi Fortress, a medieval Korean fort. Its wall is built of unevenly-matched stones, each lightened by age to a gentle ochre, as if the stone itself has softened.

The MAN walking beside this wall has a peaceful expression on his face. But from his body language we can tell he's lonely.

VO: Those were the days before I met you.

SFX: A light breeze.



EXT. THE INNER COURTYARD OF THE FORTRESS. MOMENTS LATER.

The Western man sees a group of CHILDREN. They are giggling and playing with each other. Then one of them spots the man.



CHILD: 의국인! [Foreigner]

SECOND CHILD: [sing-songy] Hello!

MAN: [smiling] Hello.

ALL CHILDREN: [gleefully] Hello! Hello!

MAN: [speaking slowly] Can you speak English?

The CHILDREN suddenly start to giggle uproariously. But their amusement is more a symptom of shyness than a desire to carry the game any further. They run away, still laughing.

The MAN continues walking. He makes his way through small, sad, empty streets.




V.O.: Chris Marker once asked how we can remember thirst. What I want to know is, how can we remember loneliness? It penetrates not just oneself but the world. Reality itself appears changed. The side-streets suck themselves empty, their noise vacuumed behind shuttered store-fronts. The sky pulls itself as taut as a blue drum. The clouds starve themselves and harm themselves, like self-loathing anorexics.

And as the world seems to change, so does the self: feel lonely enough, and that juncture of soul and body that comprises what you think of as you becomes as parched as cracked soil. The lonely individual is ancient, he is dirt.


INT. AN EVANGELICAL CHURCH. TEN MINUTES LATER.



The MAN enters. He is somewhat surprised to see a CROWD OF WORSHIPPERS. They are very involved in their prayers.

The MAN walks cautiously forward.

A MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN spots him.

CUT TO: CLOSE UP of MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN.

MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN: 하느님! 하느님이 자를 사랑하습니다! [God! God loves you!]

The MAN pulls back, alarmed.


EXT. A STREET. MOMENTS LATER.

The MAN is walking by himself again. He looks even sadder than before. A DIFFERENT CHILD spots him.

DIFFERENT CHILD: [especially enthusiastically] Hello!

V.O.: I don't know what it is was about that kid's voice. It went to my heart -- pierced it, like an exquisitely fine spear, the sharp end of sweetness. And it was this strange combination of sensations -- the needle's prick and the blood's sunny melt -- that suddenly transported me (there's no other phrase) to a different time. It was a time in the more recent past, when I still felt the residual parch of loneliness. But it was a time when I started to feel.

I mean, it was a time when I started to feel again.