Loud

The same is true of art. Consensus is that van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and Da Vinci, for example, were true masters. But that hasn’t stopped your neighbor from painting and trying to sell his or her artwork. The great artists were represented and their works competitively sought after by galleries that acted as gatekeepers. The gatekeepers began the separation of run-of-the-mill art from great art. (eBooks & the Downfall of Literature: The Great Debate – An American Editor)

It’s ironic to use Van Gogh as an example. Not because of the widely repeated myth that he never sold a painting in his life (because he did) but because his life, as documented by the letters between him and his brother, was marked by a constant struggle against the very gatekeepers that are raised here on a pedestal. The ‘no painting sold while alive’ myth has a grain of truth in it as the field and the gatekeepers of the art establishment didn’t acknowledge the quality of Van Gogh’s work until after he died. That Van Gogh’s paintings exist at all and are as respected as they are, is in spite of the gatekeepers, and are the sole result of Van Gogh’s passion and love for his art. If it were left to the gatekeepers of his time, we’d never have seen any of his works and he would have gone back to the priesthood. I’d also like to suggest that Shakespeare isn’t being read today because he’s good, but because he’s always been very, very popular, in his lifetime and among the romanticists. The gatekeepers didn’t acknowledge Shakespeare as great until romanticist ideas achieved dominance in the field of drama and literature.

The very idea of great literature is problematic. If we assume that literature is a result of objective qualities in a text and that the definition American Editor (the blog post’s author) puts forward is correct (both, as I said, assumptions which I personally disagree with, I tend to prefer Tolstoy’s definition of art) then it should follow that those qualities are orthogonal to the gatekeepers who filter and select after production. We would also have to assume that what gets categorised as literature isn’t affected by random chance and happenstance and that books don’t get put on a pedestal just because they were published in the right place and at the right time. Furthermore, we’d have to assume that most of it isn’t actually pap that caters to the values and sensibilities of specific classes (like Wagner for example, show me a Wagner fan and I’ll show you a snob with more time than sense).

But let’s ignore the problems I have with the premise and assumptions, for the sake of the argument.

It would follow from the premise in the post that the capability of the gatekeepers to sift through the volume of produced works to find great literature is independent of the actual number of produced great literature. The problem would not be the downfall of literature but rather the downfall of literature reading, which is a completely different problem that should be discussed and debated in a different way from the problem of producing ‘literature’ (scaryquotes rule). What American Editor is saying, then, isn’t that there’s any less literature around but that the gatekeepers will have a harder time of finding gems in the growing mass of indistinct muck that passes as modern day publishing.

The problem I have with that (beyond the otherwise faulty foundation we’re building on) is that gatekeepers throughout the ages, the galleries and art societies of Van Gogh’s time, publishers and critics in publishing, are hardly, if ever unanimous and their criteria for what is good is dominated by social intrigue, politics, economics, nepotism and snobbery. If they have a problem with dealing with the growing mass of works being made today, their incompetence and inefficiency is more to blame than anything else. The rational thing to do is to invest in better gatekeepers rather than to indulge in hair-pulling about the barbarians at the gate. (Otherwise known as the “shoot ‘em all and let God sort them out” method of solving the publishing problem.)

So, out of the 1 million books published in 2009, name the novel that is today’s equivalent of Catcher or Mockingbird. Perhaps there is one, but I admit I don’t know of it. (eBooks & the Downfall of Literature: The Great Debate – An American Editor)

Asking us to name a novel from 2009 that will withstand the test of time is dishonest sophistry because it’s an impossible task. If you had asked an intellectual in 1890 which was likelier to withstand the test of time, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Tolstoy’s religious writings, they would have chosen the religious writings every time. The history of publishing is littered with books universally hailed as literature that didn’t stand the test of time. The ‘gatekeepers’ get it wrong, something American Editor is obviously aware of, because otherwise he wouldn’t have said “I do not use literature to mean popular or fashionable or award winning”.

If being popular among the gatekeeper class doesn’t make it literature, receiving awards from the gatekeeper class doesn’t make it literature, being fashionable among gatekeepers doesn’t make it literature, then what role, exactly, do gatekeepers play in discovering and defining great literature? Great literature is beginning to sound more like a mythical beast than a valuable part of our intellectual and cultural heritage. George Orwell wrote (in a response to/repudiation of Tolstoy’s view of Shakespeare, incidentally): “Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.” If that’s true then gatekeepers play a precious little part in the process. And if literature came about by building a ‘societal consensus’, then either American Editor actually does ‘use literature to mean popular or fashionable or award winning’ — all indications of societal consensus — or he’s using some personal and vague criteria for deciding exactly what parts of society have opinions that matter because you’re obviously not acknowledging ‘majority opinion’ as societal consensus.

So are ebooks causing the downfall of Great Literature? No. But that’s mostly because there’s no such thing as Great Literature. Are ebooks causing the downfall of Good Books? (A more valid and less woolly question, IMO.) The answer to that would have to be: No, but you might have a harder time finding them. The only question worth asking, however is this:

Will ebooks make it easier for you to find a Good Book, a piece of Great Literature and enable you to fill your reading list with fantastic things to read from now ‘till your last dying breath?

Well – obviously – that’s a yes.