The Truth About the Literary System

 NO ONE really wants to know how the literary system in the U.S. operates.

That thought went through my head last week when I tweeted, from my personal Twitter account, links to a few essays I wrote some time back about Tao Lin and other writers and how the literary game is actually played. Clues to how a writer-- such as this one-- can receive a $2 million advance from a Big Four Manhattan publisher for an unreadable 900-page novel which bombs. 

The truth is that no writer wants to know "how the sausage is made," to use an old analogy. The reality is too upsetting, too dislocating, so we dismiss it, block it out. There will be exceptions, we believe. There have to be exceptions.

Or really, most writers aren't ambitious, aren't hungry enough to want to change things, are content to find a place in the literary world, any place. A niche.

While abject mediocrities receive $2 million advances and the condition of literature continues to decline. 

MY THINKING when I began looking into how the literary machine worked-- chiefly during my days with the Underground Literary Alliance-- was that hearing the reality would so outrage the great mass of writers they'd tear down the Potemkin Village of the established literary scene. But it didn't happen.

Can change, real change, in the literary world, or with society itself, ever happen?

Maybe not. There will always be a significant percentage of people who'll take the easy-and-cheap payoff. This happened even with the sleep-on-floors radicals of the ULA, so it can happen to any movement, anyplace.

Contradictions of the Literary World

Regarding this article about Russian poet Kirill Medvedev in the New York Times by Dwight Garner:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/books/its-no-good-by-kirill-medvedev.html?_r=0

I don’t get it. How can individuals like Dwight Garner and Keith Gessen (or Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions) be strongly for cultural democracy, dissent, and freedom in Russia but not in the United States? If anything, they’re apologists for the literary status quo in this country; part of the monolith; supporters of the kind of crony capitalism a Kirill Medvedev would loathe.

Do these establishment journalists actually believe the political, economic, and cultural systems in both countries are dissimilar?

The difference is that the corruption, lies, and propaganda—the political and media games in the United States—are vastly more sophisticated. In Russia, the magician plying his trade is a crude amateur. The audience glimpses the rabbit in the hat before it appears. In the United States, the magicians are slick professionals.

If the principles of a Dwight Garner or Keith Gessen aren’t honest, aren’t transferable to our own shores, or their own field, then what are these highly placed apparatchiks up to?

Any Word from Garth Hallberg?

Has Garth Hallberg said anything about his misguided statement dissing the ULA? Will he defend the statement, or, apologize?

Attempting to ignore legitimate criticism seems cowardly. If you can't defend your statements, why make them?

Hallberg's mistake was to take Tom Bissell's essay on the ULA at face value.

Inside or Outside?

Here's another example of puff piece journalism, by Garth Risk Hallberg, in this instance at the most powerful flagship of them all:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/magic-hours-essays-by-tom-bissell.html?pagewanted=all

What can we say about the review, and where it appears, and so about Bissell and Hallberg themselves? (Or how the review is written?) Are these two writers Insiders or Outsiders? What do you think?

Are they not fully Insiders-- as Inside the literary power system as one can possibly get? Can we speculate that said book wouldn't have been reviewed-- and the review wouldn't have been so positive-- if the book weren't published by McSweeney's? When's the last time a writer or journalist took on the McSweeney's empire? What was the result?

Garth Hallberg of course is sympathetic to Bissell's book out of natural inclination. They're both members of America's intellectual "New Class." Their attitudes are similar, or they wouldn't be where they are. Their viewpoints are acceptable to the literary and media status quo. Hallberg is also at least subliminally aware of how power works in the literary world. He's making his way inside the system. One doesn't rise within the apparatus by questioning it.

We have in literature today not intellectuals, but bureaucrats.

(I invite either Garth Hallberg or Tom Bissell to comment. But you see, they can't. That's not allowed.)