LORENTZEN V. SINYKIN (KO)
I haven’t written one of these cultural roundups in a little while — and this might be the last one before the sharknado of election season coverage sweeps all before it. Which, unfortunately, may be just as well, because, on my tour of literary and cultural magazines, I — with the very best will in the world — couldn’t come up with very much that I found interesting.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that any piece of literary or cultural writing should do one of three things. They should:
Introduce a new or provocative idea — or give due credit to an underappreciated one.
Provide an honest, clear-eyed account of lived experience.
Give free rein to the wild imagination — to be funny or fanatastical or archetypal or whatever it wants to be.
That’s a pretty wide latitude, but what I keep coming across instead is:
Gossip about literary types. (By the way, did anybody here manage to get to the point of the New York Magazine’s four-friends-having-affairs piece….I even know one of them and I couldn’t get through it).
Rehashes of long-dead famous people, giving their biographies and résumé line items.
Eddies of buzz and reactions to buzz — as I’ve gotten pulled into myself with my theory of the Troll School.
All of this is putting me into a pretty revolutionary frame of mind. My basic feeling is that — more than I would have thought possible — the work of writers and the industry that purports to disseminate the work of writers are at irreconcilable cross-purposes. One is about attempting to speak the truth, to explore the self, and to take aesthetic risks; the other is about selling widgets and doing so in a way that upsets the apple cart as little as possible. I was already in sort of a foul mood thinking about the publishing industry and all its subsidiaries — newspaper reviewers, magazine profilers, etc — and then I came across Dan Sinykin and his Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, which is like a mission statement for the soulless, the forces of small-minded consumerism giving themselves a round of applause.
For Sinykin — and you sort of need to rub your eyes to believe that this is what he actually is saying — the ‘individual’ is just a sort of trick of liberalism or the Romantic era. When we “fall for the romance of individual genius,” he argues, we miss how much of a team effort is actually going on in the back rooms. And the antidote to that is, surprisingly enough, the era of corporate conglomeration (starting circa 1960), through which literature becomes more nakedly commercial and collective and in so doing gets closer to the real truth of the activity. “In novels, the conglomerate era finds its voice,” he writes.
Fortunately for all of us, Christian Lorentzen has already provided an excoriating takedown in Granta — one of the best literary essays I’ve ever read — so I’m just retreading ground that Lorentzen has already covered. As Lorentzen writes, “The cynicism of [Sinykin’s] notion is impressive, if also disgusting. To reduce aesthetics to the results of sales strategy is to equate the pleasure we take in reading to being duped by a marketing campaign.”
But no amount of critique or satire quite does justice to the original. Sinykin’s method is to be as “ridiculous” or “ludicrous” as possible as a sort of materialist shock treatment — to get us out of our precious, bourgeois attachment to our own lived experience and instead to convince us that we have all been very satisfactorily duped and should be duly grateful for those who have duped us. Here is a representative sample:
It would be a ridiculous exaggeration to say that authors are merely the humans attached to books to fulfill the legal requirements of authorship and the cultural expectations of creative originality. Yet such an exaggeration is useful to break our habit of romanticizing authorship and begin instead to see the author through the colophon’s portal.
What we are supposed to do is to forget our attachment to the “individual loosed by liberalism” and get back to the material and legalistic settings of production. He continues:
Respect the author whose name adorns the front cover by returning her to the milieu from which she sprang. Our outsize attention to the author alone is a trick of history, the legacy of copyright: authors needed to be responsible for books if they were to collect royalties; lawyers needed someone on whom to lay the blame for libel.
I’m sorry, but what? So, individualism happens, it occurs only after laws for copyright infringement? If that’s the case, then why exactly did Dante, working entirely in solitude, spend ten years laying out an encyclopedic account of his theological journey? why did Camões, swimming away from a shipwreck, swim with one arm while holding the manuscript of the Lusiads above the water with the other? — did he just want to make sure that the lawyer of his publishing house had somebody to pin a libel suit on?
Sinykin’s book is a classic case of a small man assuming that everybody else is equally small — he sees people all around him hemmed in by legalities, careerism, and margin costs, and assumes that everybody at all times must have been exactly the same. This is really very easy pickings for a writer of Lorentzen’s caliber and here is the stirring conclusion to his piece:
I assert that reading and writing are best done in perfect solitude; that sometimes what you read and what you write should be kept a secret; that when you’re by yourself popularity doesn’t matter, nor does money, nor does fame, nor does status; that when you are a teenager and you have shut yourself into a room to read Kafka for the first time, your parents and your little sister should stop knocking on the door because you are turning into something else, something they will never understand.
Amen. But there’s this odd sense of asymmetrical warfare — of Lorentzen playing to the galley of what he calls “the freelance book reviewer/London litmag office/Downtown Manhattan scene superorganism that speaks through me” while Sinykin is smug and unmoved behind the barricades of the publishing house and the university. That’s just what a misguided liberal individualist would say, we can imagine Sinykin thinking. And, meanwhile, the conglomerates will churn on — and individual writers will continue to be spare parts attached to the production line.
Because the problem is that Sinykin is clearly on to something. Recently, I’ve had a phrase in my head that ‘the history of literature is the history of publishing.’ In our naïveté, we do miss the extent to which editors and houses control taste — the practical joke of Gordon Lish creating a ‘great American writer’ out of the fantouche of Raymond Carver is a prime example — as we do the extent to which conglomerates no longer even pretend to care about quality and, as former Simon and Schuster president Richard Snyder put it (to Sinykin’s approval), view themselves not as even as publishers but as “a creator of copyrights for their exploitation in any medium or distribution system.”
If Lorentzen’s essay sometimes reads like the Pickett’s Charge of the indie literary world, it’s important to set the terms of engagement for a longer struggle. Writers and publishers belong to completely different pursuits and worldviews. The publishers — to be clear — aren’t particularly bad people: they just want to make money, and they find it increasingly difficult to do so through anything like literary fiction, so, naturally enough, they cut literary fiction out of their operating costs. That means that it’s up to the disorganized, inchoate band of writers and readers to make their move, and that means getting out, as much as possible, from a commercial system that is interested only in exploiting them and that, per Sinykin, mocks them for their gullibility in participating. But Sinykin, with his narrow materialism, has completely confused circumstances with essentials. Yes, corporate publishing appears to control literary writing — and has done so for a while — but, as Lorentzen writes, it’s really just an historical accident: “Corporate publishing is the channel through which literature happens to flow at this moment in history.” Literature — yes, written by individuals, for other individuals — is older and deeper than that. So long as we have the material reality of an individual human being lost in a wide world we will have literature as a means of expressing that. It will long outlast the memory of the boozy lunches of the conglomeration era, but it also does need to find its nerve. It needs to break free.
SAD BOYS V. PUBLISHING
This is the level of where we’ve gotten to in the literary discourse. If the searing question in the Lorentzen/Sinykin dispute is whether literary work is created by individuals at all, our other cultural dispute du jour is whether there is any place for men in the contemporary literary landscape.
For the better part of ten years, it was indecent or reactionary even to ask this question. Now, a pair of pieces in Esquire and Dazed bring up the point — made better on Substack by Ross Barkan and Alex Perez — of whether, gee whiz, there may be something unfortunate about how younger men seem to be completely unrepresented within the publishing landscape. The Esquire and Dazed pieces try out a bunch of theories about why there seem to be so few “sad boy” stories out — maybe it’s that men have trouble expressing vulnerability? maybe they’re all sucked in by the manosphere? And then the Esquire and Dazed writers circle around the pretty, uh, easy answer — that they’re just not being published. As Perez writes, “Where are all the literary novels by men? For the American man, the answer is obvious — locked away in his computer.”
But it is a slightly more complicated question than that. As Barkan puts it: “A more uncomfortable question, for men, can also be asked: if more books were published by men with explicitly male themes — if there were male versions of Ottessa Moshfegh who wrote on inceldom or how young men bond — would there actually be a wider male readership?”
And, yes, a vicious cycle seems to have taken hold. Publishers don’t want to put out books by male writers because they know that the male readership is fairly small. The male readership continues to dwindle away because they don’t see offerings that they like. And ambitious males see the writing on the wall and don’t try to break into publishing or even write in the first place. If what’s happened with the creep towards conglomeration in publishing is the result of some fairly ironclad economic laws, what’s happened here is more contingent — and related to the social revolution that’s occurred particularly in creative industries over the last decade or so. It’s not necessarily a bad thing — whether it’s good or bad depends completely on whether it’s hurt or helped. If in the 2000s, literature seemed to be dominated by the Jonathans — the three of them who even looked the same — the publishing industry itself was switching over to being almost completely female (around 80%). The narrative was about uplift and empowerment. By the 2010s, the narrative was about diversity and representation. That revolution did what it was supposed to do. It rectified for historic injustices, it advanced ‘marginalized voices,’ it produced, within the mix of things, some very good books. But it was also a zero-sum game — and nobody should really be surprised that men found themselves left out and embittered about it. The other thing (more indefensible) that the social revolution did was that it cast virtually the entirety of literary production in political terms. A book became not really something that you read or write but something that you assert. Lauren Oyler could claim that Roxane Gay was on “her team,” even though she despised her actual book — the tension that fueled Oyler’s famous takedown in Bookslut. And, even in its attempt to rehabilitate men (or, at the very least, ‘sad boys’), Esquire — yes, that Esquire — found itself obliged to ask, “In an industry they [straight men] have long dominated, do we really need more books about them?”
This is, of course, completely missing the point. As Perez writes, “We shouldn’t read novels by men because there’s a ‘masculinity crisis’ and society needs to be better allies to these broken-down men—that therapeutic mindset has nothing to do with literature. We should want to read books by American men for the same reason that we read books by anyone else: for artistic and aesthetic reasons.” Right. It’s so tiresome to have keep saying this, but apparently it needs repeating. Literature is like the Free Parking space on the Monopoly board. It’s the one place where you get to take a breath and step outside of yourself (which is the same, incidentally, as going very deep into yourself) — and where all the laws of gravity of morality, commerce, and politics no longer apply. I’ve enjoyed books by fascists and communists. I have books by serial killers on my reading list. It’s the place of being absolutely free — and it’s absurd that anybody would want to curtail it.
The silliest way to end this essay would be to conclude it with a plea for more representation in the publishing industry — and for that representation to include straight men — so I won’t do that. The publishing industry, as we’ve demonstrated above, isn’t acting in the interests of writers, and the industry may well have done men an inadvertent favor by, in effect, excluding them from it. The action is going to be elsewhere. It has to be. And that’s going to be wherever writers and readers feel most free to be themselves.
Literature is an aesthetic form of knowledge and experience writ large or small by the imagination, an art, not some set of capitalist algorithms. Of course cultural and social, political and private contexts can have huge affects on both writers and producers, as any halfway competent institutional or social, political or personal analysis will reveal. Some writers can write comfortably within dominant forces, while other writers dig in and write against them. Much writing is mixed. What one sees in literature depends very much on what one knows, wants to know, and where one happens to look. Some literature changes the world, some literature perpetuates it, some literature changes people, some literature prevents people from changing. Capitalist algorithms, like other constrictive ideologies and circumstances, can get in the way of the creation, production, and distribution of literature, can deform and kill it. Not exactly shocking news to many artists.
Nor to, say, critic Edmund Wilson in “The Historical Interpretation of Literature”:
"I want to talk about the historical interpretation of literature—that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic and political aspects.... In the year 1725, the Neapolitan philosopher Vico published La Scienz Nuova, a revolutionary work on the philosophy of history, in which he asserted for the first time that the social world was certainly the work of man, and attempted what is, so far as I know, the first social interpretation of a work of literature…. In the field of literary criticism, this historical point of view came to its first complete flower in the work of the French critic Taine, in the middle of the nineteenth century.... To Taine’s set of elements was added, dating from the middle of the century, a new element, the economic, which was introduced into the discussion of historical phenomena mainly by Marx and Engels....
"In my view, all our intellectual activity, in whatever field it takes place, is an attempt to give a meaning to our experience—that is, to make life more practicable; for by understanding things we make it easier to survive and get around among them…. And this brings us back to the historical point of view. The experience of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered…."
Very interesting Sam. I found myself scoffing at the suggestions of this Sinykin person, who rightly does not escape your ire...i mean REALLY? But the passages about the lack of young male authors (my ship has sailed i fear) resonates. Overall, i realise that i spend too much time doing my job and not reading widely enough to tenderise the meat of my unconscious biases or broaden my knowledge of the human condition. The latter is also changing a lot more rapidly these days, hard to keep up.