Bring on the Books for Everybody

Front matter

JIM COLLINS g

JIM COLLINS

Jim Collins

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Digital Books, Beach Chairs, and Popular Literary Culture 1

PART |. The New Infrastructure of Reading: Sites, Delivery Systems, Authorities

Introduction

Digital Books, Beach Chairs, and Popular Literary Culture

This book about the changes that have occurred in literary culture in the United States within the past decade began with cup of coffee and a vacant stare ina strip mall store in Mishawaka, Indiana. The coffee was a Starbucks latte and the store was Barnes & Noble, where I sat with my daughters as they downed their Italian sodas and argued about which Harry Potter movie was really the best. Already all too familiar with this particular debate, I stared off into space, first at the façade of the Outback Steakhouse across the parking lot, and then upward, where I encountered another café scene in the mural that wrapped around us along the ceiling.

The mural presented a tableau of Great Authors— Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and company—all seated at adjacent

1. Authors Mural, Barnes & Noble store, Mishawaka, Indiana, 2008 tables in an imaginary Literary Café Valhalla. I was initially struck by the absurdity of the tableau, since we were, after all, in a chainstore in a suburban development that had been a cornfield only a few years before, and the people at the tables adjacent to mine weren't talking about the subtleties of literary craft—one woman sat alone reading an issue of Martha Stewart Living, two teenagers talked about much they hated having to read A Separate Peace and wondered why their English teacher wouldn't let them talk about something interesting like William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet or Shakespeare in Love, while another couple talked about Oprah’s Book Club. I followed their gaze to the front of the store, where I saw the table that featured the current Oprah Selection. I looked back down at my table, where the course packet for my “Postmodern Narrative” course was sitting next to my latte. Td brought it along to prep the next class, to give myself something to do while the kids did their Barnes & Noble routines. At that moment, I was overwhelmed by the absurdity not of the store’s décor but of my presuming to teach my students anything about contemporary literature without taking superstores, blockbuster film adaptations, and television book clubs into account, not just as symptoms of the current state of the culture industry but as the sites, delivery systems, and forms of connoisseurship that formed the fabric of a popular literary culture.

‘The first article in that course packet was John Barth’s essay “The Literature of Replenishment” (1980), in which he laid out a provisional definition for what the postmodern writing of the future should be, arguing quite vehemently that it must somehow expand the audience for literary fiction. He identified what he considered to be the most pertinent differences between modernist and postmodernist writing as he set his agenda for replenishment, namely, a reconnection between the literary novelists and the broad-based audience that had been commonplace in the premodern period. According to Barth, this loss of audience was attributable to the “difficulty of access” that was one of the chief distinguishers of modernist writing, and directly responsible for the unpopularity of modernist fiction outside of intellectual circles and university curricula. His ideal postmodernist author should try to recover that lost audience: “He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace, not to mention the great mass of television addicted non-readers. But he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann called the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art” (203).

If we fast-forward twenty-some years, the literary world Barth describes in that essay now seems antique. The ideal postmodern novel he hoped would appear did indeed materialize, in the form of novels such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children (1981), Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989); and by now those novels have become canonical and are regularly taught in courses on postmodern fiction. But something else happened in the meantime that redefined the entire notion of accessibility. Writers of literary fiction such as Amy Tan, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy have the brand-name recognition once enjoyed by writers of bestsellers like Michener. Their popularity depends upon a great mass of reading-addicted television watchers and a culture industry ready and eager to bring them together through book clubs, superstore bookstores, and glossy highconcept adaptations that have dominated the Academy Awards for the past decade. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) was a Booker Prize-winning example of Canadian postmodern fiction, but it also became a hugely successful film by Miramax, winning nine Oscars, including Best Picture of the Year in 1996, at which point it became the subject of an episode of Seinfeld and was later voted “Most Romantic Film of the Decade” by the readers of Romance Times magazine (the bible of the romance genre industry). Popular literary culture, in a variety of new incarnations, now appears to be everywhere you look—at the multiplex, driving down the strip, floating through the mall, or surfing the Net. And over the course of those twenty years, those early Christians—the professors of literature—ran amuck, allegedly refusing to hold up their end of the conversation as they spoke in High Theory and killed off authors on a regular basis before some returned, eager to connect with addicted readers, who congregated enthusiastically online and on television, to share fiercely held opinions about books. Apparently, the love of literature can now be fully experienced only outside the academy and the New York literary scene, out there somewhere in the wilds of popular culture.

‘The most profound change in literary America after the rise of postmodern fiction wasn’t the next generation of cutting-edge novelists; it was the complete redefinition of what literary reading means within the heart of electronic culture. The really significant next new thing wasn’t a matter of radical innovations in literary craft but massive infrastructural changes in literary culture that introduced a new set of players, locations, rituals, and use values for reading literary fiction. Within the past decade media critics have argued that film viewing has changed so thoroughly that we need to reconsider the power of images since most visual entertainment is no longer enjoyed in the confines of the darkened theater but on screens that come in a seemingly endless variety of formats and locations, from iPods to laptops to theme park sensory extravaganzas. The private dream state that used to be considered the very bedrock of film-viewing pleasure no longer seems quite adequate for describing the multiple-choice gestalts of contemporary visual culture. New technologies of exhibition have reshaped the pleasures and practices that now define what going to a movie might mean. Yet I would argue that the experience of literary reading has been transformed to an even greater extent, since who reads it, how it is read, where it is read, and even what is read under the heading of literary fiction have all changed in fundamental ways.

What used to be a thoroughly private experience in which readers engaged in intimate conversation with an author between the pages of a book has become an exuberantly social activity, whether it be in the form of actual book clubs, television book clubs, Internet chat rooms, or the entire set of rituals involved in “going to Barnes & Noble.” What used to be an exclusively print-based activity—and fiercely proud of it—has become an increasingly image-based activity in which literary reading has been transformed into a variety of possible literary experiences. Of course you like Jane Austen —but how do you take your Austen? In novel form? As a television adaptation with Colin Firth, or as a film adaptation with Kiera Knightly? As a fictionalized account of reading Jane, as in The Jane Austen Book. Club? If so, in novel form complete with readet’s guide, or the movie adaptation with Emily Blunt playing the character who reads Persuasion so passionately? Or as any and all of the above, at any given moment, as you surf through the possible Austen experiences?

How and where those audiences appreciate literary fiction has changed profoundly, butso has the literary fiction written for those passionate readers who watch television book clubs, cruise Amazon, or take their literature in cinematic form at the local multiplex or via Netflix. The refunctioning of literary experiences is a matter of how you read them, but it’s also a matter of how you write them. The use value of reading quality fiction —what we read it for—has become a central issue in novels that insist on their ability to perform a vitally important function in the lives of those reading-addicted television viewers, whether it be the delivery of essential information about acquiring significant others and material goods, or the delivery of a “pure” aesthetic experience that is intended to transcend the realm of mere consumerism (and is aggressively marketed as such). In either case, we find literary fiction insisting on its therapeutic value in everything from Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing to Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down to Zadie Smith’s On Beauty to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

Hilma Wolitzer’s novel Summer Reading (2008) exemplifies just how explicit this refunctioning project has become. One of the three main characters is Angela, a retired English professor who leads a local reading group in discussions of Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Charlotte Bronté’s Villette. The discussion begins ambitiously: “What is the function of literature? Angela had posed the question at the beginning of the meeting, before they'd even mentioned Trollope” (27). That a novel written by a respected literary author who has taught creative writing at places like the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University would pose the question that literary critics have been mulling over for centuries isn’t really that surprising, but the critical blurb on the cover of the paperback suggests a radical relocation for that discussion: “A Hamptons vacation, trophy wives and characters who dig books . . . Bring on the beach chair— People.”

‘Trollope and Flaubert at the beach? Twenty years ago the very idea would have sounded like a Woody Allen parody in The New Yorker. Trollope on Masterpiece Theatre, of course, but never at the beach, the most notoriously nonintellectual location within American culture, where one is supposed to read only for pleasure. When the most popular lifestyle magazine in North America recommends a novel as ideal summer reading because it brings together the Hamptons (the favorite playground of the celebrity news industry) and people who talk avidly about books by Trollope, Flaubert, and Bronté,and then suggests that the function of literature should be pondered from the vantage point of beach chairs filled with readers of People magazine who evidently also really dig books, then literary reading is no longer what, ot where, it used to be.

Accessing Madame Bovary at the beach involves two interdependent developments that are equally profound in terms of how literary reading has been transformed in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I can have a copy delivered to my beach chair “in under a minute” via Amazon on a Kindle digital reader, and if I have any qualms about buying a Kindle that will hook me up with Flaubert almost instantaneously, I can watch video testimonials at Amazon featuring not only ceo Jeff Bezos but also the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison telling me what a wonderful device it is for really avid readers—and she too will tell me that it’s great if you want to read “in the yard, at the beach, on a plane.” Yet taking Flaubert to the beach involves another kind of empowerment in addition to new forms of digital downloadability; it depends every bit as much on amateur readers feeling perfectly comfortable taking on books that were formerly thought to be fully accessible only to professionalized readers. The beach in this case signifies a geographic space, but also a figurative space where there used to be no confusion about the differences between pleasure reading and literary reading. In other words, of course, you can get an order of Flaubert more easily from your beach chair than an order of fried clams, but why would readers of People magazine think of Madame Bovary as a good read, intended for people just like them? Because their English teacher recommended it once upon a time? Or because it was the novel that the book club read in Tom Perrotta’s novel Little Children (also available in under a minute)? Or because it was the novel Kate Winslet’s character identified with so fiercely in the film version of Little Children? Or because books about readers reading passionately have themselves become bestsellers and are supposed to be taken to the beach, at least according to an advertisement from the Random House Publishing Group that appeared in the New York Times.

‘The first of the books featured in this advertisement, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tebran, details the book club she formed with a handful of students and how their discussions become vital transformative experiences when they make the novels that they read into narratives about their own lives (Lolita also available in under a minute, if I feel more like Nabokov than Flaubert that particularafternoon). The promotion of this book alongside Lorna Landvik’s Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (2004) and Matthew Pearl’s novel The Dante Club (2004) reveals a great deal about the imagined readership, especially since Pearl’s novel features America’s first Dante scholars (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, J. T. Fields, and Oliver Wendell Holmes) solving heinous murders in post-Civil War Boston. Why have the adventures in interpretive reading undertaken by erudite, scholarly readers like Nafisi, Lowell, and company suddenly become bestselling entertainment for those readers in beach chairs?

Hit the beach with this summer’s hottest books —

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Remarkable... An congas beef om be traning power of fara e i CORN TK smeiti

NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Matthew Pearl is the new shining star of literary fiction...

2. “Hit the Beach,” advertisement in New York Times Book Review, June 2004

How do we begin to get a handle on this robust popular literary culture fueled by such a complicated mix of technology and taste, of culture and commerce? Some of its infrastructural features are directly attributable to the conglomeration of the publishing industry—the ever-expanding number of titles, the ubiquity and velocity of delivery systems in the form of superstores and online book sales; the increasing synergy among publishing, film, television, and Internet industries; and the exponential increase in targeting quality consumers. But a number of other factors are the result of changes in taste hierarchies—the radical devaluation of the academy and New York literary scene as taste brokers who maintained the gold standard of literary currency, the collapse of the traditional dichotomies that made book reading somehow naturally antagonistic to film going or television watching, and the transformation of taste acquisition into an industry with taste arbiters becoming media celebrities. And perhaps the most fundamental change of all: the notion that refined taste, or the information needed to enjoy sophisticated cultural pleasures, is now easily accessible outside a formal education. It’s just a matter of knowing where to access it, and whom to trust.

I have no interest in judging the ultimate effects of that interplay in a unilateral way. This is not a bumper sticker book, e.g., Honk If You Think Culture Is Going to Hell in a Handbasket or My Literary Values Aren't Dead, Sorry about Yours. My goal in this book is to trace the contours of a particular “media ecology” shaped by the increasing convergence of literary, visual, and material cultures. The phenomena that I examine in detail—Barnes & Noble superstores, Amazon, book clubs (actual, virtual, and fictionalized), adaptation films, and literary bestsellers—all merit book-length studies individually, but I think they are best understood as interdependent components of a popular literary culture that has its own ways of identifying a literary experience as such, with its own way of “talking the talk” of passionate reading, its own modes of circulation and access, and its own authorities to sanction what sort of pleasures are to be enjoyed there. This is not to suggest that I intend to merely describe that interplay as a detached observer, complete with digital pith helmet and clipboard. This is a highly opinionated account, but not a blanket condemnation or celebration. I teach courses in postmodern literature but also contemporary Hollywood, as a member of both an English department and a film department. This experience has given me a keen understanding of the intricacies of style as well as the complexities of the entertainment industry. I think it has also given me a healthy ambivalence about both, repulsed equally by rapacious greed and insufferable sanctimony. So, if you hope this will be an exposé of the Evils of the Culture Industry, or a snappy remix of “I Sing the Culture Electric,” go no further, because this book just isn’t for you. Think of these first few pages as the thirty-second sample of a song you get to hear at iTunes—if you don’t like it so far, you’re going to hate the rest of it. If, on the other hand, you want something that does more than simply reaffirm all of the old prejudices as it tries to identify the moving parts and interconnections of the popular literary culture you're surrounded by, you might want to continue.

The Literacy of Infinite Personalization

‘The increasing accessibility of literary fiction obviously involves a host of issues concerning the status of “the book” and the nature of literacy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a cover story in the New York Times Magazine (May 14, 2006) entitled “Scan This Book!” Kevin Kelly argues that because of exponential increases in accessibility “everything we thought we knew about books is going to change.” He focuses on the decision by Google in 2006 to digitize the contents of five major research libraries into one vast universal library, thereby creating an unprecedented degree of access to books:

Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp? Brewster Kahle, the archivist overseeing another scanning project says that the universal library is now within reach. “This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!” he shouts. “It really is possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon.” And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to an elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person. (44)

This desire to take books to the people of the world on a grand scale is not restricted to Google, since it is also the principal goal of Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon.com, and Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club—a project epitomized by the charge she gave her “book elves” as they hand out hundreds of copies of The Good Earth to her studio audience at the end of her Anna Karenina show: “Bring on the books for everybody!” Kelly’s analysis of the ramifications of the scanning of books is a key text for understanding the revolution in accessibility, but so is the O: The Oprah Magazine—“Our First Ever Summer Reading Issue” (July 2006), which offered to its millions of readers advice from Toni Morrison and Harper Lee about the pleasures of books, along with featured articles with titles such as “How It Begins” and “How to Read a Hard Book.” Kelly argues compellingly that the basic contours of what constitutes a book have been changed by a digital revolution. The “Summer Reading Issue” in many ways confirms this, since it features on “The O List” (“A few things I think are great” — Oprah) a portable digital library, the Sony Librie (“Download up to 80 of your favorites—hundreds more with a memory card”), as well as a “special deal just for you” on twenty of the recommended titles: “This issue is so full of books you’re going to want that we asked the nice people at Amazon to do us a favor and give you a break. Just go to www.amazon.com/oprahmagazine.” Kelly focuses on the technological dimensions of this universal accessibility, emphasizing the shifting relationships between copy and copyright and how “digital bits” will change notions of authorship. Taking books to the people on the grandest of scales involves a number of other questions: What happens to literary reading when it becomes a sophisticated form of self-help therapy? What prompts this need to get some kind of aesthetic fix, in all senses of that word? Who functions as an expert? And what sort of literary fiction is being written for this passionate readership?

In order to gain a better understanding of “the book” in the age of digitized accessibility, we need to pursue the questions Kelly frames so incisively but situate them in reference to a specific culture of reading. This culture may indeed rely on twenty-first-century technologies of scanning, storage, and downloadability, but it also draws on early-nineteenth-century notions of reading as self-transformation, filtered through late twentieth-century discourses of self-actualization, all jet-propelled by state-of-the-art forms of marketing “aesthetic experience.” In other words, literary reading in the age of universal access to the universal library is an uneven development, shaped equally by contemporary information technologies, Romantic-era notions of the self, and late Victorian conceptions of aesthetic value. The reality of a universal library is indeed upon us, thanks to Google, and Amazon.com can make individual titles appear in less than a minute. But those books come to us through a thriving popular literary culture, which invests the literary text —whether experienced on the page, or on the screen, or ona laptop —with a variety of use values, some of which are just as unprecedented as those scanning technologies. We can begin to make sense of “the book” and what constitutes “literacy” within this reading culture only when we seize on those contradictions and resist the urge to generalize unilaterally about the effects of increased access.

I want to offer just one cautionary example. John Updike expressed profound doubts about Kelly’s article in a New York Times Book Review editorial entitled “The End of Authorship” (June 25, 2006). He was troubled by Kelly’s celebration of this “huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by word snippets,” because it will mean the end of reading as “an encounter between two minds.” He concludes:

“The book revolution [that] from the Renaissance taught men and women how to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a flurry of word snippets. For some of us, books are intrinsic to sense of personal identity” (27). Updike obviously hadn’t gotten his copy of O’s “Summer Reading Issue” when he penned his countermanifesto, because if he had, he would have seen that this ideology of reading as intrinsic to a sense of personal identity is the central organizing principle for the entire issue. In her final word to her readers, “What I Know for Sure,” Oprah says: “What I know for sure is that reading opens you up. It exposes you and gives you access to anything your mind can hold. What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. A world of possibilities awaits you. Keep turning the page” (224). When Oprah brings books to everyone, everyone is encouraged to make their reading intensely personal—what’s the point of reading otherwise? Consider the quotations about reading scattered throughout the magazine. A page of perforated punch-out bookmarks features a series of quotations about the joys of reading from the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“I always imagined Paradise to be a sort of library”) and Margaret Walker (“When I was about 8, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being was a book”). The monthly “Calendar” feature is also studded with the same type of quotations that confirm Updike’s sentiments: “Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing” (Gertrude Stein) and “My home is where my books are” (Ellen Thompson). Interestingly, the most explicit invocation of Updike’s notion of reading as intrinsic to a sense of personal identity comes in the introduction to an article entitled “Comfort Zone: Book Keeping”: “Your books are your autobiography. They map your history, reflect your tastes, hold your emotional moments between covers. On these pages, intelligent designs for sharing space with the literature you love.” This text is superimposed on the proper set for all this reading, with the following suggestions:

Curling up with an absorbing story is as crucial to your well-being as leafy greens or sunshine. And it’s especially restorative if you have a corner dedicated to the printed word, with all the comforts: say a cool linencovered chaise longue (Interieur); plump embroidered pillows (s184 each, Historically Inaccurate Decorative Arts); a cashmere throw (3325, Calypso Christiane Celle); and “good lamp” ($1,050, Regeneration Furniture) as well as lots of natural light. Of course you'll have well stocked shelves within reach (teak bookcase, $2,200, Regeneration Furniture).

This clean, well-lighted, Eve Decor-style space for intensely personal, transformative reading suggests that this reading culture depends on the downloadabilty of books but also on easy access to expertise about how to read even “hard books” from an informed position, and about the right sort of reading space. The text for this feature introduces the “¢ word” avoided by most academic critics, as well as these famous authors — żaste. The idea that literary reading is an expression not just of some nebulous inner wisdom but of one’s personal taste, and that it can be fully articulated only bya series of interconnected purchases, suggests that this reading culture is a hybrid of information technology and self-help discourse, fueled by high-octane Romantic humanism, all made possible through the generous sponsorship of quality consumerism.

We can’t begin to appreciate how this interplay works without looking closely at the way new delivery systems make a reading culture possible in the first place, but we can’t really discern the impact that this increasing accessibility has on “the book” unless we have a fine-grain understanding of the sort of “literacy” that is required to appreciate them. Delivery systems provide not just the books but also the sites, the talk, and the sense of belonging to a community of readers. Amazon delivers the goods, butit is also a breeder reactor of reading communities, just as Barnes & Noble provides the books and the locations for thousands of local book clubs, The technologies of accessibility do not function in a unilateral way—some may lead in the direction of wordstreams and digital bits, but others only sanctify the most traditional forms of authorship. Consider the ways in which technologies of storage and access enable passionate listeners to enjoy experiences of music that are anything but uniform. iTunes makes over a million songs available, and by ripping and burning them on my iBook, or downloading them on my iPod I can make play lists or compilation mixes to my heart’s content, organized according to the most personal listening agendas, any of which would diminish the singular intentions of the original authors of that music. On the other hand, “digital technology” can valorize, even fetishize, that singularity like never before. Consider the cp Collectors Editions boxed sets such as The Complete Columbia Recordings: Miles Davis with John Coltrane, 1955-1961, in which listeners get, in addition to all of the original albums, dozens of alternate takes from record label archives; or the London Calling: Legacy Edition boxed set, which includes the original Clash album, another disk of alternate takes, and a pvp of footage shot during the recording of the material.

In much the same way, Google’s universal library will enable burning and ripping of favorite bits from books, but another kind of effect is achieved by the pvp edition of The Hours, which includes extensive commentary tracks by its director Stephen Daldry and the novel’s author, Michael Cunningham, along with hours of special features about Virginia Woolf, in which noted scholars offer insights about the Author, her novels, and Cunningham’s appropriation of Mrs. Dalloway within his novel. The inclusion of those special features blurs the line between what is intended for amateur and professionalized readers since it converts the pvp edition of The Hours into something resembling a Norton Critical Edition of literary masterpieces used for decades in college English classes, in which the reader gets the integral text of the novel, copiously footnoted, followed by acollection of essays that contextualize the novel from a variety of different perspectives. In each case, the singularity of the masterpiece as product of the Great Author is the organizing principle of the entire enterprise, whether that Great Author is Virginia Woolf or The Clash.

This complicated interplay of early-twenty-first-century forms of digital storage and early-nineteenth-century conceptions of individual genius played out across a variety of media formats exemplifies what Henry Jenkins has referred to as convergence culture. According to Jenkins, the initial theorizing about the digital revolution, which was supposed to produce sweeping transformations that would render all previous forms of media instantaneously antiquated (books as “dead-tree” technology), has recently given way to far more subtle investigations of the ways in which old and new media now coexist synergistically: “Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to co-exist with emerging media. That’s why convergence seems more plausible as a way of understanding the past several decades of media change than the old digital revolution paradigm had. Old media are not being displaced. Rather their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies” (14). I think this essential point can be taken further in regard to the popularization of literary reading, since it involves more than the convergence of old and new media—it depends, just as fundamentally, on the convergence of antique and emergent notions of access, artistic genius, reading pleasure, and personal taste.