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“Thinking of Melville, thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and [Thomas] Wolfe, one begins to feel that there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.”
Nelson Algren, author of The Man with a Golden Arm, Chicago: City on the Make, Neon Wilderness, Never Come Morning, A Walk on the Wild Side and other works that place him squarely at the apex of American urban realism, finished only one novel in his last 25 years.
The serious American novelist’s central problem, according to Algren, is that “you have to believe your work is wanted ... but the real deception, the real disappointment, is that actually it’s not wanted.” So why put in the years that a great book demands? His disenchantment covers more than his exploitation and humiliation at the hands of Golden Arm producer Otto Preminger: “I didn’t find any real difference in the values of the publishing world than in the values of the studios. It’s the same thing. Their values are: get something that sells, get books into the presses and then promote them.” The process dominates the product, and the market rules over all. As Algren comments, “The work that is wanted is not very well paid, and the stuff that is not wanted gets paid very high.”
And so writers sell out and produce what they themselves would never read, and readers buy what they would never write, words unlinked to their own lives. A profit-driven culture biz disrupts the bond between writer and reader by forcing writers to think like MBA-wielding publishing executives and turning the reader into a passive consumer not of mere books, but of calculated, overheated bestsellers.
When the personal statement and the personal response are lost, the novel becomes a dead letter mailed to a nonexistent address. We are thrust into the absurd universe of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a tale about an emerging business civilization’s capacity for infinite proliferation of meaningless texts – pre-Facebook, pre-Tweet.
“A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. ... Society begins to take on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission and luxurious passivity.”
– Marshall McLuhan, 1951
http://www.counterpunch.org/iglarsh06102011.html
Nelson Algren, author of The Man with a Golden Arm, Chicago: City on the Make, Neon Wilderness, Never Come Morning, A Walk on the Wild Side and other works that place him squarely at the apex of American urban realism, finished only one novel in his last 25 years.
The serious American novelist’s central problem, according to Algren, is that “you have to believe your work is wanted ... but the real deception, the real disappointment, is that actually it’s not wanted.” So why put in the years that a great book demands? His disenchantment covers more than his exploitation and humiliation at the hands of Golden Arm producer Otto Preminger: “I didn’t find any real difference in the values of the publishing world than in the values of the studios. It’s the same thing. Their values are: get something that sells, get books into the presses and then promote them.” The process dominates the product, and the market rules over all. As Algren comments, “The work that is wanted is not very well paid, and the stuff that is not wanted gets paid very high.”
And so writers sell out and produce what they themselves would never read, and readers buy what they would never write, words unlinked to their own lives. A profit-driven culture biz disrupts the bond between writer and reader by forcing writers to think like MBA-wielding publishing executives and turning the reader into a passive consumer not of mere books, but of calculated, overheated bestsellers.
When the personal statement and the personal response are lost, the novel becomes a dead letter mailed to a nonexistent address. We are thrust into the absurd universe of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a tale about an emerging business civilization’s capacity for infinite proliferation of meaningless texts – pre-Facebook, pre-Tweet.
“A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. ... Society begins to take on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission and luxurious passivity.”
– Marshall McLuhan, 1951
http://www.counterpunch.org/iglarsh06102011.html
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