American capitalism has created for us a society where art, and the artists who make it, are undervalued, but it overvalues content when that content can be treated as a product, an eyeball catching commodity. Commodified content is without aesthetic, it’s functional and servile to the process of wealth extraction: i.e., easy to reproduce and recognizable to the consumer. Real art, however, is unique, individual, and through that specificity it achieves a kind of universality via empathetic imagination. Art avoids being generic even when it manipulates generic components. Real art can, occasionally, achieve popularity; however, even then, it’s hard to sell widely due to its uniqueness and its inability to be quickly and simplistically compared to something else. Art also can’t be easily reproduced and monetized the way serialized content can: there’s no “For Whom Else the Bell Tolls,” no “The Greater Gatsby” or “Another Room of One’s Own.” True art stands alone in its singularity, and it defies the demands of commerce.
Furthermore, whatever amalgam of vision, empathy, and imagination that makes art “Art” can’t be taught even if the basic techniques to make it yield to standard instruction. Therefore, in our highly commercialized and capitalistic society art isn’t worth much unless it can be scaled up and financialized, or made scarce and fetishized.
If we think of “Art” or “Literature” as simply content to be produced and reproduced, then it’s as interchangeable as a hammer or a pair of pants. Any writer who sells well is therefore believed to have created better “content” even as that content descends into what John Stuart Mill called “collective mediocrity.” What matters is the brand, and the brand is what people buy. James Patterson isn’t popular because of the artistic vision or quality of his work, he’s popular because of the consistent, sturdy, generic, mediocrity with which James Patterson branded novels are produced, and it’s that generic dependability that makes it commodifiable and therefore useful to a business.
Those economic forces driving us to treat everything we do as a potential profit center that needs to be standardized and scaled up means we don’t have time to pursue art in all its unique and troublesome ways unless we happen to be independently wealthy or married to a patron. That makes art feel disconnected from reality, and the people with more grounded concerns, such as securing shelter, food, and companionship, are unable to participate except as passive recipients and consumers to be exploited. We need “working class” artists and working-class art appreciators, and the only way, right now, that working class people can get the time to learn and practice the techniques of art free from a step-by-step formula is to tap into the instructional model provided by higher education. But the working-class artist’s base poverty means they’re forced into a kind of formula anyway simply to justify the expense of that education.
I’ve begun to feel that MFA classes, especially ones modeled on the Iowa Writers Workshop and led by their graduates, along with artificial intelligence, Bookscan data, publisher conglomeration, tyrannical profit and loss statements, and the marketing and accounting departments whose research controls them, are all working to flatten the literary arts into that collective mediocrity demanded by monopolies. Everything is written just well enough that it’s not offensively bad, but it’s not so well written that it might potentially intimidate readers who’ve been trained to admire that mediocrity, and who are resistant to putting forth some emotional or intellectual effort beyond passive consumption.
In other words, book marketers no longer care if you buy the book to read it as long as you respond to their hype and simply buy the book. Reading it is a bonus. Only Amazon cares about read-through, but only because it allows them to save money by not fully paying writers whose ebooks are never read in their entirety.
Books are no longer published solely because an editor feels they need to be read, books are published if the marketing department thinks it’s something they can convince the most number of people to buy. Reading what’s published is actually a hindrance to the publishing of commodified content—especially if it might cause controversy. Nearly every publisher, I believe, will argue with me about this, but if reading the book were as important as buying the book, I doubt there’d be so many celebrity authors or product tie-in schemes. Unfortunately, the meta-latency[1] of marketing and promotion serves to make the content of all this content (the metalinguistic material) somewhat irrelevant to the assembly line of commerce.
The Curse of Modernism
A few years ago, I read something in passing (and now can’t find the source) that claimed Modernism leaned toward totalitarianism. I’ve been thinking about that a lot since then, especially considering how deeply modernism has penetrated our social fabric. Modernism had such thrilling energy and creative force in the early to mid-Twentieth century. Modernist thinking, which was originally driven by a response to industrialization, has dogmatized itself into the same kind of uniformity that comes along with industrialized mass production. Since 1950, Modernism has felt like the cultural equivalent of a company that buys up everything around it and standardizes it all in the service of reproducibility and market dominance. Even the Beats and postmodernists, who came after 1950, seem to have been subsumed into what modernism dissolved into after 1939.
Personally, I don’t believe modernism ended with World War II. It was so revolutionary in the arts that it bled over into all other aspects of society, and therefore it has been able to hide itself in plain sight (i.e., it has become meta-latent. It is not a secret, but is invested in making you think it doesn’t exist anymore.).
All American narrative structures now seem traceable to a handful of specific American modernist writers: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Welty, Steinbeck, O’Connor, Cheever, Wolfe (Thomas not Tom), and Carver. Throw in a few foreign writers like little Virginia Woolf or Borges for some spice, and we have established the very narrow window through which most American writers must now pass. A somewhat capable young writer can land a huge contract as long as they never veer too far from the boxes those earlier writers built. If they do deviate, well, good luck you artsy fuck.
The most definitive example of modernism’s totalitarian leaning, and how it’s permeated all aspects of American culture in particular, is the automobile.
Early automobiles were close to singular works of art, at least until Henry Ford gave us the assembly line and his iconic, somewhat apocryphal statement that “People can have any color of Model T they want as long as it’s black.” As those assembly line automobiles began to dominate the market, as the more successful automakers began to acquire smaller automakers, certain signs of homogenization began to appear.
That homogenization has come to be called “badge-engineering,” or “rebadging.” Strip away the front grill and the taillights, the badges and decals, and a Hyundai Accent, a Kia Rio[2], and—get this—a Dodge Attitude in Mexico, which is manufactured by Chrysler (Stellantis), are all the exact same car. There might be slight variations in the engine and drive train, but usually it’s confined to add-ons like sound systems, turbo chargers, fuel systems, or transmissions; however, because those parts are “generic” to the platform, they’re still interchangeable. The first publicly and visually successful example of this would probably be Chrysler’s K-Car platform, which saved the automaker in the 1980s. The K-Car platform was used for all Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth models whether it was a mid-sized car, a sedan, a station wagon, a sports car, a luxury car, a compact car, or a minivan. Except for body panels, all the parts on those cars were interchangeable. The K-Car platform was so successful for Chrysler, the company was able to buy up the Jeep brand in 1987, and that’s how Jeeps got square (Chrysler) headlights for a time.
Now a car is “art” only by accident. Cars, once they were made on assembly lines and entered the cultural mindset as commodities, and rebranding became a cost-saving production model, cars became fully utilitarian. There really is no functional difference between a Lamborghini Urus and a Hyundai Venue. The only difference is the social prestige and price tag, but if you need to get from point A to point B, either one will do as long as the road is paved. This kind of utilitarianism applies to most manufactured goods whether it’s cars, hammers, blenders, glasses, pants, or even potato chips: if you need any of those items, the brand (i.e. the manufacturer, or creator) is irrelevant, especially when you realize that some of those items will appear side-by-side on shelves, competing for sales, and they were produced in the same facility, on the same production line, and simply put in different packages.
Novels, however, despite being an object for sale, have no obvious utility at all—even when they are forced into a commodification model. Books are a distraction from commerce, an entertainment, and, by flattening books to an easy to reproduce formulaic product, they become a profit tool instead of art. The beauty and elegance of the text is irrelevant and might even be a hinderance to the big publisher’s so-called “fiduciary requirement” to achieve annual exponential growth for the shareholders. For that to happen, a book must become like the K-Car platform: reliably built from a uniform set of available components, and then “badged” for a particular market. In literature, the rebadging part, has become the author’s racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identity—their identity trap.
Another “innovation” of the automotive industry that I see echoed in publishing is the annual model upgrade. This is where an automaker basically makes some superficial changes like new styling options, or a different engine, or different wheels, all to keep the model “new” and “fresh.” We also see this in the constant upgrading of cell phones, computers, and other consumer technologies. From another angle you can call this “manufactured obsolescence,” which occurs most easily with utilitarian objects, but it is now being philosophically, if not practically, applied to publishing. If a publisher can secure “brand name” status for a writer on their list, and that writer can put out a new book reliably (every year or two, or faster, if they have a ghost writing shop like James Patterson) then that’s where the biggest chunk of the publisher’s efforts will go. This works particularly well with the subliterary genres like mystery, thriller, and romance, especially when there’s a recurring central element like a character, or an historical milieu. Writers of these kind of books can pump out a new one nearly every year. For example, John Grisham, high champion of the legal thriller, has published at least one book a year since 1991 (sometimes two). Lee Child, author of all those Jack Reacher novels, has been turning out a book a year since 1997. The only way to do that is to have an assembly line approach that flattens the prose to a journalistic function devoid of any poetic art or authorial perception.
When the opportunity cost of reading a novel is so great that most people can’t or won’t read more than a few books a year (somewhere less than ten), stripping a novel down to its thinnest and most easily digestible form (a quick read) and refusing to ask anything of the reader, makes that book more valuable to a publisher than the novel that asks the reader for some effort. James Patterson, Lee Child, John Grisham are able to make a living because they have hit that sweet spot where they can reliably provide books the so-called “average” reader feels they can squeeze into their lives without losing time that could be spent doing something more “profitable.” That dependable mediocrity is far more valuable to a publisher than the troubling, the complex, the potentially “problematic” work of art.
At its best, Literature, especially imaginative writing, is (or once was) a singular, strange, personal, and diverse exercise. Dogmatized late-modernism, enmeshed as it is now with capitalism, has been trying to make art utilitarian and homogenous like journalism because, in fact, the modernist writing style is essentially, a journalistic style.
The journalistic style was revolutionary when compared to previous writing styles because it dispensed with the long, detailed pastoral descriptions of landscapes and the digressions on tertiary topics like the nuances of whales and whale hunting found in Moby Dick.
Modernism also disposed of a certain style of authorial intrusion where the author might directly address the “dear reader” like in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Modernism pared all that down to a minimalism similar to the newly professionalized journalism of the early Twentieth Century.
The early Twentieth century was a time, especially in American journalism, where newspapers were trying to shed the old, politicized label of “yellow journalism” by stepping back from their obvious political partisanship and embracing a wider audience[3]. This is what gave rise to the idea of “objective” journalism, which necessitated a more homogenized, less opinionated writing style. This, I think, is what that comment about Modernism’s tendency toward totalitarianism is pointing to: homogeny, sameness, uniformity.
Newspapers were the training grounds for a lot of writers, especially in the era before MFA programs. Ernest Hemingway is, perhaps, the most well-known journalist turned novelist. Hemingway’s style was taken straight from the old KC Star newspaper and its style guide that called for short, declarative sentences and a strong focus on the five Ws: who, what, when, where, why, and sometimes how. In that structure, a good journalist disappears behind the facts of the story. There are no editorialized sidebars, no digressions on a theme, and no poetic turn of phrase in that kind of journalism. All articles in a newspaper, despite their bylines, appear uniformly written so that the newspaper presents as a single, objective voice, even, to an extent, on the opinion page where the paper sometimes runs opinion pieces without a byline to suggest the opinion is held by the organization itself. The “art” of journalism is expended in the creation of authorial obscurity.
Early Modernist literature also got rid of the tendency of authors to insert themselves into their stories and instead focused on heightened verisimilitude, i.e., being “true to life,” which required a kind of authorial obscurity similar to journalism. The problem that has developed since then is that with the advent of creative writing programs, and the massive amount of modernist and modernist inspired literature that has been created, modernism has become the lingua franca of the publishing world and, especially, the writing workshop. That spare, journalistic prose style is easy to teach and critique, and especially easy to replicate with a minimum amount of linguistic sensitivity and daring on the part of the writer. It allows the writer to focus on what often feels like logistics: getting the characters (and readers) from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible. That journalistic style, and the focus on the five Ws, bolts neatly onto Freytag’s story pyramid. As long as the writer can provide an exciting twist before dumping the reader down the back slope to the denouement, they’re considered “masters.” They may write the clunkiest sentences ever, but they’ll be praised for the quantity of the output such sloppiness encourages because it’s the output that matters to bottom-line, profit minded executives who are more interested in moving units and capturing eyes than in what’s actually contained within those “units.”
That authorial obscurity in fiction is also, I think, partly to blame for my ambivalence toward most books these days.
I think of myself as an eclectic, open minded reader. My years at Naropa University exposed me to BIPOC and LGBTQ writers that I hadn’t encountered before in my undergrad classes, and certainly not in high school. I want to read books by human beings trying to understand the world and what it means to be alive, to fall in love, to fight the good fight, to lose or win, to suffer, to be redeemed, to find joy, to seek justice or revenge, and I don’t care if those writers are gay or straight, cis or trans, native or immigrant. In other words, I’m not looking to see myself reflected back at me in the novels I read. I want to see the world through another person’s perception, which is, to me, much deeper than simply having a set of events objectively related to me.
Look, I can read a story by a BIPOC or LGBTQ writer and witness a life unlike my own. The story will light up the appropriate corresponding areas of my brain so that I “experience” that life in a small way. My empathy might even be expanded, but my perception, the filter through which the author’s events reach me, and through which I will see the world after reading that writer’s work, will remain unchanged if the author has disappeared behind a flat, uninteresting, journalistic prose.
Think of that as the W.E.I.R.D.[4] bias in American psychological research as applied to literature: a majority of books published by the Big 5 publishers are supposed to appeal to as many readers as possible, but the cadre of writers they find acceptable, even with the upsurge in previously marginalized voices, is still made up of a very specific, very privileged minority of people who tend to see literature through the same perceptive lens.
It’s a variation of perception that is missing when everything published has had the prose flattened to the required pseudo-journalistic style. We’re getting versimilar prose. That is, we’re getting prose that wants to accurately describe the world, both the external world the characters occupy and the internal world the characters carry about in their heads, objectively, neutrally, but it’s actually being genericized by the writer’s formalized and standardized training. Prose no longer takes the shape of the writer who invented it, and it only occasionally takes the shape of a character’s perception. Fictional prose now often feels like it’s required to report objectively on a set of fictional events, and on a character’s internal life, but not open a window into how the author actually perceives the structure and workings of their imagined world.
Let me see if I can make that make sense.
In John Berger’s BBC series, and accompanying book, Ways of Seeing, he presents a basic treatise on how to think about looking at art and understanding it. He argues that a piece of visual art is not only a record of something in the past (i.e., a person, a landscape, an object), but a record of how the artist perceived the thing being looked at. So, the Mona Lisa is not just a painting of an attractive woman with a mysterious smile, it’s a record of how Leonardo da Vinci saw that attractive woman with her mysterious smile (something that, even though it was a commissioned work, he couldn’t help but do). It is an incredibly subtle distinction. Botticelli, a contemporary of da Vinci, could have painted the exact same woman, and we would be able to see it was the same woman, but those paintings would appear to the eye very differently. That difference in perception is unavoidable in visual art (unless someone is painting by numbers or attempting to create a forgery). But in prose, that distinction is harder to see and even harder to achieve. It could be as simple as word choice and not editing out a striking but mysterious metaphor, simile, or allusion; or it could be as complex as the structural form of the novel (the vehicle) reflecting some deeper element (the tenor) of the story. So, maybe I’m hoping for too much from other writers in this cultural moment when our physical survival in the world and our social cache as writers is almost entirely determined by the number of units we move.
When our worth as artists is reduced to units moved, to the exponential increase in a publisher’s profit margin or ROI, then variance, deviation, fragility, mysteriousness become too great a risk. The whole point behind a newspaper’s style manual, whether it’s the AP Stylebook, or the old Kansas City Star style manual, is to simplify the final product to a point where it can be achieved by any writer on the staff regardless of the writer’s experience and understood by any reader regardless of the reader’s education level. This is a good thing when all a writer is trying to do is convey facts. But imaginative literature, being art, isn’t ONLY about conveying the made-up facts of a made-up world. It’s much more than that. It’s a trouble generating practice space where we can rehearse our responses to potential trouble in the real world. It’s also a mind-meld between the author and the reader; a complex, risky transference of an image—a perception—of the world without a physical image like a photograph or painting. It is content and context in the best case, contextless babble in its worst.
Berger said that we see before we can speak, and so images have power over us; however, we are, ultimately, a storytelling animal. We have learned to speak to provide context to what we see, especially when we’ve endeavored to make images of singular things we have seen. Simply describing a picture we’ve seen is not as powerful as seeing it in situ, and certainly not as powerful as witnessing the thing pictured in person, in the moment, as it happens.
The picture of Phan Thi Kim Phúc[5] is stark and powerful in and of itself. Without knowing the full context, you will still be shocked, moved, horrified to look at that screaming, terrified child running naked down a road, soldiers with guns behind her. Add the simple context provided by a photo caption, or a news article, and a little more shock and horror will slip in. But render that moment in fiction—do it well, and beautifully—and those reading it will be devastated. But should that story come only from Phan Thi Kim Phùc’s point of view? Could it come from one of the other children’s point of view? One of the soldiers in the background? The photographer who took the picture? Could it be told from a remove, observing it somewhere dispassionately? Do we get in close, engage in mimesis? If you’re following the “rules” of modern American fiction, those choices are linguistically and narratively flattened, the writer is simply reporting what the girl did and felt, what the other children did and felt, what the soldiers did and felt. We might get some intense description of the moral debate going on in a character’s head, but it’ll all be rendered in similarly constructed prose. There will be no poetry to it, no art, no hint at what the author found compelling in the moment, as the artist, and no further depth to the rendering of what happened than what you might get from a brief human interest piece interviewing one of the participants in a news magazine.
I see writers, cis, trans, gay, straight, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, all constructing sentences and paragraphs and stories in predictable, almost algorithmic ways. Here is the paragraph where a writer gives us the character’s name and background, their thoughts on their mother or father or sister or the state of things in New York or Los Angeles or Haysville, KS. Here’s the paragraph describing another character that starts at the head and works down to the feet or starts at the feet and works its way up to the head - ignoring, at times, the subtle differences between people’s perception and what they notice first based on any number of external and internal variables. Here’s the description of a room from right to left (or left to right). Here’s the landscape description or the town description. Everything is in a predictable order as if we all see and notice things the same way, at the same time, and for the same reasons and then strive to describe it all in the most uniform, familiar way possible.
This flattened modernist style dominates the lists of the Big Five publishers and the shelves of even the best indie bookstores. You can read any kind of story you want, as long as it fits into the mediocre mold of an aging journalistic aesthetic designed to appeal to the broadest range of people possible, and reinforced by the algorithmic book sales data generated by Bookscan.
Literary art that strives not only to tell a compelling story but to filter it through the unique perceptive lens of the author is labelled too difficult, too challenging, too obscure to be worthy of publication. Perhaps that’s been the case ever since William Caxton brought the printing press to England. But to me, in this era where the economies of scale and the chokepoints created by mega monopsonies like Amazon and the Big Five publishers make it hard for small independent presses to compete and get their books into reader’s hands, writers are left with a kind of Sophie’s choice between trying to write to the collective, mediocre mean and hoping to find enough success to live, or chasing their vision to its most unique, expressive version and never having the opportunity to reach the others in the world who might find relief, solace, or comfort at learning they are not as alone as they might feel.
Self-publishing is not the answer for those writers and readers seeking the kind of communion that arises when we see a unique piece of art that suddenly, and fiercely, resonates. Self-publishing is a fairly good answer for those working in the extremes of certain subliterary genres and who favor serialization and endless world-building in the service of entertainment alone.
The problems we need to address, the questions we need to ask ourselves, are all around the purpose of the instruction by the Writing Industrial Complex, and the purpose of all this mediocre literary art that it creates. Is it to provide a financial lifeline for writers who wouldn’t be able to live otherwise? Is it to build appreciation? What kind of art life are we promoting? Or is it all content created and sold as a loss leader to get consumers to buy into retail platforms like Amazon, which will, in the end, destroy local individuality in favor of a mass produced, mediocre culture?
The only answer I have is that, as a society, we need to invest in our arts differently. We need to teach and think about the literary arts as a whole package: fun, enlightening, challenging, and necessary in its lack of utility all at once. But that’s hard to do when all our instruction to our young literary artists is trying to push them into marketable formulas that can be hyper-classified, serialized, and positioned as platform content designed to extract wealth from readers and deliver it to the billionaire who owns the digital platform the content was distributed on rather than the writer who made it.
We need a real alternative movement, not a Metamodernism that oscillates between two imaginary points (earnest modernism and ironic postmodernism) that have become meaningless in the meta-latency of extraction capitalism. I’m not sure what that is, exactly, but I think it starts with us paying attention to the formulas we subconsciously fall into.
[1] Meta-latency: basically, self-referential secrecy, or a publicly confessed secret. Marketing works best when it doesn’t feel like marketing, or when there is a mutual agreement between marketer and audience to ignore the fact that they both are aware that marketing is a designed manipulation.
[2] Hyundai Motor Group owns controlling interest in Kia Motors.
[3] Strange that now, in the early twenty first century, we have, with Fox “News” swung back to yellow journalism.
[4] White, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic.
[5] Wikipedia contributors. “Phan Thi Kim Phuc.” Wikipedia, May 30, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc.