A Little History of Literature (37 page)

If we are being open-minded it makes more sense to call what isn't ‘high’ (or ‘classic’, ‘canonical’ or ‘quality’) literature ‘popular’ rather than ‘crud’. ‘Popular’ implies ‘of the people’ – that is, not of institutions like the Church, the universities or the government. The fifteenth-century mystery plays (Chapter 6) were popular; the Bible, in Latin at that time, was institutional. We still have institutionally-prescribed literature, forcibly studied at school, college and university.

The novel is the popular genre
par excellence
. When it hits the mark it has always stimulated ‘uncritical’ consumption. We can see this from the genre's earliest days. When Samuel Richardson published
Pamela
(1740), his chronicle of a pretty maid-servant persecuted by her lecherous employer, it triggered a ‘mania’ – particularly among women readers of the time. When Sir Walter Scott published one of his novels, there are accounts of purchasers besieging bookshops and tearing the brown paper off the volume to start reading the story in the street. We have seen any number of such ‘reader stampedes’ all the way to the publication of the seven volumes of the
Harry Potter
series – each of which became a kind of national holiday as purchasers, dressed as wizards, queued up all night outside bookshops. They were not doing so because the book had been well reviewed in that week's
Times Literary Supplement
or was on the A-level syllabus.

The term ‘bestseller’ is of relatively recent coinage (the first recorded usage is 1912), as is the bestseller list. The first such chart appeared in America, in 1895. One of the persistent British anxieties about ‘bestsellerism’ is that it represents an unwelcome ‘Americanisation’ – the bestseller is ‘an American kind of book’, fine for America, but not for the rest of the world. The British book trade stoutly resisted introducing any authoritative bestseller list until 1975. Books, it was felt, did not ‘compete’ with one another like horses in the Grand National. Worse than that, bestsellerism cheapened the quality and diversity of books. It worked against the necessary ‘discriminations’ (this, not that, or perhaps, this then that) which the intelligent reader should make. The argument goes on.

The question is made more complicated by the fact that bestsellers frequently ‘come out of nowhere’.
Fifty Shades of Grey
, for instance, was first written as a work of fanfic, online, for an Australian reading group, by an author with no ‘name recognition’ whatsoever in the book world. Publishing companies have risen to the challenge of developing three strategies (again, mainly in the USA) to minimise the out-of-nowhere factor: ‘Genre’, ‘Franchising’ and ‘Me too-ism’.

As Chapter 17 suggested, if you go into a bookshop you are free to ‘browse’ – but the shop will be guiding you toward the kind of fiction that would work for you by racking books of a similar appeal on ‘genre’ shelves: Science Fiction and Horror, or Romance, or Crime and Mystery. ‘Franchising’ works rather differently. Readers build up what retailers call ‘brand loyalty’. They will buy ‘the latest Stephen King’ (his name is invariably larger on covers than the title of his latest work) because they enjoyed that author's previous works. ‘Me too-ism’ is simply ‘follow my leader’.
Fifty Shades of Grey
, for example, inspired a veritable tsunami of lookalike covers, titles, themed works and spoofs. (My favourite was
Fifty Shames of Earl Grey
.)

The bestseller list, if one thinks about it, does not merely chart sales, it stimulates them, setting in process a kind of ‘herd response’. You read a bestseller because everyone else is reading it. Once the herd is galloping the usual mechanisms of choice and
‘discrimination’ (some careful thought about what to read) are overridden. Dan Brown's
The Da Vinci Code
, when it was published in 2005, received almost universally negative reviews. Yet for two years it out-sold every other novel. The thundering herd, as always, voted with their hooves. And their wallets.

Most bestsellers quickly come and go. They are, usually, ‘books of the day’, and this year's bestseller list will contain a different set from last year's. A few, however, enjoy a long life and we can learn a lot about the machineries of popular literature from examining their career through the years – sometimes through centuries.
Les Misérables
is a good example. Victor Hugo published his story of Prisoner 24601's epic struggle with Inspector Javert, set against France's never-ending political upheavals, in 1862. It was initially published in French and ten other languages simultaneously. As a global enterprise,
Les Misérables
was immensely and immediately successful. Hugo's novel was reportedly the most-read book by both armies in the American Civil War in 1861–65. Dramatic versions became staples on the stage, worldwide, for decades after.
Les Misérables
has been filmed no less than twelve times. In 1985 an unambitious musical stage version was premiered at the Barbican in London. Despite poor reviews, it took off, and became what the official ‘Les Mis’ website describes as ‘the world's longest-running musical’ – ‘Seen by more than 65 million people in 42 countries and in 22 different languages’. At the 2013 Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles, the latest film version (of the 1985 musical) pulled in a creditable three awards.

No one would call Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables
anything less than popular. Neither, if we're being honest, would we call it ‘great literature’. It falls into the category of what George Orwell called ‘good-bad books’. All the adaptations of the original novel, in different ways and with different degrees of fidelity, retain the core element: the long feud between the prisoner and his jailer and the original novel's social message, what Hugo called the ‘social asphyxiation’ which causes crime (in Jean Valjean's case, stealing a loaf of bread for his starving family).

Should the long passage of
Les Misérables
through all its different
manifestations be seen as cheapening exploitations of the original text? I don't think so. It's more in the nature of a great work of popular fiction being able to evolve, adapt itself, like flowing liquid, to the ever-changing literary-cultural environment of the time. Some works of popular literature can do it, but most can't. Chances are there won't be a musical version of
The Da Vinci Code
, or
Fifty Shades of Grey
, winning any Oscars in 2120.

And what about poetry? Unthinkingly one might imagine that it is always something of minority interest, confined to ‘little magazines’, slim volumes, and an elite of highly-skilled readers. ‘Bestselling poetry’, one might argue, is a contradiction in terms – like ‘jumbo shrimp’. If we think laterally, however, poetry has never been as popular as it is today. And we hear, over the course of a week, many more hours of it. We live ‘in poetry’ in ways that no generation before us has done. How come?

The most influential single volume in the history of the form is probably Coleridge and Wordsworth's
Lyrical Ballads
. It helps to unpack the root-meanings of those two words. ‘Lyrical’ goes back to the ancient musical instrument, the lyre – forerunner of the guitar (Homer is traditonally thought to have recited his epics to lyre accompaniment). ‘Ballads’ goes back to ‘dance’ (as does ‘ballet’). So what, then, are Bob Dylan's lyrics, sung to his guitar? What are Michael Jackson's, or Beyoncé's, dance and song videos? What is each new generation's recordings of the ballads of Cole Porter? It's not too outrageous a stretch, for those of an open critical mind, to see as much ‘literature’ in popular music as there was in that 1802 slim volume by Coleridge and Wordsworth. Put another way, look hard and you'll find pearls in the crud.

CHAPTER
39

Who's Best?

P
RIZES
, F
ESTIVALS AND
R
EADING
G
ROUPS

There have always been prizes for the highest literary achievement, from the ancient world's laurel-leaf crown to the ‘biggest ever’ advances which (lucky) modern authors receive. ‘Laureateships’ are prizes of a kind. Tennyson's forty-two-year tenure of the post of British poet laureate (Chapter 22) confirmed his supremacy in the world of poetry, as did the peerage, and the state funeral (in all but name), which a grateful Queen and nation awarded him on his death in 1892.

But systematically organised literary prizes – delivering a jury's verdict that this or that is the best novel, poetry collection or play, or recognising a lifetime's literary achievement – is very much a twentieth-century phenomenon, and of our time. The first such prize to be founded in France, the Goncourt, was awarded in 1903, and the UK and USA followed suit in 1919 and 1921 respectively. Since then, literary prize-giving has grown explosively. It has become like the proverbial Christmas party gift, cynics say: everyone must have one. There are now many hundreds of literary prizes that authors can compete directly for – or be entered for, usually
by their publishers – in a large number of countries. And more of them are set up every year.

There is, among them all, a bewildering array of ‘category prizes’: awards for the best
second
novel of the year (named, wittily, the Encore); for the best detective novel of the year (the Edgar, named after the founder of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe); for the best historical novel (the Walter Scott, ditto); for the best woman's novel (the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly the Orange Prize and since 2013 the Baileys Prize); for the best any kind of literary book (the Costa Book of the Year); and for the best collection of poetry (the T.S. Eliot). Some give large sums of money, some just ‘honour’ – and some dishonour (notably the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award). The biggest cash prize is splashed by the McArthur Foundation's Genius Grants in the USA, giving lucky authors half a million dollars to spend as they please, just for being geniuses. One thing all these prizes have in common is that they do not specify too closely what precise quality they are rewarding, or by what criteria they are judging. Judges and committees have a free hand in deciding what they regard as the worthiest effort.

Before examining a few of the premier prizes, let's ask some important questions. Why has this happened, why now, and why do we need such awards? A number of answers suggest themselves. The most convincing is that we live in an age of competition, where ‘winning’ is all-important. Everyone, it is said, loves a horse race. The prize system introduces the exciting ingredient of winners and losers into literature. It makes literature a kind of sports stadium, or gladiatorial arena.

In the last twenty years, bookmakers have begun offering odds and taking bets on who will win the Booker, in Britain, or the Pulitzer, in the USA. The big prizes are announced at award ceremonies that each year come more and more to resemble the Oscars. Only the red carpet is missing, and that may come soon.

Another reason for the current obsession with prizes is impatience. As George Orwell observed, the only real judge of whether a work of literature is any good or not is time. When literature first appears, we are very bad judges of how good or bad it is. That includes
reviewers, who very often have to make ‘authoritative’ judgements within days – shooting, as it were, from the hip. Sometimes they miss badly: one early reviewer complained that
The Wind in the Willows
was zoologically inaccurate as to the hibernating habits of moles, which it almost certainly was. Many would have backed Ben Jonson against Shakespeare, in his day. Dickens, discriminating readers believed, was ‘low’; you should read Thackeray – much better stuff.
Wuthering Heights
? Don't bother. One could go on. After a few decades, the winners and losers emerge from the fog. They become our ‘canon’ and are studied in the classroom. Time has done its job. But the reader wants to know
now
who the great contemporary writers are. They won't be around in a hundred years to learn history's verdict. Prizes satisfy that need to know.

The third reason for the profusion of prizes is ‘signposting’ – giving readers some direction so we might better find our way through the ever more daunting profusion of literature available nowadays. We desperately need guidance. Where shall we find it – the bestseller list? The book all the critics are raving about in this week's newspaper? The book that has the showiest advertisements in the underground station? That ‘unmissable’ book a friend has mentioned, whose title we can't quite remember? Prizes, judiciously selected by panels of experts who have coolly surveyed the whole field, offer the most reliable of signposts.

For its part, the book trade loves literary prizes. The reason is obvious enough: they help remove the chronic uncertainty which is the bane of their business. The rule-of-thumb ratio often cited is that for every four books that lose money for a publisher, one makes money – and, with luck, pays for the other four. With a prize-winner's medal hanging from its neck, the odds are shortened that a title (or the next one the author writes) will earn its way. And it's not always necessary for the book to be a winner: to be on the short list, or even the long list, is enough to give the title ‘profile’.