E-readers, Deconvergence Culture and McSweeney’s Circle
Even if most critics would agree that literary culture is rapidly changing at present, they would probably also agree that these changes are difficult to describe and evaluate precisely. On the one hand, powerful bookstores like Barnes & Noble are facing difficulties, schools are increasingly replacing their books with tablet computers, Karl Lagerfeld’s Paper Perfume suggests that people are more intrigued by the smell of books than their contents and in 2011 the Pulitzer Board even decided not to award a prize to one of the novels selected by its jury. Perhaps we are too busy putting the advice of television chefs into practice or too busy playing on-line videogames to read books anymore, some critics have pointed out. Yet on the other hand, Amazon and the eBook are flourishing, heart-throb Robert Pattinson is starring in movie adaptations of both popular and literary novels (Twilight but also Bel Ami and Cosmopolis) and PowerPoint and wine tasting are at the heart of new books by writers like Jennifer Egan and Jay McInerney. Maybe the relation between literature and popular culture is hence more complex than unilateral critiques or celebrations of the Internet, for instance, would lead us to believe. How can we begin to make sense of this confusing interplay of digital culture and literary reading? Jim Collins, professor of film and postmodern literature at Notre Dame University, would probably argue that these phenomena fit into the rise of “popular literary culture”, a development he has masterfully described in Bring on the Books for Everybody. How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (2010). This interview
An interview with Jim Collins
Ben De Bruyn & Jim Collins
RésuméDans cet entretien, Jim Collins explique la notion de ‘popular literary culture’ qu’il a introduite dans
Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010) et revient sur son approche innovatrice de la relation entre
littérature contemporaine et culture numérique. Les questions abordées traitent des sujets suivants: la ‘de-convergence culture’, les lectures d’amateurs, les limites géographiques et historiques des questions qu’il étudie et enfin le rôle de McSweeney’s dans la littérature américaine contemporaine.
Abstract
In this interview, Jim Collins explains the notion of ‘popular literary culture’ he introduced in Bring
on the Books for Everybody (2010), his seminal account of the relation between contemporary literary
fiction and digital culture. More specifically, he clarifies his conception of amateur reading and de-convergence culture, discusses the geographical and historical limits of his argument and explores the role of McSweeney’s in contemporary US literature.
Keywords
explores his views in more detail, paying special attention to amateur reading, the lessons and failures of academic critics, the tension between convergence and de-convergence, the role of McSweeney’s and the history and future of reading in electronic times. Scroll down for more, dear digital reader.
Popular Literary Culture
At the heart of Bring on the Books for Everybody is the notion of “popular literary culture”. By way of introduction, it may be helpful if you could recapitulate the book’s main argument by briefly unpacking that notion for us.
It’s the hardest question (laughs). I guess the best way to describe it in a compressed way would be to say that the idea that literary fiction was somehow apart from popular culture was around for most of the twentieth century, but then over the course of the past decade especially you began to see what we would think of as literary fiction – whether it was contemporary literary fiction or canonical literary fiction – deep in the heart of popular culture, that it was immersed in popular culture, and that kind of divide was increasingly difficult to maintain. And that was due to a number of different things – it was due to conglomeration, with the publishing industry as subsidiaries of larger conglomerates which also had film divisions and television divisions. It was also due to new delivery systems like Amazon, iTunes and so on. But then it was also, I think, attributable to the empowerment of the amateur reader; there was suddenly this move to convince amateur readers that somehow literary fiction was intended for them, that you didn’t have to worry about performance anxiety. It wasn’t something that was reserved only for the intelligentsia; these books were “good reads”, you see, just like category fiction would be. So part of it was the collapsing of the distinction between literary fiction and category fiction but it also had a lot to do with who was supposed to be reading each. It also had to do, finally, with collapsing another kind of distinction and that was the difference between close reading (what academic reading was supposed to foster) and then passionate reading. When I was an undergraduate at the university, no matter how passionate you were about your reading it somehow didn’t count if you didn’t learn the right protocol for close reading and I think that remained preeminent for a long time. One of the key arguments in Bring on
the Books is that the next important development after the rise of postmodern literature (within
Ameri-can literary culture anyway) wasn’t the next wave of cutting-edge writers – it was the empowerment of the amateur reader.
Amateur Reading in Postmodern Times
As your previous answer already suggests, you argue that this popular literary culture is typical of a new, late version of postmodernism rather than postmodernism per se. When and how does this later form of postmodernism emerge and what is new or different about it? I was also wondering how this argument relates to your earlier work on postmodernism.
To be honest, I’m not really that comfortable with the term “late postmodernism”, because I don’t really know if we have arrived at late postmodernism yet or are past it. In the previous book, Architectures of
Excess, I used the phrase, “after the end of formerly postmodernism” and I think it’s still really
impor-tant to historicize the postmodern because so many of the things that, say twenty years ago, we pointed to as being characteristics of postmodern art – say appropriationism – have now become standard daily practice for anybody who creates a mash-up and posts it on YouTube. And so much of what we thought of as something the artists did in the first phase of postmodern art – Laurie Anderson with her perfor-mance art, for instance – is now something, whether we call it intertextuality of remediation, we do on a regular basis. There is a sense there that there were certain artists, like Anne Rice or Robert Coover, who were making use of the archive and doing interesting things with the archive or riffs with the archive by recontextualizing it – in the beginning of Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, for instance, Lestat is brought back from the dead by the “cacophony in the air” and as he walks through a bookstore he’s struck by the fact that books published across the centuries are all there on the same tables simultaneously – everything was available and subject to recombination. You began to see the effects of that appropriationism and explicit intertextuality in all kinds of texts – Blade Runner, Flaubert’s Parrot, The Road Warrior, Blue
Velvet, etc. My point is that, now, that kind of appropriationism is referred to as “remix culture” and now
it’s become literally, child’s play. There has been this kind of dispersion, as the technologies of down-loading and updown-loading images, for instance, became that much more ubiquitous. What we used to think of as the postmodern in gallery art or museum art is now something that we all do and I think that it’s still postmodern. Whether that’s late or not is less important to me – what I’m actually arguing is that there’s clearly a difference between, say, twenty years ago when there was something we identified as a solely artistic practice that then began to expand out with rap and with sampling and twenty years later we’re talking about something else, given YouTube, given the cheap user tools that allow anybody to easily create or capture images, remediate them, and then upload them. Those are the sorts of historical arcs that I think are really interesting.
The emergence of popular literary culture is also tied to a new conception of reading and its “use value”. As your book shows, advertisements, popular critics and even novels themselves system-atically invoke and celebrate a form of deeply personal and explicitly physical pleasure in talk-ing about readtalk-ing. At the same time, your argument implies that readtalk-ing also involves acquirtalk-ing knowledge about taste. But at first sight, these things (direct physical pleasure and schooling your-self) seem incompatible. How does that interplay between hedonistic and didactic elements work, in your view?
Great question. I think the best way for me to answer that is that I don’t think it’s necessarily one or the other. What I’m trying to get at is the highly overdetermined notion of reading pleasure. It can, of course, be very hedonistic – pleasure for its own sake – but it can also be the sense of being told that you’re acquiring information that can somehow be useful and it will make you a better person because of it. So one could say that there are these parallel currents of the hedonistic and the utilitarian and they partly merge because the whole mania for self-cultivation is all about a kind of didactic hedonism, you know, how that which is hedonistic acquires a kind of educational function. It becomes pleasurable if you’re somehow learning about something, something that has a kind of use value to it, as opposed to an idle pleasure.
– so it’s a sort of pleasure via knowledge, actually?
Yes, exactly. And this is actually something that a number of American fiction writers have complained about, this idea that non-fiction is somehow of more value for humans than literary fiction because you’re actually acquiring hard knowledge. This is a very old tradition, it goes back to C.P. Snow and people like that, the distinction between what is useful knowledge and what has literary fiction to offer. And so much, I think, of the literary for so long could be traced back to, say, Oscar Wilde’s “all art is quite useless” – the idea that literary fiction should not have that kind of pragmatic use value. I think the problem with that is that it creates a system whereby the meaning of literature can only be this kind of idle pleasure and I don’t think it would have ever gained the kind of popularity it did if that were the case. In popular literary culture reading is all about making it pleasurable and thinking of Tolstoy as a good read, for instance, but it’s also all about valuable information and that’s why one of the main points I make in the book is that part of the emergence of the “popular literary” was about how you didn’t have to go to the university to figure out how to get that valuable information, it was a matter of listening to other taste arbiters, for instance on the Internet.
Discredited Critics and Literary Cultural Studies
Developing that point, the introduction to your book suggests that many contemporary authors and readers define themselves over and against the academy and the professional critic. In their view, the university is no longer the place where literature “happens” because academics have re-treated into highly esoteric discussions, leading to a widespread dismissal of their former authori-ty as well as the abandonment of their reading protocols. Yet their critique is not fully convincing, your book implies, for academics have participated in this popularization of literature as well. In terms of novels, you can trace this kind of discrediting of academic critics back to A.S. Byatt in
Pos-session or even as recently as Zadie Smith’s On Beauty , in which the villain in the novel is a professor
who’s very clearly influenced by French theory and terribly cynical about the value of art, but then he has a kind of epiphanic moment at the end when he’s looking at a beautiful painting and thinking about his wife and realizes that art history is more than just tracing down footnotes and stabbing people in the back and going to conferences. Though obviously, that is part of the game (laughs). I was in France in the mid-1970s, when I was in graduate school, during the glory days of French post-structuralism, and when people would go to Lacan’s Séminaire it was like going to a rock concert. So it’s not that I don’t think there weren’t certain excesses of French High Theory in the mid-1970s. But I guess what I’ve always been so uncomfortable about when I’m reading novels which are indictments of the academy is that they’re such wholesale indictments: “literary critics have forgotten the pleasures of reading”. On the one hand, this critique is not entirely misguided. It’s not that I think that academic critics don’t have anything to say about literature or anything like that, but I feel these novels are a good reminder that it’s imperative that academic critics look beyond their own classrooms, to get a sense of who is actually reading and what are they reading for. The demise of literature and the end of reading, I think, has been greatly exaggerated, to say the least. It’s the opposite that happened, as I’ve tried to show, and so the
question is: why did that happen? It wasn’t that we got to be, necessarily, better teachers. Yet I feel that for me to teach contemporary fiction I should now talk to my students about how they come to it, how it circulates, what’s going on outside as well as inside the classroom. Because obviously I feel that, as someone who teaches literary texts, reading them closely is meaningful, but that, for me, is nevertheless predicated on recognizing that, beyond the boundaries of our classroom, there are people reading pas-sionately, and there’s a publishing industry that’s catering to them rather than to us. So what’s happening there? The other thing is that the demonization of the academy according to the A.S. Byatts and the Zadie Smiths of this world is ironic because the claim that academics are somehow not interesting in reading pleasure or in how people actually read is just simply wrong. Reader response, whether you’re talking about Tony Bennett or Wolfgang Iser, is all about how readers actually make these books into a personal experience of sorts. The problem with the indictment of the academic literary critic, in other words, is that it always focuses on things like killing authors, Derridean deconstruction, and all that, but that seems to me to represent only part of what’s been happening in academic circles. One could argue, I think, just as convincingly, that academic critics coming from cultural studies or new historicism or reader response have been committed to understanding in a far more nuanced way how people actually read and that, for me, is the work that interests me. So turning to pleasure and the reading culture of amateur readers for me wasn’t a matter of somehow leaping over the wall of the university – to me there was a kind of continuity with what was already underway.
In another passage, you argue that future scholars should not focus exclusively, like older forms of aesthetics, on the rarefied experience of fine art or letters nor, like certain types of cultural studies, on a unilateral demystification of the aesthetic experience. Or at least you suggest that neither approach is sufficient in itself. How can we cultivate that no man’s land between older forms of literary studies, for instance, and reductive forms of cultural studies? What would an alternative “literary cultural studies” look like?
To get a little autobiographical for a moment, I’ve been teaching in a film department but I have a con-current appointment in an English department and the courses that I’ve been teaching over the years were either things like media theory or Contemporary Hollywood, but then in the English department I would teach courses on postmodern fiction and we’d talk about Paul Auster and David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and Julian Barnes. I became increasingly dissatisfied with this great gap in my own teach-ing and research that meant that somehow certain questions were relevant for talkteach-ing about Hollywood in terms of the relationship between culture and commerce, but then somehow that wasn’t going to be part of the discussion when we talked about Wallace, Barnes, Rushdie and company. It seemed to me really important to consider how those literary novels are being circulated, especially when they start showing up on movie screens and in television bookclubs and all of that. That was in effect a way of not throwing out the sense of aesthetics, but contextualizing the aesthetics and letting the aesthetics of contemporary fiction be shaped by how we understand material culture. The only real danger, I think, is to remain hermetically sealed within a model where you get together with your students, you read a novel very closely and then you somehow pretend that all these other things aren’t happening. I’m not suggesting that every literary critic and every course in literature somehow has to be informed by, you
know, Bring on the Books for Everybody (laughs), but on the other hand, it seems to me that at least you should look beyond the classroom if you are talking about contemporary fiction. The last couple of times I did the postmodern fiction class before I started writing Bring on the Books I realized that Amazon and adaptations and Oprah Winfrey – they were like the pink elephant in the room, that everybody knew was there, but nobody really knew how to talk about, and so we just stayed with the text and talked about literary style and individual genius and postmodern historiography and things like that. So it was that sense of dissatisfaction. What are we missing by not talking how literary fiction circulated, how it could becomes part of day-to-day life, for everyone, not just for the literary critics and my students? It seemed to me that if we wanted to really understand contemporary reading cultures, we had to that as well.
Lifestyle Magazines and Deconvergence Culture
Your argument about taste and popular literary culture implies that literary scholars need to take less obvious intertexts into account when analyzing contemporary novels, things like cookbooks, travel guides, shelter magazines and so on. Has literature become a part of lifestyle culture and does that not imply – despite the obvious value of such practices – a certain trivialization of writ-ing and readwrit-ing?
Well, when Oprah Winfrey describes Anna Karenina and provides a kind of narrative summary, she presents it as though it’s popular romance, as if there were really no difference between, say, Anna
Karenina and, for instance, Gone With the Wind. It sounds very much like Gone With the Wind, only in
Russia and it’s much colder there, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same thing. Obviously, that does violence to Anna Karenina – it’s not just popular romance, it’s also about the genius of Tolstoy in terms of how he’s able to do something with the stock of old romance and transform it into something that is, we all know, one of the great works of world literature. I don’t want to suggest for a moment that those kinds of distinctions don’t still need to be made. What I was really interested in was what leads people to something like Anna Karenina even if, as Oprah said, they hadn’t read a novel since high school (which, by implication, means they didn’t attend college). In effect, if we’re going to talk about the intertextual or the paratextual, what are the roads by which different audiences come to that book and how do they make sense of it?
More recently, I’ve written a paper about e-readers entitled, “Reading, in a Digital Room of One’s Own”.1 There, I take up Nicholas Carr’s work The Shallows because he’s very skeptical about
e-reading. His argument is basically that no one will ever read Tolstoy in the future because as soon as you have an e-reader, you’re going to have access to so many other options and distractions that it will lead inevitably to shortening attention spans. As evidence for his argument that no one’s reading Tolstoy anymore Carr points to Clay Shirky, who effectively says that the only reason people read Tolstoy in the nineteenth century was because there was this kind of poverty of choices – you know, “if they had better options, they would probably have gone to the movies”. And it seems to me that the mistake that both of them make is that neither of them acknowledges that, when Anna Karenina was an Oprah book Club selection, it topped all of the bestseller lists. So this kind of techno-deterministic argument – the book becomes an e-reader, attention spans shorten, narratives shorten, everything becomes just a matter
of sound bites – is misguided, it seems to me, because if we are going to talk about the future of reading, we have to take things like lifestyle, popular adaptation films, television book clubs and e-readers into account because they’re all vital components of contemporary reading cultures. Too many critics and educators still imagine our encounter with literary classics in this very Edenic way, where we stumble upon a book we find in the forest and say – “Oh, Anna Karenina, this sounds like an interesting novel, I think I’ll read that because it will certainly have transformative effect on my life”. That mythology of reading is what I’m trying to get away from. Of course books still have transformative power, but what leads us to those books, and encourages us to open ourselves to that experience, and makes us feel fully empowered to talk about them as if they belonged to our culture? I think we need to learn a lot more about how that happens, especially when it happens far away from the classroom arena.
That doesn’t mean, though, that I don’t think literary fiction can still offer us something that a lifestyle magazine can’t. So part of what I was trying to get at in the last chapter in Bring on the Books was that, yes, much of popular literary culture is all about convergence culture [a phrase coined by media theorist Henry Jenkins], but this sanctification of literary reading in novels such as The Shadow of the
Wind, The Reader, The Thirteenth Tale, Saturday, or Balzac and the Little Chinese Mistress are really
ex-amples of de-convergence, since they all insist on the uniqueness of the reading experience which must be kept somehow apart from the rest of cultural noise in order to survive, which then becomes part of their marketing. And so in effect these books labor to create a space for a certain kind of reading which is clearly separate from the rest of popular literary culture but then, as soon as they become the stuff of literary adaptations, television bookclubs, superstore bookstores, Amazon communities, in effect they’re still a part of it – so there is that tension between convergence and de-convergence.
In your argument about the popularization of literary classics and reading, you also note that, even though “popular literary culture” occupies a place between mere genre fiction and serious classic fiction, this cluster of practices is different from the seemingly related notion of “middle-brow”. Would you mind clarifying that?
In terms of how a lot of these books and films are categorized, the term middlebrow is still used. So it’s not that I think it’s a worthless term and we should avoid using it or anything like that, because in effect if you pretend that this term is irrelevant, then you cut yourself off from the fact that term is still circu-lating and if I had a nickel for every film review that referred to a Miramax adaptation as middlebrow, I would have retired to the South of France (chuckles). So the term is still used all the time. I think it’s important, though, to not just incorporate that wholesale and say that, well, this is the middlebrow of the twenty-first century or the late twentieth-century. For me, the reason I wanted to move away from middlebrow is that there’s a really substantial difference between the things I’m describing and the mid-dlebrow fiction that Janice Radway’s talked about it in her book about the Book-of-the-Month Club (A
Feeling for Books), where middlebrow fiction was something that was clearly supposed to be a “good
read” and not top shelf literary fiction. It was another category that was intended for middlebrow ama-teur readers, whereas literary classics were best left to teachers of literature and other professionalized readers. The reason I wanted to insist on the difference between the category of the middlebrow in nine-teen-fifties America and the contemporary popular literary is that when Anna Karenina was presented
as though it were a “good read” (which passionate readers everywhere could enjoy on their own terms) it became the bestselling book on the planet or when a Mann Booker prize-winning novel such as The
English Patient became a blockbuster adaptation, it swept the Academy Awards, as did Shakespeare,
when he was in Love. This refashioning became a central part of popular literary culture starting in the late nineteen-nineties as one canonical nineteenth century classic after another was turned into high-end self-help by authors such as Helen Fielding, Candace Bushnell, Diane Johnson, and Melissa Bank. Their novels were all about turning pedigreed literary fiction into advice books about how to conduct yourself in love relationships and acquire taste in the wilds of material culture. At that point, I think a new regime of value begins to emerge that’s very different from the traditional middlebrow novel.
To what extent is this commercialization and distribution of cultural knowledge and skills a typi-cally literary phenomenon? Because you might argue that very similar things seem to be happen-ing with history, for instance, or music or philosophy – Alain de Botton would be a good example here.
Well, I probably grappled with that more than any other question when I was writing the book because I kept wanting to move the direction, you know: “this is also happening with the memoir, this is also happening with popular history writing” and the more I tried to even gesture towards that, the focus of the book became harder to maintain. So I decided very early on that, even though this popularization of knowledge distribution was obviously happening across the board, I wasn’t going to explore every manifestation of it. For the purposes of the book, I already had so many things on my plate by trying to sketch a “media ecology” for the popular literary that I had to finally restrict it to narrative. But you’re right; you can adapt what I’m talking about there to a number of different contexts and I think it works in the other contexts as well. What I’m talking about with the “popular literary” is not just the novel or not just the feature length film. It’s clearly happening in popular history writing, clearly happening in gastronomy, the memoir and so on as well.
Post-Lit, Lit-Lit and McSweeney’s
In the final chapters of your book, you distinguish between two types of novels, namely “post-liter-ary novels” and “devoutly liter“post-liter-ary bestsellers” (Post-lit and Lit-lit, for short). If you read closely, however, it is clear that you don’t want to erect rigid distinctions. Would you mind explaining that?
I think there is a difference. If you look at books like Bridget Jones’ Diary – and there’s a number of other novels in that post-literary chapter – these are, in effect, all makeovers of literary classics. So there’s the acknowledgment that a literary classic like, say, Pride and Prejudice is still somehow vitally important but it’s so immersed within a set of associated tastes within the lifestyle of those characters that you get the distinct impression that, even in the case of Bridget Jones, she’s read Jane Austen, but she’s most in-terested in the adaptation with Colin Firth. So within the post-literary, there’s the centrality of the literary antecedent that has to go through a kind of refashioning and then is somehow inserted into this highly
mediated environment, unlike the most pristine examples of what I call “Lit-lit”, which are all about the pleasures that can only be found between the covers of a book and where reading itself becomes a kind of sanctified practice. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be points of overlap. The Jane Austen
Book Club is a good example; that novel is all about how these women read Jane Austen and it all gets
absorbed into popular culture and lifestyle culture, but reading is an intensely personal cultural practice for them that is somehow still transformative. So I wanted to construct a continuum: books like High
Fidelity, Bridget Jones’ Diary at one end and then at the opposite end there are books like Saturday, The Line of Beauty, On Beauty, Shadow of the Wind, Balzac and the Little Chinese Mistress. But obviously,
there are novels in between or within one novel you might get a kind of gravitation between the two. And how should we see these labels (Post-lit/Lit-lit), then? Do they refer to genres? Taste commu-nities? Publishing strategies?
Wonderful question. I was trying to reflect on the distinction, say, between category fiction – which is how the publishing industry thinks of genre – and literary fiction. I was always taught as an undergrad-uate and even as a gradundergrad-uate student to consider literary fiction as something unique, utterly non-generic. What I was trying to get at with the category of Lit-lit was that literary fiction has become a kind of genre unto itself, not in the sense that it has to have the same subject matter every time but in terms of the kind of reading protocols it takes for granted, the way that it circulates, in terms of literary prizes, the way it’s categorized at Amazon. If you put these things together, it’s a way of trying to create a particular kind of reading community and a way of celebrating a particular writing practice, which itself somehow becomes another kind of category fiction.
Do these developments, to your mind, still leave room for a sort of “highbrow” fiction, that re-mains experimental and escapes from this commercialization and popularization?
That’s something else that I toyed with when I was writing the book. I almost devoted another chapter on the whole McSweeney’s phenomenon because I wanted to talk about David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz and Dave Eggers and I’m still fascinated by all those people and I teach them on a regular basis. While I was concentrating on what was happening in the world of television book clubs, high-concept adaptations and Amazon reading communities, I want-ed to explore how you could also have a literary journal which representwant-ed a kind of subculture unto itself which was committed to promoting literary writing that was hugely informed by popular culture but also functioned as a critical reflection on the kind of convergence that I was talking about in the other chapters.
On the one hand, you could say Infinite Jest and The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay are still archly literary, that even though they’re immersed in popular culture there are all kinds of protocols that would suggest that we’re going to be reading Wallace and Chabon and Eggers as explicitly literary books and their readership is a subculture of people who are going to be listening to their music on vinyl, going to independent coffeehouses instead of Starbuck’s, when they aren’t otherwise reading that kind of hipster literary fiction. There’s still a kind of taste culture there that’s not that far away today from the 1950s art cinema in the US where you would put on your black turtleneck and go watch a Bergman film.
So the one great regret that I have about Bring on the Books is that I didn’t write that chapter because I think it would have given the reader a sense of, okay, what about for those authors who still want to write literary fiction, who are deeply informed by the television programs and films and the material culture around them and yet are writing something that may not be a literary bestseller in the way that the others are. Some literary titles still don’t get turned into successful high-concept adaptations or HBO mini-se-ries, even when there is interest in doing so – Kavalier and Clay and A Visit From the Goon Squad are perfect examples of that.
All of this being said, I get emailed updates on McSweeney’s book deals on a weekly basis, so in other words, there’s still a sense of the marketplace. So it’s tempting to think of certain kinds of writing as being islands that are somehow isolated from the tidal wave of convergence culture and conglomera-tion. There’s clearly still genuine literary fiction being produced for people who insist on that difference and who take pleasure in books that apparently resist the forces of conglomeration – the literary equiva-lent of alternative rock and independent coffee bars. But as soon as it becomes that which somehow re-sists it, then it enters into a dialogue with it, and defines itself over and against it, then it seems to me that it still becomes part of that landscape. The one thing I would change about Bring on the Books would be to use McSweeney’s culture as a way of exploring how a parallel development, massively shaped by popular culture, is doing something other than what you see on television book clubs and adaptation films and all of that. But I have to admit that the main reason I didn’t write that chapter was that one of my graduate students, John Hess, was writing a brilliant dissertation about Chabon, Wallace, Lethem, and Safran Foer and he was doing a far better job with them than I ever could have done.
Globalizing and Historicizing Popular Reading
Are the developments you’re describing unique to Anglophone cultures, in your view, or are they broader, even global phenomena? Together with my colleagues from Leuven, I have tried to ex-trapolate your argument to Dutch literature and that worked rather well, we felt.2 But what do you
think about the geographic scope of your argument? More provocatively, does this mediatization and popularization not necessarily imply an internationalization of literature that renders most of our disciplinary (national) boundaries moot?
It’s a really insightful question. Because it was something else I was grappling with as I was writing the book. I wanted to get into British reading cultures and I toyed with doing more British television book clubs and book store chains like Waterstone’s but in the end it began to feel more like Volume II and my press encouraged me to bring it back more to an American readership. At this point, I’m not satisfied that I made that decision, because it seems to me that what I’m trying to identify as a primarily North-American phenomenon is no longer just a North-American phenomenon. I’m actually toying with the idea of organizing a conference here at Notre Dame sometime in the next two years that would be comparative and would tackle a subject like The Globalization of Reading Cultures and get people from the Netherlands and Italy and France and the UK and Brazil and Japan to talk about how these things are working in other contexts. The e-reader is another interesting development in this respect. I’ve learned from giving papers in Denmark, France, Italy, and the U.K. over the last year or so that digital readers
are definitely an uneven development. While there’s a fascination with the e-reader they haven’t had the same impact on the market and on reading cultures that they’ve already had in the US. Nevertheless, things are happening that have to be investigated across the map and so I would love to hear more about the Dutch context, for example. What are the points of similarity but then also where are the points of divergence?
After talking about spatial boundaries, let’s turn to the temporal boundaries of your argument. As we have seen, Bring on the Books stresses that “popular literary culture” is a recent phenome-non. But the book also traces some of the roots and precursors of this development and you could probably argue that there’s always been a “popular literary culture” of sorts. After all, in books like Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things or Joan Shelley Rubin’s Songs of Ourselves, you find very sim-ilar arguments about the interactions between canonical literature, material culture and popular reading. So maybe this development is not that new after all?
Well, we definitely need to further historicize popular literary reading formations. I think that if we want to talk about something that looks like “literary cultural studies”, in fact, there is an increasing emphasis on reading cultures. Allow me to mention just a couple of very important titles in this regard, Ted Striphas’s book The Late Age of Print and Leah Price’s new book, How to Do Things With Books
in Victorian Britain,3 which is all about the book as a physical object in the nineteenth century. We need
far more research on comparative literary cultures so we can begin to get a better sense of what shapes a particular reading culture at any point in history. Yet when I was an undergraduate, there was never any sense that reading literary books had anything to do, for instance, with material culture or anything like that. I remember taking a James class and I asked my professor about The Spoils of Poynton and he said “You know what Pound said about it – it was just a novel about furniture”. And so you never read it, right (laughs)? But my response now would be: so why were literary authors writing novels about furniture? I think that the New Critics in particular codified this way of framing literary texts in the university sys-tem; the idea that those “furniture questions” were simply deemed inappropriate or if they were in any way interesting, they were dealt with in a footnote, in a critical edition, but the main game of literary analysis was going to be about prose style, not what was happening simultaneously in material culture, or what was happening in the publishing industry, or what was a bestseller at the time, or how books were being circulated and so on. It seems to me that because we were blindered from being able to see that for so long, that a lot of our prejudices about what is a literary experience were shaped through that kind of closed-down approach – “don’t wonder about the rest of the stuff, because that’s extraneous”. As we’re talking about history, this might also be the time to reflect on your critical response to the nostalgia associated with the Lit-lit mentality.
It’s something that I’m really interested in because, as I mention in Bring on the Books, the dangers of the nostalgia mode can be – to use the example of Fahrhenheit 451 – that it divides people through this idea that there are these book people, and they’re holding on to their books and they live in a world where telescreens are everywhere. I see too much of that Fahrenheit 451 mentality, “we are the book people, ... we few, we happy few”. I think that mindset can be really counter-productive because it creates a kind
of cult which in effect says to anyone who might want to join: “of course you know that everything that you think is culture is worthless”. I don’t think anything can be gained by that. I’m asked a lot to reflect on the future of reading and who’s actually going to be reading, so there’s a lot of interest in these ques-tions right now. And despite what other people might think, I really like reading books (laughs). They’re a great joy to me. I don’t otherwise sit around burning them when I’m not watching my wall screen of choice. I’m interested in the future of reading and who’s actually going to be reading. And the nostalgia mode which pretends that, once upon a time, before visual culture took over, there was real reading and real books and people had real experiences, it seems to me that that is grounded in the most pernicious assumptions about how culture works.
You also suggest that this nostalgia often focuses on the period, specifically, between 1880 and 1920. Why is that? Why does that period occupy such a central place in our literary imaginations, do you think?
Well, the clothes were better (laughs). No, I think a lot of it has to do with the stylishness of it – which again leads to this larger question about why Merchant-Ivory films were attacked as being “Laura Ash-ley movies” when they were first released. A lot of British critics thought that they represented this kind of heritage cinema that was very conservative and this didn’t really take into account that, obviously, there were other pleasures there as well. I mean, yes, it’s an E.M. Forster adaptation, but there’s also Tuscany, there’s also these spectacular clothes, there’s also the Puccini music on the soundtrack and so I think that’s part of that. I think it’s also about this dream of a pre-cinematic period when, in effect, novel writing and novel reading was the only game in town as it were or there was a kind of hegemony of literary fiction then which was later challenged. Even though there were movies obviously happening in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, there was no sense that movies were going in any way to challenge the preeminence of the great British novel and I think that’s a big part of that nostalgia. What’s interesting about Chariots of Fire, for instance, even though it’s not a literary adaptation, in many ways the opening elegy – where they’re there and they’re celebrating this bygone period of empire – captures I think many of the assumptions about the period, say, between 1880s and 1920, which is that there were these halcyon days before the corruption of the twentieth century took place and there was a literariness that went unchallenged. But it also really comes back around to my smart-ass answer: it does have to do with the look of it, the sense that there was a sort of stylishness about that. I think you can’t discount that. – Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris would summarize all that, right?
Yes, exactly, it’s good you brought that up. That’s what it’s all about. In many ways, that’s a very enter-taining summary of the appeal of that vibe – because Hemingway and Fitzgerald were obviously these literary gods and you want to go back and experience their world vicariously through the film.
E-readers and the Consolidation of Popular Literary Culture
Seeing that your book has been out for some time now and that new media and popular culture (not to mention the wider economy) are changing rapidly (Oprah no longer has a book club on
television, Borders has closed and so on), I was wondering if you would already want to update or modify your own argument. Have things changed already?
You’re right, certain things have changed, but in many ways, they’ve just morphed into something that accomplishes the same thing as before far more effectively. Let’s use Oprah’s Book Club as an exam-ple. She did shut down the Book Club, but now she’s brought it back again – as Book Club 2.0. What I think is so fascinating about this, and part of why the next book that I’m writing is largely about e-reader culture, is that so much of what used to happen on the book club television show is now part of the tech-nology, so you can physically read along with Oprah. Previously you could watch TV, and Oprah would offer you advice about how to read the featured selection. Then there was the next step, where you could go to the Oprah Bookclub website and you could see what authorities had to say about it in their reading log and how you should be reading. But with Book Club 2.0, if you have a Kindle reader, for instance, and you download the Oprah e-book edition of that title, then you have her annotations in your copy, as it were, you can see what her favorite passages are and you can see her reflections as you click on it, so you could say that much of what was happening then has become that much more sophisticated and streamlined, so reading along with Oprah is now literally there on the page. One of the reasons my next project is devoted to e-reader culture is that so much of what I was talking about in regard to adaptation films, superstore bookstores, television book clubs and all that – all ends up on the same screen on the e-reader. The screen on which you read The English Patient is the same screen where you’re going to watch the adaptation, and it’s the same screen where you’re going to go to Amazon or Good Reads to see what other customers said about it. All of the above is now present on the same device, which has its own “media ecology” because that device is a screen, a multi-media archive, and a portal to the internet. To put it another way, the device is a superstore, a film screen, a television screen, the printed page, and the sites to engage multiple reading communities, all in one place. So it represents the perfect consolidation of the things that I was talking about in Bring on the Books.
This also ties into what you were saying in Bring on the Books about us turning into “reader/view-ers”, I imagine.
I pose the question in the first chapter: in what form do you take your Jane Austen? Once upon a time, if you were going to have a Jane Austen experience, you had to read the novel and that was all there was to it. And now so many people who consider themselves Jane Austen fans might be taking their Austen in televisual form, in cinematic form, you know, whether they watch Lost in Austen or Pride
and Prejudice or whatever – there’s this sense of the almost complete interchangeability of these media.
There are currently just under a hundred titles at Amazon that feature Darcy or Mr. Darcy, all extensions of Pride and Prejudice. So the film could lead you back to the book or vice versa, there isn’t the sense of one being massively different from the other and that’s what I was trying to get at with this readers as viewers or reader/viewers. And you’re right, that’s something that I’m now trying to develop in my account of e-readers because, in effect, they’re on the same screen where, you know, the roles of reader, viewer, listener are all activated simultaneously in the same way that in alternate reality games they often use the term viewer/user/player. It seems to me that with the e-reader in hand, they’re a reader,
they’re a listener, they’re a viewer, they’re a curator all at the same time. The other argument I’m making about the e-reader is that rather than getting distraction, which leads to increasingly shorter narrative formats, the e-reader in effect is one of those technologies which enables – along with the DVD-box set – increasingly longer narrative formats. In the case of a quality television serial, a television program no longer takes an hour, or half an hour, but seventy or eighty hours of continuing narrative demanding the kind of close scrutiny demanded by literary fiction. If you look at a program like House of Cards, for instance, it seems to me that television viewers in effect are increasingly encouraged to watch television
novelistically if that makes sense. So that’s also part of the development I’m describing – how is it that
sophisticated long-form narrative is no longer medium specific and writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon and Tom Stoppard are now writing directly for television.
On behalf of the readers of Image & Narrative, let me thank you for your time, Jim, and say that we are all eagerly looking forward to the book on e-readers you’ve been describing.
Jim Collins is a professor of film theory, postmodern studies and digital culture at the University of Notre Dame. His e-mail address is collins.3@nd.edu
Ben De Bruyn is a member of the MDRN group and a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at KULeuven. His e-mail address is ben.debruyn@arts.kuleuven.
Endnotes
1. See Jim Collins, “Reading, in a Digital Archive of One’s Own”, PMLA 128.1 (2013), pp. 207-12.
2. See Pieter Verstraeten and Ben De Bruyn, “De revanche van de populaire cultuur. Literatuur, nieuwe media en smaak”, TNTL 128.2 (2012), pp. 160-82 and Ben De Bruyn, “Eten! Lezen! Reizen! Traditie, toerisme en lifestyle bij Bart van Loo en Geerten Meijsing”, Nederlandse Letterkunde 17.3 (2012), pp. 204-24.
3. For my take on Price’s work, see Ben De Bruyn, “How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price” (re-view), Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 5 (2013), pp. 100-103.
