In your recently published book “Big Fiction,” you say that “corporatization” in publishing has changed writing and reading. How?
Until the 1950s, publishing houses were often owned by their founders. In the 1960s, larger companies that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with books began to buy up book publishers and subordinate everything to the profit motive. In the 1970s, inflation made books more expensive, but wages stagnated, so publishing had to change fundamentally – books became a much more economically valued commodity.
What did that mean?
First of all, a lot of comparison grids have been laid over the literature: Which existing book does a new one resemble? Rationalization of literature promotes conservative programming: you try to get more of what already exists and what has been successful. People tend not to take risks with something aesthetically new. This limits the possibilities for aesthetic progress.
Bad times for modern, enigmatic literature. But interestingly, you emphasize that corporatization also has good sides?
Yes – I find it interesting how some writers have still managed to assert themselves aesthetically within the confines of this new market. It seems like a dialectical process: We are talking here about the years in which corporate publishers published Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, great writers who, despite the constraints, still wrote important and successful books.
So the writers have also embraced the corporations? Let’s stay with Philip Roth for a moment.
Yes, Roth was, or became, as Christian Lorentzen has written, a great professional in this regard, who forged his career in harmony with the market – and who also worked with Andrew Wylie early on. . .
. . . perhaps the most important American literary agent today. . .
. . . who is notorious for his very aggressive way of getting the most out of his authors. Wylie got Roth to leave Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which made Roger Straus very angry at the time.
And is the change also reflected in Roth’s work? You write that by consolidating their publishing houses into corporations, authors tended to focus more on genre literature.
Well, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Roth had written what I consider to be his best novel, “The Counterlife.” At the time, FSG was an independent publisher that published postmodern authors like Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme – “The Counterlife” fit in very well. But it didn’t sell particularly well. After moving to Houghton Mifflin, Roth wrote books that were a little more market-friendly – and thus experienced his great renaissance in the 1990s. Although they were not yet genre literature to the extent that Cormac McCarthy wrote with his embrace of the Western or Toni Morrison with her embrace of the ghost story from the “Gothic Horror” genre.
Can you think of any more recent examples of such an embrace?
There is no better example than Colson Whitehead, I would say. His 1999 debut, The Intuitionist, was a noir crime thriller, and since then he has tried every genre – with immense success. He always did the right thing at the right time and won almost every award. For me, he is the consummate author of what could be called “literary genre” – a mixture of fiction and genre literature.
I just read his latest Harlem novel and think he’s also good at sampling great role models.
“The Intuitionist” is a kind of rewrite of Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.” “The Underground Railroad” is a kind of new version of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. Whitehead is very postmodern in this respect.
When you read your book, you might sometimes think that literature is created solely from a marketing perspective.
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