The Smith Myth
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: Art is slow to clean out its ears. Most of the time, you’re better off talking to rocks. At least they don’t pretend to listen.
Aphorism of the Day II: Paint only dries when you’re not watching.
I came across another central literary misconception while reading The Globe and Mail this morning, what I’ve been calling the Myth of Compositional Autonomy.
“This [the importance of a writer’s relationship with their readers] may well be true but it’s problematic. I’m concerned about the slow and subtle shift in attitude that constant marketing may effect in writers. Once you are in charge of your own promotion and sales, you cannot help think of your audience as a market, and a market must be pleased. Writers should never think about their audience – they should never worry that their ideal demographic (say, women over 45 living outside large cities) won’t get the learned reference or will be nauseated by the torture scene. Art is not a product like any other.”
Logically, the problem here is one of crude equivocation: you blur ‘audience’ with ‘market,’ and suddenly ‘writing for your audience’ becomes ‘writing for money,’ and conversely, ‘writing for nobody’ becomes ‘writing for something other than money’–which is to say (deep, reverential breath), Art.
Writing, as communication, is about audiences, period. To write is to write to, and no amount of pretending will make it otherwise. So the question becomes one of who is Smith telling us we need to write to? Nobody is simply incoherent, simply because the writer is always in the room.
What Smith is saying is that the writer must only think of themselves, what moves them, provokes them, and so on. Since every writer, no matter how hard they pretend otherwise, belongs to a demographic, what Smith is saying is that every writer must write for people like themselves. As indeed they do.
Now this may have been well an fine in the 20th Century, when something like a ‘general audience’ still existed in the developed world. In the course of writing for the likeminded you could be relatively certain that your fiction would reach dissenting audiences–people who could actually be challenged as opposed to confirmed. Your work could do double duty as high-end entertainment for some, and assumption stressing literature for others.
In other words, you could use resemblance as your primary criterion for what was literary, and still reliably produce literary effects. The ‘Smith myth’ was a relatively benign way for literary writers and readers to congratulate themselves for their moral, intellectual, and aesthetic superiority–and actually get some literary work done.
Not so much nowadays. More and more we find ourselves living in an e-Harmony world, where market segmentation and preference algorithms are balkanizing audiences according to their interests and values.
This is why I argue that the form of the literary has been disconnected from the real world consequences, why you see so many writers referring to Ideal Philistines, people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading their works, but would be challenged, were they to.
And as always I remain mystified: everyone knows that we’re living through the greatest communications revolution in the history of the human species, and here we have this set of nested institutions–the ones most prone to tout their critical credentials, no less–simply assuming that, despite the drastic technological transformation of their social context, simply repeating the old forms will produce the same results.
What could be more obvious than the fact that literary fiction has become ‘just another genre,’ a marketing category primarily distinguished by its hypocritical pomposity?
The Age of Accidental Literature is over. Writing for your audience can mean any number of things, some positive, others negative. The bottom line is that you need to know who you’re writing to if you’re going to have any hope of challenging their assumptions. Writing for yourself assures apologia and cultural irrelevance. You need to game audiences. Which means you need to abandon the milky world of literary fiction, and dive face first into the world of commercial genre.
Three Pound Brain 
Netflix. Whenever you make this argument, I think of Netflix: by telling Netflix what I liked in the past, it uses correlation algorithms to figure out what movies I haven’t watched I’m likely to enjoy thanks to others like me with similar tastes.
But yeah, it also applies to books. You don’t even have to be online. I remember one day in my local Borders when I was looking through the fantasy section, and there was a sign that said: “You like Martin? Try the following authors: Bakker… etc”
Works man. $$$
Now, the question for authors should become “how do I trick those algorithms so that I can reach a new audience?”
Also, are there any dissenting views on Bakker’s argument? Is it possible that he’s just completely wrong and we’re actually moving towards a world where greater access promotes viewing/reading things one might not simply out of boredom or morbid curiosity? Is there a kind of equilibrium here? Or is there so much of the stuff we want that it becomes increasingly tedious to leave our comfort zones?
One interesting way to achieve this would be provide an algorithm that presents the user with items they are “likely to hate”. Of course this could be re-worded to be “likely to challenge” or “betcha won’t like this” or “things outside your comfort zone”. People tend to take umbrage when told they are stuck in a comfort zone
I keep a journal. Most of my friends do. We all have many and sometimes different reasons, and we tend to be liberal with sharing them often going as far as trading them amongst each other. Keeping a journal is undoubtedly ‘writing for nobody’ or ‘writing for yourself’ or ‘writing for something other then money’. At worst it is a form of propaganda, lies we tell about ourselves to ourselves. Sometimes it reveals to a future you the stumbling myopia of a past you. At best it highlights the hair-brained assumptions you make about yourself and those around you.
My point being that ‘writing for yourself’ – it may be more apt to call it ‘writing to yourself’ – has merit. The hypocrisy comes from selling your journals I think – writing for something other than money and then marketing it.
“This is why I argue that the form of the literary has been disconnected from the real world consequences”
Perhaps it is that the literary is no longer truly literary but a simulation of something like literature. This would explain the disregard for cause and effect.
Even worse, this entire diatribe may be working to hide the fact that all writing is inherently disconnected from ‘the real world’, consequences and all. Perhaps all writing is simply the realization of the hope that some day someone somewhere will listen to us.
Also, isn’t the very act of publishing something “writing for money”? By that definition all published work (“literary” or otherwise) is writing for money and therefore not art.
So to extend this line of reasoning, in order for any work to be considered “literary” or “art” it needs to be provided to the public free of charge which is very easy to achieve in the electronic world we now live in.
Somehow I don’t think this is going to happen though 🙂
This is the main reason I keep separate the creative processes I enjoy (making music, writing, etc) from the income I depend on. It is difficult for me to genuinely enjoy doing something that I am dependent on for income, and even stranger to put a price tag on something that I really put my heart into. Then again, I am – generally speaking – pretty okay with being a poor bum. It should be that the widest audience is the one that doesn’t have to whip out their pocketbooks for your work, the problem is that most people these days don’t believe it’s worth their time if they didn’t have to pay for it.
To be clear, I do not begrudge those who do have an income based on their creative endeavors. My problem is the market/marketing itself, not so much the merchant.
Serious publishers still believe it their duty to publish (what they consider) the highest quality stuff within the realm of Literature. That is why they are willing to publish certain books and authors at a loss. Publishing literary work is seldom about the money. It is more about the honor that accrues to those who do it. If creating art is your goal, then focus on exploring humanity and finding something interesting to say. If publishing for money is your goal, then focus on commercial story telling, market segmentation, pleasing an audience, etc. etc.
Write what you enjoy reading. Otherwise, you won’t enjoy the writing, and no one will enjoy the reading.
‘Art as exspression
Not market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations
Given the same state of integrity
It will surely help us along’
Natural Science – by Rush (lyrics by Neil Peart)
If, say, Jonathan Franzen turned in a genre fiction manuscript to his publishers, what would happen (besides the Earth reversing it’s orbit)?
If Franzen wrote a fantasy novel I think we’d see the “Atwood” affect, and it would be labelled “speculative fiction” instead of fantasy.
I would agree with you, insofar as the classics I steeped myself in as a youth, were well written, well plotted and had three dimensional characters that drove the story. I still consider that the holy trinity of fiction writing, and find that most published authors are weak in at least one of them. But, I disagree that I should have to follow genre conventions order to be read. The only people who can write such stuff are those who would write it anyway.
Writing with clarity, purpose, wit, vivid characterization, and a good yarn ought to be enough. The problem lies in getting that kind of work in front of those who can do something with it, especially when they have never heard of you, and thousands of other writers who believe they are doing the same thing are clamoring for their attention.
Genres simply are audiences, populations with general affinities to certain narrative expectations. Concepts like ‘rules’ and ‘conventions’ are just the way we flatten all those people for the sake of cognitive convenience. What you’re literally saying is, Why should I have to reach out to audiences to find an audience?
Genres are opportunities, not constraints. If aesthetic criteria you mention are the primary values, then what does the narrative idiom matter, so long as you’re reaching people who don’t already share the bulk of your attitudes? Otherwise, thinking that you can write with clarity, purpose, and so on, independent of reader’s expectations is simply an illusion of perspective, the fact that we have so much difficulty seeing the ways we ourselves are constrained (and therefore enabled). I’ve yet to meet a writer who didn’t read as he or she wrote! And I’ve yet to meet a writer who didn’t belong to some demographic.
You’re simply restating the Myth of Compositional Autonomy, the conceit that leads writers to think they somehow stand above or outside the normative webs that make culture possible. It’s the literary version of “Follow your heart.”
Hi. You refer to it as ‘should have to follor genre conventions’. Then also refer to it as a practical issue – those who can write are those who can write it (ie, if you can’t already, you can’t).
In terms of should, I don’t think a ‘should’ is being invoked here. Anyway, if there’s something that disrupts creativity is being forced (in a way creativity can’t dodge). This depends on what you want (cue a depends joke from Scott…)
In terms of ‘if you can’t already…’, I think that might be a feedback loop from the above. Ie, ‘If I can’t force myself to do this in an instant, I am incapable of doing it’. It might be possible to gravitate toward it over time, rather than like pushing a button. That option probably exists.
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Scott, I’m not sure I’d argue the overall point, but what do we write? What is the ‘THIS, amongst a trajillion other things, is THE thing we aught to get excited about in writing/reading this book!’ thing?
There’s so much shit going on in the real world, but none of it really gravitates around particular central hubs. Not that I can see, anyway.
Once you step outside of self indulgence, there seems to be nothing there to write about in particular – just millions of eco systems (natural or human made) nickel and diming along and gnawing at each other. Yeah, to the point where they invade countries for oil at some point and I know you rail against ‘write what you know’, but what the hell do I know, being in Australia, about being invaded over oil? Do I just make up some fantasy of how it goes? If so, will the only dissenting audience be the one who figures I don’t know shit about my subject?