this morning I read an essay written by Jay Isaac, a painter and instagram mutual of mine. in the essay, he discusses the situation of the fine artist under the capitalist ruling class, how the job of contemporary artists is essentially the creation of luxury consumer products, and how that task requires complicity in the neocolonialist genocide and resource extraction that buttresses the global capitalist system. Isaac succinctly lays all this out so as to provide a foundation for rallying workers in the creative industries to imagine ways of noncompliance outside that framework.
since I’m not a painter or any other kind of fine artist, the particulars of that problem, while of interest, and cause for solidarity, don’t exactly translate to what I face as a writer. but as I’m striving to in some way participate in the business of publishing, since I believe an artist does have a duty to at least try to interface with the public of their time, it would be useful to particularize, since I am not interested in either allowing my work to legitimize The System or in bending myself into the shape demanded by such a System, as so many careerist writers do nowadays.
the visual arts have long been entangled with the desires of the ruling class. one need only think of the paradigmatic patronage of the Medicis to see how entwined the history of painting and sculpture are with the highest stratum of society. literature, and specifically novels, have a more complex relationship to social class. in theory, reading is a widely accessible form of artistic engagement; in practice, the ability to read novels, especially those novels that partake in the high cultural tradition (value neutral: not saying these novels are necessarily “better,” not right now at least) requires, at minimum, literacy, and usually a working familiarity with the history of (western) ideas, which, prior to (and after) the middle of the 20th century, was unavailable to the vast majority of people. not to mention the leisure time to read them. if painting is the emblematic artform of the highest social classes, then novels are the bourgeois artform par excellance. and like the bourgeoisie, novels occupy an ambivalent position, equally liable to undermine traditions as they are to cozy up with power when it suits them.
that’s all very philosophical, and not where I’m trying to go right now. in practical considerations of the nature of publishing nowadays, let us consider Penguin Random House, the biggest, by a big margin, of the Big Five publishing houses. Penguin Random House is owned by Bertelsmann, a German multinational media conglomerate. “German multinational conglomerate” should be setting off alarm bells in your head, and rightfully so here: despite painting itself as a Christian publishing company that aided resistance to the Nazis in order to be granted a publishing license by the Allies after the war, C. Bertelsmann Verlag was the number one supplier of printed media to the Wehrmacht. the man in charge of Bertelsmann at the time, Heinrich Mohn, was a supporting member of the SS; his son, Reinhard Mohn, was responsible for transforming the company into the international behemoth it is today. the number one book publisher in the US is owned by a conglomerate that lied about its support for the Nazi war machine as late as 2002, when Bertelsmann was forced to apologize.
(tangentially, another subsidiary of Bertelsmann, BMG, recently cut ties with Roger Waters over Waters’ criticism of Israel. Bertelsmann really loves running cover for fascism.)
that’s all only one example of course, but an illustrative one. HarperCollins is, as everyone knows, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. Macmillan is owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, another German company with a Nazi past. it is only natural that corporations trend towards a corporatist vision of the world.
none of this is to say that everything published by these companies is inherently fascist. I might argue that there are certain ideological inertias that would work to prevent something truly revolutionary from being published—it’s here that I should acknowledge that I haven’t yet read Dan Sinykin’s recent Big Ficiton, about the effect that the conglomerate era has had on what kinds of works get published. but fiction, done right, is elusive, tricksterish, undefangable, a double agent in the offices of publishing executives. Pynchon calls it “the ever-subversive medium,” a characterization I want to believe in, despite the myriad works being published nowadays that seem so eager to legitimize the corrupting influence that corporate agendas have on the human spirit.
there are many small independent publishing outfits putting out what I assume is interesting work: I admit I’m not very good at “keeping up” with what’s being published. perhaps I should change that; perhaps I should also try my own hand at publishing, at building alternatives to the corporatist model that’s dominated literature for the past 70 years.
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