Commercial Literary Culture

Jim Neilson Commercial Literary Culture Publishing Although literary scholars have begun exploring how dominant social groups maintain privilege and achieve ideological hegemony through cultural products (as well as how subordinate groups sometimes appropriate and subvert this hegemony), they have largely ignored the vast apparatus that provides them with literary texts—commercial literary culture. The nature of the publishing industry has contributed to this neglect. With negotiations between agents, authors, and editors occurring in private, and with the details of sales and distribution often relegated to trade journals and corporate documents, the process by which books are selected, prepared, and circulated is difficult to investigate in any but an anecdotal manner . The fragmentary and ephemeral nature of the review process also hinders a systematic understanding of the reception of texts and the development of critical reputation. Consequently, the scholarly work done in this area has focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has overlooked contemporary Uterary culture. Because of this neglect, the most significant examination of the workings ofcontemporary literary culture remains Richard Ohmann's twenty-year old essay, "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 19601975 ." Laying out the process that determines the critical fate of contemporary novels, Ohmann finds that to reach "pre-canonical" status , a novel must first be selected by an agent and editor. (In twentyseven years, Viking allegedly has pubUshed one unsolicited manuscript out of 135,000 submissions, Random House one out of 60,000 [Rodden 58]. The odds ofhaving an unsoUcited manuscriptpublished have been calculated at almost 30,000 to 1 [Unsworth]. Even if these figures are inflated, they nonetheless reveal the important gate-keeping role played by literary agents and editors.) Next, a book must be promoted by a publishing house's publicity department, chosen by a review editor (especially the one at the Sunday New York Times Book Review), read by New York metropolitan book buyers (whose patronage is necessary for commercial success), and written about by critics at gate-keeper intellectual journals. Ultimately, to reach pre-canonical status, a book must, after passing through these gate-keeper journals , be analyzed by academic critics and taught by college teachers. This model is neither a permanent nor an all-encompassing description of the process ofcritical reception. The vagaries of the mar- 72 the minnesota review ket (the fate of the NYTBR, the increasing marginalization of literature, the development of new technologies, etc.) can change the specifics of Ohmann's model; likewise, literary reputations may develop outside this scheme. Indeed, the mass media regularly feature stories about the unlikely success of an obscure title that, against all odds and with virtuaUy no publicity and reviews, becomes a bestseller (just as they often report on determined individuals who achieve fame and fortune against tremendous odds). Nonetheless, Ohmann's outline remains an accurate model of how, in general, contemporary novels gain cultural sanction. Ohmann does not, however, identify the mechanisms within commercial literary culture that marginalize radical discourse. Analysis ofhow a centrist ideology is reproduced withinthe mass media is explained most cogently in Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. To Herman and Chomsky, the media function as a propaganda system that "inculcate[s] individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures ofthe larger society" (1). Information conveyed by the media is effectively censored because it must pass through a set of news filters: (A) the size, concentrated ownership, and profit orientation of mass media firms; (B) advertising as primary income source; (C) reliance upon information provided and "experts" funded by government and business; (D) "flak" used to discipline the media; and (E) anticommunism. Since in both the publication and reception of texts commercial literary culture functions within and depends upon the mass media, and is thus subject to similar institutional strictures, Herman and Chomsky's propaganda modelcan help explain how contemporary literature is shaped by, received within, and appreciated for its adherence to a liberal-pluralist ideology. Like so much else in American commerce, the publishing industry has been increasingly corporatized and its ownership increasingly concentrated. Of the major independent hardcover book publishers circa 1981, only W.W. Norton; Farrar, Strauss & Giroux; Houghton Mifflin...