The Author As Social Production

1. Superorganism

The general claim of Dan Sinykin’s blockbuster study Big Fiction is that the age of industry conglomeration has had a significant effect on the very nature of contemporary American literature. Increasingly accustomed to working with agents and other intermediaries, and subject to aggressive competition and marketing, authors are now induced to “internalize” the rules of the marketplace via acts of “anticipatory socialization” (10). As a result, Sinykin argues, to grasp this contemporary situation scholars need to do away with a particular “villain”: “the romantic author, the individual loosed by liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to acknowledge” (25). Because “conglomerate era fiction displays properties attributable not to any one individual but to the conglomerate superorganism” (12), the figure of the individual author is quite simply inadequate to its analysis. With its chain store buyers, literary agents, and publicists and marketing departments, conglomeration has eroded authorial autonomy. For writers working within these conditions, success depends “less on simply knowing the right people...and more on one’s capacity to accommodate in one’s work the demands of the system” (97). The “relatively autonomous author-editor duo” has given way to “the work of many hands” (99), while marketing “eroded the editor’s power” (99) toward a “systematic intelligence, a systematic authorship” (103).

The most extensive corroboration of Sinykin’s point would be found in Claire Squires’s UK-based book Marketing Literature (Palgrave). Published in 2007, it was one of the first major works applying techniques from book history to the contemporary scene. Squires drew upon her own experiences working in publishing, interviewed publishers, agents, and journalists, and consulted the trade press, bestseller lists, marketing materials, and reports by industry analysts. She used these resources to document changes in the British industry since the 1970s, including conglomeration and globalization, the demise of the Net Book Agreement, which had allowed publishers some control over retail prices, and the triumph of the literary agent and the book prize. Her primary concern is the waning of editorial control over literary publishing and, especially, the concomitant “striking intensification” of marketing activity (2). She focuses on the “marketing narratives” produced to sell books (2), and what leeway authors have had to shape those stories. With Big Fiction, Sinykin has written the most comprehensive account of the parallel US case.

Like Squires, an interest in what leeway authors have orients Sinykin’s thought, as he argues that fiction itself has become a way for writers to wrest a bit of control back. His most persuasive arguments concern the major formal literary effects of recent industry changes: the predilection toward hybrids between literary and genre fiction, and the rise of autofiction. He accounts for these as literary responses to commercial pressures, inseparable from a broader trend toward literary reflexivity, which finds racialized writers deploying “ironic multiculturalism” to skewer their own market positioning, and women turning to autofiction so that they might covertly describe the constraints they have faced within a male-dominated field (85). Fictional reflexivity is in essence one key means that authors have, here, of negotiating autonomy within the field as Sinykin sees it. Pierre Bourdieu similarly argued that reflexivity was central to the autonomous pole of literary production. As Gisèle Sapiro states in The Sociology of Literature, a brief overview of the field recently translated into English, autonomy is inherently characterized by “the principle of self-referentiality...the act of making reference to the history of the field” (28). One establishes authority through display of the capacity to grasp perfectly all the workings of the field, including one’s own positioning.

We might say then that Sinykin’s astute close readings of works...