RSSTom McCarthy, “Publishing? It’s an Art Form,” The Times 23 June 2007
When mainstream publishers rejected his novel as too literary, Tom McCarthy turned to the art world. It took success in the US to make them come running
A few years ago I was invited to a dinner for young British novelists at the ICA. The other guests were for the most part successful published writers — unlike myself back then. The talk was of lucrative three-book deals with major publishers, review coverage, agents — anything, in fact, but literature.
When I steered the conversation with a couple of my neighbours that way, I discovered why: they were both indifferent to, and largely ignorant of, literary history. Sure, they’d read a book or two by E. M. Forster or Jane Austen back at college — but Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Sterne, Cervantes? Forget it. I did end up having a great conversation about Bataille and Sade, but it was with one of the institute’s curators.
A year or so later I found myself back at the ICA, doing a ten-day project. In a room resembling a James Bond villain’s headquarters, I had 40 assistants cut up and project on to the wall text-fragments from radio, newspapers and the internet, which were then reassembled, read into a microphone and broadcast around London by FM.
The idea was to put into action ideas about viral media developed in the Sixties by the novelist William Burroughs, and to mix these with Nabokov’s notions of encrypted information, overlaying allusions to the crypt-architecture of Sophocles’ Antigone. In short, it was completely literary — but it was hosted by an art venue, written about intelligently by the art press and attended almost exclusively by art “people”, who completely got it. Why? Because, unlike their counterparts in the publishing world, they’ve read Burroughs and Nabokov, and know about the important role that Antigone plays in the thought of philosophers from Hegel to Derrida to Zizek.
Art people are literate. When Margarita Gluzberg, who recently exhibited to much praise at the Paradise Row gallery, describes the thought behind her drawings, she turns to Madame Bovary. Rut Blees Luxemburg, discussing her photographs hanging in Tate Modern, talks about Hölderlin. I know at least two artists who have done work based on Huysmans’s Against Nature, and countless others whose images grapple with the labyrinthine architecture of Robbe-Grillet’s novels. The art world, it seems, is the place not just where literature is understood, but also where it is creatively developed, carried forward.
This paradox played out for me directly. By the time I did my ICA cut-up project, I’d finished writing my novel Remainder. But no mainstream press would touch it, deeming it “too literary”. Eventually the art publisher Metronome Press distributed a limited edition through art venues; the literary press picked up on it; then the editor-in-chief at Vintage in New York decided to do a mass-market US edition — at which point a couple of the mainstream British publishers who had rejected it changed their minds and started making offers. Unimpressed, I let a good, new independent, Alma Books, do the mass-market UK edition — a publisher that, maybe not coincidentally, also prints books by and about artists.
None of this is new, perhaps. Literature and art have always looked to one another when they want to reinvigorate themselves. Surrealism developed through an extended dialogue between the two forms. Futurism did the same, and the fallout from its image-derived concrete poetry on these shores led to Vorticism, which in turn, through Pound and Eliot, shaped modern poetry.
Nowadays, though, the traffic seems to flow one way only. While artists and curators still draw inspiration from writers, publishing has dumbed itself down. Marketing departments, not editors, rule the roost. Whereas a host of important art venues receive regular core-funding from the Arts Council, and are consequently able to support work that is not necessarily commercial, no such boon is accorded publishers wanting to promote challenging writing. Even in market terms, the playing field is uneven: where the UK art market is driven by no more than 50 very well-informed collectors, every schmoe is a book buyer. The point is elitist, and possibly reactionary, but true. When lowest-common-denominator logic dictates editorial policy, bookshops fill up with the literary equivalent of Athena posters.
This, of course, leaves a literature-shaped gap. And it’s being filled: in part by a few brave independent publishers, but to a larger extent by art presses. Examples are everywhere: the art press Bookworks has just commissioned a series of novels to be guest edited by the artist-writer Stewart Home; the art publisher Sternberg Press recently won acclaim from the TLS for Bedlam, a novel by Jennifer Higgie, the editor of the art-mag Frieze; Metronome continues to publish novels exclusively by artists.
These people have no desire to become mainstream publishers: they are content to stay within the art world — where, they reason, the informed readership is. When the limited edition of Remainder started to pick up momentum, Waterstone’s asked if it could stock the book. Metronome refused, replying: “If people want it, they can go to the ICA.”