I don’t know why I bothered with that question mark. Of course the internet is the future of the novel. It’s the future of almost everything. We have to remind ourselves that the web is not much more than ten years old, and that the revolution has only just begun. Think of where the automobile was after just ten years of existence, or the aeroplane, or moving pictures. And think of how far they’ve come since. We have seen, so far, only a tiny fraction of what the internet can and will do. But I’ve already seen more than enough to conclude that in my own field of interest, literature, the writing is on the wall for the traditional paper book.
I don’t say this in a spirit of glee or provocation. In fact I would be much happier if it were not the case. I love books. I love the way you can read them anywhere — on the bus, the plane, over dinner, in bed, racked out on the couch. I love the way you can flick ahead through them if you get bored, or flick back to check on stuff you missed. I love the way new ones smell different from old ones. Yet it isn’t hard to see how most of these things — with the exception of the odor thing — could be replicated electronically, with some kind of I-Pod-like device for downloaded text. Perhaps such a device exists already and I don’t yet know about it. In any case, those of us brought up on paper books, those of us with a sentimental attachment to them, will not be around forever. Pretty soon we’ll have to yield the floor to a generation of people for whom it’s at least as natural to read things off a screen as off a page. To them, the whole print thing, the whole concept of the hard copy, is likely to seem superfluous. One day our grandchildren will look back on the daily newspaper — that great wasteful slab of pulped flora that turns obsolete a mere day after its creation — the way we look back on such quaint historical objects as the penny-farthing, or the sheep-gut condom.
If the internet is not the future of the printed word, and therefore of the novel, then my name’s not Kirk Kinbote. In fact, I’ll go one step further: the novelist should want the internet to be the future of the novel. After all, what the novelist craves above anything else is control. And publishing your own stuff on your own site gives you unqualified control over it. There is, first of all, an absolute guarantee of publication. There will be no intermediaries. Nobody will alter a word of what you have written. No grinning editor will propose “working with you” on the text. Debates regarding punctuation need not be entered into. Nobody will insert any redundant comma, or remove any necessary one. Apostrophes will not be relocated from where they belong to where they don’t. You can control line-length, font, point-size. Any genuine writer is bound to be tantalized by these possibilities. Of course, there’s the burning question of how you’re going to make money out of the thing. This is a serious question, and I’ll get back to it eventually. But apart from that gargantuan caveat, web publication looks in many ways like a novelist’s paradise.
But hang on. Isn’t there an important sense in which the rise of web publication would spell disaster for the novel? Because a published novel, in the traditional sense, isn’t just a novel that’s been printed on paper, is it? It’s a novel that’s been vetted, that’s passed muster. The publisher, the gatekeeper, has lovingly hand-selected it from a chaotic bale of far lesser manuscripts. Quality control has been exerted. And without quality control, all we’d have would be an undifferentiated sludge of material, about 99% of which is bound to be worthless, right? Isn’t that all the web is? An unsifted mass of largely valueless information, with nobody in authority to guide us through it?
It’s a sound argument, in principle. But it only works in practice if the quality controllers know what they’re doing. And in my own country, Australia, there is ample evidence to suggest that they don’t. There is ample evidence, in fact, to suggest that they’re either asleep at the wheel or brain dead. Publishing in this country is growing more fatuous by the day. A good half of the books published here are autobiographies of cricket players, or celebrity memoirs that would be uninteresting even if their authors could write, or reflections by former newsreaders on the difference between Generation X and Generation Y, or barbecue cookbooks by half-assed TV personalities. (If they actually are half-assed, having lost an appendage or two in the course of some unnecessary but “inspiring” journey to the top of some indomitable mountain, then so much the better, as long as they’ve got an arm left to write the memoir.)
What matters about books these days is whose face is on the front cover, not what is written inside. In this sense at least, the web — that supposedly anarchic no-go zone of unfiltered information — is in fact a rather more rigorous enforcer of quality control than our traditional publishers are. Your web page can look as fancy as you like, but if it doesn’t deliver on content, people will hit the back button. By some strange law of publishing physics, people will, under certain circumstances, pay for unreadable tripe; but under no circumstances will they read it for free.
As for the highbrow stuff, one of the most celebrated Australian novels of recent times had a glaring error of grammar in its second sentence. I repeat: in its second sentence. Is it trivial to mention this? Or does the fact that no editor picked up this howler reinforce the point that the editor as gatekeeper, as fastidious guarantor of quality control, is these days a purely mythical figure. If a publishing house can’t even guarantee adherence to simple rules of grammar, its imprimatur is worthless. For all the help his editors gave him, this guy’s novel might just as well have been self-published on the web.
Here’s a pertinent anecdote for you. At a recent and excruciating social function, I happened to find myself seated next to a fellow who was, and as far as I know still is, employed by a globally reputable publishing house as a senior editor of fiction. Finding him generally unimpressive, I generously raised the subject of fiction, so as to let him riff freely on a topic he presumably knew something about. I mentioned Catch-22. It swiftly emerged that he’d never heard of it. He thought I meant The Catcher in the Rye. When I subsequently referred to Thomas Wolfe he thought I was talking about Tom Wolfe.
Having gatekeepers of that caliber is, I would vigorously contend, worse than having no gatekeepers at all. An idiot like that is very likely to reject good books under the impression that they’re bad, and — even worse — to publish bad books under the impression that they’re good. And if you publish shit and tell people it’s good, you’ll rapidly devalue the currency. The asinine rise of the marketers — i.e. those geniuses who slap fancy covers on dud books and hype them obscenely beyond their actual worth — might well deliver short-term profits, but only at the cost of ensuring long-term catastrophe. The public will buy one unreadable “masterpiece”, or maybe two, but after sustaining a few serious burns they’ll stop buying books altogether. And then the culture starts to rot. Publishers make less money, and the less money they make, the less willing they’ll be to publish anything remotely risky. Pretty soon they’ll be publishing nothing but cookbooks by one-legged ex-Rugby stars, with the odd new novel by some established dinosaur tossed on as a bit of artistic garnish. A literary culture run by people without brains might just conceivably survive. But one run by people without balls is doomed.
Something like this has already happened in Australia. That notional class of literati which is supposed to police our book culture, weeding out the bad books and publishing only the good ones — having first rid these of any and all grammatical howlers — has died out, if indeed it ever existed at all. No doubt this has something to do with the thinness of the country’s population base, combined with our long tradition of settling for second-best in intellectual affairs. In any case, the result is that the novel in this country is effectively dead as a form. Yes, novels still get published here. But they’re like Wile E. Coyote running on a subtracted piece of ground, treading air and not yet knowing it. If anything remotely original and exciting ever gets published here again, it will be entirely by accident. Again I have to point to the relative merits of cyberspace. It’s not enough to say that the web, in such a climate, is just as good as the traditional publishers. It’s better, because there’s no material of which it’s afraid. It excludes nothing. Which is, I repeat, better than excluding just about everything on grounds that have nothing to do with quality.
For a culture to actually be a culture, for it to live, publishers need to invest in more than just the established brand names. They need to seek out new and different and risky stuff as well. They need to publish books that might fail. They need to publish, to say it plainly, a lot of books, so that we get the kind of critical mass from which, if we’re lucky, one or two excellent and lasting things will emerge. American culture takes a lot of shit, but what other culture could sustain a young novelist as prodigiously talented but downright perverse as David Foster Wallace? Certainly the thousand-page Infinite Jest would have got short shrift from any publisher here. Wallace would have got it straight back by return post, in a crate, at his own considerable expense. Only in a culture as broad-shouldered, as robust, as America’s could a writer like Wallace thrive. There’s only one other culture from which he might conceivably have emerged: the culture of the web, in which true talent, no matter how weird it is, always seems to find some kind of audience.
Remember when The Beatles, not long before splitting up, founded Apple Corp., the idealistic publishing/recording/filmmaking company that would — so the argument went — forever eliminate the artist’s degrading obligation to go down on his knees in some suit’s office (probably yours, sneered Lennon at some unlucky journalist) in order to get his stuff out to the public? Apple of course failed to deliver on that dream, because its employees were promptly buried under an avalanche of submissions. But think of the web as one giant and unswampable Apple Corp., capable of publishing an infinite supply of creative work, without the mediation of those parasitic and vaguely contemptible middlemen who have until now stood between the artist and the public. If the idea of infinity scares you, I can only repeat that it is far preferable to entrusting our cultural future to the personal tastes of some bureaucrat who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, but thinks that he does. The question of which books will survive, and which ones won’t, is far too important to left to a handful of marketers and semi-lettered literati. The public has to be in on it to some extent.
It’s probably time for a confession. Don’t get me wrong: this confession does not alter the truth-value of the foregoing arguments. Everything I have said remains watertight, objectively ship-shape. But here is the confession. I am a novelist myself, and for a depressing year or so I have attempted, without raising a single spark of interest, to sell my masterwork to this country’s moribund publishers. And I tell you, there is no experience more surreal than submitting one’s stuff, again and again, to the burnt-out remnants of an industry which, although nominally concerned with the business of publishing books, has essentially given up on the whole notion. It’s like shouting into a void.
And so I have indignantly published my book online, where it is freely available to anyone who wants to read it. Which is to enter another kind of void — a bigger but more democratic one, which has no prima facie aversion to new material. On the contrary: it wants you. Or at any rate, it doesn’t not want you. It wants stuff. People want the stuff that’s on it. Some of them will come to your page. If it delivers what they want, they will stay. If it doesn’t, they will go. Most of them will go. Some of them will stay. If enough of them stay, then maybe your site will amount to something.
And that’s about all I have to offer on the topic. I think I said, back at the start of this article, that I would come back to the subject of money. I lied, sort of. I really haven’t worked that bit out yet. All I can do is propose, without a great deal of conviction, that anything that’s any good will eventually draw some kind of audience, and that anything that draws an audience will also, eventually, make some kind of money. That’s my working hypothesis. We’ll see how it goes.
Kirk Kinbote, operating from behind at least a brace of pseudonyms, was the key creative and design force behind http://www.adancingbear.com/, home of the online novel “A Dancing Bear.”
March 31st, 2009
Comments Off
