The Problems of Isolation and Voice – Why We Should Brand Literature by Publisher and Not by Author
by Alex Pheby
The traditional image of the writer alone in their garret room, working under the influence of their muse and producing work to the dictates of their inner voice is not simply a cliché: it is a myth perpetuated during the selling of books. The publishing industry - particularly when it produces fiction – relies on the marketing of discrete, distinguishable and consistent brands. It delineates these brands by using editorial control over content and style to individuate a writer’s work. This individuation is vouchsafed by the invocation of the writer’s isolation from external influence and the commodification of their voice, establishing to the market that the authorial brand is reliable, unique and unalterable.
Does this branding constitute a natural foundation on which to build a model of artistic production? Is the publishing industry reflecting what is being produced by its writers, or is it manufacturing its own literature: one that sacrifices something in the writing to provide commodities that can be more effectively marketed and sold? In order to answer this question we must look at the two ideas involved – authorial isolation and the centrality of voice.
Despite its long standing currency, it would be easy to attack this essentially solipsistic idea of isolation from a philosophical standpoint – pointing out the discursive, ideological, and semiotic conditions and contexts under which all writing is produced – but such a move would be redundant because the writer, in a very concrete and practical sense, is never isolated in the first place. While the daily practice of writing is necessarily done alone the writer is always operating within a community, and a community in which people other than the writer have a say over the product that becomes produced.
Firstly, and perhaps most appropriately, this community includes the writer’s peers. Canonical examples of how writers come together to influence each other’s work are easy to find – Beckett and Joyce, the Bloomsbury Group, the Pre-Raphaelite poets, the London Writer Circle, the schools which grew up around academic departments such as the Inklings, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and their modern counterparts in creative writing departments all over the world, authors banding together to publish work such as the Fiction Collective (and its successor) – indeed, it is more difficult to think of writers who insisted on their own isolation, than those who made a conscious determination to come together. Writers have always surrounded themselves with other writers, shared their work and operated as support for each other. Even in the rare exceptions it is still almost impossible to imagine a successful writer that has not, at the very least, engaged with the writing of those people working around them, and addressed their own work to the wider literary culture. Isolation, in practice, is detrimental to a writer’s ability to write and to suggest otherwise is to make a fundamental mistake in understanding how writing works. It is a form of conversation and no useful conversation is possible without someone to talk to.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that writers never speak to each other, never read each other’s work for fear of being influenced, and, prior to the commercial exploitation of their work, maintain the hermetic self-reliance the myth suggests. The moment their work is submitted for commercial consideration other influences within the community become unavoidable.
In the modern publishing industry the first influence is the agent. Where it might once have been an agent’s role simply to represent the author to the publisher, freeing them from the onerous task of eating expensive lunches, now the agent is much more hands on. As my own agent David Smith puts it in his contribution to Edinburgh University’s Handbook of Creative Writing: “The chances are your novel is not quite ready for submission to publishers. You may think you have perfected it but it’s quite likely that your agent will suggest revisions. These are not so much aesthetic considerations as responses based on her experience of whatever consensus or prejudice is at large within publishing. Remember that your agent is talking to editors all the time – finding out what they’re buying, what they’re not buying, what they love and what they hate – and this enables her to build a fairly reliable picture of how any new novel might be received. So if your agent advises you to simplify a split narrative into a single voice, it’s probably because split narratives rarely find favour with publishers.” An agent is, at least in my agent’s opinion, in a position to dictate revisions of the text and not, importantly, on aesthetic grounds.
If and when a manuscript reaches a major publishing house another layer of influence is added: judgement is passed by an editor, and then another layer: that of the marketing team, and lastly that of a senior editor who controls the funding of any publication. They all have something to say about how the manuscript is written. And if the role of the editor is not always as interventionist as it was when Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish completely rewrote the ending to his story One More Thing, if a book is to get published it must meet the requirements they have of it.
So we can see that while the writer might want isolation there is certainly no getting it. Rather, there is an overabundance of influence, most noticeably from the commercial world. This is to say nothing of the expectations of the market and the readership the author internalises and draws upon when they make decisions about what they are going to write and how they are going to write it.
If this central idea of isolation is false, then, can the same be said of the concentration on the writer’s voice to which it is closely linked?
While the importance of an individual voice in the writing of literature is less easy to undermine than is that of a writer’s isolation, when we consider what type of literature relies most heavily on the voice, it becomes clear that not all forms of literary endeavour use, let alone rely on, an individuated voice. There is, for example, a history in literature of works which take as their aim the convincing occupation of other voices and where the emergence in the text of the writer’s own distinctiveness is considered to be counter-productive. Historical, satirical, political and allegorical fiction all concern themselves more with their treatment of subject than they do with expressing the author’s voice, but the skilful occupation of other voices is also central to all fictional creations of character and thus to the creation of drama within fiction. Yet, in the current market, this facet of practice – along with many other of the skills of fictional writing – is relegated to a subsidiary position behind the all important expression of the voice of the author. Those skills that are considered generic to the practice of writing are elided in favour of that aspect of it which can be considered most particular, most individuated and therefore most conducive to authorial branding.
While the author’s voice – depending on its flexibility – can successfully achieve almost anything (even when its presence is undesirable, as in the examples given above) the fetishisation of it, when it comes to an author’s commercial positioning, can seriously limit a writer’s practice. When a writer attempts to experiment, to move into other areas of interest, or deviate from what the market expects of them, unless their brand is very well established, they risk undermining their market identity. What is easier to sell is material that is consistent, does not deviate from established form and, particularly, can be tied in with the writer’s biography and so strengthen the brand. Consequently, this is what tends to find its way to publication. This is a definite artificial influence on literature, one which explains the continuing drift toward autobiographical literature.
So, it could be argued that the myth of isolation and the concentration on voice serve the function of ossifying the pre-existent conditions of the market, vouchsafing the integrity of certain named brands at the expense of allowing writing to develop. This results in the constant reiteration of what has been done before, and preserves the voices of those who already occupy the market against the intrusion of new forms in their own writing and even new writers. What development does exist acts not in the interests of the writing, but in the pursuit of volume sales.
What is the alternative? One possibility is that the responsibility for carrying the brand is switched from the author to the publisher. Rather than insisting on a homogeneity in their authors’ output, publishers could instead market their house (or an imprint within the house) as having a definite literary slant, one that is reflected in the books that they publish (it might be enough, in the current market, simply to express an interest in literary excellence). Rather than the current situation where a handful of enormous multi-national conglomerates attempt to encompass (unsatisfactorily) the entire literary spectrum - and by doing so stifle variety and experimentation - if there were numerous small houses each publishing different aspects of literary production, branding themselves and their imprints - and not their authors - by their editorial concerns, then these houses would become the focus for both readers and writers of the kind of material that is currently being stifled.
Under this model, the producers of literature would be freer to produce, readers would be able to make clearer and more informed selections, and the onus on branding would be placed where it more properly belongs, on the commercially more experienced and flexible publishers. Small publishers could, freed from the necessity of marketing each individual novel and author, rely on their niche and their reputation to compete with larger commercial publishers. Most importantly though, this would remove the obligation for writers to replicate material that had previously been marketed successfully. Freed from the concentration on the author as brand, the writing itself becomes a marketable commodity.
This is not
a model without precedent. In fact, up until quite recently, this was precisely
the model that was used in the UK publishing industry and which has only
been undermined by the creeping expansion of the market leaders and the
commodification of literature following the scrapping of the Net Book Agreement.
It is vital that small publishers investing in the idea of literary fiction
receive the support of writers and readers if there is to be a contrary
movement toward excellence in literature that hopes to redress the rapid
commercialisation of literary production.
