So let’s say you wanted to read something by the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Cl??zio. You might go to Amazon, where you’d find that, aside from four books published by noncommercial presses — including only two of his novels, Wandering Star, published by Curbstone Press in 2004, and Onitsha, published by Bison Books in 1997, along with The Round, and Other Cold, Hard Facts, a collection of stories published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003 — there’s almost nothing available in the US. (Really, you’ve got to feel good for Curbstone Press at this moment.) His novel Fever was published by Atheneum back in 1966 but is now out of print, as is Flood (1968) and The Interrogation (1964). Jonathan Cape brought out two books in the 70’s — The Giants (1975) and The Book of Flights (1972) — and it looks like you can still get a used copy of those, with the price no doubt climbing by the minute.
I hate to say I told you so, but isn’t this exactly what Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, meant by saying that American literary culture is “too isolated, too insular” to participate in the literary conversation carried on among other world cultures? (And is it clear now why he said it?) Le Cl??zio isn’t simply a major French novelist, with 30 books to his credit and an early history of formal experimentation, considered by some critics to be the greatest living French writer; this is that rarity, a French writer who has spent time in the US and apparently has at least one active translator. So why is he unknown to us?
I argued not long ago that books are central to the evolution of the human species, since they move us from individual to collective forms of memory and innovation. But that only holds true if we view books as something more than a business. In the small Ohio village where I usually teach, it’s common to say that the bookstore is (or, sadly, was) something more than a business: it’s a community resource that enriches and broadens all our lives. Publishers hold a similar public trust, I would argue. Let’s face it, there are easier ways to make a buck than to try to sell literature to the American public. So why have U.S. publishers bought the corporate model and lost sight of their broader role? Do they believe that selling bad books will save them at a time when the whole industry faces an uncertain future? My sense is that most editors and publishers didn’t get into it for the money, but because they love books. At this moment when the MBAs who have ruled American culture for the last 30 years seem to be drowning in evidence of their own incompetence (and threatening to drag us all down with them), wouldn’t it make sense to go back to an earlier model, in which we aspire toward some higher ideal than the fertilizing of our own ignorance?
Just asking.