Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tim Parks
Title Page
Introduction
Part I: THE WORLD AROUND THE BOOK
Do We Need Stories?
Why Finish Books?
E-books are for Grown-ups
Does Copyright Matter?
The Dull New Global Novel
Reading It Wrong
Why Readers Disagree
Where I’m Reading From
Part 2: THE BOOK IN THE WORLD
What’s Wrong with the Nobel?
A Game without Rules
Most Favoured Nations
Writing Adrift in the World
Art That Stays Home
Writing without Style
Literature and Bureaucracy
In the Chloroformed Sanctuary
Writers into Saints
Part 3: THE WRITER’S WORLD
The Writer’s Job
Writing to Win
Does Money Make Us Write Better?
Fear and Courage
To Tell and Not to Tell
Stupid Questions
The Chattering Mind
Trapped inside the Novel
Changing Our Stories
Writing to Death
Part 4: WRITING ACROSS WORLDS
‘Are You the Tim Parks Who . . .?’
Ugly Americans Abroad
Your English Is Showing
Learning to Speak American
In Praise of the Language Police
Translating in the Dark
Listening for the Jabberwock
In the Wilds of Leopardi
Echoes from the Gloom
My Novel, Their Culture
Acknowledgements
Copyright
I’d just like to thank everybody who made this book what it is. Above all Hugh Eakin for all his thoughtful input and editing on every single piece, then Robert Silvers of course, Rea Hederman, and all the team at the NYRB, Liz Foley for believing in the project and the wonderful Harvill Secker editors for going over it so meticulously and sympathetically. Books are a joint effort. Many many thanks.
FICTION
Tongues of Flame
Loving Roger
Home Thoughts
Family Planning
Goodness
Cara Massimina
Mimi’s Ghost
Shear
Europa
Destiny
Judge Savage
Rapids
Cleaver
Dreams of Rivers and Seas
Sex is Forbidden (first published as The Server)
Painting Death
NON-FICTION
Italian Neighbours
An Italian Education
Adultery & Other Diversions
Translating Style
Hell and Back
A Season with Verona
The Fighter
Teach Us to Sit Still
Italian Ways
Should you finish every book you start?
How has your family influenced the way you read?
What is literary style?
How is the Nobel Prize like the World Cup?
Why do you hate the book your friend likes?
Is writing really just like any other job?
What happens to your brain when you read a good book?
As a novelist, translator and critic, Tim Parks is well-placed to investigate any questions we have about books and reading. In this collection of lively and provocative pieces he talks about what readers want from books and how to look at the literature we encounter in a new light.
Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since.
He is the acclaimed author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still and Italian Ways. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.
LET’S TACKLE ONE of the literary set’s favourite orthodoxies head on: that the world ‘needs’ stories. ‘There is an enormous need,’ Jonathan Franzen declares in an interview with Corriere della Sera (there’s no escape these days), ‘for long, elaborate, complex stories, such as can only be written by an author concentrating alone, free from the deafening chatter of Twitter.’
Of course as a novelist it is convenient to think that by the nature of the job one is on the side of the good, supplying an urgent and general need. I can also imagine readers drawing comfort from the idea that their fiction habit is essential sustenance and not a luxury. But what is the nature of this need? What would happen if it wasn’t met? We might also ask: Why does Franzen refer to complex stories? And why is it important not to be interrupted by Twitter and Facebook? Are such interruptions any worse than an old landline phone call, or simply friends and family buzzing around your writing table? Jane Austen, we recall, loved to write in domestic spaces where she was open to constant interruption.
Proponents of ‘the world needs stories’ thesis are legion, but one of the more elaborate statements comes in Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Here, in a text that falls between fable and magical realism, the telling of many stories is aligned with the idea of a natural ecology; in the normal and healthy way of things, we’re told, all the different stories of the world flow together in a great ocean of narrative. But now this harmony is threatened by an evil ‘cultmaster’ who seeks to poison and eventually shut off the flow of stories, imposing universal silence and sterility as part of a bid for omnipotence.
Given Rushdie’s personal plight at the time of writing, it’s hard not to think of the ‘cultmaster’ as a metamorphosis of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Stories are presented as a manifestation of the natural pluralism of the imagination, engaged in a mortal battle against any fundamentalism that would impose its own, univocal version: fiction is on the side of freedom. Of course.
Rushdie’s idea is charming, but his ocean of stories argument never, to risk a pun, holds water. Far from flowing together in a harmonious ecology, stories tend to be in constant competition with each other. Far from imposing silence, cults, religions and ideologies all have their own noisy stories to tell. Christian fundamentalism with its virgin birth, miracles, exorcisms and angels boasts a rich narrative flora; if we toss into the mix the Catholic saints and their colourful martyrdoms we can hardly complain that the censorship and repression of the Inquisition resulted in storyless silence.
The problem is that preacher and polemicist want us to accept just one, exclusive set of stories, one vision, which we must believe is true. And many people are happy to do this. Once they’ve signed up to a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or even liberal pluralist narrative it’s unlikely they’ll go out of their way to research competing accounts of the world. People tend to use stories of whatever kind to bolster their beliefs, not to question them.
But I doubt if this politicised version of the we-need-stories thesis was what a writer like Franzen had in mind. ‘This is an excellent novel,’ I remember a fellow judge for a literary prize repeatedly telling the rest of the jury every time he encouraged us to vote for a book, ‘because it offers complex moral situations that help us get a sense of how to live and behave.’ The argument here is that the world has become immensely complicated and the complex stories of novels help us to see our way through it, to shape a trajectory for ourselves in the increasingly fragmented and ill-defined social environment we move in.
There’s something to be said for this idea, though of course stories are by no means the exclusive territory of novels; the political, sports and crime pages of the newspapers are full of fascinating stories, many of them extremely challenging and complex. What the novel offers, however, is a tale mediated by the individual writer, who (alone, away from Facebook and Twitter) works hard to shape it and deliver it in a way that he or she feels is especially attractive, compelling and right.
Here again, though, even if we are not immediately aware of it, and even when the author is celebrated for his or her elusive ambiguity (another lit-crit commonplace), such stories compete for our assent and seek to seduce us towards the author’s point of view. D.H. Lawrence attacked Tolstoy’s novels as evil, immoral and deeply corrupting. Writing about Thomas Hardy he rather brilliantly questions the motives behind Hardy’s habit of having his more talented and spiritually adventurous characters destroyed by society; Hardy goes ‘against himself’, Lawrence tells us (meaning, against his own specially gifted nature), to ‘stand with the average against the exception’, and all this ‘in order to explain his own sense of failure’. To Lawrence’s mind, a tremendously complex story like Jude the Obscure becomes an invitation not to try to realise your full potential but to settle instead for self-preservation. Hardy reinforces the mental habits of the frightened reader. It is pernicious. In this view of things, rather than needing stories we need to learn how to smell out their drift and resist them.
But there’s something deeper going on. Even before we actually tell any stories, the language we use teems with them in embryo form. There are words that simply denote things in nature: a pebble, a tree. There are words that describe objects we make: to know the word ‘chair’ is to understand about moving from standing to sitting and appreciate the match of the human body with certain shapes and materials. But there are also words that come complete with entire narratives, or rather that can’t come without them. The only way we can understand words like God, angel, devil, ghost is through stories, since these entities do not allow themselves to be known in other ways, or not to the likes of me. Here not only is the word invented – all words are – but the referent is invented too, and a story to suit. God is a one-word creation story.
Arguably the most important word in the invented-referents category is ‘self’. We would like the self to exist perhaps, but does it really? What is it? The need to surround it with a lexical cluster of reinforcing terms – identity, character, personality, soul – all with equally dubious referents, suggests our anxiety. The more words we invent, the more we feel reassured that there really is something there to refer to.
Like God, the self requires a story; it is the account of how each of us accrues and sheds attributes over seventy or eighty years – youth, vigour, job, spouse, success, failure – while remaining, at some deep level, myself, my soul. One of the accomplishments of the novel, which as we know blossomed with the consolidation of Western individualism, has been to reinforce this ingenious invention, to have us believe more and more strongly in this sovereign self whose essential identity remains unchanged by all vicissitudes. Telling the stories of various characters in relation to each other, how something started, how it developed, how it ended, novels are intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves. They reinforce a process we are engaged in every moment of the day: self-creation. They sustain the idea of a self projected through time, a self eager to be a real something (even at the cost of great suffering) and not an illusion.
The more complex and historically dense the stories are, the stronger the impression they give of unique and protracted individual identity beneath surface transformations, conversions, dilemmas, aberrations. In this sense, even pessimistic novels – say, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace – can be encouraging: however hard circumstances may be, you do have a self, a personal story to shape and live. You are a unique something that can fight back against all the confusion around. You have pathos.
This is all perfectly respectable. But do we actually need this intensification of self that novels provide? Do we need it more than ever before?
I suspect not. If we asked the question of, for example, a Buddhist priest, he or she would probably tell us that it is precisely this illusion of selfhood that makes so many in the West unhappy. We are in thrall to the narrative of selves that do not really exist, a fabrication in which most novel-writing connives. Schopenhauer would have agreed. He spoke of people ‘deluded into an absolutely false view of life by reading novels’, something that ‘generally has the most harmful effect on their whole lives’. Like the Buddhist priest, he would have preferred silence or the school of experience, or the kind of myth or fable that did not invite excited identification with an author alter ego.
Personally, I’m too enmired in narrative and self-narrative to bail out now. I love an engaging novel, I love a complex novel; but I am quite sure I don’t need it.
‘SIR –’ REMARKED SAMUEL Johnson with droll incredulity to someone too eager to know whether he had finished a certain book – ‘Sir, do you read books through?’ Well, do we? Right through to the end? And if we do, are we the suckers Johnson supposed us to be?
Schopenhauer, who thought and wrote a great deal about reading, is on Johnson’s side. Life is ‘too short for bad books’ and ‘a few pages’ should be quite enough, he claims, for ‘a provisional estimate of an author’s productions’. After which it is perfectly OK to put an author back on the shelf if you’re not convinced.
But I’m not really interested in how we deal with bad books. It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it. It’s only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when there is no enjoyment. ‘I’m a teenager,’ remarks one sad contributor to a book review website. ‘I read this whole book [it would be unfair to say which] from first page to last hoping it would be as good as the reviews said. It wasn’t. I enjoy reading and finish nearly all the novels I start and it was my determination never to give up that made me finish this one, but I really wish I hadn’t.’ One can only encourage a reader like this to learn not to attach self-esteem to the mere finishing of a book, if only because the more bad books you finish, the fewer good ones you’ll have time to start.
What about those good books, though? Because Johnson certainly wasn’t just referring to the bad when he tossed out that provocation. Do we need to finish them? Is a good book by definition one that we did finish? Or are there occasions when we might choose to leave off a book before the end, or even only halfway through, and nevertheless feel that it was good, even excellent, that we were glad we read what we read, but don’t feel the need to finish it? I ask the question because this is happening to me more and more often. Is it age, wisdom, senility? I start a book. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and then the moment comes when I just know I’ve had enough. It’s not that I’ve stopped enjoying it. I’m not bored, I don’t even think it’s too long. I just have no desire to go on enjoying it. Can I say then that I’ve read it? Can I recommend it to others and speak of it as a fine book?
Kafka remarked that beyond a certain point a writer might decide to finish his or her novel at any moment, with any sentence; it really was an arbitrary question, like where to cut a piece of string, and in fact both The Castle and America are left unfinished, while The Trial is tidied away with the indecent haste of someone who has decided enough is enough. The Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda was the same; both his major works, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana and Acquainted with Grief, are unfinished and both are considered classics despite the fact that they have complex plots that would seem to require endings which are not there.
Other writers deploy what I would call a catharsis of exhaustion: their books present themselves as rich and extremely taxing experiences that simply come to an end at some point where writer, reader, and indeed characters all feel they’ve had enough. The earliest example that comes to mind is D.H. Lawrence, but one thinks of Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, and the wonderful Christina Stead. Beckett’s prose fiction gets shorter and shorter, denser and denser as he brings the point of exhaustion further and further forward.
All these writers, it seems to me, by suggesting that beyond a certain point a book might end anywhere, legitimise the notion that the reader may choose for him or herself where to bow out (of Proust’s Recherche for example, or The Magic Mountain) without detracting from the experience. One of the strangest responses I ever had to a novel of my own – my longest, not surprisingly – came from a fellow author who wrote out of the blue to express his appreciation. Such letters of course are a massive boost to one’s vanity and I was just about to stick this very welcome feather in my cap, when I reached the last lines of the message: he hadn’t read the last fifty pages, he said, because he’d reached a point where the novel seemed satisfactorily over.
Naturally I was disappointed, even a little angry. My leg had surely been pulled. Wasn’t this damning criticism, that I’d gone on fifty pages too long? Only later did I appreciate his candour. My book was fine, for him, even without the ending. It wasn’t too long; just that he was happy to stop where he did.
What, then, since clearly I’m talking about books with aesthetic pretensions, of the notion of the work of art as an organic whole – you haven’t seen its shape unless you’ve seen all of it? And, since again I have mainly referred to novelists, what of the question of plot? A novel that is plotted requires that we reach the end, because the solution to the tale will throw meaning back across the entire work. So the critics tell us. No doubt I’ve made this claim myself in some review or other.
But this is not really my experience as I read. There are some novels, and not just genre novels, where plot is indeed up front and very much the reason why one keeps turning the pages. We have to know what happens. These are rarely the most important books for me. Often one skims as heightened engagement with the plot reduces our attention to the writing as such; all the novel’s intelligence is in the story, and the writing the merest vehicle.
Yet even in these novels where plot is the central pleasure on offer the end rarely gratifies, and if we like the book and recommend it to others, it is rarely for the end. What matters is the conundrum of the plot, the forces put in play and the tensions between them. The Italians have a nice word here. They call plot trama, a word whose primary meaning is weft, woof or weave. It is the pattern of the weave that we most savour in a plot – Hamlet’s dilemma, perhaps, or the awesome unsustainability of Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon – not its solution. Indeed, the best we can hope from the end of a good plot is that it not ruin what came before. I would not mind a Hamlet that stopped before the carnival of carnage in the last scene, leaving us instead to mull over all the intriguing possibilities posed by the young prince’s return to Elsinore.
In this regard it’s worth noting that stories were not always obliged to have an end, or to keep the same ending. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Roberto Calasso shows that one of the defining characteristics of a living mythology is that its many stories, always so excitingly tangled together, always have at least two endings, often ‘opposites’ – the hero dies, he doesn’t die; the lovers marry, they don’t marry. It was only when myth became history, as it were, that we began to feel there should be just one ‘proper’ version, and set about forgetting the alternatives. With novels, the endings I’m least disappointed with are those that encourage the reader to believe that the story might very easily have taken a completely different turn.
To put a novel down before the end, then, is simply to acknowledge that for me its shape, its aesthetic quality, is in the weave of the plot and, with the best novels, in the meshing of the writing style with that weave. Style and plot, overall vision and local detail, fascinate together, in a perfect tangle. Once the structure has been set up and the narrative ball is rolling, the need for an end is just an unfortunate burden, an embarrassment, a deplorable closure of so much possibility. Sometimes I have experienced the fifty pages of suspense that so many writers feel condemned to close with as a stretch of psychological torture, obliging me to think of life as a machine for manufacturing pathos and tragedy, since the only endings we halfway believe in, of course, are the unhappy ones.
I wonder if, when a bard was recounting a myth, after some early Athenian dinner party perhaps, or round some campfire on the Norwegian coast, there didn’t come a point when listeners would vote to decide which ending they wanted to hear, or simply opt for an early bed. In our own times, Alan Ayckbourn has written plays with different endings, in which the cast decides, act by act, which version they will follow.
Might it be that, in showing a willingness not to pursue even an excellent book to the death, you are actually doing the writer a favour, exonerating him or her from the near-impossible task of getting out of the plot gracefully? There is a tyranny about our thrall to endings. I don’t doubt I would have a lower opinion of many of the novels I haven’t finished if I had. Perhaps it is time that I learned, in my own novels, to drop readers a hint or two that, from this or that moment on, they have my permission to let the book go just as and when they choose.
INTERVIEWED AFTER WINNING the Costa Prize for Literature, the distinguished novelist Andrew Miller remarked that while he assumed that soon most popular fiction would be read on screen, he believed and hoped that literary fiction would continue to be read on paper. In his 2011 Man Booker Prize acceptance speech, Julian Barnes made his own plea for the survival of printed books. At the university where I work, certain professors, old and young, will react with vehement disapproval at the notion that one is reading poetry on a Kindle. It is sacrilege.
Are they right?
In practical terms it is all too easy to defend the e-book. We can buy a text instantly wherever we are in the world. We pay less. We use no paper, occupy no space. Kindle’s wireless system keeps our page, even when we open the book on a different reader than the one on which we left off. We can change the type size according to the light and our eyesight. We can change the font according to our taste. Cooped up in the press of the metro, we turn the pages by applying a light pressure of the thumb. Lying in bed, we don’t have that problem of having to use two hands to keep a fat paperback open.
But I want to go beyond practicality to the reading experience itself, our engagement with the text. What is it that these literary men and women are afraid of losing should the paper novel really go into decline? Surely not the cover, so often a repository of misleading images and tediously fulsome endorsements. Surely not the pleasure of running fingers and eyes over fine paper, something that hardly alters whether one is reading Jane Austen or Dan Brown. Hopefully it is not the quality of the paper that determines our appreciation of the classics.
Could it be the fact that the e-book thwarts our ability to find particular lines by remembering their position on the page? Or our love of scribbling comments (of praise and disgust) in the margin? It’s true that on first engagement with the e-book we become aware of all kinds of habits that are no longer possible, skills developed over many years that are no longer relevant. We can’t so easily flick through the pages to see where the present chapter ends, or whether so-and-so is going to die now or later. In general, the e-book discourages browsing, and though the bar at the bottom of the screen showing the percentage of the book we’ve completed lets us know more or less where we’re up to, we don’t have the reassuring sense of the physical weight of the thing (how proud children are when they get through their first long tome!), nor the computational pleasures of page numbers (Dad, I read fifty pages today). This can be a problem for academics: it’s hard to give a proper reference if you don’t have page numbers.
But are these old habits essential? Mightn’t they actually be distracting us from the written word itself? Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.
What are the core characteristics of literature as a medium and an art form? Unlike painting, there is no physical image to contemplate, nothing that impresses itself on the eye in the same way, given equal eyesight. Unlike sculpture, there is no artefact you can walk around and touch. You don’t have to travel to look at literature. You don’t have to line up or stand in the crowd, or worry about getting a good seat. Unlike music, you don’t have to respect its timing, accepting an experience of fixed duration. You can’t dance to it or sing along or take a photo or make a video with your phone.
Literature is made up of words. They can be spoken or written. If spoken, volume and speed and accent can vary. If written, the words can appear in this or that typeface on any material, with any pagination. Joyce is as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman. And we can read these words at any speed, interrupt our reading as frequently as we choose. Somebody who reads Ulysses in two weeks hasn’t read it any more or less than someone who reads it in three months, or three years.
Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience lies not in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the ‘possession’ of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end. More than any other art form it is pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself. Memorised, a poem is as surely a piece of literature in our mind as it is on the page. If we say the words in sequence, even silently without opening our mouth, then we have had a literary experience – perhaps even a more intense one than when we read them on the page. It’s true that our owning the object – War and Peace or Moby Dick – and organising these and other classics according to chronology and nation of origin will give us an illusion of control: as if we had now ‘acquired’ and ‘digested’ and ‘placed’ a piece of culture. Perhaps that is what people are attached to. But in fact we all know that once the sequence of words is over and the book closed what actually remains in our possession is very difficult, wonderfully difficult to pin down, a richness (or sometimes irritation) that has nothing to do with the heavy block of paper on our shelves.
The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging everything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting that surrounds the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.
DO I, AS an author, have the right to prevent people copying my books for free? Should I have it? Does it matter?
‘They have taken away my right to own a slave,’ wrote Max Stirner, the opening words of the chapter on human rights in his great book, The Ego and its Own (1844). One paradoxical sentence to remind us that what we call rights are no more than what the law concedes to one party or another in any given conflict of interest. There are no rights in nature, only in a society with a legal system and a police force. Rights can be different in different countries; and they may be notional or enforced.
Copyright, then, is part of a mass of legislation that governs the relationship between individual and collective, for the most part defending the former against the latter. You will only have copyright in a society that places a very high value on the individual, the individual intellect, the products of individual intellect. In fact, the introduction of a law of copyright is one of the signs of the passage from a hierarchical and holistic vision of society to one based on the hopes and aspirations of the individual. Not surprisingly, the first legal moves towards creating the concept of copyright came in late seventeenth-century Britain.
Officially the idea is that the writer, artist or musician should be allowed to reap the just rewards for his effort. This is quaint. There is very little justice in the returns artists receive. Works of equal value and quality produce quite different incomes or no income at all. Somebody becomes a millionaire overnight and someone else cannot even publish. It is perfectly possible that the quality of work by these two writers is very similar. The same book may have a quite different fate in different countries. Any notion of justice in the incomes of artists is naive.
What we are talking about, more brutally, is preventing other people from making money from my work without paying me a tribute, because my work belongs to me. It’s mine. What we are talking about is ownership and control. The law, as it now stands, concedes that I own what I write and hence have the right to keep track of every copy of the book I have published and to demand a percentage of the sale price. This right is the same whether I sell two hundred copies of the book at a local news-stand over some years, or twenty million over five continents in eighteen months.
And I can pass this ownership on to my children or heirs when I die; they inherit the right to collect royalties on every copy of my work made and sold, as if they had inherited a company or a property I was renting out. But only for seventy years. Having conceded so much to the individual, and then to his or her family, society finally denies that intellectual property is the same as physical property. My heirs can own my house for ever, but at a certain point the product of my mind will be turned over to the public domain. The official rationale here is that I have made enough, and society, in order to build up and enjoy a shared culture, encouraging the accumulation of collective wisdom, needs to have free access to the products of my intellect, in much the same way as it has gained access to many of the great art collections and country estates of the rich men of the past.
We all sense that there is more instinct than logic at work here. We simply feel that it would be bizarre to be taking royalties from the work of an ancestor who lived four hundred years ago. It would be bizarre not to be able to quote Shakespeare without paying something to his descendants, if there are any. At the same time we do not feel that if we owned a painting an ancestor made and left to the family we should not have the right to keep it or to sell it for any price the market will offer.
In the recent past the duration of copyright after an author’s death was extended from fifty to seventy years. We sense at once that a decision like this is arbitrary and could easily change again. Was it really necessary that James Joyce’s grandson could charge more or less what he liked for quotations from the author’s work, even in academic books, up to sixty-nine years after his death? Does it make sense that to quote three or four lines from The Four Quartets in a book about meditation I have to pay T.S. Eliot’s estate £200? One feels the authors themselves might have rebelled, which gives us an insight into the real reason why works are allowed to go out of copyright protection. Because the author would have wished it thus. Once the immediate family has been protected, availability and celebrity are more important to an author than a revenue stream for descendants he has never met. The lapse of copyright is a concession to the author’s dreams of immortality at the expense of the family.
Copyright has always been contested and hard to police, suggesting that there has never been a profound consensus about its ethical rectitude. Dickens, Lawrence, Joyce and hosts of lesser authors all fought against pirated editions of their work. In the twentieth century, the opening of an international market for books and the progress in copying technology exacerbated the problem. Can one really expect all countries to defend the rights of foreign authors, when the majority of international bestsellers come from half a dozen countries, and overwhelmingly from the United States? Nor has copyright crime generally been ‘felt’ in the same way as straightforward theft or burglary; I have never heard of copyright pirates afflicted by feelings of guilt and remorse. To make the situation more unstable, the combined innovations of the internet and the e-book have not only introduced new ways of copying books, but also created a feeling, at least in some quarters, that all books should be freely available and consultable through my laptop or iPhone. There is a growing sense that copyright enforcement could become impossible.
To see how copyright law may survive, we have to ask, beyond the pieties and legal niceties, what its real social function is and whether there is at least a large constituency in favour of that function continuing. Copyright gives the writer a considerable financial incentive and locks his work into the world of money; each book becomes a lottery ticket. Huge sales will mean a huge income. Copyright thus encourages a novelist to direct his work not to his immediate peer group, those whose approval he most craves, but to the widest possible audience in possession of the price of a paperback.
On the one hand, then, by conceding copyright society declares that it holds individual creativity in high esteem – every member of society can dream of one day benefiting from copyright, of transforming genius into money – but by the same token it draws the author into a bourgeois mentality where writing is a job with an income; the writer now has an investment in stable markets and attentive policing. In short, copyright keeps the writer in the polis, and indeed it is remarkable how little creative writing today is truly revolutionary, in the sense of seeking a profoundly different model for society. There is a subversive writerly attitude, of course – liberal, anti-authoritarian – which has paradoxically become almost a convention; dissatisfaction with society is expected of an author. All the same, with a royalty cheque whose arrival relies on international agreements, electronic funds transfer, and a willingness to prosecute copyright piracy, the writer is more a creature of the status quo than its enemy. Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps it is limiting. Perhaps good things are inevitably limiting.
Imagine copyright were phased out or became impossible to enforce in any meaningful way: you can’t expect an advance from a publisher, you can’t even sell your work directly to readers online. So, creative writing is no longer a ‘job’. You won’t be able to turn it into a living unless you become a big-time celebrity, in which case no doubt there would be lucrative spin-offs; but celebrity is always a long shot and how will it be achieved if the ordinary commercial channels disappear? Isn’t today’s celebrity mostly constructed on sales, which are largely generated by hype and which would evaporate if a publisher no longer had an exclusive right to publish a given book – or if a publisher could no longer charge the prices necessary to support the publicity required to get a book to its intended public? It’s true that a certain buzz can now be created around a book simply by making it freely available on the net, as was the case with Fifty Shades of Grey; but that would be of little help if there were no prospect of turning that excitement into publishing support and money.