First published, 25th June 2013
I want to write a sort of response to Michael Krüger’s remarks quoted in Publishing Perspectives this month. Soon to retire after forty five years at Carl Hanser Verlag, he laments:
“I only know there are good and interesting books, and bad ones. You can read them on paper or on the screen, I don’t care. I only get nervous when people are constantly reading second-class books, when reviewers praise third-rate books, and when booksellers put bad books in their windows. Since book publishing became a mass-market business, the quality level is constantly sinking. But there are still very good books around, in every country! The problem is that people can’t get them because they are hiding. People thought that with digitization, the good books would be easier to get. But the problem is that most of the readers love bad books! I have no explanation for the fact that modern societies have invested tons of money into schools and universities only to find out that horrible books are much more loved than the good ones…”
But I nearly got side-tracked. Or rather, I got distracted by travels and people-watching and the restless restfulness that comes with the summer months: the time when we love our lives – like June to September is one long weekend…
I had wanted to reflect on why we do, actually, quite like crap. I mean, to read crap. Summer reads are best-selling crap. Let’s have a quick glance at some openings. In our rented villa in central Portugal, I’m picking out some old summer reads from the bookshelf at random. Let’s glance at what it is we love about crap.
Okay, first up is … Jilly Cooper’s Jump. Oops, forgot the all important exclamation mark! (All best sellers are written with invisible exclamation marks). Right. Jilly Cooper’s Jump! Sentences at random:
“In fact Alan had spent a large proportion of his married life as a househusband, enabling his wife’s career to soar. Currently writing a book on depression, Alan almost enjoyed carousing with his friends and chatting up the crumpet outside the school gates so assiduously that he had been nicknamed ‘Mother Fucker’.”
Fantastic. Love it. Glance at The Daily Mail’s back cover review comment:
“Jilly Cooper is a major genius…” (exclamation mark!)!
Right. Chuck that aside.
What about this next one? Swimsuit by someone called James Patterson. Oops, not just someone but “the world’s bestselling thriller writer” and, according to the biography page: “one of the best-known and biggest-selling writers of all time.” How about that?!
Opening sentences please:
“I know things I don’t want to know. A true psychopathic killer is nothing like your everyday garden-variety murderer. Not like a holdup guy who panics and unloads his gun into a hapless liquor store clerk, or a man who bursts into his stockbroker’s office and blows his head off, and he’s not like a husband who strangles his wife over a real or imagined affair.”
Just great!! Again, I love it. Yum. Gun zzz. Fuck yeah!
So, cool. We’re doing well here.
Okay, chuck that aside.
What’s this one? Oh, looks like a chick flick. Yep. Swirly front cover. Pink cartoon cars. Heart shapes. This gem is by bestselling author Paige Toon. Called: Chasing Daisy. Poolside present tenses coming right up:
“We’re in Melbourne, Australia, for the start of the season, and Luis Castro has just walked into the hospitality area. I’m desperately hoping he will have forgotten all about me during the last five months, because until early November when we end up back in Brazil for his home-town race, we’ll be seeing a LOT of each other.”
LOVE this. It’s like you’re really this girl and it’s for REAL and I’m really there ‘cos it’s just like I would write and it’s all just happening to me right here and now even though I’m in several countries at a time and my life is SOOO boring right now…
Hmm.
Michael Krüger continues to winge:
“Even a good publisher can’t read more than a hundred books a year, and because publishers should not publish more books than they can read, my sole explanation is: if they publish more books than that, they must not want to read them. It is depressing that there are publishers in this world who don’t like to read the books they publish. It is hard to imagine that under those circumstances the independent publishers can survive, but we try.”
Boring old fart. Come on. We just want a little light reading. Escape. Drama!
Just give us what we want!!!
And it’s at that point that the philosophising people-watcher in me pricks up his ears, narrows his eyes and thinks: maybe there is something interesting here after all…
Good analysis is not judgemental or evaluating or even critical, really. It’s curious; stirred perhaps by something interesting, or odd. And I do think there is something odd going on here. Can I maybe, just for clarity’s sake, force a binary opposition: Krüger versus, I don’t know, ‘horrible book’ lovers? Well, actually, versus what or whom? If I’m not already confessing that I’m a Krügerite, then who might be my fellows? Who are the bestreaders of the bestsellers? What is this world of the bestest!?
Behind the Krügerite position is an important observation. It’s the observation that caught my attention earlier:
“I have no explanation for the fact that modern societies have invested tons of money into schools and universities only to find out that horrible books are much more loved than the good ones…”
Yes. There is a philosophical issue here attached to quite an old chestnut one might refer to as: ‘the doctrine worthy only of swine’. That is to say, the Ancients’ interest in hedonism; the problem of taking pleasure to be, in some sense, a mark of value. And the debates rage on through the centuries at least up to Bentham and Mill. J.S. Mill writes:
“Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs… A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence… It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question…”
When I was a student of philosophy, I remember reading Mill’s Utilitarianism and thinking how wonderfully naïve and hopeful. The opening premise is crucial. The opening premise is wishful and wrong. So, rewrite:
Most human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; most intelligent human beings would consent to be a fool and the instructed person would be an ignoramus, the person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, because they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs… A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; and because of these liabilities, he wishes to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence… It is better to be like a pig satisfied; better to be a fool.
It may not be what we would like. It may not be what we think is right, or good or valuable about our species. It may not be what we should want to promote for a ‘good’ society – whatever that means. But it’s true. Anyone who works in mass marketing knows that Mill’s perception of the so-called ‘competent judge’ is of a type that doesn’t really exist or, rather, is so rare as to be irrelevant. Swift was right: we are a pernicious race of odious little vermin (his words) and proud of it. Fuck yeah! (My own).
This brings us back to Krüger’s mystification. Even with the massive increase in the quantity and quality of education in the so-called developed world over the last century, and on-going, the vast majority of human beings – educated and informed human beings – loves crap. It’s as though the human brain can and does just shelve everything it has been given to improve it. That, over the last millennium, the human mind, in spite of the apparent advances in science, the arts, literature, the enlightenment, men on the moon, etcetera, remains essentially medieval. Primitive. Why? Much of my own writing sort of seeks to explore possible answers to that…
Over the centuries we have been performing a great and hidden experiment on our own species. The result would seem to suggest that, whatever you throw at the human brain, the intellect remains unaffected. Intellectuals cannot be made anymore than yahoos can be turned into houyhnhnms. They’re born (intellectuals, that is) and I’d draw a sharp and important distinction between intellectuals and academics. Shakespeare was an intellectual. Most good writers are intellectuals not academics. To hazard a guess and throw in a ball park figure, I’d estimate that intellectual minds comprise about 1% of the human population. Thanks to global Internet corporations like amazon.com one can arrive at quite an accurate figure by playing with the sales data they parade.
If you are on holiday this summer, where there are bookshelves with summer reads mouldering away, count how many books there are that would challenge the mind. How many works are there by Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, David Grossman, Philip Roth, Robert Walser (to cite a few Krüger mentions), or other deep-thinking intellectuals?
Right. Enough of my own crap for another month. I’m off to the pool to read Celeste Anwar’s Mating Fever: steamy bestselling novel stuffed with cock-chomping vampires, werewolves, endless gratuitous violence and so much more!!!