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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Leopold McGinnis, RedFez.net
Great White Serfdom: A Brief Overview of the Undead
Éliterati’s Death Grip on Canadian Literature, Part One
I’m writing the first few sentences of this article as the so-called literary
industry of Canada gears up for tonight’s big, black-tie event: the Giller Prize.
The most ‘prestigious’ of the literary prizes up here, every year the Giller Prize
is a spectacle of industry mutual masturbation and the only time that Canadian
‘literature’ gets any coverage in the mainstream press. And as much as I
would like to say that the Giller Prize and its government-sponsored
counterpart, the Governor General’s Award, are self-indulgent well-to-do
socialite parties that have little connection with reality, I cannot. The parade of
living-dead authors behind and in front of the podium, sadly, very much
reflects the Great White Serfdom of the Canadian literary scene. But before I
get into the prizes, I should probably give a primer on the so-called CanLit
scene. Like most Canadian industries, artistic or otherwise, the book industry
here is dominated by the cultural machine of our southern neighbours. I
cannot think of one Canadian populist or genre writer. There are no Stephen
Kings or John Grishams, Dean Koonzes or, praise the lord, Nicholas Sparkses.
This doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that we don’t HAVE all these authors.
Indeed, the New York Times’ best-seller list (wherein a book is recommended
simply because everyone else is reading it) has just as much sway north of
the border. A swing through the Chapters or Indigo (the Canadian Borders and
Barnes and Nobles) will offer up shelves full of mindless corporate fluff. Our
trash market, from fast food to movies to pop-lit, is dominated by the US.
This (in connection with our pompous British roots) has allowed the rest of the
‘scene’ to fester into a literary serfdom whereby a selection of writers deemed
to have the proper credentials and training maintain a death grip on artistic
publishing. I can easily reel off a list of these authors: Margaret Atwood, Carol
Shields, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Michael Ondaatje
However, outside of MFA programs and the literature social club, I’m willing to
bet that very few Canadians have read these authors for ‘fun’. The CanLit
industry here is primarily inbred whereby writers and literary aficionados (who
are most concerned with placing themselves next to the ‘right’ artists) control,
shape and buoy up the industry. Large Canadian printing houses, for the
most part, go along with this. Since they are owned by US corporate presses
(Random House, etc ) they have little interest in creating Canadian
competition for the fluff their sister companies are sending over the border.
Instead, they set their eyes on the market their companies haven’t already
saturated. Of the six finalists for this year’s Giller, four were printed by
divisions of Random House, five from corporate houses and all six presses
are headquartered in Toronto (a city that desperately wants to be New York
and sees itself as the entirety of Canada). Canadians are generally insecure
about they’re cultural identity and, desperate to support their culture, fall a
little too often for plays at cultural superiority, buying what the Canadian
contests and ‘Canadian’ presses encourage. And what about those who aren’t
interested in reading books that get their literary merit from being
inaccessible, being from Toronto or being in tune with the éliterati’s inbred,
outdated standards? Well, there’s always Nicholas Sparks.
Literary Serfdom: Work on the Master’s Land, or Not at All Followers of the
ULA are familiar with the literary funnel, where ‘good’ or ‘refined’ work filters
through and the bad or raw material is discarded. The Canadian literary
machine operates in the same way with a collection of organizations,
individuals and systems sifting out anything that confronts or threatens the
status quo. As an unpublished, ‘untrained’ Canadian writer you are a serf and if
you want to work you have to work on what the éliterati determine is merit
worthy. I took English Honours throughout high school because I was
interested in writing. All throughout it I couldn’t wait to graduate and get into
University where we could dump all this ‘cannon’ bullshit and get into
literature that was actually interesting and relevant to our lives. A semester
into my first year I dropped my English class (we’re studying Shakespeare
and Sophocles again!?!) to switch to Communications where study was
focused on critically analyzing and dissecting the culture we live in. What a
concept! Interested in applying my cultural learning to my writing I went full
steam into the publishing game after graduation only to suffer constant
rejection. It didn’t take me long to become aware that my work was not being
rejected because it was bad, but because publishers just weren’t interested in
accepting what I was writing.
Which was funny, because one of the reasons I was submitting was to inject
some fresh air into the toxic gas of contemporary literature. Silly me for
thinking they might LIKE their bleak, centuries old stuffiness. I offer up my
experience not as an opportunity to bitch, but as an example which I think is
entirely, and sadly, unremarkable. Like a lot of journals in the US, Canadian
journals are more concerned with their status amongst the éliterati and as
‘predictors’ of future talent, rather than pushing limits, breaking moulds and
finding new voices. Journals constantly boast of the authors they’ve
published who’ve gone on to be knighted by the reigning Lords of Lit, or about
awards they’ve received from organizations crafted from like-minded sister
publications. To stave off criticisms of elitism these publications often claim to
work with new authors, however finding a genuinely ‘new’ author in these
publications is rare. Finding a new author who doesn’t resemble all the old
authors is impossible. To co-opt a phrase: meet the new wave, same as the
old wave. Canadian journals, due to the aforementioned insecurity, claim to
skew towards Canadian artists, however, due to the aforementioned
insecurity, Canadians also tend to believe that anything made in Canada can’t
be all that good unless vetted by ‘experts’. These journals tend to whore
themselves out to international authors and nothing is so juicy a catch as a big
name American author. A very common thing to see in Canadian author bios
is the number of other languages their works have been translated into: A call
to the international éliterati for support to bolster the status quo.
Unfortunately, this tends to also place the Canadian industry in the cult of
credentials where being vetted or approved by names and institutions is
paramount to quality or originality. In fact, quality does not matter as long as
approval is given. Another way journals try to gain credibility as supporting
and encouraging authors is through contests. Aside from being merely money
generators for the publications to keep them in operation, contests are claims
to impartiality because the entrants are (supposedly) judged blind.
However, first off, any name author is unlikely to submit to a contest, but more
importantly it shows how little the names matter. Any perusal of a contest
issue reveals a series of works entirely undifferentiated from the usual crap. It’
s all pre-determined in the style. What I find fascinating about this particular
setup is that these journals get to claim support for new artists while,
basically, surviving off of the artists they reject. In other words, these journals
lord over an author’s acceptance and can do so because of their ‘reputation’
but are kept in power by the very entrance fees of those whose interests they
squash. Fucked. There is a rather healthy small press industry in Canada,
thanks mostly to cultural grants from the government. These presses are
most often the ones who take chances on new authors, who are then picked
up by the major publication houses. Unfortunately, they tend to produce the
same literary drivel due to the fact that they use journal publication, awards
and Fine Arts education as criteria for acceptance.
Additionally, due to national navel gazing and the fact that their grants come
from the government, it seems a major criteria for publication with a local
press is ‘Canadianism’ where the novel is set in some uniquely Canadian
setting, makes endless references to Canadian wildlife or landscapes, and
touches upon the essential Canadian experience. Being a Canadian author
writing about something interesting is not enough.
[Part Two next week]
Leopold’s ezine is at www.redfez.net.
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