I’m writing today in the hopes of better developing an idea I didn’t have time to expand on in class yesterday. I have been thinking about the meaning of the ‘contemporary’, both in the sense of how we consume books and which layers (I will explain) compose the totality of books at our disposal.
How we access books if the easier issue to consider, so I’ll get it out of the way quickly. We purchase books (in person or online); we borrow books (from family, friends, or the library, either in paper or digital); and we steal books. Readers have always stolen books, mostly the ones that once borrowed proved to be too attractive to be returned. The novelty that the 1990s brought, with their world wide web and the internet, is the chance to steal the digital files of e-books. Before that, readers would often go through the time-consuming process of photocopying books, a practice, I was told, so extended in South America that in caused the bankruptcy of well-known publishers such as the much missed Bruguera.
Scanners helped next to digitalize books, which made stealing them easier. Today we have websites I will not name where every book (or almost) can be found. As the author of several very expensive academic books I see the need for piracy and illegal downloading, though precisely because I’m a published author I also see how frustrating it is to have one’s books stolen. Since, however, e-book readers are not as popular as expected and because reading on other screens (smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC) is not that comfortable, the sale of books printed on paper remains stable. Poor trees!! This does not mean that books necessarily survive in print format. My students were surprised to learn that unsold books are routinely pulped, often after being granted just a few weeks of shelf life in bookshops.
What concerns me next is what we find when we walk into a bookshop or a library, that is to say, how the book offer of each particular period is constituted.
Whether you read book reviews or scholarly introductions to a certain period, it seems that novelties constitute the core of what is available to readers at a given time. This is a distorted view of reality. If you look at the most popular choices in libraries, they reveal a certain time gap so that the books published last year or two years ago turn out to be the most demanded; apparently, this is how long it takes for word of mouth to circulate. I find it very hard to believe that there are readers only interested in novelties who limit their reading to what is issued in the last few months. Only professional reviewers or keen amateur reviewers read in that way, which means that they probably swallow quite a lot of trash that won’t even survive for a year in the bookshops.
There is, however, much more to the contemporary than the pure novelty and the relatively recent book. In that sense, libraries are different from bookshops since they need not retire as quickly the older books from the shelves. A new book may survive for as little as one month in a bookshop, before being remaindered (sold at a reduced price) or pulped, but very old books survive in libraries. I once wrote a post called “A visit to the library: the sad look of yellowing books” in which I bemoaned how forlorn most books in our Humanities library look. I love the smell of new books but I’m totally put off by the smell of ageing paper, which no doubt explains my mood in that post. To be honest, I don’t visit our library often enough because I use all the time its digital resources (no problem with smell!!) but you can see that a library is outdated if the number of new volumes is small. Also if, as happens occasionally in ours, the very old paperbacks are barely held together with cellotape.
The question is that the contemporary extends its realm into the past, necessarily. Readers may be interested in the classics, in the books recently liberated from copyright (you can find them in Project Guttenberg or Many Books) or in the rather miscellaneous long-sellers (a category that covers the literary and the popular classics but also plucky survivors). Readers can be also attracted to second-hand books they have come across or ‘discovered’ and, indeed, in translations, which may insert into the contemporary a book from the past of another culture. Adaptations also have an impact. Recently, El País reported that the Japanese are now going crazy for Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967) because of a new Netflix series, with the Japanese translation “selling some 290,000 copies in eight weeks… almost the same as the total number of the three hardcover versions printed in the past 52 years.”
So, all this means that for the reader what constitutes the contemporary is different than for the writer or the historian of Literature. Writers are also readers, which means that they are influenced by all the books that came before them. The admired Prof. Harold Bloom came up with the concept of the ‘anxiety of influence’ to name what overwhelmed writers may feel before such an imponent legacy, particularly if they wish to be at the same level as an admired predecessor. I have already narrated here how I once heard the late Martin Amis, one of the most admired British novelists, declare in public that he never read his contemporaries. When I approached him for an autograph and asked him why should I read him since he was my contemporary, he told me sheepishly that I looked like a “gambler.” I found that very interesting, for what he was saying is that reading books from the past is a safe bet, and who knows what one will find in the books from the present.
The ones who distort everything, I think, are the historians of Literature. In principle, historians work trying to make sense of the past, producing as Hayden White famously said “an agreed upon fiction.” History aims at the truth, but, as we know, this has many layers, hence the need to agree on some basic narrative (rather than ‘fiction’). To name a classic example, we know that the Holocaust caused the death of 6 million Jews, but a more nuanced approach reveals that there were many other types of victims, from Roma persons to Jehovah witnesses, and that concentration camps were first used by the British (copied from the Spanish) during the Boer war. The problem comes with the historians who works on the very recent past or the present, for the data that they must handle is massive which makes it very hard to focus on the main trends with certainty.
So what is happening now is that because of the urgency and hyper-productivity of academia, and also because of the reviewers’ passion for discovering the next big thing, and other factors such as awards, we are getting a very distorted view of our own contemporary time. I showed to my students the list of Nobel Prize winner between 1990 and 1997 (this is our Unit 1) and they could only recognize Toni Morrison; this was because one of my colleagues has included her in his Modern US subject. As one of the students noted, awards and prestige are useless if they are not accompanied by popularity. Historians of Literature, however, focus on prestige, ignoring popularity, which is why the books culled from the past by them are not necessarily the ones most appreciated in their own time. Likewise, the view that scholars are giving of contemporary Literature is missing a lot in so many ways that it is bound to be extremely sketchy. You might think this is only normal and logical but it needs to be pointed out that looking at the present with a focus on what might survive in the future is a rather futile exercise.
So, to sum up, I would distinguish between the ‘contemporary’ in the sense of all that is available to a curious reader today, and the ‘contemporary’ in the sense of what academic historians of Literature are selecting from each year’s novelties as the most likely texts to survive our time. This creates a strange tension, with plenty of books collapsing under the weight of excessive hype – a matter perhaps for another post…
Sorry I could not explain myself better in class…