A Little History of Literature (38 page)

Which, then, are the top literary prizes? First in the list, as it was historically first, comes the
Nobel Prize in Literature
, which was set up in 1901. The prize is one of a set of five, each for outstanding achievement in a different field. Alfred Nobel was the Swedish
inventor of dynamite, the first stable high explosive. It proved to be valuable in the construction and mining industries but also a terrible weapon of war. In his will, Nobel left most of his vast fortune for the annual awards in his name. Some think it was moral reparation. The annual literary selection is made by the Swedish Academy, with (anonymous) expert advice.

Scandinavia has its great writers (Ibsen, Strindberg and Hamsun, for example). But the Nobel net, from the start, was cast worldwide and over anything that could legitimately be called literature. Scandinavia, on the edge of Europe, was ideally placed to be objective and disinterested in its judgements. One of the undeniable achievements of the award has been to ‘de-provincialise’ our sense of literature: to see it as belonging to the world, not any single country. The Nobel Prize is awarded for a lifetime's achievement and the sole criterion for the prize is that it should go to writers who have produced ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’.

The Nobel Prize Committee has always seen itself as having influence in international politics. In choosing to award prizes to Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, it was well aware that the USSR would never let them come to collect their award. Disputes over who should have won the Nobel crop up with predictable regularity year after year. Accompanying them is a miasma of (probably apocryphal) Nobel lore. Did Joseph Conrad not get it because of the dynamiting villains in
The Secret Agent
? Did Graham Greene not get it because of the offensive depiction of the Swedish ‘safety-match king’, Ivar Kreuger, in
England Made Me
? Would the British-born W.H. Auden (widely reported to be a frontrunner in 1971) have won had he not been a US citizen at the wrong time of his life – namely during the bloody Vietnam War? For writers, such gossipy imaginings add spice to every year's announcement. And they are, backhandedly, a tribute to the importance attached to what is undeniably the world's major prize for literature.

The French
Prix Goncourt
, founded in 1903, is the ‘purest’ of the prizes, from the point of view of literary criticism. It was set up with an endowment by the eminent French man of letters, Edmond
de Goncourt, whose high literary ideals it honours. A jury of ten, all distinguished in the literary world, and long-serving, meet once a month in a restaurant (this is, remember, a Parisian prize) to elect a particularly worthy book of the year. Literary quality is all. The cash prize is a derisory ten euros, to emphasise the point that this is not about money. Perish the thought. The lunches probably cost a fortune.

America's
National Book Awards
, nicknamed ‘Literature's Oscars’, began in 1936 during the Great Depression as an initiative by publishers and the American Booksellers Association to stimulate interest and sales at a low time in their industries. Over the years it has developed a wide array of prizes – almost as many as there are category bookshelves in a city bookstore. In 2012 they even had a niche award for E.L. James's
Fifty Shades of Grey
. It could be argued that the impact of the NBAs is muffled by there being so many of them. Like the Oscars, one yawns as yet another envelope is opened.

No yawning at the annual ‘
Booker
evening’ every October. What is now acknowledged as the world's premier prize for fiction was set up in 1969 as the ‘English Goncourt’. Unlike its cross-Channel ancestor, however, it gladly accepted the embrace of commerce and gave handsome cash prizes (and, with the publicity, the knock-on certainty of big sales). Booker McConnell, the original sponsors, had interests in West Indian sugar cultivation. One Booker winner, John Berger, used his speech to attack his ‘colonial’ benefactors and passed half his prize money to the Black Panther movement. In recent years the prize has been sponsored by a hedge fund and thus renamed the Man Booker Prize. With Anglo-Saxon pragmatism the administrators of the prize have no problem with the deal they make with capitalism.

The long-serving ten Goncourt judges are all from the literary world. The five Booker judges, who serve for one year only, are from the ‘real world’ – sometimes, controversially, showbiz. The book trade not only likes literary prizes, it likes the controversy which attends them – both before and after the awards ceremony. The administrators' cunningly programmed release of who is serving
on the Booker panel, the long list, the short list, all culminate in a night of banqueting, TV coverage, suspense and, usually, fierce debate. A lot of novels, in the process, are bought and consumed. Is literature's contemporary prize-culture a good thing? Most would say it is: if only that it gets literature read. But we should see it as part of what is a changed, and fast-changing, literature scene.

Another twentieth-century novelty is the ever-expanding number of book and literary festivals which began in the period after the Second World War. These events, large and small, bring together congregations of book lovers, and in their genteel way they have become the pop concerts of literature.
En masse
, these fans make their preferences felt to authors, who meet their readers face to face, and to publishers, who pay very close attention to what is selling in the now traditional ‘book tent’. Call it a meeting of minds.

Even more recent is the explosive growth of local reading groups, in which like-minded book lovers get together to discuss a series of books they have chosen for themselves. There is nothing overtly educational or self-improving about these groups. There are no fees, no regulations – just a sharing of critical views on literature which is thought to be worth a read, and some lively discussion. Again, minds meet – always a good thing where literature is concerned.

Reading groups have changed the way we talk about literature and have opened up new lines of communication between producers and consumers. Many publishers nowadays package their fiction and poetry for reading groups, with explanatory author interviews and questionnaires. They are democratic in spirit. There is no top-down instruction: it's more bottom-up, and selections are more likely to be titles chosen from ‘Oprah's picks’ than the book that has got appreciative reviews in the
New York Review of Books
, the
London Review of Books
or
Le Monde
. Reading groups help to keep reading alive and pleasurable. And without that, literature itself would die.

CHAPTER
40

Literature in Your Lifetime… and Beyond

The printed ‘book’ – a physical thing made up of paper, type, ink and board – has been around now for over 500 years. It has served literature wonderfully: packaging it in cheap (sometimes beautiful) forms that have helped to sustain mass literacy. Few inventions have lasted longer, or done more good.

The book may, however, have had its day. The tipping point has come very recently, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when e-books – digital things made up of algorithms and pixels – began to outsell the traditional book on Amazon. An e-book, as it's currently marketed for handheld tablets, looks eerily like a ‘real’ book, just as the early printed books, such as Gutenberg's, looked just like manuscripts. But, of course, it doesn't behave like a ‘real’ Gutenbergian book. The e-book has the same relation to its predecessor as the horseless carriage (that is, the automobile) had to the horse-drawn carriage.

With an e-book you can alter the type-size, turn the pages with your thumbs (instead of your index finger) at lightning speed, search the text, and extract lumps of it for downloading. In short,
you can do a lot more with an e-book, although, as it's routinely pointed out, you can't drop it in the bath. And, of course, the e-book is still evolving – readers won't have to wait 500 years for what comes next. Book apps are already creating new formats and new ways of reading. What forms will literature take in the years to come? What new delivery systems will it use? In the libraries of the future, will we no more see a print-and-paper book than we see a horse-drawn carriage on the motorway?

By way of answering these questions, let's start from three basics that will condition the future world of literature, however it is delivered to us. First, there will be a lot more literature available. Second, literature will come to us in different, untraditional ways (in audio, visual and ‘virtual’ forms). Third, it will come in new packages.

The first, the ‘too-muchness’ of literature, is already with us and expanding all the time. Any kind of screen with an internet connection gives its owner access via new (and often free) e-libraries, such as Project Gutenberg, to a quarter of a million works of literature. You hold in the palm of your hand the equivalent of enough old-fashioned books to fill an aircraft-hanger. What's on offer is increasing all the time. Delivery is instantaneous and the material can be customised to your personal preferences for reading it.

This mind-crushing plentifulness creates whole new sets of problems. There are those still living (and I am one) who were raised in a cultural environment whose central features were scarcity, shortage and inaccessibility. If you wanted a new novel, you had either to save up the money to pay for it, or put your name down on a waiting list at the local public library. It was annoying. But, in a way, it made things simpler. You had fewer options.

Now, for relatively small sums, a couple of screen-strokes can procure you anything newly published and virtually limitless numbers of secondhand books. On the Web, a search engine (one of them aptly called ‘Jeeves’, like the butler) will serve you up any new or ancient poem you want. All you have to do is enter a couple of keywords (wandered + lonely + cloud).

In a single lifetime – mine, for example – shortage has been replaced by an embarrassment of choice. So where, in this electronic
Aladdin's Cave, does one start? More importantly, where should we invest the limited (life-)time at our disposal? It's calculated that someone at school now will encounter some fifty or so works of literature in their school career, and those studying literature at university around 300 more. Most people will probably consume no more than 1,000 works of literature in their adult lifetime. If that.

Where some literature is concerned (books set for examination, for example) we have no choice. But usually it's entirely up to us what we choose to read. We are, as readers in the present time, paddlers in a deluge. In Shakespeare's day there were, it has been estimated, some 2,000 books available to a bookish person like him. You could be, as the phrase was, ‘well read’. That is a description for which no one in the future will qualify.

One reading strategy, followed by many, is to fall back on old favourites, the ‘Usual Suspects’. In other words the canon, the classics, the works currently topping the bestseller lists, the whole mix spiced up by word-of-mouth from trusted friends and advisers. This could be called swimming with the tide.

An alternative is what we might call the ‘shopping trolley’ strategy – choosing from the wealth of what is available by defining your own specific needs, interests and tastes, and tailoring your literary diet to what suits you best. When it comes to literature, says William Gibson (pioneer of the ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction genre), we are ‘worms in the cheese’. No worm will consume the whole cheese, and no worm will tunnel through in the same way as any other worm.

The problem of ‘managing surplus’ is further complicated by the fact that what we have in our hand is much more than a functional text-delivery system. It can go beyond words on the page and also provide music, film, opera, TV and – most insidiously – games. How can the pixel-printed word compete? How do we make time to listen to our favourite music
and
read the latest novel (available, at a relatively painless price, on the same handheld device)?

Whatever else, these days we need to be educated in the intelligent use and investment of time. That, not money, is what we will be short of in the future. How much time does the average
working person have for culture, loosely defined, in an average week? Around ten hours, it is estimated. How long does it take to read a new novel by Hilary Mantel (since we've mentioned her), or Jonathan Franzen? You've guessed it. Around ten hours.

At the moment we are in a transitional or ‘bridge’ moment in our literary world. The electronic ‘faux book’ format which we cling to is an example of what the critic Marshall McLuhan called ‘rear-mirrorism’. What he meant by this is that we always see the new in terms of the old. We hold on to the past because we are nervous about the future or feel unsure how to handle it. Children and comfort blankets come to mind.

Fragments of the old can often be found in the new, if we look carefully enough. Have you ever wondered why films have musical soundtracks but stage plays don't? When Kenneth Branagh played Henry V on the screen, there was thundering music (composed by Patrick Doyle, and conducted by Simon Rattle). On stage, when he plays the same part, there is none. The reason is that silent films – which were all that was available for thirty years – had pit orchestras or, at the very least, piano accompaniment. The music stayed on, even after the ‘talkies’ came along. Why do the pages of books have such large margins – why doesn't print extend nearer the four edges? Because early manuscript books allowed space for marginal comment and annotation. We still have the margins, though few use them for writing notes in, and libraries get furious if you do. It's a perfect example of ‘rear-mirrorism’.