Why is literary fiction notorious for being statistically 'low sellers' in the world of book publishing? This question, is often indirectly asked by many literary writers who are frustrated by what they believe to be a book publishing industry who cater only to mass markets by following statistically proven trends. This article seeks to explore the origins of the separation of literary fiction from mainstream book publishing using the ideas expressed in John Carey's book called The Intellectuals and the Masses, Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.
John Carey asserts, that the English Literary Intelligentsia of this time period made a conscious effort to segregate literary fiction from the newly literate ( or semi-literate ) mass culture, produced by the late nineteenth century educational reforms to which they opposed. The Education Act of 1871 introduced universal elementary education, and in 1896 there emerged a newspaper called The Daily Mail whose slogan 'The Busy Man's Paper' was based upon a new journalism designed to 'give the public what it wants' which was in direct conflict to the intellectuals belief in giving the public what the intellectuals want, and this is what defined their idea of an education. Nietzsche and his supporters, denying that the masses were real people, suggested that the masses should be prevented from learning to read, and that education should remain a privilege. T.S. Eliot prophesying in his essays, states:
There is no doubt that our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards...destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.
The 1879 novel Immaturity by George Bernard Shaw was turned down by nearly every London publisher, and he concluded that the reason for its rejection being the result of the newly adopted Education Act, to which he proclaimed, ' was producing readers who have never before bought books.' And that Publishers were finding that the people did not want the 'excessively literary' Bernard Shaw nor George Eliot, but preferred the adventure stories of Stevenson's Treasure Island and Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. Knowing this, Shaw proclaimed, 'I, as a belated intellectual, went under completely.' However, Shaw did not go under, but made a very conscious effort to write for the masses and used the newspapers for self publicity, and proceeded to become acknowledged as one of the most brilliant and remarkable journalists in London.
The Daily Mail adopted sales figures as the sole criterion, and through this popularity rating, created an alternative culture which made the intellectual redundant by circumventing the cultural elite. The hostility of the European intellectuals to newspapers was widespread. In The Criterion in 1938, T.S Eliot declared that the effect of the daily newspapers on their readers was to 'affirm them as a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass'. Extensive campaigns against newspapers were abound, and in the pages of Scrutiny, F.R. Leavis referred to the mass media as 'arousing the cheapest emotional responses,' and declared; 'Films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction - all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.' Contrary to the benefits of publicity that would boost sales and incomes of the writers who were prepared to write for them, Evelyn Waugh, for example, instead satirised them in his novels Scoop and Vile Bodies.
To the highbrows of the time, it seemed that the masses were not fully alive, and therefore lacked souls. Many of the predominate literary icons of this period expressed clear hostility towards the explosive over population of the masses; and the triumph of hyperdemocracy and social power created by this newly created state. Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun's antidemocaratic views are epitomized by his character Ivar Kareno, hero of the Kareno trilogy:
I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be the ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.
One week following Hitler's death, Hamsun published an admiring obituary to the Fuhrer, and described him as 'a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations'. 'His fate,' Hamsun continues, 'was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism which finally felled him.'
Thomas Hardy refers to the masses when he wrote in 1887:
You may regard a throng of people as containing a certain small minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of these, being what is worth observing. So you divide them into the mentally unquickened, mechanical soulless; and the living, throbbing, suffering, vital, in other words into souls and machines, ether and clay.
D.H. Lawrence, the major English disciple of Nietzsche, argues that only the elite truly live, whilst the proletariat merely survives:
Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or
than in the palm tree,
Life is more vivid in the snake than in the butterfly.
Life is more vivid in the wren than in the alligator...
Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me.
The intellectuals could not, obviously, prevent the masses from obtaining literacy. Instead, the early twentieth century European intelligentsia attempted to exclude the reading masses from culture, by making literature too difficult for them to understand. Virginia Wolf condemned the rudimentary character of Leopold Bloom and redemption of mass man in James Joyce's Ulysses:
It is an illiterate, underbred book, the product of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating...I'm reminded all the time of some callow board school boy.
The highly complex writings of Ezra Pound in his Cantos is a good illustration of this obscurity in literature, and also illustrates the contempt for the common man. In Pound's Cantos the multitudes and democratically elected leaders were a torrent of human excrement. The illustration of 'the great arse-hole' Pound contends, was a portrait of contemporary England.
A body of esoteric doctrine defended from the herd was adopted by a group of intellectuals who considered themselves to be natural aristocrats by creating a society called 'The Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn' in 1890. This secret society fed the craving for power and distinction that soared the intellectual above the masses.
The contempt for the masses expressed by the Literary icons of this period not only opposed universal education, but many also supported the ever growing concept of eugenics as a means to control the overpopulation of inferior beings. Darwin's Theory of natural selection inadvertently led a new ethics most expressed in H.G.Well's New Republic. Wells affirms the belief that inferior beings should be mercifully obliterated and the mass genocide of these people is morally justifiable:
The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalor dishonor, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through the sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.
The entirety of John Carey's study is overwhelming, enlightening and extremely disturbing. To regurgitate the book in all of its entirety is too lofty a goal for only one article. However, given these facts, one can not limit the racist tendencies that supported the rise of the Third Reich, to only the German people. Literary elitist tendencies may be arguably present still today, and this is what concerns me most when I hear of a literary group that unites together by their common hostility to mainstream publishing. What is the mainstream, if not the masses? Would the fascist elitist ideology of Bernard Shaw, Virginia Wolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Knut Hamsun and H.G. Wells include or exclude you? Questions to ponder.
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