The whole "trying to make the thesis more radical than it actually is" is itself evidence of a different kind of conglomerate authorship: universities and research organizations, as well as the system of peer review and common ideas about what makes research valuable, shape the way that theoretical arguments like this one are shaped and communicated. If there is an intensely formulaic (which isn't necessarily to say bad!) genre of writing that is shaped by institutional demands, it'd be literary scholarship.
Also, I'm sure the point has been made before, but I guess BookTok and (to a numerically much lower degree) Substack are taking on the role of the idiosyncratic editor of old.
I was thinking this too -- it seems like a lot of interesting and worthwhile work is marred by this need to be "radical." Collective authorship is an interesting metaphor, but it seems (based on this and other reviews; I haven't read the book itself) like at some point the author forgot it shouldn't be taken literally.
God you’re good at this. Totally agree about the strength of the book. Sinykin’s insistence on conglomerate authorship has the energy of a college student trying to shoehorn evidence into a flashy thesis he figured his essay needed.
There is another and I would argue more insidious movement in writing and publishing that of the MFA factory writing dedicated to pushing the novel with speed forward. I have been railing about this type of writing that it sabotages the point of a novel to learn, linger, immerse in the thoughts, language , philosophy. Instead what we get is over blown film treatments. I have a number of essays on this subject conversation in the novel. Please check it out and join the salon conversation.
I think that drawing a direct comparison to film/tv is a mistake on the author's part, right? Even the most collectively-written novel doesn't require anywhere near the same level of coordination as the typical film, just by its nature.
This review does make me think about Harper Lee, though. There's a famous story (I'm paraphrasing from memory here) that she had a wealthy friend who believed in her and decided to fund her life for year, so that she could finally write her novel. At the end of that year, she delivered the manuscript for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Except, the story isn't entirely true -- the book she wrote that year was GO SET A WATCHMAN. Then, she spent a long time working with her editor, revising and rewriting, until together they created MOCKINGBIRD (and this was a very collaborative process; her editor had a lot to do with the book we all know). The book they produced together is, without a doubt, a work of art, but it's also much more commercially viable and marketable than WATCHMAN. I love it, but when I reread it recently I saw a lot of precursors to trends I dislike in current fiction (unfortunately I cannot elaborate yet, I'm still working through this). WATCHMAN is rough and clearly needed at least one good revision to be ready, but the racial politics and general morality in it are much more interesting and complex than MOCKINGBIRD. MOCKINGBIRD was published in 1960, maybe too early to be affected by these changes, but I wonder what Lee would have produced had she been working under Steinbeck's conditions.
Hm. I confess I'm kinda reflexively opposed to deeply collaborative writing like that, but I'm probably just being romantic. Frankly I get a little itchy even to know how dramatically Gordon Lish changed Carver's work. But now you're making me think: how different would our national literature be if we didn't have that pillar of Mockingbird. I don't suppose it's a life-or-death decision but...it's a flat truth that my joy at the book's existence outshines any pretentious hangups I have about "authorial integrity."
There should be an entire case study on Harry Potter and it's effect on publishing. I was recently querying agents on a fantasy novel, and I was struck by how so much on manuscript wish lists (romantasy, cozy) was in the long shadow of the boy wizard.
I disagree about the idea of the romantic author. Sinykin DOES challenge the romantic notion of the author because he shows that authors are subject to social forces. The forms their books take are not wholly internal, but made by external social pressure and market forces. Essentially he's proven (even though many people have proved this before him) that creation is not the result of individual interiority. Whether the creative product is good or bad doesn't change that.
Does Sinykin explain the existence and successes or perils of small, specialized publishers like Persephone Books in the U.K. who is re-publishing books from the late 19th & early 20th century written by women ( and therefore, obscured)?
Wow! This is a thoughtful and sensible discussion around a book that I never heard of. The world of conglomerates is certainly very different from the publishing world James Michener described in his novel "The Novel" (1991). As for the possible conglomeratization of literature, I don't think it is a conscious choice by the successful authors, but more of a Darwinism process of selection. Hopefully there will still be readers looking for something more than the dopamine rush.
This sounds perfect for my to-be-read pile! I just read Live and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fielder, and need something new along these lines.
"... authors are themselves influenced by what gets published. They’re influenced both in a direct way (they read the books and imbibe them as influences), and in an indirect way, because authors want to be published, so they write towards publication." -- This sums up the entire argument for me. Times change, tastes change, and an author (or any artist) either responds to those changes or doesn't.
This is why, while I'm not a fan of what a lot of people are trying to do with AI, I think the threat to serious literature posed by it is overblown. (It certainly can't write at a literary level, and there's no evidence it ever will.) Algorithms have been in charge for a long time. When decision makers are just copying notes from people who are also copying, you get a system that, as you correctly said, rewards mediocrity and gaming. If serious literature can survive the disaster that publishing has become, then it can survive AI.
I really appreciate this nuanced summary as someone who's interested in the subject matter but is unlikely to read the book.
I think the question of whether great books are produced by lone, romantic geniuses or wider social forces is a false dichotomy. Both things are true. Successful books tend to come out of (and speak to) hidden aspects in the culture that are not being voiced AND the people who produce them tend to be cranky, obsessive perfectionists.
I get a bit tired of how the The Death of The Author gets endlessly restated as if it's a new idea. Of course it's true, but the other thing is also true.
Interesting how art has been subsumed so totally into profit-seeking that “success” is now synonymous with “has broad appeal.” I’m not saying that’s *wrong*, but it certainly does have a homogenizing effect.
It was also enlightening to learn about how shifts in the bookstore economy have influenced publishing. I’ve been puzzling over how it can possibly be true that publishers lose money on most of the books they publish — I mean, how can that possibly be true? — and it makes a lot more sense now that I’ve learned that, in the past, it didn’t take as many sales to bring a book into the black due to the mosaic bookstore landscape. Thanks for giving me the info to make sense of that mystery
A great post! Well worth rereading actually. These are very important themes you bring up—concerning the literature market and its effects on culture creation (or a lack thereof).
Just a few observations and recommendations:
• Foucault writes in his indispensable essay “What is an Author” that yes, exactly, the entity the author now no longer exists—a caveat: to understand this, one must grasp what he means by the term Author. Obv ppl still write novels and poems, but do they fulfill the functions Thomas Mann or Jane Austen did? The Author is a function!
I link to the essay in my long-form post #2 “The Author is yet to appear” about the privation of authorship in the Middle Ages, not unlike today’s situation.
• Another must-read on this topic is Chapter 4 of Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the Culture Industry. He writes in inscrutable fragments, so it must be read in an open-ended contemplative way. Everyone will get something different out of it. The fragments needn’t be read in any particular order. Its a fun read.
Enjoy! I thought I would contribute things from non-anglophone spheres in case you are not familiar.
so books, just like disney movies, have their politically-incorrect edges polished off by committee, and then are shaped by inclusiveness to broaden appeal
The whole "trying to make the thesis more radical than it actually is" is itself evidence of a different kind of conglomerate authorship: universities and research organizations, as well as the system of peer review and common ideas about what makes research valuable, shape the way that theoretical arguments like this one are shaped and communicated. If there is an intensely formulaic (which isn't necessarily to say bad!) genre of writing that is shaped by institutional demands, it'd be literary scholarship.
Also, I'm sure the point has been made before, but I guess BookTok and (to a numerically much lower degree) Substack are taking on the role of the idiosyncratic editor of old.
I was thinking this too -- it seems like a lot of interesting and worthwhile work is marred by this need to be "radical." Collective authorship is an interesting metaphor, but it seems (based on this and other reviews; I haven't read the book itself) like at some point the author forgot it shouldn't be taken literally.
God you’re good at this. Totally agree about the strength of the book. Sinykin’s insistence on conglomerate authorship has the energy of a college student trying to shoehorn evidence into a flashy thesis he figured his essay needed.
There is another and I would argue more insidious movement in writing and publishing that of the MFA factory writing dedicated to pushing the novel with speed forward. I have been railing about this type of writing that it sabotages the point of a novel to learn, linger, immerse in the thoughts, language , philosophy. Instead what we get is over blown film treatments. I have a number of essays on this subject conversation in the novel. Please check it out and join the salon conversation.
I think that drawing a direct comparison to film/tv is a mistake on the author's part, right? Even the most collectively-written novel doesn't require anywhere near the same level of coordination as the typical film, just by its nature.
This review does make me think about Harper Lee, though. There's a famous story (I'm paraphrasing from memory here) that she had a wealthy friend who believed in her and decided to fund her life for year, so that she could finally write her novel. At the end of that year, she delivered the manuscript for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Except, the story isn't entirely true -- the book she wrote that year was GO SET A WATCHMAN. Then, she spent a long time working with her editor, revising and rewriting, until together they created MOCKINGBIRD (and this was a very collaborative process; her editor had a lot to do with the book we all know). The book they produced together is, without a doubt, a work of art, but it's also much more commercially viable and marketable than WATCHMAN. I love it, but when I reread it recently I saw a lot of precursors to trends I dislike in current fiction (unfortunately I cannot elaborate yet, I'm still working through this). WATCHMAN is rough and clearly needed at least one good revision to be ready, but the racial politics and general morality in it are much more interesting and complex than MOCKINGBIRD. MOCKINGBIRD was published in 1960, maybe too early to be affected by these changes, but I wonder what Lee would have produced had she been working under Steinbeck's conditions.
Hm. I confess I'm kinda reflexively opposed to deeply collaborative writing like that, but I'm probably just being romantic. Frankly I get a little itchy even to know how dramatically Gordon Lish changed Carver's work. But now you're making me think: how different would our national literature be if we didn't have that pillar of Mockingbird. I don't suppose it's a life-or-death decision but...it's a flat truth that my joy at the book's existence outshines any pretentious hangups I have about "authorial integrity."
There should be an entire case study on Harry Potter and it's effect on publishing. I was recently querying agents on a fantasy novel, and I was struck by how so much on manuscript wish lists (romantasy, cozy) was in the long shadow of the boy wizard.
I disagree about the idea of the romantic author. Sinykin DOES challenge the romantic notion of the author because he shows that authors are subject to social forces. The forms their books take are not wholly internal, but made by external social pressure and market forces. Essentially he's proven (even though many people have proved this before him) that creation is not the result of individual interiority. Whether the creative product is good or bad doesn't change that.
Does Sinykin explain the existence and successes or perils of small, specialized publishers like Persephone Books in the U.K. who is re-publishing books from the late 19th & early 20th century written by women ( and therefore, obscured)?
🇨🇦
He doesn't cover the UK, but there is a long section (a third of the book, almost) on US nonprofit presses.
As a sidenote, I love Persephone Press. Extremely good press.
Wow! This is a thoughtful and sensible discussion around a book that I never heard of. The world of conglomerates is certainly very different from the publishing world James Michener described in his novel "The Novel" (1991). As for the possible conglomeratization of literature, I don't think it is a conscious choice by the successful authors, but more of a Darwinism process of selection. Hopefully there will still be readers looking for something more than the dopamine rush.
This sounds perfect for my to-be-read pile! I just read Live and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fielder, and need something new along these lines.
"... authors are themselves influenced by what gets published. They’re influenced both in a direct way (they read the books and imbibe them as influences), and in an indirect way, because authors want to be published, so they write towards publication." -- This sums up the entire argument for me. Times change, tastes change, and an author (or any artist) either responds to those changes or doesn't.
This is why, while I'm not a fan of what a lot of people are trying to do with AI, I think the threat to serious literature posed by it is overblown. (It certainly can't write at a literary level, and there's no evidence it ever will.) Algorithms have been in charge for a long time. When decision makers are just copying notes from people who are also copying, you get a system that, as you correctly said, rewards mediocrity and gaming. If serious literature can survive the disaster that publishing has become, then it can survive AI.
I really appreciate this nuanced summary as someone who's interested in the subject matter but is unlikely to read the book.
I think the question of whether great books are produced by lone, romantic geniuses or wider social forces is a false dichotomy. Both things are true. Successful books tend to come out of (and speak to) hidden aspects in the culture that are not being voiced AND the people who produce them tend to be cranky, obsessive perfectionists.
I get a bit tired of how the The Death of The Author gets endlessly restated as if it's a new idea. Of course it's true, but the other thing is also true.
Interesting how art has been subsumed so totally into profit-seeking that “success” is now synonymous with “has broad appeal.” I’m not saying that’s *wrong*, but it certainly does have a homogenizing effect.
It was also enlightening to learn about how shifts in the bookstore economy have influenced publishing. I’ve been puzzling over how it can possibly be true that publishers lose money on most of the books they publish — I mean, how can that possibly be true? — and it makes a lot more sense now that I’ve learned that, in the past, it didn’t take as many sales to bring a book into the black due to the mosaic bookstore landscape. Thanks for giving me the info to make sense of that mystery
A great post! Well worth rereading actually. These are very important themes you bring up—concerning the literature market and its effects on culture creation (or a lack thereof).
Just a few observations and recommendations:
• Foucault writes in his indispensable essay “What is an Author” that yes, exactly, the entity the author now no longer exists—a caveat: to understand this, one must grasp what he means by the term Author. Obv ppl still write novels and poems, but do they fulfill the functions Thomas Mann or Jane Austen did? The Author is a function!
I link to the essay in my long-form post #2 “The Author is yet to appear” about the privation of authorship in the Middle Ages, not unlike today’s situation.
• Another must-read on this topic is Chapter 4 of Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the Culture Industry. He writes in inscrutable fragments, so it must be read in an open-ended contemplative way. Everyone will get something different out of it. The fragments needn’t be read in any particular order. Its a fun read.
Enjoy! I thought I would contribute things from non-anglophone spheres in case you are not familiar.
This is a precise and helpful assessment of Dan's book. Thank you!
so books, just like disney movies, have their politically-incorrect edges polished off by committee, and then are shaped by inclusiveness to broaden appeal