Why should I want to read a system? Part I

On Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, literary sociology, totality, the systems novel, ‘real subsumption’, and the (good, actually) fiction of self-legislating form.

This is part of a series on contemporary literary criticism, which I’ll be writing sporadically, working out some of my own thoughts about the discipline of literary studies and how close to, or far away from literature, it can take you.

1.

The Literature Now imprint of Columbia University Press, a series for academic monographs on contemporary literature seems to do a good job of publicity and marketing. It’s rare that you see reviews and thinkpieces responding to works of literary criticism. But when you do, if the book is not a lament for the fate of the discipline itself, it’s often from Columbia.

This good job trickles, eventually, into Useless Concentration; I wrote before on Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect, and now I’m writing, here, sort of, on Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing  Industry and American Literature. Fool me into reading a work of academic literary criticism once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well, you can’t knock the hustle. Hats off to the publicity team.

Dan Sinykin will doubtless want to credit them, because that’s what his book does—place emphasis on the non-authorial actors (both people and, crucially, ‘emergent’ properties of the system of American publishing) that shape novels, in the hope of moving ‘toward a better collective understanding of literary production.’

What he and everyone else involved have delivered is a history of how American publishing changed between the 1960s and the 1990s, and an argument about how this constrained, shaped, and generally ‘produced’ the novels written then, from those of Toni Morrison to the work of Danielle Steel. The book offers many fascinating insights into the workings and workers of US publishing during the transition to the ‘neoliberal’ status quo, or what the historian and leading light of ‘political Marxism’, Robert Brenner calls ‘the long downturn’ (roughly 1973-present).

Sinykin’s first book American Literature and the Long Downturn, addressed that wider topic, what economists to the right of Brenner call secular stagnation—that is to say the apparent slowdown of GDP and wage growth in the USA and much of the developed world that began around the 1970s. His argument in that book was that novelists, seeing that American prosperity had begun to wane, vented their frustrations into fictions of apocalypse—envisioning a final resolution to the various social contradictions they saw intensifying around them as the money dried up. This apocalyptic ‘structure of feeling’ became a plot or genre that reveals, he thinks, ‘the texture’ of life under neoliberalism.

You can think of Big Fiction as a sequel, which is both more and less ambitious. This time, rather than try to read writers as directly ‘reflecting’, or ‘writing about’ an economic situation, he’s gone looking for, and found, a mediating term that ties U.S. writing to the economic situation. The business of publishing.

In this approach, the book owes something to and yet revises or critiques Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of ‘the literary field’. Fields, in Bourdieu, are kinds of semiautonomous games. These are played according to their own rules—but the structure of the field, its shape and rules are themselves determined by the field’s relation to ‘society’ as what a different tradition would call a totality. High art, for example, acquires in 19^th century France a set of rules that are calculatedly opposed to those of economic life (‘loser wins’), but it is still structured by the overall logic of competition in certain ways; the rules come from society (‘one finds in the literary field all the traits characteristic of the functioning of political and economic fields, and more generally of all fields – relationships of force, capital, strategies, interest’). What matters to Bourdieu is that such a logic is transformed into a new field with its own rule ‘an empire within an empire’. So you go looking for ‘history’ not in the texts, but in the system of rules that the texts obey:

external factors, economic crises, technical transformations, political revolutions, or quite simply social demand on the part of a particular category of patrons, of which traditional social history seeks the direct manifestation in the works, can only be exercised by the intermediary of the transformations of the structure of the field which these factors may determine.”

Sinykin both works with something like the idea of a unified ‘literary field’, and revises Bourdieu’s assumptions about the specialness of ‘serious’ literature. He wants to show how the structure of ‘the field’ for novelists has changed because of changes in the business of publishing, which are in fact driven by a crisis in capitalism itself. You can see a similar (and presumably inspirational for Sinykin) move in Sarah Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, which, while looking closely at a singular institution and the pressures on it, stages a collapsing of what might seem like a restricted field into what she calls ‘the real economy’. Sinykin wants to show us that writers of even the most non-commercial fiction take positions in a literary field that looks a lot more like direct competition on the market than it does like a special game you need to understand on its own terms.

This new sense of what the field is constitutes the ambitious ‘move’, the thing that puts the Big in his title. But it goes further, or deeper. We ought to read American fiction, Sinykin suggests not (or not just) for the individual stories any given novel tells, but for the big story it tells by dint of being a position taken in this unrestrictive field. That story is partly the same story he told before, of the global economic downturn; but it’s actually also kind of bildungsroman, a story of the coming into being of a total entertainment system, and within that system, of a writerly intelligence that is collective, emergent—like large language models, or maybe more like the price of a tin of beans. Novels, looked at in this light are the creation of an institutional, collective subject:

Individually, an ant or bee will appear to behave erratically. Thousands together, though, display an extraordinary intelligence unattributable to any single element. That intelligence is emergent. Unlike the individual units in these examples, people in publishing experience, one hopes, consciousness, and a sense of at least some degree of rational decision-making; the point is that like an ant farm or a beehive or consciousness itself—or a Hollywood film— conglomerate era fiction displays properties attributable not to any one individual but to the conglomerate superorganism. This book charts the emergent properties of conglomerate era fiction.

2.

If the system produces the books, is that not the same thing as saying that it writes them?

That’s me trying to boil Big Fiction down to its literary critical argument in one sentence. But this argument is based on a historical one—the particular systemic qualities of modern US fiction need to be understood before they can be found to be properties of the novels themselves. Sinykin offers a handy precis narrative of what he calls ‘the conglomerate era’:

During the flush years of the postwar boom, mass-market publishers rein- forced (by instituting genre categories) and subverted (by publishing all fiction as cheap commodities) notions of high and low. Large media conglomerates began buying mass-market houses in the 1960s, but in the 1970s the boom bled into a downturn, and the book business slowed. Wages stagnated and inflation grew, hollowing out the middle class. Conglomeration intervened, creating a class of mega-bestsellers, engineering the harder (if still porous) divide between popularity and prestige that we live with today. By 1980, market segmentation and sales prioritization had become the norm, bestseller lists populated by a small group of brand-name authors. Between 1986 and 1996, “63 of the 100 best- selling books in the United States were written by just six authors: Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel.” Meanwhile, the mass-market distribution model introduced in 1939— sell books like magazines and candy, in between necessities and novelty items at kiosks, supermarkets, and airports—had been cannibalized by trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Only a few books make it into Walmart and O’Hare, but those that do sell in outrageous numbers.

It’s worth noting that it tracks with the Brenner/downturn thesis—though Sinykin doesn’t really discuss actual publishing profitability stats. That’s probably because it’s not profits that matter as such but the form the search for them takes, via conglomeration. The book business become standardised and rationalised, part of the total economic logic, rather than industry-specific—in essence the books become numbers on a balance sheet.

One way to read this narrative is as an illustration of what Marxists sometimes call “real subsumption”. Something is “really subsumed” when its nature as a commodity, as something to sell on the market, fully determines its production.

What does that mean in practice? In writing books, it seems like a complicated question. But let’s pretend that it’s simpler to say you’re a carpenter making a chair. Once upon a time, you might have had in your head the platonic ideal of a chair. It’s comfortable, durable, shaped like X, etc. But when you are a chair-making business, the platonic ideal of a chair is replaced by the platonic chair-commodity. It is maximally durable for minimal expenditure of labour and material. It is, in essence, maximally profit-making. This is an entirely different ideal.

Marx tells a historical narrative where ‘formal subsumption’—when a production process is simply incorporated into a profit-making concern as is—over time turns into real subsumption, where specific capitalist imperatives transform the production process. Silas Marner weaves for money, but his weaving is only formally subsumed into capitalism—when he gets replaced by the factory system, that’s real subsumption.

I don’t think Sinykin would argue that there is ever some kind of absolutely real subsumption, and certainly not a real prior autonomy of art-making practice. Like economic growth, perhaps, the relative distance of various practices from the profit motive goes up and down. Books have always been commodities. They’ve also always been expressive of practices and desires other than profit-making, like many other commodities. And perhaps certain kinds of counterpressures emerge that might make more space for non-commercially minded art. That seems to be the case for the way he describes some of the practices of pre-conglomerate publishing, in the immediate postwar boom.

But, like the rate of profit for orthodox Marxists, the trend line goes down.   

As a consequence of the line going down, the production of fiction, and especially of serious fiction, Sinykin seems to say, has lost a relative autonomy (from the market, if not other institutional pressures) that it had gained during and (resulting from) the boom under Military Keynesianism/social democracy in the West. Strategies such as the production of genre fiction, and of mechanically produced best-sellers become necessary to the whole field, and authors who perhaps were cross-subsidised by these best-sellers begin to be dropped as dead-weight. One example Sinykin gives here is Cormac McCarthy. Conglomeration sands the edges off McCarthy, and turns him into a profitable author of upper-middlebrow westerns, rather than the florid and rebarbative genius of Blood Meridian.

Sinykin’s story can therefore be read as a kind of stern (though genially worded and homage-filled) corrective to the comparatively rosy view that Mark McGurl takes of US Fiction in The Program Era. McGurl, like Sinykin is trying to find a collective authorial subject. He sees MFA programmes and expanded higher ed as that author. McGurl takes this, provocatively, as testament to the ‘excellence’ of the institutions of higher education built during the expansion of the welfare state.

But Sinykin argues that such institutions are part of a markedly less excellent totality, which is mediated for writers in the final instance via the conglomerate form of publishing— MFA programmes “are fundamentally entangled” with these through the extensive subsidization of NYC writers by nonprofit MFA programs.” It also becomes clear, I think, if one takes the historical narrative seriously that such subsidies are the fat of fat times. If they aren’t exactly unaffordable, their relative autonomy is no longer desirable from the standpoint of capital. And so the principles of creative writing as institution—its emphasis on certain kinds of craft etc., will give way to more direct training or ‘anticipatory socialisation’ to write for the market. MFAs in Multigenerational vampire family romance saga production.

If you squint, you can see the two books as expressing a conflict between the experience for two generations of academics. McGurl’s describes the construction of a valuable bulwark against brute capitalism and (implicitly) laments its decline. You can see that same lament more forthrightly in his book on Amazon. This nostalgic response, I think, corresponds to the working life of academics who came of age pre 2008, where teaching literature in a university seemed like a refuge from economically minded philistinism elsewhere. His younger colleague is less nostalgic. Sinykin’s story hints that the decline was always coming—literature, even as an academic subject—was always just a business.

Now, for my part, I’m tempted to read Sinykin’s book (like McGurl’s and Bourdieu’s and Brouillette’s, for that matter) as an allegory about the fate of ‘intellectual production’: not literature, but academic writing. There’s a kind of story being told about whether it’s possible to be an intellectual, projected onto the different question of whether it is possible to make literature. While clearly there are correspondences, there is a difference, surely in where you find the truth or lack of it in literature. You can’t connect its propositional content to its historical situation or its field because it doesn’t really have propositional content. That’s one possible reason why these books which offer systemic authors still perform essentially allegorical close readings; no matter how tightly they build their historical or sociological frameworks some surplus has to lie not in the plausibility of the historical narrative, but in what it shows us about the texts. What does an institutional study of this kind actually tell us about any works of literature?

In Sinykin’s book, big claims are made. While serious authors in Bourdieu’s reading are insulated from the market, though still delimited by it (if a child wears her underpants on its head, she fails to escape the logic of wearing clothes that she parodies), in Sinykin’s reading, every author is more directly subordinate to the actual operations of capitalism, as embodied in conglomeration; they follow its logic more directly, at the level not just of content but of form:

We are going to discover how fruitful it can be to investigate conglomeration—which took as its aim precisely to make publishing impersonal, rationalized, and mediated—as a reflexivity engine that produces characteristic forms of fiction.

3.

By pointing to conglomeration as a reflexivity engine, Sinykin can also supplant or get in between various other theories as to why U.S. fiction became apparently ever more self-reflexive over the 20^th century and into the 21st. The move from let’s say metafiction to autofiction looks convincingly like a market-driven strategy rather than a position taken within the restricted field.

Whereas an idiot might credit such stylistic changes to the internal motion of literary tradition and its logics; or Frederic Jameson might argue the postmodern novel is a symptom of the failure of ‘cognitive mapping’ (basically understanding the positions of individuals within a system) occasioned by the scale of the modern global economy—Sinykin’ offers us a nicely parsimonious explanation. Reflexivity is a fairly obvious (emergent) consequence of the economic logic that governs the publishing industry.

I suppose you might say that the more one thinks about the nature of one’s work as a commodity, and not, say, a story, the more likely you are to do one of two things. Either you fit the work into an established genre that sells; or you turn it inside out, so to speak, make the book a sort of advert for itself to sell consumers the fiction that they aren’t just buying a commodity. This is not just fiction, this is metafiction. That’s how he reads autofiction, a la Lerner, Heti, Cusk, etc. It’s an attempt to create maximum literariness with minimum expenditure, by selling your self-awareness.

So, over the course of the book, we come to understand the commercial pressures of categorisation that give rise both to the genre system of genre fiction and to the genre system of “literary fiction”. We see why, according to Sinykin, “literary authors” (for want of a better word) adopt the historical novel. We see why nonprofit small press books adopt a particular focus on perception and embodiment in what Sinykin sees as a product differentiation responding to the power of conglomerates. We see also how and why these nonprofits adopt certain forms and genres intended to celebrate liberal multiculturalism for their donors. We see why Toni Morrison writes Beloved with one eye on her old job as an editor.

The evidence for these propositions isn’t always convincing. At one point, we are offered, as a telling aside, the fact that “so many works of autofiction—by Rachel Cusk, Helen DeWitt, Percival Everett, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Ben Lerner, among others—are preoccupied with the book industry.”  Professional writers discussing their profession when writing about themselves—suspicious.

But I want to leave the evidence for the argument aside, because what is symptomatically interesting about Sinykin’s book is not its own truth, but its stance towards the idea of the truth, especially of aesthetic experience. Like many other books of literary criticism which come out of sociological approaches, the point of looking at a given object does not reside in that object. We want to learn instead about the system of relations. But then we go back to the object, to discuss it. Why? Why not simply describe the system? Why spend so much time performing readings that search for systemic authorship?

4.

To understand that question a bit better we might have to think a little bit more about style. In Big Fiction, style seems largely to be a question of counting what kinds of vocabulary a novel uses with the help of a computer programme. Did you know that Toni Morrison’s Beloved has more of the language of sensuous perception than you would typically find in a bestseller? But what can style  really tell us about a work of literature’s relationship to a system on the scale of capitalism, for example? What can reading for style tell us about a work of literary criticism?

To repeat the basic claim of Big Fiction as a single sentence: a book is not written by “an individual genius”, the author, and is in fact the product of the wider, somewhat creaky, capitalist system. It certainly felt true in this case.

For example, Big Fiction is full of moments that read, as a friend told me, like someone with one eye on a future gig at The New Yorker. There are countless character sketches, little vignettes, which ensure that you know that the ‘general reader’ is welcome here. This is how the book opens:

It was a Monday in late February 1990, the coldest day of the year. André Schiffrin, a natty fifty-four-year-old New Yorker, left Random House headquarters in midtown to plod through the evening crowds. Wind blew down from the Hudson River, tousling his graying red hair, stinging his wide-set, mousy eyes. He shivered and pulled his overcoat tighter around himself, heading home to his wife. He had just been fired.

You may not have this problem, but as a lifelong hater of ‘nonfiction’, I find it quite hard to read this stuff. That pairing of information and pseudo-novelistic detail, the music of a man falling between two stools, recurs like a leitmotif; whenever you sense the book is getting too close to seeming “specialist”, we are treated to this kind of writerly generosity. Have another description of ‘a jowly Italian with a PhD in economics’, ‘a Long Island girl with a Gatsby twinkle in her’ eye, and so on. That will help the medicine go down.

Sinykin tries gamely to thread the needles of two competing genres, popular nonfiction and academic lit-crit throughout the book. He fails. In academic writing, for example, you tend to use a special argumentative permanent present tense. In this book I argue, I trace, I explore, I intervene. The purpose of such statements is to spatialize an argument, remove it from the narrative time of reading a book, so people can grasp what you’re saying in the abstract (hence the name of its most obvious exemplar), before they read it instantiated in the text. But such a gesture sits quite oddly in Sinykin’s  own attempt to popularize his style by turning it into a narrative. Take this precis of his argument, which adopts this form but tries to be a trailer, as well as an abstract:

My cast of characters is vast and spans decades. And though my quarry is the system, it expresses itself through the people whose ambitions fill these pages: Victor Weybright, a farm kid from rural Maryland who wanted the whole country to read Faulkner—at least his smuttier books; Jane Friedman, a Jewish girl from Long Island who invented the author tour—or so she told every journalist she met; Morton Janklow, a corporate securities lawyer who fought for his friend to publish a book that made Nixon look good after Watergate, and who found he liked to make publishers sweat—so he became a literary agent. They made books popular, glamorous, and costly at auction. As readers at home found Stephen King, Judith Krantz, and Danielle Steel atop the New York Times bestseller lists, agents tippled martinis at Manhattan’s Four Seasons. I introduce the cast gradually…

“I introduce the cast gradually”: important information to know in advance.

You can see here the stylistic habits of academia, and the stylistic habits of someone trying not to sound like an academic rubbing awkwardly against one another. One writer, two systems, or rather subsystems of our present mode of production. Yoking both together, perhaps is the career pressure on academics to produce a new explanatory model or field theory. To think Big.

By doing this kind of reading, I am describing the institutional pressures that shape the book. But I am also judging. For me it doesn’t make for pleasant reading.

But why should these the fact of Sinykin’s writing bearing certain obvious disfigurements not exactly of his own making be related to the judgement, however? Perhaps I’m merely showing a kind of bias towards a discredited post-Kantian aesthetic tradition. Friedrich Schiller, for example, has a weird ranking system for the beauty of animals that says much the same thing:

A movement belongs to the nature of the thing if it necessarily comes from the specific constitution or from the form of the thing. A movement, however, which is prescribed to the object, independently of its specific form, by the general rule of gravity, lies outside of its nature and consequently shows itself as heteronomy. Place a workhorse next to a light Spanish palfrey. The weight which the former has become accustomed to pulling has so robbed it of its natural movement that it trots just as tiredly and clumsily as if it were still pulling a wagon, even when it is not pulling one. Its movement no longer springs from its nature but rather reveals the pulled weight of the wagon.

But it’s not apparent that giving the law to oneself (autonomy as opposed to heteronomy) must be good or bad in a book.  And I think maybe the trouble is more specific than autonomy, or autonomy is more specific than simply not being constrained. There’s another question, not of the law you give to yourself, rather also the law you take, even in art, even in fiction, but perhaps especially in a work of factual writing and argument, from the object you’re trying to describe. There’s always constraints. It’s not so much the prefabricated nature of the language that matters as the way that what it tries to describe gets away. There’s a tension visible here in Sinykin’s writing between arguments about systems, and stories, even of individuals that the system “expresses itself through”. The tension is what is expressed in the stylistic awkwardness, and that tension is itself expressive of what Sinykin’s kind of literary sociology misses about fiction’s aesthetic satisfactions, the impossible challenge of making sense of the world. 

5.

Sinykin himself, for the purposes of his book, claims to withhold judgement about whether anything that happens in his story is good or not for literature. He is not interested, exactly, in the ‘quality’ of a book, or at least he is not interested in assessing the quality of a book in relation to what he thinks determines its shape. He is of course interested in making judgements about the exclusions of race, gender, class, that the literary field is built on, but judging works is beyond his scope. He is neutral on the question of the value of the culture industry’s products, not least because studying them can tell you a lot about culture. A book might be interesting for a lot of reasons, but when attending to the nature of the field, or production, you don’t need to prioritise one kind of reason something is good, especially not its purported independence from the social world it was born bound to.

And yet the book makes judgements. Sinykin expresses a gentle, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condemnation of Alison Lurie for building her novel Real People on a cliched view of the author as Romantic genius. Autofiction, as I mentioned, is implied to be an especially marketable kind of commodity even as its reflexivity allows its authors to feel they have wrested some sense of autonomy from the conglomerates in a way that I think we are expected to read as expressing a lamentable bad faith. He is particularly hard on poor old David Foster Wallace for trying and failing to transcend his work’s nature as a commodity. It’s his second run at DFW. The previous time, Wallace hadn’t adequately reckoned with the nature of neoliberalism; now he hasn’t adequately reckoned with the nature of conglomeration.

Danielle Steele, meanwhile, might be, as he puts it, ‘deeper than you think’, but she’s finally dismissed, not because her work is mere product, but because she sometimes tries to claim it’s something else:

Her insistence on the myth of the romantic author reveals a certain naïveté, a willed ignorance of the compromises of adulthood, covering her eyes so as not to see the industry of which she is a product. With a childlike seriousness (“WHO writes my BOOKS???”) she wants to be the inspired creator solely responsible for her art, but everything about her art—its formulaic plots, its women’s-mag prose style, its mass production—betrays its mechanicity.

In a turn to the personal, that is I guess mandatory in contemporary trade nonfiction, Sinykin tells us the story of his own aesthetic education in terms that show how not just writing, but the aesthetic tastes of readers, the literary standards that we use to judge a book, are the product of a system. He speaks of his love as a teenager for Thomas Pynchon:

It would be many more years before I learned to narrate my aesthetic education not as a triumphant journey of self-discovery but as a slightly embarrassing cliché: my pretension to uniqueness, through Pynchon in particular, was repeated by cocky young white men across the United States. I was a type and played to it. In graduate school I met iterations of myself, again and again.

Personally, I find this kind of disavowal of one’s litbro past more embarrassing and predictable than being now or having ever been a litbro. But it’s decent of Sinykin to make an example of himself, as well as of the authors whose work he dissects. And the point is the same, the desire to see oneself as a special individual is like the chorus in Life of Brian who shout back ‘we are all individuals’; it’s a symptom of bourgeois liberal individualism, one more manifestation of the capitalist system, etc.:

If this book has a villain, it is the romantic author, the individual loosed by liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to acknowledge. To make this claim is already a derivative act, preceded by, among countless others, Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel that imagines that, against the all- consuming military-industrial complex, we either succumb, hopelessly resist, or disintegrate, losing all sense of personhood, becoming vessels through which flow the currents of culture.

This is a disappointingly predictable villain, I think. Literary studies has been wheeling this damned liberal individual romantic expressive genius out to pelt with rocks since at least ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. But, more importantly what is the genre, or narrative form, of these judgements?

Is it that of the Gravity’s Rainbow-style ‘systems novel’, specifically? Or is it the larger pattern of novelistic experience, of maturation, the coming to awareness of limitation, realism itself, that Gravity’s Rainbow radicalised because Pynchon seemed to think it had become conventional?

Sinykin claims to dissolve individual authorial agency into the play of forces, to follow Gravity’s Rainbow to its destructive, detritus-strewn conclusion; but the fact that an author and a reader can be in bad faith about their own self-mastery, and that this is both an emergent product of the system, and something to be condemned, is maybe more muddled than I remember being at the end of my go-around of GR. There is no outside to the system. OK. Claiming to be outside of it is precisely obeying the logic of that system, doing ‘marketing’. OK. Doing marketing is some kind of personal failing. Here I see a tension.

This tension speaks of the writerly difficulty of even describing the systemic. Most systems novels are ‘difficult reads’. In order to speak about the system in accessible ways, we need to speak about the positions individuals within it take, and the way we speak about individuals sounds, to me at least, like judgements. We might say wrong life cannot be lived rightly, but actually it’s worse to work for Blackwater or Blackrock than it is to merely benefit from a world that allows them to exist. We don’t hold the totalising and totally charitable (to understand all is to forgive all) position in relation to individuals because we can’t. And Sinykin is no better than the rest of us at doing this. It doesn’t really get him anywhere when talking about the books. In order for them to be interesting to the reader they have to remain available to individual judgment, or come attached to the story of an individual who worked on the book, otherwise they simply ‘disintegrate’ in his hands. Underneath itself, Sinykin’s book seems to say something like: there is no choice but to compromise with the market, so why not write a trade book saying that? If it’s good enough for Cormac McCarthy…

There’s a particular irony, perhaps, to the fact that the pressures of trade publication demand that Sinykin tells personal stories, his own, and others, in ways that make it harder to formally embody the impersonality of his point—he doesn’t even try to achieve his own dispersal here. And he never really addresses the question of what Romantic individuality does for capitalism.  Why might personal stories sell better? Why might people want to hold individuals responsible for things—why might such habits die hard? Why does Sinykin’s book tell us stories about people? For money, sure. But why does the individual story seem like a moneymaking proposition?  

In the next part of this essay, which will move past Sinykin’s book to consider a few other recent large-scale works on fiction, I’m going to suggest that the attraction of the individual story is a more complex thing. I agree with Sinykin, that this attraction, which must have something to do with ‘capitalism’ manifests in our sense of the individual genius of a work, but I don’t think we can do without it. I don’t think we should want to or even really could read a book without buying into the fiction of either the author or the work’s individuality. Why else is Sinykin so obviously disappointed by so many sociologically interesting books? Because here I don’t have to speak in the register of either academic or trade publication, I can say what I mean (and what I’ll try to argue more rigorously in the next part) in this slightly woo woo way:

You have to read books as if they’re alive. There is a fiction at the heart of fiction, not simply that the characters exist in some ‘fictional space’ or whatever; but that the story itself is alive—as its author was. The beauty that we look for in literature is the beauty of individuation, and we look for it because we need it—it’s a fiction that we need in order to speak, too. To speak to others we have to assume their aliveness. Literature emerges from that necessary fiction. And when we try read a system as the author of a text, we’re still doing the same thing—projecting aliveness onto something. Notice Sinykin’s emergent phenomena above. Most attempts to grasp ‘the totality’ through reading literature end up treating it as if it were an individual.

Sinykin claims that his approach liberates us from the cramped bourgeois conception of authorhood, but his model of emergent authority looks to me a lot like the great Hayekian visions of the market as Catallaxy—the thing superior to individuals that emerges from their push and pull. There’s nothing necessarily liberatory about seeing what stands behind or beyond individuals. It’s self-evidently true that in the real world individuals don’t matter. But in novels, they get to. And they get to against the backdrop of the system. That’s the generic pattern Sinykin copies for each of his stories and even his readings of authors. The individual constrained or crushed by the system provides the reader with the pathos of knowing that they matter in spite of constraint and crushings. Reading a text for the hand of the author offers a kind of contrapuntal movement to this: sometimes, though not in reading Big Fiction, we get to see the individual genius triumphing over various systems. The harmony of these two satisfactions seems to me to be the only worthwhile reason to read novels at all. I’m sure they can provide all kinds of evidence about whatever you want, but you’ve only got one life.