An Irrelevance of Talent

Bigots Don't Really Care about Literature

Let’s say in the first sentence that literature is indeed in peril; let’s clarify, however, that this has nothing to do with what authors “can” and “cannot” say about trans women—or about anyone else for that matter. That an author of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s status, to use a recent example, feels it necessary to disguise her incoherent transphobia as a defense of “free speech” or of literary ideals betrays only the banality of her imagination—the same banality that invites Republicans to loudly call themselves silenced, the same imagination that emboldens white supremacist militias to position themselves as victims. Denigrating women as a defense of feminism is not feminist.

The reason fascists have these ideas about victimhood and free speech is because they’ve created a world full of actual victims and actual threats to free speech. And yes, literature is actually in peril for these same reasons: because fascists (and the people who protect them) are dismantling it as a public art form; because they are strangling it as an aspiration.

Some definitions: Literature (not to be confused with literary fiction) is a small subset of creative written works—of any genre—that continually set the standards for all other creative written works, even those that don’t aspire to literature; Fascism is a political ideology rooted in immutability and predestination that denies agency to anyone who doesn’t participate in its categories. Because fascism is a simple, reductive way to classify or “tag” individual human beings, it becomes the most immediately profitable politics for the wealthy elite in societies with extreme inequality and under-regulated commerce. Because one of literature’s greatest strength is to complicate individuals, to both enrich and translate their inner lives, it is, in aggregate (with notable exceptions), an antifascist endeavor.

Culture is where fascism and literature intersect, as well as where, say, disingenuous novelists, newspapers, publishers, and social media platforms can interfere with literature’s struggle against fascism. Culture is where the undermining of literature compounds and accelerates fascist politics; it’s where, in a phrase, shit really gets fucked up.

Take publishers—by all accounts the organizations and individuals one would hope are most interested and invested in literature, even if publishing is not necessarily literature. It takes a lot of people—that is, a lot of labor—to get a work of literature into the hands of a reading public. In New York, home to more publishing professionals than any other American city, the average entry level salary is around $45,000. In a recent article for Vulture, Sophie Vershbow spoke with Laura Harshberger, a senior production editor at Harper Collins, where the starting salary is, of course, $45,000, and where more than 250 employees are on strike: “I recently left book publishing after nearly a decade due to so many of the things the HC Union is fighting to improve,” Vershbow writes—“low salary, long hours, limited opportunities for promotion.” She quotes Harshberger: “In order to truly address issues of inequity in the industry, everybody has to make a living wage.” While union members’ demands, which amount to a $1,000,000 increase in payroll contributions (paltry compared to giving everyone a $100,000 raise, which is about what it would take to make a real living in Manhattan), may seem steep in what we’re constantly told is a “dying industry,” Maris Kreizman pointed out that Harper Collins has just acquired a new memoir from Ron DeSantis, for which they’ve almost certainly paid seven or more figures—just as they did with Jared Kushner’s book in 2022, which was likely only a bestseller because one of Trump’s political committees spent $158,000 on copies the week of its release. Harper Collins describes DeSantis’s new memoir as “a first hand account from the blue-collar boy who grew up to take on Disney and Dr. Fauci,” failing to mention that both of these crusades—one anti-LGBTQ and the other antivax—have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Furthermore, as Kreizman points out, Florida has more book bans than almost any other state, right behind Texas. It seems, to say the least, in poor taste to buy a memoir from the man who most visibly championed book banning, and reprehensibly so when they refuse to pay their own employees a living wage. In purchases like these—and there are a lot of them—publishers undermine and disrespect the very people who keep their doors open.

The Hill, of course—one of the news organizations that announced DeSantis’s book deal—did not mention the striking workers at Harper Collins, nor the book bans in Florida. Instead, the article speculated primarily on when DeSantis would announce his 2024 bid for the presidency—the only reason, the article implies, that he would publish a memoir at all.

In the publishing industry as it exists today, large sums of money are directed away from the workers who acquire, edit, design, support, and market literature, and into the hands of an already-wealthy elite whose books exist only as marketing tools in political campaigns to further deprive others of their rights, personhood, or livelihood, whether directly (as in the case of DeSantis) or indirectly (as in the case of, say, Barack and Michelle Obama, who received $65 million in 2017 for a two book deal). This Reaganomics of publishing ensures that books with some of the lowest literary standards receive the vast share of attention and resources, while books that seek to raise the standards—and the culture along with it—are neglected, ignored, and undervalued. Most publishing employees, earning far less than a living wage and having to supplement their income with, as Vershbow and Harshberger point out, “freelance work, work in bookstores, work in retail,” do not last long in their careers. They don’t last because they can’t last; and literature itself—the culture itself—stagnates because of it. All the talented writers in the world can’t create a lasting, dynamic literature if there’s no one to push their work to a higher standard, guide them, pay them, or get their work into the hands of readers who might appreciate it. This is why so much of the industry’s marketing efforts have shifted away from individual books: the author, interacting with fans, mining their trauma, and photographed for interviews, is now the primary product of book publishing. Books require a certain skillset to understand and discuss; authors become, in their stead, a minor and vacant celebrity.

The fans themselves are another problem.