I am re-reading Silences by Tillie Olsen. There is a section where she describes Thomas
Hardy shutting down creatively after the vitriol that followed the publications
of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. In the 1890’s, books were often broken into
sections and published in magazines or journals as serials, similar to the
concept of television series today. Readers
read the book, say, three or five chapters at a time then had to wait for the
next issue of the journal to continue reading the story. If the serialized publication was well received,
the story would likely be released in book form.
Using quotes from The Life of Thomas Hardy, which includes
Hardy’s writings in notebooks and letters, Olsen recounts this situation: The
editor of The Graphic (the newspaper
where Tess was serialized in 1891)
was worried that readers would take offense to a flood scene. In the original scene, Hardy wrote that Angel
Clare (a male character) carries “Tess and her three dairymaid companions” in
his arms across the flooded lane. The
editor “suggested that it would be more decorous and suitable for…a periodical
intended for family reading if the damsels were wheeled across the land in a
wheelbarrow.”
That is the level of
censorship Hardy and other writers of the 19th century had to
endure. Men and women were not supposed
to touch in the Victorian Era unless they were married or related and even then
they weren’t supposed to touch in public.
Imagine the response Hardy received when Alec rapes Tess, and Tess
delivers Alec’s child! But this is what
blows my mind even more: The Graphic seemed
to be one of the progressive
newspapers of the day. Between 1889 and
1890, Hardy sent Tess to Murray’s Magazine, which rejected the
novel “on the score of its improper explicitness.”
This helps me put
present-day publication processes in perspective. Censorship of one kind or another is inherent
to publication. In 1891, censorship took
the form of strict moral, gender and racial codes in Britain and the U.S. (and
any country for that fact). Not only
were there restrictions placed on male/female interactions in art, people of
color had no literary voice. By the 1890’s,
U.S. slavery had ended (i.e., in the de jure sense), thus there was no longer a market for slave or free-negro narratives. Whereas W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington
were publishing much-needed texts on racial/social reform during that time,
there weren’t any books of fiction (as far as I have researched) published by black
people or people of color who were open about their race. Most Harlem Renaissance luminaries were infants
in the 1890’s or not yet born, e.g., Claude McKay was born in 1889, Zora Neal
Hurston in 1891, Langston Hughes in 1901.
They wouldn’t have the opportunity to get their work out into the world
until the 1920’s although McKay released poetry collections in 1912.
Today’s western publishing
world is obstructed less by censorship and more by gatekeeping, which takes the
form of trends, book sales and editor/publisher’s literary aesthetics. Sex is and has always been trendy even if
only in suggestive form. This is in part
because the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. We’re making up for centuries of sexual
repression. Vampires, speculative
fiction, female murders/heroines/submissives are also trendy in the U.S. now. Trends translate into book sales, and for
mainstream editors and publishers, it’s all about book sales.
Literary editors and
publishers are more interested in craft and narrative, but they succumb to trends
as well. White-lit is, always has been
and always will be, trending; whereas, people of color who write in any genre
are usually considered trendy by a small sub-group.
For example, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, racial identity/empowerment
writers were trendy. Angela Davis, Audre
Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gabriel García Márquez, and Ntozake Shange all had
books out. Some writers who hit the
scene in the 1970’s continued to produce in the 1980’s, e.g., Davis, Lorde, Sandra
Cisneros, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. In
the 1990’s, African-American writers were covering so many themes that they
weren’t just a trendy sub-group—they established somewhat of a cross-over niche. Walker and Morrison were not only literary,
they were also mainstream. Terry McMillian no
longer appealed to black women alone, white women were loving her too. Eric Jerome Dickey had straight readers and gay readers; he
crossed racial lines as well.
Today editors and
publishers are looking for trendy sub-group writers who have cross-over
appeal. The sentiment seems to be: The wider the readership, the higher the
book sales and profits. Ethnic-lit (i.e.,
books by writers who have immigrated to the U.S. or whose parents immigrated to
the U.S.) is a perfect example of this, e.g., Americanah, The Book of Unknown Americans, Stealing
Buddha’s Dinner, etc. The white- and
black-American experiences don’t adequately address the breadth of immigrant/first-gen
experiences, yet people from different nationalities read these books.
Regardless of trends
and publication gatekeeping, writers, i.e., writers who are and aspire to be
artists, have an obligation. As Junot Díaz said, “Artists are fundamentally attracted to the
things that no one is trying to deal with. That’s what art’s nature is… it immediately
goes for an absence.”
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