The post I’d planned first for you this Rumpus Saturday keeps growing and growing and growing, like Violet Beauregarde in the Wonka factory. I need to hack at it a little. It will have to wait.
Meanwhile, courtesy of the Millions, I was this morning alerted that Geoff Dyer has a piece in the Guardian analyzing the literary establishment. “There is no such thing as the literary establishment,” he writes. “I know this because I am a part of it.”
Now, I enjoy Geoff Dyer, often enough I do, anyway, but his is exactly the sort of piece that makes me wonder whether I still have any wine left in the fridge. At 10 a.m., on a Saturday.
I won’t quote much, just go read it, and know that I actually had to get up and Walk Away From the Laptop at this particular juncture:
I don’t detect anything monolithic or impregnable about this literary establishment except a belief in the importance of spelling and punctuation.
Look. If what Dyer means is that there is no locked room somewhere in which a cabal of writers — mostly male, many with pale and withered skin, all clutching Philip Roth novels to their chests like teddy bears — plot to exclude everyone, well: of course he’s right. Of course there isn’t. Writers don’t have that kind of time to hang out in rooms together. A friend of mine once wrote a critique of a list of reasons to date writers. To reason #18, “Writers are surrounded by interesting people,” my friend replies, aptly I think, “Every last one of whom is imaginary.”
And that’s perhaps how it should be.
That said, it’s hard to trust the “detections” of the porousness of certain literary borders from one who’s already inside them. And Dyer’s not exactly within spitting distance of the Customs desk – he’s barricaded in the Capitol. It’s natural for him to believe that he got there by dint of hard work and literary merit, not least because that’s probably true: Dyer is an amazing writer. I hate D.H. Lawrence, but I love Out of Sheer Rage to pieces.
But there are certain other forces at work. And here’s the thing I will never understand about these discussions: if you are already inside the admittedly creaky and misshapen House of Literature, why wouldn’t you want to add another wing? Why is it a problem for people to argue that the air’s getting a little stale in there? Don’t you want to open those windows?
And if you do want a little more sunlight in the room, why on earth aren’t you writing about the ways that can happen, instead of writing what amounts to an endorsement of the status quo?
