Dan Sinykin: Big Fiction—How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.
Out of all the recent interesting university press books coming out these past seasons, none of them has kicked up as must dust among reviewers and the ‘literary twitterati’ than Dan Sinykin’s latest book.
Sinykin has been plowing the fields of sociology and literature, in the context of America’s secular economic downturn since the 70s. His previous work came up in the letter on Blood Meridian.
The significant amount of wind-up for this bulky letter means the latter portions, that get into the brass tacks of allegorical reading and the ways of Marxian literary theory, are behind the paywall.
(Maybe this is a good time for a reminder that paid subscribers not only get to post comments but may unilaterally request any book title for a review that they want.)
As for Big Fiction itself, in order to fully grasp its argument: that industrial conglomeration left cultural and ideological impacts on late 20th century American literature, we naturally should take a look at the process of centralization that is so elemental to capitalism’s existence.
An industrial capitalist, including one who manufactures books, is constantly extracting surplus-value from the workforce, while their capital circulates as money advanced in production, as productive capital, and as commodities.
The capitalist is interested in increasing productivity, or lowering their costs per unit: they invest in improved machinery, which requires fewer workers to be employed. In society as a whole, the ratio of machines to labor-power — of capital whose value stays constant in production and capital whose value varies — increases.
All the while each individual capitalist reinvests a little more capital every cycle by capitalizing the surplus-value extracted from the last cycle: their private capital grows, in a process known as concentration. This is how capital accumulates.
But there is another way to grow heaps of capital that is much, much faster. That is by merging and unifying smaller and dispersed capitals into a single big one. The big fish engulf the small fry, the strong survive over the weak. This is capital centralization, and it only accelerates as the decades roll on.
Consider the publishing industry in the US after WWII. In 1960, Random House acquired Knopf after going public. Then Random House was acquired by RCA in 1966. Through the 70s publishing houses were subsumed under international conglomerates, like Simon & Schuster which was bought by Gulf + Western in 1977.
Additionally, Random House absorbed Ballantine Books in the 70s, Crown Publishing Group in the 80s, and merged with Bantam Doubleday Dell in the late 90s.
Sinykin’s book centers this process as a way to understand certain changes in book publishing and as such the literary landscape as we knew it. His starting point is naturally the book commodity itself. On the book’s spine is the colophon of the book’s publisher.
The colophon is an emblem that contains within in it a collective, all the people who work to make the book we hold in our hands but whose names we seldom know. Historically, and still sometimes today, publishers included a page at the end of books with information about how it was made; this page was also called a colophon.
Behind the colophon is a firewall of editors and publicists — but those figures are no longer the only ones influencing literature: conglomeration brings in shareholders as well as literary agents. This is just one element of Sinykin’s reporting.
I want us to enter the world of the colophon, to unfetishize the commodity, to respect the author whose name adorns the front cover by returning her to the milieu from which she sprang. Our outsize attention to the author alone is a trick of history, the legacy of copyright: authors needed to be made responsible for books if they were to collect royalties; lawyers needed someone on whom to lay the blame for libel. If we want to know what conglomeration did to books — why books are different now than they were — then we need to unearth what conglomeration did to the people who live inside the colophon, how it took power from some and gave it to others, transformed incentives, and invented new jobs altogether.
This is an interesting moment setting up the rest of Sinykin's presentation. The “fetish” of the book commodity (more on this reference after the pay jump) locks our focus on the individual author, without regarding the team of editors, publicists, typesetters, designers, marketers, printers, and so on and so forth. The meddling of private ownership structures these illusions through copyright laws.
In the modern age books have become mere “content,” a medium for realizing surplus-value from selling copyrighted books. As famous president of Simon & Schuster Richard Snyder is quoted saying: “We are not a publisher, we are now a creator of copyrights for their exploitation in any medium or distribution system.”
In the 90s, David Foster Wallace had believed that he could transcend the conditions of literary production.
Wallace’s error was to put too much faith in the ability of his writing to transcend its conditions of production. He overestimated the power of his message and underestimated that of his medium. His voice proved fascinating, enchanting, addictive. The moral of the story, for many, was lost in the fireworks of his prose and the hype of his promoters. In some small way, his critique of media conglomerates did the opposite of what he intended, handing.
Allegorical storytelling, Sinykin suggests, is a tool utilized within this conglomerated environment. It's a way that famous American authors fashioned self-reflexive expressions of their own economic situation.
Conglomeration led to the production of fiction that allegorized conglomeration itself. No one, to my knowledge, has interpreted Infinite Jest as an allegory for the conglomerate publishing industry. It is a novel about addiction set at an elite tennis academy and a halfway house. It features no figures from publishing. Yet an investigation into Wallace’s compositional method and the introduction of the most immediate and materialist context brings into focus the tale the novel tells of a heroic artist hoping to cut through a culture overwhelmed by media conglomerates with a work called, in the novel, Infinite Jest.
Or consider autofiction, that bluntly non-allegorical format, which in Sinykin's view is a conservative amplification of the old myth of the individual author, the artist's personality as the art object, the author as celebrity, and so on.
There's no shortage of social explanations for how the contemporary book climate ended up how it is. The massification of the book market in the mid-century incentivized a conservative turn, away from the political and social themes of the front half of the 20th century. This process is part of the thrust of Fredric Jameson's analysis of postmodernism.
Another obvious contention is the institutionalization of fiction-writing itself, under the sign of the creative writing program. “...maybe the biggest change in how Americans wrote novels after 1945 was that many of them now wrote them on college campuses. The rise of creative writing programs created an expansive patronage system that organized life and labor for novelists and had far-reaching aesthetic implications.”
A third point — and once you notice it, it's hard to forget — is that after 1980, the big, prestigious, literary prizes, like the National Book Award or National Book Critics Circle Award, start overwhelmingly going to historical novels. Rushdie's Midnight’s Children seems to be the turning point. (And the multigenerational family saga is the better awards play nowadays, it seems.) The historical novel “lent gravitas to fiction, a differentiation from blockbusters, which tended to take place in the present.”
The centralization of capital in the publishing industry, through mergers and conglomeration, is the “site” where three principal narratives describing the fate of US fiction: postmodernist aesthetics, the rise of creative writing programs, and the prize circuit.
The first area Sinykin investigates is the massification of books from the 1940s to the 80s. Especially in the 70s, “literary blockbusters” are superseded by genre fiction while the forms of book circulation shift to suburban malls and big box stores — as documented in the movie You’ve Got Mail.
The mass market of books destroys the "midlist novel," and the majority of the reading public's attention is concentrated on just a handful of proper names. We all know ‘em: Danielle Steel, Piers Anthony, etc.
Then, in 1980, Newhouse acquired Random House from RCA. Newhouse shifted Knopf kingmaker Robert Gottlieb to another of his properties, the New Yorker, reinforcing the special relationship between the publisher and the magazine. The move also freed Newhouse to fire Gottlieb’s friend, president Robert L. (“Bob”) Bernstein, who had long buffered Random House from its conglomerate owners. Under the new dispensation, top review- garnering, prizewinning Random House authors practiced earnest multiculturalism (Sandra Cisneros, Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison), adapted genre techniques in literary fiction (Michael Chabon, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, also Morrison), or enjoyed New Yorker sinecures to write New Yorker– style fiction (Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, John Updike).
Behind these names stand a slew of others, less known (outside publishing) but equally influential: Jason Epstein, whom we’ve met; Joe Fox and Nan A. Talese, Epstein’s fellow editors; Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf and his college friend, Wall Street maestro Charles Allen; Jane Friedman, a publicist at the forefront of the publicity revolution; Amanda (“Binky”) Urban, a literary agent and protégé to Morton Janklow’s business partner, Lynn Nesbit; and Sonny Mehta, who, when the dust settled after the Schiffrin affair, would find himself the most important person in trade publishing at Random. They, and the forces they channeled, are the conglomerate authors who shaped contemporary literature.
From here, the discussion ranges over ideological shifts in publishing after the 80s, favoring the feminist autobiographism of Elizabeth Hardwick and Renata Adler. There is also the embrace of “elevated” genre fiction in the trade paperback market, from the noir of Walter Mosley to the Napoleonic naval war stories of Patrick O’Brian, “the thinking man’s Tom Clancy.”
The non-profits step up to the plate in the 90s. W. W. Norton is the biggest of these (O’Brian is their golden goose, though they were initially reluctant to publish him in the States), but there is also Graywolf, and beneath this tier: Coffee House, Archipelago, Dalkey Archive, and Deep Vellum — the majority of my published book reviews are of titles that belong on their lists.
However, amongst this historical stream are discrete readings of well known American novels. In the space between the book commodities and the economic changes in the publishing sphere, there are readings of texts and author careers, arguing that they describe the predicament of conglomeration themselves. In a word, they propose allegories of conglomeration.
Stephen King meditates on his dependency on his own brand, be it in a work like Misery, or in his Richard Bachman experiment.
Toni Morrison set her famous debut Beloved in a haunted house, just as she had ensconced herself in the Random House.
Cormac McCarthy traded in his Melvillian prose (Child of God, Blood Meridian) for tough-guy-voiced genre exercises (Border Trilogy, No Country, etc.), also a necessary shift in order to play to a wider audience.
It’s these allegorical readings, like the one with Infinite Jest above, that are a major point of contention in the critical response to Sinykin's book.
Allegory is one of three modes of response or reflection of the landscape as determined by capital in the publishing sphere. The other two are "ironic multiculturalism" (such as Karen Tei Yamashita) and — as brought up in the previous letter on the Kornbluh — the autofiction trend.
Autofiction in Sinykin's presentation is a response to the loss of the novel's public prestige. It recuperates the traditional form of the Kunstlerroman as well as the postwar avant-gardist concept of the artist as a work of art to perform, through self-narration of one's existence, a reclamation of a romanticist notion of “authorship,” from the monolithic pub industry.
All in all, the historical facts arranged by Sinykin here make it clear how much this ‘conglomeration’ business determined your host’s own literary upbringing in the 90s and the aughts. The more “novelistic” prose describing key events wasn’t as appreciated, but Big Fiction was still an interesting read.
Now, what about these publishing allegories?
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