publications.
Another very important force shaping the literary marketplace in the late twentieth century has been mass-market book retailers like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks (the latter now owned by K Mart). Whereas, in 1958, independents accounted for 72 percent of all bookstore sales, by 1985 the bookstore chains had almost half of the market. In some cases, these chains have an influence on the publishing process that goes well beyond retailing: with every cash register hooked up to a computerized inventory system, B. Dalton has been able to track the 'item velocity' of each book it sells, and it provides that information to publishers in the
In the opinion of some, the influence of the chain bookstores has been more significant than that of conglomerate ownership in publishing. Richard E. Snyder argues that the chains 'serve a different community of book readers from any that the book business has ever had before….the elitism of the book market doesn't exist any more.' According to Snyder, 'the minute you get into the suburbs, where ninety percent of the chain stores are located, you serve the customers, mainly women, the way you would serve them in a drugstore or a supermarket.' While some have decried the supermarket approach to selling books as a major contributing factor in the decline of 'quality' publishing, Snyder sees the 'book supermarket' as an essentially positive development: 'Sometimes a publisher will publish a commercial book and that might be sold to Waldenbooks and some people might say that's bad. I say it's good — better that people read a commercial book than read nothing. It's a step up.'
However distasteful Snyder's endorsement of the literary supermarket may be to some, his description of that supermarket's customer — nonelite and usually female — matches the historical profile of the audience for the novel itself. Although reading has a long tradition as an activity of the elite, the history of novel reading is linked to the more recent emergence of an educated middle class. Ian Watt, Lewis Coser, and others have pointed out that the rise of the novel in England during the mid-eighteenth century was due, in large part, to the broadening distribution of wealth: as the numbers of the moderately wealthy grew, there was a corresponding increase in leisure time, literacy, and education, all of which were conditions favorable to the novel. The rise of the novel is also attributable to what might be called the rise of domesticity. The literal expansion of the -688- domestic sphere is part of this: reading is by nature a solitary activity, and larger living quarters allowed individuals the privacy in which to pursue it. In our culture, the domestic sphere has traditionally been the domain of women, and middle-class women, although generally excluded from the worlds of business and formal education during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, were increasingly literate and leisured, and made up a majority of novel readers during this period (as they still do, according to Snyder and others in the publishing industry).
The fortunes of the novel are linked not only economically but also ideologically to the fortunes of women. According to William Charvat, American readers of the late eighteenth century consumed quantities of reprinted British novels, many of them written 'by women working in anonymous secrecy' for a publisher who paid them a flat fee; this anonymity did not prevent novels from being identified as a form of entertainment by and for women, and American literary critics were nearly unanimous in denouncing the triviality and vulgarity of the genre, effectively depriving the novel of cultural status despite (or perhaps because of) its popularity.
These same considerations obviously made writing novels an unattractive profession in America — especially for male authors concerned with prestige. In explaining how authorship became a viable profession in this country, Charvat concentrates on the economics of the novel: by the 1830s, he says, American authors had begun to write on subjects of broad appeal, American readers had the money to buy their books, and American publishers had the means to deliver them. But he also notes, in passing, that it was the financial success of British authors such as Byron and Scott that finally raised the cultural status of authorship in an 'increasingly pecuniary' American society. It would appear, then, that as long as novel writing was regarded as the occupation of women, its cultural status (as well as the remuneration afforded its authors) remained low.
Recent discussions of the literary canon, and particularly of the American canon, have made it clear that the laurels for 'serious' literature have been awarded disproportionately to men. This is not because women have not written novels, or have written only bad novels; rather, it is because both the writing and the reading of novels by women has been consigned to the realm of popular (that is, dis-689- posable) culture. In the twentieth century, the bifurcation of the novel into 'serious' and 'popular' literature has been accelerated not only by mass marketing (which has increased the disparity in size between the audiences for these two categories of cultural production, even though it may not actually have diminished the audience for literary fiction), but also by professionalization, which has provided a positive incentive for certain (mostly male) writers to make their fiction less accessible to the amateur reader.
This account of the current state of literature is likely to meet the same objection from liberal humanists that the Marxist cultural critic's and the classical economist's would, namely, that 'the mysterious force of all serious art is the extent to which it always exceeds the requirements of the market' (in Charles Newman's words). But even the liberal humanist would have to admit that the struggle of 'serious' literature in America has always been in large part a struggle for an audience, and thus has been a struggle with the marketplace and its requirements. The two types of fiction most frequently identified as postmodern conveniently mark the poles of contemporary artistic response to these requirements. One is the response of writing fiction that is deliberately unmarketable: Charles Newman calls this sort of writing
a true future fiction for an audience which not only does not exist, but cannot exist unless it progresses with the same utopian technical advancement of expertise, the same accelerating value, which informs the verbal dynamic of the novels written for them. This represents an act of ultimate aggression against the contemporary audience.
The other pole of response is represented by postmodern fiction that incorporates and even celebrates mass-market commodities and mass-culture icons. This adaptation to the market may have survival value from an economic point of view, but it is likely to arouse the contempt of intellectuals:
By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in the 'taste' of the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and the public wallow together in the 'anything goes,' and the epoch is one of slackening. But this realism of the 'anything goes' is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield. Such realism accommodates all tendencies, just as capital accommodates all 'needs,' providing that the tendencies -690- and needs have purchasing power. As for taste, there is no need to be delicate when one speculates or entertains oneself.
This tirade by Jean-François Lyotard against kitsch eclecticism and commercial realism clearly demonstrates that even those who reject the marketplace still define art in relation to it. The identification of literary merit with opposition to the marketplace derives from the tradition of the historical avant-garde: Flaubert's remark, in 1852, that 'between the crowd and ourselves no bond exists' is an early but characteristic rejection of philistinism. This attitude intensified as the marketplace and its cultural influence expanded: Flaubert went on to sigh, 'alas for the crowd; alas for us, especially,' but sixty years later, Ezra Pound seems to have felt no such regret when he remarked to Harriet Monroe, 'So far as I personally am concerned the public can go to the devil.'
The artist's claim of autonomy may be one of long standing, but it takes on new significance in an age of professionalism. As Magalia Larson points out, professional autonomy always derives from exclusivity, and 'the secrecy and mystery which surround the creative process maximize the self-governance conceded to experts'; Louis Menand, in his study of T. S. Eliot's literary reputation, demonstrates that Eliot was instrumental in teaching both
