I'd like to rail for a little while against what seems to me the pernicious fad of vote-for-your-favourite on-line whatever-it-is now infiltrating the literary world. More and more literary sites are rushing to offer us the chance to vote for our favourites among their stories, poems etc. – this site included. The Guardian Poetry blog recently added a 'vote for this poem' feature, and a new literary magazine where I happen to be lending a hand with the editing allows, nay encourages readers to vote on the entire content, posing the question: Should this poem/story be included in our annual anthology? This is a brand new magazine and hasn't actually got an anthology yet, but hey – when they do, it's going to be democratically chosen. What's wrong with all this, you ask? A great deal.
Literature ought not to be a popularity contest. Most of the books we cherish are not fare for Everyman or Woman, or Child. Most of the books we need, those Kafkaesque axes to the frozen sea, are not ever going to win any popularity contest, being far too complex, rich and strange to please most of the people most of the time. There was a time when literary presses understood this, and published fine books for a small but discerning group of readers. Of course there are exceptions to this – Dickens, that consummate artist, was a bestseller in his day. But on the whole, literature needs to be nurtured by those who have the wit and the wisdom to appreciate it. It needs to be sold in that marketplace where none come to buy, not heaped up on tables and sold cheaply, three for the price of two, like onions.
I'd like to think that the web now affords a means by which all those writers whose work will never lend itself to onion-selling may find an audience. And many fine webzines have sprung up in the last decade or so that do indeed give a voice to fine writers. This is exactly why I hate to see them go the way of the popularity sweepstakes. One editor of my acquaintance, the discerning Rachel Kendall of Sein und Werden, specifies: 'I am after experimental, non-genre, erotica, horror, philosophical, noir, crime, hard-boiled, surreal'. One feels that the editor knows her own mind, and is not going to put it to the vote. But more and more of our e-zines are doing just that. If we must have voting, then how about this. Let's see an anthology of all those poems and stories that got the fewest votes. They may well prove the most interesting. Elitism! You cry? So be it. I'm not afraid to bang the drum for a literary elite. Anybody else marching to that drummer?
Spex
Date: Mon Dec 22, 2008 02:15 PM GMT
I think there is a good point here, Evan - Authonomy by HarperCollins, for example, is a bit of a popularity contest, although there's no 100% guarantee of being published.
As long as there is a balance between what people have voted for and what the editors judge as quality work, there will be good things being published.
Evan Perriello
Date: Mon Dec 22, 2008 11:41 AM GMT
I agree that internet voting systems should not be applied to the editorial process. But I have to question your assertion that literary presses used to publish for discerning readers, and now they publish for popularity. We forget that the classics were often dwarfed in sales by worse books that have now been totally forgetten. And nowadays, though things like The Da Vinci Code dominate bookshelves, there are still a lot of small presses putting out less popular books simply because they're good.
I admit, I wouldn't want to read by-vote anthologies. But, so long as they're balanced with carefully edited anthologies, I don't think they'll topple the written word.
