A thrilling rallying cry in the Independent from Granta’s new editor, John Freeman, about the place of literary journals in the modern world, and how the “Anglo-American dialogue” is no longer enough:
While American literature remains enormously vital and restless – could England ever have produced a Thomas Pynchon? Junot Diaz? – a literary journal cannot in good conscience pretend that an Anglo-American dialogue is at the heart of our cultures. Not when Nigeria alone has given us Chimamanda Adichie, Helon Habila and Uwem Akpan. Not when Kiran Desai and Suketu Mehta are exploring New York more viscerally than most writers born there, or when some of America’s most exciting young novelists, such as Dave Eggers and Tony D’Souza, are finding a way to tell vital stories set in Sudan and Western Africa.
It was John Updike, of all people, writing in the introduction of The Best American Short Stories of the Century, who acknowledged that immigration marks (and has done more to shape) the literature of the US than any other force. As borders around the world have opened up, and people migrate in search of safety or freedom or a better life, the literature of other countries is going to acquire the dynamic vitality that has given American writing its energy.This massive world-wide migration puts a new challenge to readers and writers alike. It forces us to put the world back into art. For too long, it has been assumed that these things can remain separate; that works which combine them are degenerate and political. But the mind doesn’t operate that way, nor does the world, and nor should the literature which we publish and think about.
In troubled and violent times, we do not have the luxury to avoid the hard questions which have stalked English language publishing in recent years. What stories are made visible? In what syntax do they appear? Why are writers in translation made to speak on behalf of their entire country?
Journals can afford to provoke these questions because they have the ability to fail, at least part of the time. They have the ability to use the cognitive friction of juxtaposition, layering, and varying lengths. Rare is the novel which features a one-page chapter and a 120-page chapter between two covers; but a journal can do this because a journal can be anything. [more...]
A curmudgeonly response from Robert McCrum in the Guardian:
Like it or loathe it, the engine of the contemporary global literary dialogue is Anglo-American. At the risk of stating the obvious, the intermarriage of English and American culture in its broadest expression sponsors the really dominant cultural fusions. Four out of the last 10 Nobel laureates write in English. Barack Obama reads Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Derek Walcott’s poems, and quotes from the King James Bible. The multi-Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire was based on Vikas Swarup’s Q & A. Bestseller culture, you sneer, unworthy of a literary magazine?
There’s more: the recent Orange prize shortlisted three Americans, and then awarded the big one to Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at the Iowa writing school. Jacob Weisberg, Chicago-born editor of Slate, chaired the Samuel Johnson prize, won by Philip Hoare’s Leviathan, a brilliant book inspired by Herman Melville. Michael Chabon’s essay on childhood in the current New York Review of Books, a journal that understands the “Anglo-American dialogue”, makes eloquent reference to CS Lewis, Philip Pullman, Matt Groening and Lawrence of Arabia. If this isn’t “dialogue”, I’m a Trappist. [more...]
Scott Esposito hit the nail squarely, I think, with this response to McCrum:
Incoherence like this is difficult to argue against, since I’ve read this a number of times and still can’t quite say what McCrumb is trying to prove here. It’s supposed to be a surprise that prizes chaired and sponsored by British and Americans are awarded to . . . British and Americans? Or that Hollywood’s biggest movie was based on a book written in English?
If anything, that’s proving John Freeman’s point that there’s a lot of room for Granta to expand into fiction being written elsewhere. [more...]
I love dustups like this – the more we battle out what books and literature and literary journals should or shouldn’t be doing, the more they matter. So fight on! Fight on!
[Tip to the good folk at Afterword for reminding me to post about this ... and here is their interview with John Freeman, editor of Granta & Senior editor Rosalind Porter]
