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IN France, bookstores and literary culture thrive, in part because of laws privileging books and protecting their producers and disseminators. A recent discussion in the New York Times Book Review asked if we need a similar system here.
The provocative critic Daniel Mendelsohn starts by talking about cultural differences between French and American culture.
Whatever the cultural reasons, books in France are indeed an “essential good” — the designation coined by the French government that served to justify the very concrete steps it has taken over the years to protect its precious literary culture. The most prominent of these are laws outlawing the advantages (deep discounting combined with free shipping) that big chains and Amazon enjoy over independent booksellers in the United States and other countries. These help explain a phenomenon that inevitably strikes American visitors to France today: As even big chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble have faltered here, every block in central Paris seems to sprout at least two small, intelligently stocked bookshops.
As well they should. On average, a Frenchman reads 25 percent more books per year than an American does. (The shocked outcry over the French culture minister’s admission that she hasn’t read a book in two years only proves how anomalous she is.) Other statistics are equally striking. In 2008, for instance, 14 percent of books published in F
rance were translations from other languages: a key indicator of a nation’s intellectual curiosity and awareness. In the United States, the figure scrapes along at 3 percent.
What do my readers — a number of whom seem to live in Europe, especially the German-speaking world — make of this?
UPDATE: For what it’s worth, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid takes a slightly different tack, arguing that writers are part of a larger, broader class getting crushed by relentless global capital. His point of view is similar — though not identical — to the way I frame the situation in my upcoming book, Culture Crash.
Mendohlson’s observations about the literary culture of France and the efforts to preserve it are found throughout the German-speaking world, and in most of Europe. The idea of the author as a public intellectual is still celebrated in Europe, hence the wide-ranging respect and attention given to people like Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agamben, Václav Havel, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, Hans Küng, Alain Finkielkraut, the French postmodernists who became so popular (and largely bowdlerized) in the States, etc. Widely viewed talk shows about books and authors are a regular part of television. And authors such as these are often interviewed.
In the States, by contrast, there is a long tradition of mistrust for intellectuals. People like Noam Chomsky, Jeffry Sachs, Camille Paglia, Cornell West, Christopher Hitchens, Naomi Klein, and Francis Fukuyama don’t show up on TV very often outside of highly marginalized programs on C-Span and similar programs. An unmitigated capitalism creates a relatively totalizing intellectual and social spectrum that is too narrow to allow for wide-ranging public discussion. We do not have a large, highly funded network of state broadcasters that work outside the marketplace to present authors such as these. It is thus only natural in a climate like this, that literary culture falls victim to the monolithic business operations of Amazon. Without a counter-balance, the bottom line becomes a totalizing force and nothing else is considered, while in Europe mixed economies are used to preserve intellectual traditions.
All that said, old fashioned literary culture still exists in some places in the USA. I live in Taos, Nm during the summers, which is an arts colony of sorts. There is a large community of writers and they have an organization called SOMOS (Society of the Muse of the Southwest.) They hold weekly readings almost all year-round with invited authors, both local and from the national stage. There are usually 20 to 100 people in attendance. They have an office and a large reading room. For a couple years, every Thursday morning a group of 6 to 10 writers would meet in my studio to read and critique each other’s work. The meetings were supposed to be two hours, but they usually went three, then they often went to lunch together. Now they meet in the reading room at SOMOS which is about a block away.
There is however, no turning back from the march of “progress.” Digital books have too many advantages. My visually impaired wife once lived with her nose constantly in books, but she eventually had to stop because she couldn’t see well enough until Kindle came along. She can now enlarge the print and once again reads constantly. She currently has about 175 books in her Kindle and is usually reading several at a time. We live abroad where English books on thinly pressed sheets of organic matter pumped across the planet by burning oil are hard to obtain. And even if we order books from UK they are often slow to arrive. Now we can have books in our hands within seconds and 24/7 by downloading them from Amazon’s massive library – and with little effect on forests and the atmosphere. The cost is usually about the same as a paper book, and there is no good reason that a fair portion of that money shouldn’t be going to the authors.
There has never been a case in all of history where technology and economic advantage were successfully stopped for the sake of culture. Technology and money always win with overwhelming force, so we have no choice but to reinvent our concepts of literary culture. This very discussion is one example, two dystopians, one in the Black Forest, and one in the wastelands of LA discussing the destruction of the publishing industry via a network of satellites hovering 25,000 miles over the horizon. We will need new forums and new modes of intellectual exchange to match the new methods of distributing and financing literature. Books are an essential good. Paper is not. Literary culture is essential. The traditional publishing industry, maybe less so? If we take the leap, will we survive?
I should also mention that Germany has a long history of legislation designed to prevent corporate chains from destroying small, local businesses. One of the most important has been controlling legal business hours. Big chains can easily stay open 24 hours a day, but mom-and-pop shops can’t, so they are put out of business. German laws thus used to force businesses to close at 6 PM, and they could only work half a day on Saturday and had to close on Sundays.. They recently raised the hours to 10 PM and allow stores to open all day on Saturday, but no businesses can operate on Sundays. Small businesses thus still have a fighting chance. There is also still a stigma attached to corporate stores and people often avoid them out of principle. This is enhanced by German xenophobia, since many corporate chains are foreign. Wal-Mart has thus had a particularly hard time entering the German market.
They also use zoning laws. In some of the smaller cities, fast food chains are often only allowed to operate in industrial zones.
In the 1970s, leftist terror groups like the Red Brigade set off bombs in big box stores as part of the struggle against what they termed fascist capitalism.