Where I'm Reading From

by Tim Parks

What we are talking about, more brutally, is preventing other people from making money from my work without paying me a tribute, because my work belongs to me. It’s mine. What we are talking about is ownership and control. The law, as it now stands, concedes that I own what I write and hence have the right to keep track of every copy of the book I have published and to demand a percentage of the sale price. This right is the same whether I sell two hundred copies of the book at a local newsstand over some years, or twenty million over five continents in eighteen months.

  And I can pass this ownership on to my children or heirs when I die; they inherit the right to collect royalties on every copy of my work made and sold, as if they had inherited a company or a property I was renting out. But only for seventy years. Having conceded so much to the individual, and then to his or her family, society finally denies that intellectual property is the same as physical property. My heirs can own my house forever, but at a certain point the product of my mind will be turned over to the public domain. The official rationale here is that I have made enough, and society, in order to build up and enjoy a shared culture, encouraging the accumulation of collective wisdom, needs to have free access to the products of my intellect, in much the same way as it has gained access to many of the great art collections and country estates of the rich men of the past.

  We all sense that there is more instinct than logic at work here. We simply feel that it would be bizarre to be taking royalties from the work of an ancestor who lived four hundred years ago. It would be bizarre not to be able to quote Shakespeare without paying something to his descendants, if there are any. At the same time we do not feel that if we owned a painting an ancestor made and left to the family we should not have the right to keep it or to sell it for any price the market will offer.

  In the recent past the duration of copyright after an author’s death was extended from fifty to seventy years. We sense at once that a decision like this is arbitrary and could easily change again. Was it really necessary that James Joyce’s grandson could charge more or less what he liked for quotations of the author’s work, even in academic books, up to sixty-nine years after his death? Does it make sense that to quote three or four lines from The Four Quartets in a book about meditation I have to pay T.S. Eliot’s estate £200? One feels the authors themselves might have rebelled, which gives us an insight into the real reason why works are allowed to go out of copyright protection. Because the author would have wished it thus. Once the immediate family has been protected, availability and celebrity is more important to an author than a revenue stream for descendants he has never met. The lapse of copyright is a concession to the author’s dreams of immortality at the expense of the family.

  Copyright has always been contested and hard to police, suggesting that there has never been a profound consensus about its ethical rectitude. Dickens, Lawrence, Joyce, and hosts of lesser authors all fought against pirated editions of their work. In the twentieth century, the opening of an international market for books and the progress in copying technology has exacerbated the problem. Can one really expect all countries to defend the rights of foreign authors, when the majority of international bestsellers come from half a dozen countries and overwhelmingly from the United States? Nor has copyright crime generally been “felt” in the same way as straightforward theft or burglary; I have never heard of copyright pirates afflicted by feelings of guilt and remorse. To make the situation more unstable, the combined innovations of the Internet and the e-book have not only introduced new ways of copying books, but also created a feeling, at least in some quarters, that all books should be freely available and consultable through my laptop or iPhone. There is a growing sense that copyright enforcement could become impossible.

  To see how copyright law may survive, we have to ask, beyond the pieties and legal niceties, what its real social function is and whether there is at least a large constituency in favor of that function continuing. Copyright gives the writer a considerable financial incentive and locks his work into the world of money; each book becomes a lottery ticket. Huge sales will mean a huge income. Copyright thus encourages a novelist to direct his work not to his immediate peer group, those whose approval he most craves, but to the widest possible audience in possession of the price of a paperback.

  On the one hand, then, by conceding copyright, society declares that it holds individual creativity in high esteem—every member of society can dream of one day benefiting from copyright, of transforming genius into money—but by the same token it draws the author into a bourgeois mentality where writing is a job with an income; the writer now has an investment in stable markets and attentive policing. In short, copyright keeps the writer in the polis, and indeed it is remarkable how little creative writing today is truly revolutionary, in the sense of seeking a profoundly different model for society. There is a subversive writerly attitude, of course—liberal, antiauthoritarian—which has paradoxically become almost a convention; dissatisfaction with society is expected of an author. All the same with a royalty check whose arrival relies on international agreements, electronic funds transfer, and a willingness to prosecute copyright piracy, he or she is more a creature of the status quo than its enemy. Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps it is limiting. Perhaps good things are inevitably limiting.

  Imagine copyright were phased out or became impossible to enforce in any meaningful way: you can’t expect an advance from a publisher, you can’t even sell your work directly to readers online. So, creative writing is no longer a “job.” You won’t be able to turn it into a living unless you become a big-time celebrity, in which case no doubt there would be lucrative spin-offs; but celebrity is always a long shot and how will it be achieved if the ordinary commercial channels disappear? Isn’t today’s celebrity mostly constructed on sales, which are largely generated by hype, and which would evaporate if a publisher no longer had an exclusive right to publish a given book—or if a publisher could no longer charge the prices necessary to support the publicity required to get a book to its intended public? It’s true that a certain buzz can now be created around a book simply by making it freely available on the net, as was the case with Fifty Shades of Grey; but that would be of little help if there were no prospect of turning that excitement into publishing support and money.

  How would this situation change the way a writer works? Would it make sense now to write the thriller, literary or otherwise, that was once packaged and sold to entertain and to earn? Would I really want to write all those pages, if there wasn’t even the chance of an income? Maybe yes. There is fan fiction after all. But many writers would not. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Samuel Johnson once remarked. I’m not with him 100 percent, but I know where he’s coming from. One sees here the difference from the music industry: unable to police their copyright on CDs, musicians nevertheless go on writing songs and can enjoy the feedback and hopefully some income from performing them to an appreciative public; if the songs happen to catch on through the Internet then the musicians can enjoy notoriety and expect bigger concerts, if not a huge income from selling albums. But there is no such performance possibility for the prose thriller, or even the great American novel. Without the prospect of money, the author would have to think very hard about what he really wants to write and how he plans to engage with an eventual community of readers whose appreciation, if not cash, must suffice to give him the gratification and encouragement he seeks. In short, you wouldn’t launch blindly into a major novel, as so many young writers do, simply because novels are the form that command attention and promise an income.

  As soon as we put it like this, as soon as we imagine, or try to imagine, the extraordinary confusion, creative and otherwise, that might occur, the many and fragmented ways people might enjoy and share and despair of putting together reflections and entertainments in words for each other, you can see that it is not going to happen. There is still an enormous demand for the long traditional novel, for works that r
einforce the idea of an individual whose identity is projected through time and who achieves some kind of wisdom or happiness through many vicissitudes. There is simply no form of escapism, mental immersion, or sustained illusion quite like the thousand-page fantasy narrative, whether it be the endless Harry Potters or the Millennium trilogy; if to have that experience we have to guarantee a substantial income to its creator then society will continue to find a way to do that, in the same way European soccer clubs still find ways to pay exorbitant salaries to their star players.

  Copyright, we see, is not essentially driven by notions of justice or theories of ownership, but by a certain culture’s attachment to a certain literary form. If people only read poetry, which you can never stop poets producing even when you pay them nothing at all, then the law of copyright would disappear in a trice.

  THE DULL NEW GLOBAL NOVEL

  NOT ALL WRITERS share the same sense of whom they are writing for. Many may not even think they are directing their work at any audience in particular. All the same, there are clearly periods of history when, across the board, authors’ perceptions of who their readers are change, something that inevitably leads to a change in the kind of texts they produce. The most obvious example is the period that stretches from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century when writers all over Europe abandoned Latin for the vernacular. Instead of introducing their work, as before, into an international arena presided over by a largely clerical elite, they “descended” to local and national languages to address themselves to an emerging middle class.

  In the history books this shift to the vernacular tends to be presented as a democratic inspiration that allowed a wealth of local vitality into the written text and brought new confidence to the rapidly consolidating national languages. That said, it was probably driven as much by ambition and economic interest as by idealism. There came a point when it no longer made sense to write in Latin because the arbiters of taste were now a national rather than international grouping. Today we are at the beginning of a revolution of even greater import that is taking us in a quite different direction.

  As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go out of English rather than into it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

  In recent years authors in Germany, France, and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English-language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere, you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect that the reputations of writers like Zola or Verga would not have been dented at all by a failure to achieve publication in London.

  This development has been hugely accelerated by electronic text transmission. Today, no sooner is a novel or even an opening chapter complete, than it can be submitted to scores of publishers all over the world. It is not unusual for foreign rights to be sold before the work has a local publisher. An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world. Buying the book, a reader becomes part of an international community. This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

  The proliferation of international literary prizes has guaranteed that the phenomenon is not restricted to the more popular sector of the market. Despite its questionable selection procedures and often bizarre choices, the Nobel is seen as more important than any national prize. Meanwhile, the International IMPAC in Ireland, Premio Mondello in Italy, and the International Literature Award in Germany—prizes aimed at “international” literature rather than works from the country in question—are rapidly growing in prestige. Thus the arbiters of taste are no longer one’s own compatriots—they are less easily knowable, not a group the author himself is part of.

  What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, a novelist like Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his stories would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerbrand Bakker, and the Italian Alessandro Baricco offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor the rewards that such effort will bring. More importantly, the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.

  If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position since, as Borges once remarked, most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.

  What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms or Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.

  READING IT WRONG

  HOW FAR IS language really able to communicate something new, something that runs contrary to my expectations? Or rather, how far will I allow it to do so?

  One of the intriguing aspects of teaching translation is watching students struggle with sentences that say things they didn’t expect them to say. They are used, of course, to the process of passing from not understanding a foreign text to understanding it, that moment when a seemingly meaningless drift of words suddenly falls into place. But they also know that they often make mistakes. They must be careful. If the text says something ordinary and commonplace, there will be little doubt in their minds: “This is the kind of thing people say. It must be OK.” But if a writer should come up with some perplexing idea, or, worse still, some declaration running contrary to received wisdom or political correctness, then anxiety sets in; the words will be examined and re-examined even if their individual meaning and the overall syntax is fairly clear. In many cases, especially if the novelty is expressed subtly, students, but also practiced translators, will end up reducing the text to something more conventional.

  This tic can take the form of introducing words a translator thinks should be there but aren’t. Take this fairly innoc
uous example: In D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Ursula reflects that she’s not even tempted to get married. Her sister, Gudrun, agrees and carries on, “Isn’t it an amazing thing . . . how strong the temptation is, not to!” Lawrence comments: “They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.” A recent Italian edition of the book offers something that, translated back into English, would give, “They both burst out laughing, looking at each other. But deep in their hearts they were afraid.”

  Experimenting over the years I’ve realized that if I ask a class of students to translate this into Italian, approximately half will introduce that but. It appears to be received wisdom that one doesn’t laugh if one is afraid; hence when Lawrence puts the two things together, translators feel a but is required to acknowledge the unusualness of this state of affairs. Lawrence on the other hand suggests that nothing is more common than laughing and being afraid; one laughs because afraid, in order to deny fear.

  However, what is most interesting about this phenomenon is that when I quiz the students, most will admit they were unaware of having introduced the but. They actually read the text like that. Which means, one can only suppose, that a vast number of ordinary readers will be reading it like that too. Indeed, what I’m suggesting is that the kind of slippage we see in translations is probably indicative of an even greater slippage among many readers who are not of course considering the text as closely as the translator does.

  This kind of automatic correction toward what the translator or reader expects can work in all kinds of ways. Later in Women in Love Lawrence describes how a sexual experience can induce a state of deep calm. Having made hurried love to Birkin in the back room of an inn, Ursula finds herself in unusually good form pouring the tea. Lawrence heaps on the significance with some unusual usages of the verb forget and the adjectives still and perfect: