What happened to the mythic author?

On a whim the other day I flipped through some Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and other old school writers. I watched some of their interviews, and it got me wondering: what happened to writers these days—or creators in general? The writers of old had mystique: a cult of personality elevating them and their work to ‘larger than life’ status. Why doesn’t that exist anymore? In contemplation, I went down a rabbit hole, investigating the answer’s ramifications for the modern world, and our way of life.

The first and most obvious answer stems from the perspective of the writers and figures of old themselves. They lived far richer, less sheltered lives than those today. It’s almost banal to say that many of them really lived that lifestyle, rather than pretending. Whether it’s the many veterans with real combat experience, or even medals like Purple Hearts, to show for it: like Tolkien and Hemingway in WWI, Kerouac and Vonnegut in WWII, Gene Wolfe in Korea, etc. Or the grittily dispossessed lives of Hubert Selby Jr, Charles Bukowski, or even Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer fame. Many of the writers who gained a cult following, specifically, lived lives of notorious ‘extremes’: William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick come to mind. Burroughs not only murdered his wife, but was a heavy drug user, into all kinds of woo and witchery, and was an altogether uncanny human being. Hunter S. Thompson’s reputation speaks for itself. Even the authors of the 80s ‘Brat Pack’ era really lived the lifestyles they ‘romanticized’ in print. Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney both wrote about the high-octane vagaries of youth counterculture and seedy nightlife they experienced, even being dubbed the ‘toxic twins’ for their “highly publicized late-night debauchery.” McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was mostly a self-insert of his ‘fast-lane’ exploits in the NYC Lower East Side drug-fueled party culture.

Who in the current crop of pencil-pushers can make claim to living the tawdry and boisterous life of the classic ‘iconoclast author’? Affluent Harvard alum and semi-professional “birdwatcher” Jonathan Franzen, America’s current mantle-holder for the distinction of ‘great American novelist’? No. How about Garth Risk Hallberg, author of 2015’s City on Fire—which seemed the novel most apt to inherit the street-cred and cachet of those gritty ‘80s Brat Pack New York City literary iconoclasms? Not really, he was a well-to-do small town kid who moved to NYC, imbibing the city’s edge and romance from behind the sanitized panes of the local Starbucks. The last truly ‘mythic figure’ of the writing world coming close to being deemed an iconoclast was probably David Foster Wallace, who tragically ended his own life—a path so many of those types have seemed to gravitate to, Hunter S. Thompson among them. The fact is, to achieve said mythic figure, writers typically have had to cultivate some farout eccentricities, or live puzzlingly nomadic or reclusive lifestyles. Take the infamously hermitic Pynchon—of whom something like only one extant photograph has known to mark his near-century of furtive habitation of NYC; others like Salinger weren’t far behind.

Many writers developed cultic appeal because they not only lived the lives they wrote about, they seemed to exude a mystic aura in the most direct and overt sense: that is, they engaged in occult practices, spoke of mystical experiences—Philip K. Dick’s infamous ‘V.A.L.I.S.’ incident comes to mind; Burroughs’ life was wrought with possessions and ‘visitations’. That’s not to say this necessarily makes them great writers, or even better ones than today’s stock; it’s just an observation on their image and parasocial relationship with the public, and how that served to create a sometimes grandiose representation of their work, which, illusory or not, made it seem to impart more truth, more grist of enlightenment about our puzzling, isolated experience.

But all of this so far has been from the frame of the authors themselves. The more nuanced and tangled perspective comes from that of the audience, the receptor rather than the transmitter in this two-way dynamic. The modern audience has changed just as assuredly as the author. There are myriad ways and reasons for that, primary among them the internet and spread of social media. These have changed not only the parasocial dynamic between the two, but more importantly, have given audiences a previously unknown capacity to plumb an author’s intimate depths, wash and launder every loose knickknack of their character for the public consciousness, secularizing their romanticized ‘auras’ and clinically cataloging their fey intangibles.

More than that, the audience’s tastes and consumption appetites have fundamentally changed. In the age of the quick-fix and low impulse control, grunting audiences nose through the literary truffle garden for the next novelty, eschewing the difficult or committed. The relationship between author and reader has always been a sort of channeling seance: it takes two for the creative spark to alchemize into revelation, or transcendence. If the audience is not attuned or even developed enough to be receptive to the connection—the shades of meaning and subtext—then the power will not transmit properly over frayed wiring.

The best authors sketch the secret patterns of the world, reorienting the reader through the privileged passageways and penumbras of the unseen and untouched semiotic realm. An uninterested or distracted reader—or one benumbed to the world’s artesian currents by the diffusive excesses of modernity—will not be receptive to the engagement. The vast amount of information we process in the average day today nearly alone precludes the existence of a ‘great writer’, as his shadow in the ‘great audience’ has dissipated with the times. Dilution and overstimulation leave a gray mesh of attention spans squandering the fertilization process necessary for fermenting ‘Exceptional Material’. That’s a long winded manner of saying: attention spans, over-dilution of choices, coupled with this internet-mediated demystification of authorial personas has left the audience disinterested, disengaged, and more apt to seek novelty in the form of trend-hopping or variety for its own sake.

The other contributing factor is the general direction the industry itself has taken. The total overhaul of the literary and book publishing industries from the ground up has transformed them into a fair caricature of the Longhoused DEI subversion-machine stereotype applicable to the managerial and ‘professional’ classes over the last few years. Those who haven’t followed would likely pale at the sheer depth of the industry’s total disembowelment and ideological revampment.

If you’ve had the misfortune to step foot into a bookstore recently you likely know precisely what I mean. Every offering is thoroughly rinsed through total ideological subversion, sparing no extreme of narrative conformity. This is particularly the case in youth books, be they Young Adult or children’s picture book genres. A spillway of LGBT, gender identity, race, sex lessons, and all the fashionable agendas on the rostrum. The industry itself has been reshaped with young leftist, usually POC, LGBT-identifying, females dominating virtually every crust of the hierarchy, particularly at the entry level.

They’ve worked to bar any and all privileged deplorables from the hallowed Query halls and literary spaces. Legendary authors Joyce Carol Oates and James Patterson made simultaneous controversy faux pas by merely publicizing this inconvenient fact:

The result has been the industry’s complete reshaping, with consequences reverberating through its every outstretched facet. For example, sales are down on the vast majority of midlist and lower tier authors, while any visible ‘growth’ has occurred merely at the highest end of the star household names and IPs. This has disproportionalized the distribution of profits such that publishers increasingly rely solely on their one or two big breakout books/authors, with the rest getting the shaft and merely being there to keep up appearances of a functioning publishing house.

A mass exodus of fed-up top editors sent shock-waves through the industry over the past year or two:

Midlist authors complain of endless new cuts and limitations placed on them by frazzled senior editorial staff. Here’s one award-winning midlist author writing on the recent changes which have severely affected his own publishing contract:

Publishing real talk time:

This industry is brutal. It is *especially* brutal at the moment, when production costs are off the scale because of global economic events.

I had my entire War For The Rose Throne quartet published by JFB at Hachette in the UK, and I was very fortunate there. Ace at Penguin in the US dropped it after the first two books. They've both earned out in the States and are still making me (and therefore them) money, but that's not enough anymore.

Making them money is no longer enough.

Absorb that fact. You have to make them a *lot* of money or you're done, and I guess I didn't quite manage to do that.

It is what it is. Hachette UK have bought a new book from me which you'll get next summer. PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS is a stand-alone. You don't have to have read the old ones, it's a new fantasy crime thriller set in the World of the Rose Throne, that's all.

But here's the thing: I never really had a word count constraint before. I think Priest of Crowns published at about 145k. A George Martin or Robert Jordan book is at least twice if not three times that. My new contract, glad of it though I am, has a hard 100k word cap on it. That's how much of a constraint production cost are now.

I think unless you're already a megastar the days of the Big Fat Fantasy are done. Lean and mean seems to be the way forward, like the genre was back in the 60s & 70s.

I'm not even sure that's a bad thing, but it's definitely an adjustment of expectations.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

For those who didn’t grasp the meaning: typically, publishers have wordcount limits for new prospective authors who don’t yet command proven sales records. But for established authors, there has typically been no limit, with books ranging anywhere from 300 to 1000 pages with no problem. But now, even the above established author has suddenly been slapped with a hard limit on his series—and an extremely low one, at that. 100k words is just 10k above the 90k ‘standard’ of lighter genres like Romance. In the fantasy/sci-fi domain, 150-200k word tomes are the norm, with many authors like George RR Martin regularly turning in 300-500k-word books. So for this fantasy author to be hard-limited to 100k is quite abnormal, as you will rarely find an adult fantasy novel of such brevity.

Things have gotten so bad it’s now commonplace for book agents to have side jobs, because agenting doesn’t bring in real money anymore, save for the few big name established powerhouses at the top. Agenting is quickly becoming a low-prestige entry level position for Twitter socialites who couch surf with their friends.

As a slight aside, an ongoing ‘Gamergate 2.0’ has revealed some eye-opening insights of the videogame industry which overlap with publishing, giving an idea as to how—at least in part—publishing succumbed so totally to the woke ESG goliath:

Former game executive and develop at Blizzard Mark Kern

@Grummz

"The way games are funded you don't use your own money. Even EA, its games are hugely expensive to make, they're upwards of you know 250 sometimes 600 million dollars it's for certain live games it's incredibly how expensive they are and to do that uh your CFO is your best friend.

"You're counting on your CFO to get you tax breaks to get you in to put studios in regions which are financially favorable and you will borrow the cheap money, you will get a cheap money to do it. Even EA does this. I worked with EA; we were putting together a deal where they were taking bailout money from the banks in the last financial crisis that we had, and they were applying that cheap money towards games, same thing with Covid money. They're applying that cheap money towards games, and what has been the cheapest money while interest rates were still low, you know a couple of years ago it was ESG financing, and so they're going to take this money."

"Because the returns on investment have been so poor on Wall Street for ESG funds, that source of Revenue is drying it up. This Woke machine cannot continue in the way that it is now for AAA gaming, and I think unfortunately, it's so entrenched that you're not going to see—you're not going to see much of an ability to course correct because the studios are—they're just gonna shut down."

He goes on to state that the ESG money comes with “strings attached”:

Mark Kern explains how ESG money comes with strings attached inside corporations and is used to make companies partner with DEI consulting companies like Sweet Baby Inc:

"Everyone needs to realize is that it's not that these Studios are funding the games out of their own pocket; that would be very expensive for them. Cash is king. They will preferably go out and get money from other sources if it's cheap enough to help spread the risk of these massive titles, and so you have a lot of quid pro quo happening, and I can tell you that developers have been approaching me and giving me some inside baseball on what's been happening, and there are funding deals out there for studios—and I can't get too specific; I don't want to out sources—that have certain strings attached like a company will suddenly sign with a developer and now that developer needs to hire a DEI director and needs to go out and hire consultancy firms to gender balance."

"Their staff quite specifically go out and hire companies like SBI to consult on their writing and do sensitivity reading and changes for that, and what does, all this does, it boosts their ESG score. It allows them access that funding so ESG is not going away entirely."

"It's [ESG] become an evil brand. People are waking up to this... You have you have a rebranding going on right now. They're not calling it ESG, but it's still out there."

It’s clear that something similar is happening in publishing, as mandatory “sensitivity reader” approvals have become a de facto standard for every publisher. This total ideological capture has planted the final dagger in the heart of ‘cultic figure’ authors.

I saved the most poignant point for last; the following Xeet gives us a clue:

The ultimate poison chalice of our story:

The culture and climate these changes have precipitated on the industry have wrought a landscape where truly transgressive authors simply cannot exist. That’s because to be transgressive is to go against the orthodoxy, and to do that is to be cancelled, deplatformed, smeared with a garden variety of ‘-isms’ and ‘-ists’ and have your name ground through the mud and outlined in chalk.

All the previously named authors had won their followings, built their mystiques and auras partly on having written and spoken in ways that challenged society’s shibboleths, often transvaluing its most hallowed perceptions and beliefs. But the mechanism of control is now so all-encompassing that such potential authors are weeded out long before they can make a dent. Some oblique exceptions, like J.K. Rowling autumnally transforming into a reluctant ‘anti-trans activist’, were owed to their having previously garnered global fame and acclaim. But a rising author espousing such views would be quickly extirpated like a garden weed in a tended flower bed. Thus, as the Tweet above implies, authors these days must adhere to a strictly controlled regime of fan and audience ‘service’, becoming dyed-in-the-wool narrative preservers merely there to coddle the audience’s shallow pretensions.

What does that engender?

Absolute conformity; a field of stagnant, indistinguishable scribblers and empty word-smiths without a cent of a novel, boundary-probing thought between them. The writers of old were coded as ‘cool’ or ‘rebels’ for being able to openly express unconventional, irreverently quixotic, or even subversive ideas which fed into the transgressive countercultures of their time. Now, the equivalent of a ‘counterculture’ thought would embody something like anti-LGBT sentiment—and you won’t find an established writer daring to transgress his way into total ostracization over that. The earlier examples of Patterson and Oates don’t exactly contradict this: both were forced into the hapless dance of profuse apology and retraction after their lapses.

Even a contemporary American ‘trailblazer’ like Chuck Palahniuk, considered ‘controversial’ by modern measures, remains totally anodyne when it comes to real controversy. His brushes with “edginess” typically devolves to irreverent flaunting of gratuitous sexual mishaps which, beyond their ‘graphic’ nature, are actually confined within quite popularly permissive bounds. You won’t hear any anti-LGBT or trans-gressions, for instance, but simply the style of sordid smut not only permitted, but openly encouraged by the wild baying dogs of culture; that is to say, never questioning or challenging extremes, but rather reveling in them makes Chuck an obedient boy. Hell, the quintessentially “irreverent” American bad boy was even once intimidated into full retreat—and slavish deletion of the offending post—upon mere mention that modern literature “has a dearth of novels focusing on male-centered issues.”

Incidentally, the earlier-mentioned Joyce Carol Oates controversy first stemmed from her reposting, and then commenting on, a New York Times piece which expressed concern at just this trend:

https://archive.is/3czHE

The article admits to the industry’s progressive drive to curtail ‘problematic’ work:

In the face of those pressures, publishers have adopted a defensive crouch, taking pre-emptive measures to avoid controversy and criticism. Now, many books the left might object to never make it to bookshelves because a softer form of banishment happens earlier in the publishing process: scuttling a project for ideological reasons before a deal is signed, or defusing or eliminating “sensitive” material in the course of editing.

It correctly notes things have become so hostile that it “detracts from public discourse and feeds into a climate where authors, editors and publishers are disincentivized to take risks.”

And that’s the key point: disincentivized to take risks.

An author too scared to take risks can never ascend the cultural totem pole as iconoclast, cultic figure, or bearer of mystique or legitimate respect among readers. Authors who resort to audience service and the comfort of ‘safety’ will always remain merely acknowledged and passingly permitted, never revered. Real writers break ground by teaching the audience things they never knew or expected, making them look at life and even themselves in untried ways. Authors who merely pander to and cosset the audience’s psychological dependencies like a support blanket are acting as nothing more than staid caretakers of a stuporous cattle lot.

The below article highlights many of these points:

https://jakeseliger.com/2021/09/30/the-death-of-literary-culture/

Jake Seliger writes:

Literary culture itself is mostly dead. I lived through its final throes—perhaps like someone who, living through the 1950s, saw the end of religious Christianity as a dominant culture, since it was essentially gone by the 1970s—though many claimed its legacy for years after the real thing had passed. What killed literary culture? The Internet is the most obvious, salient answer, and in particular the dominance of social media, which is in effect its own genre—and, frequently, its own genre of fiction…

In literary culture terms, the academic and journalistic establishment that once formed the skeletal structure upholding literary culture has collapsed, while journalists and academics have become modern clerics, devoted more to spreading ideology than exploring the human condition, or to art, or to aesthetics. Academia has become more devoted to telling people what to think, than helping people learn how to think, and students are responding to that shift. Experiments like the Sokal Affair and its successors show as much. The cult of “peer review” and “research” fits poorly in the humanities, but they’ve been grafted on, and the graft is poor.

He makes two good points: firstly, that academia has now become so blinded by ideology that it disproportionately contributes to creating the ‘reader problem’ discussed earlier. How can ‘great authors’ exist if there are no readers open-minded and impartial enough to understand their work? Academia has churned out a generation of hateful, cynical, judgmental, and immeasurably biased young minds incapable of tackling intellectually challenging work without reverting to the de rigueur cop-out of calling for its censorship and removal.

The second point is to bring up the Sokal Affair, which you can read about here, and which on its own explains the lack of rigor in today’s academic culture.

Seliger finishes with the following:

Adding:

I’d be a bit broader than Greer: someone like Gillian Flynn writing Gone Girl seemed to have some cultural impact, but even books like Gone Girl seem to have stopped appearing. The cultural discussion rarely if ever revolves around books any more. Publishing and the larger culture have stopped producing Stephen Kings. Publishers, oddly to my mind, no longer even seem to want to try producing popular books, preferring instead to pursue insular ideological projects. The most vital energy in writing has been routed to Substack.

Well, I certainly can’t argue with the concluding point—call me biased.

He posts a several-years-old poll from Washington Post showing that leisure reading had dropped to an all time low:

https://archive.is/qizJP

And posits that the grand cultural decline, in his opinion, occurred somewhere around the 2009-2015 era. Unfortunately, he’s not quite able to make the leap as to why that is; thankfully, I did, in this article:

While it’s true that many of the internet’s most trailblazing writers now reside at Substack, they still mostly scribe nonfiction polemics and thus don’t quite scratch the itch for those of us yearning for the transporting nourishment of fiction storytelling. So in that vein, why not use this space to share some of your favored authors, both of the literary variety, and from Substack or elsewhere, who happen to buck the concensus or go beyond the fold of uniformity into spaces of daring or unrestrained imagination?

I’ll share two from the top of my head to get it started:

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