Saturday, September 20, 2008

The Things You Can Sell and the Things that Make You Swoon

God in heaven help us, the Guardian magazine runs a feature today on fashion in literature: 'Chic Lit', actress Emily Mortimer dressed in clothes echoing female characters from fiction (she's a writer's daughter too - John Mortimer - geddit?); journalist Helen Gordon writing as if authors from Austen to Douglas Coupland wrote about fashion simply to relish it, rather than (often satirically) as signifiers of their characters' personalities and conditions; and - most telling of all - books recently in print displayed next to the latest fashion accessories (a full page spread, for instance, in which Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Life is suspended on a string next to a Gucci bag - why?)

Conjures some depressing images, doesn't it: publishers scrambling to be part of this latest, dummest kind of promotion, and editors turning manuscripts down because they can't quite see them on such a page... (You think I'm joking?)

Fortunately the Review makes up for this a little with an article from Nick Laird condemning just the kind of ethos in evidence here and showing how destructive it is for serious literature, though once again in making a special case for poetry he is rather dismissive of fiction:
A capitalist society ... teaches its citizens to think in terms of selling. Poetry manages, almost uniquely, to be outside of that, and this allows poets to make real art, without recourse to the market...
And there's a transcript of a speech by the sadly and recently late David Foster Wallace, which is so close to my own agenda in my current writing that (rather than those shoes and bags) it makes me want to swoon...

7 comments:

nmj said...

Hey Eliz, This is v sad about David Foster Wallace, this is the first I'd heard. Re. the fashion/fiction article I'm so glad I didn't have the Guardian yesterday, it would have peeved me greatly. Your post has made me think though, more about why we choose at given times to reveal what our characters are wearing.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Hi Nasim, it is indeed very sad about David Foster Wallace. A great loss.

Tania Hershman said...

Elizabeth, thanks so much for the link to David Foster Wallace's speech, it touched me, especially when he said "It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.". So true, yet so hard to do.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Exactly so, Tania: it's exactly what I'm grappling with in my fiction: the tyranny of the selfish, self-centred, single-viewpoint story.

Frances said...

A wonderfully written article by David Foster Wallace which I thoroughly enjoyred reading. Thanks so much for this link Elizabeth.

LottieP said...

Interesting point. Much as I love fashion (and frequently decry myself as shallow accordingly), the idea of using literature to sell clothes is in some ways as reprehensible as the recent Indian VOGUE shoot which used genuinely poor people to model thousand-dollar outfits.

Quite apart from anything else, shame on The Guardian for going through with a banal idea that should have been shot down as soon as it was mooted. Do they think we're fools?

Elizabeth Baines said...

Lottie, I didn't know about the Vogue shoot. You've just spoilt my day! (Though of course I'm glad to know about it)