Chasing the Enigmatic Thing

Posted on April 7, 2007

Robert McCrum, the literary editor of The Observer (U.K.) ponders the current state of literature and the authors who write it. Authors used to be untouchable, mysterious figures, he writes. But now they have to market themselves...or risk obscurity.

'Literature,' [Philip] Roth goes on, 'takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing ... the writer is only interesting in terms of how much money did he get and what's the scandal? The mysterious side of existence is not the urgent problem.'

Mailer's elegy for a lost world of high seriousness is echoed by another of the surviving American greats, Gore Vidal. In his classic memoir Palimpsest, Vidal writes: 'Television, movies, journalism claim the general audience. Today, publishers are reluctant to publish first novels by anyone who has not been a movie star or a serial killer.' It goes without saying that chick, hen and lad lit - and a lot of what passes for 'literary fiction' - will never qualify as the 'enigmatic thing'.

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It certainly requires a prodigious effort of imagination to see Virginia Woolf signing books at Hay or James Joyce giving a reading at Cheltenham. Or, better still, Sartre in the Brighton Pavilion. But wind the clock back another 50, or even 100, years and it's not difficult to picture Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Twain, or even Disraeli, indeed almost any Victorian writer, promoting his or her new book to an audience under canvas. Dickens, of course, pioneered the reading tour. Twain made his name as a popular lecturer of genius. A generation later, that supreme aesthete, Oscar Wilde, drank the miners of the Wild West under the table while promoting his career.

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Literature has always oscillated between the cloister and the marquee; at the moment, the spirit of the age favours the public arena. Perhaps it is the role of the literary festival to remind writers and readers that literature has always had a human face. Meanwhile, it may be the task of the next generation to renew the exploration of the 'enigmatic thing'.

We think that the "enigmatic thing" is a relic of the past. Reality TV, the tabloids and the paparazzi have destroyed any celebrity's chance at being truly enigmatic. Look at frenzy that surrounded Dan Brown's trial in London. Authors, if they sell enough books, become well-known to their readers. They go on Oprah and share all of their secrets. In the 21st century, there is no more mystery, no more enigmatic things. And that is a shame.

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