Democratic Publishing!

I have faith in very few things, but last night, I suddenly became a believer in synchronicity. A few minutes, s after posting a whirlwind of questions on my blog, I rolled into bed with Breton’s Nadja, and I was pretty certain the book was going to put me to sleep. I admit, I was on autopilot for much of the half-hour I spent reading the book, that is, till I hit this section:

…I am forced to accept the notion of work as a material necessity…I admit that life’s grim obligations make it a necessity, but never that I should believe in its value, revere my own or that of other men. I prefer, once again, walking by night to believing myself a man who walks y daylight. There is no use to being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning…is not earned by work.

It was not exactly Breton’s ideas that amazed me. It was when the response came – I asked a question, and ten minutes later, I got an answer. Loose pieces of my universe click into place: Nadja is coincidentally a book about coincidences.

I thank Monsieur Breton for his response – it crossed a continent and several decades to reach me (thanks to Richard Howard, too, for translating it). It’s difficult to imagine, though, how an artist can survive the 21st century without working. Even if an artist is excessively moneyed, s/he often has to “sell” his art: a curator, an editor, a producer must deem the work acceptable (or, more likely, profitable – horrors!) before the work is made available to the public.

I have never been a fan of self-publishing, but now I realize that it’s one of the few ways that makes publishing more democratic. It’s easy for company-published writers to raise their eyebrows at authors who have self-financed the publication of their books. But writing is increasingly becoming a business, an industry. It has become the system of selling, rather than sharing ideas.

Here’s my portrait of a Great 21st century writer: one who shares his or her creations by democratic means: blogging, self-publishing, public performances. One who does not need approval from self-appointed higher beings.

(Note my hypocrisy here: I am, after all, enrolled in an MFA program, which teaches one how to write acceptable, profitable manuscripts. Yarg – the irony that I am arriving at these anti-MFA thoughts because I am made to think about writing in this program)

Chew on This (a bit of a spoiler if you haven’t read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time):

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.
Mark Haddon
from A Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time