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PARTISAN REVIEW
handful of publishing houses, long established and venerable, have held
out; small presses, set up to bring out books of poems in particular, tum
up here and there; and finally, university presses in certain countries are
beginning to replace commercial houses as publishers of works hard to
sell. As to this last development, I have my doubts: the great literature of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was written and printed, almost
entirely, outside the universities. But apart from these laudable exceptions,
the publishing industry, as it increases the number of editions put out and
copies sold, tends to diminish the diversity of books and, as a
consequence, the diversity of readers. In other sectors of the economy, a
variety of merchandise is essential but the trend here is toward uniformity.
The ideal is one and only one public: readers who all have exactly the
same taste, who all read the same book. That book is many books: a
new book by a different author may be published every day, but they are
all really the same book.
The trend toward uniformity and a limited choice of books also
affects the author. In the past, he wrote for a public, but at the same
time for a reader who was a conversational partner. All poets dream of
an ideal reader: his own, her own. Today the author must confront the
publisher and his cohort of marketing executives. Moreover, in each
house, especially in the United States, there are "editors" whose job it is
to correct and adapt manuscripts. Certain editing practices, in and of
themselves, are reasonable and justified, but as a whole they are de–
plorable: they threaten to destroy the diversity of authors, works, and
readers. An incalculable loss, for not only are conversational partners lost,
even though the number of readers increases, but the very notion of the
conversational partner disappears. And along with it, the dialogue be–
tween author and reader. The most serious question of all:
From where
does a person write and read? For the modern publishing system, aided
by advertising and television, all places, no matter how remote, are
here.
And where is here? In that nowhere that is everywhere.
Here
is situated in
time; it is
right
now.
The spatial axis dissolves into the temporal axis.
Marketing practices have an equally corrosive effect on the tempo–
ral axis of poetic tradition. The preeminence of the
now
weakens the ties
that join us to the past. The press, television, and advertising offer us
daily
images of what is happening this minute in Patagonia, in Siberia, and in
the neighborhood right next to ours. We are immersed in a now that
never stops blinking and that gives us the feeling of constant acceleration.
But are we really going somewhere? Or are we simply turning around
and around in the same place? Whether illusory or real, the past whirls
away at a dizzying pace and vanishes. The loss of the past inevitably
results in the loss of the future. Since the eighteenth century, our
civilization has been oriented toward the future. Its guide on this
