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Notes -
The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."
Just some scattered thoughts.
It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?
It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.
Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.
...
It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!
There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.
Of course, and as with any endeavor of this nature, all that has happened is that the true talent has been pushed underground. And it will either find another way to reach us or be redirected elsewhere as the carcass of what was once great walks itself proudly into the garbage bin of history.
The people around these parts are all to familiar with this exact process happening to Science-Fiction, and to many other institutions by now. Oh what a Hugo used to mean!
This piece is written as triumph, but it is the epitaph of the institution that penned it. The great wordsmiths of our age won't get published in places so racist and sexist that they refuse to entertain greatness. And this is somehow to be celebrated. This is progress. It certainly is. Nay, this is reactionary. Why
Some will say, with great wisdom, that "get woke go broke" is wish fulfillment, that the tides of ideology can remain staunchly ignorant of market forces and continue to produce drekk with aplomb thanks to a steady supply of magic money.
And they are right in the short term of course, as we have seen. "Institutional buyers" can sustain these sinecures for a long time, for decades possibly.
Things will get worse, they may do so for the rest of our lives.
But eventually, inevitably, every nation runs out of ruin.
I wrote a comment and gave it to my sensitive reader. Here is it's feedback. I am "The auther" for clarity.
"The author believes that institutions have successfully brainwashed young people. The author first noticed this in video games, where games like Diablo II introduced a slot machine-like element that has now become the norm. Young gamers and game developers can hardly imagine games any other way. The author believes that this has destroyed the discerning game audience and the culture of sophisticated gaming.
The author also believes that younger generations have been trained to expect diversity in entertainment and recoil when it is not present. This has led to the removal of great cultural artifacts from curriculums or their presentation as offensive and wrong. The author believes that this has replaced our entire society.
The author believes that our nation ran out of ruin 10-20 years ago and was replaced by a new nation that is still establishing its new order. The author believes that anticipating this new nation to run out of ruin is premature and compares it to anticipating the Roman Empire running out of ruin the day after Caesar was assassinated. The author believes that by the time this new nation finally runs out of ruin, America of old may be just as much an antiquity as the Roman Republic was to the Roman Empire."
While I could be mistaken and it could just be a trick played on me by my filter bubble, I believe this:
is an illusion cast on us to make it seem as if it is fait accompli, so we do not resist it. My impession is that young generations, save a loud activist minority, do not care about this and would rather consume entertainment that prioritise quality over "activism" when both are on offer, which is why it seems like an imperative for people pushing this illusion that all remnants of past quality entertainment must be "remade" and tainted with activism, as its mere presence next to its modern counterparts shade it entirely. This is where I believe we differ, they must destroy the past not because they've won, but because they fear its presence will break the spell they've put on us.
How can you try to figure out if your filter bubble has played a trick on you? It sounds what you're describing (I think this too) is that institutions control the kinds of common knowledge that can be formed. This is independent of the fact that most young people prefer quality over activism.
Maybe I'm just trying to flatter my worldview by saying, "the institutions are oppressing me, but also they're wrong and stupid!!1!"
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