I’ve realised when reading the account of the
session at the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference (The Guardian 20 August 2012) that this
was what I was waiting for – a debate, in effect, with an ethical and values
dimension about the conditions in which writing takes place.
Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, criticised the structural bias in the literature
prizes such as the Booker prize as ‘middle-class’ and this sparked off in me
the renewed preoccupation I’ve had as an author not just of fiction but of
non-fiction as well over the past 30 years – basically not wanting to follow
tram lines laid down by somebody or by an organisation such as a mass
publisher, reflecting values and principles I simply don’t hold.
So, what does this amount to in practice? In
practice, for me and, reading this piece about the Edinburgh Festival it seems
I’m not alone, it means not accepting the way something is constructed
culturally, elsewhere – which more likely than not means somewhere where
upper-class Englishness rules – as the set of rules and procedures by which
what I write has to be judged and/or measured. And for me, of course, working
as I have since the late 1960s with people who’ve been judged by other people
as not acceptable, criminal, deviant, needing to be socially excluded, okay to
be stigmatised and all those other ghastly terms that refer fundamentally to
processes of differentiation that reinforce social inequalities and people’s
sense of personal inadequacy.
Coming back to what Irving Welsh said, I think he
argued that the globalisation of the culture in which we write makes it difficult
to conceive of certain pieces of writing being published nowadays by
London-based publishers. This, I imagine from my own experience of mass
publishers producing my non-fiction – I have to rest with small publishers for
my fiction at present – is because of the focus on marketing, the need to
define products, the need to fit them into pre-described categories.
Another remark I took from the article relates to
ideas that sociologists have talked about for years, which doesn’t make them
less important, but, given all the ways in which media studies and degrees in
the ‘ologies’ are rubbished by the right-wing press, enables ill-informed and
prejudiced comment to snipe away without any basis in genuinely critical
reflection, have identified ways in which globalisation, or universalism, has
become to an extent tied to global capitalism – and needs authors and readers
to challenge this trend, in their different ways.
A good deal of my time has been taken up over the
past 12 years in trying to achieve the setting up by the trade union of writers
in the UK, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, of the Writers’ Guild Books
Cooperative. (www.writersguildbookscoop.co.uk
) I can’t at present engage in the further development of this, even though I still
chair it, because I’m convalescing from a serious brain operation and engaging
in follow-up treatment through chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, I think
what I’ve just written sets out what might be the parameters for further
debates by writers and their smaller and independent publishers to purse.
To me, there should be a statement by writers about
what they mean by their own values and principles. These shouldn’t be imposed
on them by external, oppressive or prejudiced and exclusionary forces, rooted
in social or personal inequalities and/or attacking people’s personal or social
identies as writers. There should be no hierarchical thinking hidden in the
ways these statements are socially constructed, no pre-defined notion of what
constitutes ‘good’ literature that is transposed from vantage points of
privilege, social inequalities, class, gender, age, (dis)ability or geography.
And that is precisely what I wanted to say for today, about writers, the Writers' Guild Books Cooperative and my own frustrations about the narrowing of the tramlines of what can be written for mass publishers and ways of transforming the world of publishing beyond them.
