Proof: Editorial Incompetence

The following is an introduction to a clever (and depressing) experiment by an individual who really wanted to see how bad the tastes of editors have become:

In April [2001?] I submitted Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Torpid Smoke” to seven online manuscript evaluation services. Other than changing the title to “Russian Smoke” and Nabokov’s name to Jonathan Shade, I left the piece unaltered. My online editors had some praise for the story, but also some suggestions on how to improve it. They each charged between three and fifteen dollars for their services.

The point should be underscored: we're speaking about a scintillatingly lyrical short story by Vladimir Nabokov, arguably the greatest stylist in the 20th century, and in my unabashed opinion one of the greatest of the stylistic bunch -- to be added to the list of Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, and not much else --, being submitted to online editors with the floor left completely open for critiques. As any good fortune-telling cueball can tell you: the outlook does not look good. If Nabokov can be trashed by even one, much less seven, different services, that tells you how little the demand is for really verbally creative writing there is.

Of course, if questioned these editors will say they're looking to reflect what they think are the tastes of the unwashed masses. That would constitute quite the potent cry of the mechanics of the free market: true quality, especially in the realm of aesthetics, requires perceptive enough senses to catapult the genius in question to the statosphere of public attention. But perceptive minds are a rarity; ergo, the market praises mostly trash and everything that clutters around the center of mediocrity, and hardly ever anything "poetic" (gosh!), unless its author is a leftover from earlier times and has a really solid plot and refuses to drop his lyrical vein. Virginia Woolf had made the insightfully tragic comment that if Shakespeare had a sister, she would never be noticed -- because she would have been another unnoticeable 16th century female, and her culturally determined roles would have muffled out any chance for a nurtured, much less expressed, literary genius. Well, the story is turning back around again, this time in publishing form: if you have real talent and don't regurgitate the "explosions + sex + violence = sell" formula, and (heaven forbid!) you have a real solid inclination for stylistic expression, chances aren't looking good. Drop your authorial dreams and sit back in your secondary world with pedestrian windows.

Times really haven't changed in terms of the odds of catching a pearl within the muck of the publishing world in terms of literary creation. But there is one difference, alluded to above, which makes the editorializing process considerably different, and thereby decreases the odds of finding the pearl of genius just mentioned: editors and those in the literary judgment realms are beginning to lose their aesthetic autonomy, and are choosing instead to try and reflect (or worse, naturally reflect) the tastes of the genred population they have in mind when thinking of sales. The profit motive has again corrupted something of importance in our society. Now it's all about what they think the average book buyer -- that vague abstraction which allows no particularities -- is going to dig.

Which is why I'd rather be spending my reading time in the company the dead.