At his blog Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito has been reporting on the International Festival of Authors, in Toronto. In yesterday's post, he wonders what the benefits or dangers would be to increased government subsidies to writers, and he implicitly asks how that subsidy would work to form our national literature. He writes of a conversation about the way that 'Canada encourages a national literature (through things like the Giller Prize and Governor General's Award, the subsidization of authors, and the attempt to build a strong national publishing industry) to help build a national identity.'
Anyone who has taken masters courses in literature in the past decade has probably been confronted with the question of a national literature and identity — it was a central concern of such academic favorites as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Thomas Mann; and, the boutique area of studies for most of the 1990s was Postcolonialism, where they would happily deconstruct the words 'national', 'identity', and 'literature' for you. There are lots of insightful differing opinions, is what I mean to say.
What Scott is trying to get an idea about is not the theoretical underpinnings or the historical importance / factors, but the effect of practical governmental policies. The United States do have federal, state, and municipal government-funded organizations that provide grants to artists and writers; there are also many private organizations that do the same. What Scott perceives as the difference is in the degree: in Canada 'the money can be good enough to cobble a reasonable living from, between government money and book sales / touring,' where we can assume that he doesn't see that as being the case in the US. I suppose this to be true, although I'm not certain. Scott probably has a better idea of it than I do.
First things first, Canada has 1/10th the population of the United States, and in issues of economic policies proportion matters. Make no doubt, this is primarily a matter of economic policy. Dollars for writers come from taxes, and the mindset in this country is, 'Tax everyone — except me.' From that perspective, Scott's right in writing that 'a politician paying lip service to the arts in search of voters' is nearly unimaginable here. Indeed it is. The array of wealth needed to support that many artists is enormous, and there are enough funding problems as it stands. I cannot imagine increasing arts funding over police, medical, schools, etc.
However, there might be a different way to frame the issue. As a way of forming national literature, these public subsidies are also a matter of public education — at least to the degree that public schools were intended originally as a way of socializing citizens and preserving certain national qualities. We laud Mark Twain's sceptical, individualist wit; we indulge in the lively youthfulness of the beats: they, in turn, encourage those qualities in us. We fund them because they reinforce our national identity.
I've reached the point where policies and theories converge now, where practical social reinforcement meets altruistic urges. It's sort of an uncomfortable place. Funded fully enough to live off — as a sort of artists' dole — would the supported authors be judged in terms of the values they embody? Judged by whether they were American enough? I imagine that would open all sorts of Pandoran boxes. I wonder what the process is like now.
1 comments:
Being subsidized should never be a goal for an artist, subsidies are the symptom of a dysfunction. And yet "subsidy" is a misleading word. Being a European, this may be especially so, since our agriculture is subsidized, fisheries are subsidized, as are the tourist sector and car manufacturing. Even the biggest banks demand these injections of cash and spend their subsidies in exclusive resorts or bequeath luxury retirement packages to their senior executives' descendants for a dozen generations. They will tell us that these subsidies are investments in strategic sectors of the national economy, as if a job in a publishing house were not as good, or less strategic, than a job in a steel mill.
The think tanks of capitalism spread the idea that society and market are the same thing, and that the State must not go beyond the stimulation of the maket -- stimulation feels so good. Now, any aspect of society that doesn’t fit this utilitarian conception of life only jeopardises general progress, and must be removed. The arts are one, specially if we don’t refer to architecture or to the visual arts that the same capital hoarders collect for speculation or as a token of legitimacy that sets them apart from the nouveaux riches.
Thus considered, literature -- best-sellers and naive books aside -- is the most dangerous art form you can imagine. It can’t be labeled as commodity, it doesn’t stimulate consumerism and it questions political dominance and the social models considered to be natural, apart from being in the hands of educated people with a remarkable mastery of language which they use to show disgusting areas of life. Public spending on this punk activity is wasting the tax-payer money, and it's definitely a subsidy. Public spending on warfare corporations is not. On the contrary, that is a sensible use of public resources. What about building roads? What about education or the health care system? It depends. Stimulating private initiative in these areas is OK, while dedicating funds to strengthen public management is unfair and harms the economy. Indeed, those who hold economic and political power claim also the authority to determine what is right or wrong, even what is fiction and what is real. Determining when public spending becomes a subsidy has more to do with ideology than with the real nature or the destination of that spending. Only critical minds are subsidized.
Personally, I’d place the building of a national literature or a national identity from above, on the side of warfare corporations or aeronautical companies. A national literature should be the consequence of the works that individual artists write, not an master construct out of which those works should spring. Besides, the building of a national literature will always be a task for critics, historians and theorists, the artists’ task is to sabotage their conclusions.
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