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This is no light matter. What we make of literature, the place we deem appropriate for it, offers a diagnostic of the society which sets the parameters within which such decisions are taken. It is not too much to say that the limits we provide for literature, consciously and unconsciously, are closely linked to our ability to act and imagine in society as a whole.
The notion of freedom has always been central to literary texts, of course. But so has the notion of (conscious and unconscious) control, against which ideas of freedom are defined. And at the opposite end of the spectrum from free interpretation lies a species of tyranny, which, among its other manifestations, shows itself in the requirement to submit to a pre-given convention, or insists that a meaning made in private, as all meanings are made initially, be shaped by an external authority. In this sense, a type of cultivated bullying has always been literature’s shadow self and never more so than in these circumscribed times, when a narrowing of the parameters of available information is offered in packaging of unprecedented variety.
The novel, for example, has been largely evacuated of innovation since the middle years of the previous century because publishers are forced to serve a restricted expectation in their readers if they are to sell their product. And it is indeed as wares that books are now likely to be regarded, rather than the presentation of a mind offering itself for interaction with other minds. The fact that it is they themselves, the purveyors and keepers of culture, who have been instrumental in restricting both the expectations and the comprehension of their audience––but we must now think of ourselves as ‘customers’, I suppose: custom-made customers––is, at least, an irony which might be savoured, if only briefly. For with this change of orientation, which is currently taking us to the point where creative work of any value can almost be picked out by its miniscule sales, very great damage is being done to our cultural life. This book is directed towards helping the reader recognize that tyranny, and––insofar as this is possible––to stand outside that shadow.
Literature currently is not as highly valued institutionally as subjects with more obvious practical issue, a matter of importance not only to the types of sensibility which come to seem normative in the life of a nation, but, more immediately, if not perhaps so obviously, to the quality of the subject itself.