This is the third in the “The Real Economics of the Purely Imaginary” series, which circles some very large, very unwieldy, and–for precisely these reasons–very tantalizing questions about knowledge, creativity, teaching, writing, and the university.

I was in the bookstore last night.  Not the indie bookstore that also sells used records–the chain bookstore that also sells lattes.  I should have known better.  Of all the places people go to make themselves feel bad–the gym, home for Christmas, swimsuit shopping, whatever–the chain bookstore, to me, is the worst.  Viewing the shelves filled with political screed, chick lit, and coffee table trophies is an efficient way to a) ruin the nice feeling that comes after a productive day, and b) convert the blah feeling that comes after a nonproductive day into a serious downward spiral.  Is this true just for me, or do other writers experience this?  Granted, it’s easy to make me feel bad.  Like Bridget Jones, I already feel like an idiot most of the time.  (The difference between me and Bridge, though, is that she gets to say “I feel like an idiot” to a sexy, successful lawyer who wants to take her… out for dinner and a movie.  Also, Bridge has a fun career in television.  But I digress.)  Writers who are at peace with what they do, even if they labor in obscurity, may not agree with me about the deleterious effects of a trip to Borders or Barnes & Noble.  But if their self esteem soars after a trip to the big box bookstore, they are probably either famous, possessed of a healthy body image, capable of writing brilliant first drafts, or some combination of the above.  They sound like lovely people.  But I’m not talking about healthy self esteem this week; I’m talking about masochism.

The chain bookstore makes me–and probably you, and probably every writer you know–feel bad because, it seems, every idiot with a word processor and spellcheck can publish a book.  Every idiot, that is, except us.  But more importantly, this big fancy bookstore presents a weird paradox.  On the one hand, we all know, if we read the news online once in a while, that the publishing industry is in steep decline.  Sales are down and shrinking, publishing houses–even the big ones–can’t stay in the black, and if an arty little tome happens to make it to print, Lord knows what compromising acts the publisher had to do to finance it.  (Probably sign with Joe the Plumber.)  People don’t buy books–not the good ones; people don’t read books–again, not the good ones, unless Oprah tells them to; and it’s not long before books make like dinosaurs and retreat underground where they will wait millions of years until humans unearth them and use them as fuel.  But how is one to believe in this doomsday narrative when strolling through several huge, carpeted, air-conditioned levels of retail space, filled with thousands, if not millions of books?

But then one tries to find the poetry section.  At my local Barnes & Noble, poetry occupied one measly section of shelf in a tumbleweed-strewn corner of the store.  There was the requisite Emily Dickinson and the Robert Frost, but most of the section was a mix of pseudo-Norton Anthologies and utter trash–Great Poems of the English Language, 1000 Poems to Read to Children, Poems for World Peace, How Many White Male Poets Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?, Vampire Poetry Through the Ages, Pastor Bob’s Christian Inspirational Poems for Young Girls.  If shelf space is a measure of what people buy–and by extension, obviously, a measure of what people read–only college syllabi or the flimsiest marketing ploys might coerce, or dupe, the unsuspecting consumer into buying a book of poems.

And this state of affair holds true outside the poetry ghetto.  For example: if it’s something thrilling and weird people want, why are The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books topping bestseller lists and not, say, Lucy Corin’s astonishing Everyday Psychokillers?  (For the record, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I loved it.  A good laugh was exactly what I needed that day.)  Yes, I’m ranting.  And yes, I probably would have been better off skipping Barnes & Noble and instead trooping across the street to Pequod’s Pizza, where I could have eaten myself into either oblivion or a better mood.  But it seems that the choices for writers are:  1) crank out some marketable crap, which may in fact get you grocery money, 2) write what sustains you, at which point you may as well put it in a drawer or line your kid’s hamster’s terrarium with it, or 3) day job and quiet desperation, followed by the inevitable shooting spree in the exurbs.

Clearly this is not a new viewpoint I’m proffering here.  But if you want to think about what actually constitutes cultural capital, or the real economics of the purely imaginary, or score any points for the “An English degree is not a fatuous waste of time” side of the debate, you’ll need to take my rant at least semi-seriously.  Really, why should anyone spend time attempting to read, write, produce, discuss, and engage with literature, considering the mulch that passes for books these days?

The problem, as I see it, is that literature is a gentleman’s pursuit–and we no longer have gentlemen.  That is, a class of independently wealthy, well-educated, and erudite men (and yes, historically, letters have been a man’s game) who can afford to invest their time in artifacts which have no commercial value–unless, that is, we look at the university English department.  For instance: one highly-paid woman in my department runs the composition program.  Translation: her program purports (practical outcomes are another matter) to teach students a measurable, practical skill, which they will need in their toolkit in order to succeed the next four years of their lives–how to write papers in college.  Although this professor does respectable and necessary work, is widely published, and oversees a program that ensures every single student who graduates from the university will take at least one course in the English department (their freshman comp course), hers is not regarded as an intellectually or artistically high-status position.  In fact, without her program, the size of the department, and its share of funds, would probably shrink dramatically.

By contrast:  A highly-paid male professor, who oversees a more intellectual aspect of the department, writes books containing arguments about obscure bodies of literature and obscure schools of thought–arguments which can have a real-world effect only in a lit-nerd’s wildest utopian fantasies.  Translation: no practical skills here, but high pay and very high prestige.  I’m making no claims about who works harder or who deserves more respect–both professors work very hard, both on their own research and in their engagements with students.  But the male professor gets a higher payout, both in salary and in prestige.

Which one is the gentleman, and which one is the worker?

I’m not arguing for commercial value as a measure of actual or absolute value, by the way.  If I were, I’d have recommended Stieg Larson over Lucy Corin.  I’m also not faulting or valorizing either professor for teaching and researching what he/she teaches and researches.  I’m also going to step aside from gender questions, because, while I do think there is a gender bias at work, my main point isn’t about gender inequality.  The inequality I want to point out would remain the same whether both professors in this example were female, or both male, or if the higher paid professor were female and the lower paid professor were male.

There is a distinct hierarchy visible here in the kind of literary work that is valued and in how that value is shown.  I wonder, also, if this imbalance doesn’t have some link to the way literary value plays out at Barnes & Noble.  After all, the two situations look like mirror images of each other.  On the university side: work of practical value, which is intended for all students to access or engage in, gets less pay and less prestige, while work of little practical value, intended for a elite few, gets more pay and more prestige.  On the bookstore side: work intended for the elite few–that is, work with what we might call great cultural value–brings in little money, and takes up little shelf space, while work of perhaps lower cultural value dominates the store and brings in the most money.

This is fine for the bookstore.  The bookstore is a business.  It measures value in money, and so in the world of the bookstore, poetry, or erudite fiction, and so on, are less valuable and treated accordingly.  But the university is not a business–at least, it does not purport to be, despite the fact that more and more universities are adopting business practices in order to try and balance their budgets.  The university’s economy is primarily one of cultural capital–prestige, intellectual worth, social cultural value.  These values, by definition, are not supposed to be measured with money.  In fact, they are supposed to defy any attempt at stamping a dollar sign on them.  Intellectual, cultural, social, artistic merit–these things are supposedly priceless.  Yet the university uses money to measure and reward the acquisition, production, and proliferation of cultural capital.  Isn’t this a problematic mash-up of economies?  What it means, in real-world terms, is that a system of cultural and intellectual inequalities–that is, a system that values different kinds of work differently in a prestige economy–replicates and perpetuates those inequalities in a money economy.  It’s fine, I suppose, in the abstract, for different kinds of academic and intellectual work to achieve different levels of status and prestige in the cultural capital arena.  But when these inequalities are reflected financially, it is no longer an abstract problem or a problem in an imaginary economy, and to my way of thinking, it’s no longer fine.

by Jenn Hawe
who lives, writes, and cooks in Chicago