Eight Digressions on the Politics of Language

L ITERARY VALUES serve the interests of classes, groups, professions, institutions, industries, and this is neither bad nor avoidable. But it is a factor consistently omitted from discussion of contemporary literature-and that omission in itself, no doubt, is in somebody's interest. From this point of view, literary judgment can be read as a code, a code it might be in the interest of some literary people to maintain, and of others to break. In any case, such factors as circumstances of publication, the publishing situation, the condition of the market, the structure of production and distribution, socioeconomic and political considerations, are legitimate areas of study bearing on literary composition, style, criticism, literary history, and evaluation. Not long ago I had an argument with X, an important critic-novelist-filmmaker. It began when X said that all American writers are one another's enemies. The group of French professors to whom X was speaking immediately asked: what about the Fiction Collective? X then replied that the Fiction Collective was based solely on the principle of exclusion, meaning, I presume, that those excluded by the publishing industry could have nothing in common other than their various miscellaneous reasons for having been excluded. I responded that, on the contrary, working outside the industry provided these novelists with the opportunity to develop styles that one could develop only with difficulty, if at all, were one being published by the industry and subject to its commercial pressures. I said that such an alternative allowed new voices to be heard

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