Then there’s the appearance and layout of the bookshop itself; if our Recreational Reader peruses the book charts in his Sunday newspaper and sees a title he likes the look of, they’re right there staring him in the face when he crosses the threshold of any chain bookstore. And this is done for a simple reason. It may seem odd or even ridiculous to the bookworms among us, but extensive market research by the majors has revealed that a significant percentage of prospective book buyers are actually subconsciously intimidated by bookshops, because these establishments can make them feel inadequate in a way that a clothes store or a supermarket does not. Venturing beyond the front of the shop seems to say to those who don’t know their Austen from their Anouilh, “You Don’t Belong Here”. Whether that’s real or imagined doesn’t matter, it’s a fact of life that bookshops have identified and (quite rightly) acted on.
None of the above is retail rocket science in any other area of merchandising - but in publishing, it remains something of a novelty, particularly to the few remaining older grandees to whom books resemble virgin debutantes trembling nervously on the verge of their coming out season. Will they find themselves anyone to love? Nowadays, with retailing being dragged into the modern era, some reckon books are more like hard-headed career women brandishing pre-nups - yet the world doesn’t seem to have ended. We can only hope that commerce doesn’t eventually turn them into over-rouged old slappers who care not a jot for our respect as long as we part with our money.
So the worlds of publishing and book retailing have changed beyond all recognition in the last ten years, and, it’s true, not always for the better. What we’ve lost is some of its eccentricity; but the widespread nostalgia for that idiosyncracy sometimes conveniently forgets its various shortcomings: in the case of the Duckworth imprint, its best-selling novelist Beryl Bainbridge was never paid more than £2,000 as an advance, and only 3,000 copies of her hugely popular novels would be printed in hardback; and when those copies had sold, there would be no reprint. She’s now published by a conglomerate, AOL Time Warner.
When her first outing with that company ‘According to Queeney’ appeared in 2001, it sold more than 19,000 copies of the hardback through high street bookshops. So more readers and royalties for Beryl - and good for her.
But the most obvious (and worrying) thing we may lose as a result of these changes is the degree of risk a publisher’s prepared to take on a title that isn’t immediately marketable - who knows, if a distant company in the multinational’s empire begins haemorraging money, it may be us readers who’ll eventually suffer. But this doesn’t seem to have happened yet, and it hopefully won’t as long as long as the market for books holds its own in the greatly-expanded leisure industry. Which it is doing, in part because it modernized itself in the nick of time.
But what’s all this got to do with meaning?
A lot. Increased accessibility to information about literature, a greater awareness of its history, the availability of a wide range of titles, and the maintenance of the profile of books within our culture are all facets of circumstantial meaning that will help replenish literature’s gene pool and enable it to survive. Dumb little spats about the difficulty or otherwise of interpretation are red herrings that should remain inside the cloisters of academe or within the covers of slim books that cost 40 quid. We should all be happy that there are writers that will cater to our tastes for all types of literature, challenging or otherwise, at whatever level we’re able to appreciate it. Because to do otherwise is to paint meaning into a corner, to restrict its resonance - and let’s not forget, the kind of snobbish intolerance publicly demonstrated by some reviewers and critics isn’t the best shop window for literature. But that’s precisely why they indulge in such egotistical nonsense; in their scheme, meaning can only be preserved by, paradoxically, restricting its audience to thems that know and can truly appreciate it. And that, of course, means them - a self-appointed aesthetic elite who, to the rest of us, come over as a bunch of ponces who need to get out more.
So although the role of money in the story of meaning may seem small, and to some, even irrelevant, it’s absolutely crucial: it gets the book published, distributes it and tries to get you to notice it. But it’s once the book’s out in the marketplace that its real trials begin, and it’s usually going to be what’s between the lines that counts.The ways books insinuate themselves into the reader’s consciousness are many and varied, which is what we’re going to be looking at in the following section, which is basically about how we fall in love both with literature and the individual works that comprise it.
Those of us who are habitual readers often have a story to tell about how we fell in love with books. And I’m no exception.
I was forced by an English teacher to put down my ‘Boy’s Bumper Book of All World Facts’ and read ‘Decline & Fall’ by Evelyn Waugh. I reluctantly obeyed, because he threatened me with dire consequences if I didn’t, and at the age of 13 I had already developed a finely-honed instinct for survival. He then practically stood over me while I got stuck in. And I never looked back. Next came ‘Scoop’. Then the complete works of PG Wodehouse. Then Dorothy L. Sayers - it all just snowballed as a result of that single encounter. Talk about a defining moment. So thanks, Tony Brunskill. This book’s all your fault.
But I was a comparative latecomer to the world of fiction - many are bitten at a far earlier age than I was.
And it’s fascinating what sorts of meaning children take away from their first brushes with literature - since these interpretations are rarely even remotely connected with the author’s intentions, and certainly nothing a critic or journalist would ever dream of seizing on in their assessment of a book’s significance.
There’s no doubt scads of academic treatises on childhood cognition I could quote you if I could be arsed, but far more telling is a website I only recently heard about which enables us to deal with this fascinating area far less boringly. It’s called BookSleuth, and it uses the resources of the internet, and the accumulated knowledge of all the other readers who log onto it, to track down books that we loved (usually as kids) but whose salient details we can no longer remember.
You can read the often forlorn experiences of adults who have been severed from a much-loved source of childhood pleasure, and it’s what these bookseekers connected with that in itself makes fascinating reading. It’s all there on the site, a testament to the randomness of meaning in our childhood perceptions from as unscientific a selection of people as it’s possible to find.
Meaning often seems to reside not so much in a memorable message or the perceived cultural value of the book, but in the colour of the cover; the name of a character, a stray couplet, an illustration or a telling incident, which turns the conventional wisdom that we associate lifelong memory with “great literature” completely on its head. As children, we can often bypass these traditional benchmarks of literary status. Often, it’s the circumstantial meaning we’ve been looking at which sticks in the brain, and it’s usually more significant than the received meaning that may have been passed on by a parent or teacher - the “you really ought to read this because it’ll do you good” type of recommendation. These books, for whatever reason, have been taken and absorbed into the self, with perhaps nothing else but their imaginative importance having been registered - things that seemingly have no meaning or content other than their inexplicable place in the memory.
And it can happen to writers too: take CS Lewis, in whose 1955 autobiography ‘Surprised By Joy’, we find this:
I had become fond of Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf": fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of ‘Tegner's Drapa’, and read:
I heard a voice that cried
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead -
I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of the northern sky; I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then...found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.
It is these fleeting moments of perception, occurring throughout his life, that Lewis refers to as "Joy" (I suppose “Surprised by a Literary Orgasm” might have been a bit racy for 1956 when the book was published), and it is they that provoke his longing:
Joy, must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again...I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power,
exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.
You can always trust old Clive to turn pleasure into a sort of philosophically resigned despair, but I would guess the principle holds true for many of us, that these personal epiphanies are both unlooked for and unaccountable - and frustratingly difficult to recapture. We can only rejoice that they happened at all, and the testimony of the hundreds of contributors on the BookSleuth site, who are all helping each other to recover the trigger for those lost moments of joy, serves as an excellent reminder that the creation or identification of meaning doesn’t necessarily have to obey any laws, -isms or -ologies whatever. And don’t let anyone persuade you it does.
So falling in love with literature at all is, to say the least, a rather hit-and-miss affair. But thankfully, tens of millions do, and it’s mainly, I suspect, down to their own initiative coupled with a deeply-ingrained cultural assumption we looked at earlier that some of a book’s ‘value’ rubs off on the reader. There’s any number of routes you can travel to arrive at this destination, whether it’s a blinding Road to Damascus-style revelation, peer pressure, curiosity, an enforced period of inactivity - whatever. We may need a small push or a bloody great leg-up, but however we get there, it’s a cause for great personal celebration, since whatever you read and enjoy becomes yours, an intellectual property that is personal to you according to the way you interpret it.
