Against Literary Readings (and Especially Q & A’s)

by Mik Awake

When the young man takes a seat in the audience, his hair tousled, collar undone, they must smell trouble. An author of some stature stands at the podium, reading with florid hand gestures from his book. Slowly, everyone in the room grows aware of a noise: during the respites between poems and the beats within them, the disheveled young man is coughing. It’s a fake cough, timed perfectly for the pauses, and after each one, instead of saying Pardon, he grumbles—loud enough for all to hear—“Merde!”

It is interesting to think the reaction young Arthur Rimbaud, who was notorious for this kind of behavior in the literary salons of 19th-century Paris, might be greeted with were he to stumble into the literary salons of 21st-century Manhattan and cough the word bullshit during a reading. One imagines that people would not laugh along with him or join him in spontaneous chorus; they didn’t then and they most certainly wouldn’t now. More likely, they would cast glances—really nasty ones—in his direction. The glances would tell young Arthur, “Why did you come to the reading if you didn’t love the book?”

I have been wondering for many years now—and I imagine that I’m not alone: what is the purpose of the literary reading? Publishers say, How else can a novelist sell books without going on tour and doing readings? Critics say, In this beleaguered age of literature, where books are quickly going the way of the dodo, we must embrace any event that celebrates literacy. But does the literary reading really help promote a book? And does it really celebrate literature—or just a certain type?

Usually, when an author publishes a book, his publicist will arrange a book tour. During the week or two after the book is published, or slightly before, a review comes in from the New York Times Book Review; radio and TV hold interviews with the author; things will be happening. Crammed somewhere into these press appearances, which are proven tools for spreading the word about a book, the author will stop at the Barnes and Noble at Union Square, at Powell’s Books in Portland, at Politics and Prose in D.C., and he will crack open his book under a banner bearing his name, and he will read with florid hand gestures (see footnote #1). When he is done, there will be questions, signed copies of the book in a neat pyramid. Audience members will be encouraged to approach the table—like children in line for communion. A smelly young man with a fake cough will be nowhere in earshot.

Does this ritual really help to spur book sales? A friend of mine who works at a publishing house (full disclosure: I, too, work in publishing) had this to say about readings:

Flip through Time Out New York’s “books” section or the Village Voice and calendar you will be hard pressed to find a book event that isn’t a bestselling author or celebrity. Most often these high-profile events don’t even include a reading or a talk because of time constraints. They're held in spaces that are virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the store with stray book browsers wandering through the event space, yapping on a cell phone. The allure of people sitting in a cozy space listening to a writer speak about his or her work has been replaced by staffers directing troves of people into lines and pushing them through to the cashier. 

Indeed, in their desire to lure us away from the hectic showroom of the bookstore, literary readings often distract us from the books themselves. One of the most convivial book events I’ve ever attended occurred last month at the McNally Robinson bookstore in SoHo. Over a hundred people showed up over the course of the evening. Two women hired by the store uncorked bottle after bottle of champagne. There were at least two video cameras rolling, one of which belonged to Dateline NBC, and curious passersby could be seen stopping to peer in. According to the publicist of the event, they sold only a handful of books. So, the act of getting people excited about literature, whether with audiovisual displays or alcohol or live music, has the unintended side-effect of diminishing what’s most important: namely, literature itself. These types of events are not so much literary readings as they are parties inspired by books. Either way, they’re not effective tools for selling books.

Perhaps the Internet, perennial whipping boy of literary critics and journalists, is partly to blame. The web is making it easier to experience a kind of literary reading in the comfort of your own home. Recorded excerpts might be available on a book’s website, on NYTimes.com, or on NPR. You can find a great many readings of more popular authors on YouTube.  As opposed to sitting in a metal fold-up chair at Barnes and Noble, a reader can experience an author’s voice from the same comfortable chair he might end up actually reading the book on. And, most importantly, a reader will not have to endure one of the most demeaning aspects of literary culture: the Q & A (see footnote #2). 

After an author has finished reading the preheated, market-tested passage, one can expect a most humiliating few minutes of public conversation. It is not democratic; it—like voting—is a symbol of democracy, but not the genuine article. During the Q & A, invariably, the first person to raise his hand will be insane or will confess to being a writer himself and will want to know what kind of legal pad the author uses. (“I use a Moleskin, actually.”) This will consume half of the allotted time of the Q & A. Most other readers will have either left the bookstore or bar, or will keep his questions for after the reading, for email later that night, or, as is becoming far too common, for cranky blog posts the next day. In the same way that the literary reading is a useless means of promoting literature, the post-reading Q&A seems to me a similarly corrupt form of public discourse.

It is pointless to blame the individual audience members or the author or even the publicists for the ineffectiveness of readings at promoting literature. One reason may be that the academic format of the literary reading lends itself to this. How often does one find oneself sitting in that fold-up chair thinking, I could be at home reading this on a comfortable chair, rather than sitting here, in this terrible fold-up, trying to meet eyes with the brunette in the green sweater sitting across the aisle, trying to think of something devastatingly brilliant to ask for the Q & A (to impress the brunette in the green sweater, of course), or trying hard not to notice the pearl of saliva forming in the crease of the author’s mouth?

Please talk into the microphone . . . Please pass it down the row to the young brunette in the green sweater . . . Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for . . . (see footnote #3)

In its producer-consumer format, in its faux-democratic approach to literary discussion, in which readers are encouraged to disagree only on which passage of a book was their favorite (Merde!), the literary reading is a perfect example of market culture’s damaging influence (Merde!) on our experience of art and perhaps, for many former or current students, an all-too-familiar echo of the teacher-student format (Merde! Merde! Merde!). In a situation where the Author equals producer, and reader equals consumer, disfavor can be seen as costly. But, without drunk French prodigies yelling out swear words, how do most people gauge public disfavor at a literary reading? The answer: silence.

I have noticed that authors tend to choose the funnier passages from their books for readings. Humorous stories almost always work better at readings because laughter is an audible, quantifiable experience. You can hear people laugh; you can see people laugh; it is an instant survey of authorial success. On the other hand, passages of a book that “move” an audience have the unfortunate consequence of being accompanied by silences. And silence can almost always, in the context of a reading, be misconstrued as indifference or, worse, dislike.

At a recent reading held in the basement of a Lower East Side bar, two fairly famous novelists—one more so than the other—each read a passage from their most recent books. I had read both of their books, which struck me as being very good for very different reasons, but I was interested to see how they got on together. Laughter and generous applause greeted the two brief, humorous passages read by the more famous novelist. But when the other novelist read from his book, a lyrical and sprawling family history, no one knew what to make of it. It wasn’t funny; no one laughed. And perhaps goaded by the silence, not knowing whether to keep reading or to read until he heard adoring sighs, he read for far too long. The applause that punctuated the end of his nearly fifteen-minute passage was one of relief and bewilderment.

In this way, silence is the friend of reading and the foe of literary readings. For readings to be effective, they must drum up laughter, applause, shouting. They must become pep rallies for the author. However, for reading to be effective, there must be silence. You can sell printed words on a page; you can sell recorded words on a tape. But alas! You cannot sell the silence needed to read a book. (At least, not yet.)

All these problems arise, I think, because of the very nature of the act of reading, for reading is a solitary act. There are only a handful of really reading-able authors, authors who combine a pleasing and comic reading voice and a writing style suited for reading aloud. David Sedaris comes to mind, whom I’ve seen read on YouTube, as does Jonathan Lethem, whom I’ve seen live. In the case of Sedaris, whose writing I’ve always found thin and contrived, one wonders if part of his popularity is partly due to his ability to bring audiences to their knees in laughter at readings. This clip from a recent appearance on the David Letterman show is a prime example of what appears to be a successful literary appearance; the audience can be heard laughing after almost every sentence. Without the leading laughter of audience members around you, creating a shared social literary experience, one might find the story in question rather thin and contrived, as folks like Alex Heard have.

Reading is decidedly anti-social behavior. The freedom to read whatever we want to read is a shining legacy of our democracy, but one’s response to a book need not be democratic. One’s response is a totalitarian regime within each individual reader, morphing over time, and fighting for dominion of the imagination.  In our producer-consumer version of literature, where authorial voice is a commodity for which publishers pay six-figure advances, the literary reading overlooks the single most important commodity in any literary transaction: a reader’s voice. Most writers write to be heard in that imaginary voice that comes from within a reader’s head, a natural compliment to the writer’s own. Literary readings, and perhaps even audiobooks, misunderstand where a book derives its power. It is not from the printed words on the page—the words themselves—but from the silence that surrounds them as we repeat them in our heads. From the comfortable chair where we’ve spent many a Thursday night.

All literary readings, of course, aren't worthless or financial failures. Quite the contrary, the good ones are exactly the ones that are more like parties than like readings. The format though is in need of serious rethinking. Until someone invents a less degrading alternative, I will have to content myself with passing the microphone down the row to the smelly young man with a French cough. Or perhaps, one of these days, I will lose it like Rimbaud and walk out of a bookstore grumbling the word “bullshit,” followed perhaps by the annoyed glances of the audience and a heavy, ponderous—and perhaps welcome—silence.

Footnotes

#1: It’s worth mentioning that by this point in the life of the book, a minority of the audience will have actually read it. In the case of debut authors, the aspect of a literary reading can prove particularly daunting, considering that a majority of the audience has probably never read a word you’ve ever written aside from the snatches that were included in reviews.

#2: How great is the gulf symbolized by that harmless ampersand! It might more accurately be nicknamed the Q vs. A.

#3: The microphone business, of course, is not nearly as demeaning as when an author exhorts the members of an audience—if it’s a small audience—to arrange their chairs in a circle.

(Photo from Mr November's flickr.)

Comments

[R J Keefe]

Put Colm Tóibín on your list of "reading-able" authors. And get a schedule from 192 Books*!

*No relation.

[Amanda]

i go to a lot of readings, more often than not small press readings of poetry; some are more interesting than others, but i do find it gives me the opportunity to meet and chat with the writer and to hear the poetry in the way that he/she interpret it. now with podcasts and audio files of readings, i suppose some of this might be less relevant; however it's like asking why people go to concerts when they can just listen to the cd. it's similar. i love hearing a writer read his/her own words.