Steve Waters 

Literary fiction and a playwright’s secret pen envy

Steve Waters: Few references to contemporary drama make it into the nation's supplements. Where exactly does this aversion come from?
  
  

David Hare, one of the few contemporary playwrights to sometimes make the literary pages.
Hard lines … David Hare, one of the few contemporary playwrights to sometimes make the literary pages. Photograph: David Levene Photograph: David Levene

Am I alone in feeling a stab of pique at the way literary fiction hogs the cultural limelight? When my Saturday Review, New Statesman or LRB fall open, it's a rare moment when any plays merit a mention. Indeed, those smart lit-types often go out of their way to deliver brickbats to the world of the stage: I'm still seething at Nicholas Lezard's idle side-swipe during a review of Kenneth Tynan's essays that the "theatre is the most redundant of the major arts". Once in a month of Saturdays a more senior voice (a Hare, a Frayn, an Edgar) merits a bit of desultory attention, but largely, print culture passes theatre by.

What is this about? It's partly an echo of a longstanding "anti-theatrical tradition", documented by scholar Jonas Barish, which started with the disdain of the early church for pagan spectacle and gathered momentum with the Taliban-like rage against performance of Puritan nutcases such as William Prynne during the Renaissance.

The new anti-theatrical prejudice takes more insidious forms. One of these is wilful ignorance, often flowing from the gleeful populism of so much postmodernist thought (which tends to neglect the fact that some of Roland Barthes's finest works were his early love-letters to Brecht after being dazzled by the Berliner Ensemble in Paris in the 1950s). Another, more serious implication is that plays don't sit terribly heavily in the scales of history – they show to coteries whereas the novel with its big reach is big business.

That thought occurred to me while watching a speech in Cambridge last week by John Mullan. The professor and regular Guardian contributor – framed, I think ironically, by a huge pound sign – elaborated engagingly on the way big-money prizes such as the Booker have led to ringing cash tills and happy publishers in the world of fiction. But theatre has some hefty prizes too, not least the Bruntwood, awarded last week. (Did you catch it on the news? Me neither.)

I found myself troubled by the populist tenor of Mullan's account of the books market, where the heroes all seemed to be publishers or sponsors, and the end point, "literary fiction", required to deploy smart narrative tricks and the requisite level of allusion – enough to flatter but not too much to baffle. And then, symptomatically, Mullan – having dismissed James Kelman's refusal to smile for the cameras as grumpy bad faith – turned on David Hare's suggestion that "literary" and "fiction" are the two most depressing words in the language. "What about political theatre?" rejoined Mullan, getting hearty laughs from the Oxbridge audience.

I'm a fan of both Hare and Kelman, and recognise in their best work a resistance to the sleek "readability" of so much mainstream literary fiction. Jonathan Franzen, in his New Yorker essay Mr Difficult, offers a much more provocative framing of this debate about literature and its public. He differentiates between the novel of status – indifferent to its readers, haughtily difficult and uncompromising – and the novel of contract, which woos and pleasures them, curling up in their laps like a cat.

It strikes me that it's worth staying with the stage because, at its best, it is equidistant between these two: beadily aware of the audience while pushing them to places they may not choose to go alone. Yes, like all the arts, it can be something of a ghetto, but when so much of literary culture seems reduced to a scuffle to get on the table at Waterstone's, perhaps playwriting – free of the seductive cache of the literary – is better off out of it.

 

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