Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

See our complete list of conversations, including:

Thick Skin, where authors talk about negative reviews, from both critics and readers

Pixelated, the digital, double-blind, lit-inclined author chat

A Bit Contrived, interviews with real authors about improvised books

The Art of Commerce, exploring the intersection of literature and the marketplace

Episode XVIII: "Publishing displaces the aura which, in the art world, attaches to the actual works of art"

Published 6/14/18
In this installment, Helen DeWitt talks about A.C. Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, the art world, the book world, the difference, and more.

Today I’m with the Helen DeWitt, the author of two novels—The Last Samurai (2000), and Lightning Rods (2011)—with her first collection of stories, Some Trick, out now from New Directions.

The term ‘writer’s writer’ gets thrown around a lot without seeming to mean anything. (So much so that ‘writer’s writer’s writer’ has been publicly used, with insufficient irony, to describe Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Lydia Davis, and Henry Green). Perhaps it just refers to writers who find themselves on MFA syllabi. Or maybe it’s just a realistic response to the new fact that everyone’s a writer. 

But Helen DeWitt is a writer’s writer in a more straightforward way: her fiction will read kindred to anyone who has had to navigate the publishing world and its compromises. If art happens at the boundary between the world and the artist, her writing stands at the boundary between the world and art. And in her work and career it often feels like exactly that: a boundary. The artists in DeWitt’s stories (echoing her own tribulations) find that if creating original art isn’t it’s own battle, finding it a place in the world is absolute war.

Forced to choose one book that was seminal to your development as a writer, you landed on art critic A.C. Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Danto was famous for declaring the end of art history, observing that any notion of progress was lost to the art world’s new pluralism. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, published in 1981, he divines many aspects of today’s art world, notably the new allocation of value and meaning, from aesthetics to representation. The connection between Danto and your own work feels both too easy and blurry, and I look forward to you clearing it up.

You famously started nearly fifty novels before selling your debut. To begin, I’d like to know at what point in your career's runway you first read The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

I first discovered The Transfiguration of the Commonplace in 1985. I had a Senior Scholarship at Brasenose College, Oxford, with three years' funding to do a doctorate, which meant three years I could stay in Britain instead of going back to the States. If I had had the right to work in the UK I would not have been doing a doctorate, I would have been doing secretarial work in London and trying to write a novel, but I didn't, so I wasn't.

My research involved looking at ancient literary criticism in light of modern literary theory, so there was a philosophical element and I spent a fair amount of time at the library of Phil.Sub.Fac. (the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, but this was a time when pretty much everything in my environment had its abbreviation). I was mooching discontentedly along the shelves when I came across the The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, opened it, and was immediately enchanted.

Danto starts with this question: How is it possible for physically indistinguishable objects to be different works of art? How is it possible, of two physically indistinguishable objects, that one can be a work of art, one not? He fleshes out the question with a wit, an ingenuity, a mischievousness not terribly common in philosophy, so we get passages like this:

Suppose we have two marbles, one a portrait of the other, and the latter the original, the “real” marble. But for their different histories, and but for the fact that one of them enters into the history of the other, there may be no way of telling them apart, and so no criterion in observation and comparison for stating that one of them is real and the other not.

or, of Warhol, this:

I recall the philosophical intoxication that survived the aesthetic repugnance of his exhibition in 1964, at what was then the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street, where facsimiles of Brillo cartons were piled one upon the other, as though the gallery had been pressed into service as a warehouse for surplus scouring pads. (There was also a room with facsimiles of Kellogg's cartons, which failed, in contrast with the charismatic Brillo boxes, to excite the imagination.) Some irrelevant negative mutterings aside, "Brillo Box" was instantly accepted as art; but the question became aggravated of why Warhol's Brillo boxes were works of art while their commonplace counterparts, the back rooms of supermarkets throughout Christendom, were not.

The reader can never again see a “Brillo Box” as just a “Brillo Box”: a Warhol facsimile will always bring to mind the philosophical excitement of A.C. Danto. The reader can also never again see a mere humble Brillo box as just a Brillo box: the utilitarian object in one's kitchen cupboard will also always bring to mind the philosophical excitement of Danto.

Danto, of course, used the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard as conjured up by Borges as one of his examples, but this was a time when writers were doing exciting things with, what to say, texts with imaginary histories. Hoban's Riddley Walker came out in 1980; translations of Eco's The Name of the Rose and Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler came out in 1980 (and if one read IOAWNAT one was naturally led to Invisible Cities, translated in 1974); Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor came out in 1985. So it was in this context that I read TOTC.

Up to this time, though I had written a few stories, I had somehow always felt that there was nothing new to do in fiction. Danto's wit and ingenuity, his preposterous invented examples, made me feel that next to nothing HAD been done, that there were infinite possibilities.

This was not entirely a good influence: when my first novel was published people asked how many unfinished novels there were, I felt that "about a hundred" sounded bad, and so halved it. (So "50" is now on the record, and probably on Wikipedia.) But I still go back to Danto when I'm feeling low, and really I could spend the rest of this interview on quotations.

Ah, so I read 100 somewhere, and chose the lower figure to be safe, but let's now let the record show.

Danto gives meaning to works whose meaning requires the existence of someone like him, to ask those questions about art and ask them earnestly. I wonder if reading him gave you hope that someone might read your work with such intent.

Not exactly. I wasn't really thinking about how my work might be read, but simply about possible things to do. But I was naive in the sense that I did not so much hope as take it absolutely for granted that a sophisticated field of criticism informed by theory was already in place. Danto, after all, is talking about works of art, about artists, who were already well known—Duchamp, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, I could easily go on—and these had already challenged the art world to develop a sophisticated discourse to accommodate them. So I assumed readers would come to texts with that background.

I hesitate to ask, but how has the reception to your work matched your hope that readers would be critically-minded?

Well, I don't know how most readers respond, of course. If I think of book reviews, it seems to me that there's not much contact between styles of criticism in the book world and those in the art world. I should perhaps qualify this by saying, not much contact in the Anglophone world—I think in some periodicals, at least, French book critics are allowed to bring in a more theoretical perspective.

How much do you think this idea—that books won't be met with theory, at least within large publications—affects the material today's writers produce?

OK, I think I'll step back to the last question. The thing that strikes me, not just when I read criticism of art but when I talk to or read interviews of gallerists and curators or, of course, artists themselves, is how extraordinarily knowledgeable people are in the art world. Tom McCarthy has talked about this. People are very widely read, not just on art matters but in literature, in philosophy, in sociology, in what's loosely called theory. It's dazzling. The Berlin-based artist Jay Chung recently invited me to write a piece for a project he had developed with his partner, Q Takeki Maeda, and he came to my apartment with a pile of books he considered relevant to the project (and later sent more). There were the artists' own books, a collection of interviews with artists by Hans Ulrich Obrist (one of the projects had been translating these into Japanese), there was Shklovsky on prose, Velthuis' Talking Prices, Bourdieu's The Rules of Art (and we immediately agreed that Distinction was also relevant). I began talking about Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and we saw at once that this too would be relevant. Later Chung sent me a PDF of an essay on Beuys by Benjamin Buchloh, and later still extracts of an interview of Broodthaers, and in the meantime, inspired by Chung, I had been reading exhaustively further afield.

An element of this, perhaps, is that works of art for at least the last century have presented the kind of philosophical challenge outlined by Danto—part of responding to a work of art is deciding what kind of thing it is and how it relates to other works of art. It's hardly a pure intellectual enterprise: theoretical and historical placement of the work of art, of the artist, is part of the commodification that feeds into prices. So a gallery show will typically set the ball rolling with a catalogue dignifying the work with some kind of theoretical mise-en-scène. Curatorship these days is an industry in its own right (and museums, of course, play a key role in the establishment of a reputation, which in turn feeds back into market prices).

Needless to say, this can be oppressive for artists (attempts to reject this system are a topic in their own right). But there's a self-awareness in that world, a sophistication that is not just philosophical but sociological, that we simply don't find in the world of books. In the book world we find occasional slight pieces on what makes a bestseller, or perhaps an analysis of the difference between MFA writing and writing for trade publication, but—look, I won't say we don't find anyone, anywhere, offering the kind of analysis we find in the art world, but it isn't mainstream. There isn't a kind of theoretically informed lingua franca among agents, publishers, booksellers, critics that can't be avoided if you follow the literary press or just buy a book.

Now, I don't think we can ever generalize about what writers choose to write; we can only judge what we have seen. Everything that is written doesn't get published; most of what gets published, especially by adventurous smaller presses, is handicapped by the struggle to get reviewed and the struggle to get stocked by bookstores. What we can say is that the radically different paths open to artists and writers—the paths that lead to visibility and financial viability—haven't changed much since Frank O'Hara's day. Many of the painters O'Hara knew came to sell for high prices (which help to pay for a studio and materials); the poets often published, initially, in pamphlets issued in editions of a couple of hundred, and if a reputation was made a living could be made on the back of it by accepting an academic position. The alternative for a writer—one that's rare—is to be taken on by mainstream publishing; Tom McCarthy's Remainder was initially published by Metronome in an edition of 600 copies, and was later republished by Vintage (upon which it was appropriated by mainstream reviewing where Lacan is, shall we say, hardly a household word).

So I'm not sure that the terms of literary criticism in the press directly influence what is written. But the publishing world hasn't taken on the art world's ways of engaging with the public—a new book isn't launched with a show that could be bought out by a visionary collector. So the press assume that reviews should be accessible to a general readership, and publishers assume that a book should obviously reach as many readers as possible. I know those assumptions influence the work I decide to send out on submission, and it would be surprising if other writers didn't do the same thing.

It's an interesting thought, that in artistic worlds where the art itself is a byway to 'funding' (to be so gauche)—i.e. a visual artist being bought out by a collector—there's more room to be passionate (and well read, and well researched) about the art itself. But of course the truth of mainstream book publishing is that it's capitalism incarnate. Most agents, editors and publishers won't use their time on books that won't hit with a segment of the population, and even small literary publishers have to service a readership that, it's to be assumed, has no historical perspective. This all sounds quite negative, but I'm wondering if you can see a positive in this, too. The Last Samurai is, in many ways, written to be read by the layman (possibly because it hauls its historical bedrock with it), as is the rest of your published work. To put it simply: do you think the pressure to write for everyone can yield an art object that is, in some ways, better?

I don't think The Last Samurai is a good example of the point you seem to be making. When an agent first showed it to editors in London in 1996/7, they complained that there was too much Greek, too much Japanese, too many numbers on the page—someone might take the book off a shelf, see all the numbers, and put it back on the shelf. My position was not that I was writing for everyone; my position was that if you want a novel with NO Greek, NO Japanese and NO numbers you can walk into any bookstore, take a book at random off the shelf, and be virtually guaranteed to find something that satisfied those criteria, whereas someone who might like these things wouldn't find them anywhere else. This exhausting experience did not result in a better version of The Last Samurai—if by better we mean minus the things that made editors nervous. It simply yielded a lot of other books which ruthlessly avoided those things, on the principle that if I got several other books into print I might ultimately be in a stronger position to have The Last Samurai properly published.

That is not to say that we don't see good books written for a wide readership. But surely, when people say publishers have to look for work that can sell many, many copies, this simply shows a lack of imagination. A big agency will typically have co-agents in for translation rights and film rights, but won't typically have a liaison with, as it might be, Larry Gagosian. That is only a convention, and it's a convention that privileges, obviously, the kind of work that lends itself to being made into a film, the kind of work with VERY wide (i.e. international) appeal. It doesn't have to be that way. We may remember that Charles Saatchi bought Tracey Emin's "My Bed" for £150,000 in 2000, and that it sold at auction in 2014 for £2.5 million—whatever the problem is, it's not about the money.

At many parts of The Last Samurai I thought, 'what a miracle it was this found a home.' Which is to say: it's much more ambitious than any book selling hundreds of thousands of copies can be expected to be. But at the same time, on a sentence level, it's written for someone without a background in all of the abstruse topics it calls on; this is not the case in purely theoretical texts, or texts written for the (post-grad) classroom. Do you disagree?

No, but it doesn't seem very surprising that the language of a work of fiction should be in a different register from that of the language used to discuss it in a theoretical or academic context. If we think about what's going on in The Last Samurai, at least, we can see why this should be so.

One of the objects (which it may not have achieved as well as it should have done) was to try to overcome the learned helplessness which I thought our educational system often inculcates in students. That is, people who come out of high school don't normally look at a bit of Greek or Arabic or Japanese and think, Easy Peasy, I learned to read one script when I was six, how hard can it be? College graduates, likewise. Whereas I think a sixth-grader who is reading confidently in English should already be saying Easy Peasy.

But look (to use a different example from those in the book), suppose I just present a confident reader of any age with a couple of lines in the Greek alphabet:

Κατε ατε α ΚιτΚατ.
Κιτ ατε α ΤικΤακ.

My hypothesis is that, because the shapes of the words are similar enough to the way they'd look in the roman alphabet, most readers will know what the sentences say, and at the same time some of the things that make Greek a little unnerving (squiggly, no dotted i or crossed t, small k with no ascender) are demystified. So the natural reaction is: I can do this! And: The only reason it looked unnerving before is that it was poorly presented, if the script were properly presented I could definitely read it and learn to read the language if I wanted. (Arabic and Japanese are trickier, but this was the idea.)

That would then change the reader's view of a small child who is perceived as a genius because he can read these squiggly texts, and it would be interesting to see the effect on the child of impressing people with something that shouldn't be impressive. But for it to work it has to be presented in straightforward language, and work in the context of the story because after all there is more to a novel than pedagogy.

Going back to earlier, I'm not sure if you're suggesting a system of patronage for the publishing world. I hope you are, because that's a wild thought I think is both alluring and extraordinarily dangerous, and I would like to hear a bit more about how you envision it.

I'm suggesting that publishing displaces the aura which, in the art world, attaches to the actual works of art. In publishing, machinery is in place to transform the original work into a commodity, and the marks of transformation signal legitimacy. In the art world, because value attaches to work from the artist's hand, or undertaken under the artist's direction, legitimacy is not conferred by interventions from persons not answerable to the artist. Among other things, this means that there is attention to process, to variants illustrative of the artist's obsessions (think Monet, think Giaccometti, one could go endlessly on). So, for example, Alain Delon amassed a valuable collection of drawings, and he said what he loved about drawings was that you saw the place where the idea came into the world. Michelangelo's drawings have a market value in their own right. Bridget Riley's sketches have a value in their own right. There's an interest in seeing the working of the artist's mind.

The process of publication typically begins by superimposing aesthetic preferences of all sorts of people on those of the author and then presenting the result as an object to which value has been added. So the author's drafts, notes, collections of images, variations on a theme are in the first instance devalued. The aura is brought back in when the book is to be sold: the body of the author is shipped here and there so that words can come out of the actual mouth to promote sales of the value-added copies. Copies can have greater appeal if signed by the author's actual hand. The author can offer opinions in interviews such as this, at a point when the opinions can have no conceivable effect on the book. We might instead have, for instance, launch parties more like a gallery opening: materials direct from the author's hand might be available for collectors. We might have group launch parties/shows at which the laptops on which the books were written, with all the drafts and relevant correspondence, all the work in progress, were available for sale.

In the art world, the speculative element of collection is something a little shameful, something an artist might want to ignore. But what we see in the book world is that the absence of this speculative element consistently erases literary history—archives are acquired only when an author is well established. So we might be better off if a reader with a good eye could follow the example of Delon, pick up papers on the cheap, maybe work up to buying a laptop for $10K or $20K or more. There would be a better chance that the workings of the author's mind would be visible and valued, there would be money for authors independent of the lottery of advances. Absent the suppression of all but the processed texts, we might see also see scope for the sophistication of a Danto.