Guest Blogger: Joseph Grant - Is The Great American Novel Dead ...or Just Undead?

Is the Next Great American Novel Dead...or Just Undead?

by

Joseph Grant

Of late there is a penchant in the book business for literary cannibalism. Not that writers these days are stealing phrases or pages from unsuspecting writers living or dead, but outright plagiarism, unlike the oh-so-mortal writer, is alive and well and will likely never die. It would be bad enough if that was the only problem, but it is much worse than that. What is occurring as a trend in today's literary marketplace is the wholesale theft of entire novels in the guise of a trendy literary 'mash-up' of genres, for the lack of better words.

A mash-up by definition is when an artist combines two ideas and blends them together to create a hopefully seamless entity, hence a mash-up. Back in the day, it was called 'sampling'. Back in the day before that, it was called stealing and or plagiarism but even then it was usually confined to a small part of the whole.

The current movement in literature is to take an existing classic and interject, say, a zombie or vampire or any such monster will do, really and market it as a semi-original work of fiction. This is tantamount to literary grave-robbing, let alone sacrilege to treat a masterpiece with such glib rancor. Insult is then added to the author's already injured memory by the no-talent hack of a writer tacking their name onto the author as if the author, many years dead had risen from the grave like one of the atrocious added-on characters the new author has created from his small black and white TV mind and somehow co-authored what amounts to literary desecration. It's as if the publishing world has lost its identity and now allows literary graffiti to be tagged along the walls of immortals. One wonders if the modern-day author has suddenly stopped thinking and writing the Great American Novel and looked into the literary mirror and saw plagiarism and coattail-riding as something in which to aspire.

Is this a generation's "payback" for having to suffer through the works of esteemed authors like Austen, Melville, Shakespeare & Hawthorne in school? If this is a generation's thumbing their nose at tradition and having a laugh, I'm not getting the humor, I'm afraid. It is a glaring omission and admission of a literary business in trouble and in the process of imploding. The true question is: 'Why are we eating our own?' The answer is of course an unequivocal one. It is literary lethargy. Instead of trying to write well, we take the literary lazy road out and we write upon the literary bathroom wall in the form of parody.

This is not to say that there aren't great writers working today in cafes and in homes all across the country to write the Great American Novel. Search your bookshelves and you may see some of them yourself. But where are the writers of tomorrow? It's tragic to think that they are writing monster parodies of classics. Doesn't that strike you as empty and pathetic? It does me.

The problem lies with the literary agents who reject struggling writers, but yet sign this literary pabulum into print. Yet, we writers are at the mercy of such inept beings. Instead of finding the next aforementioned Austen, King, Hemingway, Rowling or Cornwell, they're too busy signing the next great unimaginative plagiarist. It's no wonder that a real writer can't catch an honest break, so to speak.

It's tragic that great writing is being prevented from publication because publishing itself became too big an insolent child and merged with corporations that hired agents and publishers to baby sit the industry; people who had more interest in the bottom line than the written one. As little as twenty-five years ago, it was still possible to get an unsolicited manuscript into a large house and receive an acceptance without using a middleman. Before publishing became a business, it had been run by intellectuals, whereas, it's now run by businessmen.

This is not to say that agents all agents are out for blood or have no true insight. There are still agents out there who read for the pleasure of reading, just as there are writers who still write for the pleasure of writing. Only when agents stop signing celebutards, fallen politicians and half-assed hacks instead of real writers will literature be able to look at itself in the mirror again and not see a monster looking back.

BIO: My short stories have been published in 147 literary reviews and e-zines, such as Byline, New Authors Journal, Underground Voices, Nite-Writer's International Literary Arts Journal, Howling Moon Press, Hack Writers, New Online Review, Literary Tonic, Six Sentences, NexGenPulp, Is This Reality Zine , Darkest Before Dawn, strangeroad.com, FarAway Journal, Full of Crow, Heroin Love Songs, Bewildering Stories, Absent Willow Literary Review and the Absent Willow Anthology and Harbinger* 33 a story in the anthology of horror, Northern Haunts, as well as three UK literary reviews, Bottom of the World #1 & 2 and Cupboard Gloom and Write This. I have won “Story of the Month” at Bartleby-Snopes Literary Review. I have written for The New York Bar Guide (as a reviewer) and in various newspaper articles that have appeared in The Pasadena Star, Whittier News and the San Gabriel Tribune. I have published a work of verse, Indigo, with Alpha Beat Press and have completed my first novel. I currently reside in Los Angeles . NOTE: Six stories of mine have been recently featured in 6S Volume 1&2, a collection of short stories by various writers available at Amazon. I also write a monthly newsletter column for Literary Mary.