Adult Diaper Porn Versus Henry James

I am waiting for Mark McGurl outside the “Bezos Center for Innovation” at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, along the south shore of Lake Union. We’re meeting just a few weeks after the Amazon founder and longtime chief executive Jeff Bezos launched himself into space, a nostalgia-fueled leap timed to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Wildfire smoke palls an otherwise cloudless sky and hides the Olympic Mountains. The heat index creeps into the 90s, abnormally warm for mid-August in this part of the country. Kids in sailboats and canoes ply the placid waters. These craft are artisanal products of the Center for Wooden Boats, housed in a wooden shed sited quayside in the museum’s shadow, a stubborn reminder that some things are still worth making in the old ways.

McGurl is coming from the Spheres, the nearby glass-and-steel geodesic domes that are part of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. “They look like a corporate lobby has extruded itself into the landscape, like a detached belly,” he says. We joke about their resemblance to Biosphere 2 — the ill-fated 1990s project to create earth-like conditions in an enclosed environment — as if these energy-intensive domes with their exhibitions on “biophilic design” might, like a Bond-villain’s secret base, play a role in Bezos’ “Blue Origin” space-colonization program. More trenchantly, McGurl notes that the Spheres reflect Amazon’s tendency to treat any physical space like the terrain of an alien planet, a territory to be mined.

McGurl’s conversation is accompanied by ready laughter, often with both hands raised above his shoulders, palms out, in a gesture that could indicate acceptance or warding off. There is the occasional self-deprecating remark. He comes across as both authentically curious and curiously detached. This apparent lack of self-seriousness belies both the extent of McGurl’s research and its implications for literary studies, perhaps for literature itself. “I have a satirical impulse that I can’t suppress,” he says. “So I’ve just stopped trying, and I just sort of let it go. I mean, it’s not like there isn’t genuine affection for lots of things in this book, but the irony is turned up pretty high. We live in non-ironic times. And this is an ironic book.”

That book is Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, which presents itself as a sequel to McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), which in turn grew out of his more conventional investigation into how Henry James created the idea, in America, of the novel as a work of art. Just as McGurl once put forth the poker-faced argument that the advent of M.F.A. writing programs was the most salient development in postwar American literature, here he aims “to take the measure of contemporary fiction through the analytical lens of ... the most remarkable and consequential novelty of recent literary history.” That great new thing, as McGurl sees it, is Amazon’s perfection of publishing-on-demand technology. Its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform has made it possible for pretty much anyone to publish a novel. Those who want to earn at least a living wage by doing so, however, must follow certain marketplace guidelines that are no less strict and “normative” than the rules that previously governed either the autonomous “high art” or program-era local “craft-based” regimes for the production of fiction. And where there are rules and norms, there’s room for institutional, sociological critiques of the kind McGurl has specialized in making.

“Novelty,” though, is a cheery and agnostic-sounding word to describe this process, indicative of McGurl’s high-level irony. Not “development,” which implies a teleology, as if literature or its institutions were heading toward a predetermined outcome; not Jeff Bezos’ own inflated corporate language of “innovation,” appropriated from the historical avant-garde; not a technical-sounding Germanic term like “structural transformation.” Dubbing something a novelty puts it in the sphere of the great American carnivalesque (Barnum, not Bakhtin). McGurl diminishes his subject when the stakes are highest.

Novelties are also aligned with novels, with “news that stays news,” as Ezra Pound said of literature. And one of McGurl’s thought experiments involves recounting the story of Amazon as if it were a kind of novel, or literary form, that aims to be everything to everyone — the indispensable index of all our desires, but also the exclusive purveyor and field of those desires. In the book, he compares the corporation to one of Bezos’ personal favorites, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, about a butler devoted to customer service at any human cost (Bezos once gave a copy to every new hire in Amazon’s upper management), as well as to the space-age fictions of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Robert Heinlein.

By design, McGurl focuses less on the labor practices and legal maneuvers by which Amazon has come to exert its will on global markets than on how the company has created the psychological and temporal conditions that not only alter how fiction is bought, sold, distributed, and read, but also how it is produced.

This is a familiar and by now even somewhat strained cultural-studies move — “Amazon as text” — but McGurl deploys it to, well, novel effect. Reading the Amazon system as if it were itself a kind of sprawling serial or utopian novel allows him to shed light on “the consumer unconscious” that impacts the novels produced, both intentionally and not, under its influence and in its gigantic shadow.

Everything and Less also introduces its presumably sophisticated — or more traditional — readers to a cast of writers previously impervious to critical thinking about the novel. There’s Hugh Howey, author of the Silo series and I, Zombie, among at least 30-odd other titles. Howey, a self-serious M.F.A.-program outcast, has become the polygeneric Balzac figure of the self-publishing world. Then there are satirists, like the gay-porn author “Chuck Tingle” (author of Bigfoot Pirates Haunt My Balls and Space Raptor Butt Invasion, among others), and the various best-selling avatars of novels about online video-gaming worlds (LitRPG), romance novels, zombie novels, and the “Mommy Claire” series.

The novelists McGurl selects from the herd are among the most successful — that is, the most downloaded — of the self-published. Since Amazon doesn’t track e-book sales, at least not publicly, cold, hard numbers are hard to come by. But Amazon’s rankings algorithm doesn’t exactly lie, at least about some things. Anyone can do some rough, back-of-the-envelope math knowing that the rankings are based on a certain number of sales over various short- and long-term periods, that most Amazon authors earn 70 percent of the royalties on each e-book sale, and that most KDP books are priced at $2.99 to $9.99. Howey, for instance, claims to have turned down six-figure offers from mainstream publishers for the rights to some of his books. Aside from economic measures of success, the works McGurl selects are decidedly not “literary,” nor especially intended as art, nor do the authors show much desire to become part of a critical conversation in universities or elsewhere. But these writers represent only a cross section of the bulk of fiction that’s now produced and consumed in contemporary American society. In other words, Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing have ushered in the “super-size” fast-food on-demand era of literature.

Photographs by Noah Berger for The Chronicle

To survey this impossibly large field of what he terms “surplus fiction,” McGurl adopted an unusual expedient. “For the past five years, if I’ve been driving, working out, stopping in the grocery store, anything you can think of, I’ve had my earbuds in and I’ve been listening to popular fiction.” I thought literary scholarship required close reading, so when he tells me he’s listened to many of the books on double-speed, I’m fascinated. “Is it like the chipmunks version?”

He reassures me. “The audio processing is so good at this point that they don’t sound like chipmunks at all. It sounds completely normal. I’ve spent so many hundreds of hours listening at elevated speed that I can follow. I’m a practiced listener.” He admits, though, that listening in this way can make him feel “kind of psychotic, actually.”

Psychosis seems like a heavy price to pay to write a book about digital publishing, especially when big-data tools are increasingly available to researchers in literature. Surely there must be an algorithm that could crunch all these novels? But McGurl is adamant that he “wasn’t going after it in a kind of ‘digital humanities’ spirit.” One of the great and perhaps unintended ironies unleashed by Everything and Less is that McGurl’s research became a kind of participant observation, a pre-digital methodology that draws the reader’s attention to the “how” of the effort as much as the “what” of the content. It’s literary studies’ version of the John Henry spectacle of man vs. machine. Quixotic, perhaps, more than psychotic.

Everything and Less, then, is about the conditions of literature under mass production. Successful “Amazon novelists have to write, they have to produce a novel every three months,” McGurl tells me, when I point out that he’s had to optimize himself as a literary consumer. “And I had to do my version of ‘hurry up.’”

Whether in audio or e-book form, the aim of the Amazon reader is clearly to consume as much material as possible, to buy, in other words, ever more stuff. McGurl’s name for this Amazon-generated program of overproduction and overconsumption is “servile domination,” and he finds the clearest expression of this dynamic in the genre known as “Adult Baby Diaper Erotica.” The fantasy is regressive and usually features an “Alpha” corporate man who’s both put in touch with and reduced to his infantile self via the ministrations of a dominating mommy figure. There’s plenty of breast-feeding, cuddling, and diaper changing, but no banter, no sex, no intimacy, or possibility of equal human relationships. The popularity of the genre speaks to the prevalence of the fantasy in American life, but it’s also an expression of the ethos of the Amazonian literary system: Semi-anonymous or pseudonymous content providers produce a seemingly unending scroll of the most basic form of story for consumers who, like big babies, desire to be fed more, all of it flowing from the simultaneously bounteous and withholding medium of the Kindle: the everything and the less of McGurl’s title.

There’s not anything radically new about this relationship of provider to consumer. It was supposed to have been television and Hollywood that supplied the endless consumer demand for fantasies, along with the bodice-rippers of yore, but these platforms have ultimately proved too restrictive. Amazon caters to an endless array of niche fantasy communities: whether specific types of erotica, or something known as “Scottish witch” historical fiction, or narratives derived from role-playing online video gaming, or varieties of traditional mass-market categories like “romance,” “western,” and “thriller.” Amazon is “Big Mommy,” dispensing these tales.

I ask McGurl if what he means is that the people want bedtime stories.

“Absolutely. The question is to what degree they want them. Even when they’re a fairly culturally ambitious college graduate listening to or reading the latest book, however disguised the form, all literature is children’s literature. The rise of the audiobook — or the reappearance of oral literature in our time, through this technological mediation — speaks to that ancient being-read-to by a parent. It brings that back in a weird, alienated, technologized hyper-postmodern kind of way.”

But McGurl responds more cautiously when I wonder whether he imagines “Amazon studies” will be the future of literary studies. “In some ways,” he admits, “at least for the purposes of the academy and the classroom — it feels conservative to say — but it is really hard to teach bad genre fiction. You run out of things to say really quickly.”

The specter of value has entered the bright cafeteria of the Museum of History and Industry, and it hovers over our conversation much as it does over Everything and Less. One of the book’s claims, after all, is that Amazon aspires to be “a great literary work in its own right.” Nor can McGurl resist the occasional aesthetic judgment of his own; he mentions, for instance, that the popular Amazon author of the self-help guide 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love has also produced a romance novel about the gig economy that is “not half bad.”

McGurl doesn’t necessarily view such judgments as troubling the consistency of his argument. He reposes in the cultural contradictions of the Amazon Age. And he admits that, after all this bulk consumption, he still misses a good book. “For the longest time, I’m like, Oh man, when this is over, flight to quality. Like zoom, beeline to Tolstoy! We’re back to Henry James, where I started.”

There’s an irony here that I’m reluctant to mention even to the ironist across from me: Value-free analyses of literature like that offered by Everything and Less can make it harder to provide convincing internalist accounts about the value of any one novel or author over another. Some of us still think we know what a good sentence sounds like or how a good novel feels, or the difference between convincing and flat characters — and that we might even be able to persuade others.

But McGurl is too good a sociologist not to point out that literary fiction has now become a kind of marketing and generic category of its own, one that occupies an ever-tinier niche in the wider fiction ecosystem. “The move I try to make in this book is to see literary fiction not as transcendent of genre, but as a genre unto itself,” he says. And yet he’s also an astute enough reader and literary critic to perceive that “there is literary fiction, and then there is the ‘literariness’ of certain genre fiction compared to other instances of genre fiction. So literary fiction is at once a genre unto itself and a value.”

And what about those people who successfully execute a novel every three months? What do they feel or recognize about values of craft, not to mention art? What level of bad faith, or just joyful ignorance, is necessary to be an Amazon novelist? How useful is the category of “literature” anymore? The stories McGurl selects in Everything and Less are quite often, transparently even if unintentionally, allegories of consumerism — whether that’s Adult Baby Diaper Erotica or Hugh Howey’s update of Plato’s parable of the cave to an apocalyptic world of communities living in their own silos, dependent upon an invisible authority that provides for their wants while maintaining them in a state of anxious ignorance about the conditions of the world itself. What if the world of fictions mapped out in Everything and Less doesn’t describe literature so much as a kind of autochthonous folklore of the consumer?

McGurl pleads “guilty” to a tendency to select works that lend themselves to allegorical interpretation rather than stylistic or literary analysis, but he’s also willing to consider seriously a wide range of beliefs on the part of Amazon writers and readers about how they value these books. “There are those in that world who get really irritated by the snobs and want to claim, ‘This is literature too.’ There are those who acknowledge that the classics are superior; they just don’t want to read them. People don’t really talk about this, the disdain for value that is also a recognition of value: ‘Yeah, that stuff’s great. I have no interest in reading it.’ But I’m probably most interested in that pugnacious attitude of, ‘How dare you say that this isn’t literature?’ I’m sympathetic to the desire not to be looked down upon.”

In the current flattened environment that McGurl describes, where he concedes that “the authority of the novel is clearly in shambles,” it’s no longer clear who’s looking down on whom and from what heights. The gatekeepers are really no longer at their posts. Algorithmic popularity is its own kind of cultural authority.

Yet, despite his having tenure at Stanford University and his role as one of the standard-bearers of what’s been termed “the New Institutionalism” in literary studies, McGurl sees himself as an agitator and provocateur in a field which, as he puts it, still has “an overwhelming critical focus on prestigious literary fiction.” So I have to ask him what he makes of the fact that the category of “the literary” is most in crisis just at the moment when it has never been more open to groups previously excluded from its sacred precincts.

“The super-cynical depressing reading,” he says, “is, ‘Sure, y’all can have literature now, because we have no use for it anymore.’ The power and the glory have moved elsewhere, so every literary prize is a consolation prize, basically. That’s not the whole truth because there is this other side of just rewards and of institutional structures, which have gone and found talent and created it and trained it.”

Tellingly, McGurl points out that the new “high-low” divide that exists between prestige corporate publishing, M.F.A. programs, and the prize economy on the one hand and the market-driven Amazonverse on the other isn’t so much a debate over the merits of the literary as a disagreement about the value of social difference. “You spend enough time with this Amazonian world, and it throws into relief something you already knew. It really becomes clear that the world of literary fiction as produced by the prestige houses is profoundly liberal. So Amazon is the place where the right wing, or the lover of the white billionaire, can have their thing.”

But Amazon is more than what a 2020 report by ProPublica and The Atlantic called “The Hate Store,” an ecosystem of reactionary fantasies. And it’s more than a clearinghouse for niche pornography. Surely somewhere in the Amazonian jungle, despite the apex “author-preneurs” who dominate the market, McGurl must have encountered weirdos, singular visions, a kind of Salon des Refusés that persist despite the nonjudgmental absolutism of the algorithm and what McGurl calls “the institutional incorporation of the idea of difference as an aesthetic ideology.”

“There’s stuff out there that I found super interesting and didn’t end up finding a way to use in the book,” he told me. “There’s this writer named Scott Hale. He writes dark fantasy, a very popular genre that includes Game of Thrones. But this guy found the bottom of the darkness that’s possible with dark fiction, and his fantasy worlds are rotting worlds. Like literally everything is rotting and smelling. It’s this Boschian landscape. He busts out eight or nine novels, all of them several hundred pages long. And they have tens, maybe hundreds of readers. I never got around to writing on him.”

It will be up to the next generation of Amazon scholars to write about the migration of outsider artists to self-publication. But if there’s an advantage to McGurl’s ironic, merry-prankster approach to literature as a pure consumer relationship, it’s a consequence of what might be termed his radical openness. I wonder if, by his acceptance of the abolition of “seriousness” and “art,” in the conditions of both literary production and also consumption, Everything and Less, like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, allows the ghost of seriousness or at least a wider range of people’s self-seriousness to become visible, even as the question of value or quality remains perennially deferred.

As usual, and without any trace of defensiveness, McGurl assents, even at the risk of compromising himself: “What’s the Phillip Larkin poem, ‘Church Going’?” he asks. Then he quotes from it: “‘Since someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious.’ People want to be serious about serious things, and fiction should be a vehicle for that too. I don’t think that a world populated only by hyper-self-conscious genre fiction is necessarily the way to go. In some ways I’m just full of shit, because novels that earn their seriousness move me, and I think they’re great.”