Twitchell's Carnival Culture and the Decline of Publishing

Introduction: What's on Your Bookshelf?

What is on your bookshelf — a treasury of Calvin and Hobbes comics, or the collected works of the theologian John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan? What constitutes more worthy reading material? If one reads Carnival Culture by James Twitchell, the fact that Americans are more likely to have read Bill Watterson's cartoon than the seminal text Leviathan by the seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes demonstrates the decline of the publishing industry in a nutshell. The once "cloistered" world of publishing, Twitchell states, has now become overly democratic (71). Hence the frightening speculation: why bother to print Thomas Hobbes when comics turn a better profit?

A canny executive today might even add, speaking after Twitchell's 1991 musings on popular culture, that classics are available on the Internet, so why bother publishing new scholarly editions? As for new authors of literary value who are not even required reading in colleges and high schools, the profit margin is even more dubious. Rather than seeking what is worthy of being read, contemporary book publishers instead focus only on what can be sold. The potboiler has taken over the list.

Twitchell's Critique of Commercial Publishing

Twitchell illustrates his concern with a telling anecdote: an editor who recalls attending an editorial meeting where a stepson-executive asked, "Since 90 percent of our income is derived from 15 percent of our list — why do we publish the remaining 85 percent?" The editor's response was to leave the industry altogether. This moment captures exactly what Twitchell finds troubling: the corporate logic that reduces a publisher's entire cultural mission to a profit-and-loss calculation. The editor got out twenty-five years before Twitchell was writing; the trend, in other words, is not new — but it has accelerated.

At times, Twitchell almost seems to regret the invention of the modern printing press — or at least the ability to sell inexpensively manufactured written products at a high margin (83). This has made books a subsidiary part of popular culture, he argues, and has elevated the bestseller above the great work of literature.

Books as Commodity: The Bestseller Culture

A quick scan of any major bookstore might seem to support Twitchell's thesis. Many books are being sold not to be read, but to be acquired as commercial artifacts. They are "plasma points" in a sea of competing entertainment (81) — commodity products on the "food chain" of popular blockbuster culture, marketed as subsidiaries to the movies and television shows they are designed to promote (81).

Does anyone really read the latest celebrity biography, or simply scan the text for titillating gossip? Diet books and self-help books, bought to motivate the purchaser, likely act more as talismans to make the reader feel better than to convey useful information. Perhaps worst of all are books like Chicken Soup for the Soul, which are usually given as graduation gifts or comfort gifts during emotional crises — functioning more like greeting cards than books full of ideas.

Conclusion: Can Popular and Literary Coexist?

The history of publishing suggests that popular appeal and literary seriousness have always coexisted, and that the tension between them is productive rather than fatal. It is certainly possible to enjoy both Leviathan and a Calvin and Hobbes comic. In fact, one reason a reader might actually pick up the former is out of curiosity about what inspired the great cartoonist Bill Watterson to name his creation "Hobbes" in the first place. Popular culture can serve as a gateway to more demanding works, rather than a barrier to them. Twitchell's alarm about commodification is understandable and his specific examples are often well chosen, but his remedy — a publishing industry that guides rather than responds to readers — risks replacing one form of elitism with another.