Making Conversation
The Rise of Literary Festivals
by Robert Francis

In October, Toronto's International Festival of Authors celebrated its 25th anniversary. The Festival has grown from a six-night event, with 18 authors from a handful of countries, to 11 days with 70 authors from 20 countries. Canada itself now has seven other major literary festivals and 35 other smaller festivals throughout the nation. Globe and Mail journalist Rebecca Caldwell notes that this works out to an average of almost one literary festival a week. The growth of literary events in the United States and Europe is probably similar, and raises the question: why are we more eager than ever to see and hear authors in person?

Writers' festivals are a good idea for a host of reasons. They help market books. They give writers a chance to escape loneliness and boredom. They offer booksellers, agents, and authors an opportunity to schmooze and network. But they also do something else, something new in literary history: they bring readers and writers together in an atmosphere that is much more democratic and egalitarian than it was in the past.

Yesterday's author was, as Paul Theroux has recently remarked, "powerful, priestlike, remote and elusive ... You did not see them at your local bookstore, you did not pluck their sleeves, you had no opportunity to hand them manuscripts, or to ask for tips on travel or to observe 'what's your problem?'" Theroux's pejorative tone betrays a nostalgia for this lost age of authorial mystery and idolatry. This was, after all, the age of the great modernist masterpiece, of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, of scholarly exegesis and utter inscrutability. The author wasn't someone you ever hoped to meet, or see on TV, or hear on the radio, but rather, someone you knew only through a handful of black and white photos. He was also someone you couldn't understand without the assistance of a professor.

From this perspective, someone like Theroux can only describe the present as, "An age of intrusion, where publishers conspire with bookstores to bully writers into the open and make them part of the selling mechanism." Clearly this cannot be the case. There was always a need to market writers, and there was always an interest on the part of readers to become acquainted with their favorite authors. Something has changed since Theroux's golden age of secluded, priest-like author-heroes, and putting a finger on it helps us understand why the popularity of literary events goes beyond marketing or the cult of celebrity.

In an age where we are overwhelmed by media, where everything is sound and image, we want to be able to tie an author's text to a face, and above all, a voice. As Gabriel Zaid, author of "So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance," puts it, culture can now be understood as a kind of conversation. To write a book, he says, is to start a conversation. We cluster around authors, books and bookstores much in the way we gather together to partake in a conversation. Readers attend book clubs to talk about novels; clubs and bookstores put readers onto other authors; and books provoke responses on the part of other books, articles and essays.

Of course, none of this is new. Literature as a conversation is the oldest trope in the canon. But it's new as the guiding metaphor of literary culture itself. Being a good speaker, a good reader and a funny, warm, personable author in the festival or interview setting is more than just a selling point. It's a prerequisite. Authorship has become first and foremost a social institution, and the writers who come across well in person, not just on the page, are the ones who garner the most readers.

It isn't necessary to mention Jonathan Franzen's Oprah faux pas to make this point. A better example would be someone like Salmon Rushdie, whose lasting celebrity has to do at least as much with his abilities as a performer onstage as it does with his genius on the page. (Indeed, through Rushdie we get a glimpse of how authorship today is all about blurring the boundary between page and stage.) Rushdie is enormously egotistical, yes, but it's hard to deny that he's witty, funny and provocative. More to the point, he's a great speaker, with a strong voice, an unpretentious tone and an excellent sense of timing. If you hadn't read him before you saw him on a program such as "The Charlie Rose Show," or heard him on PBS, you would want to afterwards. He's an intriguing, boisterous conversation unto himself.

It's not that literature has become a popularity contest — where the warmest, wittiest author automatically appears at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It takes more than charisma and charm. To sell books, you have to be ready to stir up a conversation, to engage readers by talking up your book in such a way that makes them want to continue the conversation with you. The ultimate goal is to start a conversation with readers that continues long after the book is finished and engages friends, and then friends of friends.

In an increasingly atomized society, the rise of literary readings is due in no small part to the growing appetite for intelligent conversation. It also entails a transformation on the part of the writer. The iconic, dust-jacket image of the author as a romantic, spectacled, cigarette-smoking, beret-sporting, man of international mystery is giving way to the cheerier image of someone under the spotlight, making charming, self-disparaging comments in response to questions from an intimate audience of readers. Author interviews are becoming ubiquitous on radio, TV and the Internet, and more documentaries devoted to authors are being produced than ever before. More than a marketing ploy, or an invasion of privacy, the author's new public persona — his or her smiling, talkative self — is today's answer to the demise of reading and the end of ultra-elite highbrow culture.

— Robert Francis (robertfrancis70 at yahoo dot com)

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)