An admirable and exhaustive panorama of the world of books in Argentina has been established, book by book, by the professor and doctor in Letters (UNLP) Jose Luis de Diegowhich now goes deeper with “The sacred commodity” (Ampersand). We talked to him.
Journalist: What kind of merchandise is a book, especially a literary work?
Jose Luis de Diego: In “The Other Side of Janus” I played with Pierre Bourdieu’s idea: “the editor is a two-faced character, with one eye on money and the other on culture.” The two faces form a kind of oxymoron, things that oppose or seem to reject each other. Now, in “The Sacred Commodity” I play with Bertolt Brecht’s idea, in “Life of Galileo.” “Oh irresistible presence of the book, sacred commodity!”, which on the one hand alludes to the transcendent, the sublime, high literature and on the other to a commodity like any other.
Q: Is it like any other?
JL of D.: No, because all exchange value has an economic value and a symbolic value. The book is a material medium that allows ideas, thoughts, and free creation to be reproduced. That is a fundamental differential value compared to any good for use or exchange. And there is a difference between a medical, legal, or self-help book and a literary one. That has to do with the content more than with the medium. They are all books, and they enter a market with different circulations. In reality, the book market is a market like any other. The content is different. Literature has a different audience, critics, and mechanisms of consecration; and rules that are not shared with other books, which circulate in other markets.
Q: Does literary work help to establish a national identity?
JL of D.: What we call “national identity” is something complex to define. In almost all countries, it is clear that there have been operations to create their identity. Operations that have been formulated later, as part of political debates. This happened in European countries in the 19th century, which, in addition to wanting territory, currency, and symbolism, wanted to have their own literature. And many times they sought sources when those countries did not exist.
Q: For example?
JL of D.: In Spain, in the 19th century, the Spanish began to be identified with the “Cantar del Mío Cid”, which dates back to the 11th century, when Spain did not exist and was a collection of isolated kingdoms at war. In Argentina, at the beginning of the 20th century, Rojas and Lugones produced an operation to glorify or canonize “Martín Fierro”. They are ideological operations. Some successful, some unsuccessful, some absurd, which search in the past for literary works that allow us to found something that identifies us as a country.
Q: Are we facing a new stage of attacks on culture?
JL of D.: There are regimes that don’t like culture. Boris Spivacov, founder of the Centro Editor de América Latina, suffered this during the Ongania government, for example. Now, in Argentina, it is happening again. There is something cyclical about authoritarian governments or governments of that profile, whether they arise from democratic elections or not, taking an authoritarian attitude towards culture. Even if they don’t censor it, they take money from it, they harass it so that it doesn’t do what it should do. And there is something more macro: a general deterioration of the world of culture. In the world of books, it occurs from the concentration of groups and the businessization of culture, which has lost its specificity and has mixed with the business world. The references have been diluted: the people who should be listened to, the authors who should be read. Literary value is no longer discussed. This is a fundamental transformation that perplexes and alerts those of us who are dedicated to culture about what the hell we have to do.
Q: Has the publishing world become one of “publishing without editors”?
JL of D.: The writer and editor André Schiffrin published “The Edition without Editors” after Random House was sold to the German Bertelsmann. It was a narcissistic wound in the United States that a national publishing house was sold to a European consortium. Schiffrin notes a change of era, along with the turn of the century, in which the large publishing consortiums, pressured by their shareholders who demand a high circulation of the products and increasing profitability. This in the book market is different from other markets, it produces a bastardization of the products. The fact is that much of the capital comes from places that have nothing to do with the book (Yenny El Ateneo was bought by an oil company) imprinting profitability logics very different from those of the world of books. They replace the old editors with marketing managers with a notable impoverishment of the products.
Q: What is left to hope for?
JL of D.: The big conglomerates have a chance. In Argentina there were three big ones until Penguin Random House bought Santillana, and only Penguin and Planeta remained. What happens if one buys another? In France there was an attempt of this kind and they had to apply anti-monopoly laws. That a group owns 75 percent of what is published is an enormous risk for thought. The alternative is independent publishing, which has a ceiling: it cannot get big authors because the big groups take them away. It has different realities, it goes from a garage publisher that publishes books for years to Anagrama. The important thing is the medium-sized publishing houses that are growing with sustainable catalogues and that favor bibliodiversity by publishing authors that are not of interest to the big groups.
Q: Did the publisher beat the editor?
JL de D.: When the publisher hires the author directly through agents, there is an erasure of the editor who produces a book intellectually, advises and dialogues with the writer. That figure has been weakened in some cases, in others not, where it is called the content area, I still like to call it an editor.
Q: What are you up to now?
JL of D.: On what happened to book publishing in the 1980s, when democracy returned.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
