The Blank Page by Jon McGregor: National Conversation

Jon McGregor. Photo credit: Dan Sinclair

This is an extract from Jon McGregor's provocation delivered at the final event of Writers��� Centre Norwich's National Conversation, Cambridge Literary Festival, on November 29.

Picture the typical literary event: there will be a long, narrow room, with chairs set out in straight rows. The audience members will gather in attentive silence. The writer will stride confidently to the front of the room, be introduced by an event organizer, pour himself ��� and the default image is, still, of a him ��� pour himself a glass of water from a jug on a low table, and move across to the lectern to begin.

From this lectern, the writer will talk for a time about their latest novel: how the research was done, where the idea came from, how the idea was developed, what a personal struggle it was to wrestle this beast into being . . . they will give a lecture about themselves, essentially, often for many long minutes.

They will then read some pages from their novel, with much harrumphing and mumbling and fiddling with bifocals.

This reading may go on for some time.

The audience will politely pay attention.

The author will then be ushered over to a comfortable chair on the stage, and joined by one or two others on equally comfortable chairs, there to have a conversation with each other to which the audience is expected to listen.

The conversation will be about the writing of the novel, or the argument of the novel; the author will be given the opportunity to very gently defend or justify what they have written. The conversation will then be "opened up" to the audience; meaning that the more confident members of the audience will call out questions to which the writer is expected to respond instinctively.

. . . the entire format is based on a nineteenth-century idea of the public intellectual: the lectern, the lecture, the silent audience, the spirited conversation, the debate; even the wine.

It's a format that deliberately privileges those from a specific cultural and educational background ��� the privately educated, the Oxbridge educated, those who have grown up with dinner parties and salons and debating clubs, those who feel comfortable and confident holding forth, those who expect to be listened to.

This all makes sense, of course. It's entirely fitting that the novel should be presented and discussed in settings such as these. Because the novel itself is a peculiar artefact, a product of a very particular socio-economic class. That the telling of stories was devolved to the object we call the novel is an historical anomaly born out of a particular set of technological and economic circumstances: printing technology, the availability of a specific size of leather binding, the educational shift from Latin to English, and the growth of a leisure class with the time to read long novels and the disposable income to collect them. And wasn't that leisure class itself founded on the wealth drawn directly from the exploitation of the labouring classes, from the pillage of empire, from slavery? Shouldn't we consider the novel itself to be a freakish indulgence, forever tainted by the stain of colonialism and slavery, as ugly in its way as the stately homes and gilded statues which shame our landscape?

We've heard a lot, in previous contributions to the National Conversation, particularly from Kamila Shamsie and Kerry Hudson, about the lack of diversity in publishing, and about the stifling of voices that results. But this lack of diversity is more pervasive than even these previous contributions to the National Conversation have suggested. The problem is one of structure. The problem is one of form. The entire culture and apparatus of the published novel was developed by an economic elite with leisure time on its hands, and the descendants of that class work to perpetuate an environment in which their own sort feel at home, while others are accepted only as hyphenated anomalies: the working-class-writer, the black-writer, the gay-writer, the disabled-writer, the woman-writer.

Here's my suggestion: if we want to open literature up to a much wider range of voices, and if we really want to hear the stories our fellow citizens have to share, we could start by entirely revising our idea of how we expect writers to behave; how we expect them to look; how we expect them to present their work to us when we ask them to perform. We could remind ourselves that we do have these blank pages from which to work.

We could start by getting rid of the lecterns . . . .

I'm not asking for the wheel to be reinvented every time a writer appears in public. Some events in the traditional format can be wonderful: captivating, surprising, engaging, revelatory. Some writers are comfortable reading at a lectern, and holding forth from a stage; some of those are even quite good at it.

But other writers are better at small talk, in small groups. Some writers benefit from preparation and rehearsal and can perform their work wonderfully, but not talk about it coherently afterwards. Some writers can work with musicians, or theatre-makers; some can work well alone; some prefer the intimacy of a bookshop; others, the privacy of a brightly-lit stage. Some writers can communicate wonderfully through social media, while an actor performs their work. Some events in the traditional format suit some of the writers, some of the time. But they exclude many writers ��� or, at least, squeeze them into uncomfortable positions in which they struggle to thrive ��� and they exclude great swathes of potential audiences.

This exclusion ��� this exclusivity ��� should be a matter of urgency for all of us who care about literature . . . .

This is an extract from a piece commissioned by Writers��� Centre Norwich for the National Conversation #NatConv
To read the piece in full, click here.