2014 August

Established authors in the United States and the UK write to Amazon, complaining about their commercial practices in a dispute with Hachette.   Authors in Germany write in similar terms about Amazon’s negotiation with Bonniers. In the other direction, an open letter from a number of American authors urges support for Amazon.   In France, the same row transmutes into a law protecting independent booksellers.     It’s all about patronage.

The authors’ complaint

The most telling complaint of the authors about Amazon is that the global bookseller is ‘refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette’s books’.   Here are independent creative artists complaining that a retailer is refusing to sell their books at knock-down prices.   What do these authors believe is the ‘right’ price for their books, then?   And why do they not write to their publishers complaining that list prices are too high?

The German language authors write in similar terms, but their main complaint is not the discounting issue, since this does not apply in Germany, but Amazon’s alleged manipulation of the recommendation lists.   Who do these authors believe should be recommended then?   Their own books, obviously, and they are upset if they do not see their own works in the recommended lists.

The French booksellers’ complaint

In France, the anxiety is about the disappearance of independent bookshops, and more particularly the ancient battle against large American corporate activity and its perceived influence on French culture.   Bookshops are disappearing all over the world, in the same way that small grocers, bakers, fishmongers and butchers do, because of changes in family life, distribution chains, habits of buying and price.   Who will preserve the booksellers, if not themselves?

The ebook pricing complaint

One of the headline rows is about ebook pricing.   Amazon wants to cap ebook prices at $9.99, the publishers want to be the arbiter of price and list ebooks at prices that they choose.   There is endless discussion about the ‘right’ price for ebooks and much nonsense talked about the costs associated with ebooks in relation to the costs of printed books.   An article in The Guardian even quoted random unit manufacturing costs for a hardback and a paperback.   Who knows what the ‘right’ price for an ebook and a printed book is?   Only the market.

The established authors want to be protected from competition, and to be specially promoted.   The French bookshops, as elsewhere, want to be protected from the changing behaviour of their customers, who know they can get any book through an online retailer, but not in a small bookshop.   The ebook publishers want to be protected from the possibility that their guess at the ‘right’ price might be wrong.

Both sides are right

The two positions that understand the matter best are that of Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette, when he says that ‘This dispute started because Amazon is seeking a lot more profit and even more market share, at the expense of authors, bricks and mortar bookstores, and ourselves’ and Sue-Ellen Welfonder who wrote, in defence of Amazon, ‘In traditional publishing, a few will always thrive, but a large number of writers, those on the dread midlist, have to learn how to paddle hard to stay afloat. Indie publishing (and Amazon) offers new writers never-before opportunities and gives midlisters a wonderful chance to re-invent themselves, making it possible to have the kind of control and power over our work that was unthinkable just a short while ago.’   They are both right, but Pietsch should not expect anything else when dealing with a retailer, any retailer.   Welfonder clearly understands the market and works hard to make herself heard.

Protection is patronage

Protection is patronage, whether it be state subsidy, corporate donation or fixed price retailing.   Writers, as any other artists, offer their work to the audience, the readers, the viewers, the market. If there are enough people prepared to pay them for their labour, they will make a living.   If not, they will do something else, or seek a patron.   In England, we have the Arts Council, which has budgeted £1 billion of UK taxpayers’ money for the arts over 2015-2018.   This is marvellous, but it’s not a right, it’s patronage.   It’s a bonus, not a pension.   Amazon has created a position for itself in retailing through top-quality service and fierce price-cutting. People who sell to Amazon have a choice – deal or no deal.   But Amazon is not a patron of the creative arts and authors should not expect the company to be nice to their publishers.

Euripides’ Medea, written 2,500 years ago, is a divorce drama with integral magic and witchcraft – as played in the current production at the National Theatre, London.

The pre-play platform discussion on August 12th described the difficulty and the intense intellectual and rehearsal effort that went into creating a living balance between the psychologically realistic and the other-worldly.   ‘How do you fit witches into our more rational world?’ asked Carrie Cracknell, the director.

The response of Tom Scutt, the designer, was to draw on influences from 1970s horror films to provide visceral menace within an apparently recognisable domestic setting.   His set did indeed offer a forested ‘stomach’, backstage centre, beneath a civilised brain, a smart dining room, all fronted by a broad, dated living room of anxious normality.   We saw throughout, simultaneously, aspects of head and heart.    The movement between them, particularly of Medea herself, and the hovering at the margins, was meaningfully directed.

The choreography of the Chorus was telling.   The women of Colchis moved, spoke and sang as a fluid group, their restrained deportment punctured by dance of agonising psychotic twitches, flailing and writhing, all perfectly controlled.    Bosch came to mind.   As much as anything, this made us feel the impossibility of repressing the misery and anguish in the human condition of the play.

Medea is an outcast, a foreigner, a refugee, an abused wife, a mother.    Helen McCrory makes her energy burst like solar flares, then suppresses it fiercely until her uncontrollable misery cracks open her public surface.    Euripides’ text, the contemporary version by Ben Power, requires Medea to shift from despair to fury to devotion to machination with scarcely a beat between.    Helen McCrory changes gear with the precision of a racing driver in full control.    Her voice ranges from a low growl to a wheedle, motherly warmth to icy ferocity.

The surrounding characters were sound, and pushed the narrative on efficiently, prompting Medea onwards to the terror of her revenge on her husband, her decision to kill their sons.   We were told of this awful journey, we were shown some of it, just beneath the surface of Medea’s skin, but in the end we were not terrified and awed by the monstrosity of the act, nor wept for pity at the final image of Medea, grunting beneath the eternal load of her dead sons, making her way into the creepy forest.

Showing both the realism of the human psychology and the ‘other’ worlds of magic, oaths and gods is hindered in this production by too much visual ‘telling’.    The design constrains the imagination by being too explicit.   The style of the playing (except the dance) is tilted to the domestic and familiar.   Artistic expression that makes a true connection with audience, reader, viewer allows the responder to contribute and complete the creation imaginatively and thereby own the emotional impact of the result.   It is very rare.

By being explicit and choosing action through domestic realism we lose the worst of the horrifying power of the human.    Fundamentally, the human and the other are not two.    The human contains, indeed creates, the other.   Women and men make gods, not the other way around.    The ‘magic’ in this play, references to Medea’s descent from the sun-gods, to her potency in medicines, even the murder of Kruesa by means of a poisonous cloak, is really a metaphor for the human power that controls and terrifies.     Such power is so appalling that people have to push it away, pass it on in story, invent gods onto whom such power is projected, in order to absolve themselves of the responsibility for their own actions.    In her final act, Medea is solely in charge.   She decides to kill her sons to cause Jason utter pain and as an expression of her own desolation beyond any hope of being re-born.   She controls and terrifies.   In Medea the human and the other are one.