Fitzcarraldo, Populism, Theocracy
Nine Circles Issue Eleven
After a few years of surprising decisions (Bob Dylan in 2016?!) under the previous Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius, the Nobel Prize in Literature under Mats Malm has returned to making generally solid, serious and predictable choices. Olga Tokarczuk sharing the 2019 ceremony with Peter Handke was a wobble, given his… unusual views about the Yugoslavian war (for an interesting overview of his writing and the controversy, I recommend this New Yorker essay by Ruth Franklin), but the Polish novelist Tokarczuk, American poet Louise Glück (who died the day before yesterday), Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, sainted French memoirist Annie Ernaux and now the Norwegian playwright, poet and novelist Jon Fosse were all uncontroversial choices for the prize.
One winner of this new era is the tiny British publishing house Fitzcarraldo Editions, which has somehow managed to have three of its authors win the prize in the last six years. Founded in south-east London not yet ten years ago by editor Jacques Testard and with only a handful of full-time employees, Fitzcarraldo has had an almost unprecedented run of hits and awards success for a small literary publisher with a tiny budget.
Testard started Fitzcarraldo in part because he couldn’t get an entry-level job in publishing. He interviewed for Penguin Random House, the TLS and Granta, but having founded a successful literary journal called The White Review, was repeatedly told he was overqualified for an editorial assistant role.
A lesson from their success is how little interest the big corporate book groups have in translating and publishing the world’s leading non-English language writers. Fosse is so beloved in Norway that he has a flat in one of their royal estates, and there is an annual two week festival dedicated to his work. He was a favourite to win the Nobel, but no major British publisher was willing to publish him.
Testard’s family is French: He moved to Britain from Paris when he was five, and grew up reading in both French and English. It was this bilingual sensibility that led him to see a gap in UK literary culture. About half of Fitzcarraldo’s output is translated, compared to 5.6 per cent of books published in Britain annually. English-language publishing remains stubbornly reluctant to invest in foreign language authors, despite the commercial successes increasing in recent years, from the Swedish Stieg Larsson phenomenon to Italian woman-of-mystery Elena Ferrante.
Fitzcarraldo publishes its books in beautiful matching editions with no images: Royal blue covers with white writing for fiction, white with blue writing for essays. The design was informed by French publishing houses like Éditions Gallimard, who have been publishing everything they put out with matching covers for years.
Last year, after Ernaux joined the Belarusian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich and Tokarczuk in Fitzcarraldo’s stable of Nobel Prize winners, the New York Times profiled the publisher. ‘The day after the Ernaux announcement, Testard said that he had ordered the reprinting of 65,000 copies of her books to keep pace with demand, a huge number for Fitzcarraldo, given that it sold around 135,000 books across all its titles in 2021.’
Sitting in the company’s one-room office… Testard said that he would think it ‘very silly’ if people called Fitzcarraldo the home of the Nobel. ‘It’s not like we have a strategy to try and win,’ he said. His taste just happened to align with ‘a bunch of older bourgeois Swedish people’ who decide the Nobel each year, he added.
For more on Fosse, I recommend Merve Emre’s New Yorker essay from last year.
For more on Testard, I listen to this podcast interview in which he tells the story of the house’s founding, and read this New Statesman article, also from last year.
Welcome to issue eleven of Nine Circles. Thanks so much for being here!
📚 Currently reading: The Bible for Grown-Ups by Simon Loveday (for a project coming to 9C soon…)
Use of the term ‘populism’ has exploded in the world of Brexit and Trump, but it’s often used to mean ‘popular things that I don’t like’. One way I’ve thought it can be understood is as a belief that difficult, complicated issues are actually extremely simple, and that elites simply don’t want to fix a nation’s problems because they lack the will/don’t want to/are conspiring against the people, and if an honest person simply tries hard enough, things will get better. Populists, I’ve argued, believe that there is a single true ‘will of the people’ that can be executed by a single charismatic figure. These leaders communicate directly with their supporters through mass rallies and hyper-partisan media, think that to achieve their policy goals they need to conduct ideological purges of the central state, and view traditional politics outside of their movement as corrupt and irredeemable.
(Notice that I could be describing Trump or the Brexit campaign here, but each of these factors could also describe Jeremy Corby’s leadership of the Labour Party)
A completely different way of thinking about the term that hadn’t occurred to be before comes from Britain’s most splendidly miserable political philosopher John Gray, writing in the New Statesman about Rishi Sunak’s retreat from net-zero policies and his government’s rhetoric about refugees crossing the channel:
Populism is, among other things, the repoliticisation of causes judged to be so sacrosanct that they must be insulated from public debate and democratic choice. Conventional green agendas belong in that category, and so does immigration.
From Blair to Cameron, the de-politicisation of key areas of policy was secured under the aegis of technocratic pragmatism. Ideology no longer mattered, we were assured, only competence in delivering what the middle ground in society wanted. The actual outcome was the dominance of a single ideology – post-Cold War capitalist realism. The centre was a triangulation of positions within that neoliberal consensus, rather than a reflection of the needs and values of any British majority.
Now technocratic government’s smartest operator is signalling that it has had its day. After Boris Johnson’s buffoonish interregnum and Liz Truss’s kamikaze dive, Sunak has become the first serious exemplar of a new era. What angry liberals denounce as the exploitation of wedge issues is in reality the return of politics. As sniping at the Conservative conference in Manchester has confirmed, Sunak’s party has collapsed into warring factions, and he may well wobble; but a sea-change is under way.
Since Thatcher left the scene, British elections have been largely about ‘valence politics’ where elections are decided by swing voter’s judgements of the relative competence of rival parties, rather than those party’s values or policies. That era might be drawing to a close.
When Judea was conquered by the Roman Empire, Rome’s generals intelligently exercised their rule through the existing native power structures. At the time, the Israelites were not led by kings, but by a hereditary aristocracy of priests, centred around the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The priests were also massive landowners throughout the province, and the highly centralised spiritual authority of Judaism at the time meant that economic and political power was concentrated at the Temple.
Describing this system of government around the turn of the first century in Against Apion, the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus coined the term ‘theocracy’.
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