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"Go Set a Watchman" and [Editorial Ethics in Publishing]
Astaereth
In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
A Michigan bookstore is now offering refunds for Go Set a Watchmen, the "new" Harper Lee book. The novel is sort of a first run at Harper Lee's only other and tremendously famous novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and was highly anticipated, with Amazon saying it was their most pre-ordered book since the final Harry Potter novel. The problem? The book doesn't nearly stand up to Mockingbird, with many calling it juvenilia that would never have seen publication if not for who wrote it.
The New Yorker wrote:Not since Hemingway’s estate sent down seemingly completed novels from on high, long after the author’s death, has a publisher gone about so coolly exploiting a much loved name with a product of such mysterious provenance.
Some, including that Michigan bookstore, argue that the novel should have seen publication, but only as an artifact of historical and critical interest, properly contextualized, rather than as any other mass market book.
So what should the publisher have done with Go Set a Watchman? What kind of ethical rules govern this sort of sticky situation, anyway?
This article offers 5 "thought experiments" based on famous (or infamous) cases:
1.
You come into possession of a long lost manuscript by your author, stashed away in a safe deposit box for the past fifty-five years. At first you weren’t sure what it was, but when you give it a close look it turns out to be the novel that she wrote before the novel that made her famous, the one that was so brilliant and incisive that it transformed people’s ideas about prejudice and injustice in their country, a novel so important and true that it became mandatory reading for school children.
This is the one she wrote before that. It was not accepted for publication at the time, and you understand why: it’s a fairly aimless, sometimes confused piece of writing. It is not bad, but it is the work of a very amateur sort of genius. All of that notwithstanding, it would be a guaranteed bestseller if published today, both because of the author’s current fame and for the controversy that is guaranteed to erupt over its content. The hero of the published book is revealed to be less than perfectly heroic in some very troubling ways. This heartbreaking complication of his character is the point of the book, but the revelation is certain to play just as poorly with this character’s fans as it does with his daughter, whose crisis is the novel’s central issue. The book may retroactively taint readers’ feelings about the book they originally loved.
You ask the author her opinion. She is close to 90 years old now, but you have no reason to believe that she is not of sound mind. She says it’s fine.
Do you publish it?
2.
Your author is one of the most popular and celebrated in his genre, with a career spanning more than forty years and dozens of publications. Tragically, he is diagnosed with a rare degenerative brain disease and probably has not long to live. As a result of his condition he can no longer write or type, but must dictate to an assistant or to voice-recognition software. He delivers to you what will, in all likelihood, be his final novel. It’s pretty bad.
It seems clear to you that the illness has harmed something about his ability to write – the characters are the same but their voices are wrong; the formerly colourful and wild world he had created over the decades seems charmless and dull. The book just doesn’t sound like him anymore. This is not, of course, his fault. But the fact of the matter is that it is a disappointing, sub-standard novel that you would not ordinarily accept for publication.
But it’s him. The book will be a bestseller because a good proportion of his audience is so devoted they will buy anything that he produces. Many of them will probably even like it. You don’t want to demand a major rewrite, because the author may have neither the capacity nor, sadly, the time left to complete them. It is a book by a once-brilliant author who is rapidly forgetting how to write.
Do you publish it?
3.
Your author, already internationally celebrated and the winner of one major award for a previous novel, turns in his new manuscript. It makes you nervous. It’s certainly brilliant, a work of magical realism in the tradition of his previous books and a powerful metaphor for the immigrant experience. But it also contains some material that is…let’s say…provocative. There are passages that make certain negative intimations about the revered prophet of a major world religion. The religion that your author was raised in, but also a religion with a number of adherents who have a reputation for dealing very poorly with depictions such as this one.
It’s arguably his best work to date, but it’s also a very dangerous book. Literally dangerous, in that it could – in fact, will almost certainly – get people killed. Not only the author himself, but anyone else even tangentially associated with the book will be at risk. Publishers, foreign language translators, booksellers – and you. If you put this book out into the world, you will be risking people’s lives. There are those out ther e in the world who would murder other people over a novel, and this is that novel. Not to belabour the point, but to emphasize the implications of this act of artistic expression: if you publish this book, innocent people will probably die.
Do you publish it?
4.
Your author is dead. He recently committed suicide after a decades-long career. He won the highest awards and changed the face of writing, and then (in what seems to have been a family tradition) he committed suicide.
His wife, as executor of his estate, retrieved a number of the authors notes and documents, originally written decades before and more recently rewritten by the author into a sort of memoir. The manuscript details the author’s experiences while he was a member of a celebrated literary circle at a crucial moment in English Literature. The author’s personal reflections on that period, and his interactions with other major writers, his friends and rivals (often the same people), would be of infinite interest to fans of the author and his contemporaries. It would be an instant bestseller.
Here are the problems. The manuscript was presented to you by his wife – his fourth and final wife, that is – and she seems to have done some work on it. You can’t be sure exactly, but you have reason to suspect that she may have altered or removed certain passages; for instance, some of the stuff the author wrote about his first wife, to whom he was married at the time of the described events, that cast his last wife in a comparitively negative light.
The other thing is that the memoir describes several events and encounters with the author’s famous contemporaries that are unflattering at best, and potentially libelous. For instance, one literary giant is alleged to have badly abused her partner, while another is portrayed as a pathologically insecure coward who requires assurance that his penis is a normal size. This book is a powerful illumination of a literary zeitgeist, but is also likely to make some people very upset.
Do you publish it?
5.
Your author is your best friend, and also quite possibly the greatest literary genius of the century. He’s always been extremely self-critical, and out of every ten manuscripts he produced he’d usually destroy nine of them. Despite this, he’s built up a pretty serious collection of writings, and pretty much all of it is exceptionally brilliant.
Only a handful of his short stories have been published – a small proportion of his life’s writing work. And now he tells you he’s dying. He’s dying, and he tells you that after he’s dead he wants you to take all of his writing – stories, novels, journals, letters, everything – and burn it. Don’t read, just burn. He never wanted fame or recognition, and since these are things particularly useless to a dead man, he wants you to destroy it all.
And so he dies. And you’ve got all this stuff. You can either respect his request and burn everything, or you can disobey his dying wishes and get it all published instead – invoking his wrath from beyond the grave, maybe, but also enriching the culture of the world for centuries to come.
Do you publish it?
(The authors referred to: 1) Harper Lee, 2) Terry Pratchett, 3) Salman Rushdie, 4) Ernest Hemingway, 5) Franz Kafka)
This thread is for discussing these five cases, including Go Set a Watchman, and the broader questions of what considerations come into play when publishing minor works by great authors, books that may be dangerous or offensive, or stories in deliberate defiance of the author's wishes. (You might add JD Salinger to that list, come to think of it.) When does the public's desire for interesting or important content outweigh the author's desire not to be published? What responsibility does a publisher have to contextualize lesser works, or posthumous discoveries? Discuss! (But I swear, if this thread goes an abortion tangent...)
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Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
As a writer, yes to all of them. The only one I'm shaky on is 2, but that seems the most subjective of all of them.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
To me the most interesting one is probably Kafka, because it's the situation where it's most clearly terrible from the artist's perspective but most clearly better for society.
I mean, you'd be dead. So I guess, no you would not be upset.
But I digress.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
The exception is if someone is universally beloved by mankind- sometimes it's better to have saints than people. No one needs to know if Nelson Mandala cheated on his wife. This is exactly what the introduction is for. At the beginning of A Confederacy of Dunces, the introduction clearly states that it is a posthumous discovery.
I'd argue that in #3 the publisher has a moral duty to publish the book and defy those who would kill over printed words, as freedom of thought is one of the things that defines our civilization.
3 is probably the most important to publish.
4 I'd hesitate on just because of the libel mess. The best option is probably waiting for the named to die, just to keep the lawyer-based headaches down. Probably should include some sort of 'compiled by' credit to wife IV too, just for the historians sakes.
5 Is maybe the easiest of all of them. There is literally no harm in publishing them.
I'm not sure you can put conditions like that into a will, but IANAL.
I think there's a big difference between "The sequel to the famous award-winning To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee" and "The unpublished works of Harper Lee".
For whatever reason, the idea of publishing the works doesn't give me pause, but taking advantage of a living person to do so does.
I'm not either, but I figure there has to be a reason they did it now instead of just waiting for her to pass away.
Because while she's alive it's easier to pass off as an actually new book rather then an unpublished manuscript she had lying around in her notes.
That's my suspicion anyway, given the marketing and her current state and all that.
As far as those thought experiments... well the first 3 just ask the same question. "Somebody who wrote a really great book has now written a really dumb one. Should you publish it?". To which my reply would be "Who the fuck are you to make the call?". Granted as a publisher you are not magically beholden to publish everything that comes by you. But if they want their book published, they'll find somebody to do it. And in these specific examples, it feels like you personally are deciding to make the moral call of whether the world should be subject to the horror that this "esteemed" writer isn't actually all that. It just feels arrogant to me for you to be deciding that.
As for 4 and 5, they boil down to "Should all the works of an author be published after his/her death?". With 5 adding the wrinkle of "Even if they specifically ask you not to?". With 4, *shrug* I don't know. She's the executor of the estate and thus has the power. If she wants you to publish it, go ahead. There's plenty of examples of that already, and they all have permission from somebody in charge and/or speaking on behalf of the author. As for 5, well you're just a dick for ignoring their wishes.
I suppose 5 is the real debate. "Should the works of a famous author be published, even those they never intended or wanted to have published?". My gut reaction is to say no. If Shakespeare wrote some cheap fanfic of no redeeming worth and then crumpled it up and threw it away... the world is not entitled to it just because he's Shakespeare.
Words. Delivered. Sold.
Literary critics, novelists, and historians now have vital data from Harper Lee's bibliography.
No one was ever owed anything in the first place.
also the james joyce love letters are one of the greatest things in the English language.
The other situations are interesting. The Lee case is touchy because there's some reason to believe Lee wasn't really of sound mind and could not give meaningful consent to have Watchman published. Assuming she could, though, it should be published. Publishers don't have an ethical responsibility to only publish "good" work, I don't think. There's certainly no more harm in releasing a potentially subpar Pratchett book than in releasing whatever Dan Brown most recently crapped out. If Pratchett wanted it released, then let it be.
Is it a publisher's responsibility to try and publish good books? Or just to publish anything that'll sell?
To me, 3 is about publishing dangerous material (Rushdie's book angered some Muslims and led to death threats) and 4 about publishing libelous material.
I agree that the most interesting question is kind of, what is the world owed when it comes to a great writer? There are probably lots of Shakespeare experts who would kill their own mothers to get their hands on an unpublished play, even if it sucked.
The author's estate should probably use the proceeds in a way the author would have found agreeable, but that's just me.
The author presumably already gave the world several works of great art, representing at minimum tens of thousands of hours of work. Why is the world owed anything more?
The real world example to this would be the recent events regarding Steam and Hatred. It's their store, they don't have to sell anything they don't want to. And then they changed their minds and decided to sell it because, again, their store.
As far as dead authors and their works go, Pratchett is an interesting one. At least... I think it's Pratchett I'm thinking of here. He came out and said "When I die, all my stuff goes to my daughter, who can do whatever she wants with it. Publish it, continue it, whatever, her call.". At which point she comes out and says "No fucking way! I can't possibly hope to live up to the literary legend that is my father. The stories end with him.".
And on the flip side of that, isn't the son of the guy who wrote Dune continuing to write those?
I will say though, I'm not advocating a hard absolute rule of "Don't do it". But you are going against their wishes. Maybe for the greater good! Hopefully you can sleep with a clear conscience. And in Emily Dickinson's case, it was her sister and not some random person making that decision.
Just that it's still kind of a dick move.
Like everything in this damn world, it's not black and white. Just greyish greying grey.
Well known murder case? Hey, let's hack into their phone to read their texts.
Because, like it or not, there are plenty of people out there who think it's more important for society to read stolen dead people gossip than to read stolen dead poet gossip.
I don't think there's anything wrong with publishing it like that as long as it's clear what it is.
The distinction in all these sort of scenarios imo is not whether or not you publish the work, but how you present it. As long as you are clear on it being some stuff the author didn't think was worth publishing, it's fine. It becomes a work for studying for a famous author thought or evolved or whatever, rather then a work they wanted published (which it was not).
It's the reverse of this:
i'm not arguing a universal, like publishing private correspondence
for example, i don't think some great societal benefit came from james joyce's smutty letters to his wife being made public (though they are hilarious)
This is not your scenario 2 at all.
If the author wrote a shitty book but wants it published, then publish it. Or don't because it's shitty and you don't care about their feelings. Or demand a complete rewrite because you don't care about their feelings.
If the author wrote a shitty book, hid it away for decades, and while in a horribly degenerative state a third party shows up with the shitty book then don't publish it because you definiely shouldn't care about their feelings. Or demand a complete rewrite for it to be not shitty.
Or publish it like cray cause your publishing company that will put out just about anything.
PS- Does anyone know a program that destroys all work periodically if a password isn't inputted after X amount of years?
Authors can put some version of "Destroy all unpublished work" in their will. And I think their executors should absolutely respect that. But that's not the current situation nor is it the situation for a lot of authors.
Edit: Oh hey that's number 5. Yeah I'd totally respect their wishes for number 5. Otherwise I'd publish the rest with the only caveat being potential editing.
Watch the thug notes version. Entire sections were lifted from TKAM
Those are mainly reader reviews yeah? Cause in my experience those almost always trend ridiculously high regardless of the book's quality.
It would be cool to look at the different ethical systems would say about this.
Utilitarianism
Publish and buy some mosquito nets I guess.
Virtue
Got me
Kant
I'm bad a Kant
@TychoCelchuuu
I don't know if I, personally, could avoid publishing 5. But that would be why you hire a professional executor and not Quid.
I'd publish 3 and hope for the best.
If it had been published after her death or been promoted as something other than a sequel, when it's clearly an early draft of TKAM, I wouldn't have a problem. I think the publisher is clearly taking advantage of a person with diminished mental capacity to make money.
I Shall Wear Midnight is a great book, and it was written and published during his decline. I think its less that Pratchett totally lost it in the end and more that he had more ability to focus on books based on character and morality than he did the intricate caper setup required by the Watch and Moist books.
There's actually one more Tiffany Aching book coming from him. I'm cautiously optimistic based on Midnight.