“Culture Shock, Sticker Shock”: Canadian Publishing and Material Literary Borders
Borders register in unexpected ways. They stamp themselves on everyday life in forms we don’t always expect, or even recognize, and extend far beyond their more obvious and patrolled fault-lines. As a result, questions about the existence and/or effects of a “literary border” between Canada and the United States should commence from Raymond Williams’s observation, “culture is ordinary.” [1. Williams, Raymond. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. Verso, 1989.] We should, in other words, build our claims about possible borders and possible bridges from the ordinary material realities of literary composition, production, dissemination, and reception. And to this end, one could do worse than beginning at the point of sale. Price tags are smudged windows onto the crossings of economics, politics, and culture. These crossings ultimately feed into whatever lies on the opposite sides of literary borders, albeit in complicated ways. We should take these tags seriously as symbolic tokens of literary borders and, instead of wishfully blinking such borders away, pursue how they impact the concrete realities of reading.
I am concerned with how borders create complex associations of aesthetics, nationality, and authorial identity, but in order to get at this heady admixture, I will approach through the user-end implications of book pricing. People clock cultural difference in various ways; for me, this often occurs at bookstores. When I moved from Wisconsin to Toronto in 2007, I experienced culture shock through the sticker shock of purchasing books. The price inflation on these items was outstanding, and led to a brief, crazed orgy of book buying upon my return to the United States. In sum, I needed to confront the fact that my lifelong conduits to the global “republic of letters” were in fact industrial trade products that, like anything else, proved subject to the violently complicated socioeconomic crosscurrents materialized in national borders.“Sometimes, it feels justifiably liberating to throw a middle finger at the border and refuse to grant it the privilege of agency or definition.”Prices aside, I noticed Canadian books also differed in more subtle ways, including paper quality, cover art and design, and the inclusion of British pounds in their suggested retail prices. All of these border markings suggested further national variables, including the availability and affordability of production materials, the application of copyright law, and continuing, complex colonial reverberations. These observations are undoubtedly naïve, but in my defense, I was naïve: previously, my reading life was spent at the epicenter of arguably the world’s largest publishing industry. Reading from this privileged position, especially in tandem with literature’s own internal inducements to complicated forms of escapism, produces a peculiar kind of commodity-blindness I have since tried to inoculate myself against. Current academic work in my own field of contemporary diasporic literature often strives to bring us back to the material realities of borders, but truth be told, the seductive rhetoric of global flows and transnational movements of capital and images so completely defines our fears and hopes for the future that borders, in all their arbitrary brutality, can sometimes seem archaic and irrelevant to modern “global” identities, especially in literature. When they are not relegated to the dustbin of history, much of the discussion concerning borders centres on the necessary political work of foregrounding and denouncing their systemic, exclusionary violence. My favourite punk band, Winnipeg-based Propagandhi, included a song on their 2001 album Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes called “Fuck the Border,” whose title and chorus concisely summarize this not-unpopular position. Sometimes, it feels justifiably liberating to throw a middle finger at the border and refuse to grant it the privilege of agency or definition. While ideas, images, and identities might increasingly seem to flow over, seep under, or break down the United States/Canada border, these concepts always inhere in physical objects and, indeed, persons, both of which are inevitably strained through the border and subject to its regulatory influence. We cannot simply dismiss borders as archaic or inveigh against them as barbaric if we want to adequately address the question of how book prices feed into national literary identities (if they do so at all). I don’t want to oversimplify the question of borders, or reduce a complex issue to reductive base/superstructure models; and yet, at an almost instinctually logical level, I find it difficult to accept the proposition that book pricing and its many determinative forces have no influence on the literary lives of Canada and the United States, particularly as a metonym for other significant differences in the cultural, socioeconomic, and political lives of both countries.
“Literary borders, in this view, are constructed after the act of composition in order to advance particular, non-literary interests.”These prices are emblematic of the overall literary border between the countries; they reveal attraction and repulsion in equal measure, registering as both cause and effect. In this respect, I work from Susan Stanford Friedman’s description of the border as an unreal paradox with very real effects: “Borders are fixed and fluid, impermeable and porous. They separate but also connect, demarcate but also blend differences.” [2. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders.” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. Ed. David Nicholls. MLA, 2006.] I do not suggest a one-way causal determination of literary identity that reduces the phenomenon to its economic context: tariffs do not define anything absolutely. That is a different claim, however, than arguing against the practical or conceptual existence of literary borders entirely. Instead, it asks us to be very particular about the exact contours of such borders and their potential meanings. This short piece tries to briefly trace such contours; it is an impressionistic collection of research material, primarily concerned with the Canadian publishing industry, that I hope will provide some reminder of the ways that the United States and Canada differ concretely in terms of literary borders, and start a discussion about where, when, and why these differences terminate.
Perhaps the best place to start is with a recent example. I’ll begin by close-reading a tweet, and then segue into a discussion of Canada’s main publishing organizations, before wrapping things up with a discussion of tariffs generally and their meaning for our ideas about literary borders. On October 10, 2013, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to Alice Munro. As one of many who have repeatedly marveled at Munro’s ability to make formal complexity read like the most natural thing in the world, I was more than happy with the selection. She is the first Canadian woman to win the award, and while the monetary gains for the author are obvious, I couldn’t help but question the implications, if any, for Canadian literature as a whole.
“Munro’s international award is used to assert her resolutely national identity.”I don’t always consider an author’s nationality when they receive such an award; however, Nobel literature prizes from previous years were often interpreted as either broad pronouncements on the “arrival” of new national literatures to the world stage, or in the case of dissident texts, as implicit political commentary on the nations from which they emerged. What would this award mean for Canadian national literary identity? Is Munro considered a quintessentially Canadian author, and if so, by whom? I can say without question that at no point in any of the press releases concerning the award did I hear or read Munro described as a “North American” author, or even (more accurately) “Ontarian.” Perhaps my questions were misplaced: Munro doesn’t neatly fit into either of the categories described above for previous winners, raising the question of whether she was, in fact, a “purely literary” choice, as some suggested. Put differently: perhaps Munro won on the strength of her literary accomplishments alone, and the choice should have no bearing on our perceptions of a Canadian literary identity circumscribed by the 49th parallel. Many writers and readers would prefer to endorse such “formalist” criteria; the time-bound and local are ideally liminal passages to the transhistorical and universal. But literary borders become more formidable realities when we acknowledge that whatever Munro’s own sense of Canadian identity in her life and work, Canadian identity is definitely assigned to her, for several reasons. On the same day the awards committee announced its decision, Chapters/Indigo—self-described as “Canada’s largest book and specialty retailer”—tweeted the following message: “Congratulations, Alice Munro, the first Canadian to win a Nobel Prize for Literature! #TheWorldNeedsMoreCanada.” [3. Chapters/Indigo (chaptersindigo). “Congratulations, Alice Munro, the first Canadian to win a Nobel Prize for Literature! #TheWorldNeedsMoreCanada.” 10 October 2013, 9:19 a.m. Tweet.] This brief tweet does quite a lot of work, stacking claims atop claims in fewer than 140 characters: first, it promotes Munro; second, it promotes Munro as a Canadian author; and third, it promotes Canada generally (seen particularly in its hashtag), suggesting in sum that whatever Munro is doing, Canada is doing, and whatever Canada is doing, the world needs more of it. All three levels of this argument work in concert to promote what I can only assume is the primary reason for such a corporate tweet: book sales.
“at some point ... authors will have to engage with the processes of selection, physical production, advertisement, and output of their texts.”Immediately following Munro’s victory, the company issued a directive to its many stores to move all of the author’s collections up to the front of their display windows and to order more of her books in anticipation of greater demand. Normally, this would prove somewhat tricky, especially given her unexpected win. However, in this case, Chapters/Indigo suggested such orders would actually be more easy to fulfill than usual, because as Ian Donkel (general manager of Book City) suggests, [4. Hui, Ann. “Book sellers, caught off guard by Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize, Scramble to Stock Shelves.” The Globe and Mail. Philip Crawley, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 22 December 2013.] Munro works through Canadian publishers, and that association greases many cogs in the machinery of book production and distribution. This is clearly a case of a large corporation playing on national identity to sell its products. And bookselling is only one part of the equation. For instance, Prime Minister (and apparent cultural critic) Stephen Harper released a statement stating the following: “Ms. Munro is a giant in Canadian literature and this Nobel Prize further solidifies Canada’s place among the ranks of countries with the best writers in the world. I am certain that Ms. Munro’s tremendous body of work and this premier accomplishment will serve to inspire Canadian writers of all ranks to pursue literary excellence and their passion for the written word.” [5. Harper, Stephen. “Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on Alice Munro Winning the Novel Prize in Literature.” Office of the Prime Minister. n.p., 10 Oct. 2013. Web. 22 December 2013.] Harper is obviously appropriating Munro for different purposes here, but in both cases, Munro’s international award is used to assert her resolutely national identity. This might imply that national literary identity is a purely posteriori construct that appropriates cultural goods for capitalist and nationalist ends. Literary borders, in this view, are constructed after the act of composition in order to advance particular, non-literary interests. This might be the case—but it also confirms the existence of one version of literary borders. While some might argue that this version is purely economic and/or political and has little to do with the individual authors or works, to my mind, the nuances of national publishing markets must influence authorial identity on either side of the border equation. I don’t mean to suggest individual authors can’t identify however they choose; I only point out that at some point, these authors will have to engage with the processes of selection, physical production, advertisement, and output of their texts, and these processes are invariably connected to considerations regarding the literary marketplace for which their works are intended.
“This is clearly a case of a large corporation playing on national identity to sell its products.”Surely, authors write for “the reader,” wherever, whenever, and whoever he or she might be, but we must reach “the reader” through induction. The starting point for such a process is invariably the local scene and market in which we are enmeshed, whether we choose to embrace it, rebel against it, or otherwise. Readers, for better or worse, will interact with some understanding of literary borders whenever and wherever they buy books, based on the manifold cultural signs and procedures involved in purchasing such products, including their price. I think it is worth pointing out that in an alternate universe, Chapters/Indigo would not exist in its current incarnation, due to a planned expansion by the now-defunct American chain, Borders. The Canadian government blocked the company’s plan on the grounds that it failed to comply with laws promoting Canada’s national publishing industry. Borders later fell into bankruptcy and no longer exists in brick-and-mortar form. Chapters/Indigo, meanwhile, followed the general Canadian trend of surviving the economic recession of the late 2000s intact, due largely to its distinct identity as a “cultural department store” which diversified its product portfolio beyond books and into household items and other paraphernalia. Canadian bookstores, it seems, have a different identity than American ones, even in the case of a mirror-chain situation like Chapters/Indigo and Borders. The unique identity of this franchise is in part the result of government policy (blocking Borders’ expansion resulted in an employee defection that eventually led to the merger creating Chapters/Indigo); in part, it results from the role of consumers’ distinct wants and needs in different markets; and finally, it results from directives issued by the company itself, based on the availability of products and their perceived salability to Canadian consumers.
“ ...publishers engage in the practice of 'country pricing.' ” All of these factors eventually filter down to the level of individual authors and their books, which provide the company’s main source of income. In this case, by applying the title of “Canadian author” to Alice Munro, the company bet on a literary border, and were able to double down on this bet due to its close relationship with the Canadian publishers who proved capable of supplying the ensuing purchase orders. Munro’s accessibility to booksellers like Chapters/Indigo is a direct result of formal trade organizations in Canada. The range and complexity of these organizations are impossible to cover in this space; as a result, I will give a cursory overview of the two largest publishing associations. First, there is the Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP), which “represents approximately 135 Canadian-owned and controlled book publishers from across the country.” The association justifies its existence in the language of artistic protectorate, using the following fascinating logic: “The membership is diverse and includes publishers from a variety of genres. Over 80% of Canadian-authored titles are published by the Canadian-owned sector. This means a strong Canadian-owned sector is vital to the development of new Canadian authors and writers.” [6. “Introduction.” Association of Canadian Publishers. The Association of Canadian Publishers, 2010. Web. 22 December 2013.] Notice that the possibility of Canadian authorship is tied very explicitly to the dominance of Canadian publishing; this rhetoric suggests that promoting a native Canadian publishing industry is essential to developing homegrown “authors and writers.” The close relationship between Canadian authors and publishers does not arise from pure cultural altruism or happenstance. The ACP website states that the organization promotes the (bookselling) interests of its members on the following fronts: marketing, mandates, government and public relations, and research and professional development. These efforts have direct legislative results that are eventually printed on the price tags of the books we buy. For instance, as a result of the organization’s lobbying, the government decided to “restrict and regulate new foreign investment in the book industry” in 1974. Furthermore, the ACP was able to push through a mandate for joint ventures in 1985, wherein potential foreign investors are required to partner with Canadian industries. Finally, the organization achieved and continues to advocate for direct federal support for publishers, resulting in the “Canadian Book Publishing Development Program” of 1979, a forerunner of the “Book Publishing Industry Development Program” currently in place. In addition to the ACP, the Canadian Publishers’ Council (CPC) was founded in 1910 and describes itself as “Canada’s main English-language book publishing trade association,” with its membership comprising “publishing companies that publish books for academic, retail, professional, and library markets.” [7. “About Us.” Canadian Publishers’ Council. Canadian Publisher’s Council, 2012. Web. 22 December 2013.] They note their members altogether employ over 2,800 Canadians and “collectively account for nearly three-quarters of all domestic sales of English-language books.” Moreover, they have an international arm, insofar as they liaison not only with other Canadian publishers’ associations, but also with the Association of American Publishers and the U.K. Publishers association.
“Tariffs on books are felt most forcefully in terms of price differences between the United States and Canada, and more stingingly since the currencies reached relative parity.” It is worth noting that whatever literary border exists between the United States and Canada, it must account for the fact that a large trade organization like the CPC would specify their role in promoting the “domestic sales of English-language books” [my emphasis]. The publication of, and audience for, French-language material is another wrinkle in the border that has formal existence in government law and publishing practice. The end result of these organizations is not necessarily higher prices on domestic books (although this is certainly debatable); instead, they lobby primarily for further barriers to entry for foreign publishers, and direct government subsidies to their constituents. The end result of these actions, however, is plain: Canadian bookstores stocked with Canadian books produced by Canadian publishers—who have a relationship, by default, with the majority of Canadian authors. The ultimate effects of such tariffs are highly contested, but they undoubtedly connect Canada’s broader borders with its literary borders, and in so doing, feed into the nebulous concept of “national identity,” as distinct from, most pressingly, that of the United States. The close relationship between these two senses of borders is by no means new; people have been thinking and writing about the relationship between customs and literary identity in Canada for a very long time. In 1906, for instance, Arnold Haultain wrote the following passage describing the effects of customs regulations on what we would now call Canada’s “creative class:”
Yet, I venture to think that there are in the Canadian Customs regulations anomalies affecting not a little the interests of the literary and artistic classes which might with justice have been brought before its notice. Compared with the manufacturers of implements and the vendors of edibles, the makers and lovers of pictures and books no doubt are a feeble folk. Yet they form a portion of the community, and if their existence is so far recognized as that such things as pictures and sculpture and books are made subjects of statutory legislation, they have a right surely to be heard as to the effects and tendencies of such legislation. [8. Haultain, Arnold. “Art and the Tariff.” The Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature Vol. 27. Ed. John Alexander Cooper, Newton MacTavish & J. Gordon Mowat. Ontario Publishing Compay Ltd., 1906. Google Book Search. Web. 22 December 2013.]Haultain ultimately argues against such strict customs regulations on the grounds that they simply increase prices for consumers, while failing to benefit the artists producing the work: “Whom does this duty benefit? Not the readers of course, because it increases the price. Not the foreign author, for it lessens his sales. Not the native author, for, on the other hand, the greater more books any author has access to the better.” His argument for the liberalization of the customs taxes and deregulation of rules for foreign investment and incorporation is explicitly founded on the premise that artists in Canada should have a greater voice about where and how their products are sold and produced; the notion of artists as a “class” assumes some form of collective identity, produced by the tariffs imposed on foreign cultural products. Such concerns extend into the present day. One could argue that in terms of sheer endurance, they play a major role in how we define the northern half of the literary border. Haultain’s complaints reverberate in a recent article from the Toronto Star, which reports on a Canadian Senate committee charged with investigating tariffs: “Everything from books to hockey pants and cars could be cheaper if Ottawa eliminated many import tariffs or brought them into line with lower U.S. rates, a Senate committee says.” [9. Flavelle, Dana. “Here’s Why Things Cost More Here Than in the U.S.” The Star. Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd., 6 Feb. 2013. Web. 22 December 2013.] Tariffs on books are felt most forcefully in terms of price differences between the United States and Canada, and more stingingly since the currencies reached relative parity. I make no claims regarding the aims or ends of such tariffs, but it is worth emphasizing the longevity of such complaints, and pointing out that at some point, the inertia of tradition results in national identity.
“While most Canadians probably have no overt position on the matter, there is undeniably widespread, tacit consent to the trade tariffs on books.”Can you read national identity in book prices? If so, these scripts would prove useful in our assessments of literary borders. In the digital age, such readings are indeed possible. While we like to think of the Internet as a global phenomenon distributed through the equalizing, universal language of digital code, electronic book publishing is just as subject to border patrol as its pulpy precursor. For instance, an article pulled from The Huffington Post notes e-book prices were higher on Canada’s Amazon.ca website, stating, “But with e-books the price differential seemed especially unjustified: There are no physical books to be shipped to small Canadian bookstores thousands of kilometres from the nearest distribution centre, no import tariffs or higher rental rates on store locations to be paid. E-books are just data, in many cases less actual bits of data than the page you’re reading right now.” Despite the utter lack of policy regulations, Canadian e-books still cost more than e-books from the United States. Why would this be? Karen Proud at the Retail Council of Canada suggests publishers engage in the practice of “country pricing.” This practice, which is not unique to publishing, assigns different price values to the same products in different countries not for reasons of regulatory compliance, but because cultural analyses of national attitudes toward those products suggests the possibility of charging less or more based on the location in question. In this case, Proud notes that book publishers charge more for electronic books in Canada “because they believe Canadians will pay a higher price.” Why do they believe this? And are they correct? [10. Tencer, Daniel. “Why are Prices Higher in Canada than in the U.S.? E-Book Industry Bets You’re Willing to Pay.” Huffington Post Canada. The HuffingtonPost.com, Inc, 20 Dec. 2013. Web. 22 December 2013.] The price tags don’t lie: electronic books in Canada still cost more than those purchased from a United States server. If country pricing exists for books, it suggests that Canadian consumers think about books differently than their American counterparts, particularly as the products of a national industry. Whether that thinking is intentionally cultivated by that industry to justify higher prices is difficult to ascertain, but in any case, I see no signs of a general change in policy designed to bring Canadian book prices (physical or electronic) in line with those in the United States. Does this indicate that the majority of Canadians believe that a material literary border, produced via tariffs, is actually required to promote and protect homegrown talent, particularly against the juggernaut below the border? This, too, is difficult to ascertain. While most Canadians probably have no overt position on the matter, there is undeniably widespread, tacit consent to the trade tariffs on books. By limiting the distribution and sale of American books, these tariffs arguably enable the “country pricing” that increases Canadian book prices. Ultimately, I wonder if the tacit consent witnessed in this case isn’t rooted in national industrial-cultural protectionism. Why else would Canadian consumers consent to such price increases? Governmental inertia and monopolistic business practices come to mind, of course. But the key to understanding the enduring sticker shock of “country pricing” (particularly on the buyer-side) might lie in its implied material contribution to a uniquely Canadian literary identity, predicated on the existence of a uniquely Canadian publishing industry. Many questions remain, particularly about the other half of this proposed material literary border—specifically, how (or whether) America defines itself against Canada’s publishing industry. For now, I reiterate my argument that literary borders do exist between the United States and Canada, but these borders are best understood through their material manifestations. This approach prevents us from unfairly homogenizing authors into uncharacteristic national identities, while simultaneously allowing us to acknowledge the realities of national difference across the full spectrum of authors, readers, and publishers.
