World Book Fair Spotlights Nationalism

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

LEISURE & ARTS

World Book Fair Spotlights Nationalism

By Anne Midgette  

13 October 1993 

Frankfurt -- In its constant search for current topics, the news media, more and more, is feeding on itself. In August, Vanity Fair ran a full-length feature not on the White House but on its press corps. On Oct. 5, the opening day of the 45th Frankfurt Book Fair, the news in Germany was that the country's leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, had printed the book fair's opening address in advance of its being given by Dutch author Harry Mulisch. It seemed a fitting way to mark the opening of a major media spectacle: media feeding on media, the reprinting of the printed word.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the year's most important event for anyone involved in the business of making books. Spread throughout a massive complex of buildings connected by moving walkways, it includes exhibits and conference rooms; a literary agents' center; a circus-like tent for author readings; and more than 350,000 books. Milling around the stands of exhibitors (this year there were 8,400 from 95 countries) are distributors and agents, journalists and booksellers.

The fair is like a giant socket waiting for a plug: One can hardly help making a connection. The lion's share of international book negotiations are transacted here every year, whether it's a deal for foreign rights at one of the conference tables in the spacious Penguin stand or a museum sale in the small corner occupied by the British art press Coracle. "We do a year's worth of business here," said Coracle founder Simon Cutts; for a small press, this justifies the expense. For the 5 1/2 days of this year's fair, a midsize stand, measuring two meters by four meters, costs about $2,000.

Because words are the commodity at issue, the book fair represents not only a business exchange, but also a symbolic focus of current international thought. Opening speeches this year referred to recession, antiforeigner feelings in Germany and Salman Rushdie. And Mr. Mulisch's "leaked" opening address focused on the concept of nationalism, which, as definitions of the term are thrashed out from Bosnia to Byelorussia, is nothing if not a current topic.

Nationalism is especially relevant at a book fair because a nation's identity relates to its language, printed or spoken. Even within the present-day European Community, some groups have had to fight for the right to their own language: the Basques, the Bretons, the Catalans and the Welsh, to name a few. The notion that linguistic boundaries are stronger than geographical ones would be hotly contested by the (German-speaking) Austrians or the (mainly English-speaking) Irish (who will be the focus of Frankfurt Book Fairs in 1995 and 1996, respectively). However, this year's fair introduced the idea by featuring as its theme, for the first time ever, a linguistic rather than national entity: Flanders and the Netherlands. Two reasons for choosing this particular area were that it has traditionally been both open to the outside world (foreign literature accounts for more than half of Dutch book sales, for example) and relaxed about its "nationalism." Mr. Mulisch noted that his Dutch identity depends less upon his heritage -- neither of his parents was Dutch -- than on the fact that the language is his mother tongue.

But the book fair itself showed that the actual working relationship of a nation's identity to its language is highly uncertain. While Gallimard, Suhrkamp or Penguin are too well-established to have to consider such issues, the Sri Lankan Export Development Board and the Kenyan publisher Jacaranda Designs are more likely to be identified as national entities than as literary, or linguistic, forces; in fact, a majority of books they displayed were in French and English. And there's a difference between a national publisher and a national literature. The Turks proudly celebrated their first-ever national display, but many of the titles weren't Turkish.

From a business standpoint, one purpose of the book fair is to break down national and linguistic boundaries by transacting big deals for foreign rights to bestsellers. The stands of every country's major publisher were hung with the same black-and-white photographs of successful authors: Donna Tartt in French and Dutch, Toni Morrison in Spanish and Norwegian, Mr. Mulisch displayed as a national treasure in the Flanders/Netherlands exhibit and as a moneymaking asset by his German publisher. This was less a statement about culture's ability to tran scend national boundaries than a proof of the efficiency of publishing as a business.

Publishing may be big business, but today it's the news media that prove the power of the printed word to form opinions. Against this, bookmakers can point to the permanence of their product. Because journalism and literature both use the same medium, it's inevitable that they come into competition, just as each under lines the importance of the other. Hence the significance of Der Spiegel's printing the Mulisch speech. Like a tourist snapping a photograph of a tribesman, a magazine can steal writing's soul, taking a piece of writing that appeals to the abiding nature of language out of its literary context and turning it into print journalism, the word at its most ephemeral and disposable.

In the end, the media proved its power by furthering literature. By the closing day of the fair, Mr. Mulisch's already bestselling novel, "Die Entdeckung des Himmels," or "The Discovery of Heaven," a historical family saga, had sold out at most German bookshops.

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Ms. Midgette is a writer in Munich.