The unruly rules of the game : writing game and writing practice in George Gissing's New Grub Street

Abstract

In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes likens the reader-writer relationship to a game, the play of which is made possible by the writer's imaginative seeking out of his reader, and the reader's openness to being found. If each does his or her part—if neither bores the other—‘there can still be a game’. This model of writing and reading as exploratory, amorous gamesmanship is troubled by the literary equivalent of spectator sports, literature for a mass audience. According to this new model, described by Marshall McLuhan, ‘Without the audience, there is no game. It would be a practice’, a rehearsal without a play. Within mass culture, then, the game is determined not by the players' mutual efforts to defer the rules, but by the presence of an anonymous public, well-versed in rule and convention before first pitch is thrown or first sentence is read. How one writes, or fails to write, in the context of this new configuration of the game is the main question posed in George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891). I contend that, while the novel’s successful writers play to audience demand, their counterparts yearn for a proper writing practice. Boredom marks the latters’ refusal of the new rules of the game, flagging the novel’s construction and allocation of artistic authenticity.