An Unhinged History of American Publishing, Episode 4: The Hachette Publishing Group, or: Hon Hon Hon, It Was Mimesis All Along

A meditation on desire and the widening gyre of world history, which in retrospect was a bit ambitious to take on in a Substack newsletter concerning the history of single publishing company. FML

Since Hachette is a French company, let’s begin our corporate history as a French auteur might: with a shot of a lovelorn grad student in a garret somewhere, probably wearing a beret, soul awash in longing, desk awash in baguette crumbs, sobbing quietly, his plaintive hon, hon, hons heaving into the Paris night.

This liberal dramatization depicts a real moment that happened sometime in the mid-1940s. It’s the moment when Hachette Livre author René Girard, by his own telling, began formulating the theory of mimetic desire, an idea for which he would soon become famous.

Girard had recently broken up with his college girlfriend. After several years together, she’d asked whether he ever planned to propose, and poof: there went his interest in her. At first, he’d felt delirious with relief, but then he’d found out “his” girlfriend was moving on and seeing other guys. Cue the crying and the heartbreak: why oh why did he ever let her go!!

Because Girard was a philosopher, he didn’t ask that question rhetorically. He was sincerely interested in interrogating what had made his feelings boomerang like that.

The answer, of course, was that people tend to desire as other people desire. We want what we want in large part because other people also want it. Desire is social and collective in nature. We desire by mirroring others’ desire; it’s imitative, mimetic.

This is an important evolutionary adaptation for an interdependent species like Homo sapiens. It’s how we learn what the desirable foodstuffs and jobs are without having to engage in potentially fatal trial and error.

Unfortunately, however, mimetic desire also brings out the worst in us. Among other things, it’s why people have spent millennia in an endless murder-torture-exile-return-rinse-repeat cycle in the Levant, losing their goddamn minds in the quest to control a patch of agriculturally mediocre land no bigger than the Delmarva Peninsula.

We don’t just want what others want; we want because others want. And then yet more people want because we want, and we all fight about it in increasingly dramatic and destructive ways. The gyre of history widens and widens.

*

Last week, Hachette USA announced a seismic change: they’re replacing Michael Pietsch, their legendary CEO, with David Shelley, the current head of Hachette UK.

As of January 1, Shelley will run Hachette Livre’s operations across the entire Anglophone world. This is the first time a conglomerate publisher has appointed a single CEO for both the North American and UK/Commonwealth markets.

As an agent, I don’t love this. I see it as an attempt to reduce operating costs and competition for World rights at the expense of author revenue and employee sanity. I suspect the other big publishers might soon attempt to do the same.

The gyre is widening. But what’s at the center? Where did the turning begin?

This is a trick question, but I’ll humor us both and give it a trick answer. Trick answers are the only ones available, really, or at least the only ones our sad little pea brains can grasp.

*

James Brown is the one who set the gyre in motion. Not that James Brown—the one who lived from 1800-1855 and grew up on a farm outside Acton, Massachusetts.

This James Brown was frail and sickly—nothing like his brawny siblings, who were natural farmhands. Still, they all loved him: he was so sweet and cute and gentle! How could you not love that guy!

Plus, he was, like, wicked smaht. Practically from birth, the kid loved books like no kid has ever loved anything. He toddled around carrying his most prize possession—a single dog-eared picture book—like it was a saint’s relic. When he lost it in the hubbub of a family outing one afternoon, he was inconsolable.

His parents found a way to buy him a new one. They couldn’t afford it, but they found a way just the same. James was just three years old, and he was so, so, so precious. Who wouldn’t have found a way?

As a teenager, James drifted from the countryside into Boston in search of paying work his noodly arms could handle. He found that work, as a bookseller’s clerk— dream of dreams! And things just kept getting dreamier from there.

Eventually, James and another young clerk, Charles Little, were able to buy their own bookshop, taking over after a series of retirements and deaths. They hung their names over the door and in time started publishing their own beautiful books.

Dreams on dreams on dreams. As all the other classy little publishers of Peak 19th Century Boston consolidated and folded, their business kept right on growing. Part of this was due to James Brown’s sheer likeability; when he died suddenly in his 50s, a paroxysm of grief seized Boston’s intelligentsia, many of whom had spent hours hanging out with James on the Little, Brown shop floor every week.

James Brown died with no less reverence for books and publishing than he had when he was three years old, clutching that single beloved picture book. He even named his son after John Murray, his publishing idol. John Murray Brown eventually took over his father’s business.

John Murray was an iconic 18th-century Scottish publisher who revolutionized his industry and started a family business run by his descendants, all of whom were also named John Murray, until John Murray VII finally sold up to inevitability in 2002.

John Murray—like Little, Brown—was eventually acquired by Hachette.

*

In 2015, René Girard joined James Brown and other giants of literary history in the great poststructural beyond. Girard has many surviving disciples, though. The most famous of them is probably Jean-Michel Oughourlian, born 1940.

Oughourlian is the child of genocide. His father, an ethnic Armenian born in the Ottoman Empire, fled the massacres there, landing first in Beirut, then Paris.

With that kind of family backstory, it’s not surprising that little Jean-Michel grew up obsessed with understanding the forces powering large-scale conflict, colonization, and conquest.

At the heart of geopolitical strife, Oughourlian sees mimetic desire. One of his most famous lines is this: “the clinical manifestation of mimetic desire is rivalry.” What he means by this is that we humans really do not like admitting to ourselves (or anyone) that we’re all kind of an intersubjective mishmash. Including, especially, our desires.

Our lack of agency and autonomy is an affront to our conscious minds, which have of course evolved to seek self-mastery, safety, and control. This part of us will go to all manner of comedic lengths to patch up its sense of self-mastery when challenged. We’ll come up with all kinds of rococo stories rather than admit to ourselves that we don’t actually know who we are.

If you don’t trust Oughourlian on this, trust me. I’m a lifelong sleepwalker, and if you ever wake me up in the middle of one of my little journeys, I’m immediately going to tell you some bananas story about how I got there.

I remember in particular a time I woke up standing in my pajamas in the lobby of a hotel in Monmartre, facing the baffled front desk attendant (“Alo? Alo?”). It was around 3am.

“Hi! I got lost looking for the bathroom,” I said, snapping into narrative rationalization mode. “Now I can’t even remember what my room number was. Help.”

“Ahh….ze bathrooms…they are all ensuite here?” said the attendant. He then looked up my reservation and led me back upstairs.

I was fully awake by this point. I wasn’t, like, high. Still—STILL—the truth of my situation didn’t occur to me until my bleary-eyed friend opened the door to our room and said to me, gently: “Anna, I don’t think you were trying to find the bathroom. I think you were sleepwalking.”

*

Jean-Michel Oughourlian has a 51-year-old son named Joseph.

Joseph Oughourlian is not an academic like his dad. Rather, he’s an investment banker: the founder and CEO of Amber Capital, a company known for something called activist investing.

Activist investors specialize in large, historically important companies that appear to be sleepwalking toward ruin. They go in, invest bigly, and then try to oust management through proxy warfare. If they’re successful, the thinking goes, they’ll be able to turn a profit for their investors just by making management competent again.

When activist investors invest in a company, the CEOs of that company tend to be less than thrilled. Like me, they tend to retreat into fantasy land when confronted with the fact of their sleepwalking: no, I wasn’t unconscious this whole time. I was LOOKING FOR THE BATHROOM IN THE HOTEL LOBBY LIKE ANY RATIONAL PERSON WOULD BE. And PS, I know you’re not really here to “help me.” You’re just here to make me feel bad!!

Until recently, Amber Capital was a major investor in Lagardère, the conglomerate that owns Hachette.

Until recently, Joseph Oughourlian was leading a coup against Arnaud Lagardère, the man at the top of the Hachette Livre ladder.