Have I Overlooked Dauriat's Virtues?

I have here written in the past of Balzac's character Dauriat. I have even suggested the use of "Dauriat" as a term for the cultureless controllers of our culture on Park Avenue and elsewhere.

This last may have been unfair--to Dauriat.

Dauriat is a crass, vulgar, cruel capitalist for whom the world of books is no more than a means of making money.

However, he never pretends to be anything other than what he is.

By contrast the folks on Park Avenue pretend otherwise--that they are book-lovers, book-people. And indeed demand to be respected as such rather than the crass, cruel, vulgarians they are, as we see in the contempt they poured on self-publishing, especially in those years when some dared to dream that this would become a genuinely viable alternative to traditional publishing. During that time the personnel of traditional publishing, and their courtiers across the literary and media worlds, insisted vehemently on their right to act as gatekeepers deciding what is or is not put before the public.

The dishonesty of their fundamental position is manifest in all sorts of lesser sorts of dishonesty. Dauriat makes it clear that the quality of a work is quite irrelevant to his concerns, that he uses books to make money out of "famous names," whereas those on Park Avenue tell the public that they are judges of quality, and that those they reject simply not good enough--which goes right along with the pretense they maintain that they are worthy to be gatekeepers, and that anything sent to the public round them is illegitimate.

Next to the tellers of such lies Dauriat can almost seem virtuous.