Canto XIV - The Great Divide of "Worthy" Literature

The literary world is hung up upon the notion of what, having gone into print, is “worthy” and what is not. This is a peculiarity of only the English-speaking literary world since other parts of the planet do not waste time on the issue; however there is an ongoing debate about what is “good” and what is “bad”.

To manage this qualitative division, the publishing and bookselling world has created an arbitrary distinction in the field of literature; specifically, it speaks of “literature” and its opposite number, “genre fiction”. This might work well for bookshops who try to keep their stock organised, but it’s simply an elite way of looking at writing and of trying to add snob value to something that doesn’t require it. Reading, and writing, are skills available to everyone in most Western, first world societies; perhaps you missed it but there was a great struggle to ensure that literacy was available to all, and the occasional bickering about national educational ability in various parliaments is the ongoing result of this concern, not just something to fill in governmental “dead air”.

Those who disparage genre fiction are snobs. No such distinction is made in Germany, or France, or any other European country; it’s only the UK, Australia and the US who make the distinction. Seriously, most Europeans consider The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie as one of the best reads of all time and I, for one, can’t fault their taste. Literature snobs, on the other hand, don’t stoop to the reading of crime fiction. The ease with which genre fiction is packaged into smaller pigeonholes is held up as a tacit indicator of the bovine nature of the science fiction, the romance, or the historical fiction readers. The snobs feel that genre fictioneers need some type of cattle corral to keep them on track in the spooky world of the bookstore.

There’s little that can be done about it. Literature types want ‘their’ book material to be shared only by like-minded bigots. They want ‘their’ prizes and ‘their’ festivals to be exclusive chardonnay-sipping affairs where the blue-collar knuckle-draggers pass by gape-mouthed on the outside of the party window. Stephen King rails interminably against these elitists, however he makes the error of embracing the red-neck label as a rallying flag for readers to mass around. Sadly for Mr. King, most readers don’t think of themselves as part of a clique-y elite.

But what the literarians forget about these categories is that they work against their snobbery, too. You don’t like our Philip K. Dick? Well, we’ll take your Margaret Atwood and your Anthony Burgess – The Handmaid’s Tale and A Clockwork Orange are both fine sci-fi works. You like to laugh at our horror novels? Well, we won’t see you laughing at our Joyce Carol Oates, or our Donna Tartt. You scorn our Daphne du Maurier, we’ll take your Kate Grenville, and your Hilary Mantel while we’re at it. And then there’s Tolkien…

As I said, the distinctions are nebulous and arbitrary, and are simply a way of disparaging readers rather than writers. Yes, there are bad books out there (50 Shades of Grey, anyone?) but these are soon tested by the readership and dispensed with as the lesser works that they turn out to be, as has happened throughout the English publishing history. Books should not be judged by their covers... and neither should their readers.