I’m a person who reads a lot. And a lot of the books I read are what you might call “good” books. Classics, “literature.” The old, fancy stuff.
But I also read young adult novels and fantasy books, and sometimes science fiction and detective stories and whatever else I get interested in. The kinds of books referred to as genre fiction.
I’d say I enjoy the classics and the genre fiction the same amount. But, recently I’ve noticed that I don’t enjoy them in the same way. I feel differently about reading depending on what I’m reading.
What I mean is, when I’m reading a young adult book, or a fantasy novel, it feels basically like watching Netflix. Relaxing, enjoyable, and at times open to deep, earnest engagement. But never really admirable in any way. A guilty pleasure.
But when I read a classic, I feel downright smug about it. I don’t mean to, I think it’s dumb, but I totally do it anyway. In the back of my mind, I get this sense of myself as a person who reads “real” books, and I congratulate myself for it. I hold the spine of the book facing out so people can see me reading this “real” book. I see myself reading it and feel just a little superior.
Even without taking any broader implications into account, this is a dumb way to look at different categories of books. That’s not to say that the categories delineated by genre are useless or meaningless; they describe a set of conventions you can expect when you buy the book, which is obviously helpful. If you want to read a book with a dragon in it, you can look in the fantasy section.
But even though having different genres is useful, elevating some above others isn’t. Reading is reading. Good writing, challenging themes, timeless characters—whatever it is that makes a classic a classic—can be found in genre fiction as well. Just because something is old doesn’t make it inherently nobler than a contemporary work. In fact (and I say this as a person who adores old books), more recent stories are often easier to relate to and understand. Many of these less prestigious books have been more relevant and vivid and real to me.
Of course, the fact that it’s harder to relate to an old inaccessible book is the reason reading classics is considered noble at all. If something is difficult, people value that thing more highly. And roaming around in the completely unfamiliar landscape of an old text, having to actively seek out and convert little bits into something that resonates with your wildly different life, is why people talk at all about classics being “universal” in the first place. If something seems completely unfamiliar, and turns out to be familiar, it’s fair to call it universal.
But that label—”universal”—is another thing that bothers me about the elevation of classics above genre fiction. The more I think about it, the more I feel that many genres are defined not only by what patterns and tropes define them, but also by what group of people will be able to relate to the story. And the assumption implicit in that is that classics are classics because everyone in the world can relate. Again, I love a lot of classics, I really do. But when you say anyone can relate to Pip from Great Expectations but only teenage girls can relate to Katniss from The Hunger Games, it sounds like certain groups don’t matter to anyone except the people in that group. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to relate to protagonists who are teenage girls, or people of color, or dragon-riding exiled knights for that matter? Reading is supposed to be all about an empathic connection with someone who isn’t you!
And this genre snobbery doesn’t just come from within the books, but from outside them. Books that start off as genre sometimes become classics when they’re accepted by people other than the ones for whom they are written. The novel, a form that was mostly written and read by women when it first emerged, was treated like trivial entertainment until men started reading and writing them. Then they were universally appreciable art. Basically, all novels were treated like romance novels when they first became popular.
And maybe that makes sense: maybe a book has to be universal and reach beyond it’s intended audience, to be a classic. But it doesn’t go the other way. Books that are mostly read by and written about straight white men don’t have to gain the approval of other groups to escape being genre. There is no genre for books like this.
What am I saying here? I’m not saying people should stop reading what are typically described as classics. I would never stop reading classics myself, and would never want to. I’m not even saying we should stop referring to them as classics (although it would be good to get the really good fantasy and mystery and even YA books included under the classics umbrella). I’m not saying we should abolish the idea of genre, but I do think that we shouldn’t see genre fiction as inherently lesser. At the end of the day, I’d rather not think of reading A Song of Ice and Fire as a guilty pleasure—it’s extremely long and I feel I deserve to be smug.
Image Credit: Digiliterate Librarian, Social Science Space, TVC Group