Literary Snobbery

How Looking Down on Some Genres Hurts Us All

(Image credit: Dabarti CGI/Shutterstock)

Some years ago, when I was still teaching, one of my colleagues told a student that “Neither fantasy nor science fiction is really literature, so you can’t do your term paper on authors from either of those genres.” Even before I became an author, this kind of statement made me wince and bite my lip.

Much more recently, I’ve seen more than one of my fellow authors write derisively about “genre fiction,” a broad category that includes pretty much anything that isn’t literary fiction.

There are several assumptions underlying these kinds of statements.

1. Literary worth must be measured solely by the intellectual stimulation a piece of writing gives to readers.

2. Literary worth can be determined only in a top-down fashion, with the intellectual elite being the only decision-makers.

3. Literary worth is validated by the test of time, so that we can only be sure of it if a work is still being read long after it was first written.

As a former English teacher, I’d be the first to agree that intellectual stimulation is an important criterion for measuring literary worth—but it isn’t the only one. As readers, we grow through works that challenge us to think. But we also experience literature in other, less cerebral ways. These other ways may not promote intellectual growth directly, but they do encourage us to read more, and they have other benefits as well.

Literature can have a powerful impact on our emotions as well as on our intellects. It pulls us into other worlds, gives us a chance to experience the points of view and feelings of others. This broadening of our horizons can increase our empathy and emotional intelligence, at least in cases in which we have to interpret how characters think or feel. At a time in which society is becoming increasingly more polarized, enabling us to empathize more is a crucial step in making society function better.

To the extent that reading makes us happier and thus stimulates the production of brain chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, it can improve our health. As WebMD puts it, “Your mental health plays a huge role in your general well-being. Being in a good mental state can keep you healthy and help prevent serious health conditions.”

In other words, gaining insight from reading and being happier (and healthier) as a result of reading are possible even with literary works that aren’t going to be taught in college courses five hundred years from now.

It’s also worth noting that the distinctions modern literary critics and academics know and love are a relatively recent creation. Projecting the genre labels back to earlier times produces some surprising results.

The oldest surviving epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as later epics such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, aside from their elaborate poetic forms, are more akin to the modern fantasy novel than they are to a lot of literary fiction.

“But wait!” someone will doubtless object. “Early epics are religious works, not fantasies.” There’s no denying a religious element in most early literature. But there are religious elements in some more modern fantasies as well. C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia is both religious allegory and fantasy. The question is not so much whether religion is present—which it is in most literary works—but whether or not the purpose is primarily religious and to what extent other purposes shape the material.

Some critics have argued that Homer (or whoever actually wrote the poems attributed to him) didn’t really believe in the gods he wrote about. It’s impossible to answer questions like that, but what we do know is that ancient writers felt relatively free to rearrange material, even changing major details to suit their own literary purposes—a less likely outcome if their primary purpose was religious. The writers may well have believed in the gods and still sought partly to entertain. And although later writers refrained from retelling the stories Homer covered, they portrayed other aspects of the Trojan War and the life of Odysseus in ways not always consistent in tone or substance with Homer. The Homeric epics might be brilliant literary works, but they weren’t treated quite like holy writ in the modern sense.

Somewhat later literature illustrates just how hard it is to be sure what is literature and what is fantasy. The Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson, one of principle sources of Norse myth, was a Christian. Similarly, Ferdowsi, a Muslim, wrote the national epic of Persia, the Shahnameh, which is based on Zoroastrian tradition. But if you read either work out of context, you’d assume that it was written by someone who believed in the material.

Once we accept that the ancestors of modern fantasy were ancient and medieval literature, it’s hard to look at the fantasy genre in the same way. What we see is that most early works canonized as classics by later generations are partly or entirely fantasy. Fantastic elements occur in a number of later literary classics, including the works of Chaucer, Malory, Spencer, and Shakespeare. Arthurian literature, rooted as it is in Celtic myth, is particular rich in this regard.

Some people would go further and argue that science fiction also goes that far back. The first story of the a trip to the moon was written by Lucian of Samosata in the Second Century CE, though the fact that Lucian has a boat reach the moon on a powerful water spout identifies it more clearly as fantasy. But at worst, the earliest science fiction is probably Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, another literary classic despite its obvious resemblance to genre fiction.

Should we revere ancient fantasy while frowning on its modern descendants? There’s no logical reason for that distinction. I suppose someone would want to argue about the test of time. But you know what? Some ancient literature isn’t all that great, despite its survival. The Roman poet Catullus wrote some moving pieces, but he also wrote poems directed at his enemies that, if translated into English, would be perfectly at home with bathroom wall graffiti. Petronius’s Satyricon, ancient though it is, is still pornography, and in part child pornography. An accurate film version would get its maker arrested in most jurisdictions.

I have always read and will continue to read literary fiction. But I don’t judge literature based on its genre but on its individual merits. And even if something is designed to entertain rather than edify, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still worthwhile.