The Oldest Sneer in Publishing

Reading back over some of these Friday posts, it strikes me that the same three words keep turning up at the edge of every argument. Not real reading.

Boys are reading, maybe, but they’re not picking up real books. They might be reading lots, but it’s not real literature. They have access online, fine, but it’s to the wrong stuff.

Basically, whatever our boys are actually up to in their reading, all sorts of voices keep insisting that this kind of literacy doesn’t count. Today, I think it’s worth looking those voices in the eye, because their track record of getting things right is a bit of a shocker.

First up, let’s not forget that the novel, a form of writing we now hand out all sorts of prizes for, spent its first century in existence as junk. It was seen as frivolous and addictive and very, very bad for young minds. Remember I wrote about Henry James before, and how he was packed off to a science school to cure him of his disreputable habit of reading too many of the things? Well, he wasn’t some kind of lone crank. Most of respectable society nodded right along with his parents. The novel was the video game of the nineteenth century. Its consumption was fretted over in almost exactly the same words we now reserve for a phone.

Basically, every time a cultural form gets cheap enough, or fun enough, or popular enough with the masses, the same charges come out. First, it’s silly. Then it’s bad for you. Then, sooner or later, it’s a drug and probably linked to devil worship.

The Victorians had this sort of junk-food chat down cold. In 1889, the critic Edward Dowden looked at what all the newly literate masses were reading and freaked out that “our caterers nowadays provide us with a mincemeat which requires no chewing.” The idea of reading for fun was mental pap, softening a generation that would lose its teeth from lack of use. And by 1932 it had hardened into an addiction diagnosis, with Q. D. Leavis writing a whole Cambridge study appalled that ordinary library-users wanted Edgar Wallace thrillers instead of the “significant” novels she approved of.

But that pearl-clutching reflex is never really about quality, is it? John Carey has emphasised that the whole idea of literary difficulty was built, on purpose, to be a wall. “The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand.”

And then these damn pulp writers come along…

Because this sort of con only works until it doesn’t. Especially once the wall keeps getting moved, and the degraded forms of one generation become the set texts of the next. Dickens was, once upon a time, a serialising hack paid by the word. Now he’s on every possible reading list going. Science fiction used to be viewed as airport pulp, but now it’s on the syllabus. Andrew Goldstone has a lovely phrase for this manoeuvre, he calls it “genre fiction without shame”, which is the moment the highbrow consumes the thing it had spent decades mocking, pretending it saw it as quality all along.

The nature of trash doesn’t change, but the gatekeeping does.

You can even see this happening in real time. When Kazuo Ishiguro published a novel with ogres and a dragon in it, the question he fretted over the most was “are they going to say this is fantasy?” That’s a grown man, at the very summit of literary prestige, and he’s nervous that the ‘wrong’ label might end up sticking to his book.

And that’s because the fantasy genre’s fine to borrow, but it’s shameful to actually be caught belonging to it…

Now, is an awful lot of published pulp pretty bad? Obviously. In fact, a great deal of self-published genre fiction is clumsy, baggy, and written at such a speed that we can feel the ink drying on the page. But, then again, nine in ten of anything is pretty forgettable, and always has been, from the Victorian three-decker to Kindle Unlimited. But “most of this stuff is rubbish” has never once been the real reason a form got dismissed.

And that brings me all the way back to my opening. Because when the trade measures boys’ reading and finds it wanting, the view it’s taking is not neutral. It was all bent out of shape, deliberately, about a century ago to keep certain readers on the wrong side of a line.

The good news, though, is that the sneerers have an absolutely perfect record of falling in the end. After all, the novel won. And Dickens won. And Science fiction won. The only real question remaining is how long the gatekeepers will make the boys wait this time, and how much of their reading gets written off as ‘not-real’ while they’re making up their minds.

My money says they’ll come around the moment it’s deemed safe, at which point they’ll announce that they always knew it was good, and then they’ll put Dungeon Crawler Carl on a university reading list.

But the boys will have moved on by then. They usually have.

Sources

• John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (Faber & Faber, 1992).
• Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (Chatto & Windus, 1932).
• Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (University of Chicago Press, 1957) — for Dowden, 1889.
• Andrew Goldstone, ‘Genre Fiction without Shame’, American Literary History, 35.4 (2023), 1745–58.
• Matthew Eatough, ‘”Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?”: Kazuo Ishiguro, Untimely Genres, and the Making of Literary Prestige’, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 67.1 (2021), 40–66.