The Classification Wars
I made the mistake of once clicking on an article about the great and terrible Literature Classification Wars, and now every algorithm is convinced I care deeply about every little sally and skirmish between those stuffy-nosed literary elitists and the knuckle-dragging genre troglodytes. The stakes of this conflict, some twitter accounts seem convinced, are absolute life and death. Piles of gold and the souls of the unconverted depend on putting genres back in their box or lambasting an out-of-touch snob.
So the internet would have you believe. I laughed at some of these exchanges while attempting to alter my preferences to make them stop showing up on my timeline. (Hint: nothing you can do will ever undo the one random click an algorithm latches onto; ESPN.com still launches its Portuguese page by default because I once visited from a VPN in Rio. I will never be rid of this). People like this couldn’t exist in real life, I thought: not only were the stakes so laughably small, but the entire division is silly. Literary works can be garbage and genre books can have the most beautiful prose; family dramas can be taut and thrilling and grand fantasy adventures can be boring.
Then I met one of these warriors in real life.
When we moved five years ago, I went looking for a new writing group in my new town. I found one on some online service or the other, the kind that exists for thirty-somethings like me with no social skills and permanent anxiety. I met them at a coffee shop a ten minute drive from our new house; how convenient, I thought. As ever with writers, we went around talking about our current projects. They described fantastic universes, mind-boggling technology, brave heroes and evil villains, action and adventure. I felt a little bashful when my turn came around and I admitted that, compared to these exciting ideas, I tended to write rather boring stories.
One woman sharply asked what I meant. I described the piece I was working on at the time, a drama about a family coming apart under financial stress. She asked if I would describe myself as writing literary pieces; I hesitated, since I’ve always found the term pretentious, then agreed.
And up came a half-hour lecture on the evils of literary authors, how we had no respect for the genre authors, how our arrogance and inflexibility would be swept away, how our desperation to keep them down reflected more of our own insecurities over how unprofitable literary fiction is. I tried to protest: first, I agreed science fiction and fantasy often had amazing cultural relevance and many genre authors wrote beautiful prose including, I knew, all those present. None of it made an impression. The other members of the group were far more welcoming and seemed a little put off by her tirade. I stuck it out for the duration, but she continued to snipe at me throughout and, despite my promises of returning for next week, I knew by the time I got to my car that I’d never be back.
I think what troubled me the most was I had never thought of myself as an elitist. I’ve always been a reader. Going back to kindergarten, I was reading several grade levels above my age. I don’t mention this to brag; reading has gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years. My grades suffered because I preferred reading the book I’d brought for after the test to actually taking a test; that’s the reason I still don’t know my seven times tables. Because my nose was always stuck in a book as my parents drove me around, when I got my license I didn’t know how to get around the town where I’d been born. (For younger readers, this was a problem in the days before ubiquitous GPS, when you had to open a physical Thomas Brothers map and hope for the best.) As I was tall and awkward, walking around with my nose in a book led to a litany of twisted ankles, bruised shins, and cracked skulls.
I didn’t much care what I read, so long as I had something to read. Mysteries, adventures, fantasy, science fiction, dramas, histories, pop science, anything. The written word has a magic power–or maybe I’m just really bad at processing information in every other way. When I started writing, I continued an eclectic path. Wooden ships and iron men, science fiction, and, yes, families struggling with financial ruin and emotional betrayal.
Anyway, all these battles over classification, us vs. them, pick-a-side no-fence-sitting, all of them are stupid. They detract from the actual magic here: the ability we humans have discovered to take our thoughts, lay them out and have them easily understood by people we’ve never met. The written word has a greater magic than any adventuring mage and a more lasting poignancy than any Booker shortlister. Let’s all change lives together.
