Of course, your own taste in reading material is beyond reproach — but those Twilight fans, they’re just stuffing their brains with garbage. And meanwhile, those literary snobs are judging you for liking military science fiction, without even having read any. If this is you or someone you know, then you ought to read Laura Miller’s essay on literary judgments.
Writing in Salon, Miller explains why we judge other people’s taste in literature — and also, why we’re so sensitive when we feel as though other people are judging ours. It’s because someone, at some point, made us feel guilty for liking the things we like, and we’ve internalized that. She explains:
Intellectual insecurity is, alas, a pervasive problem in the literary
world. You can find it among fans of easy-to-read commercial fiction who
insist (on very little evidence) that the higher-brow stuff is
uniformly fraudulent and dull, and you can find it among those mandarin
bibliophiles who dismiss whole genres (on equally thin evidence) out of
hand. One of the favorite gambits of people secretly uncertain about
their own taste is identifying some popular book of incontestably lower
quality than their own favorites and then running all over the Internet
posting extravagant takedowns of it and taunting its fans. Yeah, I’m not
crazy about “Fifty Shades of Grey,” either, but I’m not going to invest
that much energy in proclaiming this sentiment to the world. To do so
suggests you’re less interested in championing good writing than you are
in grabbing any chance to feel superior to somebody else.
[This happens because] a teacher, a parent, a romantic partner, a friend, a roommate, even a
co-worker has made them feel ashamed over a book or genre of books they
enjoy or admire. They were told to put away the comics or teased for
de-stressing with a romance novel on coffee break. Or, conversely, they
might dream of being included in some tony, brainy (and possibly
entirely imaginary) community of letters while at the same time worrying
that they won’t make the grade. There are those whose fantasies of
leading a “literary” life largely involve having their own superior
discrimination and erudition admired by other superior minds. The result
of all this baggage is a preposterous, resentful pecking order in which
readers get way too much pleasure out of pissing on other readers’
preferences and/or jumping, on the slightest pretext, to the conclusion
that their own are being ridiculed.
The whole essay is well worth reading. [Salon.com]
Top image: Tom Gauld.
