Critics

Imagine that after hours of sitting at your desk, chewing the eraser of your pencil, and stressing over what the ending to your epic masterpiece should be. You type the final sentences and spend hours revising until you feel you have finally concluded a work the world would want to read. To prove your suspicions, you take the story to your friends, who read it with gusto and return it with words of praise. You even go as far as to submit it as an assignment for your fiction writing class, and are rewarded with an A+ and the professor’s suspicions of writing success. You might even go so far as to submit it to contests or sell it to magazines who would like to publish the sort of work you do.

However, if the genre you write happens to be fantasy fiction, you can automatically expect a roadblock from the critics. If you expect your writing to be taken seriously and read as though it has something important to contribute to society, fantasy fiction is not the way to go. This genre is overlooked by the higher-ups in the art society as being “purely entertaining material” and “low-art,” and even go so far as to say it is “popular culture incapable of containing any message important enough for society to hear.” Such a reception to the fantasy fiction genre makes me wonder: exactly what is it that separates high culture from low culture?

If somebody were to ask me what society considers to be high culture, I would immediately point to the works of ancient Greece. Homer’s epics are the first thing many people think when they think of high culture. They think of marble carvings from 2000 BC or frescos painted in the Sistine chapel. If somebody were to ask me what society considers to be low culture, it would be easy to say that the men in suits with busts of Shakespeare in their office despise lousy soap operas, melodramatic sitcoms, trashy and conventional fantasy novels, and graphic novels.

What is it that sets these two apart? I know many people who prefer fantasy novels over the Odyssey or would rather look at modern art than the frescos on the Sistine Chapel. In fact, I know that most of today’s generation would prefer these things. Why is it that a very particular group of social elite are permitted to choose what society values? Why is it that even now, in a time that has changed significantly from that of the modern era or classical Greece, the social elite are determining that we should value the same works of art? People don’t write books the way they used to in the modern era, and certainly not the way books were written in ancient Greece. This is because the times have changed and so has the aesthetic of the public.

However, it seems that the aesthetics of the public do little to influence what the social elites consider good. So the next time you sit down to write a novel and feel discouraged that society won’t take it seriously, remember; the opinions of the public cannot be determined by the will of an elite minority. Write what you think needs to be said, and if people need to hear it, it will be read.