A fascinating dialogue here in the New Statesman between Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman.
In particular, as someone who chooses to write within SF conventions, but dislikes being confined to a ghetto as a result, I share their exasperation with the policing of frontiers between genres. “Why are people so preoccupied?” as Ishiguro says of the genre anxieties raised by the fact that his latest novel includes things like ogres. “What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?”
But I was particularly taken by Ishiguro’s observations here about the class aspect of our reading choices:
I don’t have a problem, necessarily, about reading for improvement. I often choose a book because I think I’m going to enjoy it, but I think also it’s going to improve me in some sense. But when you ask yourself, “Is this going to improve me?” what are you really asking? I think I probably do turn to books for some sort of spiritual and intellectual nourishment: I think I’m going to learn something about the world, about people. But if by “improving”, we mean it would help me go up the class ladder, then it’s not what reading and writing should be about. Books are serving the same function as certain brands of cars or jewellery, in just denoting social position.
It has often struck me reading choices (along with other kinds of cultural choices) are indeed in part a form of conspicuous consumption. They are perceived as demonstrating, not our wealth, but our refinement, taste, discernment, which have long been an important aspect of status (perhaps in part because they hint at an expensive education and a life not dominated by drudgery?). When I listen to Oxbridge-educated voices on radio arts shows, minutely examining the merits of some cultural artifact or other, it does indeed sometimes seem to me that what is really going on is a kind of status display. Look how well-read, how refined, how exquisitely discerning we are!
And I agree with Gaiman and Ishiguro that this kind of status anxiety is, in part, the basis of the stigmatisation of “genre”. People who are concerned to be seen as refined are anxious about touching a book with a genre label, at least in part, because they are anxious about calling their refinement into question. Some might feel the same anxiety about serving an unfashionable wine, or wearing the wrong kind of tie at a social event, or enjoying a piece of music which their peers regard as uncool.