Ruiz Zafón dismisses divide between high and low art as 'cultural fraud'

I enjoyed reading this article over at The Times Online very much. Here it is:

One of the world’s most popular authors has entered the debate over high and low art, saying that there is no such thing as good literature, only good writing.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose literary thriller The Shadow of the Wind is the best-selling Spanish novel after Don Quixote, suggested to an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that “the invention of the highbrow and the lowbrow is the greatest cultural fraud of the 20th century”.

“It’s a marketing device — it’s a way of telling people who consume specific cultural products that you are smarter because you are buying this,” he said.

He later added: “I’m not interested in having a snobby thought police that would tell me what is good, what is bad, that I cannot listen to a Britney Spears record if I feel like it or I cannot read Dan Brown or whatever. I think we all have a brain between our ears and we can find our own way.”

Ruiz Zafón was partly responding to an interview in The Times last week with Jonathan Mills, director of the Edinburgh International Festival, the three-week celebration of music, opera, theatre and dance which 62 years ago established Edinburgh’s reputation as the cultural capital of the world every August. Mills said that far too many Britons never stretched themselves culturally, subsisting on an artistic diet of “white bread without the crusts.”

While sport and pop culture had their place (he supports Chelsea and loves Bob Dylan) there should be a premium on entertainment that challenged an audience to think. Making the case for serious, highbrow and experimental work in an increasingly “trivialised” national conversation, he said that he was concerned about what would happen “if as a society all we do is entertain ourselves rather than nurture our spiritual, intellectual and emotional needs”. His views split opinion in the city, with one leading Fringe venue owner calling him “intellectually precious” and another defending his right to protest at the lack of adventure displayed by the “TV generation”.

Ruiz Zafón’s riposte has now drawn its own reaction. Rose Tremain, a serial winner of literary awards whose novels include Music and Silence and The Road Home, said that Ruiz Zafón’s argument ignored the meaningful difference between books intended purely for entertainment and “serious fiction that’s going beyond telling a story and is trying to make you think about the human condition”.

At their best those novels transcended narrative to “deliver to their readers things that they never considered that they then take into their personal psychology, that moment of revelation that you occasionally get from a book”.

Alexander McCall Smith, the author of The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency and scores of other works ranging from legal text books to a series of novels about a Scottish-American moral philosopher, agreed that there was obviously a difference “between Mills & Boon on the one hand and Madame Bovary on the other.” However, he was wary of the literary snobbery that led people to say “the most extraordinarily condescending things” to him about his own novels when they have not read them or to overlook the psychological insights and sense of place in the crime novels of Patricia Highsmith.

He believes that such prejudice would have hobbled some of the greats of the past. “Somerset Maugham would be described as a middle-brow novelist now. I suspect there would be many people who would be sniffy about Dickens. I don’t think Dickens would win many awards.”

That is Ruiz Zafón’s point, too. “We tend to forget that the vast majority of what we consider the classsics were the popular fiction of their day,” he said.

“From Cervantes to Dickens to Shakespeare. . . they were so popular and their work was so powerful that it transcended its time.” Despite his commercial success, literary editors tend to like Ruiz Zafón, partly because both The Shadow of the Wind and his new novel, The Angel’s Game, are explicitly concerned with the processes of reading and writing.

His non-hierarchical view of literature can be traced back to his childhood, where Harold Robbins nestled naturally next to John Steinbeck on the shelves at home and he learnt English by reading Stephen King novels.

“To me art is about execution, not pretension,” he said. “There’s good writing and bad writing and you can find good writing in genre fiction, in literary fiction, in mainstream fiction and you can find bad writing there as well. You may aspire to be very deep and profound and smart and refined. Actually that doesn’t matter. A crime novel may be much better than a lot of very pretentious and self-important literary works and the other way around.

Many people never appreciate that because they “are racist when it comes to books”. “One of the things I try to communicate is a respect for books of all sorts.