24. The Great Debate: Commercial vs Literary

Why do so many people hate commercial...anything? Fiction, movies, music (I don't actually know if "commercial" is the correct term for movies and music, but I mean it in the same way as it is used for commercial fiction). Why is it that because people like it, you have to hate it be really serious about the subject?

No one can tell me this isn't true (though you can certainly give me a counter if you'd like)--we see it all of the time. "How can you like that book when a bunch of 13 year olds read it?"--"That song was good...until they started playing it on the radio."

How does content change based on where it’s played or who listens to/reads/watches something? We get this a ton now with Twilight; it’s hated because it’s liked. Granted, Twilight is a horribly written book and the Great Twilight Debate encompasses a bit more than that, but you definitely see it…the people that hate the books, having never read a sentence of it, because 1.) He sparkles and 2.) It’s a cultural phenomenon right now.

This has always and will always drive me crazy. I don’t think that literary and commercial fiction can be compared--yes, they exist within the same sphere artistically, no doubt, but they are essentially two very different creatures. It would be like comparing the jingle for McDonald’s commercials to Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing. Are they both musical creations? Absolutely. Are they there to achieve the same purpose? No. So, how do you compare them and decide one is better than the other?

There is no real definition for these two entities (in the sense that no one has laid down official characteristics that get you in to one category or the other), but, basically, I would say you can point to a literary book if you would read it in school, because they wouldn’t be caught dead handing us commercial fiction (understandable, in a sense, but it really gives literary snobs more ground to bash commercial). I can understand separating the two, but why does commercial fiction have to be “bad”? In general, it’s not written as technically well as literary, that’s true--literary writers tend to have more focus on the technique, whereas commercial writers care more about the story itself (currently, anyway). My problem with it, summed up, primarily focuses on this: People enjoy reading commercial fiction; you need something light sometimes, a story you can get lost in, and this often isn’t the case with literary fiction. Commercial fiction can be mindless, but why is that wrong? It’s getting people to read something…and in a culture that is slowly losing it’s grammatical skills, I think this is certainly a benefit.

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If anyone is interested in this subject, this links to a website with a pretty cool article involving what constitutes which definition:

http://www.mirtamimansary.com/todays-rant/how-to-tell-literary-from-commercial-fiction/