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  • On Being Bad
  • Brian McHale

When we are invited to reflect on "bad books," I take it that what is really meant is "books that somebody misguidedly thinks are good"; otherwise, why bother? After all, the world is full of bad books that nobody would bother to argue about. For instance, I read a lot of science fiction, and plenty of it is pretty bad, but so what? Who wants to hear about my discoveries in the lower reaches of genre fiction, or to argue about whether (say) the last volume of David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series is bad or not? Badness comes with the territory. Nothing's at stake.

But if I call a book "bad" when something is at stake—when, by some criteria, it ought to qualify as good; when it's a bestseller (The Da Vinci Code [2003]), or a text by a canonical author (Theodore Dreiser), or one that turns up on course syllabi for reasons that somebody might find dubious (piety, political correctness; Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937])—then what I'm really saying isn't that the book is bad but that its readers are bad; or, more to the point, that they're not as good as I am. Their taste is bad, where mine (of course) is refined; their education is inadequate, compared to mine; they're susceptible to being distracted by commerce or ideology or piety or the prestige of big names, whereas I'm immune to all that, etc., etc. This seems, well, invidious; anyway, I don't think I really want to go there. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let readers read as they please, and what they please.

Brian McHale
The Ohio State University
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