I agree on the popularity aspect: one of the best writers alive is John LeCarre, and he’s always a major seller. It’s rare, though, in my opinion, that there’s such an overlap between artistic, well, weight and mass appeal; mass appeal usually requires a sacrifice to the lowest common denomitator, BECAUSE everyone reacts so individually to a piece of art.
Frankly, I think SK’s LCD is his gift for stringing you along, keeping those pages turning, and for achieving SOME kind of emotional reaction, even if it is a negative one, in today’s benumbed world. YMM, of course, V.
There’s one sure sign if it’s art – if people are still reading it long after the author has died. Any contemporary judgment is just a guess, and could be way off (consider that the most critically acclaimed 19th century novelist was Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth).
True. For the last few years, every time I’m at a loss for something to read I pull up the last hundred or whatever years of Nobel Prize winners and hunt a dusty book at the library. I’ve discovered some TREMENDOUSLY great books, and they’ve all stood the test of time.
Read most of the books that Oprah (or whoever) pushes today, and try to imagine ANY of them being of any importance in twenty or thirty years.
Huh. That’s not at all the impression I get from his works; which ones in particular are you talking about?
The rest of this post will contain spoilers for various King novels.
The world I live in is a dark and nasty place. There are monsters, and there are things worth freaking out about. King’s writing is so effective because it can show me the monsters that I know are out there.
But – and this is important – he shows people dealing with the monsters. Again and again you see characters in his stories who are able to narrate monsters into submission, characters who overcome horror and violence through creativity. Sometimes through pure creativity, too – Satan is defeated by a man wielding paper flowers, simply because Satan can’t function in the heart of a man who wields paper flowers.
And when creativity doesn’t triumph (as it does in It, Needful Things, and other books), often good old-fashioned integrity wins the day. Plain folks with common sense know better than to let the demon out of the garage, and so an extradimensional invasion is thwarted.
King sometimes screws things up badly; especially his writings from the early to mid nineties were wincingly terrible, IMO, cliched rehashes of his former writings that didn’t hold together. But when he’s on his game, he’s a great writer, prose clear as glass, an ear for dialogue, and an unerring sense of story.
There’s great work being done in “genre” writings these days; there’s been great work in genre writings ever since they existed. Here’s hoping the National Book Awards get over themselves and start recognizing the Le Guins, the Le Carres, the Pullmans of the world for what they are: great artists.
I have to agree with the NBF decision, too. Remember this is an honorary award; they’re not saying any of his individual works are high literature, but they’re recognizing the scope of his efforts as a writer.
Though I haven’t managed to read anything by King in at least 10 years, I think many of his early novels stand out for several reasons. One, they demonstrate an awareness of literary motifs and pastiches and aren’t afraid to reference canonical writing. ‘Salem’s Lot is the perfect example, going far beyond a simple reworking of Dracula. You’ll find in that novel allusions to Sherwood Anderson and Wallace Stevens one large portion of the book works significantly with the imagery from Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” for example) and a host of others. There’s an attempt at style most popular writers wouldn’t even bother to execute. Mood and theme are not slaves to the plot but are allowed their own space.
When I read King I always got the feeling that there’s someone intelligent behind the words, someone who’s aware of his craft because he’s read across many different genres and is attempting to be as good as he can be. I never got that with some of his contemporaries, like Dean Koontz, Patricia Cornwell or Robin Cook.
So for all King’s shortcomings - verbosity, clumsiness with characterizations and so on - there’s usually an uncommon level of effort in the works by him that I’ve read to compensate. Whether or not that effort as I perceived it is still there in his current output, I don’t know.
Oddly enough, I had to do a great deal of research on Tennyson for a class some time ago. Much of the contemporary criticism he drew echoed a lot of the criticism King draws today–too popular, mass market drivel, etc.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if King was being studied in colleges in a hundred years, if only because he’s quite popular and influential…and surprisingly skilled.
And no matter what you say, you can’t convince me that the Dark Tower series doesn’t stand as one of the greatest series of all time.
King’s greatest failing, IMHO, is that he usually shows evil to be supernatural; external to mankind. Sure, we live in a dark and nasty world, but the evil we live with is manmade; in King’s universe it’s usually not (with notable exceptions, like Dolores Claibourne and Misery). This is a copout, again IMHO, and an abdication of responsibility, which adds a touch of self-loathing to the mix.
An example. Parallel Pet Sematary with a book I think it owes a great deal to: The World According to Garp. Garp’s not a great book, but it’s better I think in this way: both books are about how we deal with grief; PS almost entirely, and Garp for a major chunk. In Garp, when their child dies, their world is destroyed, they grieve, they find each other again, they move on.
OTOH, in PS, when their child dies, the father is unable to recover, and his grief warps his universe, and he loses his soul to an external, supernatural evil.
IMHO, both books start with at the same point, and Garp deals realistically and humanly and redemptively with the subject, while PS takes the same subject and, imagining a worst-case instead of best case, makes of the reader a co-conspirator in the voyeuristic, sadistic destruction of a human being’s soul.
I’m not saying that makes it not art or anything; I’m just saying that that’s why I don’t like King.
In The Shining, [spoiler]Jack’s self destructive tendency and self-loathing are manipulated by the external evil of the haunted hotel to drag his soul down to hell.* This is anti-human, IMHO, and indulges a sadistic self-loathing that taints King’s work for me.
lissener, ** King and Irving are my two favorite writers and I have to say the comparison doesn’t hold up. If Garp had been offered the opportunity to bring his child back to life through supernatural means, I think he would have tried it. I probably would have.
King’s a master of the “what-if?” and Pet Sematary illustrates it well. If faced with a horror out of comprehension how would a real person react? King captures a feel for real people going the unreal circumstances perfectly.
King’s the master of the worst case scenario “what if.” Almost all of King’s novels ask the question: What if you were offered the power to ________? Would you do the right thing, or the wrong thing? Most of King’s protagonists make the wrong choice, and we simply watch, sadistically, while they self-destruct.
In PS, he’s confronted with a choice, and me makes the wrong descision, and we watch as he loses his soul as a consequence. That’s not redemptive, it’s sadistic and voyeuristic.
I’m not requiring that literature be universally redemptive; but personally I think that can part of what distinguishes great art from . . . not so great art.
To me, one of the real joys of fantasy (and I consider horror a subset of fantasy) is breaking the bonds of reality, facing a character with a choice or danger that is impossible, and seeing what happens.
Fantasy allows for pure character. Every other thing can be manipulated in a fantasy story (and in bad ones, of course, even the character is manipulated). It’s really no different than “How would you spend 100 million dollars if you won the lottery?” or “What would you do if…” You manipulate the environment in order to reveal character.
Well, seriously, what would be the point in a story about someone who makes all the right choices?
“He won a hundred million dollars and he used it only for good and spent the rest of his life happy. The end.”
You said:
Well, what if reality isn’t particularly redemptive? What happens when people make the wrong choices? They don’t need to be taken by demons to make wrong choices. How about if they fall into the grip of alcohol, or other drugs? How about if they commit suicide? I think it’s fair to say that not all tragedies end happily; not all tragedies have any sort of redemption at the end of them. I don’t think “realistic” and “redemptive” can, or should, be paired all that often.
yes, Julie; but King’s fantasy always takes us on a journey of self-destruction. Fantasy that presents the character with a choice, and then shows us how making that difficult choice helps the character to change and grow, works better for me (LeGuin, e.g.). King’s always leaves me feeling dirty and depressed, and a little hostile toward life in general.
I don’t think that shining a light on the dark heart of humanity is necessarily the mark of a bad writer—would you say Dostoyevsky was a hack because his novels aren’t particularly chipper?
I totally disagree. sure, King’s characters live in a universe filled with malign entities and dark forces, but usually the supernatural elements in king’s novels serve as a catalyst for the unleashing of human evil. Look at the The Shining example you quoted–the evil in the Overlook ignites Jack Torrance’s madness and self-destruction. The same is true in most of his books, most notably Desperation, Bag of Bones, and Needful Things. The failings of the human soul are the greatest evil in King’s world.
But the self-destruction of flawed men has been a mainstay of literature for 2,500 years, from Sophocles’s Oedipus trilogy to the present day. Think of all the literary characters who have been devoured by their own weaknesses–Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Dr. Faustus, Bosola from The Duchess of Malfi, Emma Bovary, the Baron De Charlus, Captain Ahab, Hedda Gabler, Michael Henchard, Eustacia Vye, Anna Karenina, just to name a few. To quote William Faulkner,
Your points are contradictory-on one hand you say "King’s greatest failing, IMHO, is that he usually shows evil to be supernatural; external to mankind. " and on the other you say that depicting human evil is anti-human and self-loathing. Which is it?
And just as an FYI–“sadistic self-loathing” is an oxymoron–sadism is the enjoyment of the suffering of others. “Masochistic self-loathing” makes more sense.
In the examples you’ve given, the characters do face choices, and they do change and grow. They don’t seem to be changing and growing in the direction you’d prefer, but it sounds like changing and growing.
It might be important for me to note that I’ve only read two King books. One, I liked (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon). One, I hated (The Gunslinger). I don’t read horror because I’m a big fat wimp.
Yes, again, Julie; but good tragedy, IMHO, still teaches us something valuable when we’ve experienced it; there is a sacrifice for a greater good in most such tragedy. In King, there is simply a downward spiral, leading nowhere.
And I understand that reality isn’t particular redemptive. I’m not faulting him for being unrealistic, so I don’t get that.
In any case, I’m not arguing for literature without conflict, as in your silly example. I’m expressing a preference for literature in which the conflict is redemptive–either to the protagonist or to us.
There are really only two kinds of stories, if you ask me. In all stories, except those exceptions that someone will come back at me with, so we’ll consider it a given that there are exceptions–in all stories, there is a moment when a character is offered redemption: he’s offered a choice. If he makes the right choice, there is a happy ending. If he makes the wrong choice, it’s a tragedy, with an unhappy ending. In great tragedies–Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare–we learn something of the difficulties of being human by witnessing the tragedy; we witness human evil, or human apathy, or whatever, being triumphant, and we learn a little bit more about human nature, and ourselves. IMHO, since King’s evil is so often extra-human, and does not represent a real human choice, all we witness is a universe supernaturally stacked against us, instead of a universe that offers us the opportunity of redemption.
Anyway; all this is very abstract of course; I’m just trying to express the kind of hollow empty darkness I feel when I read King. A Shakespearean tragedy doesn’t leave me feeling defeated, like King does. Anyway, just my Rorschach.
(Well thanks for introducing your wonted tone of sarcasm and hostility. This is not a right or wrong situation; it’s not even particularly important to me, g, so after this I’ll withdraw so you can bluster and blow.)
Who ever said chipper? Why can’t you engage with the discussion as is? Why do you have to hyperbolize each point before you can address it?
In King’s universe, people who are trying to conquer their own demons (Jack Torrance again) are thrown a wrench: an undefeatable, external, supernatural evil. The universe, he’s suggesting, or at least portraying, is stacked against you. You might as well give up now.
Yadda yadda. Don’t EVEN challenge me to a literary pissing contest, g, because you will lose. I don’t need to drop intimidating names in order to appear knowledgeable on a subject. As I wrote while you were googling, there is redemptive tragedy, and then there is King.
I never said that depicting human evil is anti-human and self-loathing.
This is bullshit. Sadistic and self-loathing is what I wrote, and sadistic and self-loathing is what I meant. And effWHYeye, hon: “masochistic self-loathing” may not be oxymoronic, but it’s certainly redundant, and not what I meant at all.
If we use Shakespeare, which seems reasonable since we’re both probably familiar with him, then I still don’t think I can agree about tragedy being, well, anything but a downward spiral.
Othello, Lear, Hamlet, R&J, the Scottish play (to be pretentious), would you say these tragedies have much of a sacrifice for a greater good? To me, what makes most tragedies tragic is that the suffering is unnecessary. If only the bozos had made the right choices! If only!
I guess I don’t see where that’s particularly applicable with most of the tragedies I’ve read. Greek tragedies often have only one reaction: “Whew, glad I’m not that guy!” We watch as the deck is stacked against Oedipus. There are no good choices for O. He’s doomed.
Now, I can definitely see how that sort of story could leave a bad taste in your mouth. I feel the same way when I read something like the story of Cain and Abel. Cain didn’t have a chance. God wasn’t on his side and it didn’t matter how nice and tidy his sheaves were, they couldn’t compare with Abel’s lambkins.
But I don’t think having a choice and choosing incorrectly has quite the same feel, so I’m obviously missing your point.
But I guess we’re coming back to the same point. No, it’s not a “real human choice” as I understand it. The point of horror would seem to be offering an unreal choice–a choice that isn’t otherwise likely, or even possible–and then seeing what happens. I think all such stories can end up being cautionary, if someone would choose to read them that way. And I think such things reveal (or, at least, can reveal) very fundamental human nature, without the restrictions of physical reality.
Now, we could discuss for days whether an extreme situation reveals character or creates it, but that’s probably tangential to this thread.