Dude, I was being neither sarcastic nor hostile. In any evetn, it looks like havoing an earnest with you is impossible. I provided exmples to demonstrate a point and you call it a “literary pissing contest.” I don’t why you have this permanent hate on for me, but any hostility you see is from your own imagination.
I’m staying well away from your threads indefinitely.
Dude, I was being neither sarcastic nor hostile. In any event, it looks like having an earnest with you is impossible. I provided exmples to demonstrate a point and you call it a “literary pissing contest.” I don’t why you have this permanent hate on for me, but any hostility you see is from your own imagination.
I’m staying well away from your threads indefinitely.
For what it’s worth, gobear, I thought you made an excellent post, and I’m not what problem lissener has with it (sarcastic? huh?), other than the fact that you pretty thoroughly debunked his assertions about King.
This sentence sums up something I was trying to put together most elegantly. I agree with all of your post, but this sentence in particular expresses one of the things I love most about King’s work. Well said.
What fairy tale world do you live in where the world ISN’T stacked against you? Life isn’t some Horatio Alger novel where it all works out in the end. King just adds a segment of supernatural horror to the already present evil of mankind. In many cases, the evil of man is just represented by the supernatural. The characters themselves are still free to decide whether they will embrace the evil or fight it. In the Stand, it is laid out that there is the Light and the Dark, and people had the choice whether to go for flash in the pan evil or working hard good. All of the characters were flawed in one way or another, but they all dealt with the supernatural guy in different ways. It was similar, there were human characters that It used to accomplish it’s goals besides it’s own actions. Still, the undefeted supernatural evil sure gets defeated alot for being undefeatable.
Just because the instigator of the choice is inhuman doesn’t make the responses any less real. For Huck Finn, it is hard to believe a young boy and a black man would be traveling down the Mississippi on a raft in that day and age, does that make their choices not really a human choice, since that is very unlikely to happen?
Your intellectual snobbery is SOOOOO becoming. Let me know when you start appearing knowlegable on this subject.
IIRC, Oprah has switched over to the classics in her book club. Last I remember, they were reading *East of Eden * by John Steinbeck.
Yeah, but just imagine someone reading that book when it’s thirty years old!
Julie
For what it’s worth, Hobbes would say that the world is very much stacked against us - in “Leviathan” (which I have not read, but have been taught about), he asserts that the natural state of man is violence anarchy - that without large numbers of rules, enforced by states, human lives would be “nasty, brutish, and short”. King says that the universe is a bad, scary place, and that the human condition is fundamentally a disturbing and threatening one - well, so does Hobbes, and so (as already mentioned) do a lot of “literary” authors. Art need not be affirmative.
For that matter, I’ve been listening to Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov” - extremely famous piece of work, truly beautiful and it stands the test of time. It’s also very, very Russian. 
I’m too tired to do a decent summary of the opera, but suffice to say that any opera that depicts a historical leader who (the opera asserts) murders his was to power, dies with the words “forgive me”, and then Russia falls into a time of troubles - though I don’t know if the opera mentions that last - this is not a happy opera. But it’s classic.
King’s novels aren’t all that happy. I can’t know yet it they’re classics, but the gloominess doesn’t disqualify them.
Considering that one of King’s major influences was H.P. Lovecraft, I rather think that the idea that “The universe is stacked against you. You might as well give up now,” is at the core of a lot of King’s work, although unlike Lovecraft, King occasionally let his characters have a happy ending.
However, I think King is typical of most horror writers in elliciting the emotions you complain of, lissener. Isn’t that more or less the point of the entire genre? Rather than compare him to literary fiction, I wonder how you compare him to other horror writers? Who’s an author in the genre that you approve of? What, in your opinion, would be “good” horror?
Personally, I feel that *Wuthering Heights * is just as dark and hopeless as anything King has ever written. (That scene in which Heathcliff confesses to digging up Cathy’s body . . . shudder)
Sylvia Plath’s *The Bell Jar, * Shakespeare’s *Titus Andronicus *and just about anything by Edgar Allen Poe: these are all extremely dark tales of grief, suffering and psychological pain which are now accepted as classic tales.
Actually, King’s books have more of a positive, redemptive message: that at the last moment, the human spirit may just triumph against evil.
Well, that was kinda my point, Miller: by giving him this award, the National Book Award has kind of made it necessary to consider him in the context of “literature.”
For what it’s worth, and judging from the teapost tempest above i won’t be able to express clearly why, but there is some great literature that is dark and dreary: I think Clive Barker, at his best, sees deeper into things than King does; at his worst, it’s genre tripe. The Haunting of Hill House is a thousand times better than any of King’s plagiarisms of it. Somehow, at the end of that book, I feel like Jackson has made me feel the depth and the emptiness of the universe; she’s made the dread and horror universal. King’s is, to me, always just about the loser he dreamed up for the sole purpose of torturing (cf., Gerald’s Game). I have not read Wuthering Heights, though I’ve seen the video (KaTe!). Hunger by Knut Hamsun is very dark; as is Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. And A Confederacy of Dunces, though I’d hardly call that a great novel. And I LOVE Jim Thompson’s novels, and his stuff is about the least redemptive stuff I can think of. But in his novels, and in Film Noir, which is equally dark, there’s still a sense that each man is responsible for his own downfall. In King, I feel like he refuses to accept that, and blames a cruel universe rather than the weakness of man. He acknowledges the weakness of man, and victimizes it; subjects it to the cruel universe; but he fights dirty, and novels like Gerald’s Game and Pet Sematary, while certainly page turners, are the most nearly pornographic (and I DON’T mean erotic) sadism I’ve ever seen an author visit on a character.
Obviously, I’m not making myself very clear, but King leaves me feeling lesser, while the dark literature I mentioned above doesn’t, for whatever reason. As Hunger spirals into madness, you learn something real about obsession and fear and, of course, madness; I learn nothing from Stephen King but about his own voyeuristic sadism. (Don’t even get me STARTED on the Bachman books . . . totally unredeemable, IMHO.)
Forgot to respond to the Plath reference: I think Plath falls just short of being a great poet because she indulged the same kind of misanthropy. Her later vision–her most powerful work–suffers from a narrowness of scope, and a simple meanness that somehow tarnishes the poems. The Bell Jar was earlier, and not a very good book, but suffers from much the same kind of indulgence.
sheesh. must perview.
That’s “National Book Foundation” and “teapot tempest.”
What video?
The video of Kate Bush’s first single, “Wuthering Heights.” I’ve even seen a parody video done by a British comedienne who’s name I wouldn’t remember if you shot my grandmother.
Your point should be clear in your post so that those who are not aware of your posting history can understand it. I am happy to see that we are mostly in agreeance about what is and is not art.
The title of your OP implies that popular writing is not art. If one is to debate A vs. B, the implication is that A and B are in opposition to one another. I was responding to that. Obviously, I misinterpreted your intention.
Anything produced for other than purely functional reasons is art. Instructions, movie credits, lists of ingredients, etc., usually fall into the category of purely functional. If everything produced for any reason is art–in this case if all writing is art–we lose the useful distinction between the aesthetic appeal of the form (art) and the purely functional (not art).
You obviously haven’t read Let’s Go Play at the Adams.
Obviously a debate for another place and time, but I don’t think “aesthetic appeal of the form” is a requirement for art.
I agree entirely. Some of the most powerful art I have ever seen is also the ugliest. (Picasso’s* Guernica *comes to mind.)
Art is not just something which is pretty to look at, and pleasant to the senses. Art is something which evokes an emotion from the viewer. It can be any emotion: happiness, awe, horror, anger or sadness, but art must evoke some sort of response in order for it to be valuable.
That his books are powerful enough to make **lissner ** need “recovery time” after reading them is why I feel that King is truly an artist.
I want to clarify my first post. I wasn’t saying King necessarily deserved it or didn’t. I was saying they were most likely basing their choice to give it to him on his sheer ability to evoke feelings. That’s not giving into to popularity at all. It’s using a different criterion.
On a side note, lissener your memory of the meanings of the things you’ve read in King books is about as good as Roger Ebert’s memory of LOTR.
Neither do I. In the part you quoted, I made a distinction between the aesthetic and the functional, calling the former art and the latter not, but I made no claim that aesthetic appeal is a requirement. I did, however, state exactly what I think is required of art earlier in the same paragraph that you quoted.
Thank you! I read that book, then spent years trying to forget I’d ever read it, then spent years trying to remember what that book I spent so much time trying to forget was called (I know that makes no sense).
Red hot pokers. Oh my god.
I disagree with lissener about King, but I liked the Kate Bush reference.