Soapbox.
Has anyone read the Modern Critical Views entry on Stephen King? What did you think of it?
For those who don’t know (and I sure didn’t), the Modern Critical Views series is “a critical presentation of those men and women who, from medieval times to the present, have shaped the Western tradition.” Yadda yadda. Each book focuses on one writer, with essays, bibliographies, chronologies, etc.
The series profiles important writers, like Chekhov, Emerson, Faulkner, Shakespeare, James, Joyce, etc.
They did one on King. High compliment, yes? Well, no. At least not in the introduction, by Harold Bloom. (He does the intros for all these books.) Bloom is a Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale, more yadda yadda. Guy’s got literary credentials.
He admits that people read King, who might not read anything else. But he doesn’t see this as a good thing; he sees it as “a large emblem of the failures of American education.”
Some quotes from the intro. Bloom read Carrie and The Shining (and then probably took his brain out and washed it).
“With great effort, I have just reread both . . . The narrative line of each book has a certain coherence and drive; the prose is indistinguished, and there is nothing much that could be termed characterization or inwardness, or even vivid caricature.”
"I cannot locate any aesthetic dignity in King’s writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he. There is a palpable sincerity to everything that he has done: that testifies to his decency, and to his social benignity. Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.
The essays in the book are reprints from other sources, and might be helpful to crib from if you’re doing a book report on Carrie.
I don’t know, but I would suppose that Bloom exerts some influence in deciding what writers are included in this series. If he so deplores King (and the rest of us who read and love him), why did he do this book? For the money?
I also don’t know how I feel about this. I’m tired of the notion that just because something is popular, it’s no good. On the other hand, I can understand how someone like Bloom might not be capable of appreciating King.
I think King’s books will still be read many years from now, and that they embody much of what is important to Americans in the late 20th century, what’s on our minds, what we’re afraid of. So Bloom’s partly right: King is a sociological phenomenon.
So what’s wrong with that?
