“Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!”
- William Blake
Let’s start with this: an excellent article by Stephen King on Harry Potter and reading in modern society. [Warning: do not read it if you haven't read the Potter books, because it spoils them completely. And if you think the books are silly or beneath you, you are a silly person. You can understand this post without reading King's article.]
There’s one quotation from near the end which I particularly liked, and which is the basis of this post.
I began by quoting Shakespeare; I’ll close with the Who: The kids are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story (important) and do it without talking down (more important) or resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they’ll kill the damn thing.
And that is the essence of the problem with modern academia and people like the despicable Harold Bloom (who, incidentally, hates both Rowling and King). Not only do they have a terrible idea of what makes a good novel (something as obscurantist and incomprehensibly written as possible, with little to nothing real to say about the world), they also want the novel to be dead. The idea that “no-one reads anymore” and “all the good novels were written in the past” is essential to their understanding of art: that it’s something exclusive that only they and their buddies can understand. If it’s popular (i.e. King or Rowling) then it must be bad. If they had lived in Shakespeare’s times, they (like many others) would have thought him mediocre; they would have said the same about Dickens or Chesterton or Mark Twain or any other great artist popular in his own time.
But people like Harold Bloom aren’t just glorifying a past they intentionally distort: they’re strangling the present. To a large degree thanks to them, the current attitude towards art in our society is deeply unhealthy. It’s not just that some writers get overlooked – that has always happened and probably always will, to some degree. And it’s not just that some academics wouldn’t recognize a great novel if someone hit them repeatedly in the face with it (Harold, I’m thinking of you) – no, even readers think lowly of what they enjoy reading. Millions of people read Stephen King, and there’s good reason for it: not just because his books are often exciting or scary, but because they’re full of wonderful observations of modern society, strong and memorable characters, powerful themes that are relevant and important, and on a sentence-to-sentence level, simply fantastic writing.
But how many of these readers are aware, when they’re putting away It or Duma Key, that they’ve just read a literary masterpiece? Almost none of them. “I know it’s just Stephen King,’” they say, “but I kinda like it.” As if reading something enjoyable has to be justified. As if art must, by definition, be unpleasant to be meaningful. It is one of the best novels ever written about childhood and childhood friendships. Duma Key is a deeply thoughtful work about friendship, fatherhood, the human body, and art. They are also exciting and funny and scary – like a good Shakespeare play.
King makes another very useful observation:
And, of course, the bigheads would never have credited Harry’s influence in the first place, if the evidence hadn’t come in the form of best-seller lists. A literary hero as big as the Beatles? ”Never happen!” the bigheads would have cried. ”The traditional novel is as dead as Jacob Marley! Ask anyone who knows! Ask us, in other words!”
But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire, right now it’s probably healthier than the adult version, which has to cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious ”literary novels” each year.
You see, a great many kids still read. It’s when they turn into adults that they stop. And why is that? It’s because when they’re adults, the books they are expected to read are shit. The critics haven’t applied their disgusting ideas to children’s literature as much (yet) – if only because they don’t take it seriously in the first place. What children read is considered to be mostly stupid anyway, so they have much greater leeway when it comes to reading books they like. But as they grow older, they are taught that the kind of books they enjoyed were stupid, now it’s time to read something boring. Something that no-one but professional critics would really read in the first place; something that people mostly praise because they think they ought to, not because it actually did something for them.
That’s what Harold Bloom and his intellectual bedfellows (like the equally idiotic Theodor Adorno with his hatred of anything modern) are selling us: the death of art. Because what is art if not the ability to reach out and touch people? The ability to talk about the things that make us human, both good and bad? What is art if not imagination and craft combined into something that transcends both?
Art, Mr. Bloom, is not your exclusive boys’ club. It’s a living, breathing entity, a force that is alive now, not just in your silly and outdated idea of a canon. It shouldn’t be populist, but it has every right to be popular. And I hope that one day it crushes you and your accomplices, you stranglers of dreams, because the alternative is too terrible to consider.
You know Bloom has never irked me to the degree that he has some many others including yourself. I guess I sympathize with his concern for standards and the waning quality of art in the western world. Regarding your article I wanted to make two points, first Bloom does not condemn all current novelists in America or abroad and second I don’t think Bloom finds only the novel to be endanger so much as all art and culture to be endanger due to a lack of standards.
The subjectivity of art makes standards much more difficult to judge than in other fields. It is important to remember that the “canon” attached to the end of Bloom’s book The Western Canon was an compromise he made in order to have the book published and Bloom has expressed on numerous occassions that it is far from a complete or perfect list.
Some of the living novelists Bloom has praised include Philip Roth, Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon and John Crowley in America and most prominently abroad is the Portugese novelist Jose Saramago whom Bloom finds to be the most powerful living novelist but he also has praised Will Self, Peter Ackroyd, John Banville and A.S Byatt from the UK.
I don’t think Bloom would claim the novel is dead in America, we have great novelists (and poets too.) There has been a shocking loss of cultural knowledge/ memory in the past few generations that only seems to grow as means to determine the quality of a work diminsh. Philip Roth perhaps expressed this looming “dark age” best in his novel “The Dying Animal” which seems very prophetic of our time written it so happens a little over a year prior to 9/11:
We watched the new year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones and none ignited by bin Laden. Light whirling over night time London and more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire a facsimile flame throwing weapon such as Warner von Bron might have designed for Hitler’s annihilating arsenal. The historical missile of missiles, the rocket of rockets, the bomb of bombs with ancient powers the launching pad the whole of humanity the target. All evening long on networks everywhere the mockery of the Armageddon that we had been awaiting in our backyard shelters since August 6, 1945.
How could it not happen? Even on that very night, especially on that night people anticipating the worst as though the evening were one long air raid drill. The wait for the chain of horrendous Hiroshimas to link in synchronized destruction the abiding civilizations of the world. It’s now or never and it never came.
Maybe that is what everyone was celebrating. That it hadn’t come, never came. That the disaster of the end will now never arrive. All the disorder is controlled disorder punctuated with intervals to sell automobiles. TV doing what it does best the triumph of trivialization over tragedy. The triumph of the surface with Barbara Walters. Rather than the destruction of the age old cities an international eruption of the superficial instead. A global outbreak of sentimentality such as even American’s hadn’t witnessed before. From Sydney to Bethlehem to Times Square the recalculating of clichés occurs at super sonic speeds. No bombs go off no blood is shed, the next bang you hear will be the boom of prosperity and the explosion of markets. Watching this hyped up production of staged pandemonium I have a sense of the moneyed world eagerly entering the prosperous dark ages. A night of human happiness to usher in barbarism.com. To welcome appropriately the shit and the kitsch of the new millennium. A night not to remember but to forget.”
But is art really waning that much? I’m not going to say things are great, but there are some pretty amazing works of art out there – but Harold Bloom spends most of his time condemning them.
You’re right about the first point – unlike Adorno, Bloom doesn’t hate everything modern. But his idea of “standards” is quite despicable, because it excludes anything that is popular or doesn’t fit into his very narrow ideas of what it is appropriate to write about. And thus he spends his time railing against writers who are profoundly talented and have important things to say, and ultimately cultivating an incredibly unhealthy attitude towards art.
Yes, but academia has been struggling for ages to get away from the concept of a canon and this kind of thinking.
Some of these writers aren’t half bad, but I think the list says pretty much everything about what Bloom considers quality. And if these writers are all that people are supposed to read… no-one will read.
(And yes, I find J.K. Rowling to be a considerably more accomplished writer than most of those, even on a pure prose level.)
I certainly agree that we’re heading for a cultural and political dark age if things continue like this. But blaming writers like King or Rowling for it is completely upside-down. Here are writers who are both excellent and popular, and have something to say – the very fact that such a large portion of the academic and critical world has decided that only obscure and mostly unpleasant-to-read novels are art is what is leading us into a cultural dark age. People no longer believe art is valuable precisely because art has been defined as boring stuff, and those things that people do enjoy and that are meaningful are not valued as anything but commerce. And so the truly great novels of our time, like Harry Potter, are seem only as products, and even their readers miss many of the wonderful layers of meaning and philosophy.
While I respect Roth as a not-too-bad writer, this passage actually makes me wonder about his perception of the world. Since when did the 21st century invent shit and kitsch? There were more than enough inane celebrations of meaningless events before the turn of the millennium. Sentimentality and superficiality? Hello, the 1950s? The 1980s? I agree that it was a depressing spectacle, but to me this seems more like a mixture of technophobia and general nihilism. Quite fashionable with some folks, and probably even honestly meant, but not very interesting or constructive – or perceptive, for that matter.
It’s easy to always see the past as some kind of golden age, and to condemn the present as unsaveable. That’s why writers like Rowling and King interest me a whole lot more: they write about today, recognizing its flaws with much clearer and more painful perception, but not without hope.
You’re not very intelligent, are you?
No, apparently not, since I am not capable of understanding the profound wisdom of simply posting a sentence like that on someone’s website without explanation. And I like Stephen King, which is also an obvious sign of stupidity, as is any positive reaction to that incompetent populist playwright William Shakespeare and his scatological jokes.
Why don’t you go hang out with Harold and glory in your intellectual powers while the rest of the world attempts to do something meaningful?
Jeff, you’re clearly inadequate in more ways than I care to spell out for you, because if I were to do that you would only dismiss it as self-aggrandizing intellectualism and I will have only wasted my energy. That thing that’s missing, though? The nagging feeling that art is ‘waning’? It’s that a man that artlessly hurls the word fuck every five words (King) and a dreadfully barren mind like Rowling’s, which thinks and runs on sheer treacle, on platitudes, on the crassest plot elements, are the best-selling authors of our time. It’s absolutely dismaying to see how like an assembly line it is, the modern human mind: it starts with fairy tales (nothing big like Hans Christian Anderson, just the most meretricious manglings of the originals, rid of all of their power), then goes to Harry Potter, and then goes to the latest Dean Koontz or Stephen King novel–that is, of course, presupposing the mind is ever taught to make sense of words on a page.
The great writers have always been great because of what they do with language, with imagery, how they take the simplest things and assemble from them startling conceits; Shakespeare is remembered not as a populist (where did you get this idea?) but as a wordsmith. Indeed, Shakespeare is the father of modern English more than any one person not named Samuel Johnson, who was its standardizer. He cycled through a vocabulary of over 30 thousand words, whereas Ms. Rowling is dealing with her paltry three or four and the many more on the first few lines in the thesaurus (I find it hilarious how the diction is bumblingly elevated at about the fourth book and steadily so, without fixing the grammatical and syntactical foibles that first made it insufferable, like Rowling’s insistence that there is no difference between the simple past and the subjunctive, which is baffling to me, or the objective or subjective case, which seems an even more glaring elision).
Beyond that, though, let’s talk about the ways in which Charles Dickens or Jonathan Swift or, for foreign mind (I know, it must be difficult for you, what with your meager diet of Gaiman and Rowling), Nikolai Gogol and Leo Tolstoy, engaged with the problems of their age–problems like the workhouses in England, the conflict between England and Ireland, the poor and the wealthy, and so on–and the ways in which they sketched the most vivid characters, like Dickens’s fearsome Ms. Havisham or the decidedly immodest Uriah Heep; let’s talk about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; let’s talk about Gargantua and Pantagruel. But let’s not stop there! Let’s speak of Faulkner, who was infamously difficult, and the internal monologues that he wove, the narratives that he built out of the thoughts of his characters–and the vividness with which he drew his now mythic Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants, from the pernicious Snopes to the hapless Bundrens and Compsons. Where in anything written by either Ms. Rowling or Mr. King is there a passage of such throbbing beauty and lucidity as the two chapters in which the presumably dead Addie recounts her life? Where a love more real than that of Quentin for, well, his sister? But of course you know little of this because you know nothing of the history of the novel, a term which you cheapen terribly by invoking either Ms. Rowling or Mr. King, both of whom are a disgrace to the form and offer nothing at all ‘novel.’
Reading is at its core a solitary act. Popularity has nothing to do with whether something is good, to that extent I will agree with you. But the fact that you so gleefully misrepresent Bloom’s views (and it’s all right–you don’t know any better), the way you belittle at will the significance of the novel by even thinking that Harry Potter is anything like any of the works of the authors I’ve named–with that one can hardly agree, and that’s because it’s plainly absurd. But of course now you will simply seize on the time in which these authors wrote and say that I’m just a nostalgic idiot. To obviate that, even though that’s the tack you inexorably will take, let’s talk about the major writers of our time. Let’s speak of, say, José Saramago, who writes with an inimitable style in long sinuous sentences about terrific “what-if” scenarios, and who won the Nobel Prize. How about Don DeLillo, who I believe wrote the greatest novel of the past 20 years in “Underworld” and some of the greatest going further back in “Mao II” and “White Noise,” featuring the memorable, jaded, comically insular Gladneys, including Jack Gladney, Professor of Hitler Studies who also does not know German. Where is the Dylar in Ms. Rowling’s writing? It’s non-existent, of course; the only symbolism she cares for–the layers of meaning of which you speak, I presume–is the heavy-handed and obvious sort, to which there is no mystery and from which one draws not the slightest degree of edification. Beyond that, how about Cormac McCarthy, whose prose is the most starkly original and shamelessly lyrical American letters has seen perhaps since Faulkner? More to the point, how about Jonathan Franzen, who strikes a perfect tragicomic novel in his withering portrait of suburban America and the failures of the American family across generations to right one another’s mistakes in “The Corrections”? Or what may perhaps be the greatest Vietnam novel ever written, “Tree of Smoke” by Denis Johnson (published just two years ago!). How about “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk, also a Nobel Prize winner, which hearkens back both Kafka and Dostoyevsky, which holds up to the rest of the world the enduring travails of an entire people and which addresses head on the matter of terrorism?
Reading is supposed to produce aesthetic pleasure; it’s supposed to be difficult; you’re supposed to invest yourself in it. You are not a reader in that sense–what you want in your novels is all of the clichés, all of the situational-comedy comebacks and tropes that you see on television. What you want the novel to be is an echo chamber for the utter insipidness of your own life, completely devoid of anything even remotely pioneering, with no stylistic advancements, no desire to test the boundaries of anything, no intertextuality and no context in any tradition other than that of maudlin tripe and the mighty penny dreadful. Given which, it’s natural you should call Harry Potter one of the greatest novels of our time. But be assured they are nowhere near that, and may in fact be among the worst.
*strikes a perfect tragicomic balance;
And by the way, it’s funny you should quote William Blake, because Harold Bloom loved William Blake and edited the current volume of his complete works. It is clear to me you haven’t read anything by Bloom (The Western Canon, The Anxiety of Influence, for instance) and are just on here responding, farcically, to the brief invectives he wrote of Harry Potter and Stephen King. Which leads me to ask what makes you think you’re enough of an authority on Bloom’s writing and thought as to make the absurd pronouncements that you make about it?
Nevertheless, Jonas, clearly you are not, as the previous commenter said, all that bright. You might as well just accept it and continue, like the unnamed narrator of Beckett’s masterful “How It Is,” flail and gambol about in the mud of your own profound ignorance.
You know, you’ve already exposed the hollowness of your rhetoric. Clearly you’ve never read King, because he quite certainly does not do that. He does, of course, have a wonderful ear for realistic spoken language, but if that’s a crime, well…
Treacle? Really? Can you explain that?
Yes. So? I never said the opposite of that. I am only opposed to those writers who mangle language to produce obscurantist pieces which are then passed off as deep.
Where did I get this idea? Oh, I don’t know, when I studied Shakespeare? I never claimed that he was remembered as a populist – I just remarked that in his own time, people like you would probably have accused him of being one. You do know that his reputation as the greatest playwright and poet of all time developed later, right? In his own time, he was considered good, but others were generally considered better. And his plays were popular plays, enjoyed by and produced for a wide audience.
Oh dear, you don’ think you’re impressing me with your knowledge, are you? I could’ve told you the same when I was 15.
Is it a numbers game, then?
Oh no! A writer writing in their own way and not following your rules!
Not sure what this is supposed to mean, but let’s go on…
Once again, you’re revealing just how hollow your arguments are, by assuming that I read or enjoy Gaiman. You don’t know this. In fact, you know nothing about my reading habits at all, though you could probably have found out something by reading this blog. You’re just randomly applying your prejudices, assuming I fall into some generic geek cliché.
I read and enjoyed Gogol – primarily the short stories – when I was 18 or so. I haven’t read much Tolstoy, but I’ll get around to it. Did you know he hated Shakespeare?
In the works of both King and Rowling, there are many such passages, which you with your arrogance cannot see – and will never see, because you have no love of art, only of the status of art. And name-dropping. Oh, you do love your name-dropping, don’t you, even when it adds nothing to the argument save for illustrating your unspeakable amounts of knowledge? Just like every bad academic.
As a matter of fact, King and Rowling engage the topics of their time more than most “modern” or “postmodern” writers, whose idea of what the important topics are mostly consists of the pathetic psychological problems of white middle-class university professors. But you wouldn’t know that, because you have either not read their work, or read it to hate it, which amounts to the same. You don’t know about King’s evocation of the rise of dictatorship in modern America in “Under the Dome”, or his vivid and heartbreaking characters in “The Dark Tower” (with its many intertextual references, and the way it uses intertextuality not to impress critics but to tell a story), or his exploration of painting, friendship and fatherhood in “Duma Key”. In other words, you’re talking our of your arse.
Of course I don’t! I spent the last seven years studying English and American philology for nothing! I am just another nerd who makes games and must therefore be illiterate and stupid.
The only disgrace to the form is readers like you.
Do I? Please explain. Because I’m pretty much basing myself on his own writings.
Of course I don’t. Thank you for your condescension, all-knowing wise one.
Plainly.
Why have I read and enjoyed so many of them, then?
Because that’s significant?
Well, I happen to believe that a novel can have more depth than simply having symbolism – it can have political, philosophical and aesthetic levels that have nothing to do with symbols. Though I do like Rowling’s symbolism, the few times that she uses it. I don’t see how it is heavy-handed, but it’s your right to think so. (It’s the cliché thing to say, of course, but you seem to love clichés.)
I have very little interest in his work, but perhaps some day I’ll give him another chance. I like how you seem to think that these fashionable writers are somehow challenging and known only to intellectuals, though.
If you want some true lyrical beauty, read Peter S. Beagle.
You seem to believe that this is an important subject matter. I think it’s trivial navel-gazing.
Look, if you want to impress me with your name-dropping, you better drop some names that aren’t in the Fashionable Modern Writers For Beginners bucket. Try Sam Selvon, or Zadie Smith, or Drew Hayden Taylor, or Thomas King. But I guess you wouldn’t know who these people are, because they don’t fall into your conventient little mainstream of pretentiousness.
Yes.
No. Why?
So the only way for you to invest yourself in a text is for it to be difficult? I’m very sorry for you.
Not that all writing needs to be easy, but its formal complexity must be artistically justified. Usually it isn’t, and is nothing more than obfuscation to hide the shallow nature of the content.
My God, you’re hilarious. Now it’s television. Are you going through a checklist of snobbish intellectual clichés?
Do you seriously believe that I read Blake, or Chesterton’s theological work, or E.R. Eddison, or Sam Selvon, to get the same experience I would from a bad sitcom? (I’m assuming you don’t believe such a thing as good situational comedy exists.)
Ah, now you’re really starting to sound like Bloom himself. The penny dreadful – what century is this?
This is doubly funny, given that you clearly have no idea who you’re talking to and what my work is about.
Wow, you must have read very few novels to make an assertion like that.
That Bloom loved Blake does not mean that he understood him. In fact, I have read (a long time ago) his academic musings on Blake, and thought they were mostly quite ridiculous, or at least off in significant ways. And I distinctly remember the same opinion being expressed by other academics, including (I believe) G.E. Bentley, who wrote the best biography of Blake I have ever read.
You’re right, I threw The Western Canon across the room before finishing it. But I’ve read plenty of Bloom over the years.
The very idea of a “Western Canon” would’ve appalled Blake, as it does me.
I’ve read a lot more Bloom than Bloom has read King. How about that?
Clearly. Because people who go to other people’s blogs not to argue, but to tell them that they are uneducated fools, are the pinnacle of human intellect.
Ah, there is that delightful condescension again. It’s a shame you weren’t born into the times of the British Empire, you would’ve made a wonderful administrator.
All of this was nothing more than, indeed, self-aggrandizing intellectualism and a waste of your time. Your personal attacks are distasteful and idiotic, given your lack of knowledge about who I am and what I read, and you have not presented a single coherent argument, other than a lot of name-dropping. (Do you think telling me that I am ignorant and will live a miserable, stupid life becomes more true because you name-drop Beckett?)
I should pity you, really, for the way in which you exclude so much great art from your life. I should be sad that there are people so foolish that they need intellectual nitwits like Bloom to tell them what is good and what isn’t. You want to tell me that my life is sad, but my life is filled with the light of art – from Chesterton to King, from Shakespeare and Milton to Rowling, from Lord Dunsany to Tolkien to Beagle. I read the classics, and the moderns, and all those great writers people like you discard because it’s fashionable, or because someone else tells them to. I create art, I experiment, I push the boundaries every day. You sit around desperately clutching to the official, to the canon, to the safe. You’re full of hatred and bile for anything that doesn’t fit into your little dictatorship of the mind, and ready to attack anyone who sees beauty where you cannot.
But I don’t pity you, because you annoy me too much. You are the stranglers of art, and my purpose is to defeat you, to drown your screeching in a flood of beauty.
So fuck off, because I’m busy.
“his vivid and heartbreaking characters”
I think in that sentence you say everything one need know about what you want in your novels.
With regard to my accusation that Rowling writes in clichés (you conveniently elide the grammatical and syntactical critiques, and that’s because they’re undeniable, but I’ll forgive you this), let us just take the first novel. “Stretch [his/her] legs” is used on at least two dozen occasions as a substitute for “walk”; why? The names are quite bizarre, to be sure, but that’s not enough not to recommend a book; what’s worse is the delight Rowling takes in making the names quirky, in the throbbing nostalgia she has for a bygone England where in fact the students wore robes. It’s really quite pathetic, ignoring the fact that her dialogue (and King’s) may be the most painfully artless I’ve ever read, all about friendship and love and darkness and the like–tailor-made for the movies, as it were. And yes, if that’s the question you wish to ask, I do detest television; I do not detest situational comedy, or good comedy in general, and neither does Harold Bloom–he loves the Marx brothers, actually, something you would know had you actually read anything of his. He does not believe in the death of art, he does not say it’s bad to read or that the novel is dead–he celebrates it, and the fact that you threw The Western Canon as you say you did only bears the point out.
As for Zadie Smith, she’s a writer of what a critic, James Wood, termed “hysterical realism”–where the characters become no longer realistic but so endued in symbolism that they come off as farcical, as vessels for a message rather than actual breathing characters. Which is what Harry Potter is–Harry, anointed by destiny but not quite brave enough; Hermione, the “smart” girl who can’t even be understood by her bumbling male companions–Lucy from the Peanuts; and Ron, of course, “the bumbling male companion,” the Charlie Brown of the bunch, so pathetic he’s almost cuddly.
Look, you can continue to cleave to your misguided ideas of what the novel is, or should do, or what good writing is. That’s fine. But just to leave you with a little story about Shakespeare, since you seem to think you know anything about him… In the Globe theater, the cheapest seats were standing up right before the stage. They cost one pence. These people were ironically called the “understanders”–both because they literally stood under the stage, and because they were so woefully uneducated that they could not understand and were there only for the duels and war sequences. You are an understander. Thank you–and there’s no need to respond any further because any breath spent on you is wasted breath.
Yes, I do. And you say everything that is wrong with your view of art.
First of all, you don’t get to forgive me for anything, you little shit. Who do you think you are? God? You’re just a pathetic troll posting aggressive comments on someone else’s blog. And second, I actually responded to your ridiculous critique. It is not your place to decide what grammatical rules a writer or poet has to follow. Will you blame William Blake for his unusual spelling now? Or Milton for his strange, Latin-inspired sentence structures?
Why not? It all depends on the size of the novel and what an author is trying to accomplish.
Oh dear, it’s imagination. We can’t have that, can we?
What is wrong with the quirky names, then? What is wrong with delight, other than that you can’t stand it?
Oh, that old argument. Fantastic. Because the books are completely uncritical of the school environment portrayed, are they? And because clearly the books tell us that things would be better if we went back to those times.
Portraying something does not mean wishing to go actually go back to it.
You seem to have a really terrible sense of realistic dialogue, then. Especially when it comes to King, whose skills in that department are remarkable. Not that you’ve read any of his work.
Oh, you mean about real subjects? Not all about Sebastian rearranging matches?
Bravo, you’re an idiot who cannot distinguish between the medium and the content and knows nothing about the great art that has been created for television over the years.
I do know that. What makes you assume that I don’t? But what’s so much better about the Marx brothers than so much later comedy, though, other than that the Marx brothers were long enough ago to be fashionable with the snotty crowd?
Clearly you’ve never actually *read* Zadie Smith, and have read only reviews or academic texts about White Teeth. So you’re talking out of your arse, or rather out of other people’s arses. You have no opinion of your own, but are simply regurgitating the opinions of others.
Furthermore, you didn’t even understand the (good but occasionally rather muddle-headed) essay by Wood, which is not actually about symbolism at all, but about the tendency of modern novels to go for verbal and conceptual pyrotechnics over real character development. And it actually praises Smith as well as criticizing her. Oh, and do you know who is included in the list of people accused by Woods of hysterical realism? Don DeLillo, whom you were praising so highly in your previous post. Shot yourself in the foot there, didn’t you?
How about next time you read the essay before you write? Because you embarrassed yourself a bit there. Arguments should always be on the basis of the text and all that.
I love how you can see things only as abstractions, as neatly categorized clichés that fit your worldview. Of course they can never have depth if you have already decided exactly who they are.
Oh no, another thing I knew when I was a kid. You’re impressing me so much.
I am? You’re the one who is so woefully uneducated that you can only argue by dropping names and repeating what others told you. You couldn’t even admit that you haven’t read Zadie Smith, and had to regurgitate someone else’s words, which you don’t even understand and which, when read, disprove your point. You persist in pretending that I have no literary education or knowledge, and refuse to actually use any arguments or respond to any of my questions or criticisms. Your posts are little but a collection of whiny and pretentious complaints about how you don’t like two writers, and personal attacks upon a person you know nothing about.
The irony finally becomes almost unbearable with your little story about the understanders. You’re exactly what you are describing – unable to see past the duels and war sequences (or the monsters and the magic) to all the beauty and deeper meaning. If you’d lived in Shakespeare’s times, you would have said that Shakespeare “lacked art” and was just a populist, and would have bothered other people with aggressive comments about how Chaucer was really so much better. You’d even be complaining about Shakespeare’s annoying tendency to make up new words, and all the delight he took in it.
My dear boy, this is my blog, and you’re the one who is posting comments. I will respond as I see fit, and right now your shallow arrogance is still amusing me. If it ceases to, I will ban you.
My dear, you really are obtuse–what’s more fascinating, though, is that you seem to delight in your stupidity. This is my final reply, so let’s get it all out:
(1) Shakespeare was NOT a populist. Decidedly not. First of all, the word “populist” has political connotations–indeed is explicitly political–and refers to a movement that sprang up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States, which had its roots in all sorts of peasant revolts, from the smallest in Flanders to ostensibly the largest, the French Revolution. Shakespeare was not a populist. If he were (oh, there’s that subjunctive whose Ms. Rowling so assiduously denies) a populist (whatever the hell your definition of that word is), he would not be remembered today in the light that he is. Shakespeare characterized with economy; he did not offend the reader with excessive description of the character and operated through ellipsis–take Hamlet, for instance, whose true thoughts, despite all of the monologues, are never really disclosed to the reader, nor the true motivation for his revenge. Or Iago or Don John, characters Coleridge dubbed “motiveless malignances,” about whose rationales for their actions there are only scattered hints that sometimes belie one another so that the reader is left to make up his own mind. Or Sir John Falstaff, whose past is only partly dredged up in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and who remains a mischievous mystery throughout Henry IV… Where in Harry Potter are there characters of this magnitude, sketched with such mastery? But of course to ask that Rowling do something like that would be unfair, so let’s lower the bar. Given me the Quentin Compson in Harry Potter, give me the memorable protagonist in a single Stephen King novel that does not sink under the weight of the never-ending roulades of gore and vulgarity apropos of nothing? What character will be remembered as a cultural icon, either for good or ill, in the way Madame Defarge has been, or Miss Havisham, or Fagin, or, for American examples, Harry Angstrom or, to speak finally of a real populist, Tom Joad? The point is there isn’t. Their characterization is shallow and based on the laziest archetypes, their symbolism mealy-mouthed or nonexistent, their style completely devoid of originality (nothing in Harry Potter says, hey, Rowling wrote this and not X), and their dialogue filled with bromides that approach more the way people speak on TV than in reality.
Where is Beckett’s famous aporia? Where is Joyce’s wild prose? Where are Saramago’s sinuous sentences or Faulkner’s vivid imagery and stream-of-consciousness? Where Woolf’s patience and ellipsis? Nowhere. And since you mention Blake’s peculiar spellings and omissions sometimes of apostrophes from contractions and genitive cases, I love it. I also love it when Emily Dickinson, who was profoundly influenced by him, does the same thing–and the way she–hyphenates–so–often–which–is–something–distinctive about her poetry. These things are ORIGINAL. The serious writer strives for ORIGINALITY–and feels a profound sense of anxiety in entering the pantheon of serious writers because of the pervasive sense that every original idea has already been spoken for. Harold Bloom writes of this–in fact, it is his main line of discourse. Where is this originality in Rowling’s prose? In King’s? Again, nowhere. It doesn’t exist. There’s nothing that challenges any boundaries–and that’s because neither is a serious writer, and so neither strives for originality. And please do not be patronizing–you really have no grounds to be. I have a degree in Russian literature, so your haranguing me about Tolstoy’s anxieties concerning Shakespeare (felt likewise by everyone from Milton to Joyce) is really quite pointless and more than a bit self-congratulatory. Which is not to say self-congratulation is a bad thing–it’s only bad when it is as hopelessly, risibly misplaced as it clearly is in your situation.
(2) Why is it in response to my criticism that Rowling’s themes are superficial and childish you feel the need to reference Eddie Izzard of all people? Really? That is the weapon you opt to wield in a literary discussion? It doesn’t really answer the question, of course, nor does it make the criticism any less legitimate. Rowling does write about mundane things–which would be fine, a lot of writers do it, but the problem is she writes about mundane things mundanely. Such is the mawkishness, such the shameless (and probably unwitting) lugubriousness of her writing, which skips gleefully from one cliché to another, that it becomes almost comical–like “Dumbledore’s” glum pronouncements, which read like bad fortune cookies. Darkness is not a theme, for goodness’s sake; that is stultifyingly broad. There is darkness explored in good literature–like Emma Bovary’s cloisteredness, her desire for freedom which she satisfies through her adulterous relationship with Rodolphe and Léon; like, well, the ultimate tale of revenge, “Paradise Lost,” which examines no less than the fall of man; the tedium that constantly courts Bernardo Soares in Pessoa’s masterful “The Book of Disquiet” or the immorality and anonymity of life in the city that assails Malte Laurids Brigge in Rilke’s “The Notebooks”–but it is not carried out as Rowling does it–to wit, superficially. Rowling takes darkness, which is difficult to say with a straight face, prima facie; her point of departure is that it exists–that there are good guys and bad guys and that good wins in the end. She does not plumb the depths of darkness, she skims over the surface of it. Revenge is bad but so are discrimination and wizard-vs.-muggle supremacy, etc. etc., and so the story goes, trying desperately to latch on to something that will make it ‘serious’ without realizing that it can never be serious ipso facto because it consists of stitched-together platitudes and archetypes and conceits extracted directly from Lewis and Tolkien. It’s, simply put, dreadfully executed. You mention G.K. Chesterton, a writer I admire a great deal. He deals with darkness in a different way, though, as in “The Man Who Was Thursday.” Who is Sunday, who never reveals himself? And in portraying as he does the machinations of each of the other anarchists, each trying to subvert the other, what point does he make? Does Rowling do anything remotely like this? Of course not. And of course that’s the whole point.
(3) It is a bit sanctimonious of you to accuse me of saying you haven’t read such and such a thing, and then do the exact thing to me–I have read Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” and I find her to be a bit torn as to what she wants to do exactly–whether she wants to write a sprawling social novel in the tradition of Dickens and Thackeray, or whether she wants something more Joycean or, for a more contemporary example (one cited as a major influence for his category by Wood, especially for Foster Wallace) Pynchonian. Moreover, Wood, in that essay–which I have read, by the way–did not specifically focus on Don DeLillo, but passingly alluded to “Underworld” (at the time of the publication of that article, that was his latest novel) in four instances, not once fleshing the critique, or even in fact building any kind of critique beyond mentioning him–you might, of course, call that pseudo-academic namedropping because your anti-intellectual bent is such that it blinds you to anything that isn’t readily digestible and syrupy enough. Don DeLillo wrote several great novels all of which clock in at fewer than 320 pages–”White Noise,” as I mentioned before, which is on par with the best of Beckett for its sheer tragicomic force, but also “Mao II” and his debut, “Americana.” Please do not attempt to intimate that I have not read something which I have read on more than one occasion (despite my not being especially fond of Wood), and moreover to say that because I draw different conclusions about a work that I have only read the reviews or critical reaction. As for his verdict on Smith, Wood prefers (from what I’ve read by him in “How Fiction Works” and “The Broken Estate”) the low-key novel, stylized but not to outlandish lengths–something like “Mrs. Dalloway” or “Austerlitz,” both of which he writes decent essays about–which again, I have read. He admits she has a vigorous writing style, that she has talent, just doesn’t like what she channels that talent toward. Anything that ends with this rather strident critique is hardly laudatory:
“This is problem-solving, all right. But at what cost? As Irie disappears under the themes and ideas, the reader perhaps thinks wistfully of Mr. Micawber and David Copperfield, so uncovered by theme and idea, so uninsured, weeping together in an upstairs room.” Irie disappears under the weight of the message, goes his tack, the symbolism of her circumstances–which is what I was referring to previously. This is not a rave review; it is perfunctory praise at best that Wood offers Smith. Nevertheless, you’re free to construe it as you will–just not to imply that I haven’t read it.
Although I’ve said I won’t reply further, I really am quite eager to read yours.
whose existence*
not once fleshing the critique out*
Dear P,
I would like to thank you for your delightful and much-needed words. You have indeed made my day more pleasant. Have you considered a career as a stand-up comedian? I believe talent such as yours should be shared with the world.
Yours truly,
Verena Kyratzes
You’re so friendly. Really a sign of intellect.
You continue to fail to understand the most simple things. It’s sad, really. Though it is kind of hilarious how you try to make Shakespeare into this grand intellectual hero who wrote only for you, who was never popular with the lower classes, and who never wrote a single poo joke. (How exactly do you explain Shakespeare’s fondness for what you would surely term crass and vulgar comedy?)
Why am I even arguing with you when you clearly know nothing of King’s work? Clearly you imagine King to be a writer who writes about nothing but violence and gore; this is absurd at best, willfully ignorant at worst. ARGUE FROM THE TEXT, not out of your own prejudice.
This is so absurd that it cannot be answered. You are simply projecting your own ideas onto these writers. You seem to have read some Rowling and hated the experience (or rather wanted to hate it, because you were told to), but you’ve certainly never read King, or read only one of the short stories (which are not his forte).
As for characters that will be remembered – I don’t know, I guess there’s Harry Potter. And Dumbledore. And several other characters from Rowling’s work. But that’s what you don’t want to admit, that’s what kills you. Just like it killed the pretentious academics of one hundred years ago that the characters of Dickens should be remembered.
Actually, there is plenty of King’s clean and elegant prose, his power to realistically capture spoken language, his complex treatment both of the frailties and strengths of humanity, and an optimism tempered with the knowledge that life is often painful and tragic. There is philosophical and theological depth, there are adult considerations of parenthood and sexuality, and there is a great deal of thought about the nature of art. But you wouldn’t know that.
I’m not sure it’s something to love or hate, but good for you.
Indeed they do. I don’t know a single writer whose work can be compared to King’s Dark Tower.
Really? Let’s take Blake. Do you think this absurd generalisation applied to him?
Some writers may feel a sense of profound anxiety. Others feel confidence in what they do, in their vision. To generalise is to be an idiot.
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
Because you say so? Because Harold Bloom says so? You haven’t even read King, and neither has Bloom.
You’re being condescending, the first response of the intellectually stale. You keep accusing me of being stupid, thereby attempting to highlight your own intellectual prowess. It’s pathetic.
I don’t give a shit about your degree, kid. I know too many people with degrees, and I spent too much time at university, to care about such things. I care only for arguments from logic and for evidence. You have neither so far.
It is not pointless or self-congratulatory, because it has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with your arguments. You keep trying to make this personal. It is not. You cannot really attack my arguments, so you attack me instead.
Yes. If I’m going to quote someone, why not quote a genius?
You say so. I disagree. How do you prove that you are right? By your divinely bestowed better taste?
You know, now you’re sounding hilariously close to one of those pretentious self-absorbed critics Fry & Laurie were so fond of making fun of. And again, I would like you to actually argue from the text, because what I remember of the books is a complex and touching deconstruction of the typical “wise mage” – who turns out to be a fallible human after all.
Name-dropping again, are we? How does this prove anything? I am not impressed by your ability to post short summaries of texts you have read. And why do you think you need to explain what Paradise Lost is about?
You’re simplifying to a terrible degree. Rowling makes a big point that it’s *not* just good guys versus bad guys – in fact, your argument seems to indicate you have only read the beginning of the story, if at all. The reality is that the only truly “evil” character in the novels is Voldemort himself, and I don’t see what is wrong with that. The essential question is why others choose to follow him, or not – and the answer to that question is considerably more complex than you think, as evidenced by the story of the Malfoy family.
Wrong. Quite simply wrong. There you go.
Your literary knowledge is failing you again. There are many who have imitated Lewis (a terrible writer) and Tolkien (a brilliant one), but there is very little that Rowling’s work has in common with them, especially with Tolkien. Neither in style nor in subject matter (nor in mythological inspiration) do the Potter books have much in common with The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion, and it’s rather foolish to think so. Unless, of course, you believe that anything that features wizards, from The Tempest to Le Morte d’Arthur, is the same.
Your opinion, based mostly on hot air.
Did you read the book to the end?
Actually, I suspect that Chesterton would have been quite fond of Rowling’s work, with its moral questions and underlying belief that the struggle for good is meaningful, if difficult. They are actually quite alike, except in that Rowling generally writes better sentences than Chesterton, who often tended to rush his writing a bit. But I suppose that’s blasphemy, isn’t it?
Interesting how you can understand a writer only in terms of other writers. Not very conductive to originality, of course.
The fact that he doesn’t go into a specific analysis does not prevent Wood from clearly criticizing DeLillo.
This is hilarious. You really want me to be anti-intellectual, don’t you? Then why am I arguing using literary arguments? Why did I spend so much time studying academic subjects? Why do I even know who Harold Bloom and Theodor Adorno are?
Because I’m not anti-intellectual, that’s why. You would love to believe so, but you are just embarrassing yourself. When have I argued that good art must be syrupy and readily digestible? Never. I have spoken only of unnecessary obfuscation, of the kind of dreadful pretentiousness that confuses obscurantism with depth and popularity with a lack of quality.
My favourite poet is and remains William Blake. Is his work easily digestible? Is his work syrupy?
I have no quarrel with the classics, or with intertextuality, or with challenging prose. I wouldn’t spend so much of my time dealing with all these things if I did, and they certainly wouldn’t be such a presence in my own work.
My quarrel is with those who argue in bad faith, from prejudice instead of the text. My quarrel is with those who fashionably despise everything popular without thought, without analysis; who cannot see beauty or art unless they’ve been told to.
You keep trying to portray me as an uneducated idiot, but I’m as widely read as you are, I have an academic background, and I’ve heard everything you’re saying before. I simply object to it, not out of anti-intellectualism, but because I find it to be intellectually lazy and badly thought-through. Can you understand that? I disagree with you on intellectual and artistic grounds.
Well, it’s hard to think otherwise when most of your talking points have no connection to the reality of the texts you are quoting and/or attacking.
You have yet to use any arguments that boil down to more than “I don’t like these writers and you are an idiot.” Your obsession with attacking me personally – rather than attacking my logic – simply reinforces the weakness of your perspective.
I suspect that, like Bloom, you have read very little of King or Rowling, and simply place them in the vast category of Popular Fiction, which you despise – like television.
Let me leave you on a little story. I’ve spent the last four years teaching people about academic writing, stressing the importance of clarity and simplicity, of clear arguments and consistent logic. I could’ve used your posts as a clear example of how not to write – endless lists of names and summaries to prove your intellectual worth, personal attacks in arrogant language that in no way support or strengthen your thesis, and a complete lack of anything resembling actual arguments. Behind the obfuscation lies nothing but childishness and aggression, as if you were suffering from some kind of intellectual inferiority syndrome.
We could go on ad nauseam, but what would be the point? All you have to say is that you think me intellectually inferior to yourself for liking two authors that you despise, and for believing that there is no causal connection between complexity of form and quality of content. Incapable of arguing with me on an intellectual level, you seek to argue from authority – namely, the authority of being able to cram as many names and references into your posts as will fit, and disparaging my ability to think instead of the results of my thinking.
You’re a fanatic, and I tire of fanatics.
Yeah, Jonas, kick that troll’s ass! Kick it hard!
An older article, but an important one, and I thank you for writing it. My only caveat is that Harold Bloom and the other “ivory tower” critics are not really doing anything new. The situation, stretching back in the classical period, has almost always involved intellectual critics upholding works in the past and dismissing popular works in the present as “trash.” Thank God, then, that these critics have not actually managed to have their voices heard by “the masses”, and art continues to flourish in new and interesting ways.
As for the above exchange, a quote from Leonardo da Vinci seems appropriate:
“Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.”
Again, thank you, sir, and good day.
Wow, I just stumbled across this, a year after my first post, and am really surprised to see the debate is still going strong. Whatever our disagreements, Jonas, I admire the time and thought you have been putting into your replies.
One important point to make about Bloom’s theory of influence is that is entirely contingent on what future artists will take up as an influence. Bloom has once said in an interview that it is quite possible that Yeats will not survive due to his lack of influence amongst contemporary poets.
I have also heard, through interviews with other younger writers familiar with Bloom, their surprise at his wide knowledge of contemporary writers. Although Bloom may seem to center his energy on a limited number of figures his actual range of reading is incredibly broad (the guy at one time could read 1000 pages an hour, AND remember most of it). It reminds me of a bet put on GK Chesterton, whose critics thought he was snobbish too, and only read the “classics” while dismissing popular books he had never read. Chesterton then went out and read 100 of the most popular books and was able to answer any question relating to them by his critics. When asked what he thought about the experience he stated it was an easy task since they were all so very similar.