I’m currently halfway through Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. If the other half of this book is as fascinating and deep as the first half, this book will be added to my list of Books Everyone Should Read.
Not a page has gone by that hasn’t impressed me. I think I shall have to read more by this fellow.
“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.
I was quite shocked to read that fantasy writer David Eddings died a couple of weeks ago. (Sometimes the internet is just useless for news.) He and his wife, who died in 2007, wrote several books that were absolutely central to my youth and my development as a writer.
The Belgariad and The Malloreon, and above all Belgarath the Sorcerer, were books that I read over and over as an adolescent. I still go back and read bits of Belgarath the Sorcerer every now and then, even though I know almost the entire novel by heart.
Some people may be surprised by this. Eddings is not known as a particularly intellectual writer, and he is certainly no longer fashionable. He himself had no problem admitting that genre fiction is written for money – which is something that I profoundly disagree with. All of his – or their, let’s not forget that his wife co-wrote the books; all of their books use the exact same formula, and most of them are basically thinly disguised rewrites of The Belgariad with less interesting characters. They are, in fact, at times almost unreadable.
But The Belgariad and the books related to it are magical. They have about a trillion serious flaws, which I am much more aware of now than I was when I first read them, but despite that, the books make that subtle leap from being nothing but words to being art. The magic that makes characters like Belgarath work, that makes them real, is all there. Belgarath lives. And that’s still more of an accomplishment than a lot of “serious” fantasy writers can ever hope to achieve.
What is also incredibly important is the sheer delight in language that is present in these books. Unlike some writers (such as the dreadful and dreadfully pretentious R. Scott Bakker) who try to impress us with all the words that they know, David and Leigh Eddings impressed me with how they used words to delight and amuse. They used words to make me laugh out loud, and every now and then they used them to make a shiver run down my spine. And I can’t stress enough what a positive influence all of that was – not the style, not the content, but the love of language that their books carried. For that, I owe them a debt of gratitude.
Also, at the end of The Rivan Codex, David Eddings tells people to go read Lord Dunsany. I did, and I don’t think I could be the writer I am without that. Come to think of it, even the concept for my novel was born somewhere in the interaction between Belgarath the Sorcerer and The Book of Wonder.
David and Leigh Eddings left the world better than they found it. It’s not bad for an epitaph. And if there are worlds out there beyond death, then may David and Leigh bring joy and laughter and wonderfully sarcastic dialogue to them, too.
I came across this in a recent blog post:
Along with Harold Bloom you may be astonished and dismayed to know that Stephen King was given the National Book Foundation’s annual award for “distinguished contribution” in 2003. (‘Dumbing down American readers’, Boston Globe Op-ed, September 24, 2003. Found on their web site). He wrote, “I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give the award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.”
Since the blog didn’t have settings that would allow me to reply, and since I feel rather strongly about this, I decided to post my response here. So here we go:
As much as I love the classics – and I do – I would say that King is possibly the most talented writer living in America today. His writings are considerably more intelligent and complex, and certainly much better on a sentence-to-sentence level, than many of the highly acclaimed postmodernists. And that includes the better ones, like Roth and Auster.
Harold Bloom is a terrible academic and a snob. His argumentation is about as illogical and badly researched as you can get; and yes, I’ve read more than just his unpleasant ranting on King. His writings on the subject of William Blake, for example – a topic I do know something about – are completely ridiculous, and thankfully by now recognized as such by several academics who actually know what they’re talking about. And I seriously wonder whether Bloom has ever read King. Not that it would help: books, as they say, are like mirrors, and if an ass peers in we can hardly expect an apostle to peer out ( slightly paraphrasing Stephen Fry here).
King’s work, with the exception perhaps of some of his short stories (but not the novellas) is of the highest literary value. It engages complex social, personal, political and philosophical matters while in the process not forgetting to tell a story. (That is something certain academics cannot forgive, their whole line of work basically being the finding of excuses for writers who cannot write a decent story or keep a reader’s attention because they simply have nothing to say.)
King’s writings are full of intertextual allusions and are deeply rooted in both classical and modern literature, poetry and art in general. King’s The Dark Tower does a thousand times more justice to works like Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Browning’s “Childe Roland” than any other book I have read in recent years. It is one of the very best books about childhood and growing up that has ever been written, an ode to imagination and the power of children while also a very realistic depiction of the hell that childhood can be. And so on – the man’s work is varied and excellent.
Bloom imagines that King’s work is primarily about disgusting monsters killing people; but that has precious little to do with the reality of the text. Monsters do sometimes feature, yes – as they do in many, if not most, works of great art, because monsters are an essential part of who we are and how we think. But to think that King’s stories are about monsters, or that they are all the same types of stories (King has written a couple of wonderful satires, non-fiction, and many great stories that do not feature anything remotely supernatural or monstrous) is simply prejudice and lack of research. Now that is bad writing, and shameful for someone who claims to be an academic.
The perception of King as a “cheap” writer is simply an expression of Bloom’s life-strangling attitude towards art, something he shares with ridiculous figures like Theodor Adorno, who despise anything successful because their concept of art is of something exclusive, obscure and dead. These same people would have spat on Dickens and Shakespeare – who were, after all, also popular artists and for a long time considered inferior. They would spit on the lyrics of Bob Dylan like their predecessors spat on the poetry of Blake. They are the embarrassing footnotes of the future that remind us that, for the most part, art critics have no idea what they’re talking about.
I would suggest reading King’s On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft. Roger Ebert, who originally thought badly of King, was forced to reconsider his opinion when he realized that On Writing was the best book about writing since The Elements of Style. And then I would suggest reading some of the man’s actual novels. Real knowledge of a writer’s work is considerably more useful than aggregated prejudice and false impressions perpetuated by elitist academics caught up in the worship of obscurantism.
And now, back to work.
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