Stephen King: Trash, or Literature?

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Originally Posted by Ragnar Freund

... physicists make falsifiable predictions that can be tested... But literature is not physics, and authors’ works cannot be evaluated objectively.

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I actually do approach literature by making falsifiable predictions that I test. I predict that classic, literary authors will be a better read than non-classic, non-literary authors. This prediction is born out repeatedly, for me! (Not all the time, taste in reading *is* more fickle than the Millikan oil drop experiment...)

I do read non-classic authors - mostly modern authors with literary pretensions - sometimes King and his ilk - and my prediction is, mostly, not falsified!

When it *is* falsified I can see that it may be for non-literary reasons - the Bible is just too old, too much of a hotch potch - I can see it might overall be great literature but I'm not prepared to read most of it - it's just too difficult.

Joyce and Proust present similar difficulties - and the jury is still out on whether they are great literature or not (for instance, chief juror John Carey, like me, gave up half way through Proust's magnum opus, and doesn't rate Ulysses very highly...)

Of course, I only know that this is what happens when I read. For you the opposite might apply. And I cannot say that I'm a "better reader" than you because, you are right, there are no objective criteria here.

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Originally Posted by Ragnar Freund

So, you can mention that Bloom is a Yale professor all you like – it’s irrelevant in general, and it’s particularly irrelevant in literature.

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It might be irrelevant to you, but it's not irrelevant to me. And because you say there are no objective criteria for determining 'what is literature', then you cannot say that Bloom is irrelevant 'in general'.

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Originally Posted by Drkshadow03

Genres awards are a type of literary award. Particularly good one is the World Fantasy, for which King has had novels and short stories nominated multiple times, but has only won twice, plus a lifetime achievement award.

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I'm trying to find the next great read, and looking at minor genre awards hasn't helped me much in the past. Looking at these awards might help you, if so fine. But they are of no interest to me.

I sometimes wonder at the necessity of wishing to classify writings as literature or trash. I suppose that I find a need for both in my life, so that I have very little care of which category my reading falls in.

As for Stephen King, I picked who cares, but truthfully I think his writing can be characterized as both. He has had fantastically written stories that will go down as greats and he has some that were not as well written. Perhaps my favored writing from King is actually an article he wrote about writing Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully. Overall I would say that most of his work can be classified as well written. Maybe it isn't as deep as the literature one thinks of when we think of classic literature, but then we're living in a different time and I doubt we'll ever see writing like that again. Another thing to remember is that a lot of the most renowned classic literature was fairly run of the mill in their time. It has become classic as much because it happened to survive rather than because it was truly genius for the time. King has the potential to go down in history, but he also could simply fade away like the many play writes who were writing similar tales as Shakespeare.

gone.

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Originally Posted by mal4mac

I'm trying to find the next great read, and looking at minor genre awards hasn't helped me much in the past. Looking at these awards might help you, if so fine. But they are of no interest to me.

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Aren't we all? But this is a red herring. We weren't discussing what you have personally found useful in selecting books. We were discussing the existence or non-existence of Stephen King's literary merits.

Sirs, just so you see I actually listen from time to time.

So, I read "Letters from Jerusalem" again. What exactly is the connection to "Salem's Lot", again?

Because the short story is clearly Cthulu-ish, while "Salem's Lot" is,
from what I gather, a continuation of "Dracula".

How do those two stories blend in?

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Originally Posted by LadyLuck

I sometimes wonder at the necessity of wishing to classify writings as literature or trash. I suppose that I find a need for both in my life...

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Why do you feel a need for trash? This looks masochistic. Would you pay to go grubbing around in bins for leftovers if five-star Michelin snacks were on offer for the same price?

Life's hard enough without choosing to grub for trash - you'll encounter enough trash anyway, if you want to know what trash is...

There are many modern writers who are easy to read, and who are generally regarded as producing great literature.

Readers I've enjoyed, learned from, have found straightforward to read, and who have won Nobel prizes since 1980 are:

DORIS LESSING
JOHN MAXWELL COETZEE
V. S. NAIPAUL
SIR WILLIAM GOLDING

There are several others who I suspect would be equally great reads, and probably not too difficult, but I haven't read them yet. So why would I read King?

Some classic literature was considered fairly run of the mill in its time, but the vast majority of literature that was considered run of the mill *was* run of the mill.

Literature is not classic 'just because it happened to survive'. The dictionary definition of classic is "Judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind."

I have found classics, mostly, to be "of the highest quality and outstanding" amongst the things that I read.

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Originally Posted by mal4mac

Why do you feel a need for trash? This looks masochistic. Would you pay to go grubbing around in bins for leftovers if five-star Michelin snacks were on offer for the same price?

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If I were a 16th century gentleman, most academians of the time would have told me the exact same thing, If I confessed that I enjoyed Ovid and Virgil and the great Roman poets, just as much as I enjoyed some trashy plebian contempory plays by a certain William something...

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Originally Posted by mal4mac

Why do you feel a need for trash? This looks masochistic. Would you pay to go grubbing around in bins for leftovers if five-star Michelin snacks were on offer for the same price?

Life's hard enough without choosing to grub for trash - you'll encounter enough trash anyway, if you want to know what trash is...

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It's simple, I read it as an escape :) I fully know that it is poor quality and sometimes I'll even find typos and poor grammar. It's a lot like watching a b-movie for me. I'm not going to watch it for any sort of enlightenment or edification, I simply watch to turn my very tired brain off and be entertained. I enjoy the same thing out of books from time to time as well. When I sit down to read something that is truly great, I like to be able to give it the attention and due diligence of thought that it deserves. With two young children, this is hard to come by, and sometimes you settle for merely being entertained by a book. That isn't to say I don't get enjoyment out of the classics, I do, but if I wish to just have the charm of a book in my hands for a quiet night and minimal use of brain power then popular fiction fills that void. I guess for me it's the difference between sitting down to watch Dr. Zhivago or sitting down to watch Transformers. I enjoy both, but one takes far more effort to enjoy than the other.

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Originally Posted by Drkshadow03

Aren't we all?

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Not really. I'm less interested in finding the next great read than I am in finding my next great read. I gots to get mine, Jack!

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Originally Posted by Alexander III

If I were a 16th century gentleman, most academians of the time would have told me the exact same thing, If I confessed that I enjoyed Ovid and Virgil and the great Roman poets, just as much as I enjoyed some trashy plebian contempory plays by a certain William something...

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That's why I keep on saying you have to give it a hundred years! Only then can you get sufficient distance from those '16th century gentlemen', and get enough genius-level critics to take a close look at William & compare him to Ovid & Virgil.

The truth is that you are seriously creating a dichotomy. Trash is just figurative, any serious critic must give even the nod that Dan Brown has some capacity. It is not sooo easy to put a novel, with the proper chapter flow (albeit this is a small merit and the best novels are those that stop you, not those that make you go fast), to put characters (as bad as they are acting). Stephen King then, is far better than Dan Brown, genre writting is not such a problem, because modern genres are made up for market and when you dismiss the genre reckonigtion, you dismiss authors who are commercial. (Chesterton, Stevenson ,Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Conan Doyle, H.G.Wells, Poe...heck, even Melville or Conrad will fall on Genre Writting if you want, because in the end, King has wrote more than horror stories)...

One could easily say: Why read Oscar Wilde if you have Yeats?

Mal ~ Out of curiousity, do you ever eat burgers or deep fried fish and chips?

King it's not one in my favourites list, but I admit he has books I enjoyed reading.

That's the point of being one of the "best sellers" even if it's not considered literature you can still enjoy it.

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Originally Posted by mal4mac

Why do you feel a need for trash? This looks masochistic. Would you pay to go grubbing around in bins for leftovers if five-star Michelin snacks were on offer for the same price?

Life's hard enough without choosing to grub for trash - you'll encounter enough trash anyway, if you want to know what trash is...

There are many modern writers who are easy to read, and who are generally regarded as producing great literature.

Readers I've enjoyed, learned from, have found straightforward to read, and who have won Nobel prizes since 1980 are:

DORIS LESSING
JOHN MAXWELL COETZEE
V. S. NAIPAUL
SIR WILLIAM GOLDING

There are several others who I suspect would be equally great reads, and probably not too difficult, but I haven't read them yet. So why would I read King?

Some classic literature was considered fairly run of the mill in its time, but the vast majority of literature that was considered run of the mill *was* run of the mill.

Literature is not classic 'just because it happened to survive'. The dictionary definition of classic is "Judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind."

I have found classics, mostly, to be "of the highest quality and outstanding" amongst the things that I read.

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Gee, I don't know, mal, maybe it's because different people have different tastes, and some people actually like Stephen King, as hard as that is for you to comprehend.

Man, Stephen King is such a weird case.

My personal opinion is he is a seasoned writer that specializes in writing to a certain category of readers. Generally those readers like to read suspenseful writing, mixed with far fetched nonsense, and sometimes just flagrant horse manure mixed in.

In my opinion, this cocktail of writing is what he specializes in and he may enjoy doing it or enjoy getting paid for doing it.

What is kind of impossible to dismiss, is his short stories are of very strong caliber. If he wrote just short stories about non-coke induced topics like war,love, etc we would not have this conversation right now. But instead have a conversation on where does he figure in the best short story writers.

I think Francis Bacon said it well, "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."

I would place Stephen King's works into the swallowed category because that's kind of what you do when you read them. They are big, but fast reads that don't require too much critical thought, nor do they present challenging concepts to understand. Sort of like a Big Mac. Ya eat the whole thing and it is tasty, but the nutritional content isn't so great for you.

Haven't read a lot of King, but what I've come across I can't say I'm a fan, haha. I don't like the sometimes cartoonish divide of good and evil people. Characters should be able to sit on more diverse or even contradictory traits.

I'm also not a fan of the language or the style, or the story concepts. Or nothing, really. But I guess he's an effective story teller to some people, and that's fine.

He is but a petty scrivener. His work, his produced, fabricated books have no artistic sensibility about them whatsoever. Let us not be naive: if King had written literature, we could've compared him to Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, Nabokov, Faulkner and the other writer (true writers) of the last century. But for the nonce, we cannot, because it'd make for a flagrant lapse in taste. His only worth consists in that he produces books that permit lazy nonintelligent readers to imagine that they are ''reading'' when they run through his inane vulgar cogitations.