Stephen King: Trash, or Literature?

[Drkshadow03]

I agree with eric.bell. I'm not sure Stephen King is a literary genius, but I think he's a talented horror writer whose work has a place in the "horror canon" so to speak. I also think he's writing in the same vein as Poe. I find his shorter books and short fiction to have more substance.

Carrie, for example, I think is a solid work.

[JBI]

I will put it this way. That he writes for money, is of no consequence, as many great authors write for money, and in truth, the vast majority of them write for money. That is not the problem I have.

The problem I have is he publishes everything, doesn't edit well, and doesn't plan what he is writing - he merely writes for the sake of publishing. One cannot deny his endings flop enough of the time to show that his method of no outline, no pre-planning eventually leads him to rather silly ends - the speed he churns books out at doesn't help either.

His work has an interesting motif, in that it uses horror/fantastical elements to try and show the darker aspects of American history, culture and society. In that sense, it has moments, but really, he could have perhaps been a great writer had he not had such a drive to publish everything, and had instead limited himself to more refined books.

The man writes trash, but only because he writes nonstop - he has the talent necessary to write great fiction, but not the drive to.

As for Poe, call this idiosyncratic or whatever but I don't think there is much there either - to me Poe's conceptualization is interesting, but not his delivery. He had a great mind of phantoms and dark images, but lacked the language to deliver them properly.

Poe's cemented place in the American literary tradition however is by necessity exaggerated by the fact that he is an American author, and not an English author. Longfellow is usually held up as a counter example (though Hiawatha no longer has for me any real interest as it did when I was younger) for the period, and a few more names, but Poe remains due to the fact that there wasn't an Eliot writing in the US in the period to have replaced him - compared to his English or French counterparts, he is undoubtedly lacking, but compared to his countrymen, well...

In that sense Poe, like King, is relevant in that his subject matter is that of concerning a country that doesn't like to read outside its own borders, and likes to play down hard on the early national pride, in the sense that it hammers its own early history into a sort of cultural mythology. Within that scheme though, you need American authors - you need at least one high school year of pure early America to play into the program, so now the trends require Poe.

In Canada it is different in that literature is taught in an international sense, mostly focusing on earlier English works, as well as American ones. Without the agenda then, we do not promote Lampman even though he is by my reckoning a better poet than Poe, and nobody today really reads the Confederation school or that hideously boring poet Sangster.

In that sense, the appreciation of King to me seems to at least really like to limit itself to his American mythologizing, and I don't know - that doesn't quite do it for me. Others see something else, but the whole tradition from Poe to King seems rather boring. But then again, I do not really read prose fiction that often anymore so perhaps it is just a genre-bias.

[.harlequin.]

Title says it all.
How has Stephen King impacted the culture of America?

[PeterL]

What Impact Did Stephen King Have on American Culture/History?

None beyond the mere sale of popular fiction. He has produced nothing lasting.

[Night_Lamp]

We did gain a couple of great movies from his books; like The Shinning and Salem's Lot.

[Drkshadow03]

Here is a great essay answering some of your questions.

For what King lacks in polish at times, he makes up for in his ability to capture the American Zeitgeist.

[dfloyd]

American culture as Harriet Beecher Stowe did with Uncle Tom's Cabin.

[The Comedian]

This is a really great question. I like dfloyd's comparison to to Stowe -- but the analogy is not that simple: I think in terms of vast popular appeal (and cultural influence) the two authors are similar. Stowe's book helped bring about an important social change, while King's, to my knowledge, have not.

But I agree with the comparison overall.

Drkshadow03 -- I'll have to read that essay. Thanks for the link.

[Desolation]

We did gain a couple of great movies from his books; like The Shinning and Salem's Lot.

Carrie was pretty good too.

I think that it says a lot about King that he hated Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, though.

[Modest Proposal]

His non-fiction about the necessity of horror in this day and age, along with Drkshadow's point about Zeitgeist, are generally concieved as very important in academic circles.

PeterL's point is both impossible to prove correct, and very probably wrong altogether. There is NO telling if what he has written is "lasting" because it is still extremely contemporary. Furthermore, many writers--Shakespeare, Dickens--where frowned upon by the elite but lasted because of their popularity to become the cornerstones of the cannon. I've never read King and feel no compulsion to at this time, but to categorically dismiss him as having no affect on culture and history is about the stupidest thing I've heard.

Since this is not a thread about literary merit but rather about culture--i.e. the calculable affect on the public at large--it would be reasonable to say that King as the most published and most adapted modern novelist is THE most impacting living American author. I don't feel completely comfortable defending this claim completely, since some people with a slightly smaller fan-base but more readily seen influence might be more impacting. But my point is that he is certainly one of the most impacting writers on culture. How can you even defend the position that the most read author is not, in some sense, impacting the culture? It's not as if he is writing instruction manuals. King's novels don't, probably, affect each reader to the same extent as, say, Coetzee but what they lack in hugely influencing lives on the individual level, they make up for in slightly influencing the populous at large.

Stand By Me, The Green Mile and The Shining are often ranked in the top 100 American films. While the largest and most respected movie ranking site, IMDB, has Shawshank Redemption jockeying between 1st and 2nd place. That is not even the impact of his scores of books and hundreds of stories, but merely the impact of a FEW of his adaptations.

Add onto this, the influence of all the people and works influenced by his body of work...

Like him or not, he is HUGELY impacting in American culture.

[JBI]

Here is a great essay answering some of your questions.

For what King lacks in polish at times, he makes up for in his ability to capture the American Zeitgeist.

To an extent; the question though is the evolution of American identity - not from a change within, but from an emergence amongst minorities like African Americans and Hispanic peoples. To me, he seems to capture the sort of Melville-geographic American horror - seems to continue the sort of New England rooted Gothic mode, but I think in terms of scope, that is limited now, in the sense that McCarthy really captures a different landscape, or Amy Tan tries to capture another.

I would agree with you if King had the ability to flip his imagination, but to me, instead of capturing a sort of American darker self, he just seems absorbed in it. The clown in It does seem the embodiment of the evil within the town it takes place, but his resolution to the novel seems conflicted and stretched.

I guess my problem is he has an idea, but nothing particularly inspiring to get beyond it - there is no real development, unless you count his usual Deus ex Machina endings which undercut the often profound foundations of his work. This is excluding his large body of rather mediocre almost meaningless work, but even if we just focus on the best ones, he seems to discover the darkness, but is not able to move forward beyond there.

[sixsmith]

Basically agree with what Modest and Drk (and his essay) have said. In addition, I can recall reading a few of King's short stories and thinking that a couple of them had merit beyond the pleasures of the genre.

[spookymulder93]

A lot of you guys sound like you shouldn't really be on the internet. You should just give up all of your worldly possessions and move into the woods and talk to each other and discuss reality.

I find reality to suck most of the time so I like to escape it and be happy.

[breathtest]

A lot of you guys sound like you shouldn't really be on the internet. You should just give up all of your worldly possessions and move into the woods and talk to each other and discuss reality.

I find reality to suck most of the time so I like to escape it and be happy.

I second that completely.

I think writers do not have a moral responsibility to anybody, except maybe to themselves to get down in writing exactly what is in their heads. Be as truthfull as possible in other words.

Yeah, maybe some literature is intended to make the reader think and become a little contemplative, but at the same time we need entertainment, we need the writers that provide us with something to escape reality for awhile.

It is ridiculous to sit there and think that writers owe us anything or have a responsibility toward us, and it is even more ridiculous to look down on the writers that provide us with the literature to help us escape from our lives a little.

Moral writing, which every real fiction writer strives toward, is a quest for beauty, truth, and the Good. I expect someone to come down on me that such a standard is too abstract or devoid of meaning to be a standard at all. So then, I offer here one simple way that we could determine the value of a given novel. Select any three books in the western literary canon---"the greatest works of artistic merit"---and place your selection with them side by side. For example:


Homer's Iliad

King's Carrie

Plato's Republic

Joyce's Finnigan's Wake


Now ask yourself: "Does it deserve to be among such great books at this time?" Screw the professors, the university database, the feminist whine. This is as good as it gets.

So, by your logic, lets just forget what some people like and enjoy to read. Who cares that - from the example you used - stephen kings book Carrie sold millions and that tonnes of readers read the book and liked it. Lets just forget that and if a book is not the best of the best, then it should not be published and it is not worth anything. Nice one jackass. You need to stop judging a books worth based on other books, or judging writers' worth based on other writers, and starting judging based on whether people actually like what has been written. I think that makes the book worthwhile, and the writer too.

[Mr.lucifer]

Or go with your own judgmement, which is the most important.