Just when I faced the possibility of being starved of spooks
this Halloween season, along came Stephen King.
King, of course, is well-practiced at supplying spooks. I’m not
talking about his novels. Those aren’t nearly as scary as his
occasional forays into literary sermonizing, which should appall
anyone who cares about the state of American sensibility.
The first foray was his memoir and credo On Writing.
The title passes the critical posture test. It could’ve been
“Knocking on Underwood” or “Two Fingers and a Remington Black” or
something similarly faithful to King’s instincts. His unusual
restraint here, combined with the jacket’s office-pastoral cover
art, was instrumental to my having bought and read the book in high
school.
On Writing had an influence on me in those
impressionable years. Namely, it influenced me never to open
another Stephen King book again. Given that he’s written 60 of
them, this was quite an influence. Here’s the sentence from whence
it came: “With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is
afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or
she is not getting the point or picture across.”
Feel free to interpret that as a particularly obscene triumph of
the irony gods. I’ll take it as an epitaph for literacy. Apparently
one of those deep dark forces causing so much mayhem in King’s
stories is none other than the Generic He.
Receiving the 2003 National Book Award for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters offered the platform for King’s
second foray. In the acceptance speech, he tried to demean one of
my most cherished traditions:
[I]f an elevator full of people starts free-falling
from the 35th floor of the skyscraper all the way to the bottom,
one of those view elevators, perhaps, where you can watch it
happening, in my opinion, no one is going to say, “Goodbye, Neil, I
will see you in heaven.” In my book or my short story, they’re far
more apt to bellow, “Oh s[—]t” at the top of their lungs because
what I’ve read and heard tends to confirm the “Oh s[—]t” choice.
If that makes me a cynic, so be it.
Voila! — a noble outlook of incisive wit reduced to the mindset of
a morbid seventh-grader. Sorry, but. Being cynical (Karl Rove) does
not make you a cynic (H.L. Mencken), any more than being sexually
frustrated makes you a hopeless romantic, or being comical makes
you a comic. Cynics look for the sinister surprise beneath the
apparently hunky dory, not the hysterical reaction to the obviously
horrific. Cynics look for motive, not meaningless automata. Cynics,
ultimately, enhance the understanding of human nature, not reduce
it all to a gloomy cloud.
Does this strike you less as fright and more as advanced
marble-loss? Let me to explain. Fright is borne of fear, and I fear
the increasing degradation and childishness of our language and
literary culture. While the puerile sentimentality of King’s latest
foray — an essay titled “What Ails the Short Story?” — may not
seem particularly scary, it left me feeling creeped out and
cold.
Adapted from the introduction to his recent bit of community
service as editor of The Best American Short Stories 2007,
“What Ails the Short Story?” appeared a few weeks ago in the Essay
section of the New York Times Book Review. Because the
section is usually dedicated to niche fetishes — Garrison Keillor
on the lost joys of sniffing paperback binding, etc. — I wandered
in with my guard down.
Then it came. The inane faux-profundities: “God or genetics
(possibly they are the same).” The plebeian banalities: “I think —
marvel, really — they paid me to read these! Are you kiddin’
me???” The oblivious repetition of a common opinion as if it were
an original conclusion. Another grotesque performance of the
he-or-she shuffle. The use of 1,400 words to say what could’ve been
said in none. Soon every deficiency in King’s vapid shtick was
revealed, mostly in the form of a riveting adventure to the
magazine stand aback his local bookstore.
There will certainly be a new issue of The New Yorker
and perhaps Glimmer Train and Harper’s. No need to check out The
Atlantic Monthly; its editors now settle for publishing their own
selections of fiction once a year in a special issue and
criticizing everyone else’s the rest of the time. Jokes about
eunuchs in the bordello come to mind, but I will suppress
them.
Don’t criticize unless you can do it better yourself!
Straight out of Dr. Johnson’s playbook. Last encountered by me in
seventh grade, after complaining to a classmate about that year’s
Super Bowl halftime show.
Now, I mourn the short story much more than the next person.
Odds are the next person hasn’t read one in years. But you can’t
understand what ails a particular literary form without your brain
cells rallying into some kind of critical shape. Trenchant
criticism in the Atlantic can do much more for the state
of fiction than publishing whatever comes with the current. James
Wood has done much more, for example, than Stephen King.
But King can’t handle criticism, possibly because his critical
faculties are mis-located: “Do I want something that appeals to my
critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never).” As if
critics read Shakespeare for whiffs of Edmund Wilson.
I should’ve stopped there and turned back. Like the coital coeds
in the B-horror flick, however, I kept at it despite the ominous
signs.
So into the bookstore I go, and what do I see first? A
table filled with best-selling hardcover fiction at prices ranging
from 20 percent to 40 percent off…. it hits you in the eye as
soon as you come in, and why? Because these are the moneymakers and
rent payers; these are the glamour ponies.
Boy, this guy’s really in the know! Not that you should read the
passage merely as a deft expose’ of the industry-industrial
complex. It’s so much more. In fact, it contains the whole of
King’s answer to the essay’s title question. As he or she
elaborates, “It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit)
when faced with a shrinking audience.” What results are stories
“written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The
chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf.”
Forget the unaddressed circularity. Forget how this contradicts
his assertion that “if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or
she continues on nevertheless.” Forget, if you can, the implication
that Paris Review’s readership would rise significantly if
only Barnes & Noble arranged copies of it to swoop from the
ceiling and smack entering customers in the face.
Consider instead what happens when one treats language as a
therapeutic tool rather than a discerning one. Picking his nose for
insights, King can only dig up a restatement of the problem. It’s
not even restated helpfully. Parsed down, it sounds all too
familiar: “The short story just needs some more attention.
It needs you to be there for it.” What ails the short
story, apparently, is no different from what ails misbehavin’
Meghan.
As for a solution, all we get is
…that sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out
amazement. I look for stories that care about my feelings as well
as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally
assaultive…I grab that baby and hold on tight…. What I want to
start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot
meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient
pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out
of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes
the eject button in his F-111.
Schoolboy similes aside, what’s there? For all its talk of ejected
fighter pilots and big hot meteors and blowjobs, nothing in that
passage refers to the distinct, internal experience of
reading — which occurs while sitting alone in a room,
ancient pleasures likely nowhere in reach.
King defines “real reading” as “the kind where you just can’t
wait to find out what happens next,” which is true as far is it
goes. But how far is that? I would say real reading is the kind
where you can’t wait to find out what just happened, and possibly
spend the rest of your life thinking about it.
Though King rightly espouses the importance of vitality in
fiction, he doesn’t even attempt to identify what aspirations are
necessary to create such vitality, let alone what cultural factors
explain the relative absence of those aspirations today.
REASONABLE QUESTIONS REMAIN. “Who cares what Stephen King thinks?
Why not just ignore him? Don’t you have a life? Plus, he’s looking
more and more like a character out of Sesame Street — which is
funny, not frightening.”
But he can’t be ignored. King has emerged as a high-profile
crusader in a worthy cause he threatens to undermine. Many young
writers, alienated by the genre-segregation and postmodern
meagerness of the literary establishment, are influenced by him.
They should realize his shtick is just as meager and limiting. They
should realize the enemy of their enemy is a pest at best.
Baby Boomer to the bone, King’s literary reflections also betray
his generation’s penchant for being excessively self-conscious
while utterly incapable of introspection — a lovely combo, indeed,
having culminated in a therapy culture whose frightfulness nobody
can deny.
Fear, as you see, is circumstantial. That said, I’d be wise to
take a cue from my beloved cynics. King’s verdict on the short
story, after all, is “Current condition stable, but apt to
deteriorate in the years ahead.” Looking for the underside has a
special perk in cases like this. When complacent pessimism is the
self-serving sentiment of the moment, a real cynic knows there must
be light around the corner.
