After having worked through many important books, it's nice to get sucked into a book, plot, character and line. In other words, as Stephen King put it while praising JK Rowling in a review of the HP series,"if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they'll kill the damn thing."
Saturday, February 14, 2009
For the love of story
Over the last couple of weeks and especially on weekends, I've renewed my love for story without worrying so much about big ideas and lofty style. Over the last year the youngest son and I have worked through Harry Potter 1-3--now we are on 4 and picking up the pace because the plotting is exquisite. On my own I've been reading Stephen King's The Stand. The plot is good here too but it's the characters I love. If you've read it, you know there are like 1,000 (ok 100) characters rapidly introduced chapter after chapter. I fall for just about each one: Larry Underwood the selfish recent rock star, Fran Goldsmith the pregnant girl who has to bury her father, Nick Andros the deaf-mute boy who becomes the default sheriff... Amazing.
After having worked through many important books, it's nice to get sucked into a book, plot, character and line. In other words, as Stephen King put it while praising JK Rowling in a review of the HP series,"if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they'll kill the damn thing."
After having worked through many important books, it's nice to get sucked into a book, plot, character and line. In other words, as Stephen King put it while praising JK Rowling in a review of the HP series,"if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they'll kill the damn thing."
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8 comments:
I recently reread HP #7, just for the hell of it, and was taken again by its plot delights. I just honestly admire it, since it is something I absolutely do not know how to do.
So what is it about "story sans ideas" that you find appealing? I tried reading one Stephen King novel years ago (The Talisman) and couldn't make it through. Bored me to tears.
As for Harry Potter, I read the first book and found it okay but not great. On the other hand, I admit to LOVING the Harry Potter movies, and hating that I love them. Unlike, say, a Bergman film that leaves me grateful for the life I have and closer to the pulse of existence, Harry Potter makes 'real life' seem kinda sucky by comparison. Is this what you like about plot? That it has escapist value (and, no, that's not a rhetorical question)? Would you call "War and Peace" a traditional novel? I mean, it is plot-driven. For that matter, Shakespeare seems to have some remarkably entertaining and coherent plots without being void of ideas. Still, it isn't the ideas that make Shakespeare Shakespeare. It's the spirit behind the story--something Stephen King, in my view, seems to lack.
I'm not sure I'd think it's such a bad thing to kill Stephen King's concept of the novel. Is there a value beyond escapism to mindless plot? That's a serious question. It seems to me that the only use of story-as-spectacle is to create effective propaganda and to pacify. Do you think JK Rowling's books have mythical value--as a kind of meditation on archetypes, so to speak?
Just curious.
Look I'm still going to take shakespeare or the golden compass by phillip pullman (a great direct comparison to the HP books) if I could only have a few books on an island. I'm not taking HP though I might be tempted by The Stand. This book in my limited SK experience is better than his other stuff.
What I'm saying is that it's ok for us Englishy types to enjoy some plot candy and not feel guilty (speaking for myself here) about the lack of important ideas. So mine isn't an argument (and King would probably take this further than I would) that these books are better; rather it's that they have their own beauty and friendship.
The conversations with my 7-year old as we have read HP have been amazing. I can't imagine a book working better than HP and their are ideas here; not awfully subtle or unique but compelling because you care what happens to the characters.
Finally I would invoke Wayne Booth's notion of friendship as a way of understanding our relationships with books. HP is not a best friend but more a friend I love having around if he happens to stop by. Maybe? Most importantly I'm going to resist any sort of strict hierarchy about books--this book is better. I'd say better in what way? Might depend on how I feel. And escapism ain't so bad.
Now maybe I will contradict my earlier comment about being stranded on an island. I'd want both a book like stephen kinds or maybe HP and then something deep with heft. Still, I will give you that I'm going to with heft if I can only choose one. Of course that might ultimately be a bad choice.
Well, I'm beat and must get off this blasted computer.
I do think the HP books are pretty great, and I would not say they are devoid of ideas. They are in the tradition of the coming of age story, the bildungsroman (she intones, pedantically), and so there is an archetypal structure and it is executed very well. The books get stronger, at least in a lot of ways they do, as they go along. I would definitely not call HP mindless plot (can't say anything about King--haven't read him). My experience chimes with yours, Ron--l had amazing experiences talking about these books with all sorts of readers, young and old. I have rarely had such a thoroughly satisfying reading experience--communally and individually.
Have you read Theodor Adorno? He makes the case that popular culture pacifies and negates political resistance not so much through its content (that's the conservative argument) but through a kind of reverse psychology: it advocates the antithesis of culture in such a way that the consumer has a negative reaction to what is being presented and consequently chooses the option which is being advocated against. (That's a much simplified summary)
Popular culture today seems to do that and a lot more (stuff that Adorno didn't anticipate), but the general idea that popular culture serves an escapist, pacifying purpose, it seems to me, shouldn't be ignored.
Still, I'm not trying to spark a guilt trip (while I sit here watching Cary Grant in the high-brow intellectual classic "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer"). Although I do question the value of the Stephen King concept of the novel, I mainly want to understand better what the appeal is. Maybe I just didn't read the right book. I mean, I question the value of pornography, too, but I understand the appeal. With Stephen King, that's not the case. I don't get it. And I kinda get HP, but I don't quite get the fanatacism.
Next door neighbor here; I just finished The Stand yesterday morning myself, all 1150 pages, and I was consumed with it over these past two weeks to the point of obsession. I've read probably 12-15 Stephen King novels, and this was easily the best,though there are some other good ones. A couple stinkers as well.
While I'm not the PhD English major that some of your circle appears to be, I enjoy the occassional classic, but there are some stinkers there as well. Loved Hugo's Les Miserables, hated the first couple Hemingway novels I read and won't waste my time on him again.
Spouse had to put down, only part way through, Husseini's Thousand Splendid Suns... it depressed her more that Kite Runner (I warned of this months ago, but does anyone listen to me?).
I don't so much want to be entertained, or sometimes even educated, when I read for pleasure. I want to be drawn in by what's being written.
I get Adorno's critique--but I guess I don't see what kind of cultural production wouldn't have that tendency, in capitalism. Also, there's another strain in Marxist thinking that suggests people are not necessarily passive actors in popular culture; rather, they engage in acts of subversion and reconstruction, or at least they can. (Actually, I think the guy I'm thinking of, John Fiske, was trying specifically to critique Adorno et al.) As for myself, I'm pretty sure that something in the middle is true. I don't buy into a completely pessimistic view of mass culture. For one thing, what am I supposed to do with that? It's not a useful tool to me. At the same time, it's probably a little optimistic to see subversion everywhere.
I had written up a little comment but didn't get around to posting it--the comment was about Fiske's focus on the agency of everyday consumers of pop culture. Lisa beat me to it.
I have hard time with this debate. I simply don't feel all one way about it. At times I feel pragmatic, as lisa suggest, what am I to do with a completely negative view of pop culture? I'm confident many of us--not all--can engage pop culture and reshape it in revolutionary ways.
At other times I'm nervous about a general pacification I see at times with my students. They can seem oblivious and even actively defensive about any suggestion of deleterious manipulation in pop culture.
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