Stephen King is to be awarded an honorary National Book Award for lifetime achievement, and some literati aren’t happy about it. Witness Harold Bloom’s sniveling dismissal:
“He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls…That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.”
This is another fine example of the never-ending tension between “What is popular” and “What is good”. King is popular, we are told; he is “for the masses”. This extends further to disdain for “genre” books, including – – you guessed it – – science fiction, fantasy, and horror. And even more, people who are “in the know” tell us that King is not “literature”, in some objective sense. So, awarding King for literary merit is yet another example of the dumbing down of literature and art; we’re opening the gates and letting in the riffraff.
My position on this is fairly simple: This is pure nonsense.
Back when I was active on Usenet, particularly in the film music newsgroup, these kinds of discussions would crop up all of the time. What made them interesting, for a while (until they got ridiculously repetitive), was their two-fold nature: there were the people who were appalled that James Horner or Alan Silvestri, two composers working today, should be mentioned in the same sentence as Miklos Rozsa or Bernard Herrmann (two of the greats of yesteryear). This was total outrage, they said; the latter were the great Hollywood maestros of yesteryear, while the former were competent composers at best or total hacks at worst.
What these discussions almost always boiled down to was the insistence of some that there were objective qualities by which it could be factually established that John Williams was inferior to Mikos Rozsa. My position – – that it was all little more than a matter of opinion, combined with time and influence – – was always met with the objection that there really are objective criteria by which John Williams could be factually established as inferior to Rozsa, much as there are objective criteria by which the Moon can be factually established as less massive than, say, Mars. Problems would arise, though, when I would simply ask the question: “What are those objective criteria?”
The answers would invariably be things like: “Rozsa has a sense of style. You always know you’re listening to Rozsa and not someone else. Rozsa’s music is grounded in a long, symphonic tradition. Rozsa had a long influence. Rozsa wrote well-regarded concert works.” In short, the only “objective criteria” ever advanced were statements that were either themselves opinions, or statements that were also true of Williams, thereby merely postponing by a step the arrival at mere opinion.
And then people would hem and haw and say things like, “Well, when you look at so-and-so’s music objectively, you can’t help but notice the faults like X.” I always found it interesting that people telling me to “be objective” were also of the belief that they were the ones taking the “objective” view. Roger Ebert put it best a while back: “When someone tells you to write an ‘objective’ review, what they’re really asking you to do is write a review that agrees with their subjective opinion.” I once had someone tell me that my views on these matters meant that I must therefore deny the possibility of science, which struck me as one of the odder things I’ve ever heard, because I’ve never yet seen any convincing rationale for artistic greatness being a matter for scientific thought. The rejoinder here, of course, was that we can discuss art “rationally”, but reason and science are not the same thing.
Ultimately, I am forced to agree with William Goldman: There is no “Best”, and when I say “I think Casablanca makes a greater artistic statement than Gone With the Wind“, what I’m really saying is that I like Casablanca more.
I read a lot of critics and reviews, because I think their writings are often informative. Critics are almost always very well-steeped in their chosen fields, so one can learn a great deal from them, about the history and development of the field, which works shaped the field and which might have, but didn’t (and thus went on to become “unjustly neglected masterworks”). But I’ve always been deeply suspicious of critics as judges of what is good and what is bad, because – – and there is simply no other way to say this – – they so very, very often get it wrong.
When I was a music student in college, I read a book called A Lexicon of Musical Invective, at the behest of one of my professors. This book has a very simply conceit: it is a collection of very nasty critical comments about many works of classical music that would later form the backbone of the classical “canon”, comments written by the leading critics of the day. One such critic said that Die Gotterdammerung should actually be titled, Die Goddamnerung; we had Philip Hale saying that “It would be nice if Mr. Brahms would use a little melody once in a while” – – this about the Fourth Symphony; and many more. And all of them, wrong. How could this be? How could all of these critics be so staggeringly wrong? After all, these were the holders of the “objective standards” in their day. If the “Standards” are really standards, how did they blunder so badly?
The answer, obviously, is that the critics were applying the standards of their own times. But that’s most definitely only the smallest part of what constitutes artistic greatness. As far as I can see, the best standard of greatness is simply the test of time: what is great is what lasts. To return, then, to Mr. King above, if people are still reading him one hundred years from now – – and I think it likely that, for at least some of his works, they will be – – then I suspect Mr. Bloom’s vitriol will only be remembered in a future Lexicon of Literary Invective. The critics are reduced to crystal-ball status, and as such, they have little more reliability than any other set of prognosticators.
Critics can tell us what they like, and they can do a better job than most of telling us why they like it. But when it comes to telling us what future audiences will like, they’re as lost-at-sea as the rest of us.
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