Oy.

      Stephen King has passed off a rant as an acceptance speech. I will allow that many readers enjoy King and so on and so forth: fine and dandy. But there is no way that King -- or those he invoked like a list of injured parties, like Mary Higgins Clark and Tom Clancy-- are really making significant contributions to the world of literature. Many other writers, like Graham Greene and Robert Frost, were able to be both significant literary players and popular writers. Popularity and literary 'significance' are not necessarily exclusive to one another. But when you stack King (or any of his fellow slighted-ones) up against the likes of Updike, Miller or Philip Roth, he just doesn't rate. Personally, I dislike King's prose and his stories, but setting that aside (assuming those things could be matters of taste), we have to ask if King's novels really do anything of significance in terms of understanding the possibilities of the literary form. I can't see that he really adds anything new, or provides a new perspective on things old and familiar. He writes mostly horror-versions of what Greene used to call 'entertainments,' allowing perhaps that more ambitious projects like The Stand (a staggering misery of a book) are really pretty dull versions of older stories. Who knows, maybe King will write something of more genuine significance. At this point, though, I see nothing in his work to warrant such an award, or to warrant an argument for his long-term significance in the literary canon.

      I don't want to get into the sticky question of 'what is literature,' a question that seems less and less valuable the more people insist on raising it. It does strike me as interesting that the claims of 'ignoring the popular' is the whinge-like argument of the mediocre. Is King worthy of study? Perhaps. Would I let a student of mine, in a course on, oh, contemporary fiction, write a paper on King? Sure, why not. In the end, though, I suspect this hypothetical student would end up writing a paper that was more sociological than literary qua literary. And there's the telling point. He is not a stylist, he is not an innovator, he is not an especially deft creator of literary worlds-- and he, to my admittedly limited reading of him, is never in any way profound. So, while his works may have a kind of immediate appeal to a throng of people, their literary historical significance will be pretty much nil. King's novels are like cheap Chinese food: perhaps momentarily filling (or bloating), but shortly later one feels hungry again, this time for something more substantial. And this blog will make no remark connecting reading King to the excremental final stage of such Chinese food.