/lit/ - Literature

>>15378865

Edgar Allan Poe must have the strangest legacy in modern literature: he invented both pulp fiction and the literary avant-garde.

While these two tendencies may—in their shared commitments to sensationalism and formalism—be allies in a high-low war against the middle mind (exemplified in literature by the realist novel and the expressive lyric), it is quite a feat to have birthed them both. But Poe codified several important popular genres that would later flourish in the era of mass literacy and mass media (horror, detective fiction, science fiction) and thereby influenced such proto-pulp and pulp writers as Doyle, Stevenson, Wells, and Lovecraft, even as his theoretical insistence on a “pure” (i.e., non-mimetic) literary writing designed to affect the reader through the manipulation of form and surface, not to mention his depiction of disordered psychological states and waking dream-worlds, bequeathed a legacy to modernism and the avant-garde through Baudelaire and the French Symbolists and Decadents as well as such other admirers as Dostoevsky, Wilde, and Kafka.

Whether pulp fictioneer or avant-garde poet, Poe is the founder of a literature concerned with the production of forms (well-constructed generic tales or abstract sound-surface lyrics) rather than of truth or meaning. Neither a thriller nor an avant-garde poem can really be read as one is supposed to read Keats or Hawthorne, whose texts are dense entanglements of allusion and implication; thrillers and avant-garde poems are rather absorbed as intellectual structures and interpreted as sensational events. In this sense, Poe is one of first writers who, as in the German critical judgment that opens his story “The Man of the Crowd,” does not permit himself to be read.

>>15303796

King touches the mediocrity in us all. The bottom line is he is able to fathom the surface not depths of the American psyche, and what he found was its banal horror, its quiet modes of desperation and fear; that hauntings of the untutored mind. The truth is that the vast majority of Americans are not great readers, and for the most part fear intellectuals – the anti-intellectualist tradition and all that blather etc. But hey he has the genius to touch that dark corner of our society with an acumen that few before or since can duplicate. Maybe his banal horror is the true genius of the American psyche rather than all our hypercritical elitism put together…

I don’t read King because he brings us the latest philosophical fad, nor that he intellectualizes over the world’s pain, but rather because he is able to bring to the fore the lost souls of the American psyche, to put them on a page as banal as they are and make them live, love, dread, kill, maim, horrify, etc. It’s the ugly ducklings that cannot represent themselves that King lifts up and exposes to the mesh of his fevered mind. King has no pretenses to literature, but is and has always favored the pulp traditions of our country. Too many of our supposed cultural elite seem to see in this something beneath their reading habits. So be it. For me King brings to us the haunted inscapes of the real America exposed in the frying pan of pulp. And, yet, those who love the noir narratives of the great detective and crime fictions of the last century can understand King as one of theirs… even Lovecraft and Jim Thompson would have accepted this latter day pulpist against all the literati in history.

>>14319776

Ah okay. I remembered it from an article about why King sucks and finally tracked it down:

>The hero of 11/22/63 is a high school English teacher named Jake Epping. (When it comes to writing, Jake, one of King’s regular-Joe white knights, prefers a supposedly heartfelt but clumsily written story by a janitor getting a GED degree — the story makes Jake cry and he gives it an A-plus — to the “boring” and “pursey-mouthed” essays by his honors students. King doesn’t show us a sample of the latter, but when he does finally get around to sharing a substantial piece of the janitor’s story, you can’t help but wonder about Jake’s (and King’s) judgment. King’s real purpose here seems to be to suggest that people like him write with a lot of feeling, while so-called literary people don’t, and that it is the “what,” rather than the “how,” that matters in writing. Jake, who seems to have no serious flaws other than to have once been married to an alcoholic (later described as a “sweet” person underneath it all), is persuaded by the proprietor of a diner to walk through the diner’s pantry into the past — the diner owner, Al, who is dying of cancer, has, for whatever reason, access to a time-travel tunnel. Al wants Jake to correct the past, and specifically to intervene in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. Jake, humbly demurring, says, “Al. . . man . . . I’m just a little guy.”

>Kate Gompert. Suicidally depressed 21 year-old Kate Gompert is the most uncompromising and affecting character in this entire novel, and perhaps the biggest bone I have to pick with the late Mr. Wallace concerns his failure of her. For this is a case where we actually can speak of an author failing one of his characters. When she is introduced in a 10-page scene beginning on page 68, she seems (like Erdedy) to be destined for a major role in IJ, but (also like Erdedy) we only have a couple scenes and a few brief glimpses of her thereafter. (It occurs to me that in both these scenes DFW is playing with readerly expectations, artificially heightening and then gradually dashing them.) She is a character strong enough to carry an entire novel and to be at least the equal of Hal and Gately in this one, but after the strong intro, Wallace uses her briefly and then drops her cruelly to her death. And the word 'uses' is carefully chosen. Kate Gompert provides the thin, U.H.I.D.-style veil through which DFW tells us all he knows firsthand about the suicidal depression that will eventually kill him. If you read nothing else in Infinite Jest, read pages 692-698, where Wallace dons the mask of Kate Gompert's free indirect narration to write a 12-years premature suicide note. They're some of the most brilliant and moving pages ever written about suicide, and they're well worth the price of the book. When Wallace is done with them, however, he's pretty much done with Kate. A couple hundred pages later she falls unwittingly into the hands of the sadistic "wheelchair assassins" and presumably becomes a "test subject" victim of Infinite Jest V. The character Wallace created deserves better than this; her author fails her.

Why did he fail her?

>>14015020

>All in all, Story of the Eye is a typical piece of “French extremity,” to cite the film genre, a narrative tradition almost unchanged since the days of Sade, whose books I have never succeeded in finishing, and which continues onscreen today. Mechanically reversing the traditional pieties of the west like flipping a series of switches, the devotees of extremity have created a pious tradition of their own, carried on to a stultifying extent in the institutions of culture, particularly the art world and some wings of academe.

>I am not a gelded-eyed Apollonian myself and have written with admiration in just the last few weeks of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg who perceive inhuman powers at work in the cosmos and in society and disparage any weak sentimentalism that would evade this fact. But these disparate writers do not pretend that the human condition can be one of simply melding with the anti-light of the black sun and disappearing up our own orifice in an ecstatic worship of the void; from Lovecraft’s rationalism to Schnackenberg’s Christianity, to say nothing of Yeats’s unforgettably articulated inner conflict between the needs of the flesh and the desires of the soul, these writers chart what actually is: the void, yes, but also every attempt to fill it or redeem it or see ourselves in it, all those human drives from reason to love that exist alongside or in tension with the will to annihilate ourselves or another.

>Bataille, and perhaps “French extremity” in general, is without this tension, without this dialectic, and so, for me, does not rise to the level of literature, however well it may function as a book of one hand—or one thought.

Possessed by something like the desire Plato described to look on corpses, I scrolled through Twitter to see him denounced by Anglophones as a closed-minded bigot, between all the obituaries hailing him as cosmopolitan critic in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian. It was in Bloom that I first saw the names Anne Carson and John Crowley in print; it was from Bloom that I first heard of Machado de Assis and Alejo Carpentier, of Jay Wright and Thylias Moss. I’ll wager that his critics haven’t heard of Thylias Moss (you might start here if you’re curious), but they’re sure that they’re smarter and holier than Bloom, certain that their lives and opinions and tastes are beyond reproach now and forever.

I won’t defend every excess of his rhetoric or every failure in his personal life, and I don’t absolve anyone of irresponsible or evil behavior; but neither do I think it actually helps the world when every artistic or intellectual achievement is forced back down into the squalor we should instead be grateful it was able to subsume and transcend.

Is it not possible that the work of a midcentury scholar of working-class urban Yiddish-speaking Jewish background who championed the dissenting Romantics against the New Critical establishment and its Anglo-Catholic poetics is not exhaustively explained by the word “white,” or that a critic whose aesthetics traveled under the banners of Whitman and Wilde, of Walter Pater and Hart Crane, offered, with its contingency and robust homosocial conflict and gnostic contempt for the organic and merely given, a substantially queer canon?

I would delete all these polemics—aren’t they unseemly in a valediction? But no, it’s a fitting tribute. Didn’t Bloom teach me the style? Didn’t I learn it in my teen years from books readily available at the mall and tantalizingly only half-comprehensible to me then, books written for the common reader but not for one presumed unintelligent, while the scourges of “elitism” (whatever that is—it seems like anti-elitism today is primarily the defense of corporate monopolies) wouldn’t deign to write for anyone outside their cliques and coteries? And didn’t he often affect, in a spirit whose calculated campiness was never quite grasped by his detractors, the posture of the warrior, if only of the dangerously ludic Falstaffian variety? I desist from these questions, if not from the work. Adieu to Bloom is all I came here to say.

>Why do you hate me so much anon?

Where do I start with John Green?

>>13320986
>What is it about King’s writing that appeals to so many people? Clearly, King’s readers — many of whom seem to get hooked on him when they are adolescents — don’t care that the sentences he writes or the scenes he constructs are dull. There must be something in the narrative arc, or in the nature of King’s characters, that these readers can’t resist. My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good (the latter would, of course, include the aggrieved adolescent or adult), a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil. King coddles his readers, all nice, good, ordinary, likeable people (just like the heroes of his books), though this doesn’t completely explain why these readers are so tolerant of the bloat in these novels, why they will let King go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book.

>My wife's son, George, who is now twenty-four, read a little King in high school, but he hasn’t gone back to him since then. After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, as my son has, why would you return to Stephen King? King may be an adequate enough escape from life, if that’s all you require from a book of fiction, but his work (or what I’ve read of it) is a far cry from literature, which, at its best, is, sentence by sentence, a revelation about life.

>>13075775

>What is it about King’s writing that appeals to so many people? Clearly, King’s readers — many of whom seem to get hooked on him when they are adolescents — don’t care that the sentences he writes or the scenes he constructs are dull. There must be something in the narrative arc, or in the nature of King’s characters, that these readers can’t resist. My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good (the latter would, of course, include the aggrieved adolescent or adult), a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil. King coddles his readers, all nice, good, ordinary, likeable people (just like the heroes of his books), though this doesn’t completely explain why these readers are so tolerant of the bloat in these novels, why they will let King go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book.

>My wife's son, George, who is now twenty-four, read a little King in high school, but he hasn’t gone back to him since then. After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, as my son has, why would you return to Stephen King? King may be an adequate enough escape from life, if that’s all you require from a book of fiction, but his work (or what I’ve read of it) is a far cry from literature, which, at its best, is, sentence by sentence, a revelation about life.

Is he right?

ITT: Post writers who were the John Green of their respective generation.

>>12935989


>What is it about King’s writing that appeals to so many people? Clearly, King’s readers — many of whom seem to get hooked on him when they are adolescents — don’t care that the sentences he writes or the scenes he constructs are dull. There must be something in the narrative arc, or in the nature of King’s characters, that these readers can’t resist. My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good (the latter would, of course, include the aggrieved adolescent or adult), a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil. King coddles his readers, all nice, good, ordinary, likeable people (just like the heroes of his books), though this doesn’t completely explain why these readers are so tolerant of the bloat in these novels, why they will let King go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book.

>>12916374

too bad he was wrong about, like, everything

Anon, check the doobleydoo and you'll see a list of books that you definitely need to read!

The Fault in Our Stars

Looking for Alaska

Paper Towns

Turtles All the Way Down

Thanks anon, DFTBA (don't for get to be awesome)