Right after Stephen King got that tempest in a teapot rolling I needed something to read and there was nothing new in the house but Ken Follett John Grisham and Clive Cussler. So I did pretty much what he was saying to do, I read some best-selling 'non-serious' literary authors. But that's for later. What I did last week was read in spurts and back and forth Kathryn Davis' The Girl Who Trod On A Loaf, and Robertson Davies' The Lyre of Orpheus. Both of whom are serious literary authors.
Both books are about an opera, in production by amateurs. Both books have a primary character of northern european extraction and sapphic proclivities. Both books have an intelligent everyman narrator, though Davies' alternates between first and third person and Davis' stays in the first. Both books are widely, complexly set and driven; and the plotlines of both are tapestries of philosphy and metaphysical speculation. I read often in snatches late at night these days, picking up a likely volume and reading til my eyes close. One night Davis, another Davies. Sometimes both in the same night. So of course I conflated them. Now I have to concentrate to separate them. Which means they're truly mixed deeper in where real art works its magic. And that would be the main distinction I'd make. Magic, competent or incompetent. Successful spells and fuddled attempts. Follett's Jackdaws concerns an heroic but little recognized branch of the French Resistance and its English allies, a hero of which was profiled here some time ago. He writes a gripping story. Grisham's a decent man, and that's not faint praise, decency is a rare enough virtue now, and he writes from a stance of decency, moral defense of the decent. I'm not going to pick at what it is in their work that's not enough or too much. But there it is. We're not talking about them as men, as human, we're talking about them as magi, as architects. The ranking isn't according to their worth personally, it's the value of their contribution to something higher than mere public appetite for entertainment.
There's room in the world for all of us, writers and readers and those who do neither, but the thing King didn't seem to want to address is the consuming attack on serious art the present complicitly allows; it's analogous to the assault on wilderness. Things are valued for their commercial potential and exploited or abandoned on those terms.
So the Academy's right to chastise the popular, at this point, not solely because it's popular, but because it creates the illusion, by producing millions of physical books, that there is a concomitant proliferation of actual literary art.
Magic is like technology. It works or it doesn't. The magic of great storytelling is not a consumer-determined choice. It is there or it is partially there or it is not there at all. Choice has nothing to do with it. Chocolate and vanilla has nothing to do with it.
The sun is out or the sun is not out, whether you're happy about that is another thing entirely.
The magic I'm talking about is not tricks and deception, it's the subtle outfitting of the inexperienced, giving knowledge without the gift being seen. Folk-tales, fairy tales, it's easy to disassemble some of the parts and see some of what's there. But the best literature is thrown out ahead of where we are as a whole, what we know about ourselves, as a species, as an organism, as the sum of our best, and worst, parts. What we are at this moment is inconceivably complex and vast, and the best literature does more than just reflect that, it equips us for the journey through.
Stephen King wants popular literature to be acknowledged by serious professional and accredited lettrists, but he wants it to be honored for something it hasn't done well or completely. It has not worked its magic.
Both books are about an opera, in production by amateurs. Both books have a primary character of northern european extraction and sapphic proclivities. Both books have an intelligent everyman narrator, though Davies' alternates between first and third person and Davis' stays in the first. Both books are widely, complexly set and driven; and the plotlines of both are tapestries of philosphy and metaphysical speculation. I read often in snatches late at night these days, picking up a likely volume and reading til my eyes close. One night Davis, another Davies. Sometimes both in the same night. So of course I conflated them. Now I have to concentrate to separate them. Which means they're truly mixed deeper in where real art works its magic. And that would be the main distinction I'd make. Magic, competent or incompetent. Successful spells and fuddled attempts. Follett's Jackdaws concerns an heroic but little recognized branch of the French Resistance and its English allies, a hero of which was profiled here some time ago. He writes a gripping story. Grisham's a decent man, and that's not faint praise, decency is a rare enough virtue now, and he writes from a stance of decency, moral defense of the decent. I'm not going to pick at what it is in their work that's not enough or too much. But there it is. We're not talking about them as men, as human, we're talking about them as magi, as architects. The ranking isn't according to their worth personally, it's the value of their contribution to something higher than mere public appetite for entertainment.
There's room in the world for all of us, writers and readers and those who do neither, but the thing King didn't seem to want to address is the consuming attack on serious art the present complicitly allows; it's analogous to the assault on wilderness. Things are valued for their commercial potential and exploited or abandoned on those terms.
So the Academy's right to chastise the popular, at this point, not solely because it's popular, but because it creates the illusion, by producing millions of physical books, that there is a concomitant proliferation of actual literary art.
Magic is like technology. It works or it doesn't. The magic of great storytelling is not a consumer-determined choice. It is there or it is partially there or it is not there at all. Choice has nothing to do with it. Chocolate and vanilla has nothing to do with it.
The sun is out or the sun is not out, whether you're happy about that is another thing entirely.
The magic I'm talking about is not tricks and deception, it's the subtle outfitting of the inexperienced, giving knowledge without the gift being seen. Folk-tales, fairy tales, it's easy to disassemble some of the parts and see some of what's there. But the best literature is thrown out ahead of where we are as a whole, what we know about ourselves, as a species, as an organism, as the sum of our best, and worst, parts. What we are at this moment is inconceivably complex and vast, and the best literature does more than just reflect that, it equips us for the journey through.
Stephen King wants popular literature to be acknowledged by serious professional and accredited lettrists, but he wants it to be honored for something it hasn't done well or completely. It has not worked its magic.
