Credit Where It's Due

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about literature. Partly because I'm an English major, but partly because I am a reader of contemporary pop fiction. I've stumbled upon a dilemma, well, not a dilemma so much as a question I suppose. Why can't I study the literature that I read for fun? What is the difference between literature and Literature, and why are we as scholars not looking at the popular stuff for hints at our own society?

The came to me during a discussion with my very wonderful and intelligent boyfriend. Jason was making breakfast and I was, well, watching him do so. The topic wandered onto the Noble Prize for Literature. I had just finished a class where I read several noble prize winners and I found that I wasn't too impressed with their works. Really, only one was enjoyable for me (Orhan Pamuk), and everyone else just seemed convoluted or purposefully obtuse. For example, I loved Jose Saramago's Blindness, and I thought the fact that he never separated dialog and his sentences went on forever was because everyone in the world was blind so they wouldn't know who was talking either. This was not the case, however, and as it turns out Saramago never ever separates his dialog, which makes his work very very hard to read. Also, I noticed that his narrator totally removes the reader from all possible action in the story. You rarely feel involved in what he is telling you because not only do you have a third person narrator, but that narrator is something of an ambiguous character himself, but not one with enough personally fleshed out so you can never attach to him. This is not good story telling, not if the reader finds themselves uninvolved. Aren't we suppose to attach to the characters? And yet he won a noble prize.

I found myself, in this conversation with Jason, sticking up for authors I love to read. My example at the time, because I was reading one of his books, was Stephen King. King has written a ton of different stories, and he has a pretty loyal following. King's stories, for me at least, feel like you are hearing them while sitting on the back porch, sipping lemonades, listening to some old vet telling you tales from his bizarre and frightening life. I am involved in these stories. Also, King's work isn't as superficial as most academics want us to believe. His stories are more than just monster stories, they are stories about human nature. King knows how a story is suppose to work. A good story is never about the monster or aliens or fantasy creatures, a story is about the human reaction to the world around them and to each other. King's human element examines human nature, both the good and dark sides of the human being, and that is what makes or breaks a story.

Basically all storytellers are sociologists in a way. We examine society, we examine individuals, and we try our best to capture what we see and translate that for the readers. The setting, the struggle, that is all a back drop for the human characters. King knows this. He gets us invested in the characters and then he puts them through Hell, and has us watch to see what parts of their nature gets revealed in the flames. Usually there is a character that someone can totally relate to, whose actions and feelings we can all read about and say, "Wow, would I react like that?" or "Man, that is totally me."

I could go on to argue that a lot of King's work actually references mythology and contains Biblical references as well (and the man KNOWS the Bible. Trust me, my parents are fundamentalist Christians, I attended a Christian high school [via home schooling] and went through Bible boot camp until I was 18. I can stop a Biblical reference when it crosses my path, and King's references aren't subtle.). And King's work has grown over the years. Anyone read Hearts in Atlantis? That wasn't a horror novel, that was definitely more artsy. What I'm saying is this, we as scholars can't ignore a literary figure like King. His made up words have made it into the dictionary! Pryokinesis, yeah, that was Stephen King folks. That word didn't exist before Fire Starter. He also appeals to everyone. I can read his stories and see the deeper Biblical and literary references, and Joe Snuffy can read them and see the humor and the horror and enjoy a good story. Shouldn't King be getting some credit? Shouldn't we want to study this if only to study the society that we live in now? These works are popular, don't we want to know why? Isn't King capturing some common fear here, some common thread or insight that keeps all of his fans interested? When should we study this?