« Sand castles | Main | Not soon forgotten »
October 3, 2003
Waveringly?
I was glad to receive this response to my recent post comparing Walter Scott to Stephen King:Scott was no great stylist, but he was vastly more popular and influential in his own time than any novelist is today. Scott's stories caught the imagination of whole continents, whereas the most one can say about King is that he's very popular for a writer, and even he can't match the likes of Dr. Atkins in sales of individual books. I would suggest that the nearest analog to Scott in today's world would be George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg. Both have created other worlds in which a good number of the inhabitants of this world have gone to immerse themselves, and both have spawned scores of less talented imitators. Both have occasionally approached a more enduring art, they will be remembered for their popular work. And they will be remembered perhaps less for what they said than for their subsequent influence, which is not precisely true for a Dickens or a Fellini.
I'm not trying to be snobbish about this--I'm a great fan of popular culture. But there is a difference between the novels of King and Ishiguro, just as there is a difference between the music of The Beatles and Benjamin Britten. Perhaps the crux of it has to do with the one being immediately enjoyable, while the other requires an investment of time and energy to be fully appreciated. These questions are easier to answer when faced with something that is obviously of superior quality and is immediately enjoyable (e.g., Beethoven's 9th, Apocalypse Now or Anna Karenina), but I don't see that anything on this level is being produced today, which is why we are so stymied when faced with the question of to whom we should give a literary award.
The first point, about Scott, sounds about right. I'm certain, anyway, that the comparison I drew works out a whole lot better as an answer to the question "who in the 19th century was like King?" than as an answer to "who today is like Scott?" For an answer to the latter question, jumping from literature to film is unquestionably a smart move, and gives a much truer sense of the magnitude of Scott's impact on his contemporaries and his literary inheritors.
As for the second point, yes. Absolutely. These differences exist, and they matter, and recognizing them matters. I didn't mean to suggest we lump together Stephen King and Kazuo Ishiguro. What my reader is describing, though, are individuals' experiences of cultural works. What I find satisfying about the giving of this award to King has to do with his wider, if shallower, impact on many readers (an impact made intelligently and imaginatively, in my opinion, or we wouldn't even be having this conversation). They're two distinct sorts of writing achievements, and it makes sense to me to recognize both.
Posted October 3, 2003 3:10 AM
