Bloom on Vineland?

[Dave Monroe]

For the World of Letters, It's a Horror
Giving a National Book Foundation award to Stephen
King is only the 
latest chapter in the dumbing down of our culture.
By Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is a professor at Yale, a literary critic
and author of 
"The Western Canon," (Riverhead Books, 1995).

September 19, 2003

The decision to give the National Book Foundation's
annual award for "distinguished contribution" to
Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the
shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. 
I've described King in the past as a writer of penny
dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He
shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an
immensely inadequate writer, on a
sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph,
book-by-book basis.

The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to
bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously
gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and
to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King,
they 
recognize nothing but the commercial value of his
books, which sell in the millions but do little more
for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If
this is going to be the criterion in the future, then
perhaps next year the committee should give its award
for distinguished 
contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel
Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about
a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on
Rowling. I went to the Yale bookstore and bought and
read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's
Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The
writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I
read, I noticed that every time a character went for a
walk, the author wrote instead that the character
"stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of
an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I
stopped only after I had marked the envelope several
dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so
governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no
other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced.
I was told that children would now only read J.K.
Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after
all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling
was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't
that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children
on to Kipling's 
"Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not
lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth
Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's
"Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter
by the same Stephen 
King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these
kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when
they get older they will go on to read Stephen King."
And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When
you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to
read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are
being dumbed down, and 
the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a
lifetime of teaching 
English, I've seen the study of literature debased.
There's very little authentic study of the humanities
remaining. My research assistant came to me two years
ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the
teacher 
spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist.
This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the
1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the
great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe 
Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats,
William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they
are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe,
Laetitia Landon and others who just can't write. A
fourth-rate playwright like Aphra Behn is being taught
instead of Shakespeare in many curricula across the
country.

Recently, I spoke at the funeral of my old friend
Thomas M. Green of Yale, perhaps the most
distinguished scholar of Renaissance literature of his
generation. I said, "I fear that something of great
value has ended 
forever."

Today, there are four living American novelists I know
of who are still 
at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is
still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now
share this "distinguished contribution" award with
Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt
find something funny to say about it. There's Cormac
McCarthy, whose novel "Blood Meridian" is worthy of
Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and Don DeLillo, whose
"Underworld" is a great book.

Instead, this year's award goes to King. It's a
terrible mistake.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bloom19sep19,1,6368889,print.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

--- Saulo Brandão <losvomitones at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone knows where I can get the entire
> interview?

And thank Steve (no relation?) Maas ...

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