I just finished reading Stephen King’s “1922” and was thoroughly wowed. King’s prose contains such a gritty truth that one is compelled to not only be horrified by the gore and the terror, but to understand it, mainly through the identification of the protagonists as the everyday sort. There are no Odysseuses , Beowulfs, or tragic hero in King’s story, simply the mundane who learn their lives aren’t mundane after all, but filled with as much depredation and loathing as any a hero might face. This is, in essence, King’s poetics, his literary aesthetic. That aesthetic is so gut-wrenching in its insistence on everyday characters that King felt compelled to reveal some of his thoughts on the creative process—and the role of fiction in our society in general—in an afterword:
“I have little patience with writers who don’t take the job seriously, and none at all with those who see the art of story-fiction as essentially worn out. It’s not worn out, and it’s not a literary game. It’s one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives. And the often terrible world we see around us. It’s the way we answer the questions, How can such things be? Stories suggest that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—there’s a reason.”
King’s brilliance truly lies in his commitment to the art of prose. Sure, he’s made a ton of money writing his entire life, but he declares that money is tangential, that it’s the art itself that’s important.
What King is diving at is the unshakeable desire for art in our lives. All true art, sometimes referred to as high art, is “one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives.” Fiction is a social requirement. King goes on to express his idea that commonplace characters placed in uncommon situations are the most riveting and emotionally appealing—hence the derivation of his poetics above. However, as an artist—specifically a writer—King is mentioning something that I’ve taken a large interest in in the past 12 months or so; the idea that art is essential, or even vital, as King mentions, to our very understanding of why we’re here and what we’re doing with the time we have. Intellectualism, understood as the single characteristic that separates humans from all other species on the planet, fiends for art. Those without much education have difficulty connecting to high art because of a lack of understanding of how the media work, and so most people become lovers of pop culture. One has simply to turn on a radio and a TV to hear and see pop culture hard at work, offering itself up for easy and unsophisticated consumption.
As King points out however, it’s high art like fiction—true fiction, the kind of fiction that is produced by writers who take their jobs seriously—that is absolutely essential to understanding our world. True fiction invites us in to ask the question, How can such things be?, on a more complicated and sophisticated level. What’s interesting about King’s poetics as he explains in the afterword is that he is looking for a devouring emotional response from the narrative first, and then the intellectual response second once the book is put down. King discusses voraciously reading Orwell’s 1984 as a teenager due to his emotional connection to the book while reading it. It appears King feels that emotion is the first way in which we should respond to true art. But why feel through something before one allows the intellect a crack at it? I think the answer lies in the fact that one’s mind doesn’t shut off when reading fiction, but rather is turned down to a dull roar while the emotional side is often stoked and tended like a desperate fire on damp wood in the dead of winter. We crave for emotion for our very survival, for our most immediate connection to what makes us human. Sometimes we need to pull ourselves off of the Information Super Highway and enter the dirt track that leads into the Forest of Feeling.
We’re saturated by information in the form of facts and statistics on a daily basis—the supreme comfortable realm of non-fiction. King’s compulsion to defend fiction is firmly grounded in our contemporary social context. His desire to defend what he does as an artist resides solely on the observation that our society seems to be turning away from fiction to keep our head out of the clouds, yet it’s the exploration of the clouds that makes our journey on the ground so rewarding.
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