The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Paul:

if you do not make your work pretty much inaccessible, it's lambasted by this crowd

What crowd is this? Is this a crowd with genuine malign influence or just crabby, snobby people, generally speaking? Card's conflation of the two is what I find most questionable about his remarks.

I don't want to sound as if I'm disparaging King or Card or genre fiction because I've enjoyed them all before and I will again. And I don't want to discount anyone's experiences with literary snobs and elitists, either because I've encountered them too and they're frequently just as unpleasant as Card says. But remarks like "The academic-literary elite prefers literature that cannot be properly understood unless you have your secret English Department Decoder Ring" and "Certainly you won't understand it unless you have paid money to an English professor to teach you how to read it properly. It's sort of an English Ph.D. Full Employment Policy" are just petulant. If there's any argument at all there, it's two deeply anti-intellectual assertions: A) "professors" (or the "academic-literary elite") write to intentionally confound common folk whom they despise; and B) common folk can't understand anything the "professors" write on their own, nor should they want to.

I ask you: who's the elitist here?

Card condemns an entire discipline and all his imagined pointy-headed intellectuals who aren't as in touch with the People as he is on the words of one eccentric critic and a CEO. That's what really chafes me about those remarks. Elitism isn't any less annoying when it's dressed up as faux-populism.

And Card's populism is faux-. That's the funny thing. He wants to despise Bloom's canon, but he also wants to incorporate King (and implicitly himself) into that canon. Card may say that "literature" is anything that people read and admire, but comments like "Meanwhile, though, King will have the last laugh." and "King will be remembered when all the writers favored by his disparagers are forgotten" suggest that he has an (unsurprisingly) conservative view of the literary canon as cultural validation. It's just not his canon. Someday, however, Orson Scott Card may yet take the place of F.R Leavis.

My disagreements with Card's Barcelona speech are similar, but I'll spare everyone them. If anyone must know what they are, hollar, and I'll write them up on my own blog.

I'm all for King getting his mad props, but Card's remarks are way over the top. There's a man reaching for a grievance or three to monger. Harold Bloom may speak for Card's imagined "literary elite," but Bloom is hardly a reliable indicator to the views of literary academia at large. Then Card conflates the publishing world with the literary world. No doubt there's a great deal of overlap, but the two are hardly coterminous. A former publishing CEO is no more representative of literary academia than Bloom. Card's jump from Bloom to Simon & Schuster to the "academic-literary elite" isn't even lucid.

OSC's assertion that King will be remembered when every writer "the literary elite" favors is forgotten is doubtful, but not worth disputing. No one knows who will survive; and prophecy doesn't have anything to do with enjoying any of those writers right now, anyway. Finally, it's worth pointing out, as Card doesn't, that the National Book Award has been awarded to writers who "tell stories," most notably in 1997 when Charles Frazier's first novel Cold Mountain beat literary elite faves Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon. I could go on, but it's obvious to me that King's work doesn't interest Card anymore than it interests Bloom. Both just want a scalp.

I would barely know where to start disagreeing with Card's Barcelona speech. The whole thing seems largely a figment of his own imagination.

King has some stuff that's junk. And some that's brilliant.

King's produced a lot of solid, entertaining, memorable work, but "brilliant" is a mischaracterization, I think. This isn't to knock him. I'm quibbling because King's work isn't brilliant compared to peers like, say, Nabokov, (or even Delany, maybe); but also because brilliance obviously isn't the only literary virtue to aspire to. Brilliance is an admirable literary virtue, but it isn't the only one. There's also charm, delight, entertainment, humor and many more. King's work has all of those virtures (some novels or stories more than others).

Incidentally, does anyone else think of Stephen King and John Updike as slightly more, slightly less "respectable" literary twins? Two prolific writers, writing traditional novels about the fears, desires and obsessions of mostly middle-class, mostly suburban late C20 Americans. That's a half-formed thought, so maybe it goes nowhere, but at times I've idly imagined Updike and King as the Superego and Id of a certain type of novel.

Then he began to talk about how books are removed from genre categories when they are good enough.

True from a marketing point of view, maybe, but is any book ever really "removed" from a genre catagory, regardless of how "good" it is? I don't think so. All writing is catagorized by genre, even if the genre is just "great books." Knowledge of genres and their interplay is part of makes a writer sucessful, I'm inclined to think.

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