Stephen King's Writers: the Critical Politics of Literary Quality in Misery and the Dark Half

STEPHEN KING’S WRITERS: THE CRITICAL POLITICS OF LITERARY QUALITY IN MISERY AND THE DARK HALF MICHAEL J. MEYER This essay explores how King, through his writer protagonists in Misery and The Dark Half, presents several traits shared by all creative artists and attempts to determine the validity of the present criteria used by literary critics in order to establish the differences between “classic” and “pulp” fiction. King first pinpoints differences in the writing process, including methodologies employed and language used, but, more importantly, he con- siders the motivation that engenders composition. As he probes the self- concept of a “writer,” King subtly delineates his own personal identity crisis, and, in the process, provides his readers with a deliberate analysis of the dichotomy that exists between writers whose work is considered inter- pretative and therefore classic ... and those who produce stories that are “only” designed to provide entertainment and relaxation rather than to probe vital questions about human actions and motivations. Through the plots of both Misery and The Dark Half, King poses the ambiguous question faced by all writers: whether their concern for the symbiotic relationship with their reading public is great enough to overcome their fear of catering to inferior quality in order to attain a more measurable goal: reader accept- ance and financial success. Stephen King has made it increasingly obvious in his work that he yearns to be considered one of America’s premier writers rather than merely a master of the horror genre. Perhaps motivated by his experiences as a former literature major in college and as a high school English teacher, King indicates his desire by paying lip service to so-called “great” American authors in most of his work, mentioning Poe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and especially Faulkner directly or through literary allusions. These authors, as well as Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Franz Kafka and T. S. Eliot, are representative of the artistic community with which King would like to be identified. One problem King faces in his quest to elevate his status is the fact that the genre he has chosen (horror) has long been relegated with its sisters, crime and 98 Michael J. Meyer romance, as an inferior pursuit and the province of hack writers or write-alikes. In order to redeem these areas of interest, King writes intensely in their defense, attempting to elevate their reputation by associating writers of “quality” with the field. For example, he argues in “The Horror Writer and The Ten Bears”: Horror isn’t a hack market now and never was. The genre is one of the most deli- cate known to man, and it must be handled with great care and more than a little love. Some of the greatest authors of all time have tried their hand at things that go bump in the night, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hawthorne, Poe, Henry James, William Faulkner and a score of others. (13) Unfortunately, King has reluctantly acknowledged that his critical reputation has not reached these heights; indeed in a preface to “The Sun Dog” in Four Past Midnight he states: “I am no one’s National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize winner” (608). Elsewhere, he has admitted, “I am not a great artist, but I’ve always felt impelled to write” (Night Shift, xiii). However, despite his protests to the contrary, readers can sense that King is offended by the sugges- tion that he has never written anything serious. He seems to take it as a personal insult that despite his adroit manipulation of plot and his skillful development of character, he remains, in the eyes of most critics, merely a writer of popular fiction, an author whose books may be evaluated on a level with those pro- duced by Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, Victoria Holt, Rosemary Rogers and Danielle Steele, composers of what King himself labels pulp-fiction and whom he has dismissed as “write-alikes” (The Dark Half 67). Perhaps, as novelist Michele Shung suggested in The New Republic, “the grisly nature of [his] subject matter [has led] some critics to underestimate his literary talents” (150). In an interview published in Playboy in 1983, King rails against critics who “ghettoize horror and fantasy and instantly relegate them beyond the pale of so-called serious literature” (Bare Bones, 52). He argues that such criticisms assume “that all popular literature must also, by definition, be bad literature. These criticisms are not really against bad writing; they are against an entire type of writing” (53). Thus King’s chore is primarily a struggle to overcome what Leslie Fiedler has defined as “the notorious reputation of macabre fiction,” its tendency to be labeled as “disreputable schlock, frivolous make- believe, vulgar and gross, and a regrettable regression from the straight path of literary progress” (The Kingdom of Fear, 57). Clearly uncomfortable with being labeled as an individual whose preoccupation with horror automatically results in inferior prose, King has not only revealed his frustration in inter- views and in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre but also has surprisingly included it as a major factor in several of his major novels, including Misery.

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