Bloom
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Boston Globe, September 24, 2003
Dumbing down American readers, By Harold Bloom
THE DECISION to give the National Book Foundations annual award for “distinguished contribution” to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of
dumbing down our cultural life. Ive 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.
Whats 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 University bookstore and bought and read a copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerers 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. Rowlings mind is so governed by cliches 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 read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasnt, after all, better than
reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasnt that a good thing?
It is not. “Harry Potter” will not lead our children on to Kiplings “Just So Stories” or his “Jungle Book.” It will not lead them to Thurbers “Thirteen Clocks” or Kenneth Grahames “Wind in the Willows” or Lewis Carrolls “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.
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