JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 329 из 359*
*Which reminds me of something that happened at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. A UPI reporter asked me the eternal question: "Why do people read this horror stuff?" My reply was essentially Harlan's; you try to catch the madness in a bell-jar so you can cope with it a little better. People who read horror fiction are warped, I told the reporter; but if you don't have a few warps in your record, you're going to find it impossible to cope with life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The headline on the UPI squib that came down the wire and into newspapers coast to coast was predictable enough, I suppose, and exactly what I deserved for presuming to speak metaphorically to a newspaperman: KING SAYS HIS FANS ARE WARPED. Open mouth; Insert foot; Close mouth.
"The Tehran hostages, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Howard Hughes fake biography and subsequent death, the Entebbe raid, the murder of Kitty Genovese, the Jonestown massacre, the H-bomb alert in Los Angeles several years ago, Watergate, the Hillside Strangler, the Manson Family, the oil conspiracy: all of them are melodramatic and excessive beyond the ability of a writer of mimetic fiction to capture in fiction without being ridiculous. Yet all of them happened. If you or I were to attempt writing a novel about such things, before the fact, we'd be laughed out of the critical esteem of even the lowliest reviewer.
"I'm not paraphrasing the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction, because I don't see any of these events as mirroring `truth' or `reality.' Twenty years ago the very idea of international terrorism would have been inconceivable. Today it's a given. So commonplace that we're unmanned and helpless in the face of Khomeini's audacity. In one fell swoop the man has become the most important public figure of our time. In short, he has manipulated reality simply by being bold. How precise a paradigm he has become for the copelessness of our times. In this madman we have an example of one who understands-even if subcutaneously-that the real world is infinitely manipulable. He has dreamed, and forced the rest of the world to live in that dream. That it is a nightmare for the rest of us is of no concern to the dreamer. Cane man's Utopia . . . "But his example, I suppose, in cathexian terms, is endlessly replicable. And what he has done is what I try to do in my stories. To alter everyday existence in a stretch of fiction . . . . And by the altering, by an insertion of a paradigmatic fantasy element, to permit the reader to perceive what she/he takes for granted in the surrounding precept in a slightly altered way.
*Which reminds me of something that happened at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. A UPI reporter asked me the eternal question: "Why do people read this horror stuff?" My reply was essentially Harlan's; you try to catch the madness in a bell-jar so you can cope with it a little better. People who read horror fiction are warped, I told the reporter; but if you don't have a few warps in your record, you're going to find it impossible to cope with life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The headline on the UPI squib that came down the wire and into newspapers coast to coast was predictable enough, I suppose, and exactly what I deserved for presuming to speak metaphorically to a newspaperman: KING SAYS HIS FANS ARE WARPED. Open mouth; Insert foot; Close mouth.
"The Tehran hostages, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Howard Hughes fake biography and subsequent death, the Entebbe raid, the murder of Kitty Genovese, the Jonestown massacre, the H-bomb alert in Los Angeles several years ago, Watergate, the Hillside Strangler, the Manson Family, the oil conspiracy: all of them are melodramatic and excessive beyond the ability of a writer of mimetic fiction to capture in fiction without being ridiculous. Yet all of them happened. If you or I were to attempt writing a novel about such things, before the fact, we'd be laughed out of the critical esteem of even the lowliest reviewer.
"I'm not paraphrasing the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction, because I don't see any of these events as mirroring `truth' or `reality.' Twenty years ago the very idea of international terrorism would have been inconceivable. Today it's a given. So commonplace that we're unmanned and helpless in the face of Khomeini's audacity. In one fell swoop the man has become the most important public figure of our time. In short, he has manipulated reality simply by being bold. How precise a paradigm he has become for the copelessness of our times. In this madman we have an example of one who understands-even if subcutaneously-that the real world is infinitely manipulable. He has dreamed, and forced the rest of the world to live in that dream. That it is a nightmare for the rest of us is of no concern to the dreamer. Cane man's Utopia . . . "But his example, I suppose, in cathexian terms, is endlessly replicable. And what he has done is what I try to do in my stories. To alter everyday existence in a stretch of fiction . . . . And by the altering, by an insertion of a paradigmatic fantasy element, to permit the reader to perceive what she/he takes for granted in the surrounding precept in a slightly altered way.