Media

...He does what every storyteller wants to do...

...I was a member, for the fifth time, of the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury...

...As Jack Benny used to say: "Well~" I'd never read L'Amour or Steele, but I let the whole thing drop and we proceeded with our deliberations...

...Or is it a fluke that nearly all of his books have been transformed into films and that at least three of those films-~Tarrie, The Shining, and Stand by Me--are among the most important of the last twenty years...

...There's this town, see, possessed by a demon that wakes up every thirty years and kills and eats a lot of kids, then goes back to sleep...

...You bet...

...I wrote, diffidently, to my two co-jurors and suggested that, while we might not want to award King the prize for that year, couldn't we, maybe, like, mention him, and acknowledge that he was an American writer immersed in American culture and one hell of a good storyteller (those, by the way, being the announced optimal standards for the Pulitzer Prize...

...Let me be the first--I hope--to say Yes...

...What is the mysterious, malevolent force--here's the King-plot part--that flaws this picture, that somehow blights the name "Stephen King" with the leprous hues of the second-rate, the tawd~, the (gasp...

...Vulgar and sensationalist...

...and he keeps coming up with new stories...

...Can you imagine him having the guts to quote Mickey Spillane...

...We have heard George Bush quote Shakespeare, uncomprehendingly...

...I may as well have suggested an orgy in a crack house...

...Martin, a sociologist, contrasts the Northern European Protestant ideal of personal and cultural development through voluntarism with the more authoritarian and organic Catholic ideal that fuses state, religion, and society...

...You bet...

...Maybe we are not supposed to...

...Protestant presence in Latin America as the catalytic social breakthrough necessary for the privatization of religion that will lower the religious tensions in civic ideologies...

...His monsters, in fact, are always the monsters of growing up, growing old, growing into that grey pleasure that is the absence of real expectation: and who has not faced that devil...

...Corny...

...Protestantism has come to Latin 25 January 1991:59...

...that it no longer makes any sense at all...

...It" on TV is not the best made-forTV movie ever: for me, at least, that will always be Spielberg's "Duel...

...David Martin's earlier study, A General Theory of Secularization (Harper & Row, 1978), made fresh sense of a bewildering array of statistics on church practice in Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries...

...The quotation marks are important because by "Literature" I don't mean what people read and write and value because it sanctions and sanctifies their lives, but what is vetted, validated, and canonized as what you ought to take seriously by the establishmentwhich, by and large, doesn't have the damnest idea what its own most revered classics are really about...

...In this now classic study, Martin carefully parsed the secularization thesis in order to focus on structural differentiation, the mechanisms whereby the church is partly eased out of spheres of social legitimation---communication, welfare, and educationin favor of specialized institutions and professions...

...These two books should be read in tandem to correct one another...

...So is etc., etc...

...Anderson beams...

...I mean, this guy is good...

...nonliterary...

...He tells stories that grab you in some deep, maybe forgotten part of yourself, and make you want to hear what comes next...

...King does this in a prose that is not "Literature," maybe...

...It is what makes him, I think, our first truly multimedia storyteller...

...But seven kids--now grown up and successfulkilled It last time around, and when it wakes up again they come back to kill it once and for all...

...Martin reweaves this theory in Tongues of Fire...

...Neither King's dog-in-the-manger critics nor his oh-boy-welovehorror fans seem to have noticed the immense current of tenderness and nostalgia that underlies his gothicism...

...But Stoll is more attentive than Martin to charges that Pentecostal missionaries from the United States often act as tools of rightwing demagogues bent on undermining liberation theology and its challenge to North American domination of the region...

...It" on TV also reminds us--those of us not anxiety-ridden about the health of our "republic of letters," anyhow--that Mr...

...But it is a grand movie and I have no doubt that it will be rented and seen for a very long time until we all begin to think of it as a classic...

...And that's the last time I've been asked to be on the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury...

...In his analysis, religion in modem societies does not so much wither away as end up specializing in cultural matters and the personal concems of individuals...

...I have no intention of disparaging the masterworks of modem writing: my daytime job, after all, is teaching them...

...the sister and her lover plan marriage...

...Stoll, an anthropologist, shares Martin's conclusion that, as one wing of a wider religious reformation, Pentecostalism has the potential, at [east, to transform Latin America culturally, socially, and politically...

...King, however prolific he may be and however fabulously rich, is our premiere and much-to-be-valued storyteller, and that he is so because his stories matter...

...An infusion of a tea made from dried flowers ("I do not drink potpourri," says the sister) and a sincerely reiterated, "I love you," will solve all problems, smooth all edges, bring everyone together...

...Frieda, as Martha Gehman plays her and perhaps as Kondoleon wrote her, comes across as someone out of the Hitler youth movement...

...Does Protestantism represent a new cultural phase for Latin America, a blueprint for economic modernization and cultural pluralism...

...Take It...

...JOHN A. COLEMAN he 1990 election of an Evangelical vice-president of Peru on the ticket of a Catholic, Alberto Fujimori, raised questions again about the so-called "invasion of the sects" in Latin America...

...The responses were not diffident...

...Stoll also takes note of the way in which an explicitly apolitical stance in explosive situations of injustice can slip into tacit alliances with right-wing military regimes that abuse human rights...

...He celebrates the JOHN A. COLEMAN, S.J., is professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley...

...Ibsen (The WildDuck), Gorky (The Lower Depths), and O'Neill (The Iceman Cometh) have all warned us against the transforming stranger...

...quadrupled in Brazil...

...All of this is in the context of persistent questions about the growth of Protestantism in the Southern Hemisphere: Will Latin America turn Protestant...

...Writer" or--gaah!--"author" are terms we---or somebody-maybe the French--have heaped with such a baggage of selfconsciousness and involution (such a word...

...Because King, 58: Commonwealin whatever medium, is always telling us stories of the loss of innocence and hope...

...We kill the monster by giving in to the joy of the story, reliving the myth, and recementing our links to what made us what and who we are...

...Something of immense value...

...Lima's Jesuit archbishop, Augusto Vargas, supported Fujimori's rival, Mario Vargas Llosa, an agnostic, out of fear that the evangelicals would find a new cultural platform with Fujimori's Change '90 party...

...This is, already, a cancer on our republic of letters...

...he makes a lot of money doing it...

...The fairy-tale structure of the piece suggests that she is indeed a good witch, but she is such an unpleasant presence that I found myself longing for Joan Copeland's wicked Eva...

...One of my colleagues--I've saved the letter--said that nothing would induce him/her to sign anything praising Stephen King, and continued, "I regard King as the chief cancer on our republic of letters---even more than Louis L'Amour or Danielle Steele...

...And his stories--as all stories do, if they're good ones--tell us that we haven't forgotten, or need not forget...

...quintupled in E1 Salvador, Peru, and Costa Rica...

...And so it does...

...and this quality, his central gift as a fabulator, translates from print to film to TV with absolutely no lessening of force...

...The parents kiss...

...GERALD WEALES MEDIA JUST DOING IT STEPHEN KING'S CRAFT tephen King doesn't know it, hut he and I go back a ways (that almost sounds like one of his own innocuous/ominous openings, doesn't it...

...It" on TV is not--King purists can just be quiet--It the novel: but it's close enough to be wonderful, scary, and finally (I mean this), as generous and affirming as King's stories usually are...

...At the beginning, in a foolish speech to the audience, she explains that she is not a villain...

...Since 1960, Protestantism, especially in its pentecostal forms, has tripled its numbers in Argentina, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic...

...And King's It was published that year...

...I've called King a "storyteller" throughout, not a "writer...

...He does it in a more ancient and vastly more sacred form--that of the storyteller--that reminds us that all media are there to preserve the myths of the tribe, and make us new...

...Latin America is becoming Protestant more rapidly than Central Europe did in the sixteenth century...

...25 January 1991:57So I forgot the whole thing, and then, in November 1990 ABC did a four-hour "Novel for Television" of It, and the memories came flooding back...

...FRANK McCONNELL THE PURITAN ETHIC GOES SOUTH Will Latin America become Protestant...

...The data from which he draws are both stunning and incontrovertible...

...and grown six-fold in Ecuador and Colombia and seven-fold in Guatemala (where Protestantism may become the majority religion by the end of the century...

...Well, I'll tell you...

...David Martin and David Stoll, who tackle these questions and many others in these new books, arrive independently at the conclusion that Pentecostatism may contain the necessary elements for fostering massive cultural change in Latin America--a shift toward the "Protestant ethic" needed for Latin America's take-off to modernity...

...Don't get me wrong...

...I read it--read It?--and did what we used to call in the stoned sixties, a "silly...

...It's almost like a King plot: maybe it is a King plot...

...The name of the monster is "Literature...

...Unless, of course, you are planning to rewrite Waiting for Godot for the thousandth time, but this time with no dialogue (oops--sorry, Beckett did that) or, better, a long book on Godot to demonstrate that your own nihilism is more so, and more sophisticated than, Beekett's...

...Some of them die, but most survive, and in surviving they learn to make peace with their unhappy adolescent past, they learn to love one another again as they did in their youth, and they find the courage to face down not just the monster in the town, but the monster that is their future and yours and mine...

...But I would rather read Kafka, or Joyce, or Pynchon with Stephen King than with most of the officially certified "professors" (quotes important here, too): just because King is, unlike the "professors," above everything else a storyteller, and because he keeps faith with the knowledge that if "Literature" isn't storytelling, then it deserves neither the quotation marks, the capital L, nor tenure...

...If you want to think in terms of stultifying, soul-devouring monsters, and if you know the King story, you can even think about it as "LITerature": what the universities teach, if they are not good teachers, and what governments invoke, if they are not very good governments...

...There is a certain amount of nasty vigor in the early scenes, but the fantastic change at the end needs something more than the Circle Rep production brought to it, if we are to accept the happy ending...

...What is the monster polluting the reputation of this honest and skilled craftsman...

...The absence of this structural differentiation impedes the development of modernity and, in Martin's view, it is Catholicism, as a sociological type, that most strongly resists this differentiation of church and politics into specialized spheres...

...So is all of Shakespeare and the best of everybody else...

...Only Twain and Fitzgerald--maybe Kerouac--among American writers really miss the promising vistas of youth as much as he...

...Could that have been what Kondoleon had in mind...

...It was 1986...

...Why else does It reawaken every thirty years--just the length of time it takes to get a job, make a life, and forget or repress the pure ecstasy of being twelve...

...and Orin and Frieda get together...

...It was a really diffident letter--honest...

...I'm not sure why I was there, but my co jurors were a very distinguished book reviewer for a national magazine, and a very distinguished, herself Pulitzer-winning novelist...