The Times and the Imagination

October 4, 2007

A short essay by the novelist Stephen King on the travails of the short story in modern America set me thinking about the importance for the imagination of cultural niches. The following is his description buying literary magazines at a large bookstore:

I can grab The New Yorker and Harper’s while I’m still standing up, without going to my knees like a school janitor trying to scrape a particularly stubborn wad of gum off the gym floor. For the rest, I must assume exactly that position. I hope the young woman browsing Modern Bride won’t think I’m trying to look up her skirt. I hope the young man trying to decide between Starlog and Fangoria won’t step on me. I crawl along the lowest shelf, where neatness alone suggests few ever go. And here I find fresh treasure: not just Zoetrope and Tin House, but also Five Points and The Kenyon Review. No Glimmer Train, but there’s American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, even an Alaska Quarterly Review. I stagger to my feet and limp toward the checkout. The total cost of my six magazines runs to over $80. There are no discounts in the magazine section.

Clearly the literary short story falls pretty far down the list of must-dos in contemporary America. Fresh off a bout of reading short stories for the next edition of The Best American Short Stories, King notes that many of the stories he read felt as if they had been written for a small group of writers and editors.. not for a general audience. But that is the problem.. and the reason why the literary magazines are on the bottom shelf of the magazine stand: there is no public constituency for literary short stories.

So what is a golden age for the imagination? Perhaps an odd question to ask after a Stephen King essay.. but there it is. There have been generations and places in which the level of accomplishment was extraordinarily high. Athens. Baghdad. Florence. Paris. It is tempting sometimes to think that there were more creative people running around during these periods of efflorescence. Another way to look at these periods is to see them as points in which social niches for the arts were stabilized.. and therefore social creativity ran into deeply dug channels and that resulted in lasting works. The artistic accomplishments that marked these periods were closely connected to niches in the life of the community.

In this essay King is pointing out how a specific channel for the imagination is running dry. That would not be his own summary, since at the end he urges more people to read sort stories.. but his portrait is mostly negative:

Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

That is a thumbnail sketch of the decline of a niche. There is nothing sacred—not ever!—about forms. They come and go. Greek dramas flourish and fade; classical Arabic poetry and the American short story likewise. Any form whose social niche is no longer viable, will be abandoned.

Notable about these days is the way sturdy older forms are disappearing.. while new creative forms are yet in flux. The creative energy is the same per-capita as in other periods, but the creative energy is moving in a lot of confusing directions.. and sometimes being invested in forms that have no future. Periods of decisive formal change.. when there is a transition from manuscript to print or oral performance to written texts.. such periods are not generally "golden ages". Our response to our own highly transitional time should be adventuresome.. in the extreme.