MS: Are there any forest fairy tales or for that matter horror films that have a place in your heart and imagination?
JK: I’m not a horror guy, by the way – I’m very, very convince-able – I watch horror movies and I feel horrible, I feel horror, I don’t feel special or the sacred, so I don’t know, that’s a really good question. I don’t have an answer for that.
MS: Maybe given what you’ve just said, the answer will be no, but have you given thought to Stephen King’s body of work as a kind of popular, sacred body of work?
JK: Yeah – no, I have. Years ago, I was commuting, as I still do, and I listened to a book of his called On Writing.
You know, he has a lot of really occult notions of writing, by the way. He talked about the novel or the piece of work as essentially a dinosaur bone, buried in the ground, and his job is to dig it up – it’s already there. So this goes back to my earlier notion of, you know, the work is already there. I’m sure the Stephen King corpus is rich in all of these ideas.
MS: For me, it’s truly the feeling of his world, as opposed to any particular story he tells in that world. But he has some kind of ability to tap something that is part of the American imagination or some kind of collective imagination.
JK: You know, the author I love is Philip K. Dick, and I read his stuff – I’m actually reading a novel right now of his – and I just laugh, I laugh every morning, reading it. But he really had paranormal experiences. But he also knew that they were totally effed up, to use his language. And he writes about this. He’s always projecting his experience onto some poor character in his novel, but you know darn well it’s his experience that he’s just fobbing off on some character he made up.
And I don’t think Stephen King is like that, by the way, at least everything I’ve heard from him. But I think Dick was, I think Dick was more conflicted and tortured, as it were, to write about these things.
MS: Do you think that that explicit connection to mysticism is necessary for the work to have the sacred property, or no?
JK: I think it helps, actually. I think it really helps. I don’t know if it’s necessary, but I actually think – it might be necessary.
It’s kind of like – forgive the vulgar metaphor, but it’s like writing about sexuality and never having had an orgasm. I mean, how do you do that? Well, you can – you can write endless tomes about the history of male sexual behavior, but do you really understand what human sexuality is? I somehow doubt it, and you’re going to end up writing about things that are probably beside the point.
So I do think – this puts me in a bit of an awkward place, but I do think experience matters. And I do think it changes the way a writer writes.
MS: Have you been thinking about this in terms of the recent news about AI now capable of generating stories at the press of a button?
JK: Don’t get me going on AI, I’ll just become a crabby old man. I think that’s a bunch of nonsense. I think it can make up story, don’t get me wrong, and it can mimic or imitate consciousness, no question. But I don’t think it can become conscious. That’s an ontology that is exactly reverse of what is the case. It presumes materialism, actually, is what it presumes, so I think that that’s just mistaken.
MS: The last thing I want to ask is about this question of the repeated and inherited cultural story, versus the originally perceived story. What if a story is written that has that sense of mythic resonance, but it never enters the public consciousness, and at the same time a story whose appeal is not so deep becomes enduring and widely known? Does the story that enters the public consciousness become part of a collective unconscious over time, or does it remain phony, grafted on?
JK: Yeah. I think it’s messy.
First of all, I think a lot of the greatest literary writers came to their ideas in altered states, and they told stories out of those states, and those then became great pieces of literature or great pieces of philosophy. So I do actually believe there’s a kind of quality control at work, if you want to put it that crudely.
On the other hand, I think a lot of really bad stories, a lot of phoniness, is very successful – and works for a lot of people. I study religion – there’s a lot of bad stories that essentially are taken as true. And so I don’t want to underestimate the turgid depths of the human being and its ability to tell bad stories.
On the other hand, I don’t want to underestimate the profundity of the human species, and its ability to tell profound stories. I think both are true. So that would be the binary, I guess. I think both are actually the case, and both are really influential and active in history.
MS: Again, I’m reminded of Mutants and Mystics, your anecdote about Dick, I forget whether it was – I think it was in a dream, he says that he had a dream where he went to a bookstore and he was going through and finding old stacks of whatever it was, Astounding Science Fiction or something like that. I have a great love and fondness for that era of pulp art, but it’s such an image of what’s supposed to be disposable culture having that gleam of the sacred within it.
JK: He’s so funny. I don’t know if I tell this story in the book, but he has this whole story about how he had this dream, he was going to find the secret of the universe, it was in a particular book, and it turned out to be a biography of Grover Cleveland. [Laughter] Such like – the worst book in the world, just horrible.
MS: The one place no one would look.
JK: Yeah. And of course, there was no secret of the universe in the biography of Grover Cleveland. So to me, that story itself is redemptive. There’s something about humor that propels us out of all of these stories – once we can laugh at something, it means we’re not in it anymore. So I think that’s why I ultimately love Philip K. Dick, is that he laughs at his own crazy stories.
