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I really like your take on it, and agree.
Thank you. I've been thinking on it a lot recently since I've been rereading the novel in advance of the new adaptation coming out. When I first read it years ago, I wasn't active online, so I really didn't get the sense of how much people hated this part of the novel. When I first read it, I remember getting to that line about lifelight, and it almost made me cry, it was so subtle and powerful, that single word, after being haunted and terrified and pushed to the brink of insanity with the transcendent horror of deadlights. So to hear people using words like orgy and gang bang and saying this belongs in their local porn shop—I found THAT shocking and disturbing. What had moved me so much, people didn't even notice it. So I think we should all go back and read the novel again, at least that part, and pay attention to what King is telling us.
I'm just going to say one more thing about it and then I'll shut up. There can be a range of opinions about whether this was a good way to resolve the first confrontation with It in 1958. We can argue questions of taste and social and political sensitivity. That's fine. But what I don't like is people reducing this to pornography and saying it does not cohere with the logic and themes of the novel. Both of those, as I see it, are objectively wrong. Now, you can agree that it isn't pornographic, but still find it tasteless or unnecessary (though in a book that's about an ancient child eater, the question of taste seems moot). You can also agree that it coheres with the novel, but still have criticisms of it on other grounds. But that's not the arguments people are making here. They are saying it's pornographic and/or narratively or thematically incoherent—and that is just factually untrue.
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Jingizu
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Sep 14, 2017 12:05AM
I really like your take on it, and agree.
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Thank you. I've been thinking on it a lot recently since I've been rereading the novel in advance of the new adaptation coming out. When I first read it years ago, I wasn't active online, so I really didn't get the sense of how much people hated this part of the novel. When I first read it, I remember getting to that line about lifelight, and it almost made me cry, it was so subtle and powerful, that single word, after being haunted and terrified and pushed to the brink of insanity with the transcendent horror of deadlights. So to hear people using words like orgy and gang bang and saying this belongs in their local porn shop—I found THAT shocking and disturbing. What had moved me so much, people didn't even notice it. So I think we should all go back and read the novel again, at least that part, and pay attention to what King is telling us.
I'm just going to say one more thing about it and then I'll shut up. There can be a range of opinions about whether this was a good way to resolve the first confrontation with It in 1958. We can argue questions of taste and social and political sensitivity. That's fine. But what I don't like is people reducing this to pornography and saying it does not cohere with the logic and themes of the novel. Both of those, as I see it, are objectively wrong. Now, you can agree that it isn't pornographic, but still find it tasteless or unnecessary (though in a book that's about an ancient child eater, the question of taste seems moot). You can also agree that it coheres with the novel, but still have criticisms of it on other grounds. But that's not the arguments people are making here. They are saying it's pornographic and/or narratively or thematically incoherent—and that is just factually untrue.
