Stephen King and American History

Tony Magistrale, Michael J. Blouin, Michael Blouin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367493301
• eBook ISBN: 9781000093001
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: History

This book surveys the labyrinthine relationship between Stephen King and American History. By depicting American History as a doomed cycle of greed and violence, King poses a number of important questions: who gets to make history, what gets left out, how one understands one's role within it, and how one might avoid repeating mistakes of the past. This volume examines King's relationship to American History through the illumination of metanarratives, adaptations, "queer" and alternative historical lenses, which confront the destructive patterns of our past as well as our capacity to imagine a different future. Stephen King and American History will present readers with an opportunity to place popular culture in conversation with the pressing issues of our day. If we hope to imagine a different path forward, we will need to come to terms with this enclosure—a task for which King's corpus is uniquely well-suited.

1 Stephen King and the Romance of American History

While Stephen King’s works attend at length to the disentangling of the individual from the ennui and destructive tendencies of “modern progress” (that most American of themes), like so many of his forbearers in American literature, his fiction also expresses sincere doubts about the ultimate success of such attempts. Nonetheless, it has become rather fashionable of late to contemplate the metageneric qualities of King’s multiverse, a trend that often presumes a breakage with (or, at least, ironic distance from) American literary History. Given the polymorphic character of his prose, a number of critics contend that King practices Harold Bloom’s poetic “swerve” to avoid the oppressive legacy of his literary ancestors.¹ While we do not question the merit of these analyses—indeed, King’s historical moment is mired in this sort of metageneric work—we instead wish to consider King as the inheritor of a set of preoccupations from America’s literary past. Specifically, the generic confusion at the heart of King’s fiction reflects battle lines drawn nearly two hundred years ago around the tenets of American Romanticism. In this chapter we place King’s fiction in conversation with figures less typically associated with it, such as Henry David Thoreau and his contemporary, Herman Melville. By so doing, we can better situate King’s ongoing treatment of American History as a Romance.

For nearly half a century, King has been telling stories that are specifically about America.² In The Stand, The Dark Tower, and The Mist he has warned America about its dark fascination with the matrix of technology and militarism; in Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, Bag of Bones, and Rose Madder, he has revealed uncomfortable truths about patriarchal abuse and the secret power of female friendships; in Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile he has indicted America’s antiquated and punitive prison system and its institutional web of internal corruption; and in The Shining and Doctor Sleep he has examined the inequities and contradictions inherent in capitalism, supplying fictional analogies that hinge on a tradeoff between success in America’s corporate hierarchy and the sacrifice of family and personal ethics. In an interview twenty-six years ago, King expresses a conscious awareness of his canon’s relevance to American institutions and society: “The work underlies again and again that I am not merely dealing with the surreal and the fantastic but, more important, using the surreal and the fantastic to examine the motivations of people and the society and institutions they create” (Magistrale, Second Decade 15). The King brand, in other words, remains heavily indebted to an American literary tradition, and so it behooves us to interrogate this debt further by placing King in dialogue with enduring narrative concerns, such as those considered in American Romanticism. If there is a narrative design that typifies the King story line, it centers upon gothic disruption: King characters regularly find themselves in a precarious situation that spirals out of control. In the specific context of the American pastoral, a place of beauty and harmony is threatened by the imposition of a reality (often some type of pollution) alien to the pastoral dream. Thus, the sweetness of the Territories in The Talisman are in danger of becoming as corrupt as the Blasted Lands, the placid lake atmosphere in The Mist is fractured by the results of military experimentation from the Arrowhead Project, and the serenity of small-town America is overwhelmed by supernatural intrusions bearing evil agendas in ’Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, Storm of the Century (and several other novels). King remains at home with this literary History as well as eager to evade its grasp.

The cinematic adaptations of King’s fiction—at this point hovering over a hundred—address similar themes. These adaptations frequently manage to make money, and some of the films have now entered into Hollywood’s pantheon of exceptional work. Rob Reiner’s rendition of King’s novella The Body (1982) into the film Stand by Me (1986) has long been recognized as a brilliant Bildungsroman, a coming of age narrative where four boys, like their larger nation, are portrayed on the cusp of great changes. Like the novella, Reiner’s film portrays a turbulent American History—a Romantic force field through which many of the nation’s cultural expressions must pass. Arthur W. Biddle may have been the first to interpret the narrative in mythic terms, arguing that the journey to view Ray Brower’s dead body forces the film’s main protagonist, Gordie Lachance, to “undergo a series of trials that bring him to selfhood, to an identity both as a young man and as a writer” (Biddle 83). Relying heavily on Joseph Campbell’s archetypal rites of passage as detailed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that define transitional elements from one life stage to another, Biddle traces the maturation process that Gordie undergoes during the last days of an adolescent summer. Most of the criticism that has followed Biddle likewise addresses the text as a coming-of-age story. Joeri Pacolet and Leonard G. Heldreth, for example, both view the novella as an autobiographical portrait of King’s emergence as a writer of consequence: “To see Gordon Lachance as Stephen King is tempting … that the search for and unification of identity should be a major theme of a writer as American as Stephen King is not surprising” (Heldreth 72–3). Mark Browning addresses the film adaptation as “a series of tests that the boys must overcome” in order to avoid becoming a parallel version of Ace Merrill and his gang, “literalizing what will happen to them if their lives do not change” (113). And Jeffrey A. Weinstock reads both film and novella as a confrontation with the reality of death: Gordie’s obsession with viewing the corpse of Ray Brower forces him to confront the reality of his brother’s death and then to “appreciate both the presence of death in life and the wondrousness of life amid mindless destruction” (48). What each of the critics who have written about either the novella or the film fails to supply, however, is a broader cultural context for interpreting their subject’s decision to enter into the woods in the first place. While Gordie does not share Thoreau’s confidence in going “to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” he does recognize early on that “going to see a dead body maybe shouldn’t be a party” and consequently learns “what [the woods] had to teach” (Thoreau 304). Gordie certainly follows an experiential learning curve, but it’s important to note that its unfolding takes place within a specifically American experience.

Like Reiner’s film, the novel IT (also 1986) chronicles a group of young people that come of age by wandering into the wild Barrens at the edge of Derry, Maine. These youths too must come to terms with the grotesque inheritance that they share as well as the unique singularities that empower them to transcend the corruption of their provincial hometown. In turn, both IT and the film Stand by Me recycle the concerns of nineteenth-century American Romantics by worrying over the confines of a world that grows smaller by the day while contemplating potential release from physical and psychic prisons. Just as Thoreau and Melville wrestle with a claustrophobic modernity (as well as the difficulties of overcoming such an oppressive climate), King contemplates an exit strategy from the gravitational pull of an American History that orients his own suffocating society. How, he asks us, can we preserve a vital sense of connection to a joint story—without, in the process, becoming mere pawns within a predetermined metanarrative? How can we maintain a moral consciousness beyond one imposed by state or industry—without, in the process, losing any semblance of common ground? Just as these themes surface repeatedly in the imaginary wildernesses of Walden (1854) and Moby-Dick (1851), they surface once more in King’s neo-pastoral efforts, appearing in the liminal space of the Romance. It is in this ambivalence that individual and collective H/histories clash as well as converge. It is back to this liminal space that our book must voyage in order to comprehend King’s tormented dialectic of History (with a capital “H”) and history (with a lower-case “h”).

In short, this shift in focus allows us to reconsider King’s literary ancestry, which is to say, his link to the concerns of his forefathers (a reappraisal of King as an inheritor rather than as strictly as a postmodern iconoclast). More important still, this shift underscores King’s uniquely Romantic vision of American History, defined by the impasse between a stifling History (“progress”) and the illusion of decampment from that History “into the woods” (or “out to sea”).³ Like Thoreau and Melville before him, King never loses his interest in the murky middle: the pastoral vision and its disintegration; lyrical nature and its hidden horrors; the maturation of the individual and the individual’s crushing loss of innocence. That is, although at times King calls into question the strangulating aspects of American History, his literary and subsequent cinematic preoccupations establish a vital sense of continuity with the giants on whose shoulders he stands.

Stand by Me and the American Pastoral Tradition

One of the elements responsible for the popularity of Reiner’s Stand by Me is how the film adheres closely to themes and tropes that are recognizably American. A defining characteristic of American Romanticism as well as the later artworks that it spawned is the confrontation between boyhood and tragedy. The ensuing loss of innocence serves to temper and redefine masculinity as well as American nationhood. It is a personal and a public History, one that threatens to destroy the individual while simultaneously challenging him to develop and grow. There are several classic American narratives that bear close similarities to Stand by Me. The importance of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, for example, is difficult to deny, as both narratives grapple with children on death-haunted journeys forced to process overwhelming adult realities. As such, Twain, King, and Reiner highlight a gap that exists between the decency of an adolescent value system and the violence and hypocrisy associated with adults. Additionally, Stand by Me bears similarities with other classic texts from the American literary canon. Like so many of Hawthorne’s stories—“Young Goodman Brown,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineau” come to mind immediately—it is a narrative journey into the woods that confronts and challenges the naïveté of these respective young protagonists; the events they experience radically reshape their identities. Stand by Me also owes something to Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories insofar as they are all evidence of males undergoing a loss of innocence via personal interactions with the nature of tragedy. America’s pastoral imagination continually contrasts urban corruption with the promise of relief in untainted wilderness beyond the edge of the city. Indebted to figures as diverse as Hawthorne and Hemingway, King conducts his characters “into the woods” to confront internal struggles that stew just below the surface.

Within King’s own oeuvre, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon provides another example of the pastoral themes that are so central to American literature. In keeping with that subset of the American narrative, Girl is a relentless and unmodulated portrait of the wilderness. Trisha McFarland is beset by every manner of wild thing that calls the woods home—from insects to a huge black bear—when she becomes lost in the Maine wilderness: “The woods were filled with everything you didn’t like, everything you were afraid of and instinctively loathed.” Like the adult male relationships in Stand by Me, the dark corners of the natural world essentially provide a mirror to Trish and the domestic situations in both texts—alcoholism, parental neglect, and self-absorbed brothers. The protagonists in these narratives are equally lost in their respective places; Trish even assumes the name that Gordie calls himself in Stand by Me, as she refers to herself as “The Invisible Girl” because she is ignored by a distracted family, which ultimately results in her wandering off to escape their fighting and becoming lost in the dense forest. (Girl 56, 22). As in those moments in Stand by Me when the boys find themselves terrified by the distant howls of wolves or immersed in the leech pool, Trish finds herself far removed from any pastoral idyll. And just as the boys must learn to rely on interpersonal substitutes in order to fill the void created by paternal and fraternal abuse and neglect, the mythologized title figure Tom Gordon serves as a surrogate father figure who replaces Trish’s biological father and his self-pitying immersion into the throes of divorce and alcoholism, abandoning his daughter to nature’s hostile grip. Both the boys in Stand by Me and Trish must find replacement figures to enable their mutual survival.

Yet the most provocative (and perhaps least obvious) connection that Stand by Me shares with the American Romance tradition may well be Thoreau’s Walden. One explanation for why Reiner chose to relocate the movie to an Oregon setting rather than keep it in Maine, especially in light of fact that King’s fictional Castle Rock is very definitely located in central Maine, was to heighten the pastoral beauty of the scenic backdrops, present particularly in the long helicopter shots when the boys cross an elevated train trestle. While central Maine retains its share of scenic beauty, its heavily forested areas feature a different kind of grandeur than the sweeping vistas Reiner’s crew found in Oregon. This is an important consideration as the film makes a highly conscious effort to maintain a contrast between the lyricism of the boys’ journey into nature—the sapphire blue Royal River, stunning lake views, and open expanses of forest and summer sky—and those moments where nature reveals its less attractive, darker side: the wolves howling at night, the forlorn loneliness of Brower’s remains left entangled in a thicket of blueberries, and, of course, the slimy leech pool.⁴ In these moments, the concept of American “progress” subsumes the (shrinking) individual, threatening to crush her where she stands. Thoreau references similar moments in nature, relishing the various beauties available in the woods and at the pond—indeed, Walden features the German word for forest (Wald) in its title—but these appreciations are tempered by the severity of Walden’s winter chapters and, even more tellingly, by the proximity of his cabin to the Fitchburg railroad. Readers are introduced to the railroad through Thoreau’s loaded question, “who buil[t] the railroad?” His sobering answer is that human lives are constantly being sacrificed in exchange for the “advance” of American History: “Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them … We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.” Thoreau’s conscious awareness of the locomotive’s presence “penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk.” The assault of the machine is not only audible, but visual and olfactory as well, since the train engine disrupts the solitude that Thoreau values so deeply: “The iron horse makes the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils” (306, 321–2). Leo Marx reminds us that “There is scarcely a chapter [in Walden] in which Thoreau does not mention seeing or hearing the engine or walking ‘over the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadows’” (260). The Fitchburg railroad serves as an emblem, much to Thoreau’s dismay, of the encroachment of the machine age, the globalization of commerce as it extends its reach into the isolated sanctity of Walden Pond, as the railroad’s indifference towards the “pastoral life whirled past and away.” What were once “unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day,” has been invaded with the relentless punctuality and pervasiveness of business, “shouting [its] warning to get off the track” (Thoreau 326). In parallel with the climactic scene aboard the locomotive in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Thoreau reflects a preoccupation among American Romantics with the liminal area between “progress” and the serene (as well as stationary) natural world, against which such “progress” must be foregrounded. The story of the railway in Concord, then, reveals itself to be the story of American History itself: a dizzying spectacle that overwhelms us in tension with the desire to abscond, to retreat back into our idiosyncratic, individualized nests.

In Stand by Me, there are several visual images that are constructed to contrast the pastoral ideal with the machine age. Most obvious is the fact that Ray Brower is killed by a moving train at the exact moment he is in the woods picking blueberries. The contrast between an adolescent boy enjoying the last days of summer vacation and the steam engine that takes his life, and never bothers subsequently to stop and render any kind of aid to the child victim, or the mangled body that has been knocked out its Keds (knocked out of his childhood), could not be starker. The scene in which a solitary Gordie is pictured early in the morning reading a comic book while sitting on one of the train tracks likewise contains strong echoes of Walden. A doe appears to the boy’s right and the two share a tranquil moment alone in the forest before the deer walks away from the encounter. Child and animal commune with one another; neither is afraid of the other (nor has any reason to be). And while Gordie fails to make mention of it—he informs the viewer that until this point he has never mentioned the bucolic moment to anyone else—their silent communication is, as Thoreau experiences on a daily basis, punctuated by the arrival of a train that disrupts the scene. In fact, the train’s interposition separates Gordie from the doe just as it separates the viewer from Gordie’s sleeping friends, who are situated on the other side of the tracks and are awakened by the train’s arrival as it passes between them and the camera. The languid passage of time during Gordie’s commune with nature sharply contrasts with the ever-punctual train (we might gesture ahead to the train that appears in King’s novel Pet Sematary, busily dropping off dead soldiers from the war like so many warming bottles of milk).

Stand by Me comes closest to paralleling events that take place in Walden in the train trestle scene. For his part, Thoreau always feels compelled to “get off the track and let the cars go by” (326). He doesn’t have to mention that his body would be placed in immediate physical jeopardy should he refuse to comply with the insistent rite of passage demanded by the railroad. In the film’s trestle scene, Vern and Gordie find themselves literally trapped by the steam engine that has already killed one child who lingered too close to its tracks. Throughout the film, the train always comes from the direction of Castle Rock, as if it were sent from the town in pursuit of wayward boys trying to escape. Before the train is even visible in the trestle montage, we are made aware of its presence by the thick black plume of smoke that it emits from behind a clump of trees. This moment in the film takes the viewer immediately back to the smoke of the locomotive in Walden, which puts Thoreau’s field in shade. As Leo Marx has traced the emergence of the machine as an alien force intruding on the American pastoral landscape, “More often than not in these episodes, the machine is made to appear with startling suddenness” (15). In both contexts, the locomotive is a metaphor of environmental degradation (its smoke lingers in the clean air long after it passes by in Teddy’s earlier abortive train ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Stephen King and the End of History
• 1. Stephen King and the Romance of American History
• 2. The Pasts of Pet Sematary
• 3. The Sutured Histories of The Shining
• 4. The Vietnamization of Stephen King
• 5. Outing Stephen King and the Queering of American History
• 6. The Events of 9/11 and Stephen King’s Evolving Sense of History
• Conclusion: The Inconstant Reader
• Works Cited
• Index