Stephen King's Gothic

John Sears

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780708324028, 9780708323458
• eBook ISBN: 9781783164714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Explores the works of Stephen King, one of the world's best-selling horror writers, through the lenses offered by contemporary literary and cultural theory. This title argues that King's writing explores many of the issues analysed by critics and philosophers.

1

Rereading Stephen King’s Gothic

‘Does anybody ever reread King? Are his texts susceptible to rereading?’¹

‘Reread too Kings … ’²

‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.’ (OW, 164)

Rereading King

What would it mean to reread Stephen King? What kind of demand would be levied on the rereader? Stephen King’s fictions (and those written by the different ‘King’, Richard Bachman, making two ‘Kings’ to reread) comprise a vast and ever-increasing number of novels, short stories, screenplays. To reread them (all) would require, above all, time, an extended time of reading that is potentially indefinite as the oeuvre expands within it: in the time of writing this book, King has published three new novels and a collection of short stories. Such a rereading would be, in one sense, simply an exercise in the quantification of reading, in reading as consuming. ‘Reading a lot’, as King puts it, would also be one result, ‘above all others’, of rereading King’s activity of ‘writing a lot’. But ‘rereading King’ would also be an exercise in the extension of repetition, in the act of rereading an oeuvre already deeply structured (as this book will argue) by its own engagement in the Gothic habit of rereading and, consequent on these rereadings, rewriting what it has read and reread. To reread King would be to enter (to re-enter), and perhaps to become lost within, a labyrinth of intra- and intertextual relations, an immense and complex textual space.

David Punter’s question about rereading King is the correct one to ask at the beginning of a discussion of Stephen King’s Gothic. The Gothic mode is notoriously predicated on varieties of repetition, on the recycling of narratives and forms, on revisiting older, pre-existent texts, on labyrinthine texts and spaces, and on the seemingly endless resurrection of an apparently dead, outmoded tradition. John Frow writes of ‘exhausted genres such as the Gothic romance’, which yet ‘survive in their modal form’.³ Fred Botting argues that, with its return to the genre of romance in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), ‘Gothic dies, divested of its excesses, of its transgressions, horrors and diabolical laughter […]’. This dying, he suggests, may be a ‘prelude to other spectral returns’.⁴ In Stephen King’s work and in the writings of his contemporaries and younger imitators, Gothic clearly revives or survives, persisting as a remarkably resilient, successful and lucrative mode of popular fiction.

David Punter’s questions are, of course, those asked of much popular fiction. For Punter, ‘rereading’ perhaps implies a mixture of close reading, critical reading and extended theoretical analysis, a different kind of reading from that invited by the initial encounter with the popular fictional text. That encounter of reading is predicated on ostensibly simple meanings: ‘popular fiction’, Ken Gelder affirms, ‘is simple’, in opposition to a construction of ‘Literature’ (with a capital ‘L’) as ‘complex’.⁵ Punter’s notion of ‘rereading’ implies a double level of ‘complexity’, the act of reading as a repetition that nevertheless seeks and perhaps reveals something implicitly missed in the ‘first’ reading, and geared for the literary critic towards the production of a writing that puts into practice, demonstrates or argues for a (re-) reading. The ‘reread’ text must demonstrate a ‘susceptibility’ to repetitive reading strategies (that is, critical analyses) more often associated with the values of the kinds of writing conventionally described as ‘Literature’.

Reading and writing – and rereading and rewriting – are insistent activities in King’s works. They locate texts and their production and consumption at the moral and political centres of the universes he constructs, and establish writing as crucial to King’s constructions of social relations, a pivotal element of his popular appeal. When Ben Mears, the writer-hero of ’Salem’s Lot (1975), is complimented by Susan Norton on one of his books she happens to be reading, he replies ‘Thanks. When I take it down and look at it, I wonder how it ever got published’ (SL, 23). The exchange establishes a social relation through shared but also individual acts of reading and rereading (and rereading one’s own writing), in this case a relation between two people who will become lovers, and one of whom will eventually become radically altered, transformed into a vampire. It indicates the ways in which writers and writing, readers and reading, interact across King’s oeuvre to represent different kinds of social relations established initially on the basis of the self’s response to the other and in the possibilities contained within that response. These social relations, in turn, are among the things that repeatedly come under threat in King’s version of Gothic. At its most extreme, in novels like The Stand (1979), this threat is nearly absolute. Here, humanity is virtually eradicated, leaving a small and disparate group of survivors to encounter each other, regroup and learn to live together in reconstructing a new social order in the face of extreme manifestations of monstrous otherness. This structure allows King also to scrutinise in this novel the roles in this social reconstruction of different kinds of reading and writing and of different kinds of text in establishing (or re-establishing) this society. These range from the ‘Life History’ written by deaf-and-dumb Nick Andros, which finishes with the words ‘That was where I learned to read and write’, to Harold Lauder’s ‘ledger’, a narrative account that is also ‘a solid block of writing, an outpouring of hate’ (St, 143–4). They include the establishment in chapter 51 of written legal and political constitutions that define some of the rights, privileges and policies of the new society (St, 602). The Stand, a late 1970s Gothic novel with a strong science fiction element, is itself a product of rereading. It rereads and offers a rewriting of several texts, most notably George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1948) and Terry Nation’s TV series Survivors (1975–8: remade 2008–10). King cites also ‘a book by M. P. Shiel called The Purple Cloud’, a novel published in 1901 that draws, in turn, on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826).⁶ Such a textual lineage indicates that King’s novel deliberately engages with, rereads and extends a long popular fictional tradition that crosses media and genres extending back at least to the Romantic period.

Another version of The Stand is offered in Misery (1987), where the social world is erased in another way, reduced by Gothic tropes of injury, madness, imprisonment and isolation to a minimal structure of man–woman as writer–reader, in order, again, to enact and examine a struggle over the meanings of texts and over the different kinds of authority exerted by the reader and the writer. Misery explores, within claustrophobic constraints of geography and narrative, the horror latent in a world constructed solely of a certain kind of rereading demanded by a certain kind of rereader who wants only to read the same text repeatedly, who ‘wanted Misery, Misery, Misery’ (M, 31). This is rereading as blank repetition, precisely the kind of rereading without difference that Punter implies might constitute the experience of rereading King. In critiquing this mechanical form of reading-as-consumption, Misery enacts a brutal fantasy of punishment and revenge. A degree-zero social relation is established in the novel in order for the male writer to be punished, and for the repetitive female rereader to be exorcised violently in avenging that punishment. The punishment meted out by a repetitive reader who figures, in this context in the mind of the fictional romance writer Paul Sheldon, an indiscriminate and feared social mass of readers, is for producing something different, something outside familiar generic frames. The novel centres its analysis on the tension between difference and repetition, the difference that may be potential in rereading outside the restricted demands of repetition. As I hope to demonstrate, rereading King is, in contrast to the message of Misery, an experience radically different to the repetition by an anonymous indiscriminate reader of the word ‘Misery’ and all it implies, one that instead exploits to the full the potentials of horror by both enacting and evading the reductive simplicity of repetition.

King’s works constantly develop and expand in the senses of being added to and, like The Stand, republished in 1990, and ’Salem’s Lot, in 2005, being revised and reissued in new expanded editions. They exist in a complex and reiterative set of relations to Gothic conventions. While Gothic motifs, themes and concerns resonate throughout his immense oeuvre, the relations between this oeuvre and conventional understandings of the Gothic are best understood as mobile, flexible, sometimes contradictory and always productive. Gothic exists, throughout King’s writing, as a spectral, trace effect of that writing, a product both of the failure and the persistence of words. Linguistic uncertainty and indeterminacy, effects of repetition, periphrasis, verbal encryption, anagrammatisation and other verbal tricks and insistences (like, for example, the description of Carrie’s telekinetic powers as a ‘latent talent’ (C, 15) or the subtle, divisive counterpointing of Annie’s ‘ for-EN-sics’ and her ‘frenzies’ in Misery (M, 233)), revealed through close reading to be embedded throughout King’s prose, indicate aspects of formal and generic ambivalence and mobility. King’s works display what Michael R. Collings has called ‘generic indecisiveness’, an unwillingness or inability to be confined to singular generic categories.⁷ They tend instead to fray at their generic edges, sprawl over boundaries, allowing different genres to seep into each other and constructing, in the process, different and astonishingly marketable generic combinations. Such ‘indecisiveness’, evident also in the formal complexity of novels like Carrie (discussed in chapter 2 below), is characteristic of the Gothic in its remarkably persistent series of historical survivals through relentless transformations and redeployments of other genres, from crime fiction to romance to Westerns. Many of these processes are exemplified in King’s works, where mobility is again key: individual works frequently mutate genre, or juxtapose different generic features, within their own textual borders, contravening (as we will see in chapter 4 below) the classificatory ‘law of genre’ Jacques Derrida defines, but fulfilling, in Gothic terms, the contract implicit in and demanded by that contravention.⁸

Genre, Intertextuality

As Heidi Strengell notes in one of the few full-length critical studies of King, ‘Most of King’s novels and stories are generic hybrids’.⁹ The same point might also be made about his critical writings, which tend, in delineating King’s versions of the genres and traditions of horror, to combine encyclopaedic accumulation of detail, extensive paraphrase and plot summaries, and autobiographical interludes, with occasional critical or theoretical asides. The uses to which King’s works put their ‘generic indecisiveness’ and ‘generic hybridity’ correspond to the themes and concerns of those works. Genres rely for their effects on shared meanings that are recognisable to readers, so that generic recognition invokes familiarity (just as genres rely on ‘family resemblances’ between texts) and initiates particular reader responses familiar to the experience of reading King. In that experience, genre is ‘performed’ – it ‘takes place’, Frow argues, ‘in the interplay of readings and of the social force they carry’.¹⁰ These readings and their social force also incorporate within this ‘interplay’ the effects of readings depicted within or put into effect by the texts themselves, like Annie Wilkes’s ‘reading’ scrutinised in Misery, Rose’s endless readings of signs in Rose Madder (1995) or the various rereadings and rewritings of canonical Gothic and other texts performed throughout King’s oeuvre. They also mobilise the available critical and other readings and rereadings of those texts, enabling King’s generic mixing to generate complex and critically significant meanings as they delineate his different engagements with Gothic. Genre is effectively produced by the recognition through repetition generated in the act of rereading. It depends for its effects on readerly familiarities that are established in prior acts of reading. As ‘generic hybrids’, King’s works express a complex relationship to this process of generic recognition. They demand a kind of reading which is also, already, a ‘rereading’ for the first time, an inauguration of readerly recognition that is also (in typically Gothic terms) a resurrection of previous readings. They draw on a wide range of experiences that pre-exist the texts themselves and make possible a conception of the importance of rereading to the act of reading Gothic that enables us to argue, against David Punter’s question, that no one ever ‘reads’ King, in any simple sense, for the first time.

The complex generic relations that delineate and define King’s works imply both the generation of generic positions and identities and its ideologically loaded Gothic inverse, the degeneration of discrete and clearly definable forms and structures into hybridical or mixed forms. This process, as we will see later, concerns much of King’s writing. In Misery this is made explicit, as Paul Sheldon thinks of ‘popular fiction’ as ‘a degenerate sort’ of art (M, 272). Generic relations furthermore depend upon and are produced by a proliferating series of intertextual referents that establish different traditions and different textual precursors as markers and delimiters of the ways King’s works produce meanings. These intertexts, comprised of both specific texts and generic features and motifs, ‘productively question ideas of origin, stability, and repetition’.¹¹ Such ideas are crucial to a comprehension of King’s Gothic and are manifest in the concern of his works with key Gothic configurations of otherness in terms of beginning, authenticity, identity and difference, repetition and variation, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the production and effects of monstrosity. Intertextual references abound in King’s works (to say nothing of the intratextual network that binds many of King’s novels and short stories, like those of his major precursor H. P. Lovecraft, into epic sequences and cross-referenced inter-allusive structures). Citations from fictional and poetic texts or from popular music and film are used to frame individual works. They are placed as markers at section and chapter breaks and work constantly to regulate and direct readerly attention in relation to the text being read. Allusions authenticate character, work to historicise and legitimise plot and context and offer a constant series of insights into how King’s writing negotiates its own literary and cultural inheritances. Rarely attended to by critics, these different citations signify textual echoes, parallels and extensions. They mark the specific text in relation to a range of written, filmic and other traditions that informs and draws upon readerly competences in complex ways, establishing the oeuvre again in a complex set of relations to other texts and works, and inviting the encyclopaedic response from the reader that King’s critical works often demand in demonstrating his own, authorial, readerly competence. Importantly, they also interrogate their own relations to traditions and origins, degrees of textual and ontological stability, and issues of repetition and citation, relations that are addressed in different ways within the individual works. These questions again relate back to the functions of Gothic and its willingness to raid its own textual corp(u)ses in search of narrative sustenance. King’s uses of intertextuality, like his generic flexibility, define key aspects of his Gothic writing.

Genre and intertextuality thus provide initial ways of thinking about the possibilities opened up by ‘rereading’ King. To conceive King’s works in relation to their uses of and deformations of genre and intertextuality is to establish ways of responding to David Punter’s question. Rereading is, in effect, what Stephen King’s Gothic is, initially, all about. In reading King we read his rereadings, and reread our own readerly relations to the traditions he appropriates, revises and redeploys in the act of rereading them. The intertextual interrogation of textual identity in terms of ‘origin, stability, and repetition’ impinges also on rereading as an activity that doubles and therefore puts into question the notional originality of any given reading, challenging its ostensible primacy and therefore its control over meanings. Generic and intertextual frames mark each reading as a rereading, insisting on familiar patterns, processes of citation and allusion and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Preface
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Rereading Stephen King’s Gothic
• 2 Carrie’s Gothic Script
• 3 Disinterring, Doubling: King and Traditions
• 4 Genre’s Gothic Machinery
• 5 Misery’s Gothic Tropes
• 6 Gothic Time in ‘The Langoliers’
• 7 ‘This Inhuman Place’: King’s Gothic Places
• 8 Facing Gothic Monstrosity
• 9 Conclusion: King’s Gothic Endings
• Notes
• Bibliography