by Vincent, Bev
* * *
Arachnophobia
What should a reader make of all the spiders, some with more than eight legs, that appear throughout the series? Are they an unconscious manifestation of King’s childhood experience in the barn? The ones Roland encounters in the basement of the way station are disturbingly large, have eyes on stalks and have as many as sixteen legs. The lobstrosities are described as looking like a crossbreeding of prawn, lobster and spider. Instead of the Queen of Spades, the playing card Roland knows is the “Bloody Black Bitch Queen of Spiders.”
Eddie speaks of the halls of the dead “where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet one by one.” He mistakenly associates the Dr. Doom masks with Spider-Man, when he was actually primarily in the Fantastic Four comics.
Bloated spiders bite Jake on the hand and the neck in the house where he passes back through to Mid-World. The bridge over the River Send has steel cables “like the web of some great spider.”
Roland’s horse in Mejis is afraid of spiders, and Rimer is described as a “disgusting spider of a chancellor.” Susan Delgado is afraid of biting spiders among the oil fields outside Hambry and pretends that one had frightened her to explain her delay while spying on Rhea of Cöos. “I hate the look of them,” she tells Rhea, who bears a mark beside her mouth that looks like a spider bite and whose cat looks like it has been crossed with a spider.
Viewed from the Little Needle, the train station at Thunderclap contains a spiderweb of tracks. Todash highways radiate from New York “like some crazy spider’s web,” and the members of Roland’s ka-tet think Susannah’s baby might look like a spiderling, which it does in one of its forms, for it is a “were-spider.” In the Dogan near the Calla, Jake wonders how many generations of spiders had been born in a skeleton’s empty cavity. In the banquet hall where Mia feeds, she sees a dead black widow spider in a goblet. Roland tells the people of Calla about the plague that befell the blossy trees in Gilead when he was ten; the trees were covered in a canopy of spiderwebs.
Spiders extend beyond the Dark Tower series. The creature in It is best visualized as a spider, and Rose Madder’s face turns into “a spider’s face, twisted with hunger and crazy intelligence.” The Fisherman in Black House stashed Ty Marshall in another dimension “like a spider stashing a fly.” The original version of the Creepshow screenplay specified spiderlike bugs instead of cockroaches for the final story, “They’re Creeping Up on You,” and the beast in “The Crate” was also described as spiderlike.
Finally, while Roland is plucking a rose outside the Dark Tower to make pigment for Patrick, thorns slash through his glove like it was nothing more than cobwebs, severing one of the remaining fingers on that hand. The spider’s last bite.
* * *
In the late 1980s, he finally hears the song his wife has been singing and gets sober. After that, the only thing they argue about is the dangerous route he takes on his long walks.
By 1997, he knows the rest of the story and realizes he’s going to have to tackle the three remaining books all at once. It means swimming across deep water to the other side, and there’s a chance he may drown. He decides against returning to the Tower, but he can’t separate it from his writing. His undermind is always thinking of it.
Walter tells Mordred that King was a “damnably quick writer, one with genuine talent” who “turned himself into a shoddy (but rich) quick-sketch artist, a rhymeless Algernon Swinburne.”36 After reading four or five of his books, Irene Tassenbaum decided King wasn’t a very good writer. However, when Roland asks, “If he’s not very good, why didn’t you stop at one?” she concedes the point. “He is readable, I’ll give him that—tells a good story, but has very little ear for language.” Roland tells her that he hears the right voices and sings the right songs.
Roland dislikes and distrusts King, though, believing the author has turned lazy and relies on ka to protect him against trouble. When King decides to avoid the song of the Turtle in 1999, the ka of the rational world has had enough of his frittering and conspires to kill him. Roland and Jake must counter ka’s will and save his life. If they don’t, King will die in a fatal auto-pedestrian accident at the age of fifty-two in the most important version of reality.
At some point, the song of the Turtle became Jake’s death song. King can’t ignore the song, for that would be to abandon “the trail of bread-crumbs he must follow if he is ever to emerge from this bewildering forest of plot he has planted”—if, indeed, he is the one who planted it. He regrets that Jake died—is sorrier about him than about Eddie, although Eddie was always his favorite character.
Jake sacrifices his life so King, though badly injured, will live to finish the tale. Afterward, he tells Roland he wished he could write, “And they lived happily ever after until the end of their days,” but he’s not God and he must write the story no matter how the tale falls.
King tells Roland to save his hate for someone who deserves it. “I didn’t make your ka any more than I made Gan or the world and we both know it. Put your foolishness behind you—and your grief—and do as you’d have me do. Finish the job.”
He’s prepared for reader reaction to Jake’s death when the books are published. When the little boy in Cujo died, one reader sent him a dog turd via first-class mail.
The Tower’s earliest readers have known Jake Chambers for twenty years. Yes, some of them will be wild, and when he writes back and says he’s as sorry as they are, as surprised as they are, will they believe him? Not on your tintype, as his grandfather used to say. He thinks of Annie Wilkes shouting at Paul Sheldon, calling him the God to his characters. He doesn’t have to kill any of them if he doesn’t want to. [DT7]
Three years later, the accident is a distant memory, but not the pain. He’s suffering a mild version of post-traumatic stress disorder, and part of his memory of the accident has been blinded white, hidden by Roland’s hypnotic suggestion. He considers hypnotherapy to recover the lost memories, but never follows through.
As he nears the end, King grows weary of the journey. The trip has been long and the cost high. No great thing was ever attained easily, he reflects. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time.
“It is the tale, not he who tells it,” Stevens the butler once said in “The Breathing Method,”37 [DS] but he who tells it plays a crucial role in the process, too. “I can stop now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand, although probably not forever; the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing restless.” [DT7]
ENDNOTES
1 AOL chat, September 22, 1998.
2 www.stephenking.com, June 2002.
3 Stephen King, personal communication, October 2003. He didn’t elaborate on this surprising revelation.
4 Charles Burnside, the serial killer who delivers Breakers to the Crimson King in Black House, has a similar worry. “What if there’s more to pay for the things he has done over the course of his long career? . . . What if such a place [as the Big Combination] waits for him?” [BH]
5 Jake remarks that “with Roland, you were always in school. Even when you were in the shadow of death there were lessons to be learned.”
6 In the revised edition of The Gunslinger, Roland is better at estimating Jake’s age.
7 The R doesn’t stand for “Roland” or anything else. His middle name is just an initial.
8 This is a Manni prayer, but the sentiment is reminiscent of The Green Mile.
9 Eddie Cantor was a silent movie star and comic singer famous in the early years of the twentieth century. He died in 1964, which would be around when Eddie was born (he was about thirteen in 1977).
10 Estevez and Lowe have starred in adaptations of King stories, Lowe most recently in a remake of ’Salem’s Lot.
11 Though some text references put him at twenty-one, he seems to be twenty-three in the early part of the series and is described as twenty-five in Wolves of the Calla.
12 Her name is either Selina [D
T2] or Gloria [DT3].
13 When Jake sees Eddie deliberately losing to Henry at basketball, he muses, “I think your little brother has been playing you like a violin for a long time now, and you don’t have the slightest idea, do you?”
14 He’s a year older than Cuthbert was when he died on Jericho Hill.
15 In Song of Susannah, Odetta says that the A train never stopped at Christopher Street. “It was just another little continuity mistake, like putting Co-Op City in Brooklyn.”
16 An actress in Gone with the Wind.
17 “Susan” and “Susannah” both mean lily—it is interesting to note that calla is a kind of lily.
18 King told Janet Beaulieu of the Bangor Daily News that he’s interested in whether or not there are powers of evil that exist outside ourselves.
19 This is where Callahan’s story ends in ’Salem’s Lot.
20 Callahan dubs his two assailants Lenny and George after characters from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. King often mentions this novel and it’s one of the books Ted Brautigan leaves for Bobby Garfield in Hearts in Atlantis.
21 In an interview in Prevue magazine in May 1982, King discussed the plot of his then-planned sequel to ’Salem’s Lot. He said Father Callahan, who no longer considered himself a priest, was working in a soup kitchen in Detroit when he got word things weren’t over in ’Salem’s Lot. Twenty years later, part of that vision came true.
22 Reminiscent of how Dayna Jurgens escaped from Randall Flagg in The Stand.
23 The head of the ’Salem’s Lot ka-tet.
24 Reminiscent of Ralphie Anderson’s fairy-saddle birthmark in Storm of the Century.
25 Ubris, 1969, and Moth, 1970; The Devil’s Wine, Cemetery Dance Publications, Tom Piccirilli, ed., 2004.
26 Walden Book Report, July 2003. This description of Flagg the outsider also applies to Mordred Deschain.
27 In Calla, when talk turns to Walter, Roland still wonders if Marten was Maerlyn, “the old rogue wizard of legend.”
28 In Roland’s youth, Garlan is as mythical as Gilead will become in his adult years. It is a land “where carpets sometimes fly, and where holy men sometimes pipe ropes up from wicker baskets, climb them, and disappear at the tops, never to be seen again.” [ED] People who went there seeking knowledge usually disappeared, but those who returned were not always changed for the better. On maps, the regions south of Garlan are mostly white spaces.
29 The Beast in the original version of The Gunslinger.
30 Reminiscent of a scene early in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which inspired King to write The Gunslinger.
31 Carlos Detweiler’s deity in The Plant is also called Abbalah.
32 The horse’s name is Nis, after the land of sleep and dreams.
33 Boggarts are mischievous spirits that inhabit homes but can also be transported in household items.
34 Unless otherwise specified, this section deals with the fictionalized character who appears in Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower, not the real person.
35 Master’s Tea, Yale University, April 21, 2003.
36 Swinburne was a contemporary of Browning, and was both a poet and a critic. He wrote “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” in 1890.
37 The library in 249B East Thirty-fifth contains a book called Breakers by an author who doesn’t exist outside the building. Unknown manufacturer names adorn the jukebox and billiards table. The house has rooms that go on forever, with entrances and exits throughout.
Chapter 11
EPICS, INFLUENCES AND KA
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world.1
The wheel which turns our lives is remorseless; always it comes around to the same place again.
[DT3]
When Stephen King started working on the first story of the first book that would become the Dark Tower series, his intentions were nothing grander than to write the longest popular novel in history. Now a grandfather in his late fifties, King looks back with sympathy and understanding at the youthful hubris that gave rise to such an aspiration. “At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant. . . . Nineteen is the age where you say Look out world, I’m smokin’ TNT and I’m drinkin’ dynamite, so if you know what’s good for ya, get out of my way—here comes Stevie.”2
The Lord of the Rings inspired King, though he had no intention of replicating Tolkien’s creations, for his inspirations went beyond that epic quest fantasy to embrace romantic poetry and the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. After graduating from college, he decided it was time to stop playing around and tackle something serious. He began a novel “that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against [director Sergio] Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop.”3
In the afterword to Wizard and Glass, King calls the Dark Tower books cowboy romances. Through Roland, he comments on mixing genres when Eddie explains the differences between mysteries, suspense stories, science fiction, Westerns and fairy tales. “Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths? . . . Does no one eat stew?” Roland asks. Eddie admits that it sounds boring expressed that way. “When it comes to entertainment, we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time.” The scene brings to mind a line from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”
In his review of The Waste Lands, Edward Bryant says, “One of the astonishments of these books is King’s seemingly cavalier but still utterly coherent method of merging science fictional constructs with irrational fantasy. He shoves the superficially disparate concepts together with such force, the generated heat melds the elements.”4
While most modern fantasy derives from Tolkien in one way or another, the epic quest dates back to the beginning of written language. The earliest surviving fiction is the Epic of Gilgamesh, composed more than four thousand years ago. This ancient story about unknown people in an unknown time displays characteristics of epic adventures that persist in modern fiction. Though Gilgamesh—and his companion Enkidu—accomplishes legendary feats, the story emphasizes what he learned along the way. Quests are as much about the trip as the goal.
In his inimitable pithy manner, King reflects on this in the closing pages of The Dark Tower. He addresses imaginary readers who won’t be satisfied until they learn what awaits Roland within the Tower.
You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking. . . . You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens,5 where tired characters go to rest. . . . I hope most of you know better. Want better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a closed door no man . . . can open. [DT7]
The Odyssey is mostly about what befalls Odysseus during his travels. He has a specific goal—to return to Utica after the Trojan War and regain his kingdom—but he learns more about himself during his twenty years of travel than he would have in twenty years of peaceful existence with his wife and son. He is forced to make decisions that affect not only his own fate but also the lives of those who accompany him. He’s not perfect; he makes his share of mistakes. What makes him heroic is the way he gains moral clarity by understanding his errors.
Though he is a strong leader, his quest is sometimes jeopardized by the independent actions of his companions, for each of them has a life to live, too, and their goals are not always compatible. Curiosity blended with distrust provokes some of his men into opening the sack holding unfavorable winds when his ships are within sight of home, blowin
g them far off track and ultimately condemning all but Odysseus to death in foreign lands.
Poems of epic quests are part of the oral tradition of literature. In French, these poems are called Chansons de Geste, songs of heroic deeds, the oldest surviving of which is the “Chanson de Roland” (see below). Though these poems were often based on historical events—many of them inspired by Charlemagne’s life and deeds—traveling musicians turned them into legends when they embroidered them as songs performed from village to village.
Quests have goals, indeed. Bilbo’s goal is to get back home alive after he’s dragged out of his comfortable hole to help steal a dragon’s treasure. Frodo needs to get the One Ring to Mordor and destroy it. King Arthur and his knights hope that by finding the Holy Grail they can strengthen their faltering fellowship. The travelers in the Canterbury Tales are on a religious pilgrimage. Captain Ahab seeks vengeance against the beast that crippled him. Don Quixote seeks adventure itself. Dante traverses purgatory and hell to find a way back home, a common element in many quests, including The Wizard of Oz, on which King draws in Wizard and Glass.
One thing that sets the Dark Tower apart from these earlier works—aside from its greater length—is the way in which the story was meted out to readers over such a long period of time. The words “What happened next?” have always been treasured by storytellers, but with the Dark Tower, the author has not always been prepared to reveal more of the story right away.