by Vincent, Bev
He also wonders if he misspelled the name of the vampiric man Roland and Susannah encounter at the beginning of Tower Road. Dandelo is a reference to the family cat who was the subject of the researcher’s first, failed attempt at teleportation in the Vincent Price version of the movie The Fly, based on a story by George Langlahan. King probably had teleportation on his mind after assigning that power to Sheemie Ruiz.
King borrowed from many other sources in creating his magnum opus—Tolkien, spaghetti westerns, The Wizard of Oz, T. S. Eliot, The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books, Don Quixote, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Wolfe, Romeo and Juliet, and Greek mythology. From these diverse influences he has created something unique. Edward Bryant says, “[I]t’s strangely unfamiliar, dissimilar to anything else the author is doing. And if the imagination itself can be considered a bone that supports the musculature, flesh, and hide of a writer’s private associative creative processes, then I suspect this work of King’s cuts close to it.”26
In the end, it is not clear whether to call Roland a tragic or a dramatic hero. He successfully completes the task to which he was destined, though he left many companions strewn behind him, but so did Odysseus. Although he undergoes a kind of resurrection, he fails his personal quest. King provides readers with a glimmer of hope that the last gunslinger is evolving and one day may understand ka’s message, complete his transformation and climb to the top of the Tower, mounting each level in groups of nineteen steps, and find . . . what? The destiny that Robert Browning left to the imagination of his readers?
Or maybe he will come to understand that his personal quest is too costly in terms of the sacrifices it requires of him. Perhaps he will decide that saving the world is enough purpose for one man and that the real way for him to discover the truth of creation is to live out the rest of his natural days without ever completing the road to the Dark Tower.
ENDNOTES
1 Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” stanza XXXI.
2 “On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things),” Viking, 2003.
3 Ibid.
4 Edward Bryant, Locus magazine, vol. 27, no. 6, December 1991.
5 A reference to The Lord of the Rings, analogous to Avalon in Arthurian legends.
6 Interview with Janet C. Beaulieu of the Bangor Daily News, November 17, 1988.
7 “The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1, Castle Rock Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 6, June 1995.
8 Interview with Janet C. Beaulieu, op cit.
9 King Lear, Act III, Scene IV, 178–80.
10 Robert Browning, Selected Poetry, The Penguin Poetry Library, edited by Daniel Karlin, Penguin Books, 1989. Synopsis derived from The Book of Knowledge, The Children’s Encyclopedia, Grolier, 1923.
11 Browning reportedly had in his drawing room a tapestry featuring an emaciated horse. Jim Rockhill, “The Weird Review: Childe Roland,” www.violetbooks.com/REVIEWS/rockhill-browning.html.
12 Ibid.
13 Browning perpetuates a mistake in using this term that dates to “The Battle of Hastings” by poet Thomas Chatteton (1752–1770). Though intended to refer to a trumpet, the word is actually the etymological root of “slogan,” or battle cry. Robert Browning, Selected Poetry, The Penguin Poetry Library, op cit.
14 Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays, Harold Bloom and Adrienne Munich, eds. Prentice Hall, Inc. 1977.
15 The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Second Edition, Volume B, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.
16 This was often done to convert the gestes into triumphs of Christianity, of which Charlemagne was a champion.
17 Though this is often seen as pride on Roland’s part, it may also have been an act of loyalty. The rear guard’s duty was to protect the main army from attack from behind, and to call the army back into battle might have led to their destruction. Roland had sworn an oath to Charlemagne to fight to the death to protect the army.
18 Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 1995, and The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, Columbia University Press, 2001.
19 Beezer, one of the Thunder Five in Black House, was a fan of C. S. Lewis.
20 The author of a book called The C. S. Lewis Hoax claimed that The Dark Tower wasn’t by Lewis, but a forensic documents expert confirmed that the work was indeed his.
21 The story features Dr. Elwin Ransom and the skeptical MacPhee, from Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet. The Dark Tower may have been intended as part of his science fiction series.
22 Louis MacNeice, The Dark Tower, Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1947.
23 A possible logical problem crops up here. If Mid-World people vacationed in New York in 2001, shouldn’t that have prevented the ka-tet from going to a previous time? Though they never get to test this theory, the ka-tet believes that if any one of them travels to a certain time, none of them can revisit that time. Perhaps the Mid-World Tourism Bureau only accesses worlds other than Keystone Earth.
24 Jack Sawyer is reluctant to come out of retirement to assist in the serial murder case in Black House, for example.
25 For example, in the old text adventure game based on Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, if a player fails to give a dog a sandwich very early in the game, the mission is doomed to failure regardless of whatever else the player does. It’s a small detail, like Roland failing to reclaim Arthur Eld’s horn at Jericho Hill, but a crucial one. The hungry dog always wins, and there’s only one chance to feed it.
26 Edward Bryant, Locus magazine, vol. 27, no. 6, December 1991.
Chapter 12
ART AND THE ACT OF CREATION
Two patterns, art and craft, were welded together.
[DT1]
All he needs to do is write the right story. Because some stories do live forever.
[DT7]
In the window of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, bookstore owner Calvin Tower maintains a deli board announcing the day’s specials. FRESH-BROILED JOHN D. MACDONALD, it says. PAN-FRIED WILLIAM FAULKNER and CHILLED STEPHEN KING.
For Stephen King to show up in his own novels isn’t unprecedented. His books have become so much a part of the cultural consciousness that characters who live in a simulacrum of our world need to be aware of them and mention them to be realistic. When there’s a fire at a graduation dance in The Dead Zone, the characters automatically think of Carrie, a book Dinky mentions during the aftermath of the battle at Algul Siento. Flaherty, the human who pursues Jake down the corridors behind the Dixie Pig, read The Eyes of the Dragon when he was a kid. Part of the “feeling of reality” that F&SF editor Ed Ferman identified in the series is the characters’ awareness of all the fantasy that has gone before them. Though they are living in a fantasy world, they are conversant with The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia and Watership Down.
Eddie has seen Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, but he has also read a book by Ben Mears, a character in ’Salem’s Lot. He doesn’t seem to know King’s name and later says that he thinks King exists only in Keystone Earth. The Shining may be one of those stories, like Charlie the Choo-Choo, that is so important that it is written by different authors in different realities. Eddie also dreams of the first line of The Gunslinger, though in his dream it is attributed to Thomas Wolfe. Father Callahan believes that the man who thought him up may exist in only one world.
King occasionally inserts references to himself as a writer within his books, sometimes obliquely,1 sometimes explicitly.2 However, he takes self-reference a step farther when, in Song of Susannah, Eddie and Roland visit a younger version of himself living in western Maine in 1977. King transcends the characters’ common consciousness to take part in the action, going beyond simple author intrusion.3
In “Slade,” a precursor to the Dark Tower series (see the introduction), the imperiled heroine cries, “You came just in time!” to which Slade replies, “I always do. Steve King sees to that.”4 Slade
is aware he’s fictional, but King isn’t a character in the story.
In “The Blue Air Compressor,” the author halts the action to speak to readers, but still doesn’t participate in the action.
My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you’ll pardon my intrusion on your mind—or I hope you will. I could argue that the drawing-aside of the curtain of presumption between reader and author is permissible because I am the writer; i.e., since it’s my story I’ll do any goddam thing I please with it—but since that leaves the reader out of it completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all writers is that the teller is not worth a tin tinker’s fart when compared to the listener. Let us drop the matter, if we may. I am intruding for the same reason that the Pope defecates: we both have to.5
Characters in the story are unaware that they are cast in a work of fiction, but King reminds readers that what they are reading is made up. “I invented [Gerald Nately] first during a moment of eight o’clock boredom in a class taught by Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine English faculty. . . . In truth, he was guided by an invisible hand—mine.” It’s a risky approach because readers are pulled out of the story in a fashion similar to what happens when a movie character breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience.
King and Peter Straub insert themselves into Black House in a different way, relating much of the action as omniscient narrators who offer readers a literal bird’s-eye view of events. Late in the book, the authors step briefly from behind the curtain to explain who they are, calling themselves “the scribbling fellows.” They occasionally comment on their own writing structure, in one place noting that to change scene during certain events would be “bad narrative business.”
The literary term for self-aware or self-referential fiction is “metafiction,” probably coined by William H. Gass in 1970. In his afterword to The Dark Tower, King says he hates this “smarmy academic term.” Metafiction—or the less frequently used metafantasy—is not really what King is up to in the Dark Tower series. Books to which this label is applied examine the story-telling process, exploring the relationship between the apparent reality portrayed in the fiction and genuine reality. “The Blue Air Compressor” is metafiction, a commentary on narrative reality, or the lack thereof. In the Dark Tower series, King explores the creative process, but does not often criticize the process or fiction in general.
I’m in here because I’ve known for some time now (consciously since writing Insomnia in 1995) that many of my fictions refer back to Roland’s world and Roland’s story. Since I was the one who wrote them, it seemed logical that I was part of the gunslinger’s ka. My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible beneath the arch of some über-tale. I never meant that to be pretentious (and I hope it isn’t), but only as a way of clearing my desk once and for all. . . . It was all about reaching the Tower, mine as well as Roland’s, and that has finally been accomplished.6 [DT7]
One of the earliest instances of fiction transcending itself is Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Cervantes, who is quoted by Feemalo at the Crimson King’s castle,7 is both the author and the book’s narrator and, as such, a literal presence in the fiction. He’s retelling Quixote’s story to set the record straight from the original Arabic “history,” which contained inaccuracies compounded by mistakes made by the translator. This means that Quixote has three fictional people and the real author telling his story in nested layers, all of whom are, to varying degrees, unreliable.
After the success of the original book, Alonzo Fernández de Avallaneda wrote an unauthorized sequel. Furious not only about the sequel but also about a personal attack in the preface, Cervantes wrote his own sequel in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are aware of the first book and the false sequel. They—and people they meet—know of Cervantes and their fictional representations in the original book, but they believe themselves to be real.
In the Dark Tower series, Father Callahan is the first character to discover that his reality is someone else’s fiction. The story of his life recounted in ’Salem’s Lot contains details known only to him. Roland and Eddie are less concerned that somewhere a writer is making up their lives as they go along, creating their reality a step ahead of them—or, as it happens, a step behind them. Their only concern is that he not stop, or their quest will fail.
Patricia Waugh, who has written extensively about metafiction, says that its purpose is to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.8 The metafictional novel often parodies novel conventions, thereby making the reader conscious of these conventions, and uses that awareness to evaluate them. In “The Blue Air Compressor,” King indulges in a running commentary on the story and on the genre. “In a horror story, it is imperative that the grotesque be elevated to the status of the abnormal.” In The Dark Tower, when Susannah asks Nigel the robot the way to the doorway, she realizes it is a crucial question. Nigel, being a robot, though, makes no effort to keep her in suspense as a character in a book might. He has no sense of dramatic tension, well read though he may be.
If King parodies anything in the Dark Tower series, it is the notion of deus ex machina—God in the work. In ancient Greek drama, starting with Euripides,9 gods often came onstage to intercede on behalf of characters or hand them convenient solutions to their problems.
Fiction has to be truer than reality or else it seems like contrivance. An author who relies on convenient solutions to too great a degree is seen as artless and unsophisticated. If characters only show up to deliver important bits of information or if heroes happen upon the very item they need to complete the next stage of their quest, critics—and readers—scream, “Cheat!”
When Eddie and Roland encounter John Cullum in the general store in western Maine and the man proves extremely useful, Eddie claims that someone like him would never “come off the bench to save the day” in fiction. It wouldn’t be considered realistic. Roland says, “In life, I’m sure it happens all the time.”
The Fates, who control the span of an individual’s life, appear in Insomnia, telling Ralph and Lois only as much as they need to know to accomplish their task. Without them, Ralph would never have understood what was going on in Derry and stood no chance of succeeding.
Over the course of the series—and in related books—King intercedes on behalf of his characters to help them. In Insomnia, Dorrance Marstellar acts on his behalf, delivering important warning messages to Ralph. Speedy does the same thing in Black House, phoning Jack to tell him how to handle crises and leaving some powerful flowers for him in the bathroom. In The Waste Lands, King leaves a key in the vacant lot that Jake will need to cross into Mid-World, and he provides a bowling bag that will block some of Black Thirteen’s terrible power. Hidden within the bag is a talisman that helps Susannah survive in New York with Mia and allows Jake and Callahan to battle insurmountable odds at the Dixie Pig.
King sends a message directly to Jake at the hotel in New York, providing him with the key card they need to access Mia’s room. He packs the group a lunch after they leave the Emerald Palace, and pokes fun at the chain of coincidences in The Dark Tower when Susannah finds a message in the bathroom at Dandelo’s house explaining to her what’s going on. The note points her toward a copy of “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” left by King, who is the deus in this machina.
Eddie calls these little author-provided gifts “get out of jail free” cards. Although deus ex machina is no longer fashionable, Eddie thinks that a popular novelist like King still relies on it, perhaps in a way disguised a little better than classic playwrights did. Jake argues that King isn’t thinking up these clues; he’s just broadcasting them on behalf of ka.
Though King interjects himself into the story, he rarely narrates. Readers observe him as an active participant in the tale. When he does push back the “curtain of presumption” to comment on proceedings, it is usually to absolve himself of responsibility for what
has happened or to claim reluctance to tell certain parts of the story. As he foreshadows Eddie’s death in Algul Siento, King identifies an incident that “moves us a step closer to that you will not want to hear and I will not want to tell.” [DT7]
In The Eyes of the Dragon, when Dennis is sneaking through the sewer into the castle, he narrowly misses the passage containing poisonous fumes left over from the Dragon Sand that Flagg washed down the drain. “Perhaps it was luck that saved him, or fate, or those gods he prayed to; I’ll not take a stand on the matter. I tell tales, not tea leaves, and on the subject of Dennis’s survival, I leave you to your own conclusions.” [ED]
Roland has two gods manipulating his actions, though he prays to neither. Stephen King is his creator, albeit one who proves himself to be lazy and weak. The other is a mystery and as much King’s creator as King is Roland’s: Gan, the universal creative force, the ultimate representation of the White, the power of good.
The Crimson King and Walter think they can challenge whoever lives at the top of the Tower and take over. Roland simply wants to meet the creature living there to convince himself that someone is still actively interested in creation. Though he claims he’s neither philosophical nor introspective, Roland is searching for the meaning of existence and looking for the source of good. Ted Brautigan tells Bobby Garfield that literature’s “only excuses” were exploring the questions of innocence and experience, good and evil.
While Roland searches for his maker, King attempts to elucidate where stories come from. He refuses to take credit for creating his tales, but instead likens writing to archeology. In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he addresses the subject directly: