Jack Torrance S Haunting in

Home , Jack Torrance, Trucks (short story)

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Ondřej Parýzek

Jack Torrance’s Haunting in Stephen King’s The Shining Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Jan Čapek

2019

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………… Author’s signature

Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor Jan Čapek for his guidance and invaluable advice.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 5

1. Theoretical Section ...... 7

1.1. The Gothic ...... 7

1.1.1. The Haunted Place and its Place in the New American Gothic ...... 7

1.1.2. The Ghost ...... 9

1.2. Psychoanalysis ...... 12

1.2.1. The Uncanny, Haunting and Mirroring ...... 12

1.2.2. Narcissistic Injury ...... 15

2. Analytical Section ...... 17

2.1. Jack the Narcissist ...... 17

2.2. The Uncanny Overlook and its Haunting ...... 30

Conclusion ...... 42

Works Cited ...... 43

Summary ...... 45

Résumé ...... 46

Introduction

Stephen King’s The Shining was published in 1977 as his third novel and became his first bestseller. Both the novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation are now classic works in the horror genre. The main setting of the novel is the Overlook Hotel located in the Rocky

Mountains. The Overlook is an example of a “Bad Place” – an archetype which King defines in Danse Macabre and which “encompasses much more than the fallen-down house at the end of Maple Street with the weedy lawn, the broken windows, and the moldering FOR SALE sign” (King, Danse Macabre, 296). King further adds that “the list of possible Bad Places does not begin with haunted houses and end with haunted hotels; there have been horror stories written about haunted railroad stations, automobiles, meadows, office buildings”

(299). The beginning of King’s interest in the Bad Place can be traced to his childhood, when

King and his friends explored their “local ‘haunted house’ – a decrepit manse on the Deep Cut

Road in my hometown of Durham, Maine” (296). In addition to his childhood adventure, two other sources inspired King to write ‘Salem’s Lot (the novel preceding The Shining) – an article about haunted houses as psychic batteries and Bram Stoker’s Dracula:

My experience in the Marsten House with my friend crosspatched with this article and with a third element—teaching Stoker’s Dracula—to create the fictional Marsten House . . . But ’Salem’s Lot is a book about vampires, not hauntings; the Marsten House is really only a curlicue, the gothic equivalent of an appendix . . . So I went back to the house-as-psychic-battery idea and tried to write a story in which that concept would take center stage. The Shining is set in the apotheosis of the Bad Place: not a haunted house but a haunted hotel. . . . (298)

The concept of the haunted house is closely connected to another Gothic concept – the ghost. Both these archetypes are central to the story of The Shining. The Torrance family – the parents Jack and Wendy and their son Danny – arrives at the Overlook to spend the winter season there in solitude as Jack gets the job of the winter caretaker. Jack is a bad-tempered, recovered alcoholic who lost his teaching job when he assaulted one of his students. At the

Overlook, the family hopes to overcome their troubled past; Jack, who is also an aspiring

5 writer, hopes to finish his play there. But since the Overlook is a Bad Place, the family is haunted by ghosts and the Overlook gradually gains control over Jack who gets obsessed with the Hotel.

This thesis aims to analyse the process of the psychological disintegration of Jack that occurs during the family’s stay at the Overlook. The first section of the thesis further defines the two Gothic concepts that have already been mentioned – the Bad Place and the Ghost – and also introduces the new American gothic, thus putting The Shining in the perspective of the genre. The chapter on the Gothic is followed by a chapter on psychoanalytical theory.

Firstly, the chapter introduces the concept of the uncanny, most notably studied by Sigmund

Freud; the psychoanalytical view of haunting; and the notion of mirroring, a central part of the work of Jacques Lacan. Secondly, the theory of narcissistic injury and resulting reactive violence is discussed through the work of Matthew Merced. The theoretical section is followed by the analysis of Jack’s disintegration. The analysis is divided into two chapters, which correspond to the psychoanalytical subchapters of the theoretical section, and discovers the causes of Jack’s disintegration.

1. Theoretical Section

1.1. The Gothic

1.1.1. The Haunted Place and its Place in the New American Gothic

In his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Jerrold E. Hogle provides

“some general parameters by which fictions can be identified as primarily or substantially

Gothic” (Hogle 2). This subchapter overviews the concept of the Haunted Place and shows how it is employed in The Shining. In addition, it discusses The Shining in the context of the new American gothic genre.

The first of the Gothic parameters is the setting: “Though not always as obviously as in The Castle of Otranto or Dracula, a Gothic tale usually takes place (at least some of the time) in an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space” (Hogle 2) – these spaces range from ancient ones such as a castle or an abbey to more modern locations such as a factory, a laboratory or even a spaceship. Stephen King’s own definition of the Haunted Place as the

Bad Place was already mentioned in the thesis introduction. The Shining is also set in a haunted house, the haunted Overlook Hotel. In the section of Danse Macabre where he deals with two haunted-house novels – The Haunting of Hill House and The House Next Door –

King further comments on this concept. King argues that “Our homes are the places where we allow ourselves the ultimate vulnerability” (King, Danse Macabre, 299). This suggestion of home as a safe place is further illustrated by an American cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his book titled Landscapes of Fear. The book conceptualizes such landscapes as “almost infinite manifestations of the forces for chaos, natural and human” (Tuan 6). In order to protect themselves from these forces, humans build various constructions (both mental and material); every construction, then, “is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists to contain chaos . . . Every dwelling is a fortress built to defend its human occupants against the elements; it is a constant reminder of human vulnerability” (6, emphasis added). The human

7 construction designed for protection is both an assurance of safety and, at the same time, a reminder of the possible threat.

People are “our greatest source of security, but also the most common cause of our fear” in the forms such as “ghosts, witches, murderers, burglars, muggers, strangers, and ill- wishers” (Tuan 8). But the threat does not always come in the form of villain strangers. “The home, though a haven from external threats, is not exempt from conflicts,” points out Tuan in his discussion of fear in the countryside, claiming the conflicts are “all the more intense for taking place between family members who feel strongly toward each other” (Tuan 129). In

Danse Macabre, King too writes about the danger that resides at home:

It doesn’t hurt to emphasize again that horror fiction is a cold touch in the midst of the familiar [. . .] When we go home and shoot the bolt on the door, we like to think we’re locking trouble out. The good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in . . . with them. (King, Danse Macabre, 299; original emphasis)

The family conflict is pivotal in The Shining. Although the setting here is a haunted hotel, not the actual home of the Torrance family, the Overlook becomes the family’s residence for the whole winter season when there are no guests, so the Hotel functions as a substitute home. This focus on family puts The Shining in the perspective of “new American gothic”, a term by Irving Malin. John G. Parks discusses the features of new American gothic in his article “Waiting for the End: Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial”: “The gothic house functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, of ‘confining narcissism’ . . .

Nearly all of the characters of new American gothic are narcissistic, in one form or another, weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality” (Malin, qtd. in Parks 85).

That The Shining is part of new American gothic is suggested by King himself; in Danse

Macabre, he states that Parks’s article is “equally applicable to a whole slew of American ghost and horror stories, including several of my own” (King, Danse Macabre, 315). As the analysis in the second part of the thesis shows, Jack’s character embodies the narcissist in The

Shining. These aspects of new American gothic confirm Allan Lloyd Smith’s description of

American Gothic1 as shaping “toward a concern with social and political issues as well as toward an agonized introspection concerning the evil that lies within the self” (Smith 174).

The final aspect that contributes to “the house as a Bad Place” as King defines it is history: “One might even say that the truest definition of the haunted house would be ‘a house with an unsavory history.’ . . . the haunted-house tale demands a historical context” (King,

Danse Macabre, 300). The analytical part of the thesis examines the infamous history of the

Overlook Hotel and the crucial role it plays in Jack’s obsession and subsequent psychological disintegration.

Another prominent parameter characterising the Gothic places are “secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters” (Hogle 2). While the hauntings can take many forms, the most prominent manifestation of them is the ghost, the concept of which is discussed in the following chapter.

1.1.2. The Ghost

Yi-Fu Tuan’s Landscapes of Fear provided background for the concept of Haunted Place in the previous chapter; the book also deals with the second concept, the Ghost. At the beginning of the chapter “Fear of Human Nature: Ghosts”, Tuan gives a following, concise definition:

“Ghosts are dead persons who, in some sense, are still alive” (Tuan 113). Ghosts can assume many forms, ranging from an ambiguous mist to a human-like form all the way to a zombie.

While these merely describe the appearance of ghosts, the whole concept of the ghost is a complex one.

Tuan sees ghosts (along with witches) as fear of human nature. It has already been said in the previous chapter that while we depend on other people for survival, at the same time, people are a major source of our fear. According to Tuan, “Belief in witches and ghosts is

1 The capitalization of the two terms differs between Parks and Smith. 9 evidence of weaknesses in human bonds” (Tuan 115). Ghosts therefore embody our fear of the threats that others may pose – strangers, but also neighbours or even relatives. Regarding relatives, Tuan writes: “A ghost is frequently a dead kinsman for whom we feel resentment or guilt” (115). This is especially applicable to The Shining; the second part of the thesis will closer examine how the relationship between Jack and his father plays a major role in Jack’s psychological disintegration.

People’s belief in the supernatural has “diminished over the world as a whole with the progressive dominance of the scientific world-view” (Tuan 74), but the ghosts “fade slowly from the imagination” (126). In fact, it is precisely the rational point of view of the modern human that makes the ghost’s effect even stronger as “supernatural tales that owe the special quality of their terror to deep psychological insight are a product of the modern sensibility”

(124). Even in the present day when the existence of ghosts is not frequently considered a possibility, the symbolic ghost of the Gothic is still a relevant part of the culture: “A landscape, to stay haunted, must be maintained by the art of storytelling, which until the

Second World War was a popular pastime in many homes and country stores” (128). Such storytelling is not only oral; in The Shining, it is in part substituted by newspaper articles about the Overlook and by various other documents found in “a thick scrapbook with white leather covers” (King, The Shining, 226), a scrapbook which is filled with bills and other legal documents, but more importantly with mysterious notes of the Hotel’s guests. Through the scrapbook, Jack becomes obsessed with the Overlook’s history; the obsession is discussed in detail in the second part.

Julia Briggs provides the following introduction to the ghost story in A New

Companion to the Gothic:

Ghost stories have multiple meanings, but one constant element is the challenge they offer to the rational order and the observed laws of nature, though they may do so in a variety of ways, reintroducing what is perceived as fearful, alien, excluded, or dangerously marginal. (Briggs 176–177)

Regardless of the form of the supernatural in the story, “stories of the spirits of the dead are different in subject, but not in kind, from stories of ghouls, vampires, zombies, and doubles

(doppelgänger), automata, and the golem, or from tales of witches, wizards, werewolves, and spells” (177). Therefore, for a story to be possibly considered a ghost story, it need not deal necessarily with the ghost in some strictly defined form.

There are multiple “sources of terror” that “may intrude into the familiar” in a ghost story: the most important source in regard to The Shining is “from the human mind” (Briggs

176). According to Briggs, supernatural events of the ghost story are set in “a kind of imaginative logic in which the normal laws of cause and effect are suspended in favor of what

Freud termed ‘animistic’ ways of thinking” (178). According to the laws of such logic,

“thought itself is a mode of power” and “wishes or fears can actually benefit or do harm . . .

The ghost story reverts to a world in which imagination can produce physical effects” (178).

Finally, the previously discussed notion of family appears in Briggs’s writing as well; the author claims that “from the outset, Gothic writing had displayed a marked tendency to represent the family as a source of danger” (181). All the previous notions are present in The

Shining, where the most prominent source of Jack’s haunting are traumatic memories concerning his son, Danny, and his dead father. The influence of the memories on Jack and how they contribute to his disintegration is examined in the second part of the thesis.

Briggs claims that stories by Edgar Allan Poe “dramatized the inexplicable human urge to hurt oneself or others . . . His stories revealed that the ultimate horrors lie not without but within” (Briggs 179); here again is the Gothic focus on the “inside”, on the mind of an individual, and the dangers of it. This is also the focus of the theoretical field of psychoanalysis. The following chapter introduces key psychoanalytical concepts which provide a background for the literary analysis in the second part of the thesis.

1.2. Psychoanalysis

1.2.1. The Uncanny, Haunting and Mirroring

At the beginning of his essay “The Uncanny”, Sigmund Freud defines the concept as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”

(Freud 85). The concept is, however, rather complex. Freud provides further insight into the uncanny using the notions of repression and recurrence: “. . . if psychoanalytic theory is correct in maintaining that every emotional affect . . . is transformed by repression into anxiety,” Freud hypothesizes, “then among instances of frightening things there must be a class in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then be no other than the uncanny” (93). The uncanny, again described as something “familiar and old – established in the mind”, becomes “estranged only by the process of repression” (93). Freud states several other “factors which turn something fearful into something uncanny,” namely “animism, magic and witchcraft, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration-complex” (94).

This thesis is particularly concerned with the notions of repression and recurrence.

In psychoanalysis, the unconscious is “the region of the psyche containing memories, emotional conflicts, wishes, and repressed impulses that are not directly accessible to awareness but that have dynamic effects on thought and behavior” (“Unconscious”).

Repression is “the basic defense mechanism that excludes painful experiences and unacceptable impulses from consciousness” (“Repression”). The impulses in the unconscious, however, “still remain active, determining behaviour and experience” (Drever 247). Hence the “repressed which recurs” that Freud writes about. Although the original concern of psychoanalysis is the subject’s (the patient’s) mind and the ways to cure it, the theoretical field is also relevant to art and literature. In The Routledge Companion to Critical and

Cultural Theory, Rob Lapsley claims that “both can be viewed as compromise formations in

12 which repressed desires find expression in a socially acceptable form” (Lapsley 76). At the same time, “artworks are more than merely the articulation of conscious and unconscious desires;” Lapsley claims that “they are also attempts to actively master distressing, even traumatic, situations” (78).

Distressing and traumatic situations, once repressed but continuously returning, are in effect much like ghosts: they haunt the subject. Jacques Derrida introduces his book Specters of Marx with the following line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.2”

(Derrida 1) This “temporal disturbance” is the “key feature” of haunting, according to

Stephen Frosh in his book Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions:

“something that is supposed to be ‘past’ is experienced in the present as if it is both fantastic and real” (Frosh 2). “To be haunted,” he writes further, “is to be influenced by a kind of inner voice that will not stop speaking and cannot be excised . . . It is to harbour a presence . . . that embodies elements of past experience and future anxiety and hope, and that will not let us be”

(2-3). The source of the uncanny effect that the recurring repressed produces is the past. But the uncanny, Frosh claims, is also a “beckoning from the future” (27). Here, he references to

Freud’s conviction that he would die at (among other ages) 62 (26). Instead of the past, it is the vision of the future that haunts Freud, and this also applies to Jack in The Shining. During the family’s stay at the Overlook, Jack is haunted by recurring visions of traumatic events he experienced, both in childhood and adult life. At the same time, he has visions of the future that are equally haunting.

When he discusses the recurrence of a trauma, Frosh writes that “the traumatic remainder exists in concrete reality precisely because it has never been turned into a symbol .

. . the very failure of symbolisation means that it is always present in its materiality” (Frosh

24). The haunting of the trauma can result in “projection . . . with the effect that something

2 Editors of Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, identify Derrida as a great influence of the academic considerations of haunting (Ghosts 6). 13 appears in the external world that represents, in concrete form, the unbearable traumatic idea”

(24). Jack’s haunting visions manifest in forms that he perceives as real and material. In this respect, haunting is again closely related to the uncanny: “. . . an uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (Freud

95).

The subject’s trauma being represented in the material form is evocative of the psychoanalytical notion of mirroring which is central to the theory of Jacques Lacan. Lacan introduced the mirror stage in his version of psychological development; in short, Lacan’s claim is that “before the child has achieved motor control it identifies with an image of unity and completeness, an ideal which it anticipates but which it will never embody” (Lapsley 79).

The mirror stage with its image, the “Ideal-I” establishes the “Imaginary Order”, which is

“primarily narcissistic” and which “continues to exert its influence throughout the life of the adult” (Felluga). After this stage follows the stage of language acquisition; the child moves into the “Symbolic Order” which “is made possible because of your acceptance of the Name- of-the-Father, those laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication” (Felluga). Through the process of linguistic relation of signifier-signified, the objects are imbued with symbolic meaning: the external objects (signifiers), through psychological projection, become representations of the subject’s repressed traumas

(signifieds). In The Shining, various uncanny objects that figure in the haunting of Jack are precisely the mirroring of Jack’s repressed desires.

The notion of narcissism, as well as the notion of psychological projection, is further elaborated in the second part of the psychoanalytical chapter, where it is extended with the theory of narcissistic injury.

1.2.2. Narcissistic Injury

In his article on narcissistic injury and violence, Matthew Merced introduces the classification of violence into instrumental and reactive. Reactive violence “lacks any material objective; the purpose is to retaliate, punish, or destroy in reaction to feeling humiliated, helpless, powerless, and/or experiencing perceived injustice” (Merced 82). “Reactive violence,”

Merced writes further, “typically involves a single and serious offense against a known victim, usually a spouse, relative, or caretaker” (82). Reactive violence typically occurs in domestic environment, which is the focus of the new American gothic discussed in the first chapter, and the focus of The Shining itself.

To explain the unreasonable acts of reactive violence, Merced uses psychoanalytic theory. He introduces the term “narcissistic injury”, which is “a blow to one’s self-esteem” that is “diminished by failure, disapproval, and rejection” (Merced 84). People who are

“narcissistic” are “preoccupied with their appearance and compare their knowledge, skills, attributes, and status to others” (88). Merced explains how narcissistic injury affects, among others, narcissistic individuals:

The narcissistic injury confronts them with qualities or traits they associate with badness, inadequacy, and/or weakness. Furthermore, they feel exposed. Although the precipitating event may appear trivial, to vulnerable narcissistically injured individuals it can seem catastrophic. Thus, they have extremely intense emotional reactions dominated by shame, humiliation, and rage. (84)

In case of such vulnerable individuals, their mature “defenses” – psychological coping mechanisms that protect a person from strong feelings (85) – may fail and individuals regress to less mature defences (86). These span from denial through withdrawal all the way to projection. Projection can be understood as “a defense mechanism in which unpleasant or unacceptable impulses, stressors, ideas, affects, or responsibilities are attributed to others”

(“Projection”). “Ultimately,” Merced concludes, “behavioral action (violence) may become the only means for the individual to protect him or herself” (Merced 86).

Apart from narcissism, Merced writes about a “borderline organization” of a character

(Merced 89). Among the numerous “impairments” of borderline individuals are “poor affect regulation” and “poorly integrated and unrealistic sense of self” which “result in . . . mood lability, behavioural impulsivity . . . a checkered work history . . . and difficulty coping with daily challenges without . . . substance use” (89). Finally, “an individual whose personality is organized at a borderline level has unstable, poorly anchored, self-esteem and will exhibit heightened reactivity, defensiveness, and aggressiveness toward potential threats to his or her sense of self” (89). Essentially all the characteristics listed in the previous quote are found in the character of Jack Torrance.

In his article, Merced applies the presented theory on Jack’s character in Stanley

Kubrick’s famous film adaptation of The Shining. This thesis applies the concept of narcissistic injury in the following analysis of Jack’s character as presented in King’s novel.

2. Analytical Section

2.1. Jack the Narcissist

Jack is an impulsive, temperamental man who struggles to control his bad temper. This marked characteristic of Jack is introduced right in the opening scene of the novel where Jack

Torrance is interviewed for the job of the winter caretaker by the Overlook’s manager, Stuart

Ullman. King’s description of Jack fits the characteristics of an impulsive narcissist; the fact that it is introduced in the very beginning of The Shining suggests the importance of the theme. Ullman tells Jack that he will be hired only thanks to his friend, Albert Shockley: “He wants you hired. I will do so. But if I had been given a free hand in this matter, I would not have taken you on” (King, The Shining, 7). Ullman expresses his dislike for Jack: besides

Jack’s alcoholic past, Ullman also mentions Jack’s last job, the one he lost because he “lost

[his] temper” (10). As he is faced with these uncomplimentary remarks, Jack almost loses his temper again: “Jack’s hands were clenched tightly in his lap, working against each other, sweating. Officious little prick, officious little prick, officious—” (7, italics original3).

Throughout the interview, Jack has to control himself several times to remain calm. Clearly,

Ullman’s remarks anger Jack: this is so because of Ullman’s condescending tone (stemming from Ullman’s superior position), but mainly because the insults attack Jack’s self-esteem. He is reminded of his shameful past; he feels humiliated. From the very beginning of the novel,

Jack expresses symptoms of an individual that has suffered a narcissistic injury. Jack’s ego faces several such injuries as the narrative progresses; this chapter analyses how these injuries impact Jack’s psyche and how they eventually lead to reactive violence.

It is thanks to Albert Shockley that Jack gets the job as the Overlook’s caretaker. Jack decides to thank Al for the recommendation but makes the phone call from a public booth; although Jack thinks he “could have made this obligatory thank-you call to Al from home,”

3 King conventionally uses italics to convey the characters’ thoughts and/or their inner monologues. Therefore, the italics in all following quotations from The Shining are original unless stated otherwise. 17

(King, The Shining, 52) he decides against it – because his pride said no. “These days he almost always listened to what his pride told him to do, because . . . his pride was all that was left” (52). Jack does not want his wife Wendy to hear him calling Al; he does not want her to be reminded of their family’s dependence on someone else’s good will. More importantly,

Jack does not want her to be reminded of his failure as a husband, the male provider. As this chapter further demonstrates, this failure is the central cause of the disintegration of Jack’s narcissistic self and is one of the central ghosts that haunt Jack. “Even the checking account was joint,” Jack remembers bitterly; his pride, therefore, is the “only thing that was his” (52), and Jack’s injured narcissistic self clings to it desperately.

The scene in which Jack repairs the Overlook’s roof and is stung upon uncovering a wasps’ nest introduces what could be called the wasp metaphor. After discovering the nest,

Jack contemplates his life and thinks of the nest as “both a workable symbol for what he had been through (and what he had dragged his hostages to fortune through) and an omen for a better future” (King, The Shining, 155). Jack Torrance is one of the writer characters that

King has created, these characters being “familiar territory for King” (Davenport 311); one of

King’s writer-protagonists, Michael Noonan from Bag of Bones, is described by Mark Singer in a New Yorker article as “yet another of these explorations of self” (Singer, paraphrased in

Davenport 312). This gives The Shining a slight metafictional touch; in this context, wasps do serve as a symbol as King (the actual writer) uses the imagery to represent everything bad or hurtful in Jack’s (the fictional writer’s) life. In Jack’s eyes, all of the failures and misfortunes of his life happen the same way the wasps surprise and sting him: they happen “with Jack

Torrance in the passive mode. He had not done things; things had been done to him” (King,

The Shining, 155). Although he broke the arm of his son Danny and fractured the skull of

George Hatfield, one of his students, he feels innocent; he certainly does not feel like “a son of a bitch”: “He hadn’t felt mean . . . He felt that he had unwittingly stuck his hand into The

Great Wasps’ Nest of Life” (156–157). In Jack’s eyes, it is not him but the world who is evil.

Essentially, all of this depicts Jack’s mental projection; following the various narcissistic injuries that confront him with all his negative aspects, Jack regresses to the immature defence mechanism.

The beating of George Hatfield is the reason Jack lost his teaching position. George therefore plays an important part in Jack’s life as one of the symbols of his failures. King describes George as “an almost insolently beautiful boy” who Jack doubted “had much trouble scoring” (King, The Shining, 158). Jack does not hate or envy him, though, or so he thinks: “If he had, he would have known it. He was quite sure of that” (158). But after the background of the conflict between Jack and George is revealed, the certainty is substantially questioned. The conflict arises when the stuttering George accuses Jack of setting the timer ahead during George’s speech in the debate team. Jack, still calm, pleads his innocence and tells George that the stutter is to blame. After a while of arguing, Jack finally loses his temper and resorts to mocking George: “George, you’re never going to make much of a lawyer, corporation or otherwise, if you can’t control that . . . What are you going to do, stand up in front of a board meeting and say, ‘Nuh-nuh-now, g-gentle-men, about this t-t-tort’?” (162).

This angers George who shouts “Yuh-yuh-you s-s-set it ahead! You huh-hate me b-because you nuh-nuh-nuh-know … you know … nuh-nuh—” (162) and runs out of the classroom.

Jack, at first, feels “a sick sort of exultation: For the first time in his life George Hatfield had wanted something he could not have. For the first time there was something wrong that all of

Daddy’s money could not fix,” (163) which satisfies the jealous Jack who shares the checking account with his wife. Yet, Jack is also ashamed of his mockery and feels “the way he had after he had broken Danny’s arm”; his next thought is: “Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch.

Please” (163). This desperate plea reveals both that Jack does in fact envy George and that he indeed feels like “a son of a bitch,” despite his attempts to deny it.

There is another, more important aspect of the satisfaction Jack gets from George’s stutter. Jack is exultant about the fact that George’s speech impediment hinders his potential lawyer career. But, arguably, Jack is especially exultant about George’s stutter because he himself, symbolically, stutters. Having one of his short stories published in Esquire, Jack has ambitions as a writer: he dreams of “becoming a major American writer during the next decade” (King, The Shining, 394); his wife calls him “the Eugene O’Neill of his generation, the American Shakespeare!” (168) During “the last unhappy six months at Stovington” (151) when he was still a teacher, though, Jack was unable to finish his play, The Little School; it was “delayed between hand and page ‘in that interesting intellectual Gobi known as the writer’s block’” (152), as Jack remembers while repairing the Hotel’s roof. Jack’s frustration with his inability to write manifests itself in his mocking of George’s stutter; it pleases Jack that George, the boy who is and has everything Jack would like to be and have, shares the same flaw with him. This literary stuttering, an inability to produce a text, renders Jack disempowered; or, in the language of psychoanalysis, castrated.

A week after the argument, Jack cuts George from the team which in turn makes him cut the tires on Jack’s car, leading to Jack beating him. Finally, there is Jack’s projection in work again: “And he had not hated George Hatfield. He was sure of that. He had not acted but had been acted upon”; and although Jack initially swore he did not set the timer ahead, now, he “would swear that he had set the timer ahead no more than a minute. And not out of hate but out of pity” (King, The Shining, 166). Jack regresses not only to projection, but also to denial, another immature mechanism. The chapter closes with an ambiguous sentence that aptly draws on the wasp imagery again: “He went down the ladder to get the bug bomb. They would pay. They would pay for stinging him” (167). Jack is about to exterminate the wasp nest, so “they” primarily refers to the insects; at the same time, in the context of Jack’s

20 lengthy recollections, the sentence is a promise of revenge on “them” – on everyone and everything Jack feels is responsible for his failures.

A major turning point in the narrative of The Shining is Jack’s discovery of the scrapbook. He discovers the scrapbook in the basement when he decides “on impulse . . . to look at some of the old papers” (King, The Shining, 222). The scrapbook contains newspaper clippings that report the unsavoury history of the Overlook, providing account of the criminals associated with the Hotel and the murders that happened there. Besides the articles, the scrapbook produces an old invitation to a ball: “He held [the scrapbook] on a plane at lip level, blew the dust off in a cloud, and opened it. As he did so a card fluttered out and he grabbed it in mid-air before it could fall to the stone floor” (226). As Jack imagines the event from the invitation, a sudden thought crosses his mind: “(The Red Death held sway over all!)

He frowned. What left field had that come out of? That was Poe, the Great American Hack”

(227). A seemingly inconspicuous remark, “the Great American Hack” provides a valuable insight into Jack’s narcissism. Maroš Buday in his article “From One Master of Horror to

Another” interprets Jack’s remark as “a great denouncement of one of the giants of American literature” (53). “What this act evokes in the reader,” Buday claims, “is Jack’s anger and resentment, perhaps even jealousy with respect to Poe, at the fact that he is unable to write anything” (53). Anger, resentment and jealousy – negative emotions such as these are found in “grandiose” narcissists who “have a tendency to devalue (in order to feel superior),”

(Merced 88) which is exactly what Jack does when naming Poe “the Great American Hack”.

Chapter twenty marks a great shift in Jack’s attitude toward his family – namely toward his wife – that is evident of the extent of Jack’s disintegration. As he slowly becomes obsessed with the Overlook’s history, Jack dedicates more and more time to studying it.

When Wendy interrupts him from searching the archive in a local library, he is irritated:

“What are you up to, anyway?” she asked. She ruffled his hair as she said it, but her voice was only half-teasing.

“Looking up some old Overlook history,” he said. “Any particular reason?” “No, (and why the hell are you so interested anyway?) just curiosity.” “Find anything interesting?” “Not much,” he said, having to strive to keep his voice pleasant now. (King, The Shining, 258)

So far, Jack’s irritation shows only in his thoughts, italicized in the quotation. Progressively, though, Jack grows more violent. Jack thinks Wendy is “prying, just the way she had always pried and poked at him when they had been at Stovington and Danny was still a crib-infant”

(258). When Wendy expresses concern about Jack’s well-being, he angrily recoils from her.

Finally, Jack’s thoughts turn outright vulgar: he thinks of Wendy as “the stupidest bitch,” and, in his head at least, shouts at her: “‘Want some water?’ she asked brightly. (No I just want you to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!)” (260) Out loud, Jack says: “I’ll get some at the drinking fountain when I go up. Thanks” (260). The mounting stress makes Jack violent, albeit not yet physically, toward his family. The increasingly violent atmosphere supports both the thesis of the violence that follows the narcissistic injury and the place of the novel in the new American gothic.

The primary target of Jack’s temper in the chapter, though, is Ullman. Jack calls

Ullman and they have an argument during which Jack confronts Ullman with various details from the Overlook’s past, rebuking him for not disclosing them to Jack. Eventually, their argument arrives at what is the core of Jack’s incentive: “But you raked up a lot of my personal history before you gave me the job. You had me on the carpet, quizzing me about my ability to take care of your hotel like a little boy in front of the teacher’s desk for peeing in the coatroom. You embarrassed me” (King, The Shining, 265). Jack openly admits that Ullman embarrassed him during the interview; this embarrassment pervaded Jack from the beginning of the novel and it eventually surfaced, resulting in Jack’s aggressive outbreak on Ullman.

Yet, at this point, Jack is still capable of self-reflection: he realizes he made a mistake and admits he lost his temper (268).

Following the call to Ullman is a call from Al, and Jack’s anger is on display again: “.

. . the coals of resentment had begun to glow around his heart. First Ullman, then Wendy, now

Al. What was this? National Let’s Pick Jack Torrance Apart Week?” (King, The Shining, 275)

During the call, Jack again struggles to contain himself, feeling the “hand holding the hot wires of his rage . . . greased” (276). Al proposes two conditions to Jack; in order to repair the damage he has done and to keep his job, Jack agrees to the conditions before hearing them.

After Al forbids him to write about the Overlook, though, Jack’s reaction is intense: “For a moment his rage was so great that he literally could not speak. The blood beat loudly in his ears” (278). Jack dreams of succeeding as a writer and he considers the book about the

Overlook as his key to success. By forbidding the creation of the book and therefore denying any hope of success, Al causes Jack perhaps the greatest narcissistic injury so far. Together with Ullman and Wendy, Al forms the trio that epitomizes Jack’s ongoing narcissistic projection. Jack successively insults Wendy (although he does not say it aloud); provokes

Ullman in an attempt to gain a moral high ground; and, finally, resents his best friend, doubting if he “ever liked this cheap prick talking to him from his mahogany-lined den in

Vermont” (275). What Jack sees, though, is Wendy, Ullman and finally Al “picking him apart” – Wendy nagging him, Ullman and Al criticizing him and preventing him from succeeding.

The depth of the impact of Al’s “high-goddam-handed request that he chuck his book project” (King, The Shining, 326) is illustrated after Jack’s first encounter with the supernatural force of the Overlook in the form of the attacking hedge animals. Jack remembers the incident and he is “convinced that it was his mind in revolt” (326) against the injury suffered from Al; he further thinks that it might be “a signal that his own sense of self-

23 respect could only be pushed so far before disintegrating entirely” (326). Jack’s narcissistic mind is still occupied with the ban on the book. Jack is determined to “write the book,” even

“If it meant the end of his association with Al Shockley” (326). However, “it would not be written vindictively,” Jack thinks, “in any effort to get back at Al or Stuart Ullman or George

Hatfield or his father (miserable, bullying drunk that he had been) or anyone else, for that matter” (326). This part is very revealing about Jack’s unconscious. He convinces himself that the book in question will not be revengeful. Yet, he explicitly mentions all the people that somehow figure in the failures of his life, even that of his father which emerges unexpectedly from his unconscious. It is clear that the thing Jack would like to do the most is precisely to have revenge on the various wasps that stung him. Lastly, by assuring himself about the good intentions behind writing the book, Jack again attempts to deny the negative aspects of his self.

While Jack is at one point “fascinated by the Overlook,” he nevertheless admits he

“didn’t much like it” (King, The Shining, 272). Later in the book, his attitude shifts: “Nothing in the Overlook frightened him. He felt that he and it were simpático” (369). The growing obsession with the Overlook further separates Jack from his family. After Danny reveals that it was the dead woman from Room 217 that hurt him, Jack says: “‘I’m going up to that room, what did you think I was going to do? Have coffee?’ . . . ‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said. ‘But I have to, you know. I’m the goddam caretaker. It’s what I’m paid for’” (367–368). Jack’s care for the

Hotel surpasses his care for his family; his son has just suffered a terrible shock, but Jack is more concerned with his caretaking duties. The duties satisfy Jack’s narcissistic appetite for self-worth; having failed at finishing his play and yet unable to write the Overlook book, Jack turns to caretaking as a source of self-worth.

Jack indeed is unable to finish his play: “He looked down at the play with smoldering ill temper. How could he have thought it was good? It was puerile. It had been done a

24 thousand times. Worse, he had no idea how to finish it” (King, The Shining, 377). Yet, Jack’s author impotence itself is not the core problem; or rather, what is important is the reason Jack cannot finish the play: “But, in addition to his sudden diversion of interest to the Overlook’s history, something else had happened. He had developed opposing feelings about his characters” (378). More importantly, Jack “had come to loathe his hero, Gary Benson” (380).

Previously, Jack admits that he begins to see George as “the physical incarnation” of Gary

(158). The reality, though, is exactly opposite; George resembles Gary because Jack created the character with George on his (unconscious) mind. As Stephen Davenport writes in his article “From Big Sticks to Talking Sticks”, Jack “uses the play as a means of restaging the moment of his wounding, although he does not always seem to understand his use of the headmaster and the student, or father and son, as doubles for real people in his life”

(Davenport 318). Jack comes to hate Gary’s character because his hatred for George is projected on the fictional double. The other character, Denker becomes Jack’s fictional double: “Denker, who had never had any of the things Gary had. Denker, who had had to work all his life just to become head of a single little school. Who was now faced with ruin over this handsome, innocent-seeming rich boy” (King, The Shining, 381). Gary ruined

Denker, the hard-working but unsuccessful man; mirroring the play, George ruined Jack. Gary

(and the whole play for that matter) is the target of Jack’s unconscious projection.

In the theoretical part of this thesis, the chapter on narcissistic injury presents Matthew

Merced’s notion of reactive violence as a result of narcissistic injury. Although Jack hasn’t hurt either Wendy or Danny physically yet, he becomes increasingly violent in his ill- tempered thoughts. When Wendy persuades Jack to take Danny down to get medical care for him, Jack initially (although inconspicuously) finds excuses as to why it is not possible. Once

Wendy reminds Jack about the snowmobile in the Hotel’s equipment shed, Jack (apart from being reluctant about leaving) grows even further irritated: “She was totally excited now,

25 leaning over him, her breasts tumbling out of her shirt. He had a sudden impulse to seize one and twist it until she shrieked. Maybe that would teach her to shut up” (King, The Shining,

387). This act of violence still remains merely Jack’s phantasy, but it is nevertheless a marked shift in his attitude toward his wife as Jack’s thoughts move from verbal to physical violence: whereas previously he wants to tell Wendy to “GET THE FUCK OUT OF [T]HERE!” (260), now he imagines actually hurting her. Later, as Wendy falls asleep, Jack stays awake and thinks about their whole situation again; he comes at the conclusion they have no other option than to stay at the Overlook: “When they got down to Sidewinder they would arrive with sixty dollars and the clothes they stood up in. Not even a car . . . There would be no job,” Jack fears, “. . . except maybe shoveling out driveways for three dollars a shot” (394). The thing that haunts Jack the most, “much more clearly than the hedge lions,” (395) is the prospect of occupying a lowly, menial job. This is especially marked when contrasted with Jack regarding himself as “John Torrance, thirty years old, who had once published in Esquire and who had harbored dreams . . . of becoming a major American writer during the next decade” (394).

Jack is obsessed with the dream of becoming not only a successful writer, but a “major

American writer”; but because he is “Unable to write, he cannot take part in the male literary tradition . . . to which he aspires” (Davenport 315). Jack’s selfish ambitions overshadow

(albeit momentarily) the concerns for his family. Finally, the muddy waters of his stream of thoughts carry Jack to a dark pool of his unconscious:

So you see, Al, I thought the best thing to do would be to— (kill her.) The thought rose up from nowhere, naked and unadorned. The urge to tumble her out of bed, naked, bewildered, just beginning to wake up; to pounce on her, seize her neck like the green limb of a young aspen and to throttle her, thumbs on windpipe, fingers pressing against the top of her spine, jerking her head up and ramming it back down against the floor boards, again and again, whamming, whacking, smashing, crashing. . . . He would make her take her medicine. Every drop. Every last bitter drop. (King, The Shining, 396)

It is only for Danny that he suppresses his extremely violent urge: “He got out of bed and went across to the boy, feeling sick and ashamed of himself. It was Danny he had to think of, not Wendy, not himself. Only Danny” (396–397). Jack hesitates to leave the Overlook and with it the vision of success, but yet his need to succeed conflicts with his love for Danny, showing that he is not yet completely possessed by the Hotel.

The wasp metaphor makes another appearance when Jack goes to check on the snowmobile as he promised to Wendy. “Sitting there in its shaft of morning sun,” the vehicle is described, “yellow body and black piping, black skis, and black upholstered open cockpit, it looked like a monstrous mechanized wasp” (King, The Shining, 405). For Wendy, the snowmobile is a symbol of hope and rescue. For Jack, it resembles a wasp, the symbol of all the problems they would face after leaving Overlook. Therefore, Jack is angered when he finds all the necessary parts to get the snowmobile working. He even considers concealing his findings, so that he would not have to leave the Hotel. Once again, it is the sight of Danny that awakens his rational-self:

(What in the name of God were you thinking of?) The answer came back with no pause. (Me. I was thinking of me.) . . . In that instant, kneeling there, everything came clear to him. It was not just Danny the Overlook was working on. It was working on him, too. It wasn’t Danny who was the weak link, it was him. (410–411)

For the first time, Jack realizes the influence the Overlook has on him. Despite the realization, he is torn between leaving and staying, no longer knowing “which side he was on, or how things should come out” (415). The dilemma is resolved when Jack is overcome by his all familiar ego defence again: “It had been all right until he had seen Danny playing in the snow.

It was Danny’s fault. Everything had been Danny’s fault. He was the one with the shining, or whatever it was” (415). And after Jack considers the possibility of becoming an alcoholic again in case they left, he sabotages the snowmobile, thus making the final, crucial decision to stay: “Abruptly he leaned over the Ski-Doo’s motor compartment and yanked off the magneto

. . . He flung the magneto as far out into the snow as he could” (416). Jack throws away the component and resorts to a physical act that parallels the number of mental, narcissistic projections he uses to defend himself.

Jack conceals his act of sabotage from his family, but Danny, thanks to his shining, is suspicious. Danny has a feeling that Jack “had done something that was very hard and had done it right”, but he “could not seem to see exactly what the something was. His father was guarding that carefully, even in his own mind” (King, The Shining, 418). When Danny thinks about whether one can be glad about and ashamed of something at the same time, his response is perfectly revealing of Jack’s mental state: “He didn’t think such a thing was possible … in a normal mind” (418). Danny’s thoughts suggest that Jack grows insane. Furthermore, Danny confronts Jack with his knowledge. After a scene in which Danny is attacked by the hedge animals, Jack scolds Danny because he, reminded of his own troubling experience with the animals, refuses to believe his son and tries to, in his words, “help him find the difference between something real and something that was only a hallucination” (433). Danny reasons with Jack and defends himself while Jack loses his predominance. Suddenly, the realization comes to Danny: “It had flashed into his mind all at once . . . He stared at his father with widening eyes. ‘You know I’m telling the truth,’ he whispered, shocked. ‘Danny—’ Jack’s face, tightening. ‘You know because you saw—’” (433) At the risk of being exposed, Jack silences his son with a slap in an act of reactive violence. It is a repetition of violence – Jack hurts Danny for the first time since the traumatic breaking of Danny’s arm and so fails as a father yet again.

When Jack almost forgets to release the boiler pressure, he thinks of it as the “final crashing failure” (King, The Shining, 489). He recalls all of the past failures: “He had failed as a teacher, a writer, a husband, and a father. He had even failed as a drunk,” (489–490) he thinks. The greatest failure, though, would be failing at the caretaker job: “But you couldn’t

28 do much better in the old failure category than to blow up the building you were supposed to be taking care of” (490). Jack posits it even higher than failing as a husband or a father; the

Overlook, again, is more important to Jack than is his family. Davenport comments on this, saying that “it is work, either the kind of work he does or the way in which he does it, that separates Jack physically from his family, that makes him easy prey for the hotel’s evil spirits”; furthermore, Davenport writes, Jack makes “the worst of shortsighted deals: he sells his soul to the devil” (Davenport 319).

And sell his soul Jack indeed does. Even before he makes the pact itself, Jack is possessed by the Overlook. At the same time that Jack leaves the basement and goes to the

Hotel’s bar for “a little drink . . . To ease the pain,” (King, The Shining, 490) Danny has a vision of the explosion Jack has just averted. Danny tries to read Jack’s mind and finds him thinking about drinking. Abruptly, Jack’s stream of thoughts is interrupted: “(GET OUT OF

HIS MIND, YOU LITTLE SHIT!) [Danny] recoiled in terror from that mental voice . . . It hadn’t been the voice of his father but a clever mimic. A voice he knew. Hoarse, brutal, yet underpointed with a vacuous sort of humor” (492). This mental voice is summoned by the

Overlook because the Hotel “hadn’t wanted [Danny] to go to his father” (495); and it is the ghostly voice of Jack’s father. A while later, Danny has the recurring vision in which he sees

“a huge creature dressed in white, its prehistoric club raised over its head” that yells “‘I’ll make you stop it! You goddam puppy! I’ll make you stop it because I am your FATHER!’”

(496). Danny sees the ghost of Jack’s father who worked as a male nurse (327) and who

“always looked like some soft and flapping oversized ghost in his hospital whites” (328); the prehistoric club is the cane Jack’s father beat his wife with (330).

The “little drink” Jack initially wanted to have eventually leads to a substantial hallucination in which he has a conversation with Delbert Grady, the previous caretaker.

Grady tells Jack that the manager is interested in him; that Jack could study the Overlook

29 further; and finally, that Jack could go “much further [. . .] in the Overlook’s organizational structure. Perhaps … in time … to the very top” (520). Jack, clinging anxiously to any prospect of success and enraged at being humiliated, agrees to “deal with” Danny:

“A man who cannot control his own family holds very little interest for our manager. A man who cannot guide the courses of his own wife and son can hardly be expected to guide himself, let alone assume a position of responsibility in an operation of this magnitude. He—” “I said I’ll handle him!” Jack shouted suddenly, enraged. (521)

But at first, Jack is not able to keep his promise. After a fight between him and Wendy, he ends up unconscious and Wendy and Danny lock him up in the Hotel’s pantry. The Overlook, having evil intentions, summons Grady to help Jack; Grady insists that Jack deals with his family: “‘You would have to kill her, I fear,’ Grady said coldly” (565). Completely under control of the Hotel, Jack subdues: “‘I’ll do what I have to do. Just let me out . . . My word, my promise, my sacred vow, whatever in hell you want. If you—’ There was a flat snap as the bolt was drawn back” (565–566). Thus, as his ego collapses under the accumulated weight of the suffered injuries, Jack makes the final, crucial Faustian bargain with the Overlook which leads to his death.

2.2. The Uncanny Overlook and its Haunting

The majority of the haunting in The Shining occurs during the Torrance family’s stay at the haunted Overlook, but the first and one of the most important hauntings appears before the family moves there. While he is waiting for his dad to come back home from the job interview, Danny asks his mum how Jack lost his job. This evokes painful memories and after

Wendy tells Danny the truth and goes back inside the house, she, upset by the memory of

Danny’s broken arm, starts crying “in grief and loss for the past, and terror of the future”

(King, The Shining, 21). This very much fulfils the definition of haunting from the psychoanalytical chapter as the “presence . . . that embodies elements of past experience and future anxiety and hope” (Frosh 3). The ghosts of the Torrance family appear already at the

30 beginning of the novel and while they haunt Wendy at home, they also haunt Jack at the

Overlook. “You lost your temper, Ullman had said” to Jack at the interview (King, The

Shining, 21), and as the summer caretaker shows Jack the Hotel’s basement, Jack is occupied by the words. He too eventually recalls a vivid memory of him breaking Danny’s arm, hearing

“the snap of the breaking bone [that] had not been loud, not loud but it had been very loud,

HUGE”; the sound that “let in the dark clouds of shame and remorse, the terror, the agonizing convulsion of the spirit”; most importantly, “A clean sound with the past on one side of it and all the future on the other” (23–24). The memory is further described as “a total thing that made that night two years ago seem like two hours ago” to Jack (25), completing the temporal disturbance of haunting. The past, present and future merge completely. The chapter ends with Jack thinking about the former caretaker whose family tragically died at the Overlook;

Jack’s haunting memory still accompanies him: “Poor Grady . . . he shouldn’t have lost his temper . . . the words echoed back to him like a knell, accompanied by a sharp snap—like a breaking pencil lead” (36).

Danny has visions of future that are a product of his ability called “the shining”. While

Jack is on his way home and Danny reads his mind, Danny sees the central vision of the novel for the first time, the “redrum vision” of a thing chasing him with a mallet:

And now he was crouched in a dark hallway, crouched on a blue rug with a riot of twisting black shapes woven into its pile, listening to the booming noises approach, and now a Shape turned the corner and began to come toward him, lurching, smelling of blood and doom. It had a mallet in one hand and it was swinging it (REDRUM) from side to side in vicious arcs, slamming it into the walls, cutting the silk wallpaper and knocking out ghostly bursts of plaster dust: Come on and take your medicine! Take it like a man! (King, The Shining, 47-48)

Immediately after Danny wakes up from his trance, he sees Jack coming in his car. Danny runs toward the car enthusiastically but freezes with horror when he sees the nightmarish

“short-handled mallet, its head clotted with blood and hair” (49) in the passenger seat. By juxtaposing the vision of the mallet, which turns out to be a bag of groceries, next to Jack,

King already suggests the danger that looms over Jack. More precisely, the mallet foreshadows violence, so it is violence that looms over Jack; the violence of the past influences the present and threatens to repeat again in the future. Indeed, the thing from the

“redrum vision” is Jack, because Danny’s “redrum vision” is a premonition of the climax of the book in which Jack chases Danny around the Overlook, armed with the roque mallet. This haunting violence constitutes the temporal disturbance in The Shining.

Another major source of haunting in Jack’s life, one already discussed in the chapter on narcissism, is George Hatfield. At first, George’s ghost appears only indirectly; the effect, though, is very direct and intense. In chapter sixteen, Danny is found in a trance-like state in the bathroom, arguably possessed by the Overlook, talking nonsensically about roque and the recurring mallet that foreshadows Jack’s violence but is unintelligible for either him or

Wendy. The “ghost” of George appears when Danny awakens from his vision:

Jack shook him again, and Danny’s eyes suddenly cleared. . . . “What?” he asked, looking around. He saw his father kneeling before him, Wendy standing by the wall. “What?” Danny asked again, with rising alarm. “W-w-wuh-what’s wr-r-r—” “Don’t stutter!” Jack suddenly screamed into his face (King, The Shining, 181).

What must seem an absurd order to Wendy or Danny is clear enough for Jack; Danny’s stutter reminds him of the traumatic past, and Jack looks “scared, as if he’d seen something that might just have been a ghost” (183). Although Danny does not remember his vision entirely, his following words further confirm that his vision concerned Jack and George: “‘Something about the timer …’ Danny muttered. ‘What?’ Jack was leaning forward, and Danny flinched in her arms” (183). Under the influence of the Overlook’s supernatural powers, Danny embodies the ghost of George Hatfield and haunts Jack. But it is not just the reminder of the past that is haunting. As the previous chapter claims, George’s stutter is a symbolic counterpart to Jack’s own “stutter”, to his inability to write which hinders Jack from succeeding. The possibility of being unsuccessful Jack fears immensely; Danny’s stutter, then, haunts Jack also as the vision of future, one where Jack fails as a writer.

Immediately after the bathroom scene, Danny has the “redrum” nightmare again.

Upon waking, he is stung by almost a dozen wasps (King, The Shining, 193), wasps that come out of the nest Jack exterminated and placed on Danny’s bedside table. The wasps’ attack enhances all the hauntings that already trouble Jack:

One thought played over and over in his mind, echoing with (You lost your temper. You lost your temper. You lost your temper.) an almost superstitious dread. They had come back. He had killed the wasps but they had come back. In his mind he heard himself screaming into his frightened, crying son’s face: Don’t stutter! He wiped his lips again. (196–197)

Finally, there is the all familiar wasp metaphor again. “They had come back”, Jack thinks, meaning the wasps; but the wasps are a metaphor for all the misfortunes and failures in Jack’s life. The same way that Jack tried to kill the insects but they returned to hurt Danny, the traumas that Jack tried to “kill”, to repress, return from his unconscious to hurt him.

In the beginning of his discussion of the uncanny, Frosh writes that the uncanny

“suggests the existence of something odd that we have not noticed before” and that it “is often particularly unnerving because it seems . . . so familiar, yet also fundamentally different,” comparing it to the reversal of right and left in the mirror (Frosh 15). The first instance of Jack witnessing the supernatural forces of the Overlook at work is his encounter with the hedge animals. Jack feels an irrational fear – “the flesh of his face and hands begun to creep . . .

Now the flesh on his testicles had begun to creep too” (King, The Shining, 304) – although he cannot notice anything different at first. Finally, he sees that “there was something different.

In the topiary. And it was so simple, so easy to see, that he just wasn’t picking it up . . . The rabbit was down on all fours . . . but not ten minutes ago it had been up on its hind legs”

(305). Jack then observes similar slight differences on the other animals as well and slowly realizes that they are attacking him; every time he looks away, they move. The uncanny effect the animals (the Overlook) produce almost drives Jack mad, but in the end, he sees the animals back in their original positions, dismissing the incident as a “hallucination” and “a

33 bad scare” (309). Nevertheless, the encounter contributes to the disintegration of Jack’s psyche, creating a cognitive dissonance and returning several times to confront Jack (e.g.

432–433).

Danny learned about his mental ability from Dick Hallorann, the Overlook cook who also “shines”; Dick advised Danny how to defend himself from the Overlook’s “bad things”:

“‘But they’re just like pictures in a book [. . .] So if you should see something, in a hallway or a room or outside by those hedges … just look the other way, and when you look back, it’ll be gone’” (King, The Shining, 125). Jack faces the moving hedge animals and manages to overcome the illusion by closing his eyes and only opening them after a while (308). When

Danny enters the Room 217 and finds the revived corpse of Mrs. Massey rise from the tub and approach him, he fails (322). The ghost tries to strangle Danny, leaving visible bruises on his neck and chin and rendering him catatonic (336), all the time (arguably) a product of mind. This is the materiality of the uncanny that Frosh argues for, comparing it to the unconscious that is produced in the consulting room (Frosh 29). In her discussion of the ghost, Briggs as well writes about “a world in which imagination can produce physical effects” (Briggs 178). The extent of this material force is evidenced not only by the physical harm done to Danny (his bruised neck), but also in the psychological effect it has on the family. Since Jack, Wendy and Danny are alone at the Hotel, the first logical conclusion for both the parents is that the other one must have hurt Danny. And although Wendy accepts that

“a separate section of [Jack] had been responsible” (King, The Shining, 343) for the act and

Jack admits “Wendy would pour a can of gasoline over herself and strike a match before harming Danny” (358), the incident alienates the parents nevertheless.

Besides George Hatfield, the other and probably the main source of Jack’s haunting is his father. It is telling that the first time Jack’s father is properly described in the novel is as a “miserable, bullying drunk” (King, The Shining, 326), and only then information such as his

34 occupation and appearance is given; it is equally telling that he is titled several times “the irrational white ghost-god” (333). King uses the following simile for the relationship between

Jack and his father: “. . . like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside” (327). At first, Jack admired his father, despite his alcoholism and the beatings he gave his children. The event that uncovered the blighted inside of the flower of their relationship was the brutal beating of Jack’s mother. Jack recalls the incident in rich detail: he remembers what either of his parents said or what the family had for supper; he remembers exactly how many times his mother was hit because

“each soft whump against his mother’s body had been engraved on his memory like the irrational swipe of a chisel on stone” (331). Jack’s father’s violence left a trauma on the figurative stone of Jack’s nine-year old mind, remaining in his unconscious and returning to haunt him. It is mainly the “whump”, the sound of the cane hitting the flesh, that is imprinted on Jack’s memory and that haunts him – much like the “snap of the breaking bone” (23), the sound of Danny’s arm breaking, that Jack remembers and is haunted by.

Jack remembers the traumatic beating when he is once again going through the papers in the Hotel’s basement; while doing so, he falls asleep and has a long and complex nightmare. The primal trauma evokes other traumatic memories and they all interweave in a haunting fashion. At first, “[Jack’s] face rose before him as if in a glass, his face but not his face, the wide eyes and innocent bowed mouth of a boy sitting in the hall with his trucks, waiting for his daddy,” who would play the elevator-game with Jack; the image of playfulness is disturbed, though, with the atmosphere of “salt-and-sawdust mist of exhaled taverns” and with the image of little Jacky “crashing down, spilling old clocksprings out of his ears while his daddy roared with laughter” (King, The Shining, 333). This memory evokes the second trauma, that of Danny’s broken arm, as Jack’s face “transformed into Danny’s face, so much like his own had been” (333). As in the first memory, there is the atmosphere of “fine misty

35 smell of beer rising . . . on the wings of yeast, the breath of taverns,” suggesting the similarity between Jack and his father as both are/were alcoholics; and finally, the memory again ends with violence: “[. . .] snap of bone … his own voice, mewling drunkenly, Danny, you okay, doc?” (334) The succession of memories ends with the final transformation, that of Danny’s face into “momma’s dazed face rising up from below the table, punched and bleeding,” closing the haunting circle (334).

Jack’s nightmare continues, and the transformation of Jack being hurt by his drunk father into Jack hurting his son while drunk only acts as a prelude to the final vision where

Jack hears his father’s voice over the Hotel’s citizens band radio: “—kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down” (King, The Shining, 335). Jack’s father’s voice is “coming dead at him out of the radio” (335) which the Overlook uses to transmit out of Jack’s unconscious. Jack, confronted with the return of the repressed memory, tries to defend with denial: “‘No!’ he screamed back. ‘You’re dead, you’re in your grave, you’re not in me at all!’ Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back, creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died” (335). Under the influence of the dream, Jack sleepwalks from the basement to the office where the radio is. Jack is so shaken by the dream that he cannot tell what is real and what is not: “Had he maybe hurt Danny as Wendy thought? Tried to strangle his son at his dead father’s request?” (342) His attempts to assure himself are challenged by his conscience as the memories of George and Danny’s broken arm recur once more, accompanied by the recent wasp incident:

No. He would never hurt Danny. (He fell down the stairs, Doctor.) He would never hurt Danny now. (How could I know the bug bomb was defective?)

Never in his life had he been willfully vicious when he was sober. (Except when you almost killed George Hatfield.) “No!” he cried into the darkness. He brought both fists crashing down on his legs, again and again and again. (342)

Jack hits himself “again and again and again”, as if each “again” symbolically stood for one of the three hauntings recurring repeatedly.

The second time Jack experiences the Overlook’s uncanny force is during his visit of the Room 217. Determined to expose his son “hallucinating or outright lying” (King, The

Shining, 371), Jack heads to the room to make sure that it is empty. His certainty is slowly undermined by small details that make Jack feel out of place. At first it is a bathroom mat that is supposed to be stored in the linen cupboard for the winter season, but Jack dismisses it as simply being forgotten by the chambermaids. Just as he explains the first detail, he senses another: “His nostrils flared a little. Disinfectant, that self-righteous smell, cleaner-than-thou.

And— Soap? Surely not. But once the smell had been identified, it was too clear to dismiss”

(372). What Jack perceives here is a ghostly remnant of Mrs. Massey, the old lady who committed suicide while she stayed at the Overlook as a guest. The fragment of the past remains in the room and Jack experiences it both as a temporal disturbance and as the uncanny, as “something odd that [Jack has] not noticed before” (Frosh 15). With the distressing memory of the hedge animals in mind, he starts out of the room, when a “sudden rattling, metallic sound behind him” makes him, unwillingly, turn around: “The shower curtain, which he had pushed back to look into the tub, was now drawn” (King, The Shining,

373). Afraid to look behind the curtain, Jack hastily leaves the room and, after some struggle, locks the door. But even though he, unlike Danny, escapes the room unharmed, “he could hear the soft and futile sound of the doorknob being turned to and fro as something locked in tried helplessly to get out” (375). Once more, Jack protects himself and his sanity by not looking: “If he opened his eyes and saw that doorknob moving he would go mad. So he kept them shut, and after an unknowable time, there was stillness” (375). But even though the

37 hallucination ceases, and Jack sees nothing when he looks again, he feels “watched just the same,” (375) which implies that the Overlook undermines his sanity further still; even after the hallucination ends, Jack cannot help but still feel a ghostly presence.

Jack tells Wendy and Danny that he saw nothing in the Room 217 (King, The Shining,

376), but the impact the visit had on Jack is illustrated by the dream he has the same night. He cannot contain his fear despite knowing it is a dream, because “So many things at the

Overlook seemed like dreams” (398). This is reminiscent of the “fear produced by the continuing inability of people to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality” that has

“uncanny effects” (Frosh 28). Jack revisits the room in the dream, and this time faces the thing in the tub – this time, in another haunting vision personalized for Jack by the Overlook, it is the ghost of George: “He flung the curtain open. Lying in the tub, naked, lolling almost weightless in the water, was George Hatfield, a knife stuck in his chest” (King, The Shining,

399). The ghost of George rises from the tub and chases Jack who escapes the room and emerges in the basement, where he attempts to confront it. The dream, filled with symbolic objects (a wasp nest; the timer that was at the centre point of their argument), climaxes when

Jack obtains the most symbolic object of all, “a stout black cane, like the one his father had carried” (401). Along with the cane, Jack embraces all the aspects of his father and, in the dream, assumes his father’s position in the primal trauma: “‘Now you’ll take your medicine,’

Jack grunted . . . George’s bloody protecting fingers fell away from his head and Jack brought the cane down again and again, and on his neck and shoulders and back and arms” (401–402).

But since the aggressor is Jack, the cane transforms into the roque mallet; accordingly, the victim transforms as well: “He brought the mallet back for a final whistling downstroke and it was fully launched before he saw that the supplicating face below him was not George’s but

Danny’s . . . And then the mallet crashed home, striking Danny right between the eyes, closing them forever” (402). Jack experiences the same vision that Danny has been seeing

38 since the beginning of the novel: to paraphrase Frosh, it is the uncanny message from the past of what the future will become if Jack does nothing about it (Frosh 168).

The haunting vision of the omnipresent paternal violence recurs, but whereas previously it came in the form of a nightmare, this time Jack experiences the vision while awake. The first, uncanny indication of violence occurs already at the beginning of Jack’s conversation with Grady: “There was a small white plastic bucket on [Grady’s] cart that was filled with olives. For some reason they reminded Jack of tiny severed heads” (King, The

Shining, 516). Jack’s traumatic and repressed violence returns and manifests – is mirrored – in the material around him. Just after Jack promises to Grady that he will “handle” Danny (521),

Grady leads him to “a clock under a glass dome” which shows “a minute to midnight” (522).

The clock previously figured in one of Danny’s visions as well, in the final revelation of the meaning of “redrum” as merely a mirror reflection of “murder” (452). Both the visions are triggered by the clock approaching and then striking midnight, always accompanied by the image of unmasking. The approaching midnight together with the unmasking work as a symbol for the imminent violence, for the murder of Danny by Jack. What Jack sees in the clockwork are two figures, “a man standing on tiptoe, with what looked like a tiny club clasped in his hands” and “a small boy wearing a dunce cap,” (523) a daddy beating his son.

At the end the vision transforms, just like the nightmare with George: “He could hear the hammerblows still falling . . . But the sounds were no longer the mechanical tink-tink-tink noises of a mechanical hammer striking a mechanical head, but the soft and squashy thudding sounds of a real hammer slicing down and whacking into a spongy, muddy ruin” (524). The mechanical sounds of the clockwork imitation transform into the realistic sounds of beating, the clockwork father and son symbolic of Jack and Danny. This is further confirmed by the fact that the vision immediately follows Jack’s promise to Grady – Grady shows Jack the consequence of his decision. In fact, this vision is the last that Jack sees; alongside the

39 transformation in the vision, Jack himself transforms. At the end of the chapter, Jack falls unconscious and when he awakens, he is completely possessed by the Hotel:

As she reached Jack he rolled over, opened his eyes, and looked up at her. For a moment his gaze was utterly blank, and then it cleared. “Wendy?” he asked. “That you?” “Yes,” she said. “Do you think you can make it upstairs? If you put your arms around me? Jack, where did you—” His hand closed brutally around her ankle. “Jack! What are you—” “Gotcha!” he said, and began to grin. (544–545; emphasis added)

If Jack merely awakened from his unconsciousness, the conjunction would have been but; the odd and suggests that it is not in fact Jack who awakens.

Indeed, after Danny realizes that the thing from his visions is in fact his father, he thinks: “Force, presence, shape, they were all only words and none of them mattered. It wore many masks, but it was all one. Now, somewhere, it was coming for him. It was hiding behind Daddy’s face, it was imitating Daddy’s voice, it was wearing Daddy’s clothes. But it was not his daddy” (619-620). The scene in which Danny confronts the possessed Jack exemplifies the uncanniness of the unclear boundaries between fantasy and reality. “Dream and reality had joined together without a seam,” writes King as Jack actually chases Danny with the mallet and therefore enacts the vision of murder (King, The Shining, 629). The presence of the Overlook inside of Jack is exposed when Danny confronts it:

Its hands closed around the mallet again, but instead of aiming at Danny, it reversed the handle, aiming the hard side of the roque mallet at its own face . . . Then the mallet began to rise and descend, destroying the last of Jack Torrance’s image . . . when it turned its attention back to Danny, his father was gone forever. What remained of the face became a strange, shifting composite, many faces mixed imperfectly into one. Danny saw the woman in 217; the dogman; the hungry boy-thing that had been in the concrete ring. (633-634)

Jack kills himself and it is the malevolent Overlook that controls Jack’s hands. What Danny sees before him is Jack, his father, the most familiar person of all; yet at the same time it is not Jack himself. This final transformation, revealing the multitude of the Overlook’s ghosts

40 inside of him, is the final and ultimate uncanny manifestation of the haunting of Jack

Torrance.

Conclusion The thesis introduces several aspects of the Gothic genre, namely the concepts of the ghost and the Bad Place, as well as the focus on family, the characters’ mind and violence. These aspects are found in Stephen King’s The Shining which is posited as part of the new American gothic genre. The gothic theory is complemented by the psychoanalytical notions of the uncanny, haunting and mirroring and by the theory of narcissistic injury which results in reactive violence. The thesis then applies the psychoanalytical notions in the analysis of the psychological disintegration of the main character, Jack Torrance; the analysis also examines the role the haunted (uncanny) Overlook Hotel plays in the process.

The analysis shows that the main cause of Jack’s disintegration are the narcissistic injuries to his self-esteem. Under the ever-increasing pressure, Jack’s inflated ego disintegrates.

Desperate and driven by a need to succeed and to satisfy his narcissistic self, Jack gets separated from his family. He gradually grows insane and attempts to kill his wife and son, thus performing the reactive violence which follows narcissistic injuries. The major factor in Jack’s disintegration is his obsession with the Overlook Hotel; at the same time, the Hotel haunts Jack.

While the narcissistic injuries are mostly perceived as coming from other people, the source of the haunting is Jack himself. It is the repressed traumatic memories which return from Jack’s unconscious that manifest – are projected – in the Hotel and haunt: Jack is haunted by the memories of his abusive drunk father and of himself hurting his son while drunk. The traumatic violence of the past that affects Jack in the present repeats in the future, which completes the temporal disturbance, the major feature of haunting.

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Summary

This thesis analyses the psychological disintegration of the character of Jack Torrance in

Stephen King’s novel The Shining, drawing on the Gothic and the psychoanalytical theory. It also puts The Shining in the perspective of the genre.

The theoretical section is divided into two chapters. The first chapter deals with the

Gothic theory, namely with the concepts of the ghost and the Bad Place; it also introduces characteristics of the new American gothic genre. The second theoretical chapter deals with the psychoanalytical theory: it introduces the notions of the uncanny as studied by Sigmund

Freud; the psychoanalytical notion of haunting; and the notion of mirroring in the work of

Jacques Lacan. In addition, the psychoanalytical chapter introduces the theory of narcissistic injury and resulting reactive violence.

The analytical section contains the analysis of Jack’s disintegration; the analysis is divided into two chapters which correspond to the psychoanalytical subchapters. The analysis reveals how the narcissistic injuries together with the haunting result in Jack’s disintegration.

Résumé

Tato bakalářská práce analyzuje psychologický rozklad postavy Jacka Torrance v románu

Stephena Kinga The Shining s využitím gotické a psychoanalytické teorie. Práce také dává

The Shining do perspektivy gotického žánru.

Teoretická část je rozdělena do dvou kapitol. První kapitola se zabývá gotickou teorií, zejména koncepty ducha a „zlého místa“, a představuje rysy žánru nové americké gotiky.

Druhá teoretická kapitola se zabývá psychoanalytickou teorií: kapitola představuje pojem

„uncanny“ zkoumaný Sigmundem Freudem, psychoanalytický pojem „strašení“ a pojem zrcadlení v práci Jacquese Lacana. Kromě toho představuje psychoanalytická kapitola teorii

„narcistické újmy“ a z ní plynoucího reaktivního násilí.

Analytická část práce obsahuje analýzu Jackova rozkladu. Analýza je rozdělena do dvou kapitol, které korespondují s psychoanalytickými podkapitolami, a odhaluje, jak narcistické újmy dohromady se strašením vyústí v Jackův rozklad.