Steioliepnen Jibing s Dart Towers Quest. Apocalypse, and American Culture.

Hear The swish of the blade And see the Rose Suspended in air Then falls And a muffled thud As soft red strikes Unyielding Earth The shrieks of Agony As life- blood spills And Remorse The wish to be shrieved of SIN.

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*1* Scot McCann *** *** *** Introductory comments (Argument?)

Stephen King is, in my view, a writer sadly neglected by serious scholars of American literature as a result of the widely held view that he is a purveyor of popular schlock horror; and because he is a very successful writer, is still alive, and has a stable family life, not to mention a highly irreverent, and sometimes joyously vulgar sense of humour it is the accepted premise that he hasn't really suffered for his art, and is therefore a poor writer. That such a premise should be so widely accepted is a mystery- Kurt Vonnegut has a similarly irreverent sense of humour, indulges in sci- fi 'schlock' as well as horror (probably to a greater extent than King), and gives no indication of suffering for his work, yet the man is regarded as a genius.

Another widely held assumption (mainly adhered to by those who have never read King's work) is that King deals exclusively in supernatural horror, and does it on the technicolour 'gross- out' level. Unfortunately for King's critics, this is just not so: most of King's novels work on a decidedly plain, everyday level, providing a social critique on contemporary America. Most of the horrors King presents are everyday horrors, shining out against the drab background of day to day life, and proving most terrifying in their very commonness.

His epic Apocalypse novel, The Stand, in which most of the world's human, horse, and dog population is wiped out by a 'superflu' developed by the US army is a powerful cry against the follies of the Cold war and post- Cold war fascination with weapons of mass destruction. The second half of the novel focuses on what we might call the outrage of the eternal human condition, the struggle between good and evil in the face of the loss of that essential religious impulse, and the urge toward order and authority that can initially create a Utopia, but eventually becomes a fresh dystopia as size increases. The Stand ends on a particularly pessimistic note, realising that all the survivors ever wish to do is recreate the antediluvian order and get back down to the business of slaughtering each other and producing VCR's as quickly as possible.

The Dark To wer. the topic of this thesis, is a much more optimistic, though far more apocalyptic (appearing to be moving toward the ending, rather than the gloominess of a new beginning as in The Stand), narrative consisting so far of three books- The Gunslinger. The Drawing of the Three, and The Wastelands, with the fourth book to probably appear about two days alter I finish this. 11

There may be some doubts as to the feasibility or value of writing on a series that has not been completed yet. To dispel them I would say that there is sufficient scope to write twice as much as I have already on the first book alone, and in my defence I will point out that I will not be attempting to draw any grand conclusions, merely to outline some of the more intriguing philosophical and political aspects of what is a strangely compelling work. My only request is that you explore the themes King presents at first hand- and be open mindedly addicted. Chapter 1 : synopsis

"The opening segment of [The Dark Tower] defines the epic quest to follow by introducing the Gunslinger, Roland, and his search for the man in black. A tale within a tale , "The Gunslinger” includes one of King’s most potent ",monstrous women",Sylvia Pittston, whose intrusion into the Gunslinger's life leads to the destruction of an entire town."1 )

The Dark Tower begins with the words " The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." 2 , 3a phrase which, in (the gunslinger) Roland's mind, would amply sum up not only the action to follow, but also the reasons for it, and signals to the reader that questions of who, what, and why, will be answered in good time. For now it is enough to know that Roland is a gunslinger (although we don't learn his name until much later in the book, I use it here for convenience).

The opening phase of The Gunslinger (Book One Of The Dark Tower) follows Roland through "the apotheosis of all deserts"J in pursuit of the enigmatic Man in Black. It is literally the cleansing wilderness period of a prophet4, for Roland follows on the path of the Adversary's henchman and his temptations, though no visions are presented until the end of the book. As he travels through the sterility of the desert Roland reflects periodically on the events of his journey so far, a process which fills in some of the more pressing blanks.

Roland's first flash back concerns his last human contact, a night spent with a young hermit named Brown, in his shack on the edge of the desert. It is here that Roland is compelled to prove his worthiness to continue the quest by confessing the killing of the population of the desert- fringe town, Tull, to Brown. Tull is a metaphoric Sodom/Gomorrah, and as such Roland acts as the avenging angel of the Lord, yet he must present his confession to both cleanse

Michael.R. Codings, The Annotated Guide to Stephen King. Starmont house, Mercer Island WA 1986, p34. 2 The Gunslinger, pll. 3 Ibid, pll. "There were several American Indian tribes that used to make 'having a vision' an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your turn to become a man, you were supposed to go out into the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs- one about the Great Spirit and one about your own prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker- and have that vision. ... gain strength and holiness by a purging process, ... The casting away of things is symbolic, ... Tahsmanic. ... When you cast away tilings, you're also casting away the self- related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning out process. You begin to empty the vessel." Stephen King, The Stand. New English Library, London 1980 p653- This is not entirely accurate of what Roland does, but its close enough for government work... 2 himself for the next stage of the quest, and to prove himself to have been worthy of the destruction. When Brown invites Roland to confess, a second narrative frame is set up within that created by Roland’s memory.

In Tull Roland becomes the lover of the girl/ bar owner, Allie, in exchange for information about the passage through Tull of the man in black. The bed of Allie has many overtones: it is a satanic temptation, a trap left by the man in black and an overt badge of Sodom ("You Know my price"f; an oasis for rest before the ritual of the desert; and a visage of youthful despair in the face of God's withdrawal west ("the gleam was replaced by hopelessness, by a dumb need that had no mouth. ")6. In the face of this last Roland becomes the harbinger of a greater hope- love, for at least a while; and the gift of death over the hopelessness of the spiritually undead Tull (a place so far beyond despair that it has become a spiritual vampire feeding on its own barren-ness), given in stark contrast to the mocking gift of life left by the Man in Black. As Allie speaks, we learn that the man in black performed a ressurection in the saloon, bringing back to life the town 'junkie', but mockingly leaving him addicted to the "devil- weed" (it is perhaps appropriate that he remain addicted to the devil weed, since he was resurrected by the Adversary; it is ironic that he believes "/ been touched by by God")7.

Roland performs a double Exorcism on the town: the first is when he invades the body of Sylvia Pittston, the town 'preacher' ("The woman who preaches has poison religion")* pregnant to the Man in Black with a demon- child (Sylvia also believes the man in black to be divine- "You dare not touch the Bride of God")9, with his revolver and thus casts out the demon- gaining further information about his quarry as he does so. His second exorcism is the slaying of Sylvia and the rest of the townsfolk in an orgy of violence, with Allie and the infernally resurrected junkie, Nort, becoming sacrifices to the Lord. The final departure of God’s purpose from Tull is symbolised in the shooting of the crucifix carried by Sylvia Pittston, just before Roland kills her and thus casts the devil from Tull. "He ended up where he had started, in the middle of the deserted mam street. He had shot and killed thirty-nine men, fourteen women, andfive children. He had shot and killed everyone in Tull"'0.

The Gunslinger. p30. Ibid., p30. Ibid., p39. ibid., p47. Ibid., p55. 10 Ibid., p63. 2

The narrative frame containing the confession to Brown ends with the gunslinger walking off into history, rather than riding into the sunset as is customary, for his mule is dead. The death of the mule just before the confession divests the Gunslinger of all but his own resources (his feet and guns), and, incidentally, means that at a later date he has no animal to offer the Lord as a sacrificial alternative to [Isaac/]Jake, only the Quest itself, which his utterly pragmatic (yet deeply Romantic!) nature cannot accept. Roland awakes out of the narrative framing back into the desert and moves into part two of the book, The Wav Station.

"The second episode in DT introduces Jake and suggests alternate worlds impinging upon the Gunslinger's quest. The place Jake describes as his home resembles New York City; he has been taken from that world and intruded into this one to impel Roland's quest. The story adds the complication of a science fictional framework in a collection already straining generic classifications. "n

The first stage of the ritual purification is complete when a badly dehydrated Roland arrives at "the way station", a tattered relic of the past world of communication links, and is nursed by the boy Jake, a twice reborn (he is reborn, not merely rewound between points in his existence after each death) symbolic son who Roland in his excited delirium at first mistakes for the man in black. This scene marks a profound end to the vestiges of Roland's immature self- his initial boyish excitement at reaching the end of his quest is soon extinguished by the realisation that his road is far longer than this. He can also displace what is left of the child Roland onto Jake by assuming the role of proxy father. Jake, we learn, has been murdered in 'our' world, and "reborn" into Roland's. He is therefore not just an Isaac, but also another Jesus figure. Before leaving the Way Station, Roland discovers a Speaking Demon in the cellar, and it provides an Oracle indicating the sacrificial nature of Jake, and that he has been left by the man in black as trap- "Whileyou travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket"12. Roland vows to jake the he will not be sacrificed, a vow Roland must later break. More than just a vow to Jake, this is to himself, and thus , when Roland leaves Jake in favour of the Quest he becomes Judas also to himself.

In this section King begins to fully realise the links with our world, begun in Tull with the playing of "Hey Jude", and becoming concrete with the knowledge that Jake comes originally from modem New York via death13. From this point wreckage from our world appears more and more frequently,

11 Michael.R. Collings. The Annotated Guide To Stephen King. Starmont House, 1986 p49 12 The Gunslinger. p90. 13 Ibid., p81 - 83. 4 strengthening into the idea that Roland's world is a Romantic poet’s vision of the reflection of the death of our world- Roland’s world is, after all, a weirdly minimalist, yet richly textured, reflection of the "American Dream". Magistrale writes: "King's stories are richly evocative; they often speak to us of unresolved tensions that are both endemic to our time and particular to an individual's identity formation. Like the inherent suggestiveness of dream archetypes, King's fiction delves into the realm of the collective and personal unconscious- a landscape that may be explored artistically only in the world of the fantastic. ”14

The Way Station is also the place where the first glimpse of Roland’s moral development is given to the reader- "Not for the first time the gunslinger tasted the smooth, loden taste of soul sickness. ... There were such things as rape in the world. Rape and murder and unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, for the myth, for the grail, for the Tower." l3- after he hypnotises the boy in order to gain information. From this point on the text enters into the story of Abraham, the difference being that this time God’s will is expressed for Him by the Man in Black, and the sacrifice is required in human blood. Tony Magistrale has said of the section between The Way Station and the meeting with the Man in Black "The remains of gasoline pumps, highways, and railway lines attest not only to civilization's passing but also to the dwindling of mechanical power in the face of magic, the latter rising as technology wanes."16 This is an unfortunately simplistic view, as technology and magic, entwined in this world, are waning together toward the Apocalypse, indicated by the ’cheap’ magic tricks practised by both the Man In Black (The Resurrection In Tull), and Roland (the hypnotism of Jake with the shiny cartridge). That the two are entwined is indicated by the magical, even religious regard with which Roland's guns are invested-’’ The guns themselves made no noise. They had spilled blood."1 ; the gun delivers Sylvia Pittston of the demon- child18; "it was not only his mouth that knew the High Speech. The guns beat their heavy, atonal music into the air"1 ; ”... tell them of the guns and the blood that had blessed them?"16. Between after the pair leave the way station there is another reflective frame, which begins to explain something of Roland's history and character.

The book's penultimate section, The Oracle and the Mountains, is a classic night-journey, a period of self-discovery via the besting of one’s fundamental fears, and the experience of having to outlive psychological limitations. At the beginning of this section Roland receives another Oracle, 14 Magistrale, Op.Cit., pi50. 15 The Gunslinger, p80. Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: the Second Decade, Macmillan New York 1992 p.142. 17 The Gunslinger, p 12. 18 Ibid., p56. 19 Ibid., p59. 20 Ibid., p60. 5 foretelling some of the events to occur in The Drawing of the Three, and confirming that Jake is to be sacrificed. Once again Roland trades sex for information in a diabolical coupling21. Roland and Jake ascend to the heights of the mountains where Jake realises that he is to be killed again and tries to persuade Roland to turn back, only to be tricked into continuing by Roland. Immediately after this the pair come face to face with the man in black, who mockingly confirms Jakes coming death ("/know what I am to you ... a poker chip." the boy says to Roland under the mountains.)22, and then disappears through an old tunnel to await Roland on the other side of the mountains.

Jake and Roland plunge into the very bowels of the earth, travelling through the old railway tunnel populated by ’slow mutants', whose radioactive glow provides the only light. It is quite literally a tomb (" this living burial")23, in which Jake is sacrificed remember your Isaac" the Dark Man says to Roland)24, and from which Roland is reborn, stripped of his old life, but saddled with the unexpected emotional baggage of Jake's death {"the sale of his honor was now, at last, nearly negotiated")25 that signals the reawakening and redevelopment of his moral self. At a rusty bridge leading to the end of the tunnel, Roland is forced to chose between his quest and his ingrained sense of morality and loyalty. His choice of the Quest over Jake ( probable damnation vs. possible salvation) is the moment of rebirth, and the Gunslinger emerges into the beginning of the West (that eternal American fable), and the beginning of the Quest proper.

The final section, The Gunslinger and the Dark Man, is dedicated to a palaver which outlines more fully the gunslinger's Quest, and the metaphysical issues of the Tower which form the central concern of the next book. The Drawing of the Three. Roland’s immediate future is outlined by the dark man and his Tarot deck (preparing the story line for the injection of T.S Elliot's The Wasteland in Book three), but more importantly, Roland is sent a vision of the Universe which concludes in the vision of a single blade of purple grass, obviously meant to be the universe or the container of universes. The image apparently derives from Clifford Simak's science fiction story Ring around the Sun, as King himself admits in the Afterword26, and is the entry point for the central metaphysical concern with the problem of containing/ defining Size, and its relation to human sanity. It is the eternal problem of where to stop division or multiplication of size, and man's need to construct artificial limits in the face of a

Ibid., pi29- 131. Ibid., pi75. Ibid., p 186. Ibid., p 198. Ibid., pi89. 26 Ibid., p223. 6

universe (and a God) where everything denies the possibility of an ultimate size, and where the enquiring mind will discover that there are really no fixed points of reference in size, for each point can break into ’smaller' units. Size, like time, is one of the arbitrary, and artificial, forms of reference instituted by what King would call the 'finite' mind in the interests of preserving sanity- without time, without Size, without fixed reference points of direction, man is cast adrift in the void. If God does indeed see the least sparrow fall, what sort of God is He, that He can keep watch on an infinitude of sparrows in an infinitude of infinities? The imposition of some form of limit or point of definition is essential for the human mind to remain anchored and sane- to stave off the terrors of endlessness ("So much as gladness that some end might he")21 Paradoxically, it appears that the Dark Tower for which Roland seeks is just such a reference point, existing within its own impossibility, for it is not merely a 'nexus of time and size', yet also somehow contains all time and size- "Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met in a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. A stairway, perhaps, to the Godhead itself... Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room...?"2*. King is not rehashing the idea of an infinitude of parallel universe- possibilities, as found in John Brunner's The Infinitive of Go29, but postulating a situation where an infinitude of universes can be subdivided into infinitudes of universes and so on ad infinitum; hence the idea that Roland's "universe exists within a single molecule of a weed dying in some cosmic vacant lot."30

The second book in the Dark Tower series, The Drawing of the Three, extends the ideas of this endlessness of size into the realms of the psychological effect of the knowledge (or even implication of the concept) upon 'normal' minds (which, it appears, are of finite size or at least comprehensional abilities.); it would seem that Roland's mind is the only one which is 'infinite' and can cope with all the (apparent) paradoxes of size. (In the third book we find him unable to cope with the idea of parallel-possibility universes being perceivable at the same moment, a factor I put down to King's insistence on the religious rather than mathematical aspects of limitlessness).

The book opens with the ritual maiming of Roland by the 'Lobstrosities' on the seemingly endless beach; a motif reminiscent of St. Paul's blinding on the road to Damascus, the wounding of Frodo by the King of the Nazgul31, and

Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. LI8. The Gunslinger, p209 John Brunner, The Infinitive of Go. Methuen, London 1981 The Gunslinger: afterword. p223. 31 J.R.R. Tolkien, TheLord of the Rings. Unwin, London, 1978, p212. 7 indeed, Christ on the walk to Golgotha. What follows is another purgatorial journey, where the gunslinger is again forced upon his own resources (sent into the wilderness with no more than the basics- see King's other apocalypse novel The Stand)32 but this time is given a more potent view of his own mortal vulnerability: not only is he out of food, water, and dying from infection caused by the wounds, his guns have become unreliable as a means of making his way in the world with his ammunition supply wetted, and half his right hand missing. The experience is undoubtably meant to humble Roland, yet in the absense of companions it merely strengthens his resolve.

Roland's only option is to keep going up the beach until he finds whatever it is that he must find. The objective turns out to be a miraculous door, freestanding on the the beach- "The door had hinges, but they were fastened to nothing... It simply stood there there on the grey strand twenty feet above the high tide line, seemingly as eternal as the sea itself "33 His true moral development begins after Eddie Dean, the man into whose mind the door opens, is drawn through the door into Roland's world, and a mutual dependency develops based on mutual disabilities. Roland is seriously ill, and in need of physical care, whilst Eddie is a heroin addict clinging to the last vestiges of his self respect- Roland's strength of character in adversity helps Eddie to recover his seif respect ("It's like somebody's poured two quarts of fresh guts down his throat,")34 and become physically free of his addiction (in time), while Eddie slowly helps Roland recover his long forgotten social graces. The pair stage a shootout in the lair of a mafia boss for whom Eddie has been working in his world, and Eddie's potential to become a gunslinger is immediately apparent- the incident serves to convince Eddie that there is more for him in the Quest than in his own world, and so the pair journey on along the beach, finally arriving at a second door. On the other side of this second door is a legless schizophrenic black woman civil rights activist named Odetta Holmes/ Detta Walker; as the story progresses and she is drawn across into Roland's world, we learn that Odetta is the kindhearted personality with whom Eddie falls in love, and Detta is a murderous iron willed bitch ("she's a gunslinger as surely as Eddie is one"Y~ whose only purpose becomes the killing of Eddie and Roland, those "HONKYMAHFAH['S]". Magistrale sees this book as a Gothic novel, and treats psychological development in the light of a Victorian Gothic, where the protagonist often journeys toward moral selflessness. He claims that the association with Eddie turns Roland into a man who is willing to now relinquish his Quest rather than sacrifice others in its service- " the Gunslinger demonstrates a willingness to sacrifice the successful completion of his journey- quest because of its cost in human life."'6, however, at the end of the

The Stand. p553. The Drawing of the Three. p33-34. Ibid.,pl30. :5 Ibid., p251. 8 book we learn (if we read it- and I don't believe that Magistrale did) that Roland really hasn't changed in this way at all. "Roland. ... fearedfor her because he knew he would sacrifice her- Eddie as well- without a question or a look back. For the Tower. The God- Damned Tower."37 Magistrate's mis- reading/ lack of comprehension goes even further than this, however. He has made the fundamental error of viewing Roland as a morally empty vessel, mistakenly reading the desert of The Gunlinger as a metaphor for Roland's soul. The truth is that Roland is a romantic pragmatist whose Quest is selfless rather than (as Magistrate believes) spiritually self- serving. He is a character who must be read in a similar light to Tolkien's Frodo, who embarks on a Quest bitter to his own nature solely for the greater good of others. Roland is of course bound by his nature to be 'magnificent' in endurance of trials, rather than merely dogged, but then he is a romantic hero.

Magistrate says "At one point in the journey Roland urges Odetta and Eddie to abandon him and go on, essentially handing down the henoc quest to a handicapped woman and a heroin addict- certainly the least likely pair capable of reaching the Tower. But as Roland discovers in this second volume, his quest is less physical than it is spiritual." This statement pushes the misreading to ridiculous extremes: the incident of which Magistrate is writing serves to strengthen the impression of Roland's pragmatic dedication to his quest (if it needed strengthening), for he forces Eddie into the necessary action of moving first Odetta/ Detta to the third,and last (for this book) Door, and then returning for him- an action which is absolutely necessary, as Odetta's wheelchair is needed to move the ailing Roland (even Superman occasionally needs to be helped away from the Kryptonite). To say that the quest is spiritual, and undertaken only for Roland’s development is equally ridiculous. King states all along that it is Roland's sworn duty to reach the Tower and right the wrongs that are causing the world to 'move on'; and anyway,how exactly is a 'spiritual' quest handed on, when the only means of continuing (the Drawing) can be accomplished by Roland alone (a point which is made explicit-”/^/or him, then."j8, as the Doors will open only to him? I think Magistrate has made the mistake of misreading the story as a Hollywood by­ product, where everything must have a 'safe' moral development and conclusion.

They attain the third door, that labelled The Pusher, and despite murderous drama involving Detta Walker, the evil half of Odetta/Detta, Roland enters through into the mind of Jack Mort, the psychopath responsible for the death of Jake in New York, and also for creating Detta within Odetta; first by dropping a brick on her head when she was a child, and years later by pushing^ 36 Magistrate, Op.Cit. pi46. 37 The Drawing of the Three. p396. 38 Ibid., p293. 9 her in front of the train that severed her legs. Virtually the rest of the book is devoted to the adventure Roland has in New York, an episode where, through divine intervention, Roland is able to re-equip his party for the times to follow- importantly, he restocks with ammunition for his guns, allowing him to once more rely on their help in getting along in this world; and is able to obtain penicillin to heal himself in a rather amusing robbery seen Q-"this might be the first penicillin robbery in history1,39. Toward the end Roland throws Mort under the train which took Odetta's legs rather than bring him back to Roland's world, and, by forcing both Odetta and Detta to watch (making each consciously aware of the other, and of the creator of their pain), removes the barrier between the two personalities causing them to meld into a new one, Susannah Dean, combining the useful features of both.

The third book, The Wastelands, begins some time later in the woods beyond the edge of the beach. Susannah and Eddie are training to be gunslingers, and the party is confronted by a monstrous adversary in the form of a cyborg grisly bear which has gone insane. The scene humourously furthers the symbiotic ties between the two worlds, as the find a brand-name plate on the bear which gives its model designation as Shardik, the name of a Richard Adams animal protagonist. Eddie says "/associate it [the name] with rabbits. Isn't that nuts?1'40

After Susannah destroys the creature, our heroes follow its back track and find the origin of one of the man- made 'Beams' which link at the Dark Tower, and are meant to hold the world in balance; they are apparently a binding web utilising gravity and magnetism created as a response to some great mistake made by ’the Great Old Ones’ centuries before that has unbalanced the Dark Tower41. The Beam is the first directional guidance provided in the quest so far, and the party follows it to the end of the book, as its power seems to influence everything in its path, from the growth patterns of the trees, to the movements of the clouds and the birds- "The effect of the beam was everywhere along its course, but it was subtle. The needles of the pines and spruces pointed that way. The tt42 greenberrv bushes grew slightly slanted, and that slant lay in the direction of the beam.

The most important incidents in the book involve the boy, Jake. There is a lengthy section devoted to Jakes adventures in New York after his death in Poland’s world, and we learn that his death in his own world was not really a

Ibid., p366. The Wastelands, p35. Ibid., p73. 4: Ibid., p81. 10 part of the appointed order of things- he was supposed to be drawn like Eddie and Odetta/ Detta/ Susannah. This segment highlights again Roland’s blade of purple grass, and introduces the Rose, which I think is probably representative of God, as it is described as the sum of all suns. Jake is drawn to this rose "growing from a clump of alien puiple grass" (the Tower standing above all universes)43 and finds a key which will enable him to open the door between worlds which will allow him to return to Roland’s world. Jake is also given an ’oracle’ (in the form of the childrens book Charlie the Choo- Choo, and his own final essay for school) concerning the further stages of the quest, particularly Blaine the Mono, a train whom they must encounter during the journey, and who, it is insisted, is a pain.

Jake is drawn through a gateway protected by demons on both sides. On Roland's side it is a male demon of the kind encountered in The Gunslinger, and must be trapped by Susannah using sex. On Jakes side the doorkeeper is a demon which has lain in wait disguised as a haunted house that Jake must enter in order to find the door. Eddie acts as the midwife to Jake's rebirth, pulling him upwards into the world (for the door this time is created in the dirt by Eddie, and is meant to represent a grave). The party journeys on toward a city, Lud, which looks supiciously similar to New York, and is where they must find Blaine the Mono. In the city the second important scene involving Jake occurs, a scene reminiscent of the ending of The Gunslinger: Whilst crossing a rotting lookalike of the George Washington Bridge (from New York), the party is held up by a syphilitic pirate with a hand grenade who demands Jake as payment for their lives. Jake goes voluntarily, but importantly Roland tracks and eventually rescues him while Eddie and Susannah seek out Blaine. Our heroes find Blaine and discover that the train is a sentient machine obsessed by riddles and a petulant form of politeness. ’He’ is also insane, and schizoid. They solve the riddle needed to get aboard Blaine, and in return Blaine kills the population of the city with nerve gas. (In the meantime we are given our first glimpse of "the Ageless Stranger", Maerlyn, preparing to go in pursuit of the questers, armed with his new human henchman.) Once outside the city the party find themselves travelling through ’the Wastelands', a blasted landscape reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch at his best. Blaine is travelling toward Topeka, the last stop before the Dark Tower, and Jake works out that Blaine, in his insanity, means to commit suicide there taking them with him. The book ends with Roland making a deal with Blaine- they will pose riddles to him, and if he cannot solve one of them, he is to deliver them alive and healthy to Topeka. If he can answer all the riddles, of course, their lives are forfeit.

43 Ibid., pl25. 11

Chapter 2: "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

King maintains that The Dark Tower is a "tale inspired by and to some degree dependent upon Robert Browning's natrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came" Ml, and to a large degree this is true, although characterisation is at great variance. King makes great use of Browning's 'feel' for desolate landscapes, particularly in their function as an external signifier of spiritual states. Browning's protagonist is a man who it seems has nothing left to live for, other than making an end ("so much as gladness that some end might be.)2, and so travels a landscape which is the extemalisation of hopelessness and despair ("I think I never saw/Such staged ignoble nature1)3. In a similar manner, (yet not hopeless) the gunslinger travels across "the apotheosis of all deserts"4 , *a journey of spiritual purification where the external environment indicates the processes of the psychological environment. In effect, King reverses the relationship between mind and environment that Browning has set up. In Browning the external environment mirrors the way Childe Roland is thinking or feeling; in King, Roland's thoughts or emotional modes reflect his surroundings- in the desert he is empty of all extraneous feeling, a means of surviving the landscape without succumbing to the terror of endlessness. Childe Roland is sickened and terrified by his surroundings- n Which, while I forded, - good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek. Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! -It may have been a water-rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek. and only carries on because there is nothing else, no way back. He is an heroic figure who has lost his heroism in the foul landscape of his mind, and is unconsciously searching to get it back. Harold Bloom says "[Childe] Roland is questing for lost and forgotten meaning, questing for representation, for a seconding or re- advocacy of his own self"6 Browning's Childe Roland moves through a nightmare landscape shadowed by the spectre of the rise of technology, the industrial revolution ("Tophet's tool")1, and its wars, the horrors accelerating and intensifying with each dicovery, each 'advance'. King's Roland, by contrast, travels through a sparsely populated post- apocalypse (or maybe mid-

1 The Drawing Of The Three: Argument, p 11. Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, L 18 3 Ibid., L 55-56. 4 The Gunslinger, p 11. Browning, Op.Cit., L 121-6 Harold Bloom. Poetry and Repression. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1976 p200. Browning, Op.Cit., stanza 24. 12

apocalypse?) lanscape, littered with the bones of technology, and saturated with the knowledge of the ruin that runaway technology brings.

Barbara Melchiori writes of 'Childe Roland' " Throughout the poem, through visual and literary reminiscences, what is constantly stressed is the element of spite, utter repulsion, disgust, and, finally, hate. ... The cripple, the horse, the very landscape are all '’hateful”, "hated”, "spiteful”. Maimed, blinded, diseased, they make no claim on our sympathy- the one note sounded is that of vengeance and punishment. The horse "must be wicked to deserve such pain”... This hate [is] coupled with suicidal despair, for Childe Roland's turning- off toward the Dark Tower is a form ofsuicide."*. King's Roland in no way relates to this vision of quest- he seeks the Tower not to make a selfish ending for its own sake, but because the seeking is what he is meant to do- it is his duty, even though he has no clear idea of why, or to he holds the duty; he is really a divinely ordained seeker, much the same as Galahad, whereas Childe Roland is a seeker after glory, disillusioned, and turned to a despairing search for any ending that presents itself. Where Childe Roland's ending indicates the rediscovery of a grim sort of honour-

"And yet dauntless the slug- horn to my lips I set, and blew. ”Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." the pragmatic, yet romantic, Roland is prepared to make an end if his fate so decrees- the great difference is that Roland is determined to be magnificent in adversity, to be glorious in ending, but above all he will continue undaunted at all stages of the quest, not merely rediscover honour when there is really no other option. Not for him the dejected wandering through the horror stricken landscapes of the mind that Childe Roland sinks into.

King’s treatment of the Dark Tower is also radically different from Browning, King pictures the Tower as having been infected by evil, and thus blighted along with the land. It is indeed the celestial city, New Jerusalem, but occupied at least in part by the minions of evil. Browning’s Tower is really a negative Jerusalem, the centre from which the evil radiates- in King, the 'dragon' has invaded the Tower ("/f was something like a worm. He could feel it beating like a sick and dirty heart")9 and is in the process of changing it; for Browning, the Dragon was bom and bred there, and the blight fails on the landscape because for a great part of the narrative Childe Roland falls into despair and corrosive hatred as a response to his own perceived failure; as a result his blighted thought transforms the landscape through which he travels into a twisted , repulsive

Barbara Melchion, Browning's Poetry of Reticence. Oliver and Boyd, London, 1968, p 121 - 122. The Wastelands, p 125. 13 parody.10 It is worth mentioning that in 1946 Louis Macniece wrote a radio play for the BBC entitled (you guessed it) The Dark Tower: a radio parable play11. The author writes in his introductory note "The Dark Tower was suggested to me by Browning's poem 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came', a work which does not admit of a completely rational analysis and still less adds up to any clear moral or message. This poem has the solidity of a dream; the writer of such a poem, though he may be aware of the 'meanings' implicit in his dream, must not take the dream to pieces." Perhaps the greatest failure of Browning’s Childe Roland is that he spends all his time taking the dream to pieces, rather than watching for the meanings as King's Roland does; Childe Roland thus intensifies the misery of both himself and the landscape by dwelling on the fears of these self made horrors. Macneice stresses the point that Childe Roland says "Andyet Dauntless the slug- horn to my lips I set", marking in particular the words "and yet" as an indication that Childe Roland finally realises the mistake in dwelling on the dreams rather than on the meanings of them13.

It is obvious that King's work (and Macneice's for that matter) owes a debt to Browning as a seed of inspiration, perhaps working to colour their narratives as Childe Roland's warped mind colours and transforms the landscape through which he travels, yet neither are as hate- filled and pessimistic through the body of the quest as Browning- both King and Macneice find elements of redemption in the solitude of the desolate landscape, elements of purification. Macneice's Roland, after being pushed through most of the quest by his mother's will, suddenly finds self- definition in the desert as she tries to recall him to her death- bed- he chooses magnificence over the gradual rotting of the soul that an ignominious return would engender14. King's treatment of the quest for the Tower is based on magnificent endurance, on what he calls "pioneer spirit"I5, and tempered by the experience of being a "cold war kid" (which provides interesting parallels with Childe Roland's state of mind- the paranoia, fear, and loathing). Of course, for King the corrosive paranoia never entirely wins through, due to being "raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told we were the greatest nation on earth and that any Iron Curtain outlaw who tried to draw on us in that great saloon of international politics would discover who the fastest gun in the west was ... but we were also told what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay there after we had won the war." 6 and

Melchiori, Op.Cit., p 126- 127. Louis Macneice, The Dark Tower and other radio scripts, Faber and Faber, London, 1947 Ibid., p21. Ibid., p23. Ibid., p63- "Forward, Roland ... into the empty desert" \ Danse Macabre. p24-25. 15 Ibid., p23. 14 the sense of strength and endurance is highlighted. King's landscape is an America which is at once "the colossus that stood astride the world"11, and a part of the dragon infesting the Tower. It is probably at this point, where socio­ political commentary takes on a subliminal cast, that King's response most closely resembles Browning's dream, for Browning was strongly critical of the dragon (the industrial revolution) growing within the citadels of his society18.

17 Ibid., p23. 18 Meichion, Op.Cit., pi 14-119. 15

Chapter 3: The Quest motif in King- in search of the Grail/ the Journey West,

The central motif of The Dark Tower is, of course, the Quest for the Tower itself, and to a slightly lesser extent, the Journey West which constitutes the physical part of the quest. The idea of the search for the Tower, or Grail, is drawn from the Arthurian Grail quest stories as much as from Browning (who was really tapping into the same set of stock stories anyway); however, the Journey West in search of it is drawn from King's American cultural heritage- " the American myth that l [King] grew up with requires the journey westward. Moving west meant growth, change, a break with the past. / think a lot of this has to do with me being an American writer who is aware of a specific histoiy and tf’adition. ... My characters head west because Americans have always headed west, and that's where the mystety lies. " - and ultimately, I suppose, from the inherited westward movement of derivative European languages and cultures over the past five thousand years.

There are numerous direct parallels between The Dark Tower and the Arthurian myth cycles, the most obvious and important being the search for the 'hallowed object'. Arthur's questers must set out upon their journey initially alone, and have no idea of where to search- like Roland, if they are called to find the Grail, they will know instinctively where to go, and when. God will provide. All are tested for their courage, endurance, dedication, and particularly, spiritual purity during the Quest, and have to prove themselves to be worthy of each ensuing Stage. "None may take maid or lady with him on this Quest without falling into mortal sin; nor shall anyone set out unless he be shriven or seek confession, for no man may- enter so high a service unless he is cleansed of grievous sin and purged of eveiy wickedness. For this is no search for earthly things but a seeking out of the mysteries and hidden sweets of Our Lord, and the divine secrets which the most high Master will disclose to that blessed knight whom He has chosen for His servant from among the ranks of chivalry: he to whom He will show the marvels of the Holy Grail, and reveal that which the heart of man could not conceive nor tongue relate."2 The first major scene in The Gunslinger is the confessional scene with the hermit Brown, a purging of the baggage of sin. It takes place within the purification ritual of the walk through the desert, and parallels the shriving the knights must undergo before being allowed to participate in the quest for the grail. The subsequent finding of Jake at the Way Station bears a resemblance to Galahad's meeting with Melias3, who is to become his squire; and Galahad's following adventure with the demon infested tomb4 is reflected by Roland's encounter with the speaking Demon in the cellar5. Magistrale, p 18 The Quest of the Holy Grail ( Queste del Saint Graal), Penguin, 1969, p47. Ibid., p57. Ibid., p62. 5 The Gunslinger. p90. 16

Galahad's adventure at the Castle of the Maidens6 is a possible source for Roland's adventure with the succubus who provides the oracle in return for sex7; and the traps of Allie and Jake left by the man in black parallel the trap of the false horse given Perceval by Satan in the form of a woman,8 or the attempted seduction while Perceval is alone on the island.9 Magistrale would probably argue that the section of The Quest for the Holy Grail titled Lancelot: the slow ascent can be related to the process of physical and spiritual cure that Eddie and Roland undergo on the journey along the beach, and with some justification. The most obvious, and fully realised usage of the grail quest as a source for King is the train, Blaine the Mono, in The Wastelands, a literal representation of the miraculous ship of Solomon, come to bear the questers safely to the Holy city and the completion of the journey. The Ship of Solomon will only carry those "full of faith, for I am faith itself10- just as Blaine will only carry those who can solve his riddles, and will only let them off with their lives if they be full of riddles in turn. Obviously, as the fourth Dark Tower book has not yet been released, I cannot comment on correlations beyond this point at this time, so the thesis will fall silent at this point, and turn to the treatment of archetypes.

The Quest of the Holy Grail. Op.Cit., p73-76. The Gunslinger, p 127-131. The Quest for the Holy Graif Op. Cit, pi 12-113. Ibid., pi29. 10 Ibid., p214. 17

Chapter 4: Treatment of Archetypes- Derivation of important scenes, concepts, and names: and a certain lack of academic seriousness much exhibited.

"The tale of Hansel and Gretel begins with deliberate abandonment..., it progresses to kidnapping, ... enslavement, illegal detention, and finally justifiable homicide and cremation ...fairy stories are the perfect point of crystallisation for... fears and hostilities."1

Stephen King recognises the value of deeply embedded cultural archetypes and makes constant use of them, consciously and unconsciously, in all his work. The Dark Tower proves to be one of his most fertile grounds for archetypal derivation, ranging from the (consciously used) symbolism of the 'Wild West/ cowboy' and deified JFK mythos, to the (unconsciously used) Sumerian myths of Gilgamesh and Huwawa, and monstrous Adversary traditions found in most cultures world- wide. Subtle parody of archetypal modes also provides King with many opportunities to exercise his sense of ironic humour, or 'certain lack of proper canonical seriousness'. This is particularly evident in his character naming, and also in the repeated digressions into a more colloquial 'jokesy- folksey' tone.[eg the statement that "Godpisses

down the back of your neck every day, but only drowns you once"2', Or Eddie's constant juxtaposition of Quest and chicken takeaway]- unfortunately for the critics, this technique works to overshadow any of the minor technical shortcomings occasionally found in King's work.

Obviously, the single most important, constant, and pervasive motif in The Dark Tower (other than the tower itself) is the Quest.

"Among the archetypal images of mankind, the image of a spiritual quest is fundamental, and for this reason is one of the most profound of all literary themes. It is the

"return" to whatever is nearest the heart of each man that sets him on his quest. It is the search for the ultimate foundation of his being, for that which lies behind all the images of reality and which creates for him those images ... When the Quest begins, there is a blight upon the land. No man can achieve the goal of his seeking unguided. ...It is a dark voyage, a night journey from which no man will return as he left, if he returns at all. The way is long and the dangers almost insurmountable, and if he be alone, man cannot succeed in the high adventure.

1 Stephen King, Danse Macabre, Warner, London 1993, p 125-26. 2 The Drawing of the Three, pi 16. F.W. Locke, The Quest for the Holy Grail: a study of a Thirteenth- Century French Romance. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1960, p3 18

The Dark Tower fulfils all these criteria, with the exception of revelation of incommunicable truths or visions, a requirement I expect will be fulfilled at least in part in the last book when it is finally published. (I say fulfilled in part, by the way, because the capacity Roland shows for absorbing the metaphysical vision of the universe at the end of The Gunslinger4 *suggests that King is going to explain the truths Roland wins through to, or die in the attempt.) Roland indeed searches for the ultimate foundation of his reality, the Dark Tower, and does so as a result of the blight (comparable to the wounds of the Fisher King in Oueste del Saint Graal) on his world which sparks the desire to return it to its old existence- that which, because of his nature and training as a gunslinger, is ’nearest his heart'. It is obvious that Roland cannot win through alone, and receives ’divine' help in the form of answers and advice/ instruction from the Man in Black (a legitimate reward for prowess, surviving the initial ordeal and catching the Man in Black ), and the power to 'draw' Eddie and Odetta/ Detta/ Susannah into his world as companions. This boon parallels the aid that most 'classical' mythic heroes receive from the various Gods, for example, the parting of the Red sea for Moses, or the supply of seven weather demons to Gilgamesh by the sun god Utu in the Sumerian narrative of Gilgamesh and Huwawa.3

Further 'divine' help is evidenced by direct interventions such as the telepathic linkage within the mandala (or 'Ka- Tet' as King calls it, harking back to Egyptian theories of the soul), and Eddie's vision and dreams of the 'Key between worlds' which allows the Drawing of Jake, the sacrificial son of The Gunslinger, now reborn. The elements of Otherworldly intervention are strongest in The Wastelands, where the Tower (in the form of the Rose, the container/ metaphor for all universes- quite possibly God) guides Jake to itself and shouts in triumph when he achieves a specific goal- part of the means for his journey from his world into Roland's.

The group is also presented with a clear path in the form of the Beam, an aisle of power (like Ley lines) which links to the Dark Tower and holds the world in place (the artefact left by the ancients against the coming of a foretold hero is also a common motif in "Fantasy" literature- this is one of the central motif in Tolkien's The Silmarillion6 and The Lord of the Rings', as well as in the Oueste del Saint Graal where the Seat of Danger- the ’Siege Perilleux’-, the

4 The Gunslinger, p202- 204. Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth. Pnnceton University Press, Pnnceton 1987 p27 For example, the armour left for Tuor at Vinyamar by command of the Sea- God. J.R.R. Tolkjen, The Silmanllion. Unwin, London 1979 p288. Further examples: The Palantir (seeing stone), and the Paths of the Dead, prepared for Aragom. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Unwin, London, 1978 p811- 813. 19 sword in the stone, and the shield "made for none other but you"* are prepared against the coming of Galahad.

Near the end of The Wastelands, the party is presented with Blaine the Mono as a means of continuing the quest over and beyond the Wastelands (reminiscent of the Hells of Hieronymous Bosch), and evading Maerlyn (aka Flagg, the Dark Man, the figure of pure evil from The Stand and The Eves of the Dragon, who has never really been destroyed, only momentarily defeated). Blaine the train is a quite literal version of the Ship of Solomon from the Oueste del Saint GraaL which conveys Galahad, Perceval, and Bors onto Sarras and Galahad’s attainment of the Grail and Ecstasy. That this is so is indicated by Blaine’s place in the narrative (the end of phase two of the Quest, phase three being basically the attainment of the goal); confirmed by the facts that the questers will be delivered only if found worthy through their riddles (the Ship of Solomon will only accept unharmed those who are spiritually pure and firm in their faith in God9); and will be delivered to Topeka in End- World, where stands the Dark Tower and the fulfilment of the Quest10.

The use of Topeka as an analog for Sarras is significant as another tie to the Western genre and American myth, as it is a name which should be as recognisable to anyone familiar with the genre as Dodge City, Tulsa, or Boot Hill. Sarras is the end point of the Grail quest, from whence the Grail is assumed into Heaven; it is also the burial place of Galahad, Perceval, and Perceval’s sister (Roland, Eddie and Susannah?)- Topeka is where Blaine intends to kill them all.

The next- most important archetype, and obviously an integral part of the Quest motif, is the figure of the Adversary. The Adversary manifests itself in many ways in The Dark Tower, from the landscape through which the gunslinger passes, to the physicalf?) figures of Satan- The Man in Black, and Later, Maerlyn. Throughout The Gunslinger, the Adversary figure is Walter, the Man in Black, "the furthest minion of the Dark Tower" leading Roland through his initial ordeals of ritual purification. No battle is fought between Roland and this version of the adversary- this is to come later, for part of Roland’s Quest is to kill Maerlyn, a greater Adversary figure who first appears physically near the end of The Wastelands. Walter’s function throughout The Gunslinger is that of the Tempter in the desert, in the manner of Jesus’ forty day ritual, leading Roland on

P. Matarasso (trans.), The Quest of the Holy Grail (Queste del Saint Graal), Penguin, 1984 pgs 33,35,57 Locke, Op.Cit p71- "Unless you believe in Jesus Christ with a perfect faith, in no wise enter into this ship, for know you well that you shall perish therein. For the ship is such a wondrous thing that that no one tainted with sin can remain aboard without great danger" 0 The Wastelands. t>419. 20 into the Quest and leaving traps intended to test, damn, and purify him (a rather blackly humourous analog to the biblical prophet's days of honey and locusts is found in The Wastelands, where after following a bee back to its hive with hopes of feasting on honeycomb, our heroes discover the hive to be mutant, and God’s providence almost certainly poisonous11; this is, I think, an image drawn from King's experience as a cold war child in America, where all the Godlike security of living in the greatest nation on earth is found to be a rather sick joke when he realises the tenuousness of existence in the face of the Superpower nuclear standoff)12.

The first trap left by the Adversary is the Town of Tull, where the Man in Black sows both love and hatred. The girl Allie is the love trap, seducing Roland into familiarity and affection- "He felt a growing (but strangely absent- minded) affection for her and thought this might be the ti'ap the man in black had left behind... He thought veiy little about everything.',13- and the possibility of abandoning the Quest; in the Grail Quest, the purity of the quester is paramount, and no man who is unclean with woman may attain the grail (his sin with Allie is not the sex, as in the case of Lancelot and Guinevere's infidelity, rather it lies in the bartering of'love' for information, his calculating cruelty in the service of his quest).

The seeds of hate come to fruition under the guidance of Sylvia Pittston, a witch of the Man in Black, when the entire town sacrifices Allie and the reborn Nort (a satanic parody of Lazarus- very black humour) and attempts to destroy Roland. He redeems himself firstly whilst sinning, by bringing a small measure of earthly hope and an approximation of compassionate love to the forlorn Allie; and secondly (ultimately) by destroying the nest of vipers (the townsfolk) planted by the adversary, and then confessing to the hermit, Brown. The great irony of this segment is that the townsfolk are deluded into believing that Roland is himself the adversary (and he may well be, for later when Jake asks if the Man in Black is evil, Roland replies " That depends on where you're standing")1*.

The second trap is the boy, Jake, whom Roland meets at the way station. The trap here is twofold-firstly, Roland develops a love for the boy which is iivided between a vague sense of paedophilic homosexuality ("The boy's pretty ,ips"[5; "He liked him a great deal"16; "Nice looking boy"11; "He held the boy to him, feeling

The Wastelands. p284 Danse Macabre, pgs 15- 26 (particularly 25 and 26) The Gunslinger. p45. The Gunslinger. p88. The Gunslinger. p75 ibid, p84 7 ibid., p 85 21 his face, hot against his chest, and his hands, dry against his ribcage. It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy"iH) and the development of a fatherly feeling; and secondly, the boy is literally a gift from the Adversary (like the horse given to Perceval by Satan19) which ties Roland to Walter spiritually- " While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket,"20- , and later, a sacrifice (Isaac) to the Man in Black, in exchange for the ability to continue the Quest- a course of action that Roland feels has damned him even further. In a less direct sense, Jake is also the sacrifice to God which is required of all questers, who must forsake something dear in order to enter upon the quest- for example, Perceval sacrifices his chance at carnal pleasures21, Frodo gives up the pleasant, quiet life of the Shire22, and Abraham is fully prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac- and prove themselves obedient to God's will.

In The Drawing of the Three, the Adversary first appears as the landscape through which the gunslinger moves. The journey along the beach is more than ust another trial by ordeal, for the environment, namely the lobstrosities, takes an active role in opposing Roland by maiming him and thus reducing his capacity to continue and perform in the quest2After Roland is maimed by the obstrosities and serious infection sets in, he is further hampered by the sheer ahysical distance to be covered in his weakened state (incidentally, his body tself becomes a shadow adversary figure here).

As serious as the landscape is the Adversary as incarnated in Detta vValker, the second of the two personalities in the body of Odetta. The nurderous Detta (a black Morgan Le Fay- colours in keeping with her character) s committed to not only hampering the progress of the quest, but to destroying it :>y killing Eddie and Roland, an objective to which she comes near to achieving. This Adversary is as literal a form of the Castrating Woman motif as you are ikely to find anywhere ("GOAN GELD EM FUST! GOAN CUT OFF THEIR BALLS IND SPIT EM IN THEY FACES!"24), although whether this is an intentional anti- eminist intrusion into the decidedly un- new age world of the gunslinger is lifficult to say- certainly in The Wastelands Susannah (Odetta/Detta) becomes a gunslinger, and thus an honourary man.

We find four Adversary figures in The Wastelands, three monstrous, and >ne Maerlyn. The first of the monstrous adversary's is in the form of a huge

p 91 The Queste of the Holy Grail (Qiieste del Saint Graal), Op.Cit., pi 13 The Gunslinger. p90. ibid, pi02 Op.Cit., J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rinas. p288. The Drawing of the Three, p 17 The Drawing of the Three. p219. 22 cyborg bear, set to guard the origin of one of the Beams that links to the Dark Tower and helps hold the world in place. This sequence reads like a subconscious retelling of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and his fight with the guardian of the sacred woods, Huwawa; but also a conscious adaptation of Canadian Indian Wendigo myths, as the Bear is also a vengeful guardian of the forest ('7/i Indian folklore the Wendigo is sometimes described as a creature ... that stands 20 to 30 feet tall. The Wendigo is 'so powerful that when it marches along it can brush aside the great pine ti’ee as an ordinary man does the grass of the prairies' "25). Arthur's hunting of the boar Twrch Trwyth in the Welsh tale of Kulhwch and Olwen is also brought to mind by this scene. The pathos of the scene is filtered by a sardonic amusement at the ability of a precision machine to go insane as a result of its approximation of soul; a concept which loses much of its humourous appeal near the end of the book, where the scenes of the Jonestown- like slaughter are perpetrated and revelled in by Blaine the insane train.

The second of the Monstrous Adversary's is the Gatekeeper, which opposes Jake’s journey from his world into Roland's. The Gatekeeper, disguised as a haunted house, is a product of the Lovecraftian horror genre, for, standing between worlds it is closely related to H.P. Lovecraffc's concept of the 'Elder Gods'. Being a shape changer, the Gatekeeper is also a derivation of the werewolf/ mutant ("watch thou for the mutant!”)26 motif that fascinates King so much.

The third, and most important monstrous adversary, is Blaine the Mono, another insane machine, but with reasoning (and physical) powers approaching godlike. Blaine is to an extent an insane God, for it is worshipped by the people of Lud as such, and they make regular sacrifices to it. The fact that Blaine is a version of the Ship of Solomon is quite ironic, given the wilfully evil , capricious nature of the machine. It could also be argued that Blaine represents both Chaeron and his boat, ferrying the questers into the nether- world where they will find the Dark Tower.

The last Adversary figure is Maerlvn himself, and the only information of note about him (until book four arrives) is that he is the same figure of evil found in The Stand (as Randall Flagg), The Eves of the Dragon (as Flagg), and The Gunslinger (also Flagg).

The last motif 1 wish to discuss here is the Dark Tower. The Tower is drawn directly from Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, "The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart/ Built of brown stone, without a counterpart/ In the whole world"1' and is for King the centre of all universes, a stairway, perhaps,

25 Op.Cit., Magistrale, pi68-69 note 5. 26 Danse Macabre, p56. 23 to the Godhead28. For Browning the Tower was the culmination point of a quest through the mutant landscapes of the soul, in frenzied search of a peace and maybe shriving attainable only through a noble striving end. Browning implies that the Tower is an adversary figure, although I would interpret this in a psychological sense, that it is Adversary in fit measure to each quester. Louis Macneice, in his 1946 radio play The Dark Tower, casts the Tower as simply a place that has been invested by evil (he calls it the dragon), but is not actually of any particular moral or metaphysical awareness of its own-

"We call it the dragon for short, it is a nameless force hard to define- for no one who has seen it, apart from those who have seen its handiwork, has returned to give an account of it. All we know is that there is something there which makes the Dark Tower dark and is the source of evil through the world. It is immortal hut men must try to kill it- and keep on tiying so long as we would be human. ”29

King casts his Tower in the same fashion- the Tower itself is the nexus of all universes, but has been invested by the evil of the Beast and Maerlyn, and must be freed.

King's writings are full of usually subtle (and black) humour injected so that only the alert reader becomes aware of its ironic presence. At its most overt and recognisable, his sense of humour produces jovial, grandiose statements such as " Yes, folks, in The Stand I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and it was fun!"30. The more subtle and ironic humour is found particularly m character names; for example, Roland is not immediately ironic, yet take a moment to consider a paperback or Hollywood screen cowboy (the physical descriptive source for Roland) with a name like Roland- what credibility could such a character muster against all the Wyatt's, Doc's, Hank's, Larry's and Stretches. Goddamn sissy name. Goddamn faggot. Take the Johnny Cash song "A bov named Sue" as another example (an* while we're on the subject of Vlr. J. Cash, it is fitting to mention that in The Drawing of the Three. Johnny Cash is referred to as the Man in Black, the significance of which should be immediately clear after having read The Gunslinger. ”This popular singer is also mown as The Man in Black. His first name means the same as a place you go to take a piss

Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. L 182-84. 25 The Gunslinger, pg 209. Louis Macneice, The Dark Tower and other broadcast piavs. Faber and Faber, London 1946 p27 Danse Macabre. p450 24 and his last name means what you got in your wallet unless you're a fucking needle freak"'

If you think I'm taking close reading a bit far in this case try the rhythmic correlation between Eddie Dean and Heroin, the drug to which this character is addicted (also his brother, Henry Dean; or the relation between Eddie’s old rebellious self and James Dean). There are nasty little dark ironies to be found in Detta Walker (she’s got no legs), and Jack Mort (the psychopath who pushes people in front of cars and under trains- read the surname literally). Speaking of trains, the two monorails in The Wastelands are called Blaine and Patricia, commonly used as names of Soap Opera heroes and heroines in such memorable saga’s as The Young and the Restless and Davs of Our Lives: and also (I asked people about these) in some Pom movies (Blaine is occasionally found as a hero in Western pulp novella’s too). This may not strike one as obviously amusing, yet the irony is, I would think, subtly undeniable- Blaine is a ’serious as fuck’ piece of psychotic technology who behaves in the shallow, arrogantly adolescent manner of most of these soapy stud/ heroes; it is worth noting that being a supersonic bullet train, Blaine is one heck of a phallic symbol). The name Jake Chambers brings to mind the methodical mechanical motions of a cartridge ’chambering’ in a firearm; Brown the waste dweller embodies the surrounding environment on the desert fringe- from his name to his violent shock of red hair. In an interview with King , Tony Magistrale asked him if his character names were meaningful, and King replied "Sure. Here and there they appear like jokes. The lad in Apt Pupil, his name is Tod, which is German for death. It seems appropriate, given that he falls in with this Nazi. The guy in The Drawing of the Three who likes to push things 32 on the heads of people is named Jack Mort. They are little dark jokes."

Later in the same interview King says ”One thing that most reviewers and scholars have missed so far is that I have tried to have some fun in these novels and that I’ve tried to poke some fun along the way. I guess that if people have missed one glaring point, it is that fantasy and horror can be wonderful tools of satire. , an important point to remember even in relation to The Dark Tower, which has less of King's satiric lack of seriousness than other of his works, because most of the major scenes :ontain an alternate satiric or blackly humourous strand; not to mention that in following the Romantic structure and feel of Browning, the more iconoclastic aspects are toned down by the almost religious seriousness of the style- this is lot to say he abandons iconoclasm or colloqialism, he just doesn't take it to the extremes of his other works, such as Danse Macabre. King's often colloquial :one and style are important tools for conveying this sense of irony in a literary vorld under the pressure of television's ’bigger, louder, brighter, gorier’ modus 1 The Drawing of the Three. p!24. T. Magistrale, Stephen King: The Second Decade. Macmillan, New York 1992 p3. 3 Ibid., p 16. 25 operandi- as he says ’’/ think that figures in a landscape show up brighter if the landscape is drab"34. In the face of such grass roots cultural competition, there are few courses of action that will effectively grab the attention of a large audience- satire and gaudy, vulgar, black humour are the two that work for King.

King's style has been as challenging to notions of mainstream ’canonical’ American literature as the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedy's and The Gonads were to notions of mainstream ’pop’ music- he has shown no mercy toward the traditional concept that authorial intrusion be kept to a minimum, yet neither is he a self- conscious post- modernist; in fact, King is blatant about the fact that he writes in a manner more than reminiscent of a bar-room oral tradition (shock! horror! literary irreverence!). Peter Straub has written of King "he puts himself wholly into his books, and in the best way: by doing it piecemeal, by spreading himself throughout the book to get between the reader and the narrative. ... Good taste had no role in his thinking: he was unafraid of being loud and vulgar, ... and because he was able to abandon notions of good taste he could push his ambition into sheer and delightful gaudiness- into the garish beauty of the gaudy. ... This was not at all a literary style, but ra:her the reverse. It made a virtue of colloquialism and transparency. The style could slide inio jokes and coarseness, could lift into lyricism ... it moved like the mind itself. It was an unprecedentedly direct style, ... and like a lightnig rod to the inner lives of its characters" - (for example, Roland, after his maiming, rationalises the experience in a darkly humourous tone, thinking "Ijerk off left- handed... at least that's something,"3')

The only important example of his black satire in The Gunslinger is the scene in Tull where the Man in Black gives the gift of life to a dead drug addict (tie most severe form of Cold Turkey), in the manner of Jesus calling forth Luzarus. The dark irony is found in the fact that whilst bestowing immortality onNort, the Man in Black doesn't see fit to remove the addiction- he says, in fact, "it's... so ... goddamned ...funny!"36. The sense of coarse, colloquial, vulgar dark humour reaches new heights in The Drawing of the Three, but is absolutely essential to the characterisations that King needs to build in the space of a few lires. One of the better examples is part of the description of one of Balazar’s mobsters- ” George muttered in Henry's ear. He put his mouth so close it was like kissing a girl's ear in a movie theatre, and that was pretty fucking gross, especially when you coisidered that the guy was probably dead- it was like narcophobia or whatever the fuck thiv called it... George slid a hand inside Henry's shirt. Oh, this was getting worse and wo'se. That image of being with a girl in a movie theatre wouldn't leave him. Now here he wcs, feeling her up, only it wasn't a her but a him, this wasn't just narcophobia, it was fucking faggot narcophobia, and Henry’s scrawny junkie's chest wasn't moving up and down, anl thei'e wasn't anything inside going thump-thump-thump It is sickly amusing to Op.Cit, Magistrale, p3. The Drawing of the Three. p29. The Gunslinger, p38- 40. 37 The Drawing of the Three, pi 32. 26 watch the imagination of this obvious intellectual pygmy busily working on the psychological problems inherent in the situation, and his very lack of education provides a further pun- narcophobia (or whatever the fuck they call it) is particularly appropriate, as Henry is addicted to a particular narcotic substance (Narcophobia: a morbid sexual attraction to dead junkie's!). The description is also apt, as it serves to bring the physical action firmly to mind by tapping into an action sequence (petting in the back row of the movies on a Saturday night, ooh, ooh) with which most readers will be familiar, if only on the TV/ received image level.

This colloquial sense of humour is one of the most widely criticised aspects of King's work, as many people seem to see this stylistic trait as being the mark of the 'penny- dreadful', yet in using common, vulgar imagery he has found a formula for drawing rapid yet seemingly rounded character sketches that convince the reader of their authenticity in a way that took Tolkien decades, and millions of words, to achieve- for example "your good friend Edward Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and liesurely squat in this grove of trees first thing tomniorrow morning ... if you'd told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point of my day, I'd have laughed in your face."™ is mildly vulgar, yet the very fact that this scatological form of character description is rarely found in modem literature (certainly not in this matter of fact, down to earth form) gives King's characters a simple everyday strength which should not be denied.

38 The Wastelands, p251. Chapter 5: Characterisation: JFK« the Western^ and Cold War hysteria- figures of the salvationer.

Roland is the last of his kind in his own world, and its only chance of redemption in the face of the apocalyptic breakdown that is occurring. This idea can obviously be read in a variety of ways, from the evils of conservative capitalist imperialism, to the breakdown of religion and modes of authority in modem western cultures as a legacy of the past. I want to concentrate on the latter, combining it with the idea of the Cold War motifs so obvious in all King's writings, the cult of personality surrounding the figure of Kennedy, and the most obvious motif in The Dark To wer. that of the Western genre.

To begin with, we cannot totally ignore the conservative capitalist aspects of the books. King is himself an avowed moderate conservative, not in over­ retreat from his radical past, yet by no means a socialist, and Roland's origins strongly reflect this. Roland comes from a background marked not only by privilege, but more importantly, by an almost certainly protestant-in-origin ethic of privilege through duty. It becomes his duty to prevent the world from moving on- read suppressing revolt and insurgency- and for this quality he is, despite being unable to prevent the destmction of his home state and avoid the insinuation that some of his methods are evil, respected by the narrative. How American.

A certain dependence on the 'Western' genre is asserted from the beginning of The Gunslinger, and continued throughout the story to date. The opening description is enough to appeal to the subconscious archetype created in the collective subconscious of western European/ American civilisation by a century of’cowboy' movies, novels, and comics. "Below the waterhag were his guns, finely weighted to his hand. The two belts crisscrossed above his crotch. The holsters were oiled too deeply for even this Philistine sun to crack. The stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow and finely grained. The holsters were tied down with raw- hide cord, and they swung heavily against his hips. The brass casings of the cartridges looped into the gunbelts twinkled and flashed and heliographed in the sun. The leather made subtle creaking noises. The guns themselves made no noise. They had spilled blood. There was no need to make noise in the sterility of the desert. His clothes were the no- color of rain or dust. His shirt was open at the throat, with a rawhide thong dangling loosely in hand- punched eyelets. His pants were seam- sketched dungarees. Instantly we have the image of a John Wayne (although this is probably anathema to King because of The Duke's hard core Republican politics) or (more particularly) Clint Eastwood- in likeness to whom Roland is explicitly cast: "a tall man with dirty grey- black hair and a face that looked as if it had been chiselled from obdurate stone by some

1 The Gunslinger, p 12. 28 savage god."2 In The Drawing of the Three Roland is also described in terms of TV cowboys- "through, the man he could see a figure much more real, one of those legendaiy gunfighters they used to make movies and TV shows about when he was a kid: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Butch Cassidy, one of those guysV In The Wastelands we leam "Susannah had seen Roland strictly in terms of television shows she rarely watched: Cheyenne, The Rifleman, and, of course, the archetype of them all, Gunsmoke. ... his face seemed to her more that of a tired poet than a wild- west lawman, but she had still seen him as an existential version of that make believe Kansas peace officer [Marshall Dillon]... Roland had once been much more than a cop riding a Daliesque range at the end of the world. He had been a diplomat; a mediator; perhaps even a teacher. ... There was a lot more of JFK than Matt Dillon in Roland. She suspected that Roland possessed little of Kennedy's imagination, but when it came to romance ... dedication ... charisma ... And guile... don't forget guile"4. The link between the romantic Western Hero and JFK is evident throughout The Wastelands, never developed in depth, but constantly referred to. The first hint of the link can be found at the beginning of The Drawing of the Three, when Eddie, with Roland as a spiritual passenger, lands at John F. Kennedy International airport in New York, but of course this only becomes obvious in hindsight. The first concrete evidence of this linkage also comes in The Drawing of the Three when Kennedy is referred to as "the world's last gunslinger". The character Odetta/ Detta is very interesting indeed. King attempts his first fully realised Negro character, who also happens to be a woman, rich, disabled, schizophrenic, a human rights activist, thief and car park "cock- tease", and it seems, probably a democrat. She is for King a very serious, and important, character study; yet her very characterisation is also one of the finer examples of his satiric wit, for here are representatives of just about every minority group available (for her to have been a pregnant lesbian ecologist would be just too perfect) becoming empowered in a world where most of these traits are redundant, rather than existing in King's own social era when these very traits seem to have gained an insidious, almost hypnotically evil, attraction at least, if you are a Republican). Just as a point of further (subconscious ) amusement: when shortened to just the two first names we get O/D, or what Eddie has been saved from by Roland.

King explores the exile of the essential religious impulse from the world. Roland is to restore faith and provide something in which to have faith. Roszak said in Where The Waste Land Ends " we are long past the time for pretending that ;he death of god is not a political fact."5 It is in this context that Roland becomes he meeting point of mythic heroes old and new: Jesus, Galahad, and the last The Drawing of the Three, p 146. Ibid., p358 The Wastelands, p 258. Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends. Faber and Faber London, p xxi 29 gunslinger of the western world- the deified hero/president John.F. Kennedy. The figure of Roland seems ,in fact ,to derive directly from the joint images of JFK and Clint Eastwood's western roles. There are close parallels with Kennedy-Miller's Mad Max, though Roland is a consciously dedicated salvationer, where Max seeks oblivion and saves the day more by chance locality than by any act of will. Kennedy was the shining presidential light of King's childhood era, a figure vested with the religious regard of a saviour, the man who was to "lead us to a fruitful America, to a peaceful world for mankind everywhere"6 7 It soon became abundantly clear to this generation that Kennedy was neither the messiah, or even a new Moses, and I believe that the figure of Roland was bom partly as a response to the disappointment of the Kennedy regime, an attempt to marry up the expectations with a character who can fulfil them. In The Drawing of the Three, Kennedy is described as a gunslinger- "America has seen the passing of the world's last gunslinger", and it is said of him "Jack Kennedy was different, that s all. He said he would draw, but only if someone weaker needed him to draw, and only if there was nothing else to do. He said Kennedy was savvy enough to know that sometimes talking don't do no good. He said Kennedy knew if it's foaming at the mouth you have to shoct, it. ft 7.

In fact Kennedy seems to have been the one foaming at the mouth, interested in his own exercise of power, for it was Kennedy who got America fim.lv into the Vietnam conflict, and did much to destablise the tenuous geo- polf.ical situation through his fascination with covert operations8 and destabilisation of governments he felt were unfriendly to his administration. Herry Fairlie wrote of the Kennedy myth "The legend is today being questioned, but it is likely to remain the source of a powerful mythology, iffor no other reason than the lives of the tvo brothers were cut short. Both the Unfinished Presidency of the one, and the Una:hieved Presidency of the other may tempt the Americam people to believe that, just as then country was deprived of two unusual chances of salvation in the past, so their best hope in the future, as trials beset them, is to find and to follow another deliverer. It is the promise of thi Kennedys, unrealised but remembered, which is itself a source of expectation." and also "it seems as if the American people, for the first time in their history, have buried an empiror and, alongside him, his rightful but deprived heir."9 Couple this deification with the Kennedy idea of the new frontier10, and you get the basic blueprint for Rolmd: an heroic saviour, a tough cowboy figure who plays the odds, but plays then wisely- "He required in his administration, says Arthur Schlesinger, "a tough,

6 Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. Dial press, New York, 198) pi 1. 7 The Drawing of the Three, pi 86. Henry Fairlie, The Kennedy Promise: the politics of expectation. Eyre Methuen Loncon, 1973, pi85-90. 9 Ibid., p2-3. 10 Ibid., pi83. 30 nonchalant acceptance of the harsh present"n- exactly the way Roland reacts to his surroundings.

11 Ibid., pi85. 31

Chapter 6: Metaphysical Concerns in The Dark Tower- Problems of Time. Size, and Sanity in a limitless Universe.

King is one of the few writers who, upon using the hoary old time/ space travel story, has had the courage to tackle the problems of size inherent in such narratives. Our general theory is that time moves in a linear progression, in one direction. Yet in time travel stories the hero returns to a point in the past, or moves forward to a point in the future, making a mockery of the linear concept, unless we realise that for such travel to be possible outside a character’s imagination all events must be occuring simultaneously, side by side, no matter what logic of date order is imposed. This must be taken to the next postulate that for all these whens (each embodying mass) to coexist simultaneously space must be filled by each one, and space therefore has to be infinite- museums get clogged with the past, so why wouldn't a strictly linear concept of time suffer the same fate? In such a situation time and size become in effect the same force, for the size of the infinite universe will be equal to the infinite number of whens constituting our 'time line'. King's Dark Tower is supposed to be the 'central lynchpin' of all time and size, the meeting point of the two forces; this does not seem to be a particularly apt or workable description as a centre implies that somewhere there are, or are going to be, limits; or at least, fixed points of definition. It is an idea that makes the Tower a starting point of the all, yet infinity denies a beginning- "Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest conclusions [or beginnings] to things is one impossibilityThe Tower is meant to prevent the very insanity that exploring such notions invites, but for it to perform this function, it must be viewed as an object of faith, subverting the very logic it embodies- in Brunner's The Infinitive of Go. a character says of the concept of infinite universes "they exist, and even if you can't perceive them, your machines [or gods] by this time can"2. A quote in Magistrale's book says that Roland has fexpanded beyond the limits of the universef3- unfortunately, since everything denies nothing, a 'universe' can have no limits; can have infinite mass, infinite time, and infinite size: and how, therefore, can there be more than one? How indeed can we define the universe as being 'one', a unitary entity?. It would seem that King's metaphysic steps around this problem by providing the Tower as the philosophical help desk, answering questions on an instinctual level by providing the urge to look aside when such thoughts loom, and proclaiming that the infinitudes of infinitudes are actually nothing other than physical- concerned with grains of dust within grains of dust ("/ will show you fear within a handful of dust"4), and not the metaphysical ideas that move between and through them,

1 The Gunslinger. p208. 2 John Brunner, The Infinitive of Go. Magnum, London 1981 pi 08. 3 Op.Cit., Magistrale, pl44. 32 constituting either God or insanity (or maybe both). In the interview with Magistrate, King illustrates the rationale behind his metaphysic of the Dark Tower-

"I read an Indian sioty once, and it struck a chord in me because I remembered the myth of Atlas holding the world on his shoulder. In the Indian tale someone asks the tribal medicine man, "how does the world stay up? Why doesn't it fall? At night the sky gets dark and looks empty, so why don't we just fall down into the emptiness?” The medicine man responds, "Because a man- a big man- holds it up."... Then somebody asks the obvious question: "What holds up the man?" The answer to this is, "There is a turile that holds up the man. The man stands on the turtle's shell and the man holds up the world." Then, one more question from some officious brave or squaw: "Well, what holds up the turtle?' And the answer to this question is, "Don’t ask any more questions .”45 [lest ye lose your tenuous grasp on sanity wrestling with the existence of transfinites]. Comprehending the existence of the Dark Tower is at once being told to ask no more questions, and being given an answer to _aU questions- the paradox of the Tower (and ’the' universe) is that it is the limitless, or boundless, container 'beyond' even the void in which God created heaven and earth, perhaps beyond God, which whilst allowing for the answers forbids the questions.

The drawing of Eddie begins the examination of the psychological effects of the limitless universe. First of all Roland opens the door into Eddie (not just his world) and is terrified by a vision of the earth from an aircraft, and then realises that he is looking through Eddie's eves, that the door leads into Eddie’s mind- he qualifies that this notion is insane even as he accepts it. This also confirms the nagging suspicion that Roland's world and Eddie's are parallel views from a grossly distorted mirror, and not two separate universes or possibilities, and also entrains the irritating notion that each persona expresses their own universe by their prescence- this is continued later when Odetta is drawn and Eddie sees everything in her world freeze solid like still photo just as she and Roland have come through the now closing door6, and strengthened by the differing time zones each is drawn from: Eddie from 1987, Odetta/Detta froml 964, and Jake from 1976. Roland's time has, of course, been so stretched and distorted that he becomes in effect 'timeless'- of course, it must be said that King’s grasp of time from book to book seems somewhat tenuous, whether as a deliberate reflection of the ills of the Tower, or just as an oversight I can't say; it does seem somewhat strange that Henry could go to the Vietnam war in 1977 (in The Wastelands we see Eddie and his brother Henry playing basketball watched by Jake- this is supposedly well before Henry is drafted, but the year is 1976). In the incident at Balazar's, the limitless universe confronts a man who

4 T.S. Elliot, The Wasteland. L 30 Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: the second decade. Macmillan, New York 1992, p12-13. 6 Ibid., p228. instinctively knows the truth (in his building of the card towers that explain the stars to ’Cimi7) yet is compelled by his 'reason' to deny that a thing (the cocaine smuggled into New York by Eddie, and hidden in Roland's world before the customs people arrest Eddie) can occupy a 'no space' and still exist- in other words, he follows the basic human psychological survival method and ignores metaphysical 'actualities' in the interests of'sanity'.

Balazar's Tower of cards is described as "standing in defiance of a world spinning through a universe of incoherent motions and forces; a tower that seemed to 'Cimi's amazed eyes to be a ringing denial of all the unfair paradoxes of life.whilst God ”pisses down the back of your neck every day, but only drowns you once"9 It would appear that in King's view sanity is not a 'faculty' that can survive the close scrutiny of logic.

7 The Drawing of the three, p 118 8 Ibkf pi 18 Outtro: Quest and Apocalypse: regretting the concept of space.

Well, as Bugs Bunny would say, "that's all folks!". I hope I have been at least partially sucessful in outlining the more important themes in The Dark Tower, and providing the sense of the importance of Stephen King as a writer of contemporary American cultural critique. It is unfortunate that in the limited space allowed me in this project I could not even begin to fully realise the more interesting themes of King's work, such as the link between religion, politics and cultural myth that seems focussed on the figure of John F. Kennedy; or develop the notions of an Apocalyptic cultural base in the American Dream.

The one theme I hope I have done justice to is that of the Quest, and its position in cultural mythos- one idea which I didn't have the space (or at this stage, the resources) to develop any further than a sentence, is that the westward quest seems to be a subliminal mythic theme in Western European cultures, a possible result of the migration over thousands of years from the Indian subcontinent area of the linguistic and cultural bases that developed into the languages and cultures we know and adore today. Failing all else, I can only trust that you find the compelling nature of the books as powerful as I did. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works:

By Stephen King:

The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger, Sphere, London 1988) 2: The Drawing of the Three. Sphere. London 1989. 3; The Wastelands, Plume, New York 1992.

The Stand, New English Library, London 1980.

Danse Macabre, Warner, London 1993.

By Other Authors:

The Quest of the Holy Grail (Queste del Saint Graal), translated by P. Matarasso, Penguin, Harmondsworth, England 1984.

T. Underwood and C. Miller (Ed.s), Fear Itself: the Horror Fiction of Stephen King, Pan Books, London 1990.

F.W. Locke, The Quest for the Holy GraiL Stanford University Press, Stanford 1960.

Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: The Second Decade, MacMillan, New York 1992.

Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, in The Norton anthology of Poetry (third edition), Norton, New York, 1983.

Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1987.

Micha,el Collings, The Annotated Guide to Stephen King. Starmont House, Mercer Island Washington, 1986.

Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, Yale University Press, New Haven Conn. 1976.

Barbara Melchiori, Browning’s Poetry of Reticence, Oliver and Boyd, London, 1968.

Louis Macneice, The Dark Tower, and other broadcast plavs, Faber and Faber, London 1947.

Henry Fairlie, The Kennedy Promise, Eyre Methuen ,London 1973.

Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, The Dial Press, New York 1983.

John Brunner, The Infinitive of Go, Magnum, London 1981. Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, Faber and Faber, London 1973.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Unwin, London 1979.

The Lord of the Rings, Unwin, London 1978.

Secondary Works:

Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, Penguin, London 1980.

Richard Barber, The Figure of Arthur, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge 1976.

Alfred Nutt, Studies on the Legend of the Flolv Grail, Marandell, New York 1965.

Peter Korrel, An Arthurian Triangle, E.J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands 1984.

N.J. Lacey and G. Ashe, The Arthurian Handbook, Garland publishing, New York 1988.

Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam Wan and US Political Culture, Verso, London 1993.

Douglas Robinson, American Apocalypses. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1985.

Hams Wofford, Of Kennedvs and Kings: Making sense of the Sixties, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Pensylvania 1992.