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Ontology and Metafiction in Stephen King's Song of Susannah

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Ontology and Metafiction in Stephen King's Song of Susannah When Worlds Collide: Ontology and Metafiction in Stephen King’s Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower By Dimitrios-Agamemnon Tsompanos A dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki September 2016 When Worlds Collide: Ontology and Metafiction in Stephen King’s Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower By Dimitrios-Agamemnon Tsompanos Has been approved APPROVED: Zoe Detsi-Diamanti . Tatiani Rapatzikou . Domna Pastourmatzi . Supervisory Committee ACCEPTED: Domna Pastourmatzi Department Chairperson TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………….……………i Abstract ……..………………….……………………………………..……………………....ii Abbreviations …………………………………………………………………………………iii Introduction ............................................................................................................................iv CHAPTER ONE: The Author as Character: The Role of Stephen King in Song of Susannah (2004) 1. Entering the World of Song of Susannah…………………………………………1 1.1. Meeting the Maker: An Alternative Representation of the Author-God…………5 1.2. The King is Dead: Automatic Writing and the Reader-Character. ……………. .20 CHAPTER TWO: Characters as Authors: Intertextuality and Closure in The Dark Tower (2004) 2. Entering The Dark Tower ………………………….……………………………32 2.1. Long Live the King: Authorial Power and the Reversal of Deus Ex Machina ....35 2.2. Resisting Closure: Parallel Universes and the Full-Circle Story ………………..52 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………...... 73 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………….. 79 Tsompanos i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank the directors of the postgraduate program in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, on the one hand, for organizing and developing a high- quality program worth to study, and on the other hand, for letting me be a part of it. The umbrella-theme of “Re-presentations of Resistance” has allowed the exploration of various literary as well as historical topics with a critical eye and has broadened my horizons. During this two-year program, I have evolved both as a student as well as a person. I owe that to my teachers, namely Dr. Zoe Detsi, Dr. Yiannis Kanarakis, Dr. Katerina Kitsi- Mitakou, Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi, Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou, and Dr. Anastasia Stefanidou. I am indebted to them for passing on their knowledge. I would like to especially express my gratitude to my instructor and supervisor, Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou, for inspiring and believing in me. Without her insights and her constant support, this project would not have been realized. Tsompanos ii ABSTRACT This project examines the relationship between reality and fiction in Stephen King‟s Song of Susannah (2004) and The Dark Tower (2004). One of its aims is to explore the double role King plays both as a writer and a character in these two novels and the implications his authorial practice has on the characters‟ existence and the text‟s overall structure. The inclusion of the writer within the story is seen, in this thesis, as an attempt to dissociate the author from the text‟s creation and to elevate the role the characters play in it. This project intends to expose the fluidity that characterizes the notion of fictional reality and the plurality of narrative worlds this can create especially in relation to King‟s The Dark Tower universe the two primary sources under examination here belong to. Another aim of this project is to discuss the relationship that a text can establish with other texts and the intertextual and cross-referential dynamics this can generate with regard to the development of the story. In order to accomplish that, texts that have influenced and have been influenced by The Dark Tower series are considered in the two chapters of this thesis. Finally, this project will attempt to critically approach terms such as metafiction, intertextuality, deus ex machina, mise-en-abyme, deferral. Tsompanos iii ABBREVIATIONS In the course of this project, Stephen King‟s work will be abbreviated as follows. This list only includes his primary works that are of an importance to this study: DT The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004) DOT The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987) GS The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (1982, rev. 2003) OW On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) SS The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (2004) WC The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (2003) WG The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997) WK The Dark Tower IV ½: The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012) WL The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991) Tsompanos iv INTRODUCTION Go then. There are other worlds than these. – Jake Chambers, The Gunslinger (1982) Written in a timespan of over forty years (1970-2012), The Dark Tower series has enabled Stephen King to closely examine human nature and depict a plurality of worlds and realities as well as experiment with a variety of literary techniques that shed light on the ontology and construction of his fictional Dark Tower universe. With emphasis placed on the sixth and the seventh volume of the series, Song of Susannah (2004) and The Dark Tower (2004) respectively, an attempt will be made to comment on the postmodern elements that he resorts to in his stories. My analysis of these volumes seeks to reveal that, by becoming a character in his own work, King elevates the text over its writer, and by jumping back and forth from fictional to objective reality, he makes it hard for the readers to distinguish between reality and fiction. Indeed, the writer‟s interaction with the characters, in combination with the topological similarities between the fictional Mid-World and our world, do not only render The Dark Tower universe more real, but also challenge our perception of reality and make us ask: Who is in charge of this world?; what about the characters and their role in it?; and, to what extent do they challenge authorial power? In this thesis, an attempt will be made to comment on the intertextual and metafictional aspects of King‟s authorial and narrative practice in Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower by also resorting to certain theorists such as Roland Barthes, Linda Hutcheon, and Brian McHale in an attempt to delineate the self-reflexive qualities of The Dark Tower series in general and the two texts under examination in particular. Specifically, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower are the two last volumes of The Dark Tower series which were published a few months apart in 2004. They revolve around Tsompanos v Roland Deschain and the final part of his long journey towards the elusive edifice known as the Dark Tower. Roland is the last gunslinger, a title evoking both veneration and awe, a descendant of the great “Gilead that was” (The Dark Tower 141) and a successor of the Line of the Eld, who struggles to prevent his decaying world from “moving on” (125). In order to accomplish that, he embarks on a quest to reach the Dark Tower: the nexus that is responsible for the stability and preservation of the worlds that surround it. Roland‟s goal is to protect the Tower from falling, an outcome that would result in the downfall of his world and civilization into the abyss of the Prim. Although The Dark Tower series ends with the sixth and seventh volume‟s publication, in 2012 King published an additional novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole, which he places between volumes four and five in the series. His willingness to revisit his Dark Tower oeuvre reveals King‟s attitude towards his writing which he treats not as a definitive but malleable construct, an issue which will play a central role in our discussion in this thesis. Taking into consideration that The Dark Tower series is not among King‟s most popular and widely-known pieces of work, one can partly explain why there are not many scholarly articles or papers written about it. Yet, it is noteworthy that this multi-volume epic that fosters great ontological, cultural, as well as ecological implications has received only little literary attention. The most thorough and theoretical analysis of the series and of King‟s work as a whole can be found in Heidi Strengell‟s Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (2005). In this project, I will make an effort to share and expand Strengell‟s standpoint of King‟s role not merely as an author but as a medium through which the text is made. Additionally, Sharon A. Russell‟s articles that focus on the third and the fourth volume of the series offer a very interesting approach to The Dark Tower universe, and her points regarding the intertextuality found in King‟s work will be elaborated on in this thesis. On the other hand, Robin Furth‟s Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Tsompanos vi Concordance (2012) and Bev Vincent‟s The Road to The Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King’s Magnum Opus (2004) are two extremely useful literary encyclopedic companions to The Dark Tower universe, and will be valuable tools throughout my thesis. After this brief review considering the previously published works that are relevant to my research project, it becomes appropriate to introduce the theoretical approach I will resort to in my commentary in the chapters to follow. In her very influential work, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980), Linda Hutcheon refers to a number of authors “who rejected the theological and artistic implications of the novelistic illusion: first, that the novelist is a god who – like God – creates what and how he pleases . and secondly, that the reader is reading a verisimilar „slice of life‟ to which, paradoxically, he need not seriously respond, since it is „only a novel,‟ only entertainment, only fictive” (58-59, emphasis in original).
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