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UMI® Writing is Dangerous: Exploring Creativity and the Other in Stephen King's Fiction A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Maser of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science Trent University Peterborough, Ontario, Canada (c) Copyright by Sara Joan Berniker 2009 English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program January 2010 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre rGf&rence ISBN: 978-0-494-57779-0 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-57779-0 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantias de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada ABSTRACT Writing is Dangerous: Exploring Creativity and the Other in Stephen King's Fiction Sara Joan Berniker This thesis is an attempt to explore the perils of the creative process as it applies specifically to Stephen King's fiction. I examine the role played by King's writer- characters in the creation of fiction in order to determine the positive and negative effects of the creative process on their internal and external worlds. F examine the manner in' which the creative process disassociates King's writer-characters from the 'real' world, transforming them into Other figures. As an Other, King's writer-characters are also responsible for creating Others, fictional, often monstrous, characters of their own which often step off the printed page and into the writer-character's world. The manner in which writer-other and monster-other clash is pivotal to understanding the underlying dangers of the creative process. This is a fictional world (of King's making) wherein characters can come to life, seeking vengeance on their creators, and writers can disappear with equal ease into their own fictional creations. Keywords: Stephen King; Horror Fiction; The Other; Creative Writing; Supernatural m Table of Contents Page Abstract ii Table of Contents iii 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Stephen King and the Clash Between 'Popular' and 'Literary Fiction 1 1.2. The Writer as Other and the Dangers of the Creative Process 2 1.3. Overview of Chapter One: "The Writer as Other" 3 1.4. Overview of Chapter Two: "Creating the Other" 5 1.5. Overview of Chapter Three: The Dangers of the Writer-Other" 8 1.6. Writer-Others, Monster-Others, and Stephen King 9 2. Chapter One: The Writer as Other 11 2.1. The Horror of the Other/The Other in Horror Fiction 11 2.2. The Writer as Other ' 15 2.3. Isolation of the Writer-Other and the Creative. Process 18 2.4. Conclusion: The'Comforting Fiction'of the Other 33 / 3. Chapter Two: Creating the Other 34 3.1. Approaching the Monster-Other 34 3.2. Dangers of the Monster-Other 40 3.3. Who Owns the Words? Creativity and the Monster-Other 51 3.4. Conclusion: The Impossible Task of Defeating the Monster-Other 61 4. Chapter Three: The Dangers of the Writer-Other 63 4.1. The Monstrous Writer-Other 63 4.2. Differing Perspectives: Who is the Monster-Other? 66 4.3. The Monster-Other as Foreigner: A Sympathetic Approach 67 4.4. The Dangers of Creativity: Unmaking the Monster-Other 83 4.5. Defeating the Writer-Other: The Last Stand of the Monster-Other 87 4.6. Conclusion: The Ambivalence of the Other 91 5. Conclusion: What Price for Creativity? 93 5.1. The Origin of Creativity and the War Against the Self 93 5.2. Stephen King as a Fictional Character: Autobiographical Aspects 94 5.3. Beyond Fiction: A Larger Perspective 95 6. Bibliography 98 6.1. Primary Sources 98 6.2. Secondary Sources 99 1 Introduction With more than 350 million books currently in print, over sixty published novels and short- story collections, and a myriad of film adaptations of his works, it would be an understatement to say that Stephen King is a North American household name. Although King's fiction and his life as a writer have been the subject of a number of works 1, analysis of his writing tends towards overview and summary rather than focusing on a specific thesis. Such works tend to inhabit a gray zone—not quite critical study, not quite fanzine—and seem designed to appeal to a broader audience than the typical academic tome, perhaps so as to remain accessible to King's readership2. Not even taking into account aspects of King's writing itself, the size of his canon, or his ability to set market trends for horror fiction, spawning a whole host of imitators, studies of his work are hugely underrepresented in the academic world, due in part to the popularity that makes him so oft-read. Some critical responses3 have suffered from the misconception that genre fiction is unworthy of scholarly treatment because it panders to the lowest common demoninator; essentially determining that the popular has no place in the hallowed halls of academia. King's insistence on remaining firmly planted within the horror genre, despite forays into science fiction, fantasy, and more straightforward 'literary' prose, has also impacted how the academic world responds to his work. The clash between literary and popular fiction is a subject that fascinates King4 as much as it does his detractors. However, an even more all-consuming 1 See Tony Magistrate, Douglas Winters, and Heidi Strengell. 2 This is not to suggest that King fans and academia are mutually exclusive, only that King's readership is more interested in his stories than the techniques he used when creating them, something King himself acknowledges in his memoir/writing guide On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) as well as the introductions to a number of his collections. 3 See Harold Bloom's 2006 collection Stephen King (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Imagining the Worst: Stephen King & the Representation of Women (1998) by Katherine Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson, and Joseph Grixti's Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction (1989), among others. 4 See Misery (1987), The Shining (1977), and "1408," (2001), among others. 2 theme in both his fiction and non-fiction, and one that is rarely discussed in critical works addressing his fiction, is how the creative process impacts upon the writer. King disproportionately populates his stories with characters who write fiction, starting with Ben Mears in 1975's 'Salem's Lot and seen most recently with aspiring writer Chad in the short story "Morality" which appears in the July 2009 issue of Esquire. It is not enough for King to litter his fiction with writers (subscribing perhaps to the old adage that one should write what one knows), for writing is more than window-dressing meant to give his characters greater substance through the characterization-shorthand of career choice. Instead, the act of writing becomes a means by which King's characters define themselves, and a source of great stress when the proverbial well of words dry up (which they often do for King's writer- characters). In this thesis, I will argue that King's writer-characters are others, set apart from non-writers by virtue of their profession to become undeniably othered from much of what can be considered 'normal' or 'real'. This othering, along with the social and physical isolation that is both necessary to and a negative offshoot of writing, endangers the writer- other on two distinct levels: he5 faces real world dangers such as alcoholism, spousal abuse, the inability to produce, and mental instability that threaten his life and his craft (which are, to many of these writers, the same thing); he also must deal with the supernatural dangers inextricably bound to a creative process that King describes as "magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art" (On Writing 270). But such magic comes at a price; the ability of the writer-other to lose himself in his work also means that he can quite unintentionally create characters so vivid that they, quite literally, step off the page.