Stephen King Or the Literature of Non-Exhaustion
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 July 2013, Vol. 3, No. 7, 427-435 D DAVID PUBLISHING Stephen King or the Literature of Non-exhaustion Jessica Folio University of Reunion Island, Saint-Denis, France This paper focuses on Stephen King’s (1947- ) long-form narratives and attempts at perceiving the elements accounting for his endless success. As the author chooses this title for her paper, she clearly keep in mind John Barth’s (1930- ) essay. The choice of “punning” Barth’s title is made so as to situate ourselves in the wake of postmodernist studies to try and analyze King’s deconstruction and reconstruction of common ideas, myths, and the Gothic genre, applying them to the contemporary era. The choice of this angle of study is accounted by the fact that the aim is to prove that King has not literarily exhausted himself in spite of his 37 years of writing and is in a constant quest for a renewal of the Gothic genre. The notion of remolding is one of the red threads allowing to weave the intricate cloth of postmodernism. The author will here humbly try to unveil the essential elements perceived in King’s narratives which allow to qualify him as “a postmodern writer”. Keywords: Gothic, postmodernism, grotesque, parody, deconstruction Introduction In her thesis completed in 2011, the author dealt with three precise works by three American writers: Stephen King’s Thinner (1984), Peter Straub’s Shadowland (1980), and Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby (1980). The cornerstone laid on the notion of abjection in the Kristevan sense of the ambiguous coexisting feelings of repulsion and fascination for the abject object/subject. The author attempted at lifting up the veil on the various strategies used by the authors to almost hypnotize the readers, to lead them into what Stephen King calls the “danse macabre”. One of the doors the author opened was the reworking by those authors of the Gothic motifs by roaming on the path of postmodernism. In this presentation, the author concentrates on the case of the mainstream American writer, Stephen King, whose works helped to popularize the conventional Gothic tale tropes. The author chose to entitle her presentation “Stephen King or the Literature of Non-exhaustion”, clearly keeping in mind John Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (Barth, 1984, pp. 63-76). Barth (1984) suggested that the conventional modes of literary representation have been overused, that modernism has exhausted itself and he foreshadowed the notion of rewriting as a leitmotiv in postmodern works. The author’s aim is to account for the fact that King has not literarily exhausted himself in spite of his 37 years of writing if we consider his novels from Carrie (1974) to 11/22/63 (2011). This would be in part explained by the postmodernist touch brought to his narratives and his remolding of the Gothic genre. In Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (2005), Strengell Jessica Folio, Ph.D., English Department, University of Reunion Island. 428 STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION enlightened King’s Gothic heritage, his reworking of the Gothic genre along with that of common myths and fairy tales. The author will open a short parenthesis on the controversial term “postmodernism”, controversial for its definition itself which is regularly debated and is hard to grasp entirely. In A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), Hutcheon pointed out the ironic quote marks characterizing the postmodern movement. Irony is often combined with black humor and verges on parody1. Considered as a hybrid movement, postmodernism stresses the mingling of unexpected, incongruous elements, establishing a link with the term “kitsch”, which often assimilated to bad taste2. Hutcheon (1988) also suggested an intertextual relation between postmodern novels and past works. The latter are revisited, remolded, and even deconstructed. In the term “deconstruction”, we perceive like Derrida, the absence of a unique meaning, of an absolute link between signifiers and signified. The term “instability” is at the root of the narratives. A Feminine Angle In King’s first eponymous novel, Carrie (1974), the heroine, who has been the scapegoat of her mother and her peers at school all her life, discovers her telekinetic abilities. The feeling of entrapment, confinement running through the veins of the Gothic genre is transposed to Carrie White’s familial house. The house plays the role commonly held by the Gothic castle which “confines, walls up and tortures by its mere architectural presence” (Lévy, 2002, p. 10). Carrie’s house is depicted as the lair of a monster, a devouring cave where even daylight does not get through3. The abusive, sadistic male figure (a monk, a patriarchal figure in Gothic tales) is replaced by Carrie’s fanatically religious quasi castrative mother who wishes to control Carrie and shuts her out from the surrounding world. The town of Chamberlain itself is a locus of entrapment where Carrie tries to escape from people’s prejudices. The images of violence, abuse find a parallel with the blood images that give King’s narrative its circularity: Carrie bathes in her menstrual blood in the girls’ shower at school at the beginning; she is soaked in pig’s blood at the prom. The scene of the shower deserves a short analysis. As Carrie has her period for the first time at the age of 16 in the girls’ shower at school and she has no understanding of why she bleeds the monstrous figures represented by her classmates bombard her with tampons and sanitary towels, chanting: “plug it up” (King, 1974, p. 13). There is a grand-guignolesque undertone as King seems to go one step further in the paradigm of excess. There is a reworking of the signified of hygienic towels which are no longer means of protection but weapons and the scene becomes grotesque when one of the napkins remains stuck on Carrie’s pubic hair as a stigmata of both her innocence and humiliation. The expression “plug it up” commonly designates the fact of filling up a hole; it is assimilated to cracks, leaks. Here it is associated with Carrie’s vagina perceived as a monstrous hole, a cave whose entrance has to be obstructed. If, in Gothic tales, the female body is both desired and feared and has to be dominated, King objectifies Carrie’s body and almost makes her a martyr. Carrie eventually lets her darker side bring her own annihilation and the destruction of her town. 1 Parody does not just apply to the strict sense of turning into ridicule an original text but is seen as having an intent. Parodic works have an artistic autonomy and parody is viewed as a form of transgression for Genette in Palimpsests. 2 In his Psychologie du kitsch, Abraham Moles places the latter between art and conformism and makes it correspond to the immediate, to a reflection on contemporary society in its alienation to the object. 3 “Carrie went into the house and closed the door behind her. Bright daylight disappeared and was replaced by brown shadows, coolness, and the oppressive smell of talcum powder”. Stephen King, Carrie (1974), pp. 38-39. STEPHEN KING OR THE LITERATURE OF NON-EXHAUSTION 429 The rebellion of the feminine against the feeling of entrapment, isolation, the crushing surrounding world is also visible in Firestarter (1980). Charlie’s pyrokinetic power is explained by the fact that her parents underwent an experiment called “Lot Six” made by the “shop”. The motto of the pursuit of the defenseless heroines by monstrous villains in Gothic castles or abbeys is transposed into a contemporary USA in which Charlie and her father Andrew McGee attempt at escaping the men working for the Shop. The signified of the noun “shop” is metamorphosed into a secret government agency. The latter is recurrently compared to Big Brother: The omnipresence of the TV monitors and the thirst for power of its leaders echoes the dictatorial state of George Orwell’s 1984 (1948). The Body Paradigm The intertextual undertone visible in King’s texts allows us to establish a connection with Salem’s Lot (1975). Indeed, the influence of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) for this novel has been stated by King himself4. The wand of postmodernism affects this narrative. Gothic elements are tainted with the grotesque. In Rabelais and His World (1968), Bakhtin showed the importance of the tradition of the grotesque in medieval era and its link to the body seen in a hyperbolic way. The grotesque was regenerative mainly through laughing. King enlightened the theme of the body and its violent destruction. Susan Norton’s death in Salem’s Lot echoes that of Lucy Westenra’s in Dracula. Nevertheless, Susan’s body is depicted as a grotesque, impure double of her former self. If Lucy’s death is described in 13 lines and the term “blood” is only mentioned twice, King on the contrary highlights the bloody and violent aspect of Susan’s death and has it run on 40 lines. Susan’s body is submitted to convulsions, loss of her soiled vital fluid, the deformation of her jaws and her inhuman shouts. We are in a case of what Mellier (1994) calls in his thesis5 “hypermonstration” to refer to an excessive monstration6. In the death of the Dracula figure, the grotesque element surges out when we read the final dance given by Barlow’s finger bones, with his rings clicking like castanets. We have here one of King’s brand marks, an unexpected kitschification of a common element in a climatic situation. Just as the Gothic genre rimes with transgression, excessiveness, and irrationality, King is concerned with the pushing away of limits, the crushing of rationality.