They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

Albert Camus. The Plague. 1947.

People on all sides of the political equation make the mistake of seeing pestilence as punishment, with famous precedent in the black plague of the fourteenth century.

“The Coronavirus, and Why Humans Feel a Need to Moralize Epidemics,” Adam Gopnik, March 11, 2020.

King notes in the preface to the Uncut edition of The Stand that he is “a writer who has been accused over and over again of having diarrhea of the word processor.” As his fame grew, so did readers’–and therefore publishers’–willingness to not just tolerate this so-called diarrhea, but to revel in it. So, the Uncut.

In the Uncut preface, King notes a couple of the major additions he specifically thought enriched this story: Frannie’s altercation with her conservative mother over her premarital pregnancy, and the Trashcan Man’s journey west to join the dark man. In my humble opinion, the former is a bit overwrought, but it’s a good setup for how something that seems like a problem in one context can become the potential salvation of mankind in another. As for the extra time with the Trashcan Man, I could have done without it. His journey alongside the Kid, who was cut from the original, seems designed to humanize the Trashcan Man and make him and his loyalty to Flagg sympathetic, but the backstory about his mother marrying the man who killed his father and then sent young Trash to an institution already does this work, and that childhood backstory is really what ends up being critical to the plot, since it’s a comment triggering a flashback to childhood bullying that causes Trash to start blowing up shit, which then leads to him trying to redeem himself by unearthing the A-bomb. King says he’s glad readers got to meet the Kid, but I don’t think I’ve yet read a more absurd caricature in the King catalogue (except for maybe the Rat Man who appears near The Stand‘s end, but he doesn’t get nearly as much airtime as the Kid).

I’ve said before that I don’t find narratives of pure good v. pure evil particularly compelling, and while the setup for the main conflict in this novel is basically that, King does complicate matters in the process of how things unfold such that I’m certainly not ready to dismiss it out of hand, even if the overtly Christian themes–King refers to it as a novel of “dark Christianity”–are more than a little annoying. The way the plot unfolds in this epic battle of good v. evil is not so much the good defeating the evil as the evil defeating itself. In this way its themes are reminiscent of a lot of what I talked about with The Shining, but in this plot much more overtly implicating the U.S. government. It’s almost like The Stand literalizes what The Shining treats allegorically.

To synopsize this epic narrative in a nutshell, when a biological weapon in the form of a superflu escapes a U.S. military base due to incompetence and kills 99% of the population, the survivors start having dreams about a dark (but Caucasian) man and a nice old (Black) lady. Those who choose to follow the dark man, aka Randall Flagg, primarily settle in Las Vegas, while those who follow the old lady, aka Mother Abagail, settle in Boulder, CO. As the latter form their new government and fear an eventual attack from Flagg’s side, they send three spies to Vegas to try to get intel on how soon that attack might come. Mother Abagail then decrees, on God’s authority, that Boulder’s four leading men (Stu, Larry, Glen, and Ralph) must go to Vegas to face the dark man openly instead of sneaking around and spying. On the way, Stu breaks his leg; the other three have to leave him behind and are then apprehended by Flagg’s men. Glen is killed in his jail cell after he mocks Flagg, while Ralph and Larry are taken to be pulled apart by a torture contraption in a gruesome public display to demonstrate Flagg’s power over the other side. When one of the Vegas people in the crowd to witness this display protests, Flagg flicks a “ball of electricity” at the protestor that burns his brain. Then one of Flagg’s people, the Trashcan Man, whom Flagg enlisted to hunt down weapons, shows up with an A-bomb that the electricity ball inadvertently detonates, killing everyone there. From his distant vantage in the desert, Stu sees the mushroom cloud; he ends up making it back to Boulder with the help of one of the spies, Tom Cullen, who is on his way back from Vegas. Fran’s baby survives, heralding the survival of the human race.

Of course 2020 is a special context in which to read The Stand‘s treatment of a flu pandemic. King has updated the timelines in this novel twice, shifting the year the flu hits from 1980 to ’85 in the paperback edition, and then to ’90 in the Uncut. Some have noted that simply changing the year doesn’t do enough to change the novel reading like it’s from the ’70s in a lot of its references and in how it exemplifies the “paranoia” of that period, which is in keeping with my reading of how the narrative extends/continues a lot of the themes in The Shining. The “evil” in the novel functions very much by way of covert ops in the Nixonian/CIA fashion, by which very means–namely secrecy–that evil ultimately destroys itself (or nearly does). The complication in The Stand arises when the “good guys” resort to the same covert means–namely, sending three “spies” to the West.

The deterministic Christian worldview played out by the plot is unambiguous, which characters themselves specifically point out in regards to the “psychic experience” of their similar dreams. That is to say, the text provides what amounts to proof that a supernatural/divine force is at play. Mother Abagail claims the four men she tells to go west have a choice about whether to go, but when the men protest that it would be a pointless suicide mission, she berates them for thinking God’s “plan” could be that simple (at which point she miraculously heals Fran’s injured back). This would seem to make the novel’s guiding philosophy the polar opposite of the existentialist random suffering evoked by Camus’ pandemic in The Plague, and yet, in spite of this and these novels’ supernatural v. natural treatment of pandemic subject matter, they share some illuminating similarities alongside the differences.

Cry Me A Conspiracy Theory

The all-pervasive “plague” in Camus’ context becomes symbolic of the specter of death itself and the great equalizer of the human condition–the inescapability of MORTALITY. In King’s context, the true underlying “plague” would seem to be government itself. The thematic treatment of nuclear fallout as emblematic of the self-destructive fallout of man’s (and it is pretty exclusively man‘s) will to dominion/knowledge/power resulting in cyclical self-destruction is reminiscent of Walter M. Miller’s 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. But King’s taking pains to depict a very specific cause of his novel’s pandemic is pretty anti-existentialist (and makes this novel’s mass appeal reminiscent of religion’s…) and in the location of that cause (aka the military), reflective of that ’70s mistrust of the government that stems from Watergate. The Stand, even more so in the Uncut version, takes great pains to depict the great pains the government takes to cover up their responsibility for the pandemic.

Now that we have a real pandemic on our hands, we might gauge whether King’s or Camus’ take on the experience rings truer. This is a subjective question based on individual experiences of Covid, but the depiction of the pandemic’s origin and its accuracy might be more objective. In Camus, plague appears randomly, vanishes randomly, and will reemerge somewhere else later, randomly. In King, the origin point is squarely in America, by America, for America, and the coverup is so egregiously gruesome that the government is as unequivocally as evil as Flagg himself. Not only does King’s pandemic start and spread in America, the military intentionally spreads it to other countries in order to cover up its American origin point:

“Cleveland has between eight and twenty men and women in the U.S.S.R. and between five and ten in each of the European satellite countries. Not even I know how many he has in Red China.” Starkey’s mouth was trembling again. “When you see Cleveland this afternoon, all you need tell him is Rome falls. You won’t forget?”

“No,” Len said. His lips felt curiously cold. “But do you really expect that they’ll do it? Those men and women?”

“Our people got those vials one week ago. They believe they contain radioactive particles to be charted by our Sky-Cruise satellites. That’s all they need to know, isn’t it, Len?”

This is (at least) a double indictment of the government’s nefarious nature: they’re willing to spread it further to hide that they started the spread in the first place, and they will achieve this spread by not telling the people who are spreading it what they’re actually doing. Covert all the way. And the post-pandemic rebirth of society will replay this cycle. The bottom line this narrative reinforces is that the conspiracy theories are true, and any mistrust of the government is not paranoia but entirely founded.

Covid, of course, started in China and spread here not so much due to explicitly malicious intent but more due to a globalized culture. In our current case, it’s not the virus that’s been weaponized so much as the idea of its weaponization that’s been weaponized: aka the conspiracy theory that covid was spread intentionally, not to mention the even more potentially harmful conspiracy theory that the virus is a hoax and doesn’t really exist. As I said in my analysis of how The Shining treats these themes (covert/secretive action = “dirty”), our current conspiracy-theory-riddled times–compounded by our conspiracy-theory-spewing President who wields a significant amount of his power through this rhetorical weapon–can be traced back to this ’70s period, and The Stand plays this out even more than The Shining does. Framed this way, I’m starting to wonder if The Stand‘s anti-government narrative reinforces a cultural mindset that Trump continues to manipulate to his advantage…

(Side note: Bob Woodward, a journalist who did a lot of the reporting exposing the Watergate scandal back in the day, just released Rage, his second book on Trump, and, as noted here, has a recording of Trump saying back in a February interview that he “wanted to always play it down,” the “it” here being Covid-19, even though he knew it was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” because he didn’t want to create a “panic.” Thus clarifying that he was actively deceiving the American people rather than being dumb enough himself to not recognize the situation’s seriousness, but doing so (supposedly) for the sake of their own protection. A blanket justification invoked by so-called intelligence agencies going decades back…)

The propensity to believe in conspiracy theories is driven by a psychological urge for explanation, a need to be able to pinpoint a responsible party for the bad things that happen, because, while it might seems counterintuitive or at the least ironic, apparently it’s easier to accept these horrible things if someone is at fault for them rather than if they just happen for no reason. (It seems to be a similar psychological urge that drives us to produce and consume narratives via novels.) In the figure of Randall Flagg, King has provided a handy scapegoat; according to The Stand‘s narrative logic, he can be blamed for the government being to blame for the end of civilization as we knew it. This is in keeping with Flagg being vaguely linked to a lot of the violence and unrest in the period’s recent history:

He remembered the civil rights marches of 1960 and 1961 better—the beatings, the night rides, the churches that had exploded as if some miracle inside them had grown too large to be contained. He remembered drifting down to New Orleans in 1962, and meeting a demented young man who was handing out tracts urging America to leave Cuba alone. That man had been a certain Mr. Oswald, and he had taken some of Oswald’s tracts and he still had a couple, very old and crumpled, in one of his many pockets. He had sat on a hundred different Committees of Responsibility. He had walked in demonstrations against the same dozen companies on a hundred different college campuses. He wrote the questions that most discomfited those in power when they came to lecture, but he never asked the questions himself; those power merchants might have seen his grinning, burning face as some cause for alarm and fled from the podium. Likewise he never spoke at rallies because the microphones would scream with hysterical feedback and circuits would blow. But he had written speeches for those who did speak, and on several occasions those speeches had ended in riots, overturned cars, student strike votes, and violent demonstrations. For a while in the early seventies he had been acquainted with a man named Donald DeFreeze, and had suggested that DeFreeze take the name Cinque. He had helped lay plans that resulted in the kidnapping of an heiress, and it had been he who suggested that the heiress be made crazy instead of simply ransomed.

Flagg is on all of the “Committees of Responsibility”–i.e., somehow inciting the country’s periods of unrest. He’s linked here to two major historical events that greatly interest (if not “obsess”) King–the JFK assassination (though simply taking one of Oswald’s tracts as described above wouldn’t seem to make him all that “responsible”), and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. In his treatise on horror, Danse Macabre (1981), King basically locates the Hearst kidnapping as the source of his idea in the first place when he describes the germ of his idea originating with a phrase he heard on a Colorado biblical radio station: “Once in every generation the plague will fall among them” combined with his musings about Patty Hearst and the SLA in the news at the time:

I sat there for another fifteen minutes or so, listening to the Eagles on my little cassette player, and then I wrote: Donald DeFreeze is a dark man. I did not mean that DeFreeze was black; it had suddenly occurred to me that, in the photos taken during the bank robbery in which Patty Hearst participated, you could barely see DeFreeze’s face. He was wearing a big badass hat, and what he looked like was mostly guesswork. I wrote A dark man with no face and then glanced up and saw that grisly little motto again: Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. And that was that.

Note: Donald DeFreeze was black, which is why I guess King felt the need to clarify that he did not mean racial blackness by the terminology “dark man.” I’ll be returning to King’s problematic conflations of the negatively connotated term “darkness” with race…

This allocation of blame feels both unrealistic and not, reflective of the ways our corporate/bureaucratic culture diffuses responsibility, “passing the buck,” as one expression puts it, and probably most directly addressed by one of Stu’s “doctors” at the Stovington disease control facility when Stu demands an explanation:

“Listen to me,” Deitz said. “I’m not responsible for you being here. Neither is Denninger, or the nurses who come in to take your blood pressure. If there was a responsible party it was Campion, but you can’t lay it all on him, either. He ran, but under the circumstances, you or I might have run, too. It was a technical slipup that allowed him to run. The situation exists. We are trying to cope with it, all of us. But that doesn’t make us responsible.”

“Then who is?”

“Nobody,” Deitz said, and smiled. “On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it’s invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways.”

(Note: The “Stovington” disease facility would seem to be a callback to The Shining, Stovington, Vermont being where the Torrance family lived before they moved to Boulder. Though in The Shining Stovington is intimated to only have the prep school Jack teaches at a nearby “IBM plant”…)

Since Deitz and Denninger are obvious villains, Dietz’s saying this itself becomes evidence that the claim isn’t true, which the reader already knows from other things they’ve been shown up to this point, since the reader is patently not in the position of Stu’s very limited perspective here. By adding the opening showing Campion’s escape from the base in the Uncut, King provides an even more definitive identification of the pandemic’s origin point. In this way the omniscient point of view in the novel seems to almost inadvertently reinforce the conspiracy-theory themes: a need/urge to believe in such theories evidences a need for certainty–a need that omniscience–not to mention religion–fulfills. Camus’ version would seem to more accurately reflect the uncertainty that in 2020 many of us are grappling with more directly. But ironically the fact that we’re grappling with uncertainty more directly then drives us to the comforts of certainty-laced narratives like The Stand–and some of us even further to the comforts of conspiracy theories…

I would have thought King was disavowing The Plague both philosophically and structurally in this novel if it weren’t for his own assessment in Danse Macabre:

In spite of its apocalyptic theme, The Stand is mostly a hopeful book that echoes Albert Camus’s remark that “happiness, too, is inevitable.”

But I didn’t catch any explicit references to Camus in the text of The Stand, and King tends to be fairly explicit with his references. By that metric, the text he’s using as more of a model is that of the quest from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which he calls out in the preface of ‘Salem’s Lot as being cribbed from Dracula. He seems to acknowledge the debt by having his characters verbalize it:

“The beginning of a journey,” she said, and then so softly he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly: “The way leads ever on …”

“What?”

“It’s a line from Tolkien,” she said. “The Lord of the Rings. I’ve always thought of it as sort of a gateway to adventure.”

and:

She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.

These very specific LOTR references in the mouths of female characters in particular feel more than a little ridiculous, and such literary references are something of a (bad) Kingian habit. H.G. Wells is also more present on the layperson’s mind here than would probably be the case:

Still clutching the gun he whirled around again, and now it was not the soldiers in their sterile Andromeda Strain suits that he saw on the screen of his interior theater but the Morlocks from the Classic Comics version of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, humped and blind creatures coming out of their holes in the ground where engines ran on and on in the bowels of the earth.

and:

They camped a quarter of a mile over the line, beneath a water tower standing on tall steel legs like an H. G. Wells Martian.

and:

His white underpants were the brightest thing in the darkness; in fact, the boy’s skin was so dark that at first glance you almost thought the underpants were there alone, suspended in space, or else worn by H. G. Wells’s invisible man.

Maybe one character could be characterized by a particular interest in Wells, but these three passages are from three different characters’ points of view–Larry, Nick, and Nadine, respectively–which makes these references feel not like characterization but by the writer showing his hand by not differentiating the characters’ viewpoints enough.

The Hand of God

Some have accused The Stand‘s plot of being resolved by a deus ex machina, which would be generally in keeping with the Christian themes of there being an overarching divine plan rather than everything being simply random, but while “the hand of God” literally makes an appearance in the plot’s climax, it’s a little more nuanced than a completely random occurrence forcing the action to its final destination. The intersection of threads here is the product of evil, as specifically embodied in “dark man” Randall Flagg, destroying itself, which most prominently pivots on Flagg’s enlistment of the highly unstable Trashcan Man to unearth weapons. His instability leads to Trash blowing up many of the weapons Flagg planned to use against the Free Zone, which then leads to Trash trying to make it up by scrounging up an A-bomb. The reason the A-bomb ultimately detonates and destroys Vegas instead of the Free Zone is also a manifestation of Flagg destroying himself–it detonates specifically because of “the ball of electricity Flagg had flicked from the end of his finger,” the force that inadvertently swells into what’s referred to as “the hand of God.” The reason Flagg flicks this ball also plays out overt v. covert themes: after explicitly lying that the three Boulder men tried to sneak in under cover of night and that they were the ones responsible for the destruction Trashcan wrought, someone on Flagg’s side finally stands up to him for being so evil; in response, Flagg bores his head in with the electricity ball.

For a time, the “good” side falls prey to the apparent evil of the “old ways” in attempting to send spies to the other side, but then the avatar of “good,” aka Mother Abagail, aka the Magical Black Lady, corrects this mistake by sending the four men west with nothing but the clothes on their backs for an overt, direct, face-to-face confrontation, much in the manner that Danny confronts the Overlook ghost in the form of his father in The Shining‘s climax. The deus ex machina feeling some readers might get here could be due to the three Boulder men not actually doing very much once they get to Vegas, a feeling that it’s not action on their part that affects the outcome. But their presence there is crucial, because if they hadn’t shown up, Flagg wouldn’t have been compelled to have a public display of their destruction, prompting the lone voice of dissent, prompting the ball of electricity. One might argue that Trash’s showing up with the A-bomb at that particular moment is pretty convenient/coincidental, but King can basically write off any accusations of that with the Christian theology explicitly influencing, if not directing, the outcome. Glen Bateman’s presence in Vegas might feel the most irrelevant, but it’s the verbal component of the confrontation with Flagg, whom he meets face-to-face, even if through bars. All through the final sequence Flagg is shown trying to get others to do his dirty work for him–he wants Lloyd to shoot Glen, and he wants Lloyd to get Trashcan Man to get him to take the A-bomb away.

In Danse Macabre, King lays out a narrative horror formula:

Further, I’ve used one pompously academic metaphor, suggesting that the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence, and that the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been repelled and the Apollonian norm restored again.

An ancient Greek gloss on the whole good v. evil idea. He applies this to The Stand:

On the surface, The Stand pretty much conforms to those conventions we have already discussed: an Apollonian society is disrupted by a Dionysian force (in this case a deadly strain of superflu that kills almost everybody). Further, the survivors of this plague discover themselves in two camps: one, located in Boulder, Colorado, mimics the Apollonian society just destroyed (with a few significant changes); the other, located in Las Vegas, Nevada, is violently Dionysian.

…

In The Stand, Dionysus announces himself with the crash of
an old Chevy into the pumps of an out-of-the-way gas station in Texas. … [T]he Apollonian steady state is restored when … the book’s two main characters, Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith, look through a plate-glass window in the Boulder hospital at Frannie’s obviously normal baby. As with The Exorcist, the return of equilibrium never felt so good.

King also discusses The Stand and his struggle to write it at some length in On Writing, identifying it as a “fantasy epic” (“there was a chance for humanity’s remaining shred to start over again in a God-centered world to which miracles, magic, and prophecy had returned”) and revealing the influence of the time period–“the so-called Energy Crisis in the 1970s”–on its development. But the real reason he finds it worth discussing is the struggle aspect: he almost abandoned it because he couldn’t figure out how to end it. This invokes a distinction of process we discuss in my creative-writing classes, that between “pantsing” (aka flying by the seat of your pants) and “plotting” (having a plan/outline from the beginning). I was surprised to learn that King was a pantser, mainly just considering the sheer scope of this particular novel. Maybe it’s too much of a generalization to say more “literary” novels are the product of pantsing while more formulaic genre thriller-type books are less so, but I’ve always thought pantsing as a method, though probably often slower, leads to better books, that if a writer is willing to let the narrative surprise them as they’re writing it, then the reader will also be surprised, and the ending will feel more authentic, less contrived.

In spinning the epic of his struggle to finish The Stand, King notes:

…I started taking long walks (a habit which would, two decades later, get me in a lot of trouble).

He made no progress for weeks…

…and then one day when I was thinking of nothing much at all, the answer came to me. …

What I saw was that the America in which The Stand took place might have been depopulated by the plague, but the world of my story had become dangerously overcrowded—a veritable Calcutta. The solution to where I was stuck, I saw, could be pretty much the same as the situation that got me going—an explosion instead of a plague, but still one quick, hard slash of the Gordian knot. I would send the survivors west from Boulder to Las Vegas on a redemptive quest—they would go at once, with no supplies and no plan, like Biblical characters seeking a vision or to know the will of God. In Vegas they would meet Randall Flagg, and good
guys and bad guys alike would be forced to make their stand.

It was at this point that he engineered the bomb at the committee meeting, “sav[ing] my book by blowing approximately half its major characters to smithereens.”

What’s interesting to me as a writer is that what I identified as a complication enriching the narrative, King identifies as the source of his writer’s block in the first place:

What had stopped me was realizing, on some level of my mind, that the good guys and bad guys were starting to look perilously alike, and what got me going again was realizing the good guys were worshipping an electronic golden calf and needed a wake-up call. A bomb in the closet would do just fine.

And then, for the record, he goes on to identify God’s existence as the novel’s definitive ruling logic:

The folks who plant the bomb are doing what Randall Flagg told them to, but Mother Abagail, Flagg’s opposite number, says again and again that “all things serve God.” If this is true—and within the context of The Stand it certainly is—then the bomb is actually a stern message from the guy upstairs, a way of saying “I didn’t bring you all this way just so you could start up the same old shit.”

He notes how his experience with writer’s block led to him considering the development of theme much more explicitly than he ever had as a writer before, though the theme he’s referring to here isn’t all things serving God, but rather “that violence as a solution is woven through human nature like a damning red thread.”

In his epic of the writing of the epic, King likens the bomb plot development to being a way of cutting the “Gordian knot” of his numerous characters and their tangled plotlines, as the plague itself was a Gordian knot dispensing with all the problems of modern civilization. This is a metaphor whose thought-provokingness is somewhat undermined by its being awkwardly shoved into the mouth of more than one character in a manner reminiscent of the literary references.

So if King pantsed it and did not contrive his ending in advance, in theory that should make the ending feel more natural. Yet his endings in general get shit on quite a bit. A gag about this recurs in last year’s It: Chapter Two movie, and one of my new high-school freshmen was even compelled to comment that he liked Stephen King, “except for the endings. The endings are crap.”

I’m guessing some of that attitude might be due to the frequency of a verbal calling-out of evil being adequate to defeat it, as in The Shining. Simply calling out a bully for bullying or a liar for lying is turning out to be pretty useless in the Trump era. But the ending of The Stand technically “works” because their making their stand ultimately enables the detonation of the A-bomb.

As for the extra parts that were added/reinstated for the Uncut, none of them are actually necessary to the plot, which is more or less what King told the reader in his Uncut preface (the part they were supposed to read in the bookstore before they went to the cash register). The guy who catalogued the changes says he prefers the longer, but others have argued for the shorter.

It seems that in large part what King readers love is being immersed in a world with his characters, which could be why so many continue to read him even when there’s an apparent consensus about the crappiness of the endings. At the same time, immersing the reader further in that world as the Uncut does actually puts more pressure on the ending to do justice to the characters the reader has grown to love so much…

Baby, Can You Dig Your (White) Man?

King might have avoided a full-blown deus ex machina in the execution of this ending, as well as in having humanity technically kill itself off by creating the plague in the first place. And he finds some wiggle room within the narrative’s determinism to eke out some character development…but only some. Is this a pitfall of the epic’s scope? Or of the patriarchy in general…or some insidious combination of both…?

Fran is the only “main” female character in a cast of what I would designate four main characters: Fran, Stu, Larry, and Nick. The Free Zone committee of seven would seem to imply there should be seven main characters, but you can tell the real main characters from those who get more extensive pre-pandemic chapters. Glen Bateman is a prominent character and committee member, but we don’t meet him until most of the country’s been killed off. Glen is also pretty much only a mouthpiece for thematic development rather than a developed character in his own right, offering theories as a sociologist and driving the committee’s policies (including ratification of America’s founding documents), painting “mediocre pictures” literally and figuratively. Another committee member, Sue Stern, the only other woman of the seven, gets pretty much no development at all before she’s killed, and Ralph Brentner, who would seem to be fairly important as one of the four who’s sent west to make the stand against the dark man, is also only a type (“a simple soul, but canny”) with no nuanced development. Nick, who gets pre-pandemic chapters, turns out to be the biggest disappointment as a character for me, not just because he’s killed off, but because before that, after they’re in Boulder, he does basically nothing. He’s noted to the be “heart” of the committee, and his decision to send Tom west as a spy becomes critical to the plot when Tom ends up rescuing Stu, but this critical decision doesn’t feel like a product of any of the character development we got about him, specifically the backstory about his struggle but eventual success in learning to read and write. Ultimately Nick feels more plot device than character.

King specifically designated Fran and Stu as the “main characters.” But Fran’s entire function ultimately is to propagate the species through reproduction, as a woman should. Stu is technically critical to the plot in a lot of ways, but his development on the whole feels pretty lame. He ends up running the committee meetings, leading Fran to think at one point how much he’s evolved/developed from the quiet/shy man she initially met, but this feels contrived too. Stu’s pre-pandemic chapter isn’t pre-pandemic in the sense that Fran’s is: his first chapter is the start of the pandemic as it shows him meeting patient zero. Everything we learn about Stu’s past–he stayed in Arnette after his mother died of cancer instead of taking a football scholarship so he could support his younger brother; he had a wife who died of cancer–never comes up again. He thinks one time that I can recall about his wife, when the caginess of the Stovington disease docs remind him of her doctors. We don’t even learn her name. His mother and brother never cross his mind again.

The nameless wife and general lack of female characters are a shared trait/symptom with The Plague, as is the main male cast: Dr. Rieux, Tarrou, Grand, Cottard, and Rambert. Camus’ (white) men are more evenly developed as they weather the plague in different (philosophically symbolic) ways, and the (minimal) female characters are sacrificed to the cause. The climax of the plot hinges on two deaths, Tarrou’s and Rieux’s wife’s. Tarrou’s been there the whole time, and the friendship he forges with Dr. Rieux becomes the emotional center of the book. Rieux’s unnamed wife leaves for a sanatorium before the pandemic strikes the town, so she’s only present in one scene near the beginning when he says goodbye to her. The two deaths are necessary in theory because one is due to the plague and one is not, point being that even if the literal bubonic/pneumonic plague is over, the plague of mortality will never be. But for this to fully work it feels like Tarrou’s and the wife’s importance to Rieux would have to be equally developed, which is far from the case. (“A perfect achievement,” reads a quote emblazoned across the front of my Plague paperback edition. My ass.)

Larry Underwood probably gets the most significant character development to my mind. Fittingly so, I suppose, since he ends up being the explicitly designated “sacrifice” in this pseudo-Biblical narrative. Larry’s pre-pandemic chapters provide two refrains, both initially voiced by women, that sum up his pre-pandemic character that seems reflective of a largely American selfishness/self-interestedness: “‘You ain’t no nice guy,'” from a one-night stand, and “‘You’re a taker, Larry,'” from his mother. He’s tested by two more women, Rita Blakemoor and Nadine Cross, on his journey to become the “righteous man” of the song that ironically turned him into a bigger asshole by virtue of being a hit. (King emphasizes the importance and destination of this journey by making the lyrics of Larry’s song one of the epigraphs. Since it’s a song lyric I could abide this move much more than his using the character’s quote that triggers Trash to start blowing stuff up on his own side, which is then repeated in the text itself, thus making its use as an epigraph entirely unnecessary…)

Larry’s development also shows how the women basically serve only to characterize the men, failing the characterization version of the Bechdel test, but at the least he’s more developed than Stu because when he’s thrust into a position of leadership and rises to the challenge, it actually marks a change.

“Larry is a man who found himself comparatively late in life,” the Judge said, clearing his throat. “At least, that is how he strikes me. Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizens should be: partisans but never zealots, respecters of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely able to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered … or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.”

That such a democratically ideal figure should be the sacrifice seems to be another sign that we should do away with the American version of democracy (i.e., the pretend one that’s only masquerading as a democracy).

Larry’s forced to make a choice when Nadine comes to him after he’s with Lucy Swann (the fifth woman sacrificed to Larry’s character development), begging him to sleep with her when she wouldn’t let him before. Larry thinks his choice not to is what shows he’s truly changed, which is true, though this is complicated by the fact that his sleeping with Nadine would, the narrative definitively (ridiculously) emphasizes, save her from the dark man and by extension that she probably would not have planted that bomb that ends up killing those committee members…

In keeping with King’s questionable association of magical abilities with “otherness,” Joe/Leo, the child who reverts to savagery post-superflu (denoted by a loss of language) and whose defining trait is his “Chinese eyes,” is unambiguously indicated to have psychic tendencies, and during one of these episodes–when he’s telling Larry that Nadine and Harold are going to go west–Joe/Leo specifically indicts the committee:

“The committee won’t help you, it won’t help anyone, the committee is the old way, he laughs at your committee because it’s the old way and the old ways are his ways…”

Which seems part and parcel of King’s pretty much wholesale indictment of politicians as evil (no argument on my part) for being so duplicitous and slimy and saying the opposite of what they really mean and achieving their underhanded aims via underhanded means. But then King seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too on the whole spying front, because Stu only ends up surviving specifically because of their having sent Tom Cullen as a spy….

The indictment of politicians comes into play in the development of the other character who’s potentially the most developed despite his not getting his own pre-pandemic chapters, and who is (of course) another white male, Harold Lauder.

King uses Harold to implicitly characterize flowery writing styles, which will then be implicitly linked to politicians via other aspects of Harold’s character:

Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars—that was Harold’s style.

“He whacks off in his pants,” Amy had once confided to Fran.

The juxtaposition between these two paragraphs speaks volumes…

Harold’s pivotal transition to the dark side is precipitated by his discovery that Stu and Fran are together, at which point he starts plotting and presenting a patently false face to his fellow Free Zoners. And this patently false face is likened to…

“Don’t think I know you,” Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry’s hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago. If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.

This Uncut passage actually names a figure who was only designated by title when they make an earlier appearance in the narrative on television to blatantly and ridiculously deny the danger of the flu (sound familiar?).

Harold’s evil political characterization is reinforced by his constant “grin,” and before the passage above officially identifies who the President is, we get a reference to the anonymous figure when he relieves General Starkey of his duties:

“It was really him, then?”

“The President, yes. I’ve been relieved. The dirty alderman relieved me, Len. Of course I knew it was coming. But it still hurts. Hurts like hell. It hurts coming from that grinning, gladhanding sack of shit.”

The Bushwhacker

King’s exploration of the 70s Energy Crisis still permeates the narrative even when he shifts the dates up a decade and it should be more in the rearview. (His references to the Arab oil embargo in the Uncut are historically inaccurate with his updated timeline.) But even though sometimes all he does is change out “Carter” for “Bush” in some passages, George H.W. Bush could be a figure more relevant to a lot of his themes than he or most have probably realized. And Wred Fright, cataloguer of changes between editions, notes a slightly more substantive change made to the “glandhanding sack of shit” passage above:

In Chapter 22, King updates the reference from Jimmy Carter to George Bush.  So, instead of a description of the President of the USA as the “Georgia Giant” and a “clod-hopper”; he gets called “The dirty alderman.”  Despite their shared Maine background, it appears King might have liked Bush less than he did Carter.  Then again, he also deletes the line, “The night that man had been elected had been a night of horror for him, and for all thinking men”, but since the thought is attached to Len Creighton, who is one of the men responsible for the flu, it’s probably just a reflection of the fact that Carter was not perceived as militaristic as his predecessors Nixon and Ford were, and thus might have been viewed as a threat by men such as Creighton to the military’s development of biological weapons, and perhaps to Creighton’s livelihood of war in general.

From here.

That King felt “dirty” to be a descriptor specific to Bush is significant, since he’s used it as a descriptor specific to the CIA: their “dirty little wars” mentioned in The Shining (these are the wars that are “dirty” because they’re a) specifically engineered for profit, and b) presented to the public as being for national security, not for profit). Bush’s association with the CIA is that he served as its director for one year in 1976–Bush is not publicly purported to have ever worked for the CIA in any capacity before or after this one year. According to the CIA’s own account, Bush came on as Director of Central Intelligence during the “‘time of troubles'”:

The Agency was shrouded in controversy from the leak of the “Family Jewels,” an internal report detailing controversial activities undertaken by the Agency dating back to President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration.

From here.

But don’t worry, because Bush turned everything around:

As DCI he immediately established himself as a leader who restored the morale and reputation of the CIA.

From here.

Bush originally hailed from snobby New England, where his father was a Connecticut senator named Prescott who initially worked “as a Wall Street executive investment banker,” but George (known in the family as “Poppy”) made his fortune down in Texas, eventually settling here in Houston and tapping the burgeoning offshore drilling market in the nearby Gulf of Mexico. After his time in office, he lived here until he died not quite two years ago, triggering a spate of articles extolling his heroism. There is a fairly elaborate monument to him here downtown that was dedicated long before he died, in ’04, which emphasizes how important both oil and war heroism are to his narrative.

The investigative journalist Russ Baker has some pretty crazy-sounding ideas about Bush’s connection to JFK’s assassination and Watergate that he lays out in his book Family of Secrets–excerpts of which you can read here. Baker’s first excerpt lays out some not unconvincing evidence that Bush was actually a CIA agent long before he was named their DCI. The theory continues that Bush used the offshore oil rigs from his oil business to stage operations related to the covert Bay of Pigs operation, and that he helped train a group of Cubans that helped assassinate JFK. This theory basically cites the motivation to do so as JFK’s intentness on getting rid of “the oil depletion allowance, which greatly reduced taxes on income derived from the production of oil,” predominantly coveted by Texas oilmen (such as Bush). Baker claims the revenue lost by the taxpayers to this allowance was $140 billion. (When you realize that politicians write the tax code and learn about the loopholes like this one it’s pocked with, it’s not so hard to see how the wealth keeps trickling up…)

I don’t necessarily think King is alluding to this conspiracy theory in any way intentionally (I doubt it was on his radar, predominant as the narrative of Bush being a “wimp” was), it connects back both to his fascination with the Kennedy assassination and to how these 70s novels of his are haunted by the political duplicity of Watergate, which specifically pivoted on the covert methods the CIA practiced. And to inhabit the worlds of King’s early novels that are so saturated with this 70s paranoia, it becomes even more possible (for me at least) to believe in at least the possibility that the CIA, cornered by the publication of its secrets, staged bringing in an outsider in order to clean up its act.

The Bush rabbit hole goes deeper…Antony Sutton, the academic who did (subsequently shunned) research on the U.S. financing “both sides” of wars including the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam, wrote about the idea of “contrived conflict” as utilized by the “Hegelian State” in his 1983 book America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. Bush, as was his father Prescott and his son W., was a member of this “secret” order (as was W.’s ’04 Presidential election opponent John Kerry). Really this society is just a natural (if insanely insidious) extension of what we in modern society dub “networking.” H.W.’s membership in this order is also cited as circumstantial evidence of his being a CIA agent, since the Ivy League secret societies, especially the Bones, were heavily recruited from. It almost seems like these “secret” groups are especially designed to practice/indoctrinate members to the idea of covert ops…

(Side note: One of the “dirty little wars” I mentioned when King referenced these these in The Shining was the 1954 coup in Guatemala engineered to preserve the bottom line of the American corporation the United Fruit Company, purveyor of bananas, which I thought of when Dayna Jurgens tries to stab Flagg with her switchblade and it turns into…a banana.)

At any rate, thinking about these possibilities (admittedly far from proven but hardly completely crackpot), it’s amusing to picture the elder Bush sitting there telling the American people that:

“Further, there has been a vicious rumor promulgated by certain radical anti-establishment groups that this strain of influenza has been somehow bred by this government for some possible military use. Fellow Americans, this is a flat-out falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and now. This country signed the revised Geneva Accords on poison gas, nerve gas, and germ warfare in good conscience and in good faith. We have not now nor have we ever—”

[a spasm of sneezes]

“—have we ever been a party to the clandestine manufacture of substances outlawed by the Geneva Convention. This is a moderately serious outbreak of influenza, no more and no less. We have reports tonight of outbreaks in a score of other countries, including Russia and Red China. Therefore we—”

[a spasm of coughs and sneezes]

Somebody give him a mask that’s not just made of empty rhetoric!

The Stand is very much about the character of America itself, and King seems to be saying that character leaves a lot to be desired…

“We used to watch Presidents decay before our very eyes from month to month and even week to week on national TV—except for Nixon, of course, who thrived on power the way that a vampire bat thrives on blood, and Reagan, who seemed a little too stupid to get old. I guess Gerald Ford was that way, too.”

Good thing we’re about to see a Presidential election between a 74-year-old white man and a 77-year-old white man…

“I’d like to have that old fellow they call the Judge. But he’s seventy, and that’s too damn old.”

-SCR