Author: profrol

Here We Go: Carrie

On By profrol8 Comments

“All right. What happened?”

…. “Nobody knows, not yet.”

Stephen King. “Carrie.” iBooks.

Carrie, Stephen King’s first novel, was published in 1974. The book juxtaposes epistolary snippets from newspapers, books, and even graffiti scrawled about Carrie White on classroom desks with direct scenes of the titular character and those surrounding her who will play pivotal roles in her taking revenge on the small town of Chamberlain, Maine, where Carrie has always been treated as an outcast.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One, “Blood Sport,” opens with a newspaper story about stones raining down on Margaret White’s house when her daughter Carrie was three. We then go into a direct scene of a morning when Carrie, now a high-school senior, is showering in the locker room after gym class when, unbeknownst to her, she gets her period for the first time. Having never been informed about this standard occurrence by her mother, Carrie believes the blood means she is dying and freaks out while her fellow classmates jeer and throw tampons at her. As Carrie is distressed, weird things happen like a light fixture popping and an ashtray flipping off the principal’s desk when he dismisses her for the day. On her walk home, Carrie notes that the muscle in her brain she can use to move things sometimes seems to be getting stronger. When she then confronts her zealously religious mother for never informing her about periods, her mother says that the blood is a mark of sin, and she locks Carrie in the prayer closet for hours.

Meanwhile, one of the girls in the locker room during the incident, Sue Snell, confides to her popular boyfriend Tommy that she feels bad about what happened. The sentiment is not shared by another girl involved, Chris Hargensen, who refuses to participate in the gym teacher Ms. Desjardin’s detentions for the incident and is thus banned from attending the prom (or Spring Ball). Sue asks Tommy to take Carrie to the prom as her own penance, and he agrees; he has some trouble convincing Carrie he really wants to take her, but she eventually agrees. Discovering Tommy and Carrie’s names on the ballots for Ball King and Queen, Chris enlists her delinquent boyfriend Billy to procure some pig’s blood, which he does with his delinquent group of friends.

In Part Two, “Prom Night,” Carrie’s mother of course does not want her to go to the prom and is enraged Carrie’s sewn a sinful red dress for the occasion, but Carrie goes (after enduring some anxiety that Tommy will not actually show up). She enjoys herself at first, until she and Tommy are called up on stage after being voted King and Queen, and Billy and Chris unleash the buckets of pig blood Billy’s rigged above the stage, dousing Carrie and knocking Tommy out with a falling pail. A bit later, Sue, at home, notices that the school she can see through her kitchen window from a distance is on fire. We learn through other accounts that somehow in the gym the doors shut and locked themselves, trapping the majority of the students inside while the fire-sprinkler system starts deploying. Carrie is later seen walking around town starting fires and disabling the fire hydrants that might put them out.

We circle back to Carrie’s point of view of what happened when the blood dropped, seeing that she mentally shut the gym doors and started the sprinklers in response to her classmates’ laughter. After leaving, she stops at a church to pray (but fails to sense God) before heading home to confront her mother, who confesses that when Carrie’s father raped her, she liked it, before stabbing Carrie in the shoulder. Carrie is still able to kill her by using her telekinesis to stop her mother’s heart, then leaves. When Billy and Chris pass by her driving and Billy tries to run her over, Carrie flips their car and kills them, then collapses in a parking lot. Sue is able to find her by tapping into the psychic energy Carrie’s exuding that everyone seems to notice, and when Sue finds her, they communicate telepathically so that Sue is able to feel what it’s like to be teased and tortured like Carrie, and Carrie sees that Sue didn’t plan on Tommy taking her to the prom as a trick. Sue feels Carrie die.

In Part Three, “Wreckage,” we see the mass funerals and debates in the books about the incident and what to make of it, including the official investigative body’s conclusion that there’s “no reason to believe that a recurrence is likely or even possible” before we get a final letter from a woman describing her child clearly exhibiting telekinetic powers. The End.

The narrative of Carrie might be more familiar to people from Brian DePalma’s movie adaptation in 1976 that launched the career of Sissy Spacek (who, to my joy, narrated my audiobook version of the novel), but the film omits some of the critical elements that give the book a lot more depth. The first is the epistolary snippets. These provide more context about the before and after of the novel’s present timeline–things like Carrie having had at least one major telekinetic incident in the past with the raining stones, and, perhaps more importantly, an attempt by others, including those directly involved like Sue but mainly those only made aware of it after the fact, like politicians and scientists, to reckon with what has happened. The movie narrows its focus on the effects of what happened to just Sue, ignoring the possibility of national awareness about the incident. But by threading this larger awareness into the novel, King achieves a few things the film doesn’t. The first is suspense: these snippets provide direct hints very early on that a major incident involving a lot of death is going to happen because of Carrie. The second is a more meaningful cultural commentary than the film manages to make by refusing to look outside the present timeline. And finally, one could also argue that in representing the larger reverberations of this incident and the existence of telekinesis as supposed scientific fact, Carrie is the entry portal into the King extended universe.

Suspense

King actually tells us a few things outright early on. On the second page (of the ebook at least), we’re told:

What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic.

And the mere existence of epistolary snippets from books analyzing Carrie and an apparent tragedy she’s related to provides a hook that pulls the reader in. This is a hook that writers deploy frequently but when described seems counterintuitive: you’re basically giving away the end at the beginning. But even if the specifics of a high death toll are revealed, the reader’s interest is piqued by this knowledge rather than coming to the conclusion that the book has become pointless to read if we already know the end. We might know what happens–loosely–but now we want to know how it happens. And now the drama behind potentially low-stakes developments like who is or is not going to be able to go to a high-school dance is intensified, because we implicitly understand that these developments are pivotal to the development of a massacre.

King’s references to the tragedy the arc is building toward are somewhat vague at first but become more pointed in an escalation of their own. Very early on we get from one of the snippets of a book written about the incident:

The great tragedy is that we are now all Monday-morning quarterbacks . . .

Not long after that another one of the book snippet’s mentions:

One of her surviving classmates, Ruth Gogan…

A bit later, when we start getting excerpts from Sue’s memoir, she gives us a more specific estimate of the death toll that’s coming:

In the wake of two hundred deaths and the destruction of an entire town, it is so easy to forget one thing: We were kids.

One thing to note about this final passage is the double duty it’s doing: it reveals a suspenseful scale of upcoming destruction, but that scale is used as a springboard to characterize Sue and her attitude about what happened, not to mention that Sue, via the existence of her memoir, is also revealed to have survived.

Related to suspense is the novel’s structure: we start with a scene of Carrie getting her period in a shower. We build to a climax (or near-climax) of blood being dumped on her, in response to which she thinks (among other things):

They had finally given her the shower they wanted.

Something the pacing starts to do in the second part is circle back to describe the same incident through different points of view, specifically witnesses’ experiences of what happened juxtaposed with Carrie’s experience, a tactic that works to draw out the suspense of this extended action sequence and provide natural breaks that increase the tension. These competing accounts also complicate the dichotomy of monster versus victim.

Essentially there are two threads running through the rising action in the epistolary snippets and the direct scenes, and these build to a nice concurrent climax in the Carrie-Sue exchange when Sue’s contentious interview with the White Commission is juxtaposed with what “really” happened between her and Carrie. The film’s adaptation of the rising action’s penultimate and ultimate events also demonstrates a critical distinction between novels and film in how novels can depict action in the mind in a way films can’t. Hence, we have the climax of the film being when Carrie kills her mother by telekinetically hurling sharp objects at her, something that’s much easier to represent visually on a screen than Carrie’s visualizing her mother’s heart to bring it to a stop (an action that resonates more with themes of parental love and responsibility). Then immediately after Carrie kills her mother in the movie, the house implodes. I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be a product of Carrie’s own psychic tumult in the wake of her matricide, but I do know that it was not as satisfying to me as the psychic exchange between Sue and Carrie in the novel’s climax, which in a way feels almost sexual as each feels what it’s like to be the other–two become one. This climax is also a potentially implicit commentary on the type of access that fiction-writing itself offers–direct access to someone else’s head, to what it feels like to be somebody else. And the film adaptation’s doing away with this element of the climax altogether seems–to this fiction writer at least–like an implicit admission of films’ inability to do what novels can.

Cultural Commentary

The movie, as mentioned, dispenses almost entirely with any reckoning with the aftermath of the tragedy, but this is in large part where the novel is able to derive its relevant commentary, perhaps most acutely via the primary investigative body dubbed the “White Commission,” an almost too on-the-nose label reminiscent of the real-life Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of JFK. If there was any doubt of the connection, one of the book snippets notes:

Morton Cratzchbarken, in an admittedly sensationalized address to The National Colloquium on Psychic Phenomena last year, said that the two most stunning events of the twentieth century have been the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the destruction that came to Chamberlain, Maine, in May of 1979.

It’s also interesting that Carrie, published in 1974, is set a few years in the future, but in drafting it King himself would have been less than a decade out from JFK’s death. So what commentary is he making, exactly, with this likeness? What we see in snippets from the White Commission’s interviews, most climactically in its interview with Sue, is an unwillingness to listen to what the witnesses have to tell them–they seem to want to ignore the collective testimony serving as evidence for Carrie’s telekinesis and telepathy alike. Sue notes before we actually see her (post-)climactic interview with the Commission that they used her as a “handy scapegoat,” language that might call to mind a possible likeness to JFK-assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. But not long after Sue makes this claim, the passage cited above continues:

Cratzchbarken points out that both events were driven home to the citizenry by mass media, and both events have almost shouted the frightening fact that, while something had ended, something else had been irrevocably set in motion, for good or ill. If the comparison can be made, then Thomas Ross played the part of a Lee Harvey Oswald—trigger man in a catastrophe. The question that still remains is: Did he do so wittingly or unwittingly?

Here we’re seeing another element the epistolary structure introduces (lost in the film translation): the divide between what really happened and what people think happened. If the novel were purely epistolary, we’d have competing accounts that we’d be left on our own to make sense of, meaning we wouldn’t know an objective “truth” about what happened. But by intercutting these accounts with direct scenes of what happened that include access to different characters’ actual thoughts (and not just what they tell others), the reader is provided the objective truth of what “really” happened, which we’re then able to compare to the version of events recounted by others. This means that we do know the answer to the question posed by the passage above of whether Tommy is a witting or unwitting “trigger man”–he is patently unwitting. Anyone looking at the events from outside can’t be sure whether Tommy and Sue set Carrie up as a joke intentionally, but the reader knows definitively that their motives were pure, which heightens the tragedy. But if Tommy (and/or Sue) is an Oswald figure, then there’s potential commentary that our culture’s historical conception of Oswald as “witting” trigger man is fallible. By showing us how potentially off-base the White Commission’s interpretation of events is, King seems to be showing us that such investigatory bodies by their inherent nature not only cannot offer us a full picture of what “really” happened, but will actively obscure it.

And even if isolation could be made successful, would the American people allow a small pretty girl-child to be ripped away from her parents at the first sign of puberty to be locked in a bank vault for the rest of her life? I doubt it. Especially when the White Commission has worked so hard to convince the public that the nightmare in Chamberlain was a complete fluke.

Indeed, we seem to have returned to Square One . . .

If Sue is the Oswald figure, she is left having to reckon with the massively negative fallout that resulted from what she’d intended to be a good deed. This could be potential commentary on our country’s foreign policy–we think we know best, so we go meddle with some other country’s affairs and leadership (in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador…the list goes on)–but then it turns out to have consequences we were unable to foresee (migrant caravans, anyone?). The CIA, our country’s potential shadow self, orchestrated the assassination of many others’ country’s leaders, so even if they aren’t directly responsible for JFK’s death, they are in many ways responsible indirectly. Even if Lee Harvey Oswald was the trigger man, the larger animosity between nations that the trail of a bullet between two individual men represented is still the product of our government’s actions that make JFK’s shooting much more than a mere “fluke.” King seems to be pointing out the dangers of ignoring such implications:

In conclusion, I would like to point out the grave risk authorities are taking by burying the Carrie White affair under the bureaucratic mat—and I am speaking specifically of the so-called White Commission. The desire among politicians to regard TK as a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon seems very strong, and while this may be understandable it is not acceptable. The possibility of a recurrence, genetically speaking, is 99 per cent. It’s time we planned now for what may be. . . .

The White Commission’s problematic conclusion ends up being the penultimate statement of the novel:

. . . and so we must conclude that, while an autopsy performed on the subject indicates some cellular changes which may indicate the presence of some paranormal power, we find no reason to believe that a recurrence is likely or even possible . . .

The final piece of Carrie‘s epistolary puzzle, snapped into place immediately after this conclusion, is a letter in which a woman describes seeing her young daughter exhibiting telekinetic powers. This juxtaposition would seem to make a fairly clear–and foreboding–statement about the fallibility of the White Commission’s conclusion. The evidence is right in front of their faces, and yet they ignore it. This would seem to be another critical element of how King injects “real-life” horror into his fantastical scenarios.

I’d posit that King’s ability to inject “real-life” horror into such scenarios is potentially one of his defining features and a major element of his success. Carrie’s powers aren’t the truly horrifying thing here, but rather the combination of circumstances that give rise to her deploying them in such a horrifying way. These factors are the religious oppression of her mother and the mockery of her classmates, the latter seeming to stem directly from the former. But it’s definitely worth noting, if risking stating the obvious, that these factors are both things that could occur in the “real” world, and through this lens this narrative seems a harbinger of the modern-day school shooter: a high-school student who is alienated due to relentless mocking uses the potentially destructive powers at her disposal to take revenge on a mass scale (the death toll mentioned at the end is 400+ and counting). In this reading, Carrie’s powers become the equivalent of the modern ease of access to the AK-47, foreshadowing a trend of predominantly teenaged retribution in school hallways that won’t be fully realized in the culture for another two decades.

Related to these themes of alienated teens and the country’s dicey foreign policy in the seventies, Carrie is not pocked by as many references to what was likely the most salient and horrific political flashpoint of the time, the Vietnam War, as its followup Salem’s Lot will be. But Carrie‘s image of the bodies for a collective mass funeral of high school students seems to be commenting on the senseless carnage of youth in Vietnam:

They were buried on June 1 and 2 in three mass ceremonies. A memorial service was held on June 3 in the town square. It was the most moving ceremony that this reporter has ever witnessed. Attendance was in the thousands, and the entire assemblage was still as the school band, stripped from fifty-six to a bare forty, played the school song and taps.

If the horror of Vietnam is a mere trickle of an undercurrent in Carrie, the horror of the potential mundanity of domesticity is closer to a riptide–sneaky and powerful enough to suck you under and carry you away. Take Sue’s consideration of her potential future:

The word she was avoiding was expressed To Conform, in the infinitive, and it conjured up miserable images of hair in rollers, long afternoons in front of the ironing board in front of the soap operas while hubby was off busting heavies in an anonymous Office; of joining the P.T.A. and then the country club when their income moved into five figures; of pills in circular yellow cases without number to insure against having to move out of the misses’ sizes before it became absolutely necessary and against the intrusion of repulsive little strangers who shat in their pants and screamed for help at two in the morning; of fighting with desperate decorum to keep the n*****s out of Kleen Korners, standing shoulder to shoulder with Terri Smith (Miss Potato Blossom of 1975) and Vicki Jones (Vice President of the Women’s League), armed with signs and petitions and sweet, slightly desperate smiles.

After we momentarily marvel at the datedness of an income aspiring to “five figures” (and return to the casual racism in a future post), let’s note Tommy’s teasing response to Sue’s ennui:

“I’ll probably end up working at my dad’s car lot,” he said. “I’ll spend my Friday and Saturday nights down at Uncle Billy’s or out at The Cavalier drinking beer and talking about the Saturday afternoon I got that fat pitch from Saunders and we upset Dorchester. Get married to some nagging broad and always own last year’s model, vote Democrat—”

“Don’t,” she said, her mouth suddenly full of a dark, sweet horror. She pulled him to her. “Love me. My head is so bad tonight. Love me. Love me.”

Interestingly, Sue’s response to these visions of domestic horror is to want Tommy to have sex with her; also interestingly, this will be the first time the sex is actually good for her. Later, the possibility that Sue is pregnant is briefly noted:

Her period was late. Almost a week late. And she had always been as regular as an almanac.

I didn’t notice any followup references to this, but it comes very close to the climactic dumping of the pig’s blood, seeming to underscore its potential horror.

Sue’s horror of domesticity seems to serve as reinforcement for Carrie’s domestic conundrum and how her going to the prom with Tommy comes to represent the one possibility for escape she has:

And if he didn’t come, if she drew back and gave up? High school would be over in a month. Then what? A creeping, subterranean existence in this house, supported by Momma, watching game shows and soap operas all day on television at Mrs. Garrison’s house when she had Carrie In To Visit (Mrs. Garrison was eighty-six), walking down to the Center to get a malted after supper at the Kelly Fruit when it was deserted, getting fatter, losing hope, losing even the power to think?

No. Oh dear God, please no.

(please let it be a happy ending)

This passage complicates how to read the ending that we do get. Carrie’s apparently subconscious–to judge from the parentheses–clinging to the idea of a happy ending shows to an extent how she’s been conditioned by the culture despite the restrictions of her upbringing, and it certainly humanizes someone about to engage in a monstrous spree of destruction–which is more or less the novel’s entire project. It also invites us to consider the alternative to her not engaging in this monstrous spree. Her moment of choice has come, but the real tragedy is not so much the eventual death toll as the fact that she has no good choice. She’ll either attempt to step out of her shell and be pushed over the edge, or she’ll stay stuck in the swamp of a domestic nightmare. (There’s also the interesting detail that Carrie’s mother works at a laundry, and that this is specifically noted more than once to be a source of the brute physical strength she sometimes uses on Carrie.) Is not her escape from this swamp, no matter the means, a version of a happy ending?

Cultural Commentary II: Narrative Stance

In The Art of Perspective, writer Christopher Castellani notes the advent of shows like The Affair, which uses a plot device frequently noted from the Japanese movie Rashomon, according to Wikipedia:

The film is known for a plot device that involves various characters providing subjective, alternative, self-serving, and contradictory versions of the same incident.

With this device, the viewer/reader is never shown the objective, true reality of what “really” happened, but is left with the understanding that in a world where we’re all trapped in our own necessarily limited perspectives, truly there is no objective reality. This development is part of a trend that can be tracked through literary movements: look at 19th-century novels, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and we have omniscient narrators espousing about what becomes through their omniscient perspective official facts about human nature, implying that there is a universal objective reality. Around the time we get to Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (1881), narrative focus starts to pivot from the external to the internal–action is based in the internal vagaries of the mind, and narrative climax defined by the James Joycean epiphany. In the wake of the First World War’s apparent evidence of a lack of any all-knowing and -loving deity, the modernists become obsessed with the limitations of the individual subjective experience, and we get Proust mining from his own thoughts and memories enough material for a seven-volume novel. The postmodernists take the conundrum of subjectivity’s limitations to absurdist levels, bringing the backlash of minimalist realism and then something called post-postmodernism. Granted, this is a narrative of literary history distilled from my years of myopic patriarchal western imperialist classical education, but it seems more or less true that we’ve arrived at a point in time where the all-knowing narrator has bitten the dust, due in large part to the now abundantly obvious issues of 1) omniscience/objective reality not actually being a thing that exists, and 2) any all-knowing narrator has to be written by a decidedly not-all-knowing individual human person.

(This issue of a lack of an all-knowing entity who can offer a comprehensive and infallible account of “what happened” permeates not only fiction, but history as well. History is written by the victors, as Winston Churchhill is said to have said, which connects directly to theme raised by JFK.)

Basically, who now has the ego to aspire to godhood, omniscience-wise? The Victorians doing so was a symptom of the hubris that drove their ruthless colonialist expansion. But America was and is also an empire. Enter a young Stephen King. Who could have more hubris than a white American male under the age of 25 (except for maybe one over the age of 25)?

King gives us competing accounts of what happened this night in Chamberlain, but does not limit these to subjectivity. These “direct scenes” often strip psychic distance to the bone to give us direct access to different characters’ thoughts, and King plays with the technique that critics like James Wood have dubbed “free indirect discourse/style” in which characters’ thoughts are given to us directly in their pure unmediated substance by doing this in the traditional sense and seeming to penetrate to an even deeper layer of the mind by depicting some thoughts within parentheses. This reinforces the King tenet of potential horror lurking in the hidden corners of the mind (more on that below) and is a nice setup to allow us to see Carrie’s telepathy at play in other characters’ minds later (also more on that below).

But King frequently give us lines that transcend the subjectivity of individual experience into a broader objectivity, latitude King sets up for himself in the opening lines of the first “direct scene”:

Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow. On the surface, all the girls in the shower room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply glad that the White bitch had taken it in the mouth again. Some of them might also have claimed surprise, but of course their claim was untrue.

By incorporating this omniscience into his narrative stance, King seems to imply that fiction is more substantive than official history in being able to provide a full and complete accounting of “what happened.” This omniscience also transcends historical themes to connect to the book’s religious ones about the nature of God. Take this passage:

If someone had been there to watch, he would have been struck by the resemblance between [Carrie and her mother].

It’s interesting that King constructs this hypothetical entity in this passage when, having given himself the latitude of a purely omniscient narrator, King doesn’t really need to position this supposition as being from this hypothetical entity’s perspective but could just tell us that a strong resemblance exists between mother and daughter. But the hypothetical entity King conjures here is of course reminiscent of God, with the construction of the sentence–“If someone had been there…”–calling into question whether God might really be there or not. The existence of God is not something that this omniscient narrator is prepared to take a definitive stance on, apparently. (We’ll put the gendering of this potential omniscient entity aside for a future post.)

The conflict between religion and science is on full display as Carrie’s mother reckons with Carrie’s powers as some kind of divine punishment while the scientific community reckons with the evidence of Carrie’s telekinesis. King takes great pains to establish another critical element the film omits–the scientific basis of telekinesis:

With the TK phenomenon, the male appears to be the carrier; the TK gene may be recessive in the female, but dominates only in the female.

There’s also the fact that Carrie’s autopsy revealed abnormalities in her brain, something the White Commission acknowledges before immediately dismissing as a one-time anomaly. While that dismissal allows for a pointed commentary on the fallibility of human reasoning within the space of this one novel, King’s ending the book with the implication that others do indeed have powers like Carrie’s is a punt outside the confines of this book into future ones.

The King Universe

Carrie seems primarily driven by the concept of telekinesis, but the novel also establishes a link between telekinesis and telepathy that we’ll no doubt see recur in other novels (this link is the main basis for his most recent release, The Institute). In the second half of the book detailing the destruction that occurs on Prom Night, several witnesses are able to identify Carrie White by name despite having never seen her before. Tommy notes hearing her name echoing in his head:

Carrie drew in a startled, smothered gasp, and Tommy again felt (but for only a second) that weird vertigo in his mind

(carrie carrie carrie carrie)

that seemed to blank out all thought but the name and image of this strange girl he was with. For a fleeting second he was literally scared shitless.

Then one witness interviewed later not only recognizes Carrie without ever having seen her, but seems to know what she’s thinking:

And she kept looking at her hands and rubbing them on her dress, trying to get the blood off and thinking she’d never get it off and how she was going to pour blood on the whole town and make them pay. It was awful stuff.

Q. How would you have any idea what she was thinking?

A. I don’t know. I can’t explain.

Q. For the remainder of your testimony, I wish you would stick to what you saw, Mr. Quillan.

and

“Tom Quillan flinched back. “Carrie. Carrie White.”

“Who? How do you know?”

Quillan blinked slowly. “I dunno. It just sort of . . . came to me.”

and

Q. Mrs. Simard, how did you know it was Carrie White?

A. I just knew.

Q. This knowing, Mrs. Simard: was it like a light going on in your head?

A. No, sir.

Q. What was it like?

A. I can’t tell you. It faded away the way a dream does. An hour after you get up you can only remember you had a dream. But I knew.

Q. Was there an emotional feeling that went with this knowledge?

A. Yes. Horror.

Carrie’s “psychic energy” encompassing both telekinesis and telepathy is relevant to another significant tenet of the King universe, one conveyed in the first line of the novel we get that’s a direct scene rather than an epistolary snippet:

Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.

The true horror, King implies almost immediately, originates from within the self, rather than from external factors. This would seem to be why so many of King’s books are dubbed “psychological thrillers,” and seems reinforced here in that one of the main books he’s fabricated about the White incident is called “The Shadow Exploded.” This dichotomy of an internal versus external starting point for narrative action is potentially a key to a broader point I’ll return to about the distinction between “genre fiction” and “literature” as plot-based (something happens to characters) and character-based (something happens because of characters).

By its very title, Carrie would seem to be a character-based narrative. Notably, few novels in the King canon are named for characters: there’s Misery (which isn’t the character’s real name), and Dolores Claiborne, and Mr. Mercedes (also not the character’s real name). (Cujo and Christine might in a sense be named for characters, but those characters being a dog and a car, respectively, don’t really count.) This means King’s first three most character-based narratives are female-centric (though Misery might split the difference, being from a man’s perspective; we’ll see).

Carrie‘s being character-based, by the classifying definition I offered above, would put it more in the realm of literary than genre–the action happens because of the character. And yet if Carrie causes the action to happen via her telekinetic powers, she’s exercising them in response to external stimuli–she snaps because of her classmates’ excessive teasing, a narrative thread that can be traced back to her mother’s fundamentalist restrictions marking her as an outcast from day one. These are all things that happen to Carrie, not things that she causes. But the root causes of these external factors also have a basis in human nature that potentially makes them more literary, as the aforementioned referenced line points out, and which connects back to King frequently deriving horror from the real in the midst of the fantastical–in this case, the horror of the human capacity for cruelty. What makes Carrie a complex character is that we understand her motivations; we’ve been granted access to her selfhood and situation, and we sympathize. We might, in her situation, have done the very same thing.

-SCR

The Beginning

On By profrol4 Comments

Before I actually start posting about King’s novels, I’ll elaborate a bit more on the origins and aims of the Long Live the King project. I myself am a fiction writer, albeit not a particularly prolific or well published one, which is probably at least one of the sources of my fascination with one of the most prolific and well published fiction writers of all time. King is, in many ways, the reason I became a writer in the first place.

This blog’s home page says that it “will look at King from a biographical perspective, a narrative perspective, a psychological perspective, a creative writing perspective, a pop culture perspective, a personal perspective, and pretty much anything and everything in between.” These perspectives are all overlapping Venn diagrams, not distinct or linear. But were I to attempt to trace the origins of the project chronologically, I suppose I’d have to start with the origin of my personal interest in King and his work.

My relationship to the King goes way back. By the time I was born in June of 1985, King had been publishing books at his stunningly prolific rate for over a decade, and would have been working on the final editorial stages of It. My mother and her sisters read his books almost religiously. When I was little, my mother entertained me by describing the plots of his books in lurid detail (describing the plots of books and movies, inasmuch as she can remember them, is one of my mother’s hobbies). I remember getting confused at one point, not realizing she was describing the plot of Pet Sematary and having somehow gotten the impression she was talking about King himself–“Stephen King did that for real?” I asked when she described a man so distraught he tried to raise his own son from the dead. Appalled that I could think that, she snapped that she was going to stop describing the books to me if I couldn’t tell what was real from what wasn’t.

It was an idle threat. 

By the time I reached junior high, I was reading King’s books for myself, despite my mother’s moratorium on consuming content she deemed “inappropriate.” The devil’s in the details, and she’d censored her plot summaries to gloss over the more graphic parts of King’s prose. I remember passing around a copy of Cujo so my friends could giggle over a scene where a jilted lover (I think?) got revenge by jacking off all over his ex’s bed. It was 1998, and I was thirteen. That year in English class we had to do a biographical project on someone, and I chose the King. Tasked to report on a biography, I read one that, despite having lost probably dozens of books over the years, I am still in possession of: George Beahm’s Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Boogeyman (1998). This turned out to be, as my teacher would point out, a biography of King’s working life, rather than a more traditional comprehensive biography (fortunately she didn’t hold this against me, grade-wise).

Amidst his descriptions of King’s career trajectory, Beahm notes a response to one of King’s early novel manuscripts before Carrie was eventually accepted: 

“We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”

Wolheim, a well-regarded editor/publisher, knew his markets and his readers well. He knew they read fiction to get away from the depressing realities of life; they wanted to read and be entertained (26). 

This is a point I’ll return to.

In typical junior-high fashion, the biographical project required compiling the required materials into a shoe box. To decorate mine, I went to Kinko’s and scanned and miniaturized images of King’s novels’ first-edition book covers, reproduced on this site’s collaged banner. The box was the only part of the project I didn’t get a perfect score on, its decor apparently not demonstrating quite enough work on my part. So I’ve embellished the first-edition covers in the blog’s banner a bit more just for you, Ms. Norton. 

In high school, Stephen King was the reason I went around saying I was going to be a writer when I grew up. The few half-hearted attempts to write fiction I actually made were blatant King rip-offs. I was too busy with schoolwork and sports and my part-time job and religious repression to do anything much other than say what I was going to do later.

For college, I moved 600 miles from home, majored in English and read classics instead of King. I took creative-writing classes and finally started writing in earnest. Rice University, renowned for engineering and other hard sciences, had only one full-time creative-writing professor at the time. Justin Cronin had published two understated literary novels, and he forbade genre-writing in his class–no sci-fi or horror. We focused on understated short stories, and the final semester of my senior year I was planning on taking a novel-writing independent study with him, but then he left suddenly on a sabbatical to do research for his own novel. It was shortly after I graduated in May of 2007 that I heard the news: Justin had landed a multi-million-dollar book deal for a trilogy about vampires.

Cronin never refers to them as “vampires” in the text of The Passage (2010) and its two sequels, but rather as “virals.” A huge marketing push behind the book promoted it as literary and genre in one: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road meets Stephen King’s The Stand. Justin appeared on Good Morning America, where he acknowledged the book is a vampire narrative (while attempting to divert its connection to the Twilight fad by mentioning the vampire narrative’s more literary antecedents–“it’s a fable to reassure us it’s better to be mortal”), and where–ta-da–Stephen King himself phoned in as a surprise to praise the book. Justin graciously referred to King as a “monument” when the interviewer implied this moment must have been the highlight of Justin’s career, but I couldn’t help but wonder, SJP-style, if he inwardly bristled at all when King called him “buddy”–folksy down-home friendliness, or potential condescension? In a symbolic physical manifestation of the debt owed to King, Justin kept looking up above him, noting that was where King’s voice was coming from. Justin’s interviewer noted at the end that people would be seeing his book at “beaches and airports” everywhere.

(Cronin’s Passage trilogy books were adapted into a television show that premiered on Fox in January of 2019 with a ten-episode first season, after which it was cancelled. The Passage would not be the next Game of Thrones.)

Witnessing Justin make the leap from academia to commercial success was another chapter in my own lifelong artistic battle of what I wanted to prioritize in my own work.

Like King, I have had to make a living as an English teacher to support a habit of writing fiction before that fiction started generating revenue. Unlike King, I’ve had to do this a lot longer, and am in fact still doing it. I teach composition writing at the University of Houston, which consists primarily of two courses: First-Year Writing I (1303) and First-Year Writing II (1304). Students are supposed to be learning about analytical and argumentative writing. For 1303, I use pop culture as the umbrella theme of the content students read and write about; for 1304 I use politics (more specifically, political conspiracy theories). These, to make a gross generalization, form the twin pillars of our modern civilization, and reading Stephen King–more specifically, reading Stephen King chronologically–might provide an interesting gloss on both. His work can be read as a kind of historical artifact, since he’s published across decades and populates his books with dated references to both politics and pop culture to achieve verisimilitude. His continued mainstream appeal also offers a potential window into the concerns and preoccupations of the culture and how those have (and/or have not) changed over time.

In my 1303 course we start off with the idea that popular culture both shapes and reflects the world we live in. We know King is a pillar of our popular culture from the fact that not only is his work regularly referenced in other media, but that he himself has been portrayed as a character on shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy. A la the carbon footprint we should all be concerned about at this point due to its role in this planet’s biggest real-life horror story, this blog will track the King Footprint: how Stephen King’s life and work has reflected our life and culture in the decades surrounding the transition from one millennia into another. 

I imagine centuries from now an alien ship landing on the charred carcass of our planet, discovering in the course of their anthropological excursions more skeletons of book spines reading Stephen King than King James Bible, and deducing which was the more significant cultural text. (And even if there might technically be more copies of James Patterson floating around, these might all just be different versions of the same book.) In this scenario, future eons/generations might look on King’s work as a sort of Greek myth, foundational texts of the culture expressing/dispensing necessary lessons about life, death, and human nature in the form of outsized horrific anecdotes. 

While I’ll be looking at King through these political and pop cultural lenses, I’ll also be influenced by my second teaching gig at a performing and visual arts high school (PVA). There I teach creative writing–fiction writing, the majority of the time, and for my classes there my students and I post on a blog about the craft of creative writing. Stephen King is the most tagged author in the blog’s four and half years of posts, in part because an old story of his, “Suffer the Little Children,” has been a popular choice for presentations among the freshmen after a freshman introduced it into our story database a couple of years ago (I note this to point out that I am not the one who originally posted the story as an option, though I did allow it to be read and discussed in class). In the story, an elementary-school teacher ends up murdering a dozen of her students after becoming convinced they’ve turned into demonic monsters. “How does he get away with this shit?” a fellow teacher of mine asked after reading it to help me out with the freshmen’s presentations. I’d thought my fellow teacher, who was relatively burnt out on teaching at that point, might enjoy this story more than she did. Now I can’t remember if she posed the “shit” question about “Suffer the Little Children” or another King story that’s been presented on a fair amount, “A Death,” in which the mystery of a man’s guilt in a murder is resolved by a piece of evidence that turns up in his stool after he’s hung (and which is a story I must take responsibility for introducing to the class database myself). My fellow teacher’s “shit” question might be more pertinent to the latter story, published in The New Yorker in 2015, versus the former, first published in a magazine called Cavalier in 1972–which means it came out before Carrie, King’s first novel, and that he was in his early twenties when he wrote it–by male standards in many ways still an adolescent. (Note: “Suffer the Little Children” was not actually published in a King story collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, until 1993, raising at least one thorny issue with attempting to approach King’s work chronologically….) And yet, “Suffer” still contains that nugget of quintessential King–psychological horror–as the story leaves it (somewhat) ambiguous whether the children have actually become monsters or the teacher has simply gone insane.

As it happens, I first introduced “A Death” to the class database for the advanced fiction workshop, not the freshmen, and did so after reading it in The New Yorker not long after an advanced fiction student did a presentation on another King story I had not read before, “Autopsy Room 4,” in which a man mistaken for dead due to a rare snake-poison-induced paralysis experiences the beginning of his own autopsy. The sensory details in “Autopsy” and the voice of the main character were outstanding, but the premise tipped too far into the absurd when the man’s true living state was revealed by an erection–and it wasn’t even the juvenile humor of the erection that was the issue; it was that the erection’s reveal was rendered utterly irrelevant because before the doctor performing the autopsy even noticed it, someone burst into the room crying he’s alive! Then the story goes even further into stupid joke territory with a coda that the main character dated the (female, of course) autopsy doctor for a period, but they had sexual problems because he could only get it up if she wore rubber gloves. While the story does have its cultural referents–the main character/narrator is a Vietnam vet–in this case the referent is merely a meaningless plot device, the character’s shrapnel wound from Vietnam the reason the doctor needs to be holding his penis in a way that leads to his erection, and not symbolic of any larger psychological wound incurred in Vietnam that the acute tension of the current paralysis trauma would help lead to a resolution of, or at least consideration of. This is not that kind of story. The character’s experience on the autopsy table is meant merely to titillate, not to provoke meaningful thought of any real kind. And therein likely lies the source of its mainstream appeal.

The juvenile humor of “Autopsy”–this story seemed like King pleasing himself more than anything else, though, to be fair, I’m sure it probably pleased a good deal of people more than that–reminds me of a South Park episode from the most recent season, “Turd Burglars,” branded specifically as “For the Ladies,” in which the female characters are shown gratuitously shitting and vomiting after getting bacterial infections from attempting their own fecal transplants to lose weight. This episode seemed to be yet another declaration from its writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone that they can still do whatever the f*ck they want. Of course, “Autopsy” was published in 1997, shortly before South Park made its debut, and “Turd Burglars” is from 2019. One could make the case South Park has evolved and matured in its political commentary over the past two decades, while maintaining its irreverent roots in the face of a changing culture. This blog will in part attempt to chart Stephen King’s trajectory and analyze his evolution to see how much his work and commentary have matured, when, by this point, like Parker and Stone, he can basically publish whatever the f*ck he wants.

An initial glimpse of King’s potential maturation is present in the post this blog takes its name from, comparing “A Death” to “Autopsy Room 4.” I wrote the post in 2015, right after I started the class blog at the beginning of my second year at PVA. I’ve gotten somewhat sick of “A Death” in the intervening years, what with the freshmen being so fond of not just presenting on it but including in their presentations a line from the story describing a digital anal examination with a phrase that still makes me shudder (“soft pop”). This particular line seems like classic juvenile South Park King, but after rereading my 2015 post, I’ve convinced myself of the story’s literary merit and don’t (fully) believe the New Yorker published it solely because it had the King’s name on it. I would say “A Death” is more in the vein of a South Park episode like “World War Zimmerman,” making incisive commentary via and/or in spite of juvenile antics, rather than an almost purely (pre)adolescent romp like “Turd Burglars.”

With this blog I’ll continue to explore whether the conclusions I drew in that initial post hold up:

King is the king for the same reason sitcoms and blockbusters are ubiquitous: we’ve been conditioned to take short-term pleasure over long-term gain. But King is really the king because he’s proven he can also grab those of us who are seeking a challenge by the literary balls when he wants to.

To be fair, students posting about King on the class blog is probably only responsible for a little more than half the King posts there. My initial fascination with him as a tool to teach fiction-writing stemmed from the post this blog takes its name from, comparing “A Death” to “Autopsy Room 4”: King’s work is a great way to explore the distinction between “genre” and “literary” fiction. I explored this distinction by comparing King’s depiction of Lee Harvey Oswald in 11-22-63 to Don DeLillo’s in Libra and finding King’s lacking. I also found myself writing about King’s newest releases, first writing about the 2017 doorstopper Sleeping Beauties he wrote with his son Owen King, then a post last year comparing his novella Elevation to the Netflix hit movie Bird Box, and a post comparing his 2018 doorstopper The Outsider to last year’s unexpected bestseller, Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, and finally, a post about his 2019 doorstopper, The Institute, by itself. As it happens, none of these posts looked at King’s work particularly favorably, though again it should be reiterated that the lens of the blog I was writing on before was literary. That will continue to be one of the lenses I’m looking through here, but it won’t be the only one. I’m compelled to explore why I keep returning to King despite my conclusions about his generally lackluster literary status.

My educational background in regards to writing has, in a nutshell, emphasized literary as “good” and mass-market appeal as “bad.” At PVA, I am, in theory, supposed to teach my students how to write “literary” fiction, and in my years there I have found myself frequently turning to King’s work to illuminate the distinction between literary and genre as a way to define what exactly we’re talking about when we talk about “literary.” And the conclusion I come to is that people read genre fiction to escape from the world, while people read literary fiction to engage with the world. This also frequently amounts to character serving plot (genre) rather than plot serving character (literary).

Here we can return to George Beahm’s description of that publisher’s early 1970s assessment of the market for King’s work, so off the mark in the hindsight of the year 2020 as to be laughable. That publisher didn’t think King’s horrific scenarios–his “negative utopias”–were what the public would want to turn to as an escape from the horrors (specifically the horror of the mundanities) of life. But it wasn’t a fantasy of perfection that readers wanted–it was a fantasy of something more horrific than life’s mundanities to render life’s mundanities bearable by comparison. In my reading of King so far before starting this ultra-immersion project, King is best able to straddle the divide between genre and literary when his supernatural unrealities reflect and echo the horrors of the world’s natural realities.

I also tell my students that they will have artistic decisions to make about their careers and futures. Do they want to be a “good,” literary writer (like PVA alum Susan Choi, whose 2019 novel Trust Exercise set at a school much like PVA won the National Book Award and made Obama’s favorite books of the year list), or do they want to make money? Are these things really so mutually exclusive? My witnessing of Justin Cronin’s Passage trajectory makes me wonder. And to judge from Greta Gerwig’s recent adaptation of Little Women, this artistic conflict is hardly a problem pertinent only to me.

-SCR