In death, George Floyd’s name has become a metaphor for the stacked inequities of the society that produced them.

Jelani Cobb, “An American Spring of Reckoning,” June 14, 2020.

“No one ever asks about the language.”

Stephen King quoting Amy Tan in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000.

[Dick] Hallorann had the dark eyes and that was all. He was a tall black man with a modest afro that was beginning to powder white.

Stephen King, The Shining, 1977.

Black America

In the time I’ve been compiling this post since making my last one, the world has changed again in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Trying to process the immense scope of systemic racism and injustice–in the face of an ongoing global pandemic, no less–can be more than a little daunting. But I want to be clear (to myself not least of all) that I don’t consider reading Stephen King’s work to be a distraction from the world’s horrors, but rather a way of engaging with them. Because most of us are horrified right now, whether we know it or not.

It might seem counterintuitive to address issues surrounding race by writing about a white man’s writing (not to mention for a white person such as myself to do so), but examining representations of race in the writing of one of America’s premier white male writers (in terms of numbers of readers, at least) can reveal quite a bit about a major component of our collective national unconscious, or America’s shadow self. What my wife calls my “white man problem” is also the country’s white man problem.

New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb recently discussed George Floyd’s murder as a sort of flashpoint through which White America has become conscious of the existence of Black America–i.e., become aware of the fact that black Americans live in an ostensibly different country than white Americans. More aware of that national shadow self constituted (so to speak) by an economic system based on racial exploitation that’s continued long after Juneteenth. Ongoing and flagrant police brutality reveals how the legal system in this country is explicitly, staggeringly, appallingly racist, but White America needs to maintain a larger awareness of systemic problems and how white people’s daily lives, habits, and choices are continuing to perpetuate them. The systemic problem that the capitalist system is rigged in favor of white people–specifically because of this system’s American origins in slavery–creates other problems, not least of which is that white people are not naturally inclined to see their having this inherent advantage as a “problem,” and it’s to our advantage to remain in denial about the fact that this advantage exists, because if it does, that means we haven’t “earned” what we have based on our own merits, which would be horrifying…

Toni Morrison articulates the relationship between capitalist power structures and race via her character Booker in her 2015 novel God Help the Child:

He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. So as a graduate student he turned to economics—its history, its theories—to learn how money shaped every single oppression in the world and created all the empires, nations, colonies with God and His enemies employed to reap, then veil, the riches.

Toni Morrison, God Help the Child, 2015.

So a bit more of an academic gloss on the old maxim money is the root of all evil…

In narrative structure, for a plot to “work” you ideally need an intersection of chronic and acute tensions–there is an ongoing problem before the story starts (chronic tension), and the story starts with an incident (acute tension) that forces up that which was previously submerged beneath the emotional surface: the acute tension incident causes the character to confront the chronic tension problem they were avoiding dealing with. If our country is a character, George Floyd’s murder is the acute tension incident that is forcing the problem of White America’s lack of awareness of Black America to the surface.

As Toni Morrison has it in the aforementioned passage, a critical element of this chronic tension problem pivots around money: more specifically, that White America doesn’t want to recognize that slavery’s effects continue to this day, that the capital generated by slave labor has trickled down through white families and white businesses to form the backbone of our current capitalist economy. The economic landscape of our country, in other words, would look quite different had those white European settlers never kidnapped people from Africa and forced them to work for free. Morrison further points out that the motivation to forcibly remove people from their homeland and violently oppress them was ultimately the profit motive, the incentive of a capitalist system. And it seems important to note that while we nominally abolished slavery, we still abide by the same system that fostered it, created it. Abolishing slavery is treating a symptom, not the disease itself.

White America doesn’t want to face the truth of this disease. The books of King’s I’ve read so far seem to advocate for the necessity of facing the problem/monster head on in a specifically verbal confrontation. As King would have it via Carl Jung, we need to face it, or it will continue to fester. It’s festering right now as people pour into the streets, and as I heard one commentator say on my local independent radio station, if the murders and violence by police continue, we could cross the line from predominantly peaceful protests into true civil unrest.

Narratively, it’s often a satisfying plot to have a character figuratively shoot themselves in the foot. That is, they cause their own problems, in literary fiction reflecting a flaw(s) in their personal character, and in having to deal with a problem caused by their flaw, they’re forced to confront the flaw itself. As human beings, we’re implicitly burdened with the possible unforeseen consequences of the choices we make. In terms of this country, before it even existed as such, a choice was made to kidnap people from another continent and exploit them for free labor. But free labor came at a non-monetary price. Mat Johnson touches on the fear of rebellion that existed among white slaveowners in his book The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York. I can imagine a type of Newtownian fear equation: the more horribly a white slaveowner mistreats the people they’re enslaving, the more likely those enslaved people will be to want to take violent revenge against the white slaveowner. Power creates paranoia, and the more horrible you are, the more afraid you should be.

A deep-rooted fear still exists within the White psyche–the fear of vengeance for White America’s original sin, a sin that deep down we still harbor shame and guilt over. But we are unable to face that shame–don’t want to admit we feel it because we don’t want to admit we did anything to merit feeling it, which would be to admit a lot of other things, opening a can of worms with an explosive force that might knock us off our pedestal of privilege. So we deflect that shame onto others, a kind of emotional alchemy wherein we try to convince ourselves our original sin was not really a sin: if the groups that white European settlers slaughtered and subjugated are not really our “equals” as human beings, then we can conceive of what we did to them as acceptable…

The kind of duplicitous Bernaysian rhetoric I talked about in my last post that infuses our capitalist marketing and foreign policy is very present in our figuring of these marginalized groups, aka the other, such as the indigenous people already living on the North American continent when Columbus arrived, as “savage,” and us European settlers as “civilized,” when the Europeans are the ones who slaughtered the indigenous people (via both outright overt violence and more covert duplicitous methods like smallpox blankets) to take their land by force.

The idea articulated by one character in The Stand, that “nobody is as afraid of robbery as a thief,” reflects a lot of White America’s unconscious fears: we stole the land we live on, and we stole human beings to do work to generate wealth from it. By this logic, by this history, everything white people has comes from theft. Nothing we have is really, truly ours by the terms of which we understand ownership. It’s another common narrative device that doing something “wrong” may entail a certain payout, but that payout frequently comes at a cost that’s too high. The cost is often psychic/psychological–fear of getting caught, guilt, etc. Fear that the consequences will catch up with your, fear that there will be a reckoning. Toni Morrison’s concept of Africanist “othering” is a reflection of White fear of a reckoning for the reason Black people are in this country in the first place.

White America owes a debt, a debt we don’t want to own up to because it will mean giving up the advantages that constitute our cushy comfortable lifestyles, and there’s an implicit unconscious shame attendant in that failure that constitutes a collective national psychic wound. The bottom line is reparations have to be paid somehow, or White America will continue to live in fear that Black America will rise up to take what they are owed by force. (This idea is related to depictions/figurations of black violence, the construction of the black criminal/”thug” archetype.) We nominally abolished slavery, but not the system that enabled it–not just enabled it, but actively motivated it–capitalism. The demons White America needs to face, its chronic tension, is that we continue to abide by the system that engendered this horror. Slavery is not the true monster that needs to be slain, but a mere appendage of it.

The N-Word

King’s brief cameo on the first season of The Chappelle Show in 2003 is fairly representative of the posture toward race/blackness that appears in his work: outwardly innocuous-seeming, like your best friend’s dad with his somehow endearingly nasal voice and the pen clipped inside the neck of his weathered black tee, but with somehow insidious implications/undertones. Despite sensing their existence, I cannot even properly explicate the problematic implications of King’s question(s), which itself is indicative of my own white privilege and lack of awareness, but what I can tell you is that when King takes a humorously long time to come up with the word “undertaker,” thus prompting the segment’s titular “Black Person” interlocutor Paul Mooney to quip that King “almost said” the N-word, Mooney invokes a word that appears disturbingly often in King’s work.

As an English teacher and a writer, I am someone who believes in the power of words. I’ve never used the N-word in any of my own fiction that I can recall; I can’t even recall considering using it, and I wouldn’t use it without consideration. The N-word is the only word I have ever censored in any published fiction I’ve assigned to students as an English/creative-writing teacher. There have been two writers off the top of my head I’ve had to do this with: Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor.

Of course there’s a whole debate about censorship in literature, accuracy of historical representation, etc. One of my English professors in college (a Latino man, for what it’s worth) said he used to use the N-word outright in class in the context of reading/discussing passages from novels, but after a student expressed to him how traumatic it was for her to hear it, no matter the context, he substituted “N” for any time he needed (“needed”) to say it in class discussion. Context seems critical to the situation described here about a white professor being investigated for using the N-word in class in reference to a quote of James Baldwin’s. There is a subjective question at the center of this debate about whether censoring the N-word in contexts that are not invoking it as a racist slur is going too far and potentially stifling the interrogation and/or critique of the history and meaning of its use and what it says about our country, etc.

King himself contributes to this discussion in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (which wasn’t published until 2000, but reading King chronologically in 2020 means allowing for the context of hindsight):

Not a week goes by that I don’t receive at least one pissed-off letter (most weeks there are more) accusing me of being foulmouthed, bigoted, homophobic, murderous, frivolous, or downright psychopathic. In the majority of cases what my correspondents are hot under the collar about relates to something in the dialogue: “Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge” or…

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000.

He then quotes two more fake examples of offensive dialogue, one invoking the N-word (in a metaphor invoking “cotton” to boot), and one invoking an anti-gay slur that I don’t really feel like repeating either. King’s point is one that I raise in my comp classes when we look at pop culture texts: just because a character does something unethical doesn’t automatically mean the text/author it/themself is unethical; it depends on the text’s ultimate message/attitude toward that unethical aspect. King’s defense is thus that in representing racist characters saying unethical things, he is representing the ugly truth of the existence of racism and homophobia–not endorsing it, but revealing it, and additionally, providing a sense of reality via verisimilitude. “It’s important to tell the truth,” he says two sentences after the above passage in which he spells out the N-word, a passage that comes some pages after he parenthetically designates H.P. Lovecraft a “galloping racist,” noting the frequent inclusion of “sinister Africans” in Lovecraft’s stories, an analysis it seems like Toni Morrison would have appreciated.

King’s going out of his way to use the offending words in his fake examples seems a way to intentionally underscore this point. And yes, there is a distinction between depicting a racist/homophobic/etc. character and the narrative promoting racism/homophobia/etc.; it can be important and necessary to depict such characters as he argues, though I’m sure that nuance is lost on some (if not many) people. But it was notable to me how King juxtaposed the racist and gay slurs in his fake examples, because at this point in my King reading project, King’s work’s racism and homophobia are definitely some major twin emergent threads. At points King threads a finer line than others in telling the “truth” about these things in a way that is perpetuating problems he’s supposedly telling the truth about rather than addressing them in any productive way. There’s an underlying assumption symptomatic of white male privilege in King’s claims about truth-telling: he assumes that if he doesn’t intend his fictional depictions to be racist, but to be in the service of what he deems some greater truth, then his work can’t and won’t be racist. I guess he forgot about his own unconscious…

It strikes me as further emblematic of white male privilege that King should basically declare such slurs acceptable to use in the service of truth-telling. He has the authority to declare it acceptable to do so because of his status as a white man. But since he’s a white man, there is literally no slur, no word with the power to inflict on him the pain those words have for the groups they’ve been used against–for white men such a word cannot exist by concept. It’s supposed to be King’s job as a fiction writer to imagine other people’s experiences and what being able to be hurt by words might feel like, but I’m starting to think it’s a problem how often we give fiction writers the license to render their imaginings of things they have no firsthand experience with.

This is all a pretty big can of worms–a can of snakes, really. The reason I’m writing this blog in the first place is indirectly related to these issues, a way to explore the politics of representation, which basically came to paralyze my own fiction writing. All writers are political, whether they want to be or not. It’ll be a white man who advises you not to think about that stuff, to just put your head down and do the work.

A Screwed Up Interlude

A year ago, when we lived in a different world, I was teaching a summer literature class at the University of Houston. Providing a brief overview of literary history, I noted the trend of the death of the all-knowing author (not to be confused with Roland Barthes’ concept of the death of the author, which applies to literary criticism rather than to literary fiction). If you look at 19th century novels, Tolstoy and the Victorians and the like, you’ve got an entity making sweeping statements about mankind, who not only knows what all of the characters are thinking, but things that not any of the characters know–essentially amounting to a God-like figure. Then the theretofore unknown level of carnage inflicted in the Great War blotted out the concept of any overarching deity harboring a grand design, heralding the advent of Modernism, in which fiction reflected the concept that we were all necessarily trapped in the prison cells of our own perspectives. The more I think about it, the more it seems presumptive, and usually a symptom of the inherent authority of white male privilege, to invoke a fully omniscient perspective. (King is prone to invoking it, but probably more for the sake of creating suspense than necessarily making sweeping generalizations about humanity.)

I’d been grappling with the debate(s) about racial representation in fiction, with who had the right to tell whose story in fiction. On the one hand, a novel, which is what I was trying to work on, ought to incorporate a diversity of perspectives, otherwise it would implicitly privilege the white perspective it was my own default to write from, because that was my personal perspective. On the other hand, as a white person, I did not have the right to presume to describe the experience of a person of color; I could feel the inherent element of identity theft in this, of exploitation. But plenty of (probably white) writers had said or implied that you could do enough research, talk to enough people, put in enough work, to get it right. Secondhand experience substituting for first.

It wasn’t until the president of the University of Houston sent out an email after George Floyd’s murder mentioning it that I learned Floyd was a member of the Screwed Up Click. I was not overly familiar with DJ Screw, which is another travesty that reveals my ignorance and privilege, since I’m a Houstonian–a college transplant, not born and raised, but still–until about a year ago, when I happened to read Jia Tolentino’s “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston” detailing some of Screw’s history and influence, and recalled the archive of materials dedicated to the city’s hip hop history in the UH Library, and visited it on the last day of my summer class. It’s in the Special Collections Department, which means you have to put your bags in a locker and sign a bunch of forms before they’ll unlock the glass doors for you.

At that hour on a Friday afternoon, this windowless inner sanctum was otherwise empty. I found what I didn’t know I was looking for in a box of photo negatives taken by Peter Beste for his book Houston Rap. I was there to find out more about the world I wanted one of my characters to inhabit, a world I lived adjacent to–commuted through on a daily basis to get to the UH campus, in fact–but only knew what it looked like from the outside. The Houston Rap book itself is pretty immersive–in both the photos and the interviews–but in the full collection you can see the negatives of all of the photos Beste took, of which ultimately only a fraction made it in. So many were taken contiguously they were like little film reels.

I also had the person behind the desk haul out a few boxes of Screw’s records, the ones he used to make his Screw Tapes. (They had some of his Tapes too, but they didn’t have anything you could listen to them with.) There were old flyers for house party shows, magazine articles, a handful of grillz, the program for “Robert ‘Screw’ Davis”‘s funeral with an image of a turntable xeroxed onto the cover. I was there for a couple of hours.

I bicycled home through the Third Ward just ahead of a thunderstorm, past Cuney Homes, where George Floyd grew up, past the corner stores and the churches and the row houses and the Garden of Eat’n (est. 1985). I crossed the main drag of Emancipation, which until very recently was Dowling, named for a Confederate general. The Ward ends at a knot of freeways; I bike under one and over another, giving me a view of the back of an exit sign graffitied with the tag KONQR in enormous letters that must be taller than a person, hovering in space over a steady stream of traffic.

DJ Screw has loomed fairly large in my creative life since then, something I hope to return to (eventually) in a discussion of King’s use of (black) music in The Stand. For now I’ll just mention a couple of my takeaways from that afternoon of vicarious cultural immersion from the academic citadel.

One is the blatant misogyny that rages through hip hop, which might qualify as “common knowledge” by this point, but was reinforced by image after image of fully clothed men tossing green paper at women naked but for the rubber-banded bills above their knees and the occasional tattoo.

It’s a dichotomy we’ve all had to deal with (I won’t say “accept”), that an artistic creation might have merit in some ways and be problematic in others. Artists are mere mortals, after all. I was reminded of this problem again reading James Baldwin’s “The Creative Process” and feeling many lines that resonated, but then being irked by his constant references to the ubiquitous “artist” as “he,” and his using “men” when he really meant–or at least should have meant–“people.”

But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself.

James Baldwin, “The Creative Process,” 1962.

I was reminded of the problem again reading a recent article re-evaluating Flannery O’Connor’s racism–and how scholars have consistently glossed over it. While the white writer of this article patently acknowledges O’Connor’s racism, he did elect to use the uncensored N-word in the context of his discussion. And back on the subject of that subjective debate, I’m in the camp that white people shouldn’t use it (as my not using it here might have implied). White people can claim they’re using it for a purpose that they’ve deemed productive, but it’s a dubious defense and a fine line.

Which brings me to the second takeaway from DJ Screw I’ll mention. As a DJ, Screw’s creative work was screwing together other people’s creative work, emblematic of the eminently subjective fair use principle and raising questions concerning intellectual ownership. Which reminds me of the idea of collective ownership over nebulous non-physical entities, over something like the N-word. White people don’t like to hear that black people can say it and they can’t, that black people might have ownership of something they don’t. The implication that only white people have the right to own something (whether concrete or abstract, living or inanimate) strikes me as being a product of that old psychic slavery-related wound.

Dick Hallorann, Magical Black Man

In an earlier post about Carrie I analyzed King’s treatment of race via Toni Morrison’s theory in her book Playing in the Dark:

The Africanist presence exists in the marginal shadows of the white mainstream that has dominated literature–the Africanist presence is the white mainstream’s shadow self, implicitly a site of horror that whiteness can define itself in relation to.

From here.

This presence is “shadowy” because a) it exists on the margins and b) it’s an unconscious reflection of white attitudes toward blackness. And as Jelani Cobb has it, via George Floyd’s death White America is becoming conscious of these formerly unconscious attitudes, which have been contributing to the ongoing oppression of Black America as much as overt police brutality.

These formerly unconscious attitudes include guilt/shame over white privilege and continuing to profit from the original sin of slavery. Like a grown son of a mother forced to continuously bail him out of situations of his own creation who lashes out at her because he’s displacing/redirecting his shame and anger at his own inadequacy, White America lashes out against the minorities who have more of a right to lash out at them, and White American maintains recourse to plenty of psychological and rhetorical contortions to position themselves in the “right,” which include, among other things, Morrison’s concept of “Africanist othering”–depicting the Africanist presence as “other”–necessarily different, and implicitly something to be feared.

But in certain attempts to rectify past racial injustices, the pendulum can swing too hard in the other direction. White people at pains to demonstrate that they’re not racist can overcompensate in their narrative depictions of black people–instead of depicting them as something to be feared, as a sort of demonic presence, white writers have fallen to depicting black figures as something to be revered, divine, magical.

The problem is, even if a divine presence is “good” instead of “evil,” it is technically as inhuman as a demonic presence. This type of implicit dehumanization is potentially even more problematic than explicit dehumanization because it’s masquerading as its opposite–it’s in disguise, and thus, according to King’s narrative logic in The Shining, even more insidious–another characteristic/aspect of duplicitous Bernaysian/Hegelian rhetoric. The irony is that while King seems to almost consciously render such rhetorical duplicity as “evil” through The Shining‘s plot, he does not seem to recognize that he’s resorting to a sort of rhetorical duplicity himself. Though to be fair, if it’s unintentional, I guess it can’t technically be called duplicity through definition, which implies purposeful deception. Through Hallorann’s character, King seems to be making conscious efforts to not be racist, or to be even anti-racist, but in doing so reveals unconscious racism. His good intentions are precisely the problem, symptomatic and indicative of White America’s larger aforementioned problem(s). Because you know what they say the road to hell is paved with.

In On Writing, King jokes that “Dick” is “the world’s most Freudian name,” though without noting the times it’s appeared in his own fiction, like the character Dick Hallorann in The Shining. This Dick would appear to be King’s first significant use of the trope of the magical black man:

These Black characters, often referred to as “magical Negroes,” generally focus their abilities toward assisting their White lead counterparts. At first glance, casting the Black and White leads in this manner seems to provide examples of Black and White characters relating to each other in a constructive manner; however, a closer examination of these interactions suggests a reinvention of old Black stereotypes rather than authentic racial harmony. 

Cerise L. Glenn & Landra J. Cunningham, “The Power of Black Magic: The Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film,” Journal of Black Studies 40.2, Nov. 2009. 

Another academic examined this same issue the same year:

I find that these films constitute “cinethetic racism “–a synthesis of overt manifestations of racial cooperation and egalitarianism with latent expressions of white normativity and antiblack stereotypes. “Magical negro” films thus function to marginalize black agency, empower normalized and hegemonic forms of whiteness, and glorify powerful black characters in so long as they are placed in racially subservient positions. The narratives of these films thereby subversively reaffirm the racial status quo and relations of domination….

Matthew W. Hughey, “Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films,” Social Problems 56.3, August 2009.

A key word here being “subversively”–being racist specifically through depictions that seem anti-racist on the surface. These articles are specifically examining films, but the trope holds true in books as well; both articles discuss the use of the trope in the film adaptation of King’s The Green Mile. King mentions the character that’s the trope in that source novel in On Writing:

…not long after I began The Green Mile and realized my main character was an innocent man likely to be executed for the crime of another, I decided to give him the initials J.C., after the most famous innocent man of all time. … Thus death-row inmate John Bowes became John Coffey.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000.

Here King is invoking the trope indirectly, unconsciously rather than consciously, since some have posited that Jesus Christ is the original manifestation of this trope, and because “Coffey” had to be the C-word you chose to name your black character, Steve? Really?

But almost twenty years before that, we have Dick Hallorann in The Shining. I mentioned before that while all three (white) members of the Torrance family were extensively developed as human beings, Dick felt like a plot device. King explicitly takes up Dick’s point of view at the beginning of the final section of the book, and we’re with him for quite awhile along his arduous journey to drive to the Overlook through a snowstorm (and to encounter a white woman on the plane prior to that who’s very conscious of America’s deep-state shadow and very nice to him), and yet nowhere was I really made to feel that Dick Hallorann has a legitimate personal or emotional reason to risk his life to save a little white boy he’d talked to once for all of half an hour. (That Danny has the strongest shining ability he’s ever encountered and Dick somehow feels the need to preserve this would be based more on concept than character.) Not only risk his life, but face down a force so malevolent as to be able to project into his mind racist slur-filled rants that I will not excerpt here. I’m tempted to say these slurs were “appalling”; all slurs should be appalling inherently, but if you take a regular appalling slur and multiply it by ten, then just mathematically it should be ten times more appalling. King multiplies it by ten at least.

Also, Dick Hallorann verbally sacrifices his own family in order to save Danny when he has to lie and tell his boss, Queems, that his son was shot in order to justify taking off work:

“Hunting accident?”

“No, sir,” Hallorann said, and let his voice drop to a lower, huskier note. “Jana, she’s been livin with this truck driver. A white man. He shot my boy. He’s in a hospital in Denver, Colorado. Critical condition.”

That Hallorann says he has to leave for his son creates an implication that Danny is his figurative son. Hallorann is thus still being defined as a character by Danny rather than himself–we don’t even know if anything he says to Queems is based in fact.

One might argue that since the (appalling) racist invective–rendered in ALL CAPS–is being hurled at Hallorann by the ghost of the Overlook, that figures this racist invective as bad: the monster is doing it, which means it’s a monstrous/evil thing to do, which means King is sending a message that expressing racism through such virulent slurs is bad, so don’t do it. I basically argued before that the Overlook ghost represents the worst of our country’s history, which would make its invective here in line with King’s idea of truth-telling about our country’s ugly history.

But there’s a significant distinction in the way the Overlook ghost makes very individualized character-tailored seductions and threats against Jack (like putting Jack’s former student George Hatfield in 217’s bathtub) while exclusively interfacing with Hallorann as an individual who is defined only by his race–saying things to Hallorann that would in theory be offensive to any black person, but saying things to Jack that are about Jack’s personality and history, things that could not be applied to anyone else. Maybe one could argue that this still makes the Overlook ghost racist instead of making King’s authorial depiction of it racist, but I’m not so sure. The sheer amount of racist invective that gets airtime undermines this emotionally if not logically. At the same time, it does effectively demonstrate words’ potential to be weaponized…just too effectively, is ultimately the problem.

Then there’s the fact that the title of the book derives from a racially loaded term that King was, according to Lisa Rogak’s biography, unaware of:

[King] based the title on a song by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band called “Instant Karma,” with a refrain that went “We all shine on.” But he had to change the title to The Shining after the publisher said that shine was a negative term for African-American.

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 84). St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

The way Rogak says “the publisher said” is a little weird, as though this connotation doesn’t really exist beyond the publisher’s claim that it does… There’s also an interesting moment in the biography when Rogak depicts King as the marginalized outcast in the publishing world due to his foundation in genre:

In the winter of 1976, Steve went to a publishing party in New York where he met an agent who primarily worked with fantasy and horror writers. Kirby McCauley, who had recently moved to New York from the Midwest, had read only one of King’s two books when they met, Salem’s Lot, but after chatting with Steve discovered they shared many of the same interests in obscure authors from the 1940s and ‘50s. … McCauley saw out of the corner of his eye that most of the other writers were queuing up to talk with author James Baldwin, who was holding court in a corner of the room. But Steve was happy to stay with McCauley, and he was impressed when the agent mentioned some of his other clients, including Frank Herbert, Piers Anthony, Robert Silverberg, and Peter Straub.

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 81). St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

In other words, Steve was impressed with the roster of White Man, White Man, White Man, and White Man… And there’s some kind of implication that the establishment, ignorant of King’s value at this point, is ignorant in the way it’s fawning over (black man) James Baldwin.

Anyway, another tidbit reinforcing Hallorann’s lack of development is one of the few memories we get from Hallorann of his past. (We know his brother died when Hallorann was in the army, but this is used only as a device to explain–to Danny specifically–how the shining works.) In the novel’s climax, just after the hotel has exploded, Hallorann looks back and sees what one can only assume is the Overlook ghost dispersing in a black cloud that reminds him of when he and his brother were kids and blew up “a huge nest of ground wasps” with a “[N-word]chaser…saved all the way from the Fourth of July.” Which is an interesting linkage of our most patriotic holiday’s explosive symbolism of our (explosive) history with that slur so casually dropped by a black person…in a way that definitely does not seem would be so casually used or thought by an actual black person. That term is slang for a firework that (racist) white people would use. Yet this slang is put not even just in the mouth, but the head of a black person, as we’re in Hallorann’s close-third-person point of view for this passage. Putting it in the thoughts of a black person in this way creates an implication that it’s patently not a racist term, that it’s a term Hallorann himself is completely fine with; he thinks it as breezily as he would think a word as mundane as “bread.” But if the bombs that gave us the freedom that we so patently celebrate and venerate, both in the fireworks whose fuses we light on July Fourth every year and in our National Anthem (not to mention the funding of our military-industrial complex), are replicated in another layer of symbolism here as “[N-word]chasers,” that’s sending some kind of message about the purpose of these venerated bombs to be targeting a certain group, or being designed to “chase” them away, which is kind of ironic (but hardly uncharacteristic of our country’s patriotic rhetoric), considering that this demographic was specifically brought here in the first place by force against their will. (It might have been more verbally logical to imply the fireworks were bombs chasing away Native Americans, since that’s the demographic white Americans actually had to chase away.)

My original point about this passage concerning Hallorann’s memory is that the whole wasp thing has already been extensively developed through Jack’s reflections and experiences. Jack is thus someone who as a character it would make sense for him to associate something he sees with wasps. It’s like a Rorschach blot. Wasps characterize Jack, so to use them here with Hallorann is to apply Jack’s characterization/experience to him in a way that problematically blots out Hallorann’s point of view/individuality. Hallorann should see something else, his own personal Rorschach association, but he just sees what the white man saw. Again, there could be a potential white apologist reading here: it’s the Overlook ghost Hallorann is mentally making this linkage to wasps about, so you might argue the wasps are the Overlook’s thing, not Jack’s, so it’s not discriminatory to have Hallorann associate wasps with it. The fact that the wasp passages are directly in the different characters’ points of view makes it feel more problematic, though again a big part of the Overlook ghost’s insidiousness is shown to be its ability to penetrate a person’s thoughts…and that it might be making both Jack and Hallorann think about wasps is potentially even creating a type of theoretical equality between them. But even if the white apologist defense might hold up logically, Hallorann still feels subsumed into the white man’s perspective.

I doubt King was necessarily consciously aware of Hallorann’s lack of character development, especially at this point, in the 70s, but I can almost feel him trying to mitigate the problematic nature of Hallorann’s lack of development by making him…magical. Magical by sharing Danny’s telepathic ability (the one accidentally named after a racial slur against Hallorann’s racial demographic), and magical in the heroic role he plays in saving Danny and Wendy (an extension of his original magical ability). Heroic, but inhuman.

Danny also has magical, technically inhuman abilities, and he sees things generally associated with the hotel rather than his personal life, but this is largely because he’s still a child, and his love for his father is developed in a way that makes him feel like a human with a magical ability rather than nothing but a cipher for the magical ability. So it’s important to note that it’s not just Hallorann’s magical abilities that make his character problematic, it’s that his magical abilities and his desire to help Danny are the only things that characterize him.

After watching Kubrick’s adaptation, I’m tempted to say that King’s version is less racist in letting Hallorann not only survive but be the critical figure who literally carries Wendy and Danny out of the hotel as it’s exploding. In the film, Hallorann is also critical: he brings the snow plow that enables Wendy and Danny to flee the hotel. He also does this in the book, but then instead of surviving to be a hero, he is almost immediately axed in the chest by Jack as soon as he enters the hotel, fulfilling another racist trope of the black man in the horror movie being first to die.

Another adjustment Kubrick makes concerns the use of the N-word: instead of having the Overlook ghost scream racist invective in Hallorann’s head, its sentiment is quietly subdued–yet no less sinister–as it issues from the mouth of Grady, the former caretaker, in that critical scene where Jack shifts his loyalties from his family to the hotel (and Kubrick shifts the setting from the pantry to the (red) bathroom). This exchange shocked me almost as much as the book’s all-caps invective–in fact seemed almost an homage to it. The N-word is used three times in a row (separated only by the article “a”) as Grady uses it to specify the “outside party” Danny is bringing to the hotel, Jack then repeats it back to him, and Grady says it back, this time adding “cook” (thereby extending Hallorann’s characterization to his job in addition to his race). The exchange pretty closely mirrors that in the book except for adding an extra N-word, in the film replacing where in the book Jack actually identified Hallorann by (last) name. This excessiveness almost seems like it’s calling attention to the word’s evil itself, with the hotel’s evil embodied in Grady and his use of this slur infecting Jack, but that feels like another white apologist explanation to me, as does the reading that Jack’s axing Hallorann in the film is symbolic of the callousness of white America’s crimes. It is symbolic of that, but likely more unconsciously than consciously…

Unsurprisingly, considering that the characterization of the white Torrances is less developed in the film than in the novel, Hallorann’s film characterization is no more developed than in the source material either. The most significant hint of Hallorann’s personal life we get in the film is a glimpse of his bedroom when he’s watching the news and Danny shine-messages him. What do we see in there to give us an idea of Hallorann as an individual? (The news he’s watching is a pure plot device warning about the bad weather he’s about to have to navigate, so no characterization there.) He has two framed images on his walls–both of black women with afros, one topless, the other fully nude. These feel like images that primarily highlight his identity via categories: his blackness, and his maleness, kind of like how Grady defines him by the category of his job. Kubrick generally seems more interested in categories than character, and again I can foresee a white apologist counterargument of these images being a symbol of/calling attention to the stereotypes emblematic of the blaxploitation film genre, but I can’t really see what these images are doing to counteract those stereotypes.

I recently read If It Bleeds, King’s latest book (I had to since I got it for my mother for Mother’s Day), and it seemed like King was trying even harder to be NOT RACIST in ways that are still revealing a lack of awareness of his own unconscious racism and white privilege. He is still, in 2020, using the N-word, and his publisher is allowing it. The apparent progress would be that instead of it being used as racial invective, as a slur hurled against a black character in an effort to intimidate and belittle them, it’s used by a black character to explicate/express the historical racial injustices his black grandfather suffered as proprietor of a speakeasy he dubbed “The Black Owl,” the same title this black character plans to use for his own book on the subject. The sentence the N-word is invoked in is the final one in a lengthy chunk of dialog, and really, I thought, the sentence with it is utterly unnecessary to get the point across, feels excessive in a way that seems like he’s using it just for the sake of using it. It feels like the white author using it, not the black character. The black character is reduced to a device, a mouthpiece–a mask, if you will–through/from behind which the white author can safely use the word under cover of context.

Say Their Name

The converse of not using the N-word outright–if you’re not part of the demographic that’s been oppressed by its usage–would seem to be the articulation promoted by the “Say Their Name” mantra that’s arisen in response to our country’s ongoing race-related hate crimes. Rayshard Brooks. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery.

The idea of the importance and power of naming is something used as an effective narrative device in Bryan Washington’s recent story collection Lot, set in the city of Houston, where Washington, an alum of the University of Houston, lives (and from which he’s been writing dispatches about the city’s protests and Floyd’s visitation for The New Yorker). Several but not all of the stories in Lot are about the same character, whom we see grow up (or “come of age” as the copy says) over the course of the book. This first-person narrator, whose mother is black while his father is Latino, remains nameless until the final story. The very naming of his character (Nicolás) represents his emotional breakthrough of finally being able to trust someone else enough to try an intimate (gay!) relationship instead of running from his feelings so he won’t eventually get hurt, as we’ve seen him do in the stories leading up to this one. The dropping of the name (in dialog by the character he’s finally trusting) feels visceral to the reader after the consistent withholding of it; the name has been withheld because the character has been withheld from himself. Name is identity. Its use in the climax of the collection’s climactic story is a way to show that the character is coming to terms with who he really is. It was powerful.

In the comedy special Douglas, Hannah Gadsby makes a recurring theme of “white men naming things” as part of a vendetta against that which she names the “patriarchy.” I started noticing more how often King uses proper Brand Names, a tendency that seems to mostly come from a desire for verisimilitude and a general love of pop culture, but often feels like he’s cutting deals on the side for product placement. Whether he is or not, his verisimilitude is usually a boon for whoever he’s mentioning in a way that’s unconsciously perpetuating a patriarchal corporate system much like the way he unconsciously perpetuates implicit racism. White men naming things, mindlessly…

In fiction, naming specific places–using proper street names, neighborhood names and the like–provides a more convincing sense of setting (and often poetry), just as naming those individuals who have been murdered hopefully helps keep them from fading into statistics. A name signifies an individual identity, a distinct existence. In Lot, Washington constantly names places as a way of rendering the setting of the city I live in; I was excited to recognize many, and ashamed of how many I didn’t. Washington also often utilizes names as a way to form lists that efficiently create a sense of passing time and/or accumulation, as in this passage:

But it didn’t stop the two of us. We touched in the park on Rusk. By the dumpsters on Lamar. At the pharmacy on Woodleigh and the benches behind it.

Bryan Washington, “Lockwood,” Lot, 2019.

My initial reaction to this passage was probably as a Houstonian: to be excited to recognize the names. My second was as a creative writer: that neither “the dumpsters on Lamar” nor “the pharmacy on Woodleigh” were actually very specific location descriptors, since the roads mentioned would have lots of dumpsters and pharmacies on them. This isn’t really a weak point, though, since there’s just one pharmacy on Woodleigh for the character…that’s how he thinks of it. But I was reminded of my initial impulse to judge that element of the style of Washington’s writing–too many names, and lazily used, leaned on like crutches!–when someone I’d told I was reading the book said someone else they knew hadn’t liked it, because Washington had gotten the names of some places in Houston wrong. And he could at least go to the trouble to get the names right!

But Washington is rendering a different landscape, one that the above (presumably white) person’s reaction to his use of names seems evidence of their inability to see. He’s rendering the landscape White (and Straight) America hasn’t seen, the one that it does, in theory, see now, via the flashpoint of George Floyd’s murder. Washington uses understatement as a way to render his protagonist’s pain and inability to face that pain, creating a sense of a character at a distance from himself. Washington also frequently kept me, a white reader, at a distance with uncontextualized slang, inserting little hurdles in the language itself, in the use of the names that reflect a different experience than the mainstream (i.e., white) mode of expression that defines the patriarchy that defines everything else. And in making me feel that distance, Washington invited me in.

-SCR