By Noah BendzsaThe Department of English Language and Literature Student Blogger for 2021/2022
Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, my friends and I were addicted to feeling shocked, scandalized, thrilled, chilled, freaked-out. We loved horror movies with leaping danger and sudden, discordant sounds, and creepypastas—short stories published on the internet that are scary as long as you don’t contemplate their logic (“If my dog was dead, who was licking my leg, in the dark?” and that kind of thing). Interestingly, though, none of us had read Stephen King. Everyone we knew who had grown up in the seventies and eighties—parents, teachers—regularly adduced King’s books, in conversation, as the scariest things they had ever read. Carrie, Christine, Cujo, The Shining, and It were household names, like Bran Buds. And like Bran Buds, they were nothing we had ever tried.
When I was fourteen, I finally took Carrie out of the library. It bemused me more than it frightened me. Nineteen-seventies culture was odd, and I couldn’t quite figure out the characters’ motivations. What I remember most vividly is identifying quite strongly with Carrie’s friend, the one who, at the end of the book, is left wandering a field somewhere—though I can’t recall her name. Although I liked Carrie well enough, I moved on to other things, and until recently hadn’t had any urge to read another Stephen King novel. A few weeks ago, I got the urge.
The novels I read were ’Salem’s Lot and It. I started reading them because I have an obsessive interest in regionalism, or local colour—of which I had heard King is a specialist—and I finished reading them because their writing surprised me. King is not, as Harold Bloom blustered, “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis” (qtd. in Ciabattari, 2014). He is a talented writer who works with mature themes and is sometimes capable of genuinely beautiful prose and imagery.
Admittedly, ’Salem’s Lot is not superbly strong, but it is only King’s second novel. And it certainly delivered on its regional promises (and in high gothic fashion): the best writing in the novel comprises descriptions of the fictional town Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. Nonetheless, a lot of the other writing, including the horror, is boilerplate. The protagonist’s love interest, like many of King’s women, apparently, is repeatedly described as “pretty” (as in, she has pretty much the depth of the woman from the Roy Orbison song). Characters’ emotions can often be read off their faces, like those of the characters in a sitcom. And King’s musings about evil and the haunted house on the hill are clumsy. The word “haphazard” is used in a description of the house, and then, as if readers don’t get the point, “haphazardly” is used a few lines later (King, ’Salem’s 24). The echoes of Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House and Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream” are too frequent, and the internally rhyming sentence “Hail Mary, full of grace, help me win this stock-car race” is embarrassingly like something a teenager might write (241). (I should know, because that’s the kind of stuff I wrote as a teenager). But as a whole, ’Salem’s Lot is an entertaining work, and the last 150 pages read very, very quickly—to King’s credit as a haberdasher of plot.
It is an entirely different work and an impressive novel, without qualification. It was published ten years after ’Salem’s Lot and showcases King’s development as an artist. It is a masterclass in structure. Over 1100 pages long, the text jumps back and forth between 1986 and 1958, and across more than a dozen different focalizations. Certainly, King doesn’t worry over his sentences like Henry James or Jean Stafford or Shirley Hazzard, and many are duds. Though none are any worse than many of those authored by the most-praised contemporary “literary” writers (see B. R. Myers’s manifesto), and the book contains some truly beautiful passages. Consider the focalized description of a boy getting his first bicycle, named after the Lone Rider’s horse, Silver, up to speed:
He pedaled down Kansas Street toward town, gaining speed slowly at first. Sliver rolled once he got going, but getting going was a job and a half. Watching the grey bike pick up speed was like watching a big plane roll down the runway. At first you couldn’t believe such a huge waddling gadget could ever actually leave the earth—the idea was absurd. But you could see its shadow beneath it, and before you even had time to wonder if it was a mirage, the shadow was trailing out long behind it and the plane was up, cutting its way through the air, as sleek and graceful as a dream in a satisfied mind.Silver was like that. King, It 226
He pedaled down Kansas Street toward town, gaining speed slowly at first. Sliver rolled once he got going, but getting going was a job and a half. Watching the grey bike pick up speed was like watching a big plane roll down the runway. At first you couldn’t believe such a huge waddling gadget could ever actually leave the earth—the idea was absurd. But you could see its shadow beneath it, and before you even had time to wonder if it was a mirage, the shadow was trailing out long behind it and the plane was up, cutting its way through the air, as sleek and graceful as a dream in a satisfied mind.Silver was like that.
King’s diction doesn’t always strike the right note, as this passage demonstrates (is an airplane really a “waddling gadget”?), but the whole is an amazing trick. Anyone who has ever ridden a bicycle and has pushed it to thirty-five or forty kilometres per hour feels what’s being described, here. The experience is like that.
Later on, one of the male protagonists, Ben, returns to his hometown, the fictional Derry, Maine. “He walked across the library lawn, barely noticing his dress boots were getting wet, to have a look at that glassed-in passageway between the grownups’ library and the Children’s Library,” King writes;
[i]t was also unchanged, and from here, standing just outside the bowed branches of a weeping willow tree, he could see people passing back and forth. The old delight flooded him, and he really forgot what had happened at the end of the reunion lunch for the first time. He could remember walking to the very same spot as a kid, only in the winter, plowing his way through snow that was almost hip-deep, and then standing for as long as fifteen minutes. He would come at dusk, he remembered, and again it was the contrasts that drew him and held him there with the tips of his fingers going numb and snow melting inside his green gumrubber boots. It would be drawing-down-dark out where he was, the world going purple with early winter shadows, the sky the colour of ashes in the east and embers in the west. It would be cold where he was, ten degrees [Fahrenheit] perhaps, and chillier than that if the wind was blowing from across the frozen Barrens, as it often did.543–44
[i]t was also unchanged, and from here, standing just outside the bowed branches of a weeping willow tree, he could see people passing back and forth. The old delight flooded him, and he really forgot what had happened at the end of the reunion lunch for the first time. He could remember walking to the very same spot as a kid, only in the winter, plowing his way through snow that was almost hip-deep, and then standing for as long as fifteen minutes. He would come at dusk, he remembered, and again it was the contrasts that drew him and held him there with the tips of his fingers going numb and snow melting inside his green gumrubber boots. It would be drawing-down-dark out where he was, the world going purple with early winter shadows, the sky the colour of ashes in the east and embers in the west. It would be cold where he was, ten degrees [Fahrenheit] perhaps, and chillier than that if the wind was blowing from across the frozen Barrens, as it often did.
Although It is inarguably a horror novel, it is also delightfully ruminative, and explores serious themes of childhood remembrance, belonging and ostracism, and friendship and the bonds between people. If any of that sounds familiar, it’s because those are some of the same things that Proust writes about in À la recherche du temps perdu—for instance. I’m not trying to imply that King is “our Proust” or as even meticulous a writer as Proust; all I’m trying to say is that saintly feet have walked this ground before.
I should remark, though, that It’s status as horror is not as straightforward as you might assume—as I assumed—at least, not for a non-coulrophobic adult reader. Before I began the book, I understood its horror elements to consist of a shapeshifting clown called Pennywise (or an eternal spider-thing that sometimes takes the shape of a clown called Pennywise) and his various forms. But the portions of the book about the clown, the clown-cum-teen-werewolf, -cum-mummy, -cum-Honda-Civic-sized-chickadee aren’t scary. These are childhood fears, and may be the things that tweens and teens find frightening when they pick up the book. They certainly would have been the scares my friends and I were after at thirteen. What’s really horrifying for an adult reader, though, are the human acts of violence, for which the clown is only a catalyst. I’m not sure if Henry Bowers resembles any real fifth-grade bully, but his homicidal tendencies make you angry, make you feel powerless, make you really fear for the kids in his sights and wish you were there to give him a few whacks with a sand-filled hose. This is how we are made to feel about a twelve-year-old. And then there’s the protagonist Beverly’s abusive husband, Tom; the scene in which he beats Bev’s whereabouts from one of her friends, and then threatens to come back and kill the friend if she calls the police, is hard to read. It’s awful and all too real.
But Tom’s violence is not the only violence based on a—based on many a—true story. After the famous clown-in-a-storm-drain opening, which even those who haven’t read the book know about from the 1990 miniseries, comes the first murder of the clown-creature’s new cycle. Except this murder is not perpetrated by the clown. Pennywise, although he snacks on the corpse, as he is wont to do, is essentially a bystander. The victim is a gay man, Adrian Mellon, and the murderers are a pack of rabid homophobes. It is these banal and intolerant human characters who “stab [Mellon] seven times,” before throwing him over the side of a canal (38). The episode is based on the real-life killing of Charlie Howard in Bangor, Maine, in 1984. But hate-crimes against LGTBQ folks—like spousal abuse, like violence against women—are frighteningly commonplace. This murder isn’t the reified fear of a desiccated corpse. One of my friends has had to lie about his sexual orientation before because feared for his life. We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve had to keep quiet because it’s safer, and we’ve all read or heard stories about people who have been badly hurt, or died, if we haven’t known a survivor personally. That’s terrifying.
There is received wisdom, other than that about the scares, that turns out to be wrong, too. First, there is the assumption, upon which the two-“chapter” adaptation of It from 2017 and 2019 is based, that the novel is actually a pair of novels grafted together: a protagonists-as-children novel, set in 1958, and a protagonists-as-grownups novel, set in 1985. A diligent structural reading reveals that these two “novels” are not separable. The as-adult sections might be surgically removed from the as-children sections, but unlike the as-children sections, they would not be able to survive on their own; they rely too heavily on flashback and recollection, and the scenes that result from these techniques constitute parts of the as-children section. The above-quoted scene from the as-adults section, when Ben returns to Derry, for example, is anchored in the winter scenes of the as-children section.
Then, there is the notion that “what amounts to an orgy” takes place amongst the seven protagonists, in one of the sections set in 1958 (Smythe, 2013). What happens is the six male protagonists have vaginal sex with the female protagonist, Bev, at her instigation. Doubtless, for some the scene will be discomfiting and feel voyeuristic, although I suspect this is age dependent. The protagonists are eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and the reader—at least, this reader—and the writer are much older. Overstating the case somewhat, we might ask, “Does this scene amount to the promotion of some kind of meta-literary pedophilia?” Without appealing to King’s intentions, I think we can answer “No” to this question and its variants for two reasons. First, there are a fair number of sexually active eleven- and twelve-year-olds; the scene, if improbable, is realistic in the sense that children become sexual subjects (in the self-forming sense of “subject”) around this time in their lives. Second, the sex isn’t exploitative of the characters, or especially explicit within the text. Bev uses sex strategically, and its purpose is to renew the bonds of friendship amongst the participants. She isn’t objectified during the scene; in fact, in a pleasant inversion of many adult-heterosexual-sex scenes, it is her pleasure that is central, and most of the male characters are unable to ejaculate. (Oddly, this appears to be for developmental rather than psychological reasons).
For folks in English studies, the most controversial thing about It, or any of Stephen King’s novels for that matter, ought to be their literary status. Are they Literature or are they mass entertainment, pulp, penny-dreadfuls, or whatever else you want to call the negation of Literature? This question, popping back up like a clown-shaped punching-dummy whenever someone thinks that they have successfully put it down, is one of the eternal questions of our discipline that many pragmatic people wish would just go away. It is interesting to study why people hold the beliefs they do about Literature, and what it means that literature has been defined this way (with a capital L), rather than that way, but Is It Literature? is largely irrelevant as a question in and of itself. The great Literature Debate is a debate in the same way that “Who would win—Darth Vader vs. Kylo Ren, Jaws vs. Moby Dick” are debates. Yet people insist on debating.
Harold Bloom has already weighed in; a few years after he made the above-quoted comment, he said this: “Stephen King is beneath the notice of any serious reader who has experienced Proust, Joyce, Henry James, Faulkner and all the other masters of the novel” (qtd. in Ciabattari, 2014). I don’t know how Bloom could have taught undergraduate English students for all those years and made this statement, but there you are. Here is another self-avowed snob, the novelist Dwight Allen: “After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon… why would you return to Stephen King?” This is not the best set of examples, not the least reason being that all the writers are men, and three of them are white American men. It is also predicated upon excluding these (admittedly very impressive) writers’ worst work. Having not read enough Bolaño and Johnson, I can’t speak of their books, but after a few chapters of the expansive and frivolous Against the Day or an encounter with the aptly named Wallace narrator Ovid the Obtuse, I think most people, even serious readers, would gladly return to King, and even say that some of his writing is markedly superior.
Heck, I am willing to do both, right now.
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French Dispatch Sentences. I am still looking for opening sentences with three dangling participles, two split infinitives, and nine spelling errors, in response to a challenge posed in "Fifteen-Minute Intermission" (send to: noahbendzsa@cmail.carleton.ca).
Below are a two marvellous submitted sentences—one by Vivian Astroff, a fourth-year student studying the History and Theory of Architecture, and one by Professor Jody Mason, of the English Department—and one sentence I’ve written.
Having put all his egs into one baskit so to speek, the show q-rated by Dudel Thomson displayed a range of werk to clearly dazzle the eye’s, to totally overcom the brain and even stimulate a debate, hanging in the new gallry; it was certainly contraversial, being a carear highlight.V.A.
Having put all his egs into one baskit so to speek, the show q-rated by Dudel Thomson displayed a range of werk to clearly dazzle the eye’s, to totally overcom the brain and even stimulate a debate, hanging in the new gallry; it was certainly contraversial, being a carear highlight.
Traking Henry Jamze, after the fayled Guy Domville in London, to vividlie portray his secluzion in Rye, Jamze maykes masterpieces in Tóbín’s The Master, to carefully corral words to controll that which terrifyes.J.M.
Traking Henry Jamze, after the fayled Guy Domville in London, to vividlie portray his secluzion in Rye, Jamze maykes masterpieces in Tóbín’s The Master, to carefully corral words to controll that which terrifyes.
Broddly speeking, David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder is woden compaired to Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully—although a Yale-educated acter and x-pected to fanatically x-cel, Mulder has a perticular yen for the cerebral monologue—and to gently put it, he overextendes and lures in the fans with his paranoia.N.B.
Broddly speeking, David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder is woden compaired to Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully—although a Yale-educated acter and x-pected to fanatically x-cel, Mulder has a perticular yen for the cerebral monologue—and to gently put it, he overextendes and lures in the fans with his paranoia.
Works Cited