The Road to The Dark Tower (51 page)

²⁶
Walden Book Report,
July 2003. This description of Flagg the outsider also applies to Mordred Deschain.

²⁷
In Calla, when talk turns to Walter, Roland still wonders if Marten was Maerlyn, “the old rogue wizard of legend.”

²⁸
In Roland’s youth, Garlan is as mythical as Gilead will become in his adult years. It is a land “where carpets sometimes fly, and where holy men sometimes pipe ropes up from wicker baskets, climb them, and disappear at the tops, never to be seen again.” [ED] People who went there seeking knowledge usually disappeared, but those who returned were not always changed for the better. On maps, the regions south of Garlan are mostly white spaces.

²⁹
The Beast in the original version of
The Gunslinger
.

³⁰
Reminiscent of a scene early in
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
which inspired King to write
The Gunslinger
.

³¹
Carlos Detweiler’s deity in
The Plant
is also called Abbalah.

³²
The horse’s name is Nis, after the land of sleep and dreams.

³³
Boggarts are mischievous spirits that inhabit homes but can also be transported in household items.

³⁴
Unless otherwise specified, this section deals with the fictionalized character who appears in
Song of Susannah
and
The Dark Tower,
not the real person.

³⁵
Master’s Tea, Yale University, April 21, 2003.

³⁶
Swinburne was a contemporary of Browning, and was both a poet and a critic. He wrote “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” in 1890.

³⁷
The library in 249B East Thirty-fifth contains a book called
Breakers
by an author who doesn’t exist outside the building. Unknown manufacturer names adorn the jukebox and billiards table. The house has rooms that go on forever, with entrances and exits throughout.

Chapter 11
EPICS, INFLUENCES AND KA

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world.
¹

The wheel which turns our lives is remorseless; always it comes around to the same place again.

[DT3]

 When Stephen King started working on the first story of the first book that would become the
Dark Tower
series, his intentions were nothing grander than to write the longest popular novel in history. Now a grandfather in his late fifties, King looks back with sympathy and understanding at the youthful hubris that gave rise to such an aspiration. “At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant. . . . Nineteen is the age where you say
Look out world, I’m smokin’ TNT and I’m drinkin’ dynamite, so if you know what’s good for ya, get out of my way—here comes Stevie
.”
²

The Lord of the Rings
inspired King, though he had no intention of replicating Tolkien’s creations, for his inspirations went beyond that epic quest fantasy to embrace romantic poetry and the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. After graduating from college, he decided it was time to stop playing around and tackle something serious. He began a novel “that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against [director Sergio] Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop.”
³

In the afterword to
Wizard and Glass,
King calls the
Dark Tower
books cowboy romances. Through Roland, he comments on mixing genres when Eddie explains the differences between mysteries, suspense stories, science fiction, Westerns and fairy tales. “Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths? . . .
Does no one eat stew?” Roland asks. Eddie admits that it sounds boring expressed that way. “When it comes to entertainment, we
do
tend to stick with one flavor at a time.” The scene brings to mind a line from
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”

In his review of
The Waste Lands,
Edward Bryant says, “One of the astonishments of these books is King’s seemingly cavalier but still utterly coherent method of merging science fictional constructs with irrational fantasy. He shoves the superficially disparate concepts together with such force, the generated heat melds the elements.”
⁴

While most modern fantasy derives from Tolkien in one way or another, the epic quest dates back to the beginning of written language. The earliest surviving fiction is the
Epic of Gilgamesh,
composed more than four thousand years ago. This ancient story about unknown people in an unknown time displays characteristics of epic adventures that persist in modern fiction. Though Gilgamesh—and his companion Enkidu—accomplishes legendary feats, the story emphasizes what he learned along the way. Quests are as much about the trip as the goal.

In his inimitable pithy manner, King reflects on this in the closing pages of
The Dark Tower
. He addresses imaginary readers who won’t be satisfied until they learn what awaits Roland within the Tower.

You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking. . . . You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens,
⁵
where tired characters go to rest. . . . I hope most of you know better. Want better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a closed door no man . . . can open. [DT7]

The Odyssey
is mostly about what befalls Odysseus during his travels. He has a specific goal—to return to Utica after the Trojan War and regain his kingdom—but he learns more about himself during his twenty years
of travel than he would have in twenty years of peaceful existence with his wife and son. He is forced to make decisions that affect not only his own fate but also the lives of those who accompany him. He’s not perfect; he makes his share of mistakes. What makes him heroic is the way he gains moral clarity by understanding his errors.

Though he is a strong leader, his quest is sometimes jeopardized by the independent actions of his companions, for each of them has a life to live, too, and their goals are not always compatible. Curiosity blended with distrust provokes some of his men into opening the sack holding unfavorable winds when his ships are within sight of home, blowing them far off track and ultimately condemning all but Odysseus to death in foreign lands.

Poems of epic quests are part of the oral tradition of literature. In French, these poems are called
Chansons de Geste,
songs of heroic deeds, the oldest surviving of which is the “Chanson de Roland” (see below). Though these poems were often based on historical events—many of them inspired by Charlemagne’s life and deeds—traveling musicians turned them into legends when they embroidered them as songs performed from village to village.

Quests have goals, indeed. Bilbo’s goal is to get back home alive after he’s dragged out of his comfortable hole to help steal a dragon’s treasure. Frodo needs to get the One Ring to Mordor and destroy it. King Arthur and his knights hope that by finding the Holy Grail they can strengthen their faltering fellowship. The travelers in the
Canterbury Tales
are on a religious pilgrimage. Captain Ahab seeks vengeance against the beast that crippled him. Don Quixote seeks adventure itself. Dante traverses purgatory and hell to find a way back home, a common element in many quests, including
The Wizard of Oz,
on which King draws in
Wizard and Glass
.

One thing that sets the
Dark Tower
apart from these earlier works—aside from its greater length—is the way in which the story was meted out to readers over such a long period of time. The words “What happened next?” have always been treasured by storytellers, but with the
Dark Tower,
the author has not always been prepared to reveal more of the story right away.

“It’s the one project I’ve ever had that seems to wait for me,” King said in 1988.
⁶
“Epileptics, I have heard, either see or sense aura of some sort before a seizure. In much the same way I would, from time to time, find
myself thinking of Roland and his queer, sad world . . . and then there would be a brief writing seizure.”
⁷
Within the story, King attributes these long lapses to the phenomenon of waiting to hear the song that carries the tale.

Roland’s quest to reach the Dark Tower is an Aristotelian epic, in which a hero who was already larger than life, possessed of unique strengths, sets out on a journey, encounters great challenges and learns from both his travels and his encounters with others.

Unlike Odysseus, Roland doesn’t have a large company of men. He starts out alone and fully intends to complete his journey alone until events conspire against him. When it seems like his goal is within his grasp, though it is still thousands of miles away, he is disabled. He loses some of his unique strength and is forced to rely on others who are conscripted to assist him but who ultimately adopt his quest as their own. Roland’s obsession with the Tower infects them. If he were to fall, the others would carry on without him.

Roland’s primary calling is to save all of existence, a task that has been prophesied and the one that fate and destiny—called ka—conspire to facilitate. The Dark Tower, the axis around which an infinity of universes and realities rotate, is failing. It will collapse if Roland cannot stop its decline, and if it does, existence will come to an end, to be replaced by a vast chaos known as Discordia.

However, saving the Tower is a means to an end for Roland. If the Tower were to fall, he wouldn’t be able to climb the staircase to the room at the top. The Tower is made of the flesh of creation, and those who know of it and believe in it think that something dwells—or once dwelled—there. God? No one knows for sure, but Roland, Walter and the Crimson King all believe that by reaching the Tower they will be able to discover what is at the root of existence. The latter two aspire to control, destroy or replace it. Walter is worried that he might be called to account for all he has done in his life. Roland’s fear is that he will mount the stairs and find nothing.

Nothing drives Roland to go beyond saving the Tower other than his own curiosity, the age-old drive to discover the nature of existence. Is there a God? Does He control creation from atop the Tower, or has He abdicated or passed on to the clearing at the end of the path? In biblical times, the people of Babel attempted to build a similar tower that would reach to heaven to find their maker.

After completing
The Drawing of the Three,
King told an interviewer, “I think everybody keeps a Dark Tower in their heart that they want to find and they know it’s destructive and it will probably mean the end of them, but there’s that urge to make it your own or to destroy it, one or the other. So I thought: Maybe it’s different things to different people. . . . And as I write along I’ll find out what it is to Roland.”
⁸