The Road to The Dark Tower (55 page)

²⁶
Edward Bryant,
Locus
magazine, vol. 27, no. 6, December 1991.

Chapter 12
ART AND THE ACT OF CREATION

Two patterns, art and craft, were welded together.

[DT1]

All he needs to do is write the right story. Because some stories do live forever.

[DT7]

 In the window of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, bookstore owner Calvin Tower maintains a deli board announcing the day’s specials.
FRESH
-
BROILED JOHN D
.
MACDONALD
, it says.
PAN
-
FRIED
WILLIAM FAULKNER
and
CHILLED STEPHEN KING
.

For Stephen King to show up in his own novels isn’t unprecedented. His books have become so much a part of the cultural consciousness that characters who live in a simulacrum of our world need to be aware of them and mention them to be realistic. When there’s a fire at a graduation dance in
The Dead Zone,
the characters automatically think of
Carrie,
a book Dinky mentions during the aftermath of the battle at Algul Siento. Flaherty, the human who pursues Jake down the corridors behind the Dixie Pig, read
The Eyes of the Dragon
when he was a kid. Part of the “feeling of reality” that F&SF editor Ed Ferman identified in the series is the characters’ awareness of all the fantasy that has gone before them. Though they are living in a fantasy world, they are conversant with
The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia
and
Watership Down
.

Eddie has seen Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of
The Shining,
but he has also read a book by Ben Mears, a character in
’Salem’s Lot
. He doesn’t seem to know King’s name and later says that he thinks King exists only in Keystone Earth.
The Shining
may be one of those stories, like
Charlie
the Choo-Choo,
that is so important that it is written by different authors in different realities. Eddie also dreams of the first line of
The Gunslinger,
though in his dream it is attributed to Thomas Wolfe. Father Callahan believes that the man who thought him up may exist in only one world.

King occasionally inserts references to himself as a writer within his books, sometimes obliquely,
¹
sometimes explicitly.
²
However, he takes self-reference a step farther when, in
Song of Susannah,
Eddie and Roland visit a younger version of himself living in western Maine in 1977. King transcends the characters’ common consciousness to take part in the action, going beyond simple author intrusion.
³

In “Slade,” a precursor to the
Dark Tower
series (see the introduction), the imperiled heroine cries, “You came just in time!” to which Slade replies, “I always do. Steve King sees to that.”
⁴
Slade is aware he’s fictional, but King isn’t a character in the story.

In “The Blue Air Compressor,” the author halts the action to speak to readers, but still doesn’t participate in the action.

My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you’ll pardon my intrusion on your mind—or I hope you will. I could argue that the drawing-aside of the curtain of presumption between reader and author is permissible because I am the writer; i.e., since it’s my story I’ll do any goddam thing I please with it—but since that leaves the reader out of it completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all writers is that the teller is not worth a tin tinker’s fart when compared to the listener. Let us drop the matter, if we may. I am intruding for the same reason that the Pope defecates: we both have to.
⁵

Characters in the story are unaware that they are cast in a work of fiction, but King reminds readers that what they are reading is made up. “I invented [Gerald Nately] first during a moment of eight o’clock boredom in a class taught by Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine English faculty. . . . In truth, he was guided by an invisible hand—mine.” It’s a risky approach because readers are pulled out of the story in a fashion similar to what happens when a movie character breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience.

King and Peter Straub insert themselves into
Black House
in a different way, relating much of the action as omniscient narrators who offer
readers a literal bird’s-eye view of events. Late in the book, the authors step briefly from behind the curtain to explain who they are, calling themselves “the scribbling fellows.” They occasionally comment on their own writing structure, in one place noting that to change scene during certain events would be “bad narrative business.”

The literary term for self-aware or self-referential fiction is “metafiction,” probably coined by William H. Gass in 1970. In his afterword to
The Dark Tower,
King says he hates this “smarmy academic term.” Metafiction—or the less frequently used metafantasy—is not really what King is up to in the
Dark Tower
series. Books to which this label is applied examine the story-telling process, exploring the relationship between the apparent reality portrayed in the fiction and genuine reality. “The Blue Air Compressor” is metafiction, a commentary on narrative reality, or the lack thereof. In the
Dark Tower
series, King explores the creative process, but does not often criticize the process or fiction in general.

I’m in here because I’ve known for some time now (consciously since writing
Insomnia
in 1995) that many of my fictions refer back to Roland’s world and Roland’s story. Since I was the one who wrote them, it seemed logical that I was part of the gunslinger’s ka. My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible beneath the arch of some über-tale. I never meant that to be pretentious (and I hope it isn’t), but only as a way of clearing my desk once and for all. . . . It was all about reaching the Tower, mine as well as Roland’s, and that has finally been accomplished.
⁶
[DT7]

One of the earliest instances of fiction transcending itself is Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
. Cervantes, who is quoted by Feemalo at the Crimson King’s castle,
⁷
is both the author and the book’s narrator and, as such, a literal presence in the fiction. He’s retelling Quixote’s story to set the record straight from the original Arabic “history,” which contained inaccuracies compounded by mistakes made by the translator. This means that Quixote has three fictional people and the real author telling his story in nested layers, all of whom are, to varying degrees, unreliable.

After the success of the original book, Alonzo Fernández de Avallaneda wrote an unauthorized sequel. Furious not only about the sequel but also about a personal attack in the preface, Cervantes wrote his own sequel in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are aware of the first book and the false sequel. They—and people they meet—know of Cervantes and their fictional representations in the original book, but they believe themselves to be real.

In the
Dark Tower
series, Father Callahan is the first character to discover that his reality is someone else’s fiction. The story of his life recounted in
’Salem’s Lot
contains details known only to him. Roland and Eddie are less concerned that somewhere a writer is making up their lives as they go along, creating their reality a step ahead of them—or, as it happens, a step behind them. Their only concern is that he not stop, or their quest will fail.

Patricia Waugh, who has written extensively about metafiction, says that its purpose is to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.
⁸
The metafictional novel often parodies novel conventions, thereby making the reader conscious of these conventions, and uses that awareness to evaluate them. In “The Blue Air Compressor,” King indulges in a running commentary on the story and on the genre. “In a horror story, it is imperative that the grotesque be elevated to the status of the abnormal.” In
The Dark Tower,
when Susannah asks Nigel the robot the way to the doorway, she realizes it is a crucial question. Nigel, being a robot, though, makes no effort to keep her in suspense as a character in a book might. He has no sense of dramatic tension, well read though he may be.

If King parodies anything in the
Dark Tower
series, it is the notion of deus ex machina—God in the work. In ancient Greek drama, starting with Euripides,
⁹
gods often came onstage to intercede on behalf of characters or hand them convenient solutions to their problems.

Fiction has to be truer than reality or else it seems like contrivance. An author who relies on convenient solutions to too great a degree is seen as artless and unsophisticated. If characters only show up to deliver important bits of information or if heroes happen upon the very item they need to complete the next stage of their quest, critics—and readers—scream, “Cheat!”

When Eddie and Roland encounter John Cullum in the general store
in western Maine and the man proves extremely useful, Eddie claims that someone like him would never “come off the bench to save the day” in fiction. It wouldn’t be considered realistic. Roland says, “In life, I’m sure it happens all the time.”

The Fates, who control the span of an individual’s life, appear in
Insomnia,
telling Ralph and Lois only as much as they need to know to accomplish their task. Without them, Ralph would never have understood what was going on in Derry and stood no chance of succeeding.

Over the course of the series—and in related books—King intercedes on behalf of his characters to help them. In
Insomnia,
Dorrance Marstellar acts on his behalf, delivering important warning messages to Ralph. Speedy does the same thing in
Black House,
phoning Jack to tell him how to handle crises and leaving some powerful flowers for him in the bathroom. In
The Waste Lands,
King leaves a key in the vacant lot that Jake will need to cross into Mid-World, and he provides a bowling bag that will block some of Black Thirteen’s terrible power. Hidden within the bag is a talisman that helps Susannah survive in New York with Mia and allows Jake and Callahan to battle insurmountable odds at the Dixie Pig.

King sends a message directly to Jake at the hotel in New York, providing him with the key card they need to access Mia’s room. He packs the group a lunch after they leave the Emerald Palace, and pokes fun at the chain of coincidences in
The Dark Tower
when Susannah finds a message in the bathroom at Dandelo’s house explaining to her what’s going on. The note points her toward a copy of “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” left by King, who is the deus in this machina.

Eddie calls these little author-provided gifts “get out of jail free” cards. Although deus ex machina is no longer fashionable, Eddie thinks that a popular novelist like King still relies on it, perhaps in a way disguised a little better than classic playwrights did. Jake argues that King isn’t thinking up these clues; he’s just broadcasting them on behalf of ka.

Though King interjects himself into the story, he rarely narrates. Readers observe him as an active participant in the tale. When he does push back the “curtain of presumption” to comment on proceedings, it is usually to absolve himself of responsibility for what has happened or to claim reluctance to tell certain parts of the story. As he foreshadows Eddie’s death in Algul Siento, King identifies an incident that “moves us a
step closer to that you will not want to hear and I will not want to tell.” [DT7]