King’s graphic depictions of gratuitous violence and nauseating behaviors usually incur complaints from critics who believe that King’s work is better without them. Greg Smith blames the hack conventions of the horror genre for spoiling the quality of King’s work: “the quality of his work overall tends to be uneven, exhibiting in its worst manifestations the two dimensional stock characters, superfluous narrative description, and gratuitous scenes of violence typical of junk horror fiction” (340). Similarly, Joseph Reino views the better part of King’s oeuvre as a proof of King’s ability to improve the hackneyed devices of a century-old art form whereas the rest of his stories are still not free from the tendency toward grotesquery and senselessness, characteristic of modern Gothic fiction: “much of his work is entrapped in the absurd confinements, crude vulgarities, and simple-minded exaggerations of late twentieth-century gothic fiction” (139). Though the gross-out is one of the effects horror
writers produce to entertain readers, the other two being terror and horror, in Samuel Schuman’s view, King resorts to this particular effect way too often while he should use it as moderately as Shakespeare in whose works gross scenes are exceptional rather than common:
“King’s second major problem is a fairly regular and deliberate absence of taste. . . . He himself says that, when he cannot achieve a higher effect, he will aim at revulsion”
(108-09).41 While some critics choose to leave out the gross-out in King’s fiction out of a belief that they are meaningless and exist solely for shocking readers, others see no reason why shock effect cannot be compatible with symbolism: “The insight which King offers into the work of horror is based upon a bimodal or dualistic vision which insists upon the necessity of reading between the lines” (Gallagher 37). James Egan, for whom the Gothic and the melodramatic are always bound with each other, sees in King’s overt intent to treat his readers to spectacles an covert attempt at articulating his view of the world. Not unlike his Gothic predecessors, who found the realist prose and the rationalistic view insufficient to account for the universe and the human condition, King deems the melodramatic a fitting vehicle for a world which keeps getting more and more inexplicable in spite of human beings’ progress in science and knowledge: “the territory of the unknown is immense and probably expanding, not diminishing, despite the increasing sophistication of modern investigative methods. . . . The plot, characterization, rhetoric, and world view support these thematic premises and may be viewed, in melodramatic terms, as vehement arguments for them” (Egan, “Single” 64).42
41 King ranks the levels of effects in horror fiction as follows: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion . . . and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I will go for the gross-out. I’m not proud” (Danse 37). Besides, in Schuman’s view, King’s first major problem, one that is typical of prolific writers such as Shakespeare and Dickens, is a tendency to overwrite and the ensuing careless mistakes which could be avoided if he had the habit of revising what he has written down:
“he has the tendency to churn out enormous volume of prose with a great speed and without much of an inclination to go back over what he has written and make sure he has got everything just right. As a consequence, he is often ‘uneven’” (108).
42 Vernon Hyles distinguishes Gothic literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from modern Gothic fiction in terms of the use of Gothic apparatus as metaphors. Whereas eighteenth-century Gothic fiction used to
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King’s much-censured willful indulgence in blood and gore looks inevitable given the fact that the horror genre is more often than not grounded in the conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian forces of the universe: “the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian . . . exists in all horror fiction” (King, Danse 242). The calmness of our familiar surroundings is disturbed when the Dionysian force of irrationality and chaos suddenly erupts and asserts dominance. The perennial war between the opposing forces goes on day after day both inside and outside the human mind. King identifies the struggle, which he believes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde typifies, as one between rationality and desire within each person: “the twinning of Jekyll and Hyde suggests another duality . . . between the Apollonian (the creature of intellect, morality, and nobility, ‘always treading the upward path’) and the Dionysian (god of partying and physical gratification; the get-down-and-boogie side of human nature)” (Danse 83). Recognizing the excessive nature of Gothic writing, Fred Botting in Gothic opposes it to what rationalists and humanists have held to be true about the world and human nature since the eighteenth century:
Gothic signifies a writing of excess. It appears in the awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality. It shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence . . . . In the twentieth century, in diverse and ambiguous ways, Gothic figures have continued to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values. (1-2)
The use of horror fiction, as far as King is concerned, is not solely for showcasing the
hint at an alternative world view to the more constrictive thinking of the Age of Reason, modern Gothic tales replaces the sublime with the grotesque as an expressive vehicle more in accordance with the contemporary view of the human condition as absurd and senseless: “Much as the Gothic temperament was a pervading metaphor for the wild, romantic spirit of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the grotesque has become the primary metaphor for the twentieth century world view and for Stephen King” (63).
upsetting of the Apollonian aspect of the universe by the Dionysian force. Horror fiction, King believes, foregrounds the restoration of order, a comfort for readers whose fears in reality are confronted and dealt with, after monsters are driven out or slain or the encroachment of the supernatural on the mundane world is stopped: “For a little while the deeper fear . . . has been excised. It will grow back again, but that is for later. For now, the worse has been faced and it wasn’t so bad after all. There was that magic moment of reintegration and safety at the end” (Danse 27).
One of the horrors to be contained is the fear associated with the physical body. Fears of the body and anxieties about bodily functions, as Leonard G. Heldreth concludes, dominate horror fiction: “Consciousness of the physical body—its sensations, vulnerability and ultimately termination—is the focus of horror literature” (64). King’s comments on carny freaks in Danse Macabre indicate that he is aware of physical aberrations’ power of horror.
The fear that the staples of the freak show such as the Siamese twins cause is for the most part related with the body: people might be curious about “every possible bizarre exingency of life among the mortally attached: the sex life of, the bathroom functions of, the love lives, the sicknesses” (44; sic). Besides deformity, other bodily defects can also border on monstrosity. For example, the monstrosity of fat is confirmed when some easy tasks in everyday life cannot be performed without great efforts or can’t be performed any more:
“Has the obese person reached the point of monstrosity when he or she can no longer go to the movies or to a concert because his/her buttocks will no longer fit between the fixed armrests of a single seat?” (King, Danse 47). Also, acne could become so abhorrent that it reminds King of the most disgusting scene in Alien: “I’m talking about the case of acne that runs absolutely apeshit . . . pimples on pimples, and most of them red and suppurating . . . . Like the chest-buster in Alien, it’s enough to put you off your popcorn . . . except this is real”
(Danse 49). King makes use of the fears associated with the body in many of his stories, such
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as The Stand and “Night Surf” where the human species is endangered by a deadly virus which has wiped out most of the population when each story begins. In stories about people who are dead or appear dead but still capable of feeling, such as “The Breathing Method” and
“Autopsy Room Four,” physical sensations are found so incredibly entangled with death that readers are confronted with phenomena which nullify the materialist assumption that death is the end to all sensory perceptions. The fears portrayed in “The Body” are articulated in concrete terms. The boys on their way to view the dead body of a boy killed by a train have been threatened by bodily harm of many sorts including being chased and bitten by a dog, being run over by the train and being brutalized by older boys. There is nothing abstract about the dead body of the boy that they are dying to see, either. The boy has become a piece of rotting meat, impervious to the insects crawling in and out of all the openings on his face, probably busying themselves with eating or nesting: “There were ants and bugs all over his face and neck. They ran briskly in and out of the round collar of his tee-shirt. His eyes were open, but terribly out of sync—one has rolled back so far that we could see only the a tiny arc of iris; the other stared straight up into the storm” (King, “Body” 409).
Like the unnatural stare of the dead boy in “The Body,” the shape, size and functions of the body are constantly twisted and exaggerated in tales of horror to the extent that the carefully-guarded boundary between normalcy and monstrosity is crossed in order to cause fear. In King’s eyes, our culture’s desperate attempt to prevent the contamination of the acceptable by the abnormal reflects human being’s craving for order: “it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which the aberrations seem to imply” (Danse 50). Meditating on physical aberrations which used to be viewed as signs of evil or associated with deviltry, such as left-handedness, widow’s peak, and moles on women’s bodies, King notices that the line separating normalcy and monstrosity changes over time and concludes that “[n]ormality is a sociological concept” and
is accordingly historical and endemic (Danse 48).43 People are thus taught to love or hate, as Edward J. Ingebretsen rightly points out while they are led to believe that their choices of the objects of desire or fear are free from the mandates of the culture eager to define the scope of the permissible by naming and excluding social deviations: “terror likewise presumes a prior discrimination and its use suggests implicit authority. Those who create the monster (or the monstrous) must either continue reminding us of the fact or convince us to do that work ourselves. Consequently, neither love nor terror can be considered ‘merely’ natural or, in a democratic regime, ‘freely chosen’” (xxiii).
The body is among the things people are instructed to hate or fear. Noticing Lovecraft’s obsession with the body’s constant resistance to definition and discipline, Ingebretsen concludes that the body is almost synonymous with monstrosity for Lovecraft, who finds the intractability of the body almost bordering on the demonic and accordingly considers it an effective means to horrify readers: “The body is Lovecraft’s favorite source of outrage—its generations and degenerations, and the way these affect identity, its duplicities and perplexing fluidity. The human form’s disconcerting talent for losing locus, changing shape, or for transgressing the boundaries of the humane is, in short, Lovecraft’s definition of the
monstrum” (161). Ingebretsen goes on to say, in his insightful book on the often neglected
bound between theology and horror literature, Maps of Heaven and Maps of Hell, that the horror of the body can be traced back to Christianity’s denial of the flesh in favor of the spirit:Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror,” the bastard son of an unknown god and a mortal woman, “embodies the deeply discountenanced horror of the flesh central to the abstracting,
43 According to King, left-handedness has a long history of being suspected of evil for the alleged association of the left side with Satan: “Left-handed baseball players are all considered screwballs, whether they are or not.
The French for left, bastardized from the Latin, is la sinister, from which comes our word sinister. According to the old superstition, your right side belongs to God, your left side to that other fellow. Southpaws have always been suspect” (Danse 49-50). He also enumerates physical aberrations which used to indicate those people who engaged themselves with witchery or sorcery: “almost every physical and mental human aberration has been at some point in history, or is now, considered monstrous—a complete list would include widow’s peaks (once considered a reliable sign that a man was a sorcerer), moles on the female body (supposed to be witches’ teats) . . .” (Danse 50).
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spiritualizing Christian imagination” (161). The fear of the body is not only foregrounded in the Christian belief, it is also an integral part of Western culture: “As Michel Foucault demonstrates in A History of Sexuality, a dread of the body—its issues and fervors, its unspeakable and uncontrollable desires—profoundly influences western culture” (Ingebretsen 186). In Misery the struggle between the seriously injured popular writer and his number-one fan and abductor, as Bernadette Lynn Bosky sees it, is one between the mind and the body since Annie is bulky and overweight while Paul is wasting away from his injuries: “The strong, fleshy nurse and the crippled, emaciated writer represent the body and the mind”
(154). Moreover, Paul’s loss of body parts to Annie, who chops off his foot and thumb in extreme rage, literally reduces his corporeality. The more his body is mutilated, the more he is convinced of Annie’s craziness, which must be dealt with more cautiously by rational thinking and self-discipline: “he keeps control over himself and does not give up or make desperate mistakes. . . . Paul is always thinking and calculating. Stripped of all his vices—from cigarettes and alcohol to his own false pride—Paul fashions himself into a Spartan-like being” (Magistrale, “Art” 275). Paul attributes his incredible productivity—he is writing at a pace of twelve pages a day—to the rigorous way of life Annie has forced him into:
“Part of the reason was that he was living an amazingly straight life. No long, muddled nights spent bar-hopping, followed by long, muddled days spent drinking coffee and orange juice and gobbling Vitamin B tablets . . . . No more waking up next to a big blonde or redhead he had picked up somewhere the night before . . . . No more cigarettes” (King, Misery 163).
Besides, that he continues to write even after his thumbectomy is a sure proof that the power of the mind is in inverse ratio to corporeality.
In The Stand there is another example of clarity of the mind purchased at the price of the emaciated body. When the small group of people from the Free Zone, one of the forms of government in the post-plague America, is sent out by their leader and prophet, Mother
Abagail, on a mission to defeat the Dark Prince, they are ordered to travel from Boulder to Las Vegas on foot. The questers at first cannot understand the purpose of walking since it takes a lot more time and exposes them to dangers than traveling by car. As they walk westward for some time, they begin to notice the changes, especially of their bodies. One of the members, Ralph, is surprised to find his weight loss: “We’ve dropped some weight . . . . I know that just looking at you guys. And me. I used to have a helluva beergut. Now I can look down and see my toes again. In fact, I can see just about my whole feet” (King, Stand 1030).
Walking and hunger—they are also ordered not to take food with them and are supposed to eat whatever to be found on the way, which could be little since the plague has laid the whole area desolate—contribute to a sense of well-being. Larry, another member of the group, is amazed at the effect of hunger on the mind—it works like drugs, but without those unpleasant side-effects: “I’ve been feeling high. Like I’d done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there is none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. . . . I feel like I’m thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high. . . . Maybe it’s just hunger” (King, Stand 1030). The scholarly Glen tries to account for the good feeling and concludes that hunger purifies the body, which also leads to the clarification of the mind: “When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there . . . . The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It’s a whole-body, whole-mind enema” (King, Stand 1030).
Western culture’s emphasis on the superiority of the mind over the body finds one of its manifestations in people’s overanxiety about fat and body-weight: “According to Chernin, Western dualism between the mind (or spirit) and the body, and emphasis that the former must overcome the latter, is one reason for contemporary obsession with slimming” (Bosky 146).44 When King discusses physical aberrations and their relation to the concept of
44 Bosky is referring to Kim Chernin’s idea in The Obsession: Reflection on the Tyranny of Slenderness.
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monstrosity in Danse Macabre, fat is not only the first trait that suggests itself, it also occupies a large part of his discussion of people’s interest in and fascination with the inconveniences faced by extremely fat people, such as having to buy two seats when flying and being stuck in a revolving door. In King’s horror landscape, it does not require a hungry wolf to turn Grandma’s loving embrace into a deadly trap; fat can also do the trick. In
“Gramma,” a contemporary rendition of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the six-year-old George is terribly frightened by his blind, mostly bedridden grandma whose weight of two hundred pounds impresses him most: “he had cried with terror whenever Gramma held out her heavy arms toward him . . . she held out her white-elephant arms, wanting him to come to her and be hugged to that huge and heavy old white-elephant body” (464). Bosky observes that of all the features of the body that King usually employs to do a sketch of a character, body-weight carries with it more suggestions while other physical characteristics, such as stature and skin color, are mostly descriptive.45 She goes on to attribute King’s highly-suggestive use of body-size to the complicated conception of fat in the culture at large: “body-weight is highly
“Gramma,” a contemporary rendition of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the six-year-old George is terribly frightened by his blind, mostly bedridden grandma whose weight of two hundred pounds impresses him most: “he had cried with terror whenever Gramma held out her heavy arms toward him . . . she held out her white-elephant arms, wanting him to come to her and be hugged to that huge and heavy old white-elephant body” (464). Bosky observes that of all the features of the body that King usually employs to do a sketch of a character, body-weight carries with it more suggestions while other physical characteristics, such as stature and skin color, are mostly descriptive.45 She goes on to attribute King’s highly-suggestive use of body-size to the complicated conception of fat in the culture at large: “body-weight is highly