Captain Trips: Stephen King's Style in The Stand

[This is the first of three posts on Stephen King's The Stand. In this post, I will write about reading some of his other works from the '80s and look at the writing techniques that Stephen King uses in the novel.  Later entries will focus with greater detail on the content of The Stand.]

Stephen King, you nearly made a teenage bed-wetter out of me.  I was twelve when I brought Stephen King's It with me on a summertime visit to my grandmother`s house.  Late in the humid evening, while the grownups were out talking somewhere, I quietly read how the monster It stalked the children of Derry, Maine.  What most deeply chilled me about this monster was that he wanted more than blood.  He wanted to use the deepest fears and shames of the children against them.  Sometimes he would adopt the form of a clown, to abuse and corrupt the images that brought the children happiness.  He wanted them to feel unsafe in the places where they should have felt protected.  In short, he wanted to torment them.

In the scene that I read that night, Beverly Rogan, one of the children of Derry, hears the voice of It rising from the bathroom sink, accompanied by the cries of the town‘s murdered children.  Afraid to move, she watches as a bubble of blood forms in the drain, only to burst all over her and the bathroom walls.  Yet, when she calls her mother and father, they cannot see the gore spattered around them.

After reading those passages, my grandmother's old house seemed terrifying and empty. I called out to my parents, but they didn't respond.  Uneasily, I went to look for them, imagining the gruesome clown waiting for me around every corner.  I could picture the blood spurting out of my grandmother's antiquated bathroom sink.  When I saw that the front door was ajar and could hear my parents chatting in the cooler night air, I raced outside to be with them.  I didn`t tell my parents why I was so jittery and anxious to see them, because, like Beverly, I knew adults couldn`t see It. 

It was the first of many Stephen King novels that I would read in junior and senior high school.  I joined the legions of King devotees, happily shuddering through Carrie, The Dead Zone, The Shining, Tommyknockers, The Gunslinger, and Misery.  And while many books have excited and moved me since then, none have had such a visceral, bladder-weakening, goosebump raising effect that It did.

And you wonder why I hate clowns?

Once I entered university, though, I pretty much stopped reading Stephen King.  I had decided that a serious academic should only devote oneself to serious art and high culture.  Yes, his grisly page-turners were simply unworthy of one such as me.  Harold Bloom, the venerable literary critic, would later huffily support my decision.  After The National Book Foundation awarded King the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Harold Bloom wrote an editorial, calling King "an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis."  Wow, wasn't I smart?

Now that I'm older and a not as insufferably pretentious as I once was, I decided to return to the author that I`d enjoyed so much.  I chose The Stand partly because many of his fans listed it as their personal favourite.  Also, I`d read an interview that King had given on the 30th anniversary of the novel.  But, like the tormenting voice that Beverly heard rising out of the gory bathroom sink, I could still hear my old self — the snooty twirp — lurking in the sewers of my mind.  He wanted to know (*gulp*) was King really `inadequate` on all of the levels that Bloom had listed?

Well, inner twirp, let me just say that Bloom's definition of good literature is too narrow, in my view.  Near the end of his editorial, Bloom states that there are only " four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise": Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.  Now, I've read and admired works by all four novelists (ugh, I can hear my inner twirp applaud), and, while each one offers readers a very different style, what makes them great is their willingness to explore large issues.  On a "book by book basis", Stephen King engages his readers by disrupting our accepted ideas, which are rooted in comparably large issues.  Politics, morality, innocence, and sexuality are just a few of the themes raised in his works, underlying the more evident violence and horror.

In spite of the scope and thematic complexity of King's novels, academics like Bloom often discredit his work partly because of his approach to writing.  After King published a succession of novels at a rate that would kill ten ordinary writers, the critics began to snipe that he valued prolixity over proficiency, quantity over quality.  Moreover, the attitude that King takes towards literature is intimated in The Stand through one character`s reminiscence about her deceased husband:    

 "I always used to get my husband a second cup.  He insisted on it.  Although I never saw more than his hairline at breakfast.  The rest of him was behind The Wall Street Journal or some dreadful heavy piece of literature.  Something not just meaningful, or deep, but positively gravid with meaning.  Böll. Camus. Milton, for God's sake.  You're a welcome change." (289)  

King wants to write meaningful novels, but, unlike the novelists that Bloom champions, he never allows his writing to be "gravid with meaning" or "heavy".  In fact, "heavy" writers — like the pompous `blowhard` Harold Emery Lauder or the radical poet Kit Bradenton — are subtly ridiculed and tormented in The Stand. Some might argue that these interpretations of isolated events and quotes don`t conclusively prove that King rejects the standards of so-called high literature, but the strongest evidence is found in his style.

King primarily uses simple sentences, with a fair number of compound and an occasional complex.  He also chooses common words, though critics often fail to note that he is very precise with descriptions of concrete objects.  What the critics focus upon is the cliché or unevocative quality of his writing, particularly when he tries to punch up his prose with metaphors and similes.  While reading The Stand, I also noticed a few unclear or lazy flourishes in his writing.  Probably the most glaring instance of this failing occurs when Larry Underwood, one of the principal protagonists in The Stand, remembers how a friend described his personality:

 A memory circuit in the Department of Masochism clicked open and he heard Wayne Stuckey saying, There`s something in you that`s like biting on tinfoil. (84)

I have to confess that I initially didn't understand this simile at all.   Turning to Google, I learned that people with metal dental fillings could painfully shock themselves by biting tinfoil.  Huh.  How many people were biting on tinfoil when King wrote this novel?  Would teens hang out and dare each other to gnaw on tinfoil or was this more of an adult pastime?  Aside from the obscurity of the reference, I also thought that it was just an unnatural statement for anyone to make.  It turns out that reading that sentence was like biting on tinfoil.  But, dwelling on this shortcoming in King's style is unfair, because he seldom uses metaphorical language.  In fact, I have never seen a critic remark upon the stylistic device that King uses most frequently.

Throughout The Stand, I often noticed the subtle ways in which King would modulates his narrative voice to reflect the characters being represented.  In the chapter that briefly introduces and then kills the poet-radical Kit Bradenton, for example, the language is more abstract and poetic than in previous chapters, while the allusions to Charon, Goya, and Raphael reflect Bradenton's cultured tastes.  King shifts to a very different voice when he writes about Irma Fayette, a woman with deep fears about men.  After the plague strikes most of the people in her town and all civil order falls apart, Irma initially hides in her attic, fearing that someone will come and rape her.  But, after she finds her father`s old pistol, she makes this firm decision: 

Yes, Austen and King are identical.

She loaded the gun under the single cobwebby attic bulb, and then went down to eat her breakfast at her own kitchen table.  She would not hide like a mouse in a hole any longer.  She was armed.  Let the rapers beware. (341)

The unusual choice of words (`raper`) signals that King is not addressing the reader in his own narrative voice, but is indirectly presenting the fears of this character.  Essentially, the literary technique that King most often employs in his works is called free indirect discourse, in which the author blends the character`s views directly into the narrative without adding quotes or some marker to indicate that these are the sentence is derived from the character.  My professors used to praise Jane Austen for her subtle use of this technique, but, when Stephen King uses it, it seems the critics are silent.

Most critics also fail to note the complexity of The Stand on a chapter by chapter and a paragraph by paragraph basis. The novel is over 1,200 pages in length and has a large cast of characters whose stories unfold all across the plague-stricken United States of America.  To weave such a complex story, King shifts his focus in each chapter, moving between panoramic descriptions of a society in the grip of the plague and a more intimate view of the main characters' experience.  Unlike the more structured narrative used in It, King doesn't seem to follow a distinct pattern in The Stand, apart from keeping the characters in the same chronological period.  King connects these disparate narratives through variations of a dream sequence that all of the plague survivors seem to have.  The reader knows the plot is moving inexorably toward some grand outcome, and, though the narrative is long, these shifts heighten tension and anticipation. 

After thinking about Stephen King and The Stand, I think I can safely tell my inner twirp and Harold Bloom that King is a more than adequate writer on many levels.  While his metaphors are sometimes flawed, his narratives operate on a gutsy, large scale.  He takes on huge themes and paces even his big stories masterfully, drawing the reader along to the climactic finale.  In the second of three entries, I'll look more closely at The Stand, and the political questions in this work.   

Bangor, Maine.  Home of the master of American Gothic