It is for these reasons that any theoretical framework which attempts to seriously grapple with any of King's novels, and with IT in particular, must likewise take a scatological approach. Only through scatology can we fully understand the cultural dynamic at work in King's expulsion; only by making shit the focal critical point of our reading can we illuminate King's essentially genius strategy, a strategy which, for the most part, is dismissed as -- but which actually derives its power from -- wallowing.

How could we consider King, possibly the epitome of selling out, radical or genius? Literary critic Todd McGowan, in an essay that traces the thematic importance of waste in Don DeLillo's Underworld, provides one possible angle on King's unlikely status as revolutionary:

Capital submits everything to the process of exchange, and under its sway nothing remains sacred or outside of commodification. ... Through this process, capital transforms everything, ultimately, into waste. ... But this waste, which marks the elimination of the sacred, itself comes to occupy the position of the sacred. ... Garbage achieves this status because, within the structure of global capitalism, it is the only thing that exists outside of the commodification process. Garbage is what doesn't fit, and thus garbage becomes holy. ... Capitalism produces garbage and then doesn't know what to do with it.

And though McGowan is talking here about actual, physical garbage, we can see how these ideas about waste and its place in our culture nonetheless apply to King. Capitalism, we could say, produces Stephen King and then doesn't know what to do with him or where to put him. If King is sublime, then, it is because he embraces his status as cultural and literary garbage; because he refuses to strive, refuses to refuse that symbol of profanity -- shit -- against which the entire Western project of progress and technology have struggled, and whose production, ironically, has become the defining hallmark of that project.

Reveling in his brand name status, trumpeting himself as the literary equivalent of a supersized Big Mac and fries, King makes the profane the central focus of his work, refusing to look away from the horrific sight of shit -- and it is for this reason that any exploration of his work must do the same, through a kind of Shit Crit that refuses to turn away from literary productions with mass appeal.

When we employ such a critical framework to a reading of IT, what we see is that shit takes on three dimensions in the novel: first, a literal dimension, in which King is actually writing about shit in the broadest sense of the word; second, a canonical dimension, in which the novel as popular fiction is expelled -- shat out -- from circles of critical regard; and third, a metafictional dimension, in which we see that this piece of shit novel about shit is actually a novel about language and about the writing process itself.

This element of the pornographic, which to some extent pervades all of King's novels, stems from the fact that he spares no detail, however grisly or fulsome. He is not delicate; he exposes and delights in this act of making external what is internal: and the public, watching, is riveted. Here is a man, his popularity seems to voice, who is saying what our mothers always told us not to say.

Reading King is thus a vicarious return to the potty-humor of the preschool child, for whom the disruptive functions and excretions of the undifferentiated body are a supreme source of pleasure and enjoyment. It is a return to the bathroom, that pre-Oedipal site of repugnance and attraction in which the private and internal become the public and external, subsequently dividing the one from the other.

What I want to propose is that It {the monster}, then, is shit: it is the monster that refuses interpretation, refuses language, refuses to be refused and constricted by the symbolic. As Kristeva's abject, das Es, "King's Thing ... is primitive, an ingredient of the evolutionary soup that still simmers in our veins": it is the internal goop whose elimination both terrifies and fascinates, beckons and repulses, for its outward manifestation reminds us of the terrible cost we exact in order to participate in a culture based on Enlightenment assumptions of a mechanical, material universe -- namely, our ties to the cyclical, the natural, and the numinous.

If the It of the novel is frightening, then, if shit is frightening, it is because both remind us of the conflicted truth of our existence: that even as we thrive we decay, that the processes of life and death, vitality and entropy, are commingled and inextricably bound. It is, after all, the very expulsion of wastes that assures us of the integrity of the living organism, even as those wastes are the definitive evidence of our corruptibility and inescapable mortality.

Thus, even as King's novel chronicles, on the level of plot and exposition, the descent of the Loser's Club into the Derry sewers to slay the child-devouring beast, on a deeper level it is also a story about the writer's regression into the bathroom, into that pre-symbolic space in which the child must confront the internal matter which becomes external, that unstable and compelling ooze which, though it stinks of chaos and death, is also the source and determinant of all ideas, order, and creative expression. Ultimately, King's genius as both novelist and cultural phenomenon is a result of his complicity with, rather than his resistance to, the profligacy of consumer culture.

The horror that King elicits in his readers does not offer, as some critics derisively attest, an escape from the rigors of culture, but rather "offer[s] an avenue by which a direct confrontation with the problematic nature of the modern American experience can be launched".

In resisting interpretation, in resisting the urge to flush, in forcing us, over and over again, to look at what we don't want to see, King thus transforms the horror of bodily and social existence into something mundane, familiar, ordinary, and human: into the original delight of the child, into a recognition of the body's essential, humorous instability. King's horrorbooks, then, are actually lullabies -- IT is a strident Brahms for a civilization that has not slept since Francis Bacon, since Plato, since agriculture.