I am sure we'll be hearing a lot more from Ms. Cortez in the near future.
Enjoy the unabridged article below. If you want to read the abridged version,
click here [1].
In short, who, I ask you, would agree to call himself abject, subject of
or subject to abjection? ... Such a frontiersman is a metaphysician who carries
the experience of the impossible to the point of scatology.
Nothing is more bourgeois than fear of the smell of feces.
--Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead
--Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
IT wasn't the first Stephen King novel I finished, but IT was
the first one I started, pages and chapters sneaked furtively, greedily,
illicitly, like handfuls of candy before dinnertime, when I was about ten. This
subterfuge was necessary because, according to my mother, as much concerned and
censorial parent as she was avid King fan, IT was not for the
impressionable eyes of children.
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Why not? I asked, profoundly intrigued. What's so bad about IT?
Too much profanity, replied my mother with mysterious finality: case closed.
Or not--for she had never spoken so enticingly, and I would crave the quiet Saturday afternoons when, she and my father off running errands all afternoon, I could carefully slide that hefty volume from its place on the living room bookshelf and curl up on the couch, one ear cocked for the sound of the garage door gratingly heralding my parents' return. The most critical thing was to remember not to dogear the pages, lest my mother, casually thumbing through the novel at some later date, discover my mark, and through it, my transgression. (I always thought I did a fairly good job of covering my tracks--that is, until I quite recently related this story to my mother, who looked at me slinty-eyed and said, Oh, I knew.)
I didn't finish IT then, reading like petty thievery; IT turned out, however, that at the time I didn't have to: by that point I, and every other kid in school, had seen the made-for-TV movie. And so IT was that the tale our mothers didn't want us to know had tentacled its way into our psyches, sticking to our soft, malleable young brains with the tenacity of the archetypal, with the persistence and durability of urban legend, fairy tale, mythology. For years afterward, even before I read the novel with any kind of critical eye, IT structured my reality like some kind of mythopoetic framework: I'd look down our bathroom sinkhole, the one with the missing drainplug, and inadvertently think of Beverly Marsh and the Voices. Or I'd hear someone stutter and think, Stuttering Bill, the connection swimming up from hidden mental vaults.
I bring up this personal experience because I think IT arrives at the central question that informs any endeavor to seriously and critically explore not only IT as a novel, but Stephen King as horror novelist. For my personal history in relation to the book, so powerfully affected by King's storytelling prowess, stands in sharp contrast to King's critical reception, or lack thereof, within academia. How is it, this disjunction leads me to ask, that a writer can wield such influence over the imaginations of millions of readers, and yet meet with such utter and disdainful silence on the part of literary scholars? How can a writer enjoy, on the one hand, phenomenal popular acclaim, and on the other hand be so thoroughly and wholeheartedly dismissed and discredited by the bastions of literary opinion? These questions would not be necessary if King were simply a bad writer; that he is not, however, and that King's writing abilities have been noted by nearly everyone except mainstream literary critics1 points instead, I will argue, to a persistent class politics at work where the literary canon is concerned. King, in other words, is trivialized or dismissed because of his mass appeal--because he is read by those who are, for all practical purposes, illiterate; those who, in Darrell Schweitzer's words, "don't ordinarily read much more than the MEN/WOMEN signs on restrooms"2. Because his books are widely accessible, enjoyable, and sell for cheap on supermarket racks and in bus stations, they do not merIT serious evaluation; King is dismissed as "storyteller" rather than writer.
This is not to suggest that there has been an absolute silence on the part of academics in response to popular or genre fiction; on the contrary, cultural studies--as well as any traditional forum which takes the claims of postmodernism seriously--is awash in critical discourse that plumbs the depth of the reputedly low-brow and shallow: romances, Westerns, mysteries, sci-fi, thrillers, and action/adventure stories are now all fodder for academic explication3. Even the boundaries of conventional literary studies have not been entirely unforgiving; there have been various critical attempts to locate King within an American Gothic tradition, to posIT him as the scion of such luminaries of horror as Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft4. But however sympathetic, most of these attempts are unsuccessful. Those critics who desire to validate and redeem King by working him into an established literary tradition find that he simply will not fit: he is very much like Poe or Lovecraft in some respects, they cautiously aver, and yet "he fails to create a timeless world that can be appreciated centuries from now,"5; "one cannot go thirty pages into Cujo without mention of Luke Skywalker, Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island, Mike Wallace, Jerry Falwell, Darth Vader, the New York Mets, and the Rolling Stones"6. King's problematic status derives not from the simple fact of his popularity, but rather, like the Marquis de Sade, from his immanence, his explicitness: he is Poe on Ecstasy, Lovecraft on LSD: too extravagant, too gross, too gratuitous, too gregarious, too opulent, too decadent, too commercial. As one reviewer protests, there is so much "blood, mud, slime, sewage, vomit, urine, feces, and oozing flesh" that King's fiction exceeds even the classification of horror; "[his] spendthrift elaboration and gargantuan iteration are more appropriate to the genius of comedy than to the spirit of horror, which is anal and claustrophiliac"7. Like a bad case of the shits, Stephen King is explosive; his corpulent epics and profuse vulgarities of speech and description cannot be contained by the sphincter of traditional disciplines. He thus must be violently expelled from the literary corpus and flushed away, out of sight.
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.8
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.
In beginning to understand what King is doing in his fiction--or not doing, as I will later argue--the most logical starting point is with the term that, for my mother, summed up her entire rationale for refusing me license to read IT: profanity. Too much profanity, she had said--which, at age ten, I construed as meaning too much swearing, too many ess-words and eff-words and worse. And, certainly, she did mean swearing when she said profanity, but she meant something else as well, something that was not quite so apparent, something implied rather than stated outright. In saying, Do not read IT because IT is profane, what she was in effect saying was, But you are free to read Conrad and Shakespeare and Golding and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and, yes, even Miller, for even though all of these writers are just as disturbing --if not moreso--than King, they are not profane, for they present their traumatic material in such a way that your unformed child's mind cannot readily understand or even recognize it. My mother's injunction, in other words, implied a distinction between the realm of Real Literature, in which writers deliver their disturbing messages covertly, shrouded in layers of complex metaphor or allegory, and the world of popular fiction, in which the text is bald, eviscerated, meaning gutted and exposed for the apprehension of all. My mother did not say, Don't read Salinger because you won't understand him; rather, she said, Don't read King because you will. Edwin F. Casebeer makes note of this same curious paradox in his article, "Stephen King's Canon: the Art of Balance", stating that though King's book sales have netted him an income greater than some Third World countries, these same novels are top of the charts on lists of censored works9.
I would argue that IT is this sense of the profane--here identified with explicitness, lucidity, and titillation, with showing everything--that accounts for the paradox of King's success, for his dual allure and prohibition, and hence which proves most useful as a means of understanding both IT as a novel and King as a writer. We can see this conception of profanity at work in a passage that exemplifies one of the novel's many instances of ironic self-consciousness; speaking through Patty Uris, and in reference to a book written by protagonist Stuttering Bill Denbrough--whose identity as a horror novelist clearly mirrors King's own--King writes that
[i]t had not just been a novel, she told her mother later; IT had been a horrorbook. She said IT just that way, all one word, the way she would have said sexbook. ... 'IT was full of monsters,' she said. 'Full of monsters chasing after little children. There were killings, and...I don't know...bad feelings and hurt. Stuff like that.' IT had, in fact, struck her as almost pornographic.10
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.
King best captures his task as horrorbook writer in a passage describing Patty Uris's discovery of her husband Stan's suicide. Employing diction so eerily sparse and minimalist that his prose seems almost puerile, King states that "[t]he bathroom was lIT by fluorescent tubes. IT was very bright. There were no shadows. You could see everything, whether you wanted to or not" (58).
The image of a naked Stan Uris floating in the bathtub, wrists slashed and bloody, is undoubtedly gruesome. But gruesomeness is not necessarily profanity--and what I would thus argue is that the profanity of the passage does not result simply from the act of drawing back the proverbial (and literal) shower curtain, but from the fact that King sets up the display in a pre-symbolic fictional space. The image is profane not because King shows us everything, but because he shows us everything and then insists that we not mitigate our horror by interpreting what we have just witnessed. By writing from the bathroom, in fact, what he does is incapacitate this interpretive drive so that we are forced to confront the abject--Kristeva's term for the fluid interior we must reject in order to delineate ourselves as discrete subjects, that "jettisoned object" which "simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject"11--without the protective, transcendent rationality of adulthood. The true profanity, for which he is both venerated and prohibited, lies in King's asking his readers to believe that what they read is only a story, that there is in fact no subtext: that the madwoman in Jane Eyre and the skulls atop the fenceposts surrounding Kurtz's Inner Station in Heart of Darkness are merely plot devices, gratuitous thrills designed to captivate and entertain the reader. But just because King asks us not to interpret doesn't mean that we have to comply--or that a subtext doesn't exist--and so IT is, then, that we can view Stanley Uris, who commits suicide rather than confront IT as an adult, as the bourgeois reader, the rationalist scholastic for whom everything must signify something else:
Stan snatched the album from his hands and slammed IT shut. He held IT closed with both hands, the tendons standing out along the inner surfaces of his wrists and forearms. He looked around at the others with eyes that were nearly insane. "No," he said rapidly. "No, no, no."
And suddenly Bill found he was more concerned with Stan's repeated denials than with the clown, and he understood that this was exactly the sort of reaction the clown had hoped to provoke. ...
"No," Stan said softly.
"Yes," Bill said.
"No," Stan said again.
"Yes. We a-a-all--"
"No."
"--a-a-all suh-haw it, Stan," Bill said. He looked at the others.
"Yes," Ben said.
"Yes," Richie said.
"Yes," Mike said. "Oh my God, yes."
"Yes," Bev said.
Bill looked at Stan, demanding with his eyes that Stan look back at him. "Duh-don't let IT g-g-get y-you, man," Bill said. "Yuh-you suh-saw it, t-t-too."
"I didn't want to!" Stan wailed. ...
"But y-y-you duh-duh-did." (731-32)
In the end, however, Stan can neither accept nor incorporate that inexplicable, unreal part of reality; unable to "digest" it, as Ben Hanscom puts it, he kills himself: not because he is afraid of IT but because IT offends him, because IT disrupts his belief in an entirely stable, material, and rational universe, a universe in which the pictures in photo albums do not leak blood, werewolves do not lurk in school boiler rooms, and the dead do not come back to life.
This idea of the offensive or horrifying return, the return that rends our conception of reality, is central to an understanding of the second, canonical dimension of shit in the Stephen King novel. Slavoj Zizek writes in Looking Awry that "if there is a phenomenon that fully deserves to be called the 'fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture', IT is this fantasy of the return of the living dead: the fantasy of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living"12. IT seems reasonable to suggest that, just as King writes about, and achieves popularity for writing about, the living dead, so too does the King novel function as the living dead in relation to the literary canon, returning again and again, bestseller after bestseller, to satisfy our mass fantasy, to give us exactly what we want. In addressing the question of why the dead, the horrific, return, Zizek points to the commonsense answer given to us by our culture: because they have not been properly interred or given the necessary symbolic rites, because "they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition"13. Thus we can see that, as a writer who catalogs the offensive, who repudiates the symbolic, insisting on the primacy of style, plot, and narration, King is not simply excluded from the corpus of Real Literature but is in fact expelled: shat out as a piece of dead matter in order to maintain the fiction of the highbrow. What makes IT such a fascinating example of this dynamic is King's continual awareness of his status as literary offal or corpse, an ironic consciousness that imbues the novel with a rich and often deeply satirical wit, and which suggests that, as much as IT is simply a story, IT is a story about storytelling itself, a profane piece of shit writing about being a profane piece of shit writer.
Nowhere in the novel is this more clear than in one wildly funny and key scene in which King seems to tell the story of his own life as a writer through the character of Bill Denbrough. "Here," he writes,
is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There's one guy who wants to be Updike. There's another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner. ... There's a girl who admires Joyce Carol Oates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is 'radioactive in a literary sense'. Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. (124)
Bill's talent, however, lies in writing science fiction and horror stories--productions that earn him, at best, Bs and Cs in his creative writing seminar. His classmates' ideas about writing confound him; he doesn't understand why stories have to be "socio-anything": "' ... politics...culture... history", he asks in class one day, "aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well?'"(125)
When the instructor snidely inquires whether Bill believes Shakespeare and Faulkner were simply telling tales to make a quick buck, Bill replies that, yes, actually, he thinks just that--after which he goes home and writes a story called "The Dark", a tale about a boy who discovers, battles, and defeats a monster that lives in the cellar of his house. He turns the story in to his instructor, only to get IT back with an enormous F across the title page and "two words ... scrawled across beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams another" (126). Humiliated, he is about to discard his story when, suddenly reconsidering, he decides to submit "The Dark" to a men's magazine. And though he expects further rejection, expects to be once more shat out, the story is accepted with much accolades, Bill Denbrough is two hundred dollars richer, and, along with his drop card, he tacks his acceptance letter to the bulletin board outside his instructor's door, on which he writes: "If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I'm going to kill myself, because I won't know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do" (127, my italics).
Two ideas emerge from these brief lines: first, that lest Stan Uris's fate become our own, IT is imperative that as writers and readers we not separate private from public, scatological from symbolic, rationality from that which is inexplicable. If we are to survive without self-destructing, we must preserve that horrific aspect of fiction, that core kernel of unreality which, in its demand that we confront and accept IT as reality, allows us to live with the text, with ourselves, and within the inscribing context of culture. The second thing to emerge from Denbrough's defiant note, and especially from its last lines, is that there is something almost archetypal or archaic about Stephen King's stories--an observation that gains additional credence when we consider that "The Dark", Bill Denbrough's story, is simply a supercondensed version of IT, Stephen King's story. What this instance of metafictional imbedding suggests is that in addition to simply being a monster story, IT is also a novel about writing; is, in fact, the story of the creative process itself, which King describes as an act of excretion: "'I'm so stuffed with talent,'" he quips through Richie Tozier, "'I have to plug up all my bodily orifices to keep IT from running out like...well, just running out'" (61). If, as opposed to politics, stories do not change--if, that is to say, stories are archaic or archetypal--IT is because they precede the trauma of symbolization, because they originate in the bathroom. Thus do we see that, even as King writes about shit and is subsequently shat out of the literary body, he also envisions the writing process as defecation. One might argue, then, that King writes horrorbooks because nothing else can come out: for what is, to the writer, more horrific than language itself, that structure to which we submit in order to become fully human? What is more terrifying than the creative process, that act of excretion which reeks of the repressed at the same time that IT indicates the proper functioning of a healthy, self-regulating psyche? As Kristeva asks in Powers of Horror, "Does one write under any other condition than being possessed by abjection, in an indefinite catharsis?"14
What I want to propose is that It, 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"15: 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. IT demonstrates that the gratuitous display of what is most mundane, quotidian, and banal, what attracts the broadest base by selling out to "people's baser natures" (41) is actually the most radical move: King is radical because, as a literary man who chooses to stay in the muck, he refuses to struggle or oppose, and through this politics of absolute investment and absolute affirmation, King demonstrates the untenability of an economy and culture based upon the repudiation of natural processes. By giving us exactly what we want, by indulging the fantasies of mass culture, he not only escapes, but does so while holding up a mirror to the material conditions from which these fantasies and desires emerge. Even now, as shit theory, he dances away from me, laughing, calling out: just a story, just a plot device, you bourgeois reader! You're reading too much into it! And herein lies the very heart and essence of the scatological project: in resisting nothing and baring all, in exploding, the scatological--that which we must flush--liberates us from the illusion of liberation itself, frees us from the confinement of a transcendental ideal. The reality, as King suggests through his fiction, is that we cannot escape the horrors of the Symbolic Order any more than we can escape the horrors of an ensnaring corporeality. But nor should we try: our task instead must be to plunge into the sewer of what we have rejected and forgotten, into that monstrous and profane ITness that we can neither explain away nor interpret but must simply--like children--incorporate. 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"16. 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.