6.10.2009

THE FUTURE OF ART IN DARK TOWERS



"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."


An evocative opening sentence?

Stephen King thinks it is. He claims these are the finest words he has ever written and perhaps we should consider him seriously -- since he is supposedly the most widely-read English-speaking author since Charles Dickens.

"Horror writer" is definitely poor and inadequate category for Steven King. He is remembered by the uninformed for a set of classic supermarket bestsellers featuring
demonic house pets, haunted automobiles & sexually disturbed adolescents who can start fires with mind-power. It hardly need be pointed out that these are already a large-scale attempt to re-mythologize the contemporary American landscape. And in the decades since his fame, Steven King has continued his mutation into the most popular, most prolific and, quite possibly, the most important mythic artist of the late 20th century.

So let us put aside our like, dislike, or indifference to the story-telling skill of Steven King. Instead, we should diagnose the primary features associated with the cultural production of King's self-proclaimed magnum opus -- a massive 7-book meta-narrative, entitled: The Dark Tower.

1) The seed of this work lies in a line of dialog from Shakespeare's King Lear which formed the title of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" and blossomed in Stephen King as the odyssey of Roland the Gunslinger in his Ahab-esque pursuit of the legendary fortress which stands at the Heart of All Possible Worlds. Thus the concerns of classical literature are continued into the modern world as an extension of their acoustic resonances and cinematic evocations. McLuhan never grew tired of quoting T.S. Eliot's assertions on this very point.

2) It is rooted in unconscious inspiration. The invocational open sentence "arose" into King's awareness, and vexed him with his sense of its unique perfection. One is reminded both of Coleridge's revelatory discovery of the opening lines of Kublai Khan and also the phrase "There is a man cut in two by the window," which set the young poet Andre Breton on the arch-contemporary path which would become called: surrealism.

3) A ghost in the machinery of the mind. The idea of the work suggested to King by Browning's poem neither dissipated nor dominated his psyche. It merely lurked. It persisted. There is a ludicrous aspect to hearing Steven King describe his fear that audiences would reject the story which was so dear to his innermost heart. Unlike his more popular books, he found THE DARK TOWER to be significant, peculiar and oddly unjustified. Our higher cultural inspiration, in order to be vital, must be a bit slippery, a bit vexing. If we can count on its style, depend upon its worth... then it surely it cannot be very fresh?

4) Poetry is the method. Everyone knows that Heidegger felt this way -- and he joins King in a concern to produce a world-mood. It is the implicit quality of the opening sentence against which all the rest of THE DARK TOWER is referenced, and not against any crude external factors that might be hiding the "meaning" of the work. King's dedication to unfolding the hidden implications and subtle personal reactions of the artist in each 'next step' of the work is obvious and admirable. It goes hand in hand with his devotion to the rambling aural poetry found in rural speech patterns -- which King works hard to sublimate into his own stream-of-consciousness responses to what he has already written -- decode a half-glimpsed but potently felt subtle world which the artist can expereince as mysteirously 'already existing.'

5) It is blatantly post-genre. This is not some little experimental hybrid like "vampire comedy" or "adventure-romance." It could truthfully be called a coming-of-age sci-fi fantasy Western-style adventure soap opera which mingles humor, myth, travel writing, social commentary, stream-of-consciousness under a simultaneously post-modern and classical-archetypal manner with a flavor of deep surrealism and an homage to small-town living. Part book, part film, part comic, part painting. THE DARK TOWER does not cross genres but confidently takes its stand in that global complexity which is establishing itself as the "new normal category" of the 21 century.

6) It is hyper-referential. Now only does the narrative enfold all other Steven King books and characters, even those not yet written, AND not only does it include King himself and the decades-long writing of THE DARK TOWER, but it also compresses different ages of popular culture and high literature into a single vast world and moment.


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