I don't think I've read anything like Stephen King's
Dark Tower series. I'm not even sure it's possible to provide a clear summary of the plot in basic terms without coming off sounding like I've just come down from some mild fever dream high. For what it's worth, here's the best I can do. It concerns a remolded version of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone's Man with No Name with the serial numbers filed off. This literary incarnation of Leone's Nameless Outlaw Hero has been given the title of Roland this time around. The story opens with him trudging through the desert with a mule for his only traveling companion. We're told that he's looking for the trail of a shady sounding character known at first only as the Man in Black. So far, so regular sounding, maybe even a little bit intriguing. To put it in cinematic terms, what King has given his readers here is the kind of opening establishing shot that could, in capable hands, deliver up something along the lines of a maybe interesting example of what was once referred to as a Sagebrush Epic, or an Oat Opera. So right away, the audience is left with the most important question the artist can plant in their minds, what happens next? Well, to his credit, King does fill the reader in on a great deal of the main character, his quest, and at least
something about the nature of his secondary world. It's just that to this day, I'm not certain what all that spilled ink amounts to, if you want me to be honest about it.
What starts out sounding like it could be a pastiche tribute to the likes of John Ford and Zane Grey soon takes a very sharp turn into something out of a late 60s acid trip. I suppose that kind of makes sense, considering what King said about the genesis of his idea. He claims to have gotten started writing this little oddity sometime back during his college years at the University of Maine. Turns out one of his friends had gifted him a whole ream of bright green writing paper (307-9). He was living, at the time, in a part of what I guess you might call a student dorm. To hear King tell it, however, the place he chose for a Crash Pad was a step or two below the house Abraham Lincoln was born in. Years later, he would go on to immortalize this little hovel for college alumni in the pages of his 1999 book, Hearts in Atlantis. It's there he refers to that dormitory setup as follows: "I finished my senior years living off-campus in LSD Acres, the rotting cabins down by the Stillwater river (328)". I think the name of the place might be an important clue to the exact nature of the curious saga that King eventually spun out from that initial collection of green writing sheets. The least surprising thing to me about the Dark Tower books is that they get their start in a moment of youthful chemical exhilaration. In a later essay on the genesis of the series, King explains how "Hobbits were big when I was nineteen...
"
There were probably half a dozen Merrys and Pippins slogging through the mud at Max Yasgur’s farm during the Great Woodstock Music Festival, twice as many Frodos, and hippie Gandalfs without number. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was madly popular in those days, and while I never made it to Woodstock (say sorry), I suppose I was at least a halfling-hippie. Enough of one, at any rate, to have read the books and fallen in love with them. The Dark Tower books, like most long fantasy tales written by men and women of my generation (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen Donaldson, and The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, are just two of many), were born out of Tolkien’s. But although I read the books in 1966 and 1967, I held off writing. I responded (and with rather touching wholeheartedness) to the sweep of Tolkien’s imagination—to the ambition of his story—but I wanted to write my own kind of story, and had I started then, I would have written his. That, as the late Tricky Dick Nixon was fond of saying, would have been wrong. Thanks to Mr. Tolkien, the twentieth century had all the elves and wizards it needed". Then, so far as the writer can recall, that's when inspiration hit him from what might seem like the most unlikeliest of angles, or places to happen.
"Then, in an almost completely empty movie theater (the Bijou, in Bangor, Maine, if it matters), I saw a film directed by Sergio Leone. It was called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and before the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic, but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop. If you’ve only seen this gonzo Western on your television screen, you don’t understand what I’m talking about—cry your pardon, but it’s true. On a movie screen, projected through the correct Panavision lenses, TG, TB, & TU is an epic to rival Ben-Hur. Clint Eastwood appears roughly eighteen feet tall, with each wiry jut of stubble on his cheeks looking roughly the size of a young redwood tree. The grooves bracketing Lee Van Cleef’s mouth are as deep as canyons, and there could be a thinny (see Wizard and Glass) at the bottom of each one. The desert settings appear to stretch at least out as far as the orbit of the planet Neptune. And the barrel of each gun looks to be roughly as large as the Holland Tunnel.What I wanted even more than the setting was that feeling of epic, apocalyptic size. The fact that Leone knew jack shit about American geography (according to one of the characters, Chicago is somewhere in the vicinity of Phoenix, Arizona) added to the film’s sense of magnificent dislocation. And in my enthusiasm—the sort only a young person can muster, I think—I wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history. I did not succeed in doing that, but I feel I had a decent rip; The Dark Tower, Volumes One through Seven, really comprise a single tale, and the first four volumes run to just over two thousand pages in paperback. The final three volumes run another twenty-five hundred in manuscript. I’m not trying to imply here that length has anything whatsoever to do with quality; I’m just saying that I wanted to write an epic, and in some ways, I succeeded. If you were to ask me why I wanted to do that, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it’s a part of growing up American: build the tallest, dig the deepest, write the longest. And that head-scratching puzzlement when the question of motivation comes up? Seems to me that that is also part of being an American. In the end we are reduced to saying It seemed like a good idea at the time (web)". According to scholar Bev Vincent, King "told an audience at Yale in April 2003...he was flying high on mescaline at the time (Road to Tower, 24)".
Some of the most famous names who have been able to pull this sort of narrative hat trick off are Vladimir Nabokov, Lewi Carroll, and King's own close friend, Peter Straub. The key thing about this subgenre is that when it's done right, the results can vary from memorable (in the case of Nabokov, and Straub) to an all out timeless classic (as Carroll was able to prove not once, but twice, in the
Alice books). When it fails, the results can sometimes come off as a hodgepodge of ideas that never quite manage to coalesces together. King's efforts fall into the latter category, I'm afraid. It's a collection of interesting notions and concepts that might sound interesting in rough draft. However, in terms of a finished execution, it's debatable if a lifetime of continuous rewrites and drafting would have been enough to salvage anything of value here. Don't get me wrong, King has done plenty to earn himself the distinction of being perhaps one of the premiere authors in the history of American Letters, right up there with Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The trick is none of those accolades are ever bound to come from his work on the
Tower, no matter how fond he is of it. If I had to take a guess, I'm pretty sure King himself is aware of this, and probably isn't all that put out by it. It also still doesn't change the fundamental nature of
The Dark Tower either as a multi-part book series, or even as a literary concept.
It's what happens when an author tries to see if he can turn one of his acid fantasies into a maybe publishable book. To be fair, there's nothing inherently wrong with such an idea. If that were the case, then we wouldn't have books like Alice in Wonderland, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or even works like It (and yes, I still continue to defend the ending; there's a lot more sophistication to it anyway, than just "This is Your Premise on Drugs"). The trick here seems to be down to two choices. You can either try to rest some semblance of coherence from your daydreams, or else you have to find a way to make it so over the top bonkers that it kind of has no other choice except to be labeled as entertaining. Again, Lewis Carroll remains the all-time champ at being able to pull the latter creative strategy off without a hitch. Ken Kesey, meanwhile, was successful in the opposite direction. He found a way of humanizing all the madness inherent in an acid trip, and made us care about the cast of characters that emerged from his chemical jaunts. King's Tower, on the other hand, remains something of an unbuilt edifice. That's down to two major, interlocking reasons. The first is that the entire series amounts to a poster child warning for what can happen when a writer's ambitions get the better of his ability to live up to whatever kind of hype he's built up for himself in his head. Works like the Tower have made me realize how futile it is for anybody to try and be the next J.R.R. Tolkien.
In the first place, it can't be done for one simple reason. Only Tolkien could ever be himself. It's not the kind of thing anybody else has ever been able to truly replicate. To those who would point to books like
Watership Down or the original
Star Wars trilogy, I'd point out that what makes those efforts work is twofold. First, the stories never extend to such a far off point as that found in the Mid-World saga. What makes Richard Adams's animal fable work so well is that it is this neat, compact, and above all, standalone fairy tale of the natural world. The same thing originally applied to the Galaxy Far, Far, Away. Everything built to a series of more or less well wrought plot beats, and that was it. Even
Lord of the Rings can be said to work because of one very important aspect of its concept. It's just one, single, book. It gets marketed today as a trilogy, but in actual truth, Tolkien only ever wrote it as this one, doorstopper of a novel. There's just one reason for why people are calling it a Trilogy at all now, and that's because book publishers learned you can double your value by taking what is just this one story, and breaking it up into three parts. This may have been a mistake, in retrospect, as it left even Tolkien's professional fans with the idea that all great epic Fantasy sagas are meant to work this way.
So now you've got guys like Terry Brooks, who have spent an entire lifetime trying to outdo the college professor from Oxford in terms of worldbuilding and output, yet the whole thing remains a cheap knockoff. That's a problem that has repeated itself over the years, to the point where Tolkien's original achievement runs the risk of being degraded and lost sight of amidst a sea of copy cat mediocrity. King's efforts in this direction don't quite sink that low, yet the final product can't be called well made, either.
The Dark Tower is one of those stories that seems forever doomed to have never really gotten anywhere past the planning stages. In distinction to a book like
Misery or
Salem's Lot, there's the lingering air of looking at the textual equivalent of an unfinished painting. You can see which bits and pieces of other books and films might have inspired this or that incident. It might even be possible to catch the faint glimpses of something approaching an over-arching idea to the series as a whole. However, even if that's the case, the fact remains that, in this instance, at least, King (unlike Tolkien) was never able to find the right way of embodying these ideas within the narrative proper. In all the best stories, the theme and the narrative are able to blend together so well as to be a seamless whole. This is an effect King was able to achieve best in works like
It or
The Shining. These are instances of the author at the top of his game. The fact that it's difficult to get that vibe here tells us something.
It leads to the second main reason for why The Dark Tower comes off as such an abortive project. The simple fact of that matter is that every author has their specific level of strengths and weaknesses. In King's case, the way this fact of life works out boils down to an ability to create a kind of "portable magic" (in his own words) when sticking to tales set in the genre known as the American Gothic, or else when crafting these neat, and sometimes heartfelt slice of life dramas. Even in a relatively self-contained work like the Lot, you come away with the sense of the author being able to tap into that same kind of epic scope that Tolkien was able to grant to his work. The only difference is this time the grandeur of Hobbiton and Mordor are each being applied at once to either a series of fictional small towns, or else to various spots of the American landscape in general. When he's being himself, King can turn America into an EC Comics version of Middle Earth. It makes for sort of a fitting irony that the very moment he tries to deliberately copy Tolkien that his inner creative workshop seems to grind to a halt. I think it might have something to do with the indelible individuality of the author's own true creative voice. What makes King stand out so well in the field is that he is one of the few artists who has managed to leave an impact on both the vocabulary and even iconography of the Horror genre.
It's an impact that has been able to seep its way into the vernacular of both pop culture, and of common, everyday discourse as well. It's become so ubiquitous at this point that at least two whole generations have been born unknowing that a certain part of their dialogue is set by books like
The Dark Half and
The Dead Zone. There have been efforts on the part of Tower Junkies to make the same thing happen for Mid-World. However, the fact that names like Cujo or Christine have a greater currency than that of Roland says a lot about which books are more favored by the public at large. A book like
The Stand, meanwhile is interesting, in that it seems to be ubiquitous on one level, while on another, it's almost like it shares the same fate as the
Tower saga. Perhaps a lot of that has to do with the fact that King later tied it into the exploits of Roland and his quest. By shackling a story commonly touted as his most popular book to such a niche series, King seems to have created an unintended side effect in
The Stand's reception history. It still maintains a certain level of its former popularity. At the same time, it has begun to garner a reputation as part of a small collection of titles set apart from his more popular writing. Perhaps part of what has helped this lopsided audience response along can be discerned when you take a look at the tale of Randall Flagg, and then place it alongside the exploits of Roland.
When you do this, the similarities between the two titles kind of have no choice except to jump out at you. It becomes pretty clear real fast that each set of novels share a lot of the same inspiration in common. Both works can be thought of as something like the ultimate Counterculture Apocalypse Fantasy.
The Stand is a novel haunted by the 60s decade out of which pretty much all of its inspiration sprang. This is something that is noticeable in its current incarnation, yet it becomes obvious if you go back and read its original 1978 edited release. Even in its truncated state, it becomes clear as day that this is the work of a man who's formative years were spent in the crucible of anti-war campus protests and Civil Rights marches. It's written from a perspective that knows how to survive the love taps of a policeman's nightstick, or the painful sense of suffocation that comes from being teargassed. It's general outlook is one that was used to seeing Flower Power signs and posters as a normal part of its everyday, waking landscape. The musical references go no further than the glory years of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. The death of men like Elvis and Jim Morrison are still a fresh memory in the original publication. A lot of the sentiment of the novel can be found in a simple throwaway line at the start of Chapter 35, the moment where "Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram 1980 up your ass (
286)". That's a line that transitions to, and loses all its sense of urgency in, the 1900 re-edit edition.
Perhaps that in itself explains another reason for the shifting sense of this book's reputation. As a lot of those old Flower Children begin to enter the clearing at the end at the path, pretty soon the way people relate to the vibes and outlook of that novel are going to take on a very different tone from the ones that once made it one of King's most well regarded works. For what it's worth, while it's not my absolute favorite of his (that honor still belongs to, and remains with the ghoulish exploits of Pennywise the Dancing Clown) it is possible to see how all of these elements used to make it such a blockbuster back in the day. It also probably doesn't hurt that I'm a fan of the 60s, myself. You might even say I'm something of an informal student of that decade. Perhaps it's this otherwise quiet bit of personal enthusiasm that has enabled me to see and therefore grasp at all the ways in which the same sense of shared inspiration is able to pass neatly from The Stand in the works of the Tower proper. In Mid-World, the reader is treated to that same sense of late 60s apocalypticism. This time, however, true to the roots of the decade that birthed it, the same world of The Stand has now been taken and amplified up into Gonzo levels of lunacy. Here we're treated to the sight of Clint Eastwood's nameless cowboy as he's taken and transposed into a version of The Stand's Captain Trips Americana as it is shaped and molded in the kind of setting that can only be found within the pages of old issues of Heavy Metal.
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The main stage that Roland traverses is a version of America in which the ravages of Flagg and the plague have somehow managed to render everything into the kind of trippy, symbolist landscape that could only have emerged from the mind of graphic artists like Jean "Moebius" Giraud and Alejandro Jodorowsky when they've each taken their share of the same mescaline that King claims to have been on, or else plain old LSD. This is the kind of inner, mental topography that belongs to someone who remembers what it was like the relax on a Summer day, trying to devour the words of Frank Herbert or Carlos Castaneda, while chilling to the wired folk rock of Traffic, King Crimson, or Blue Oyster Cult on the record player. All of these influences find themselves mirrored in the terrain Roland finds himself wandering through, and the kind of people he meets along the way. It's this same landscape that guys like George Lucas was able to take from the pages of
Heavy Metal and translate it all in a way that was able to grant it a genuine form of mainstream popularity. It's pretty clear King was always trying to do the same thing in his own Gothic way. The difference is here he strayed too far out of his comfort zone for any of it to do any good. You get the sense its one of those ideas that wanted to go all the way. If so, it needed someone with the manic intensity of a Harlan Ellison or a Philip K. Dick to pull it off.
King is neither of those guys, he's just a simple New England Pastoralist, for goodness sake. His strength's are in tales of American life as it is encroached by the Fantastic. Anything more than that is the author asking for trouble. Still, the fact remains that the
Tower books amount to a series with a great deal of multiple inspirations that went into it all. Alissa Burger's
The Quest for the Dark Tower is perhaps the best place where the both curious and incredulous reader can trace down the various strands of other narratives that have woven their way into the total patchwork tapestry that is Mid-World. What I'd like to do here today is devote an article to just one single aspect of King's ambitious, yet flawed attempt at a dark fantasy series. It involves one of the central ideas governing Roland and his story. For all it's flaws (and there are many), it is at least possible to say that King tried his best at fleshing out an
attempt at yet another secondary world. The Gunslinger's home is best thought of as something like the jumbled contents of a world library, with characters and settings from various texts all somehow occupying the same space. One day you find yourself in a Sergio Leone Western, the next day you're in Lyman Frank Baum's Emerald Palace. Because: Metafiction. Yeah, it's that kind of world. Writers like Kelly Link and Jasper Fforde are way better at this kind of thing, and King is always playing catch-up.
Which sort of makes the fact that he was able to weave a number of interesting concepts around the main setting something of a remarkable feat. What might be called the Reigning Ideas of Mid-World are also the one aspect of the Tower books that I find the most fascinating. This is because they are the single handful of elements that can be traced back to their original, literary sources. Once you do that, you'd be surprised to learn that for all the faults of the story proper, it's got some pretty heady influences in back of it. People like to think of King as the literary equivalent of a Rock n' Roll guitar artist. It's easy to see why this is the case. In addition to a lyrical kind of style which can put one in mind of a good piece of R-n-B music at it's best, it doesn't hurt that King came of age with the birth of Rock as an artistic genre. So it does make a certain amount of sense that this is an influence that is at least capable of encoding itself into the rhythms of modern literate prose. King just turns out to have been the one to perfect it to an artform. It's a style that makes its way even into Roland's quest, yet the real point is that he's able to take that guitar riff lyricism, and match it to themes and ideas that stretch all the way back to the eras of guys like Chaucer and Shakespeare. If that sounds far-fetched, let me assure you it's not.
Near the end of his non-fiction study,
Danse Macabre, King makes a statement which probably has no choice except to come off as one hell of a left-field idea. At the same time, though, for better or worse, he has given us at least some kind of insight into the thinking that powers the themes of his fiction. The import quote comes in the middle of the author's justification for the value of the modern American Gothic as a genre worth of being called literature. He suggests that Horror's "main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by
showing us what awful things happen to people who venture
into taboo lands. Within the framework of most horror tales
we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile.
In the old E.C. comics, adulterers inevitably came to bad ends
and murderers suffered fates that would make the rack and the boot look like kiddy rides at the carnival". Here's the part where King drops the crucial reigning idea. "Modem horror
stories are not much different from the morality plays of the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get
right down to it. The horror story most generally not only stands
foursquare for the Ten Commandments, it blows them up to
tabloid size. We have the comforting knowledge when the lights
go down in the theater or when we open the book that the
evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will
be returned for measure.
"Further, I’ve used one pompously academic metaphor, suggesting that the horror tale generally details the outbreak of
some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence, and that
the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been
repelled and the Apollonian norm restored again (442)". The idea that someone who writes the sort of stories King does might very well be plying in the same sort of literate branch office that was once inhabited by the likes of Edmund Spenser is enough to sent any tenured Ivy League Professor of English into an apoplectic fit. If someone like Harold Bloom had ever read, or heard King repeat those paragraphs in an interview, he might have gone on the warpath. For the rest of the faces in the audience, however, it's almost like our favorite Horror scribe just handed us some kind of riddle written in a foreign language. That's because the notions King uses to describe the nature of both his own efforts and Horror as a genre are all taken from the era of the Renaissance. That's the time period when modern literature was born, and in the process, a lot of the writers of that early modernistic generation utilized all of the words that King just used to describe the American Gothic genre. He's saying that most Horror fiction makes use of tropes dating all the way far back before the Founding of the American Colonies. He also says that these concepts make up the nature and content of his own books. It sounds strange, yet I think King has been of some assistance here. For better or worse, he's given critics and readers a hitherto overlooked and unexplored aspect of his work. The interesting thing about it is just how much it helps to make sense of the writer's own fiction.
Mid-World is a thematic amalgamation of insights, and maybe even philosophical concepts which find their earliest artistic expressions in works like The Canterbury Tales, or the oeuvre of the Globe Theater. The reason I'm able to say this with a decent enough amount of assurance is because it's ever so often possible to catch King in the act of using words, or phrases that would have been familiar to someone like the Bard of Avon. Specifically, in nonfiction works like Danse Macabre, King keeps utilizing the same set of terms, over and again. These are the Microcosm and the Macrocosm. An attentive reader of that study text will note King's acknowledgment that he got those terms from the writings of sophisticated literary critics such as John G. Parks and Irving Malin. These are the kind of guys whose reputation goes all the way back to the days of T.S. Eliot, William Empson, and Northrup Frye. The kind of people who wrote articles you might in journals with names like The Sewanee Review, or other places like it. What's interesting to note is that King further states that he knows a lot more about the thematic history or background of those terms even beyond what it found in the work of Parks and Malin. It's clear he knows that they are a shared vocabulary between Shakespeare and Chaucer. The Macabre paragraph quoted above is proof that King knows where Parks and Malin got it from. The trick is this is the aspect of his thinking that he chooses to keep and play close to the vest.
If I had to say why this is the case, then all I can do is point to the motto from the world of a certain type of stage performer. "A good magician never reveals his secrets". If it's a question of where else King might have gotten both an interest in the themes of guys like Shakespeare? Well, I mean that's sort of a loaded dice question, isn't it? There's like a ton of places where that can happen for just about anyone who decides to allow themselves to be curious about that sort of thing. In terms of how King fell into it all, then I'd have to point to a college teacher that the writer has always cited as one of his biggest influences. His name was Burton Hatlen, and like Parks and Malin, he was the product of both a literate household and background. Hell, even the guy's doctoral dissertation was about John Milton (
web). What do you suppose that tells you about his level of sophistication? What it says to me is that King got his interest in the thinking of men like Geoff, Big Bill, and Uncle Milty from first taking part as an enthusiastic student of Hatlen's college courses. Then going on from there with his tutor's instruction and encouragement to branch out and explore the related topics of Macro and Microcosm for himself. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that his later friendship with Peter Straub acted as a further encouragement to study these words and the ideas in back of and beyond them. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Peter Straub got King further interested in these arcane subject matters.
It's all a bit esoteric when you get down to it, more or less a form of lost language, yet it seems to have captured King' Imagination in a way that is still visible even in his latest written works. It's what allows me to make the startling discovery and declaration that King is something of, for all intents and purposes, something of a literal Renaissance Man. The literary themes and ideas of that Era somehow became a permanent part of his artistic storehouse. The good news about this is that these are concepts that have a life outside of the
Tower series. You can find them inhabiting the pages of even a simple short story like "The Monkey". That's an example of King employing his Elizabethan influences at the summit of his creativity. In Mid-World, by contrast, we're seeing the author spread himself too thin. Yet it's also the one place where King seems comfortable allowing himself to be more up front about his literary Inspirations. Which, paradoxically, might be the ultimate explanation for a writer spending so much time and effort on what is otherwise a cistern well that's run dry a long time ago, or else never really worked properly to begin with. To be fair, it's excavating the themes of
The Dark Tower that stands out as the most interesting part about the whole affair. One particular aspect of these books jumped out at me recently in the middle of a passage found in the series' third book,
The Wastelands.
It's a moment that comes relatively early in the proceedings, and one of the interesting things to note about Wastelands is that it seems to have been the volume where you can sense King trying to get down to basics facts, of a sort. It's the book where he tries to make a concerted effort to layout the nature of Roland's world. He never really quite succeeds in this endeavor, I'm afraid. Yet along the way he does manage to throw his readers a bone in terms of allowing us to figure out where he got some of his ideas for the series. To be specific, there's a point where the author tries to let the characters do some world-building, and it results in the following exchange, where the protagonist tells the characters, and also the readers the meaning of a very specific word, one that King tries to hang a great deal of weight on as the series moved forward. That word is, "Ka - the word you think of as 'destiny'...although the actual meaning is much more complex and hard to define,
as is almost always the case with words of the High Speech. And tet, which
means a group of people with the same interests and goals. We three are a
tet, for instance. Ka-tet is the place where many lives are joined by fate.”
“Like in The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Susannah murmured.
“What’s that?” Roland asked.
“A story about some people who die together when the bridge they’re
crossing collapses. It’s famous in our world.”
Roland nodded his understanding.
That whole bit of lore drop conversation can be found on page 79 of the current trade paperback edition, as of this writing. It's one of those passages that I think even self-described Tower Junkies tend to overlook. It's something I'm guilty of myself. I'd coasted through an audiobook version of this text only once before, and somehow it must have gotten lost in the shuffle of my attention span. I had a chance to pick up a copy of an book on tape version of
Wastelands, recently. This one was read by the author himself. Maybe that's what allowed both the word and the nature of the conversation outlined above to jump out at me this time. Whatever the case, the fact is on this go-round I was either smart or else just attentive enough to realize something. That name drop of a long forgotten book wasn't just some throwaway piece of literary trivia. This was the writer signaling to any who could or would listen that this is where he must have got the idea for one of the most intriguing and/or frustrating features of the
Tower series. A great deal of it must have come from
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, whatever that was. It turned out to be one of those accidental discoveries that tends to spark a kind of bulldog curiosity in bookworms like me. If I'm able to find even the slightest scrap of a topic fascinating, then I'll tend to try and hunt the meaning down to it's source. Yeah, I'm that kind of reader, if it that matters.
It's not the sort of thing that happens every day. Yet it is what you might call a normal, standard operating procedure for anyone who decides to take an active interest in the reading and critiquing of stories. Something you need to do if you ever want to be a professional arts critic, in other words. If that's the kind of goal you can ever conceptualize for yourself, then you'd be surprised how sometimes even a little hint like the one King provides can go a long way. It can provide the start of sometimes very intriguing breadcrumb trails that can lead you through all sorts of fascinating textual thickets and forests. In fact, it's sort of how I learned about King incorporating the themes and ideas of Renaissance literature into the entirety of his work. In this case, just hearing the title was enough to send me to the posthumous doorstep of a writer by the name of Thornton Wilder. He's a name I'd heard of before, yet never in anything like a major capacity. He's the kind of name you run across in passing during English 101. I guess you could call him something of a literary polymath. He wasn't just a novelist, but also a playwright, a lecturer, broadcaster, WWII soldier, and maybe even something of a literary theorist. So far as I can tell, his most famous works are plays like
Our Town, and that's about it for most of us.
He counts, in other words, as something of a famous obscurity. It's the kind of fate that can happen to a lot of talent if you're not too careful. When most people here the name Jack Nicholson, for instance, most of us think of his role in Kubrick's The Shining, or else it's the Joker from Batman. It's easy to see why this is the case. These are the two performances of his that have managed to capture the imagination of pop culture. With that said, how many people today even remember that he was in a film like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? That's the same kind of fate that appears to have caught up with guys like Thornton Wilder, albeit in a more all-encompassing manner. His fame, such as it is, belongs more to the sequestered halls of high school theater programs than to either the Ivory Tower or pop culture. It is therefore possible for a flesh and blood human being to become an anachronism. Still, King must have been impressed with the guy's work if he allowed one of his quaint, curious, and forgotten tomes to shape the lore of the Tower books. After finding out this is what happened, I then became curious about what it was, or might be, about The Bridge of San Luis Rey that made King want to incorporate it as one of the governing ideas of Mid-World. So I decided to look into it myself, and the result is the following article. It's going to be a review of Wilder's text, yet there's a trick to it.
I'm going to do the best I can to give my thoughts about how well the merits of Wilder's novel holds up on it's own. At the same time, I'm not going to review it in a vacuum, like I do with other texts or films here. Instead, I'll also examine the fact that it inspired King's notion of literary fate, not just in the
Tower saga, but in a lot of his other fiction as well. What this means in practice is I'm going to keep comparing notes between the two authors. I want to take a look at what King borrows from Wilder, and how it either fits, or doesn't within the story of the Gunslinger. In that sense, what happens next will be almost like a double review, in a way. I'm not only going to be giving a regular critique of Wilder's book, but I'm also going to see how well King does in utilizing this as part of his dark fantasy series.
The Story.
"On
Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. This bridge was on the highroad between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day. It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century before and visitors to the city were always led out to see it. It was a mere ladder of thin slats swung out over the gorge, with handrails of dried vine. Horses and coaches and chairs had to go down hundreds of feet below and pass over the narrow torrent on rafts, but no one, not even the Viceroy, not even the Archbishop of Lima, had descended with the baggage rather than cross by the famous bridge of San Luis Rey. St. Louis of France himself protected it, by his name and by the little mud church on the further side. The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break. The moment a Peruvian heard of the accident he signed himself and made a mental calculation as to how recently he had crossed by it and how soon he had intended crossing by it again. People wandered about in a trance-like state, muttering; they had the hallucination of seeing themselves falling into a gulf."There was a great service in the Cathedral. The bodies of the victims were approximately collected and approximately separated from one another, and there was great searching of hearts in the beautiful city of Lima. Servant girls returned bracelets which they had stolen from their mistresses, and usurers harangued their wives angrily, in defense of usury. Yet it was rather strange that this event should have so impressed the Limeans, for in that country those catastrophes which lawyers shockingly call the "acts of God" were more than usually frequent...(Earthquakes) arrived every week and towers fell upon good men and women all the time. Diseases were forever flitting in and out of the provinces and old age carried away some of the most admirable citizens. That is why it was so surprising that the Peruvians should have been especially touched by the rent in the bridge of San Luis Rey.
"Everyone was very deeply impressed, but only one person did anything about it, and that was Brother Juniper. By a series of coincidences so extraordinary that one almost suspects the presence of some Intention, this little red-haired Franciscan from Northern Italy happened to be in Peru converting the Indians and happened to witness the accident.
"It was a very hot noon, that fatal noon, and coming around the shoulder of a hill Brother Juniper stopped to wipe his forehead and to gaze upon the screen of snowy peaks in the distance, then into the gorge below him filled with the dark plumage of green trees and green birds and traversed by its ladder of osier. Joy was in him; things were not going badly. He had opened several little abandoned churches and the Indians were crawling in to early Mass and groaning at the moment of miracle as though their hearts would break. Perhaps it was the pure air from the snows before him; perhaps it was the memory that brushed him for a moment of the poem that bade him raise his eyes to the helpful hills. At all events he felt at peace. Then his glance fell upon the bridge, and at that moment a twanging noise filled the air, as when the string of some musical instrument snaps in a disused room, and he saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below.
"Anyone else would have said to himself with secret joy: "Within ten minutes myself...!" But it was another thought that visited Brother Juniper: "Why did thin happen to those five?" If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan, And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off (5-8)".
A Forgotten Novel.
It seems like the American author Russell Banks is the one to give us a good starting point for discussing the ins, out, and potential merits of Wilder's novel. In his introduction for the 2021 Harper Collins edition, Banks gives the rather hyperbolic description of the book being "as close to a perfect moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature. Written near the end of the Roaring Twenties by a man barely out of his own twenties, it nonetheless feels, in its exquisite universality and ease of timeless application, ancient, classical, almost biblical. When we read the novel today, we nod in admiration, and we wonder at its uncanny ability to describe ourselves to ourselves in terms that are both essential to our species and particular to our times. One merely has to consider the central question raised by the novel, which, according to Wilder himself, was simply: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?” It is perhaps the largest and most profoundly personal philosophical inquiry that we can undertake. It is the question that defines us as human beings (xi)". Banks then proceeds to be of somewhat further help by supplying us with as neat a summation of the overall contents of the novel."The novel begins precisely at noon on July 20, 1714, when a bridge on the Royal Road between Lima and Cuzco, “the finest bridge in all Peru,” inexplicably collapses, and five people who happen at that moment to be crossing the bridge plummet to their deaths. “The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break.” A devout, metaphysically anxious Franciscan missionary to the natives, a man named Brother Juniper, witnesses the collapse of the bridge and almost at once asks of the event, “Why did this happen to those five?” He is convinced that the accident cannot be other than “a sheer Act of God,” and believes, therefore, that a scrupulously scientific examination of those five lives will reveal why they, and no one else among the thousands who might just as easily have been crossing to or from Lima at that moment, were killed. He decides to ferret out the facts of those lives: “He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven. He thought he saw pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and he thought he saw humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city.”
"Falling to her death with the Marquesa is the old woman’s maid and faithful companion, a convent-raised orphan girl named Pepita; she dies alongside a young man, Esteban, who, in despair over the death of his twin brother, has recently botched a suicide attempt and has reluctantly decided to begin his life anew by running off to sea. Also crossing the bridge that fateful noon was Uncle Pio, an “aged Harlequin,” a literary man of the theater and retired adventurer who has devoted long years of his life to the tutelage and sponsorship of the great Peruvian actress Camila Perichole, now retired and living in rural seclusion. Accompanying Uncle Pio is a child, Jaime, the son of the famed actress, who has been given over to the old man to be taken back to Lima, there to be educated and protected by him just as she herself was years earlier. There are many memorable, gorgeously drawn, minor characters as well: the roustabout sea captain who saves Esteban from suicide; the sybaritic Viceroy of Peru, who makes Camila Perichole his mistress; the Abbess Madre María del Pilar, who rescues the orphans of Lima, including Pepita and Esteban and his twin brother, Manuel. But in the aftermath of the accident, it is the lives of the five who are killed that we, and Brother Juniper, come to know most intimately. Brother Juniper is our naïve, somewhat unreliable stand-in, and theirs are the fates that he and we must closely examine and contemplate. His investigation is ours. His conclusions, however, will not be ours. They will be judged heretical, and he will suffer terribly for having come to them (xi-xiii)". According to Banks, "The underlying assumption of the novel is that any one of us could have been on that bridge when it collapsed and threw five people into the abyss. According to Wilder, the plot, such as it is, was inspired “in its external action by a one-act play by Prosper Mérimée, which takes place in Latin America and one of whose characters is a courtesan. However,” he goes on, “the central idea of the work, the justification for a number of human lives that comes up as a result of the sudden collapse of a bridge, stems from friendly arguments with my father, a strict Calvinist.” It’s an argument, if not always friendly, that most of us have had at one time or another, if not with a Calvinist father or Jesuitical friend, then with ourselves. And we have learned that such an argument usually leads us to either a stubborn affirmation of belief or a rote recitation of material fact (xiii-xiv)". My immediate response to all of that is more or less : Huh...So that's where King got all his ideas for the Random and the Purpose.
Wilder's Renaissance Influence on King.
The Tower series demonstrates the ways Inspiration gets stifled for King when the author tries to keep too many plates spinning in the air at once. Because he keeps piling on and introducing one concept after another in an ongoing, narrative rush, the plot itself has no real time to digest and incorporate all these elements. The result is a through-line that never has a chance to blend it's contents seamlessly the way Tolkien was able to do for the ingredients of Middle Earth. Without necessities like this, the meaning and allure of the story fail to cohere. However, some terms, and the concepts behind them, do manage to stand out, even on what is an otherwise over-crowded stage. Chief among them is a single word, Ka, and the meanings King has chosen to attach to it. If the term itself sounds made up, the irony is that it used to have plenty of currency in the real life language of Ancient Egypt. There, however, it was meant in reference to the human soul, for lack of a better phrase. King, on the other hand, uses the word to mean something like Fate. Here, however, is where the author risks things by complicating what could have been a simpler narrative pattern. Within the entirety of King's writing, Fate seems to function as just one of the key cogs in a much larger thematic setup. The simplest description for such a seemingly complex narrative framework is to say that the author tends to align Ka, or Fate, with the concept of Purposefulness. King further establishes all this in parallel to it's opposite, Randomness.
The Themes of San Luis Rey.
At an earlier point in the narrative, we're told that "The Perichole", one of the key players in this story, "had appeared in
a hundred plays of Lope de Vega alone (69)". It's the author's willingness to drop the names of now forgotten dramatists like de Vega, or a famous obscurity like Cervantes, that points in the direction of the final undergirding theme of this novel. It's an idea that had its heyday during what was known as the Spanish Golden Age. It's a reference to the flowering of Spain's cultural life during the Renaissance, and particularly in the life and performances of the country's public stage dramas. Much like with England during the Elizabethan Period, the Spaniards saw a flourishing in the Arts which was able to enrich their national literature in ways which are still being felt there to this day. It was dramatists like de Vega or de la Barca, and early modern novelists like Cervantes who helped put the defining stamp on the nation's cultural identity. It was this milieu they had created which also gives Wilder the last over-arching theme of his book. If I had to sum it up in a phrase, then it would have be: El Grand Teatro Mundi, The Great Theater of the World. This is a concept with roots that reach all the way back to the Classica Era of Greco-Roman literature. All that authors like Cervantes did was to give the concept its modern expression, the first of many. Wilder has revived it once more for his story.
For what it's worth, this does seem to be a case where it's possible to tell what the author is thinking in back of the words on the page, to a discernable enough extent. For whatever it's worth, while it might sound heavy-handed just as a mere summary description, the way the plot delineates its main cast goes a long way toward finding ways of just being able to see why the compass of the book can seem so uncompromising at times. The fact of the matters is we're dealing with a set of figures who can't seem to decide where they belong on a spectrum ranging from the caring to the callous. They have their admirable moments, but these usually only start to come to the fore after they've suffered a reverse of fortune. One half of the sibling pair is so co-dependent that he practically makes himself an invalid for the sake of keeping his brother around. This gets worse when it looks like he might be falling for Camila. The Marquesa, meanwhile, is like one of the earliest textbook examples of the clinging, possessive mother figure that has long since been made famous by shows like Arrested Development. Wilder, however, has zero interest in mining this situation for it's potential comedic aspects. Instead, Maria's possessiveness is enough to make her daughter sail all the way to Spain just to get away.
When Pio sees Camila for the first time, he realizes the kernel of promise which could, if nurtured in all the best possible ways, result in a genuine talent later on. With this train of thought in mind, Pio takes Camila into his household, and proceeds to raise her as if she were his own daughter. The rest of her childhood is spent undergoing a rigorous training regimen in which her skills at song and dance are perfected, along with her "Uncle" introducing her to all the subtleties in the craft of stage acting. In this way, the character reminds me of Mozart's father. Turns out that guy was really a showbiz parent in real life, and it is plausible to assume that he might damaged his son by constantly forcing the great composer to be always on-stage. It's the same setup that Uncle Pio forces onto Camila, whom he later gives the stage name of Perichole. The way this "generous" little bastard reminds us of Salieri is through the motivation he's given in the novel. The prose describes Pio as a man of many ways. He "came of a good Castilian house, illegitimately. At the age of
ten he ran away to Madrid from his father’s hacienda and was pursued
without diligence. He lived ever after by his wits. He possessed the six
attributes of the adventurer —a memory for names and faces, with the
aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention;
secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that
freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich
he preyed upon.
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Wilder name drops forgotten names like de Vega, and still somewhat familiar ones like Cervantes. It's from them that he borrows not only the concept of the Theatrum Mundi, but also a lot of the conventional literary techniques that authors like de la Barca, and even Shakespeare used in their plays. The convention of the Cosmic Theater and its associated tropes may be obscure and even outmoded by our lights, yet they were coin of the realm for guys like the Bard. And anyway, Wilder's history as a writer proves that he was enough of a fanboy of both English and Spanish authors for them to provide an Inspiration for the book. Even if it's not entirely possible to say that the novel's five main cast members aren't the original character types found in the Spanish dramas that have inspired Wilder's text, then there's still a sense in which they might count as a form of literary descendent. The Theatrum Mundi is just another part of the ancestry of this particular work. The way it functions in the story proper is interesting. I almost have to describe it as an indirect presence operating just at the corners of the narrative. A better way to say it is that the characters go about there affairs either unaware, or unconcerned that their actions are functioning in what can only be described as an Order that is ethical and karmic by turns. Wilder's characters live in a world where bad choices come back to haunt you.
Man, King, Wilder, and Macroverse.
Life seems to be made for commitments of one sort of another, even in the choice of deciding to do no more than be a complete and total slack-off. What Shakespeare and others like Cervantes seemed to insist on was the notion that what goes around comes around. Any and everyone is free to make whatever choices they like. What they assert about all that is how it seems impossible to remove human choice from some sort of odd, yet apparent moral plain. As such, if you're the type who insists on trying to see how much you can get away with, then just keep one thing in mind. You can do all in your power to try and blot out the very Sun from the sky if you feel it as an insult. Try and break the very fabric of reality, if you even can. Just be sure to see if you can ever calculate the cost of at least some of your actions along the way. Turns out Stephen King was able to summarize all that better than me. According to his 1996 chiller, Desperation one of the fundamental principles of life goes as follows: "Take what you want, and pay for it (524)". That's about as close as I can get to a good description of the underlying theme Wilder is working with. It's the idea that a single life is like a bridge. It can be spoken of as having a value. The trick is that it needs to be sturdy if it wants to function well at all, the whole constructed edifice has to be kept up in a proper working order for as long as possible.
This is the same sort of technique employed in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Much like in his more famous stage play, Wilder takes a bird's eye view of his cast. It's a the sort of narrative vantage point that can jump into the minds and motivations of any one cast member in one scene, only to then zoom out and grant the reader a greater perspective on the meaning of the action from the viewpoint of the Cosmic Playhouse as a whole. In all of this, the writer shows an easy going ability to take his time in a plot that involves various slices of life, and whether or not each character is willing to embody them with meaning. It's difficult to know just how well this sort of thing will fly with today's readers and viewers. While there have been films and books in this mode that have done well (and here a good example of what I mean are films like Stephen King's Stand By Me, and the original novella it was based on), by and large, the novel does contain an inherent risk within itself which it didn't have upon it's initial publication. This is the problem of what happens when the author's collective audience has moved on from older forms, or modes of narrative. In other words, what happens when some kinds of literature fall out of public favor? In that sense, all writing is a harrowing, tricksy high wire act.
The plot and its characters, the themes and ideas it tackles, and even its own once normal, now quirky sense of pacing and denouement are all executed with a level of skill and craftsmanship that might very well count as a lost art in the contemporary age. The funny thing is how the completed book maxes out at just 138 pages in the Harper Collins Classics edition. It means this book has roughly the same page length as the novella version of King's
Stand By Me. The irony there is that both books contain this semi-shared level of epic scope in such a small setting, yet most readers will possibly come away from Wilder's text feeling like they've read something that was just as long as the saga of Middle Earth. I almost wonder if the story would have had better luck if Wilder had decided to make it into a stage drama. It would at least have offered it a better survival via the grapevine of Theater Kid culture, and thus be able to enjoy the kind of ubiquitous half-life that Our Town has survived on. What can be said with a greater degree of certainty is that what the author has given his readers here is a story that acts as both a literary inheritor and a forgotten piece of pioneering drama all in one. It's a story that takes its cue from literature of the past, in particular, the drama of the Spanish Golden Age, and the manners and morals novels of scribblers like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. It's also a pioneer in the sense that it's dramaturgy is one that looks forward to the likes of The Breakfast Club, and Foreman's Amadeus.It's an early example of the Slice-of-Life drama, where the focus is more on the personalities of the characters, and how they either change or fail to grow for the better over the course of the plot. Film's like John Hughes's Brat Pack classic are examples of the core of narrative storytelling boiled down almost to its essence, and the same might be applied to a now obscure book that helped pioneer this format. It's this knowledge, combined with the overall skill of the novel as a whole that makes it all the more unfortunate that Wilder's efforts have faded so far into obscurity, whereas the books of others like Jane Austen have continued to thrive well beyond their original context. My hope with this review is that I might have done at least something to bring Wilder's text back into a bit of the spotlight, as it does bear all the hallmarks of a neglected classic. With this in mind, there's just one loose end left to sow up. Where does Stephen King fit into all of this? What did he take away from The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and what kind of influence has Thornton Wilder exerted on his own literary efforts? Well for me, the answer starts off with two facts. What we've got on our hands are a pair of writers, both of whom are drawing from the same storehouse of literary Inspiration. With the passage of time, the older of the two writers goes on to become yet another part of the same memory warehouse the later one uses.
King as a Literary Inheritor.
It is Collings, in particular, who is able to trace a line of descent connecting King to that aforementioned inheritance which stems from Wilder on back to both the Spanish Golden Age, and the Elizabethan Stage. He's the one critic who has come close to giving a name to the storehouse that King keeps coming back to time and again for just about every word he ever wrote. Collings labels it simply as, the Epic (142, 149), and it's to his credit that he's able to use this term as a means of drawing attention to King's use of literary allusions to writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton in works like Desperation or The Dark Tower. It's thanks to this insight that Collings allows us to posit the idea that King is best seen as an Individual Talent operating both an inheritor of and practitioner within the Epic Tradition. It's the narratological heritage responsible for the Greek and Norse myth, the German Marchen, along with the written work of modern authors like Cervantes and Wilder. Each of them started out as Individual Talents who later became part of this shared storehouse that King now draws from to the best of his abilities. This appears to be the one aspect of King's works to be overlooked by his fans, and I'd argue it serves as a good marker place for the next step in the criticism of his writings.
If the World of Epic, especially as it applies to the tropes and concepts of the Renaissance is a good description of the Gothic paradigm King works in, then what does his use of it in his fiction say about his understanding about all these ideas. How does Wilder and his use of the same material fit in, also? Well, the most obvious thing to say is that what we've got on our hands is this working class poor kid from Maine, who somewhere along the line developed a fascination with what E.M.W. Tillyard described as
The Elizabethan World Picture, and his interest in it never really seems to have gone away. Even in overlooked works like Dreamcatcher, we can find King dusting off such obscure Baroque concepts like the Memory Palace, and putting it to some surprisingly sophisticated use. In much the same way, he gives us a situation in which one of his many child protagonists are confronted in a dark wood with characters that share a relation with the poetry of both Edmund Spenser and William Blake in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. And, of course, the public at large seems to be aware of the tragic, Shakespearean qualities of novels like The Shining. These are all example of the writer finding the best possible modern voice for these Elizabethan ideas. In the Tower series, meanwhile, I'm sorry to report that everything is still the same. He's too far out of his comfort zone, and the Muse is stretched thin.
Bev Vincent described Ka as "King’s great invention, a powerful and nearly irresistible force that
guides" his protagonists' "quest from the beginning (289)". In world-building terms, King goes to great lengths to define it as a fundamental part of the Gunslinger's outlook. Either that or else it's the closest thing thing Roland has to any well defined belief. "He grows to rely
on ka. When he needs something, he knows it will be provided . . . because
he needs it. If his group tries to go against ka, ka will shepherd them back
on course. If ka wants them to go through" what amounts to your prototypical post-apocalyptic cityscape (which the persevering reader later learns is based upon New York), "and they start to go around
it, circumstances will force them back. Ka’s only rule is “Stand aside and let
me work.” It has no heart or mind. According to" another character in a connected volume known as Black House, “ka is a
friend to evil as well as to good. It embraces both.” Ka is like a Path...it’s the way to the Tower. It isn’t omnipotent, though. Ka can
be fought and changed, but only at a great cost. "In matters of the Tower, fate became a thing as merciful as the lighter
that had saved his life and as painful as the fire the miracle had ignited.
Like the wheels of the oncoming train, it followed a course both logical and
crushingly brutal, a course against which only steel and sweetness could
stand (289-90)".
"Anyone else would have said to himself with secret joy: “Within ten
minutes myself! …” But it was another thought that visited Brother Juniper:
“Why did this happen to those five?” If there were any plan in the universe
at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered
mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by
accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on
that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives
of those five persons that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the
reason of their taking off (7)". I don't know about you, yet for some reason it becomes very easy for me to imagine King (maybe as a young college student, or else later on) running across that passage in his own copy of Wilder's book, and thinking to himself something like, "You know what? Wouldn't it be funny if you could find some way of applying that to the Dark Tower itself, and like maybe have that be the ultimate goal of Roland's quest"? I'm not sure how far-fetched that must sound to others. For me, though, the answer is: not much. I don't get the sense that I'm straying too far into the Valley of the Novelist here. I can't tell you King's exact reaction, yet I'll bet odds are even that it went something very well like that.
It may be possible to say, then, that in addition to
being inspired by a forgotten bit of verse from the pen of Victorian poet Robert Browning, another overlooked piece of imaginative stimulus for Roland's character motivation might have stemmed from the mission that Wilder's quixotic Friar assigns to himself. If this is the case, then the moments in the Tower books where Roland is likened to a desert ascetic, and his adversary, the Man in Black, is described as wearing the clothing of a monk begins to take on a maybe interesting bit resonance as a buried bit of literary allusion, one so deep underground that there may be times when even the writer doesn't notice it. It's as if King had taken the figure of Brother Juniper, stripped him of his station, put a gun in his hand (along with plenty of reasons to meditate on the topic of guilt), and then turned him loose in a Heavy Metal style acid fever dream, inspired by Sergio Leone, and yet left him with the same gnawing, obsessive sense of questing vocation that he still had in Wilder's text. If this is in any way plausible, then at the same time, there is this interesting sense of shared identification going on to an extent between author and character. There are moments when King as a reader of Wilder almost seems to be in the same position as the monastic chronicler of the San Luis Bridge tragedy. The character's quest becomes the reader's at the same time.
In between these two polar opposite pictures rests the concept of the possible free will of Man the Microcosm, and the question of whether or not his lives in the sort of Macrocosm that would allow him to exercise it well. That's a lot of heady material to work with, and yet it's easy to see where it all comes from, and how its applied when you take into account King's own struggles with impulse control. It becomes possible to map out how a book like The Bridge of San Luis Rey could fire his Imagination. It would have served as as neat a summation for his own worries on the topic of clinging to sanity, and what that means in the larger scheme of things. It's the kind of behind-the-scenes information which can be somewhat inspiring when related to some of the writer's best work, like the quiet triumph that is Misery. The somewhat forever ironic punchline is that King's limitations as an author probably will never allow him to address it in the one setting he likes to spend time with the most. A discussion of Fate, Chance, and Free Will can carry a great deal of thematic weight in, say, a novel about vampirism.
mode of communication here strikingly resembles late Renaissance Emblems, visual representations of straightforward Things that in
turn stand for complex, subtle, often philosophical meanings, readily
understood and accepted by the culture at large. There is no need for poetry;
the image communicates everything necessary (150)". So there is a sense of perfect irony that King writes the most like Tolkien when he's not trying to imitate Middle Earth, and, instead just be himself. If you stop and think about it, there's a sense of fitting rightness to such an outcome when you consider it might have been the ultimate lesson King was meant to learn about freeing oneself from addiction.
Conclusion: A Book with a Fascinating History and Influence.
So in terms of how King fairs as a reader of Wilder, the final results are mostly good, if paradoxical. He seems to demonstrate a pretty strong grasp of the text, which is an always necessary, yet often overlooked skill in the Art of Reading. Being a professional writer himself, it also makes sense that King would be able to penetrate either right at or else close to the heart of whatever text he is studying. In the case of Wilder's
Bridge, however, there is this lingering note of curious ambiguity. It comes from the way King himself handles the jumbled concepts of Fate, Free Will, and Fortune. In each novel or short story he writes, King is prone to dredging up all three of the aforementioned concepts. He likes to place them in opposition to one another, like a Chessmaster whose attention is forever consumed with a trio of specific pieces on the board. The funny thing is, once King has set up the figures of Fortuna, the Fates, and Man the Microcosm on the playing field, it's as if he deliberately steps aside, and lets each of these topoi do as they will. In other words, King seems to never give his readers a straight answer to the topic of man's free will in the universe. Like that old Springsteen song, he "just stands back and" lets "it all be". Sometimes he even succeeds in being able to do just that. The ironic catch is that the decision to never weigh in the the eternal debate he raises in his fictions has played havoc with King's critics.
Some of them have labeled his outlook as a form of Cosmological Determinism. Yet this judgement call seems short-sighted at best. The major reason for this is because in addition to being obsessed with the concepts of free will and determinism, over-arching it all is the constant refrain of a continues and consistent moral stance. It's there from the opening pages of Carrie, to the closer of later novels like Fairy Tale, 48 years later. It's a hallmark of the author's work that has been noted by scholars like Magistrale and Collings. It is only the latter critic, however, who is able to discern the author using each completed writing as a way of arriving at, and then clarifying this ethical stance. Collings hints that it may be King's way of affirming his own moral identity. If this is the case, then no matter what even informative commentators like Magistrale and Heidi Strengell claim, their focus on Literary Determinism and Naturalism continues to blind them toward the fundamentally Romanticist moral streak both in King's nature, and hence his fiction. It is this element of the same Romanticism as that found in writers like William Blake and Samuel Coleridge (the latter of whom, also like King, knew what it was like to struggle with substance abuse) that allows the perceptive reader to reach a sustainable conclusion that when push comes to shove, King will always telegraph that he believes in the ability of the human being to make an informed moral choice for themselves, and not be determined by fate.
One other reason for why King's thought on the matter might seem a lot less cut and dry than it is in reality could be down to the way he
might have originally interpreted Wilder's own ending. The structure of the
Bridge novel is configured in such a way as to feel as if the author is leaving us with a riddle to be solved. Wilder's book ends on a note that might prove frustrating to those who aren't paying attention. It all stems from what happens to the Monk character who has acted as the quasi-narrator of the novel. When the story of the bridge victims is concluded, Brother Juniper publishes his findings in a philosophical text that he hopes will vindicate his view of the world. Rather than being greeted with open arms, the young Mendicant finds himself treated as a pariah by the public, and finds himself accused and condemned as a heretic by his own Church. Both the Monk and his book are submitted to a public burning. That's still not quite where Wilder wraps things up, yet it is the most oblique angle the book has going for it. The reader is never given quite as clear a picture of both the Monk's conclusions, or of how they were expressed in his treatise. Wilder never tells us whether Juniper was guilty in any way or not. Instead, the story leaves things so that the Monastic chronicler could have been either someone who broke too far from the Faith than was healthy for him, or else he was a devote soul who's only crime was to be condemned by the words of the cold-hearted, the blind, and the hateful masses.
With this kind of a denouement in mind, Wilder is almost guilty of withholding a resolution from his readers. It's easy to see then not only how King could get caught up in the mission of Brother Juniper, but also how the character's ultimate fate could go on to echo that of the Gunslinger. Both men find themselves condemned for their sense of duty, whether it could be considered either wise or misguided. Brother Juniper can be interpreted as either a figure of fun, whose only purpose is to be mocked by the reader. Or else you can posit that he's this tragic martyr, and that the San Luis Bridge has claimed one more final victim. In the same way, Roland is either the last Knight Errant, or an amoral fool who confuses his own personal obsessions and guilt complex with a feigned higher calling. It makes sense therefore that in choosing to give Roland the ending that he has, King seems to be doing no more than remaining true to Wilder's own conclusion. At the same time, just like with the Romantic streak that will not allow King to submit Free Will to Fate, so Wilder gives the final word to one of the novel's overlooked side characters. The all important lines go as follows: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is
love, the only survival, the only meaning.” What the story seems to be hinting at is just this. Love is a choice, just as much as hate. It takes a free will to make it matter.
If I had any words to convey all of that to the character of Juniper, then it make help to paraphrase the Bard of Avon himself. Perhaps the true fault in cases like this, dear Brother, really isn't in our stars, but in ourselves. Still no reason to not give it our best; so far as I'm concerned, anyway. That's a sentiment that both King and Wilder seem to agree with, and while I can't recommend
The Dark Tower series as an example of America's reigning Monarch of Terror at his best, I can at least say that
The Bridge San Luis Rey has made for a very entertaining and somewhat enlightening excursion for me in a double sense. For casual readers looking for a good, quiet yet engaging bit of dramaturgy to enjoy, this book will fit the bill. For Constant Readers looking to arrive at a better understand the themes contained in the novels of Stephen King, Thornton Wilder and his Towering Bridge offers a hidden treasure mine.
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