1
Prelude
The (Im)possible Politics of Stephen Kingâs Fiction
FROM CARRIE (1974) to The Institute (2019), Stephen Kingâs fiction reflects dramatic political upheavals of the past fifty years, including disillusionment in foreign wars, disenchantment with the welfare state and a drift towards theocracy. For nearly every major concern of the era, readers will find a corresponding work.1 To address this correspondence, the book adopts several aims. First, it takes stock of the dominant political themes in Kingâs universe to understand better the relationship between his writings and the contexts in which they emerge. Secondly, it expounds upon moments of cohesion as well as conjuncture (at times, his texts involve a consistent set of commitments; at other times, his texts suggest tension or uncertainty). Finally, it politicises King scholarship because many of his critics too readily accept the claim, trumpeted by King himself, that his fiction remains âanti-politicalâ.2 In contrast to the analyses of cultural politics in Kingâs corpus undertaken by a wide range of critics, I concentrate in the pages that follow upon how his texts engage with politics proper, which is to say, the never-ending (re)formation of groups with shared interests. This book examines how Kingâs narratives reflect as well as challenge the role of politics as a passionate struggle that has been steadily displaced over the last fifty years by Americaâs all-consuming focus upon economics. If we minimise this aspect of Kingâs fiction, we undervalue an incredibly rich vein of interpretive possibility.
Rather than attend to the cardinal function of politics as a persistent wrangling, scholars of Kingâs work sometimes put forward a thin conceptualisation by exposing evidence of social decay, or commenting upon a broad middle-class habitus in a manner that treats politics as a secondary â not constitutional â attribute of being human. This approach perhaps seems reasonable enough when, for instance, we consider the intentionally massive scale of Kingâs 1977 novel, The Shining: â[The Overlook] forms an index of the whole post-World War II American characterâ (King, Shining 281). But we might worry, alongside Douglas Cowan, that scholarship on this subject tends to be satisfied with relatively âparochial understandingsâ of complex terms. The general use of the term âpoliticsâ in certain analyses serves as âa superficial abstraction, [an] empty placeholderâ that means too much and too little. Consequently, it becomes commonplace to map âeasily recognizableâ ideas of the âsociopoliticalâ onto Kingâs narratives in a manner that downplays the complicated part that politics actually plays (Cowan 13â15). Although King and many of his critics frequently present the politics of his fiction as external to everyday life (an ill-fitting adornment, or a bad habit foisted upon a bedrock called society), I wish to survey how politics comprises Kingâs multiverse at its most primary level.
Of course, to say that critics have not given the political aspects of Kingâs fiction their due is not to argue that critics have produced no valuable commentary on the subject. Tony Magistrale, for example, opens his landmark study of Kingâs fiction with the observation that his stories are âpolitically focusedâ (Landscape 25). Craig Ian Mann posits, âKing has always been a political writerâ (199). And Douglas W. Texter adds, âKingâs work in general is much more political than critics ⌠want to admitâ (45). Built upon a foundation laid by these insightful readers, the following book charts how political concepts weave their way into the pages of Kingâs fiction.
We might sympathise with critics that produce more anaemic accounts of the politics in Kingâs fiction because of the prominent method for reading that is bundled together with his prose. Specifically, King endorses a method of reading that adamantly refuses to âget politicalâ. Although his non-fiction treatise Danse Macabre (1981) admits the influence of the Cold War and the Kennedy assassination on his creative process, it relegates these connections to his unconscious, as he doubts that horror writers ever intend to âwear a political hatâ. Danse Macabre opens with an outright denial that his texts harbour any âdisguisedâ political commentary (Danse 6, 131).3 His fiction similarly disinvites readers from politicised interpretation. The novella Apt Pupil (1983) treats politics as window dressing for barbaric human behaviour, insisting that âpolitics is just so much tired bullspit to cover up the gooshy stuffâ (130).4 Likewise, a character from 11/22/63 (2011) argues that nothing is ever truly about politics anyway: âAt the bottom itâs always a womanâ (540). And Bill from IT (1986) succeeds as a popular novelist as a result of his withholding of political engagement: âIf fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeableâ, he notes, âIâm going to kill myselfâ (122).
By disinviting the political, Kingâs fiction reflects a cultural shift into neo-liberal rationality: âthe insistence that there are only rational market actors in every sphere of human existenceâ (Brown, Undoing 99). Sociologists Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval define the shift as
The dilution of public law in favor of private law; configuration of public activity to the criteria of profitability and productivity; symbolic devaluation of law as the specific act of the legislature; strengthening of the executive; prioritization of procedure; a tendency for police powers to break free of any judicial control; promotion of the âcitizen-consumerâ responsible for arbitrating between competing âpolitical offers.â (303)
Over the last fifty years, this unique rationality spread as the United States curtailed homo politicus and idealised homo economicus.5 In theory, to be political means to engage in moral deliberation, to sustain a capacity to generate associations with fellow subjects and to invest in public goods. To champion homo politicus is to recognise what German philosopher Immanuel Kant posits nearly two centuries earlier â that dignity is not synonymous with price, and so we must confess âan irreducibility of the political and moral to the economicâ (303). Indeed, the designation of the political signifies a field of open conflict, an interminable sense that when it comes to communal governance things could always be otherwise. As a result, we cannot reduce the political to a citizen-consumerâs relationship with what is normative in their society (a tendency that has been taken up elsewhere in the study of Kingâs politics). After all, Kingâs stories routinely separate ethical behaviour from the political imagination, as when the school-age protagonist of Doctor Sleep (2013) skips an assigned chapter in her textbook on âHow Our Government Worksâ that she finds to be âmajorly boresomeâ â and a mere twenty pages in length â to read the apparently more important chapter, âYour Responsibilities as A Citizenâ (205). Counter to Kingâs thoroughly private portrait of an ethical life, real-life politics requires public demonstration, institution-building, as well as the messy work of passing legislation. Whereas homo economicus understands her relationship with social norms as a personal matter to be navigated with economic tools, homo politicus can choose to eschew financial motivation and stir up alternative associations. I will develop this definition of the political further in the next section.6
Importantly, though, the following chapters do not âisolate politics from everything elseâ (Wiley 12). To politicise Kingâs fiction, we need not ignore or conflate other facets of American life, as tomorrowâs singular focus upon homo politicus would be no more palatable than todayâs exclusive focus upon homo economicus. Moreover, Adam Kotsko denies that a clear border between the two ever exists, insisting that their relationship is continually being reconfigured. I do not denounce Kingâs fiction (or many of its critics) for being anti-political in order to substitute my own hierarchy of interests â to pick a side, for example, in the debate between neo-liberalism and a more radical democracy. In truth, the repression of the political as well as its return are at times equally terrifying, and of even greater consequence, they are always-already intertwined. We must examine the tumultuous intersection of the political and economic features of Kingâs works by addressing a tendency among his interpreters to overstate the âsociopoliticalâ character of his corpus (when economic factors are more forcibly in play), at the same time that we call attention to a tendency among these interpreters to under-appreciate the political aspects of Kingâs stories (in places where politics remains exceedingly influential).
The remainder of the text inspects how, on the one hand, Kingâs brand of anti-politics affirms the status quo of a growing demo-phobia in the post-1960s United States alongside a hyper-inflated emphasis upon economic growth. On the other hand, there is a spectre haunting Stephen Kingâs America, and that spectre is the concept of the political. Kingâs stories repress this concept, but it eternally returns. Consequently, as we track the ways in which the political has been repressed in his page-turners, we consider how this repression serves as a necessity in efforts to release Americaâs stifled political energies. Precisely because of its ardent anti-politics, Kingâs fiction preserves the political as a fantastic force as horrifying as it is hopeful.
The repression (and return) of American politics
The repression and return of American politics in Kingâs fiction occur during an era in which citizens gradually lose faith in electoral processes that they are told to deem as too slow and inefficient (at least, the logic goes, when compared with corporate governance). Justifying the fears of Carl Schmitt, managerialism replaces democratic sparring as American citizens start to understand âpolitics only as a shadow of economic realityâ (Crisis 20). In turn, when the corporate approach of elites fails to produce satisfactory results for a majority of the populace â a failure perhaps most glaringly exposed by the financial crash of 2008 â voters look to peculiar, even outright gothic, sources for alternative answers.7
To establish a broader context, it may suffice to remark briefly upon how, following the departure of the US from the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971â72 and the subsequent shift into floating exchange rates, influential capitalists are less and less held in check by the demands of democratic constituencies. What emerges in the wake of this departure is a âvirtual senateâ of investors and lenders that âexercise âveto powerâ over government decisions by threat of capital flightâ (Chomsky 219). Corporations are held less accountable because the forces behind globalisation grant them extra-territoriality and allow them, in the process, to mute the voice of âthe peopleâ. As examples of this depoliticisation, we might consider the (in)famous Public Act 4 in Michigan, otherwise known as the âlocal government and school district fiscal accountability actâ (2011), in which economic managers can be appointed to make executive decisions for a community should that communityâs financial matters fall into a state of disrepair. Or Tennessee legislation (HB 1632) that constrains locally elected officials from mandating affordable housing in their municipality (2016). Or recent efforts to pass the BDS Act â an act that condones state-imposed penalties against citizens wishing to boycott or divest from enterprises affiliated with Israel (2018). Or bill SB96 in Utah, a 2019 bill designed to restrict Medicaid expansion after voters approved the expansion at the ballot box. These examples are only a handful of the recent manifestations of depoliticisation in the United States. The list goes on. As we will see shortly, Kingâs fiction shares a number of goals with these initiatives: to critique the so-called nanny state; to laud leadership by managers such as police officers, entrepreneurs or rogue actors; and to spark fear of the masses by treating âthe peopleâ as gullible, unreasonable and prone to zealotry. Whether he intends to do so or not, King helps to sustain Americaâs widespread de-democratisation via his popular paperbacks.
To understand how Kingâs texts reflect this phenomenon, we must flesh out our definition of the political. To be political means preserving the potential to forge new alliances, overturn the establishment and express dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. The concept of the political evokes core antagonisms within any social order: a tremendously unstable and disruptive plurality that can, at any given moment, exceed organisational limits. Thanks to the interminable nature of the political, one cannot imagine a government that could satisfy every demand made by every taxpayer, and so groups must wrestle with one another to align (and realign) in perpetuity. Claude Lefort describes the political as âprinciples that generate society or, more accurately, different forms of societyâ, forms that âappear and then disappearâ (Democracy 217, 54). According to theorists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the âstable articulatory structuresâ of government could never bring closure to the âsurplus of meaning of âthe socialââ; instead, the concept of the political denotes the (im)possibility of articulating a permanent social arrangement (Laclau and Mouffe 82). In a word, this signature of the (im)possible â with its internal brackets â conveys a dual movement in which we pursue a fully satisfied society and actively recall the futility behind such a premise.
To visualise how Kingâs fiction reflects a restless political impulse in tension with the confines of institutional politics, let us turn for a moment to Kingâs The Tommyknockers (1987), a novel that represents American politics along these lines. The town constable of Haven, Maine likes to think of her job as community service, not âpoliticsâ, because she believes that government toil inevitably devolves into a âdrive ⌠to dominateâ. Meanwhile, unaware of his own drive to dominate, the protagonist seeks to overthrow âthe establishmentâ due to its reckless obsession with nuclear weapons. His activism, however, proves to be barbaric. At one protest, the police arrest him for wielding a gun; later, during a heated argument on the subject of nuclear weapons, he murders a colleague. Kingâs Hearts of Atlantis (1999) upholds this fear of activism when Carol accidentally kills an innocent bystander during a heated protest. In this way, The Tommyknockers exposes the radioactive side of political engagement in a manner that defuses the appeal of antagonism for his readers. The story suggests that, in the game of politics, participants find âdevils on every sideâ (213, 396, 314). Although the âgood guysâ of The Tommyknockers think of themselves as benevolent voices of reason, their political idealism marks them as intrinsically power-hungry.
In The Tommyknockers, to be political means to desire utopia while being driven, unaware, by the vanity behind such a proposition. Crucially, the narrative condemns political strife as well as the illusion of its end. Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch discuss how the concept of the political depends upon the (im)possibility of its final articulation. Adorno anticipates the main sentiment of The Tommyknockers when he recognises that utopia is far too monolithic to be truly attainable: âThere is nothing like a single, fixable utopian content.â The potency of the political will forever endure because members of heterogeneous populations can imagine a vast array of different utopias. At the same time, Bloch responds, these members persist in presupposing âthe conception of, and longing for, a possible perfectionâ (Bloch 7, 16). Indeed, the protagonist of The Tommy-knockers reveals the self-sabotage behind his desire for a perfect society when, on an unconscious level, he admits that he does not genuinely want to complete the struggle: âIf your politics never get the chance to be tried outâ, his unconscious whispers, âYou never have to worry about finding out that the new boss is the same as the old boss.â Said another way, while many of the novelâs characters persist in reaching for flawless community â a true Haven to be distinguished from the deeply flawed town of the same name â the novel proclaims an ultimate âANSWER TO EVERYTHINGâ to be unattainable (except, it warrants pointing out, in dreams). Correspondingly, Kingâs novel closes with two children entering into a peaceful slumber: âNinety-three million miles from the sun and a hundred parsecs from the axis pole of the galaxy, [the children] slept in each otherâs arms.â Despite its anti-political tenor, The Tommyknockers preserves the political as a powerful (im)possibility. Even when Americans appear to desire static institutions, they are still driven to hunt for better arrangements. Kingâs text stresses this point by referencing Mohammedan rug-makers that âalways include a deliberate error in their workâ to maintain their status as âfallen creaturesâ (159â61, 558, 213). According to The Tommyknockers, then, a functional society unsuspectingly retains âdeliberate errorsâ to carry on the all-important ritual of political contest.
Along the same lines, Laclau and Mouffe describe organisational politics as âan âorderâ that exists only as a partial limiting of disorderâ. Positions of dominance can only ever be placeholders, or âsuturesâ, because society is a never-ending sequence of formations, ânone of which could aspire to be the truth of societyâ. For a community to endure, its mythic totality â its Edenic âoriginal absenceâ â must be forever deferred (Laclau and Mouffe 177, xxiii, 37; authorâs emphasis).
[The construction of social objectivity and political identity as a closed, self-contained structure] is ultimately impossible but, nevertheless, necessary (we are necessarily engaged all the time in identity construction exactly because it is impossible to construct a full identity) ⌠It is in the moment of this prevention which is simultaneously generating â or causing â new attempts to construct this impossible object â society â that the moment of the political is surfacing and resurfacing again and again. (Stavrakakis 4)
The Tommyknockers illustrates how the spectre of the political in Kingâs fiction preserves an ongoing, vital friction between a fantasy of permanent control and the unconscious admission that control remains indispensably up for grabs.
According to a number of contemporary political philosophers, this notion of a perpetually restless political is best upheld under democratic regimes: âDemocracy is the regime that, in welcoming conflict, social and political debate, makes room for the possible, for the newâ (Lefort, Writing 262). Democracy widens the field of political contest to all takers, regardless of their prescribed status, and so âwelcomes and preserves indeterminacyâ (Democracy 16â17). And yet, in the United States over the last fifty years, democratic channels have been aggressively closed in favour of economic competition between market actors. Prominent intellectuals as well as politicians âestablish limits to popular sovereignty in the name of libertyâ (Mouffe, Democratic 4). In particular, proponents of âpatterns and proceduresâ react to the egalitarian âoutburstsâ of the 1960s by tamping down democratic excess and assigning the perceived glut of the political back to its âproper placeâ (Rancière, Dis...