PulpLit.net

Stephen King and The Body Redemption

For four months last fall, I worked as an intern for the Atlantic Monthly. An intern at the Atlantic has one central duty: reading the so-called "slush pile," the mountain of unsolicited manuscripts the magazine receives every day. Unlike most mainstream literary magazines, the Atlantic prides itself in its assertion that they read every manuscript they get. The Atlantic receives over 10,000 unsolicited manuscripts a year, and maybe one or two are published, if that. The process isn't entirely egalitarian, either--knowing the right people could mean your manuscript gets more than a passing glance from an intern with low blood sugar.

I relay this information to establish my credentials. In my time at the Atlantic, I read a good two or three hundred of these unsolicited manuscripts. In order to have a good feel for what the Atlantic (and the market in general) was looking for, I also made sure to read every story published in the Atlantic as well as The New Yorker (something I was doing anyway). I should also note that I had just taken a creative writing course my last semester at college and had, for three years, been a member of the so-called Harvard Fiction Workshop. As an Arts Board editor for the Crimson, Harvard's flagship newspaper, I reviewed both Birds of America, a book of short stories by Lorrie Moore, and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. I also tried not once, but twice (unsuccessfully) to get on the staff of the Harvard Advocate. All of these experiences have given me, at the very least, a decent conception of what contemporary "literary" fiction looks like. I hope, at this point, you are willing to grant me at least a passing grasp of the kind of stories that appear in the Atlantic and The New Yorker--putting any and all opinions of these magazines aside.

As I read the stories in these magazines, I began to notice how bizarrely similar the stories seemed to be from issue to issue. Sometimes it was the tone, sometimes the oddly detached narration, sometimes the open-ended or entirely absent conclusion or the stubborn refusal to write a shred of exposition--but each story seemed to have something in common with the next. I even began to notice the author's names and nationalities-- for instance, The New Yorker as of late has had an appetite for fiction from the British Isles. It was this seeming sameness that caused me to perk up when I saw an unusual name in the January 29, 2001 issue of The New Yorker: Stephen King.

In my senior year of college I had many a debate with my thesis advisor, Gustavo P. Secchi, over the nature of literary fiction. He told me that eventually I would learn how to distinguish literary writing from what I must term "non-literary writing" (I hesitate to use "popular fiction" since that which is literary can sometimes be popular). Gustavo then drew a graph in the shape of a horizontal line. On one end was the literary, and on the other end, the non-literary. Gustavo was careful to point out that it was a spectrum, not a hierarchy; unlike many scholars and writers, this graph made no assumptions about what was good or what was bad. In fact, the graph allows for good and bad fiction of both the literary and non-literary form. This makes sense to me: anyone can write a novel that looks like Finnegan's Wake, but if he or she writes it carelessly, it's unlikely to be as "good" as Joyce's work.

So the graph divides the literary and the non-literary by form. The basic unit of the literary (and remember, this graph is intended for Modern and post-Modern works primarily) is the word. Language, even the individual choice of words is where the significance of the work resides. Finnegan's Wake is the supreme example of this model of the literary. On the other end of the spectrum is the non-literary. Most popular fiction falls under this category. The basic unit of the non-literary is plot, and the supreme example of this is many of the books produced by cheap fantasy and sci-fi publishing companies who throw together a plot from a variety of standard elements, then hire a writer to make a novel out of it.

A less abstract example would be this: James Joyce thought very carefully about specific words and their placement. Stephen King is concerned primarily with the story. He's certainly aware of the language, and in his literary stories he tries hard to do something with it, but for the most part he focuses on the story. There is also, perhaps, the issue of talent; when it comes to language, some writers have talent, and some simply do not.

Which leads me, finally, to the purpose of this essay. The idea came to me as I read King's afterword to Different Seasons, his collection of novellas that includes "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and "The Body." One paragraph in particular caught my attention:

There are still magazines that publish long fiction--Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker are two which have been particularly sympathetic to the publication problems of a writer who has delivered (we won't say "gotten"; that's too close to "misbegotten") a 30,000-word novella. But neither of these magazines has been particularly receptive to my stuff, which is fairly plain, not very literary, and sometimes (although it hurts like hell to admit it) downright clumsy (506).

This gave me pause. Of course, I had just read King's story "The Death of Jack Hamilton" in the pages of The New Yorker a few weeks ago, so either King had gotten over his clumsiness or the Yorker had lowered its standards. Giving King the benefit of the doubt, I then began to mull over "The Body" and tried to imagine it in the pages of the Yorker or the Atlantic. I couldn't do it. Somehow, "Jack Hamilton" worked, while "The Body" just didn't fit. Yet "The Body" was not a horror story. It wasn't a genre story at all. I tried to think of another author who wrote straightforward "plain" fiction that wasn't couched in some genre or another, but I couldn't. Any writer whose novel wasn't slotted into a genre was "literary," it seemed. So why couldn't I visualize "The Body" in the pages of The New Yorker? I knew it wasn't just some ingrained prejudice, a result of four years of a departmentalized Ivy League education. Something kept "The Body" out of the realm of the literary.

The answer, in light of the literary/popular graph discussed above, is that "The Body" does not have enough care in its language to reach the realm of the literary. Thus, in an effort to understand the difference between "literary" and "popular" fiction, and perhaps expose some of the fallacies and truths that surround each form. I will treat "The Body" and the intuitively understood (if inchoate) standards of literary fiction with the seriousness each deserves.

When altering "The Body" enough for acceptance into the pages of an Atlantic Monthly, the first and easiest place to start is the title. The story is about four boys going to see their first dead body, that of a boy their own age who was hit by a train and was thrown to the side of the tracks. The body was seen by some local hoods, who decided not to do anything about it. One of the boys overhears the hoods discussing it, and so the plan to find it is hatched. In a literary story, such a close relationship between title and story--the signifier and the signified--might be considered trite and unimaginative, like a songwriter who titles his song after the phrase most often repeated in the chorus. The first story in Different Seasons has the much more literary title of "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." Note the vagueness and ambiguity of the title. Rita Hayworth plays no role in the story other than that of an image on a poster. The object of the "redemption" in the title is uncertain--who or what is redeemed? Andy Dufresne, or perhaps more logically, Red Redding? Or perhaps the prison itself is redeemed by the escape of an wrongly accused man.

"The Body" contains none of these double meanings. There might be some play on childhood's preoccupation with bodily functions, which occasionally come into play in "The Body" (most notably in a scene where a leech clings to the narrator's testicles). But it seems more likely that the title is meant as a tribute to the classic pulp stories of King's youth. This has some merit, particularly when one considers the story as a work of popular fiction, but the title must be changed if it is to make the pages of the Atlantic. Just specifying which body could do the trick: "The Body of Ray Brower." After reading the title, questions immediately pop up in the reader's head: Who is Ray Brower? Why is his body being referred to--is he dead, as the title seems to indicate, or, in a twist on the trope, is it his living body that will be the focus of the story? If he's dead, how did he die? Most importantly--since both his first and last name are the title, imbuing it with a sense of declarative authority--is Ray Brower someone important and am I a bad intellectual for not knowing who he is? Is he some forgotten existentialist or rare American Surrealist? Was he a freedom fighter in Ireland? I'd better go look him up, just in case. No wait, I'll read the story, I'm sure it'll come out eventually.

Compare these with the questions raised by "The Body": Whose body? Or what body? What about it? Is it dead or alive? Or do you mean "the body" more abstractly, as in, "The body is the house of the soul"? None of these questions are as complex as the previous ones, and they certainly don't cause one to question one's level of erudition or pop culture immersion. Anyone can write a story called "The Body." But how many will write a story about Ray Brower?

Of course, "The Body of Ray Brower" is probably still too blatantly simplistic to warrant inclusion in the Atlantic. Let's get more abstract, more detached from the nuts and bolts of the story and into its themes. Fundamentally "The Body" is about the loss of innocence--Paradise Lost in 1950s suburbia. The particular form of that loss of innocence is perhaps the most common and significant: the realization of one's mortality. Using this knowledge we can make a quick and fairly lateral move to "The Death of Ray Brower." But the story takes place after the death of Ray Brower, a fact which is integral to the plot, so giving Death top billing isn't really accurate. Perhaps "The Search for Ray Brower"? This opens more possibilities--questions of the afterlife, the children's relation to this dead contemporary and their own inevitable deaths, ambiguity of identity and so forth. But even this title suffers from pedestrian grammar and fairly straightforward interpretation.

What's needed is something truly abstract--something along the lines of the mysterious redemption of Shawshank. To borrow the template of "Shawshank," we might title the story "Ray Brower and the Harlow Pilgrimage." This raises numerous questions. Aside from the aforementioned questions about Ray Brower, we get an undetermined place (person? thing?) called Harlow, and then this word "pilgrimage." For the enlightened, "pilgrimage" will bring to mind Mecca, Mahatma Ghandi, and Malcolm X along with the usual black-clad Puritans eating turkey and dying in winter. How is it a pilgrimage, we might wonder? What is being worshipped? The body of Ray Brower? Or is this a final paean to innocence itself? Or is it a pilgrimage for the narrator, retracing long-repressed steps to his revered childhood?

Of course, far more abstract title are possible, but in the interest of brevity I will end that discussion and move on to other aspects of the story. The plot, in abstract, is sufficiently literary: four young boys sneak away from home and travel by foot through the backwoods of suburbia to see their first dead body. The plot has power in its sheer morbidity: there is something unwholesome about the idea of four suburban children bypassing the police to go and look at a dead body--the body of a kid their own age, no less. Structurally the story is episodic in nature, featuring several tense instances such as the kids' battle with the owner of the junkyard, outrunning a train across a bridge, and confronting some petty criminals over the right to report the body to the police. I won't linger too much on the plot. In terms of literariness, it's perhaps a bit too busy--plot gets in the way of all that language if it's too complex (insert footnote about Ulysses here). But the only real problem with the plot, in terms of getting published in a literary magazine, would be the length--as a novella, "The Body" is a little too long, even for more generous magazines like the Atlantic.

Which leaves us with the most significant and subjective characteristic: language. Altering "The Body" to fit the pages of The New Yorker would require deep and extensive revisions to the entire novel, including cutting nearly 15,000 words. Again, in the interest of brevity and holding my readers' attention, I will take a mere two passages and rewrite them to be more literary--with explanatory remarks afterward. The original passage will be followed by the rewritten one.

"Our folks," Teddy said. "If we find that kid's body over in South Harlow tomorrow, they're gonna know we didn't spend the night camping in Vern's back field."


"Yeah," Chris said. "They'll know we went lookin for that kid."


"No they won't," I said. I felt funny--both excited and scared because I knew we could do it and get away with it. The mixture of emotions made me feel heatsick headachy. I picked up the Bikes to have something to do and started box-shuffling them. That and how to play cribbage was about all I got for older brother stuff from Dennis. The other kids envied that shuffle, and I guess everyone I knew had asked me to show them how it went...everyone except Chris. I guess only Chris knew that showing someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I just didn't have that much of him that I could afford to pass pieces around.

And now, the amended version:

"Our folks," Teddy said. "If we find that kid's body over in South Harlow tomorrow, they're gonna know we dint spend the night camping in Vern's backyard."


"Yeah," Chris said. "They'll know we went lookin for that kid."


"No they won't," I said. My mind was churning...I was both excited and scared, certain as I was that we wouldn't be caught, and the mixed emotions played havoc with my stomach and head. I picked up the cards and started box-shuffling. Split, whisk!, stuff, split; my tension faded into the staccato rhythm of the cards. This and cribbage was the whole of my inheritance from Dennis. The others envied my shuffling, and I was constantly pestered to teach to teach them how. Only Chris never asked for lessons. Somehow he knew my older brother was being shuffled along with the queens and jokers and I couldn't afford to deal him out to anyone.

A common aspect of much modern mainstream "literary" fiction is narcissism. There is plenty of narcissism in "The Body": the narrator, a successful bestselling author, is an obvious stand-in for King himself. But King's linguistic style is generally bare--"fairly plain," as King calls it. In the original story, the narcissism is part of the outer narrative frame. The King-Narrator always speaks directly to the reader, as he does when describing the history of some town or family or discussing his own literary ambitions (footnote for page 326). Otherwise the style of the narration is quite functional. In the above revision, what I have done is internalized the narcissism into the language itself. Everything is now focused through the lens of the self--"I" "me" "my." All characters, even dead ones, are significant only in their relation to the narrator.

Also, the tempo has changed. The sentences now have slower, steadier cadences, drawing more attention to the words themselves. The overall effect is to give the impression that serious thought, contemplation, lay behind what is being read. It may also suggest a decision to withhold absolutes, either from a desire to promote interpretation via ambiguity or from fear of making any claims whatsoever, lest one be exposed in his or her ignorance, bias, or arrogance. This withholding of absolutes adds to a (perhaps regrettable) sense of detachment on the part of the narrator that is not present in the original passage.

The onomatopoeic "whisk!" is a touch that only a literary writer would dare use--shades of Finnegan's Wake.

Let's try another passage. In this scene, the twelve-year-old Chris has just threatened to shoot Ace Merril, a teenaged thug. It is arguably the climax of the story, as the four kids face off against the thugs for the right to become heroes by "finding" Brower's body.

Ace slowly got control of himself. The muscles in his face tightened again, his lips pressed together, and he looked at Chris the way you'd look at a man who has made a serious proposition--to merge with your company, or handle your line of credit, or shoot your balls off. It was a waiting, almost curious expression, one that made you know that the terror was either gone or tightly lidded. Ace had recomputed the odds on not getting shot and had decided that they weren't as much in his favor as he had thought. But he was still dangerous--maybe more than before. Since then I've thought it was the rawest piece of brinkmanship I've ever seen. Neither of them was bluffing, they both meant business.

Revised:

Ace was silent. The muscles in his face tightened and the terror vanished as he gazed at Chris with renewed cool. It was an expression of waiting, of curiosity. Chris might shoot him, he knew now, and the thought had given him pause. But he was still dangerous. He stood eyeing Chris. Chris kept the gun trained on Ace. Neither was bluffing.

Brevity is the order of the day in this passage. This is the moment of greatest tension in the story, and much of that tension is undone in the unrevised passage by needless words and near-anecdotal metaphors. The fate of the four children--or at least Chris and the narrator--balances on the edge of a knife here. The original, bloated paragraph conveys, linguistically, neither the tension or the urgency of what is being described. It is a classic example of the "show, don't tell" rule of writing. The description of Ace's expression alone takes up half the paragraph. The second, third, and fourth sentences render the first one entirely unnecessary. Redundancy is probably the greatest problem with the unrevised paragraph.

The revised paragraph has several advantages over the original. The first sentence establishes the mood of the scene: silence as these two young men face off, both facing a choice between order and bloody chaos. Relaxed words like "gaze," "waiting," and "pause" highlight the tension in stark relief. The lines "He stood eyeing Chris" and "Chris kept the gun trained on Ace" provide a visual image of the standoff. "Neither was bluffing" completes the tension of the passage by providing a detail that the narrator could almost certainly not know, but we believe he could by what has been built up before this conclusion.

As I reach the end of this essay, I'd like to point out that, like Gustavo's graph, I'm not attempting to make any claims of the superiority of "literary writing" over King's, or any other less literary author, for that matter. I suspect some readers may entertain notions that my intentions in writing this essay are not entirely noble; to them I say, you have shocked my gentle sensibilities, and I'll thank you to keep your faithless cursors away from my website.