The Uncanny and The Dark Tower

    

This hub discusses the Freudian concept of the uncanny as it pertains to the later portions of Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.  Indeed, one could open any Stephen King book and find ample material with which to discuss the uncanny. I have chosen this book because of its ties to The Wizard of Oz. It is the fourth book in the seven book series, The Dark Tower. I will begin with a brief overview of the characters, simply for clarity. A summary would provide too much information (and simultaneously not enough).  Following this, the paper will begin an earnest look at the last section of the book.

Our main characters are four humans and one bumbler (a hybrid pet raccoon/dog of sorts). The leader of their ka-tet (or group) is Roland. He is a gunslinger, which is to say a hard cowboy type who has been battle tested and whose mission is to find the Dark Tower which holds the worlds together. Roland’s world is moving on and falling apart. Through magicks, he has drawn three people from different times and versions of New York City. Jake is a prepubescent boy with a touch of psychic power.  He comes from New York of the 1970’s.  The bumbler, Oy, if it could be said to belong to someone, is owned by Jake.  Eddie is an ex-heroin addict and provides comic relief for the group. Susannah is two women in one. She is a crippled schizophrenic whose personalities have recently been forced to integrate into a single being.  She hails from NYC of the 1950’s. All four characters are on the road to find the Dark Tower in order to save the universe from destruction. 

With such a place to begin, Freud describes the uncanny as, “what is frightening- to what arouses dread and horror” (Freud, 193). Stephen King uses fear and dread in this series a bit differently than in other books which too clearly intend to frighten. The language and action in these books are more subtle. Instead of the monsters being ghosts or aliens or psychotic prom queens, they are barely glimpsed images of evil, feelings of suspenseful anticipation, and shadowy figures who loom in the sidelights and in dreams.  In the world of The Dark Tower, the characters themselves often refer to eerie coincidences and off feelings as “nineteen”.  This number continues to appear in the books in uncanny manners. “Nineteen” is their way of expressing something that seems off the grid.

Freud discusses the uncanny in terms of the “intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one” (Freud, 208). Roland and his troupe of traveling gunslingers board a talking mono-train in the desolate town of Lud. The train’s name is Blaine. Despite the fact that he is only a collection of gears and wires, he contains a personality which is deteriorating by the mile.  He insists that he will smash the train and kill them all. They convince him to play a game with him. He shows ever increasing humanity, displaying petulance, anger, and fear. The gunslingers are struck by his emotions and capability for all too human mannerisms. This is what makes the travelling train so uncanny. It is an inanimate object, and yet it seems alive. It considers itself to be alive as well. The group barters and a contest is agreed upon. If they can pose a riddle which it cannot solve, they will live. After many hours of riddling, Eddie finally poses a silly joke which the train cannot answer. By out-riddling the mono-train, they defeat it and step out and onto I-70 in Kansas.

Jake is the first to notice that they have moved.  He looks away and then, “He was half-convinced it would be gone, or that it would say something else (Mid-World Toll Road, perhaps, or Beware of Demons), but it was still there and still said the same thing” (King, Ch. 4). They have somehow been transported to Topeka, Kansas.  They learn that while aboard the insane train, they passed through a kind of travelling fog, “where the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away” (King, II.4). They have been transported from a quite unheimlich place to a where that should be familiar.

But that would be too easy. As they explore the city of Topeka, they begin to notice that things are a little “nineteen”. Freud goes on to assert that the uncanny is “something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny. For the three native New Yorkers of the story, everything is uncanny. From the get-go, they have been pulled from their world into a strange one where the customs, clothes, dialects, and games are all different. This is Roland’s dying world. Throughout the series, the New Yorkers travel through many places, stepping outside of worlds and into others.  They are consistently placed in unfamiliar territory.

 In a newspaper stand, they find a newspaper that tells a gruesome tale. A super virus has wiped out most of the population. It is called Captain Trips in some states and Tube-Neck in others. (To make it even more uncanny, the story of this city and its super flu is told in Stephen King’s The Stand). Although Eddie is from a when later than the time period into which they appear, he has no knowledge of this nationwide epidemic. It did not happen in his world. The city is devastated, corpses lie asunder, and buildings lie abandoned. The paper tells of an America where things have definitely gone a little off. Roland says, “We’re in Topeka, Kansas, in the Reap of eighty-six. That’s the when of it. As to the where, all we know is that it’s not eddies. It might be yours, Susannah, or yours, Jake, because you left your world before this happened” (King, II.4.5). This is a where and when in which the world is moving on, also. Despite the characters having moved to a where that ought to be Heimlich, it is very much an unfamiliar one.

            When the characters awake in the morning, they begin walking from the city. Off in the distance, they begin to see something in their road. They arrive to find that someone has placed shoes for each of them. Cowboy boots have been left for Roland, cappies for Susannah’s stumps, Oxfords for Jake, and Cuban heels for Eddie. Even Oy has four little booties for his paws. All the shoes are red. Beyond the line of shoes they see a glass palace which “glimmered a delicate green shade, like the reflection of a lily pad in still water” (King, III.2). The three New Yorkers immediately make a connection between the red shoes and Roland feels an uncanny feeling of recognition. Once the story has been told of Dorothy and her red shoes, the characters identify with the little girl who only wanted to go home. The unfamiliar begins to wear on them.

They approach this green palace. It is, “like a drawing in a fairy tale book, one so good it had become real somehow” (King, III.2). They are unable to open the impressive and quite uncanny gate unless by clicking their red heels together. They enter the palace and set off to find the Wizard. In this story, however, Wizards and Magicians are not as welcome as in Dorothy’s. Roland has pursued a man called Marten, a magician, an evil man who serves the Crimson King (the driving force of evil who is attempting to break the Tower and the world with it). So although the characters can be assured by the original tale that the Wizard is probably not all he seems, they enter anyway.

Just inside the gate they find a newspaper. This is just a single instance of the doubling up or repetition principle of which Freud speaks. Things in Roland’s world appear in double very frequently. Things which happen in the past occur again and people who are long gone appear suddenly. The newspaper headline reads, “Tragedy in Oz: Travelers Arrive seeking Fame and Fortune; Find Death Instead” (III.3). This is accompanied by a photo of the group seemingly taken only moments before. Inside the palace, they find a mixture of the palace from the story and the train which they have just defeated. Freud addressed the topic of doubles by attributing them to illusions. He says that such doubles are delusions, pathological detours from sanity. In addition, these may be unfulfilled possible whens. This speaks easily in King’s world.

Jake would disagree with Freud on this topic. He thinks, “Roland could say all he wanted about how things had changed, how Jake’s feeling of being trapped in a nightmare was just an illusion created by his confused mind and frightened heart, but Jake knew better” (IV.3). In the end, Freud is right. The effects are all smoke and mirrors and the man behind the curtain is a man from their past. This man is not particularly important. He is a repetition, a character you think could not possibly have survived, could not possibly have made it there, especially not ahead of the gunslingers. The real Wizard does in fact appear. He is Marten, the very nemesis of Roland. He has many names and appears many times in other King books.  This man seems to have magical powers, though one can never be sure what is true magic and what is merely trickery. In an earlier scene, he is to meet with a minor character named Jonas. Jonas enters a room and does not see him, when he turns back around, Marten is there. His very appearance is frightening, that he ought to appear so suddenly. His countenance is fearful as well. He has unnaturally pointed teeth, knowing eyes, and “he laughs like a dead man” (III.4.12). A moment later, he could appear entirely differently. He is a frightening man, but he is only the minion of the much scarier Crimson King. In Oz, a fight ensues, resplendent with more smoke and mirrors and the Wizard disappears. He leaves behind, however, a glowing pink ball which Roland has seen in the story of his first love and battle.

This glowing pink ball is a sort of crystal ball. Its repetition in the story is a source of its uncanniness, but the ball also has more creepy powers. Roland, himself, has traveled through the ball, seen the past, present, and future in it. He also went briefly mad on account of it. The ball has been the destruction of his innocence and youth, has caused him to commit heinous crimes. This crystal ball is repeated because it is perhaps the only thing Roland truly fears. Roland brings his companions into the ball with him to see a memory from his childhood.  This is the story of the death of Roland’s mother. The story appears many times in the series, in different forms.  In this viewing, the reader and Roland’s companions learn that the pink ball has tricked Roland in the past, that it tricked him into accidentally killing his own mother. When they come out of the ball, they are no longer in Oz.  Eddie realizes that time and space have slipped again; Eddie thinks that “Roland’s world was like a transmission with its gear-teeth all but stripped away; you never knew when time was going to pop into neutral or race you away in overdrive” (III.5).  The characters are constantly being moved, so they can never find a rhythm of what is familiar. In the distance, they see the green palace. The magic of Oz is used up, the green palace no longer shines, the ruby shoes seem lifeless. They have moved forward again.

Freud ascribes another set of feelings as uncanny. Repetitions are uncanny, but ascribing a feeling of fate to them is more so.  This is “a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself sharply off from the external world” (Freud, 212). He writes of a man who constantly comes across the number 62. At first the number means nothing, but after many repetitions, it seems uncanny; perhaps even a little “nineteen’. Freud thinks that perhaps the uncanny is “something which is secretly familiar” (222). Roland and his crew would probably agree as the number nineteen and it’s too copious appearances later has meaning of great importance. Repetitions are too common in King’s stories for it to be of any use to find one and trace it through the whole story.  Any person, place, event, story, object, or thing is almost certain to appear again somewhere.

What Freud calls a feeling of destiny or fate, King calls ka. Ka is what decides how things must go. All things are subject to ka and no one is exempt from it.  They awake and find themselves miles in distance from the green palace. They discuss their adventure and comfort Roland, who is upset by having to relive his most painful memory. His friends tell him that he did not kill his mother and he disagrees. Eddie replies that it was, “ka like the wind” (King, IV.2).  Susannah sums the uncanny fate feeling up very well when she says, “Either this whole business is ka, or none of it is. And scary as ka might be- the idea of fate with eagle eyes and a bloodhound’s nose- I find the idea of no ka even scarier” (IV.2). The uncanny is the feeling that something must be tying all these strange coincidences together, because if it really is just chance, it is somehow the worse for it.  It is easier to ascribe something to fate or ka than to admit that some things are just too uncanny, too coincidental to be permitted.

Freud writes, “One of the most uncanny and wide-spread forms of superstition is the dread of the evil eye” (Freud, 216). The Crimson King of King’s stories is evil, as I’ve said. More to the point, his sigul is “a hideous staring eye” (King, III.4.12). The eye appears frequently in the story, it is graffiti in the city of Lud and etched onto papers or signs or trees all along their journey. His sigul repeats and repeats and repeats until it and everything else build to their suspenseful and uncanny climax in the last book. This is appropriate because the Crimson King represents that “animalistic conception of the universe” (Freud, 216). He wants the world torn apart; it does not seem to matter that he himself would fall with it. He wants it with a childish selfishness, to want simply for the sake of wanting. He and his sigul are symbols for the uncanny, more so because he leads legions of undead, dead, and mutated creatures.

Stephen King is considered the master of horror and The Dark Tower is his biggest and most expansive work.  These books and Wizard and Glass work so well because King plays with the uncanny. The uncanny may be any of the things Freud discusses, an odd  feeling, a repetition, a sense of evil, a frightening thing, intellectual uncertainty, déjà vu, or an inanimate object that riddles. Stephen King piles them one atop another. In this book, he writes The Wizard of Oz into his story, weaving it in like it belongs there, when its placement is quite uncanny. Why is the green palace there, how did it come to be, how do they get out alive? These are all excellent questions, but to answer them would leave the reader in a familiar place, a nice neat place to set the book down and leave Roland’s world in one piece. Eddie could sum it up best, “We’ll arrive as strangers in a strange land, no matter what when it is. This is our world now. The world of Beams, and the Guardians, and the Dark Tower” (King, III.4). One you enter the realm of the nineteen, you can never really leave.