Introduction
Stephen King does both horror and sympathy exceedingly well. For those who know him better for his reputation as "America's Shlockmeister" it is worth pointing out his uncanny ability to sympathise with and inhabit the worlds of his characters. This is seen and felt very clearly in some of his famous non-horror stories, such as
Rita and the Shawshank Redemption and
The Green Mile (if I had a pound for every time I mentioned that Stephen King wrote the story for
The Shawshank Redemption, and people responded: "Really?!" then I could probably feed Hackney's homeless for a day), and also his early work
Blaze (a re-discovered "trunk novel" published in 2007).
In this respect the type of stories King writes, both of the horror and the non-horror kind, actually fits quite well with the legacy of Romantic fiction in America. It is in spirit akin to Poe, and shares his deep sympathy of the soul. Whereas I'd noticed these traits before, and
Bag of Bones in particular is a remarkable blend of the romantic and the supernatural, it was after reading
Wizard and Glass that I felt compelled to make a few observations in this regard. Whereas
Wizard and Glass compelled me to start writing this, it was
The Wind Through the Keyhole that allowed me to complete it. So at this point, anybody who hasn't read
The Dark Tower up to
The Wind Through the Keyhole, or
Salem's Lot, and don't want any PLOT SPOILERS, do stop reading now.
Roland and Ben, they walk away
A part of the plot line in
Salem's Lot, Stephen King's 1975 vampire novel set in the small town of Jerusalem's Lot, involves Ben Mears' relationship with Susan Norton. Susan, unfortunately, falls prey to Barlow, the resident vampire overlord of Jerusalem's Lot. As a result she dies - first as the human Susan at the fangs of said vampire, and again later, as vampire, at the hands of Ben Mears. There's a memorable moment in the film version where Ben heads away from the burning mansion and mutters something like "sorry Susan" before leaving the cursed town behind.
There is something similar at work in
Wizard and Glass, and this got me thinking a little bit. In this case it is Roland of Gilead who, lured by the Dark Tower, walks away from Susan. She is captured and dies at the hands of the town folk due to her association with Roland. It is interesting, if not necessarily intentional, that both Susan Norton and Susan son of Pat share the same name.
We know that, due to what the orb revealed to him after Roland takes it from Eldred
Jonas, Roland saw that Susan is not in his future. As a result he became less
concerned with her as the love of his life, and more and more
pre-occupied - nay,
consumed - by the Dark Tower. He later speaks
to his friends of a choice he was offered. There were two alternatives:
family life with Susan on the one hand, and pursuit of the Dark Tower
on the other. He reasons - or rationalises - that he and Susan would
have had no future if the Dark Tower was not saved, so he chose the
pursuit of the Dark Tower. This choice, brought on by the glimpse
offered by the orb, coincides with him losing Susan to death. He had
underestimated the orb and Rhea, and by focusing his attention on the
Dark Tower the orb had led him away from protecting the one he loved.
Roland's Guilt
Now we skip forward a bit. It is revealed that Roland unintentionally killed his own mother. Roland is consumed with guilt. Roland, naturally, thinks he is responsible for his mother's death, even though it was probably a trick played on him by the orb. The irony, of course, is that it happens exactly when Roland goes to beseech his mother to "change her ways". On the other hand it may have been predestined. "Ka," as Eddie remarked. "Ka like a wind."
In both cases, his mother's and Susan's, Roland suffers because he believes he had a hand in the victim's death. In the case of Jake, again, he has the option of saving Jake or pursuing the Dark Tower. He chooses the latter, and suffers for it as Jake dies. He suffers terribly ... and so does Jake.
An Inverted Oedipus Complex
Roland's story is a partial inversion of the ancient Oedipal archetype. Recall that King Oedipus runs away from Corinth to escape his foretold destiny (he believed his parents in Corinth to be his real parents) and inadvertently kills his father on the way back to Thebes, his real home. After solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus is entitled to marry the queen - who actually turns out to be his own mother. Much later he realises his true identity, and therefore that he murdered his own father and is sleeping with his mother, and is so consumed by guilt that he pokes out his own eyes.
Roland's story goes the opposite way. Firstly, it is not his
father who is killed by his hand, but his
mother. In addition Susan Delgado, his love, also dies due to a choice he makes (when he chooses to pursue the Dark Tower). In the Oedipus complex, destiny brings Oedipus
closer to his mother (who also becomes his lover), whereas Roland's destiny takes him
further away from both his mother and his lover.
The Evolution of Consciousness
1. The Uroboros
In the history of world mythology there are recurring patterns and mythical images, which Erich Neumann (a student of Carl Jung) correlates with the evolution of consciousness. Western civilisation as an evolving consciousness, he argues, started with the
Uroboros, the self-contained circle that encapsulates both masculine and feminine opposites. It is the self-begetting circular snake that bites its own tail. This early state is what Neumann calls in his work
The Origins and History of Consciousness the "dawn state, showing the infancy both of mankind and of the child" (p. 11). Compared to the world as it became once it had "moved on", Roland's time in Gilead seems idyllic and self-contained, like the Uroboros.
2. The Great Mother
The next stage of the feminine is the
Great Mother, also called the
Terrible Mother because she overpowers men and literally drives them mad. Both personality and body are dissolved. In early cultures the Great Mother was attended by eunuchs with weak egos. But the Great Mother is also a powerful sorceress who "transforms men into animals" (p. 61). Rhea is an echo of the Terrible Mother, and is in a sense Roland's nemesis in Wizard and Glass (in contrast to Maerlyn, who turns out to be a rather tame obstacle). According to the logic of the evolution of consciousness, she is the unconscious aspect of the Great Mother, who has been split out into the Good Mother (Roland's own mother at the point of her death, when she wanted to appease) and the Terrible Mother, which is relegated to the unconscious. It is therefore apt that Roland's mother's image in the glass orb shows up as Rhea. They are two sides of the same coin. (One could argue that Roland's mother's unfaithfulness is a dark side he cannot accept, and therefore would prefer to repress. Yet it surfaces just as Rhea appears, which provokes his own violent unconscious urges and results in his mother's death.)
3. The Hero
It is only much later in the evolution of consciousness that the heroic figure comes to pass. The
hero signifies a progression in consciousness as the male principle is split away from the female, and femininity becomes suppressed in culture. The rise of the hero corresponds with the domestication of the female (suppression of femininity) and the subsequent relinquishing of female goddess worship in favour of male god worship.
As Neumann says: "The individual has in his own life to follow the road that humanity has trod before him." Roland can be construed as a heroic figure who must live through various unconscious phases. We've already seen that he enacts a curious mirror image of the Oedipus myth (by killing his own mother), but there is more: he is also a harbinger of awareness. He himself is more intuitive than intellectual, more romantic than rational. But his eyes, set on the Dark Tower - and a tower has ever been a symbol for human aspiration, achievement, intellect and also folly (think of the tower of Babel) - is a journey towards awareness. We may therefore say that Roland chooses consciousness over the alternative, which could be called the domestication of his own passions and unconscious, but according to him also the very destruction of reality. This decision results, not in domestication and repression of the feminine, but in death for his mother and for Susan. Potentially also resurrection, just as in the myth of Osiris, who after he is murdered by his brother Set, is resurrected by Isis. But about that we will have to wait and see...
The Myth of Osiris
The Osiris myth is also instructive in other ways. In the myth, Osiris is murdered by Set. Isis then resurrects Osiris and conceives a son with him, a boy called Horus. Horus is now in direct competition with Set for the throne. Here we find further parallels with Roland's story (as well as deviations). We see hints of Horus in Roland, of Osiris in Gabrielle, and of Set in Marten Broadcloak. In particular, Marten knows that the young Roland is a threat to him, and provokes him to try to earn his guns prematurely. This strategy backfires, as Roland succeeds. At this point in the story, Roland is not yet the hero figure, but still a struggling consciousness that is only beginning to emerge from opposing forces.
Roland's family drama also deviates from the Osiris myth in that Marten Broadcloak seduces Gabrielle, rather than trying to kill Steven Deschain directly. Roland's father Steven is emasculated psychologically just as Isis was emasculated physically (in the myth, Isis' penis is the only part of him that Osiris could not recover), even though Steven Deschain remains an important part of his life and a wise mentor. The seduction poses questions about Gabrielle. In the Osiris myth, Isis' role is unequivocally on the side of Horus. Yet Gabrielle has allied with the "enemy", even if unwittingly, and this complicates things. Whereas most characters in the Dark Tower are clearly delineated as good or evil, Gabrielle's role puts her in an ambiguous position. It also leaves a residue of consciousness that is a wildcard in Roland's quest for the tower.
Reconciliation
Nevertheless, the revelation at the end of
The Wind Through the Keyhole resolves this potential anomaly more or less elegantly. SPOILER WARNING! Gabrielle Deschain, it turns out, was foretold the fate of Gilead, and also her own ("you die at your brat's hand") by Marten Broadcloak during a much earlier stay at Serenity. She wrote what she heard in a message to be kept safe by Everlynne, to be given to Roland one day when ka finally brings him to Serenity (an event that is effectively the main story of
The Wind Through the Keyhole).
All of the letter is significant, but the final words are the most important:
"I forgive you everything. Can you forgive me?"
Gabrielle foresaw Roland's torment, and knew that he had to reconcile his guilt in order to fulfill his own destiny. Yet it also required great moral courage from him, because it asks him to forgive her in turn. Indeed, it requires
compassion.
Once Roland reveals the words to his ka-tet, Susannah asks Roland: "And could you, Roland? Did you?" To which he answers unequivocally:
yes.
As if to emphasise the great importance of this act of forgiveness, Stephen King treats readers to a short afterword, which we must read as
the very last word on the Dark Tower if we consider the chronology in which the Dark Tower books were written. These final words of the afterword are:
"The two most beautiful words in any language are: I forgive"
We are left in no doubt as to their importance.
Reconciliation through forgiveness would clear Roland's mind of the cobwebs of guilt and confusion, and focus his mind on the true task at hand, which is to reach the Dark Tower. In the letter Gabrielle reveals she was also warned by Marten not to return to Gilead. Yet her intuition told her it was ka to go back to Gilead. So she did, a fact that restores Roland's mother's dignity. It reveals her to be someone who acted according to her own convictions. She was therefore not just a helpless pawn of history, even though she could not change her own destiny. (Bear in mind that it would probably have been a great convenience to Marten Broadcloak if Gabrielle had stayed on in Serenity.)
Most of all forgiveness, and therefore compassion, hints at the unity of consciousness that is an increasing feature of Roland's world. It binds the ka-tet, and also connects characters across the various worlds.
Conclusion
It is perhaps apt that this post should end where it began. I observed that Susan Norton's relationship to Ben Mears in
Salem's Lot, and her subsequent fate, was an interesting precursor to Susan Delgado's relationship to Roland (and
her subsequent fate).
I was therefore more than a little surprised to find Father Callahan, also from
'Salem's Lot, making his return in
Wolves of the Calla (which I recently started reading). Not only that, but Father Callahan's retelling of the story of Jerusalem's Lot has Eddie, Roland and Susannah finding parallels with their own ka-tet. In a sense, the world of
The Dark Tower is also Stephen King's metaphor for the connections and parallels between his own various fictional creations.
To conclude, I wondered what - if anything - it means that Roland's relationship to Gabrielle and Susan inverts the old Oedipus complex. The Oedipus Complex (a proposal by Freud) concerns desire for the parent of the opposite sex and competition with the parent of the same sex, and we likewise see Roland desiring Susan and competing with Marten Broadcloak. The Dark Tower represents Roland's search for the truth about the state of the world (and to fix it), but his real evolution of consciousness happens while he becomes more compassionate and draws his ka-tet around him (the Dark Tower novels don't actually reveal all that much about what is really happening to Roland's world, and in fact are much more about the various people and their stories).
If it is suggestive of anything, perhaps it is that Freud's (now often considered defunct) proposal harks back to an earlier stage of Anglo-European civilisation wherein the intellect dominated. In Roland's world intuition and surprising synchronicities are more the order of the day than empirical and analytical certainties. In this perspective,
The Dark Tower is a story about that stage of civilisation entering its last days. The Oedipus complex is replaced by a different family interaction that reflects the need for compassion and intuition over intellectual and technological achievement.
And now I can't wait to read the rest ...!
