Spiritual Elements in Stephen King’s “The Stand”

After I finished reading the novel The Stand by famed horror writer Stephen King, I began thinking about the various thematic aspects of the book.  After a long time sitting wordless at my laptop, I decided that I’d go and have a cup of coffee or three before contemplating the matter any more, as it could very well be dangerous to do any serious amount of thinking while the super bowl is still fully immersed in the death-throes of good entertainment.  Now that it is quite a few weeks later, the book has had sufficient time to digest, and I believe I have something useful to say on the subject.

The Stand is, in Mr. King’s own words, a tale of “dark Christianity.”  This is a very good way to put it, as it seems to focus on what is commonly referred to as an Old Testament perspective on God.  Some prominent cultural figures such as Richard Dawkins cites what they see as the sadistic tendencies of the Hebrew “Yahweh” as ample proof not to consider Christianity a worthy belief system; they would prefer to view it as the symbol of oppression ever since its birth.  What many fail to see is that the statement of the Old Testament is one of hope, a hope that is fulfilled in the New Testament introduction of the main character of time: Jesus Christ of Nazareth.  Similarly, in The Stand, the statement of the book is one of hope.  Hope that this present world can change without something so terribly drastic as a large-scale apocalyptic divine intervention, such as the super-flu virus the main characters of the book all experience in all its strange and seemingly-absurd terror.  Although we cannot presume to know the mind of God, it seems reasonable to believe that Jesus’ promise of the holy spirit’s work in the world is sufficient to provide against this kind of retribution.  Stephen King’s use of the divine in his novels has been declared a brilliant compromise between the moralistic determinism of explicitly Christian novel such as the Narnia Chronicles – in which we know from essentially the first page that all will end up right in the end – and the amoral, nihilistic absurdism which so thoroughly and annoyingly permeates the culture of our day.  Rather, King chooses to have God remain a seemingly aloof deity whose interests in the present sufferings of humanity are contingent upon some kind of “bigger plan” of which humanity is incapable of comprehending, due to our finite perspective on matters.  This is true in part: God certainly does seem to let His people suffer and lose battles so that greater spiritual ends may be achieved in a fullness only He can see.  And yet, God is not aloof at all, having offered salvation to humanity in a most personal manner.

One of the effective subtleties of the over-arching message of The Stand is how different humanity perceives life and events when the safe-guards of society have either been upended or removed entirely.  In the paranoid, fearful uncertainty that follows the eradication of 99% of humanity via an engineered super-flu virus, virtually everyone is willing to admit a supernatural element to an uncanny phenomenon entailing a shared type of nightmare that prior to the death of the vast majority of humanity would have been written off as a glitch in the collective unconscious at most (and even that would have been accepted only in the most progressive intellectual circles).  But in a society that lives in fear of things supposedly conquered eons ago, a theocratic government centered around a mysterious, prophetic character seems a much more rational option than a secular democracy, which has the potential of being incredibly weak when population is minimal (the Greek city states are a common historical example: their destruction at the hands of Philip of Macedon can be attributed to the fractured nature of a democracy when not supported by a good-sized populace).  We seem, as humans, to forget that the means to which we have achieved dominance over the earth has been supported by the structure of a religious tradition.  From an objective perspective, the reason the West has achieved a kind-of perceived international superiority can be traced to a philosophical structure intricately linked to Christian tradition.  In The Stand all of the characters were children of our supposedly post-Christian society, and yet belief in God was demonstrated to be an inevitability in the re-foundation of a structurally-sound secular society.  These are things it would be well for us to remember.

The Fall of the House of Usher: Has Glass Overextended His Artistic Reach?

“DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.”

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A little over a week ago I and my roommate made the arduous two-hour trip to the Nashville Opera to watch a performance of a little-known opera by Philip Glass, the renowned modern minimalist composer.  This particular performance was to be quite exceptional, even among the relatively sparse showings of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is not exactly Glass’s highest triumph.  The cause of the hype due this performance was the way in which the director altered the visual aspects of the show: in essence, he turned the concept of a “live opera” on its head, placing a transparent screen in front of the actors, and one behind, and as the show progressed the director had video projected two ways: toward the transparent screen from behind the actors, and toward the solid screen from behind the audience.  The affect was astounding, in that it seemed like the actors were moving in and out of video, which to a large extent, they were.  The combined affect of the visual experimentation and fog-machines lent an unreal atmosphere to the opera, which, to anyone who is familiar with the macabre short-story by Edgar Allen Poe, is absolutely essential.  There was just one problem…the music.

Generally speaking, Philip Glass is a phenomenal composer.  He is capable of eliciting a heightened emotional affect unlike anything in the wide expanse of musical genius.  And yet, I was expecting something a little different – perhaps transcendent would be a more fitting word – for such a landmark story.  Instead, what I and my roommate heard over the course of approximately an hour-and-a-half was almost exactly the same as, say, the score to The Illusionist.  The vocal parts were the least impressive of all, for they were utterly, terribly devoid of any melodic content.  It seems as though Philip Glass has become too ingrained in the formlessness of 20th century music to recognize the necessity of an over-arching “hum-able” melodic theme in vocal music.  Throughout the 20th century it seems as though, outside of film music, the single aspect of music that has been the most fervently persecuted is melody.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with Mr. Glass’ style, it is, in fact, one of the most influential among today’s composers; however, the problem lies in his persistence that if it works for one thing, it must be able to work again, and again…and again, no matter the genre, or the incompatibilities thereof.  It is my opinion, therefore, that Philip Glass’ The Fall of the House of Usher falls quite short in it’s purported ambitions.

The Importance of Being Important: Lajos Egri and Characterization

The single most helpful book that I’ve come across with regards to understanding the formation of characters in fiction writing is The Art of Creative Writing by Lajos Egri, a Hungarian-born journalist, playwright, and teacher.  In that book I learned that perhaps the most essential aspect of a character’s make-up is his or her motive.  If you read a book or play or watch a movie and find that no matter how bizarre a character’s actions are, in the end you always think “somehow that made sense…I’ve no idea why, but it did!” then you’ve latched on in part to what makes some characters fascinating and others just bland: motivation.  Lajos Egri posited that all people, all humanity, has a single, all-consuming desire to be important.  In some form or manner it is, he proposed, the underlying motivation of every human being to matter.  As long as writers of fiction keep this in mind, they cannot go far wrong, he says.  Or course it isn’t always as simple as that, as Mr. Egri knows.  The key is that although all people have this desire, it is never worn on the sleeve, so to speak.  It takes many forms, and sometimes it manifests itself in wonderful ways, and then again sometimes in horrific ways.  Whether or not you agree with Mr. Egri, it certainly is uncanny when I can look at any character in fiction and be able to identify a hidden desire to be important in everything they do.  Perhaps this is also something that we could identify in other people…even in ourselves.