"Hell is repetition": Stephen King and the infinite loop
Robert Browning, 1855
Stephen King hardly requires any introduction. He is probably one of the most famous American novelists of our age, and his books are read by passionate fans all over the world.
King, born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, is mostly known for his horror novels. His production is huge, varying from novels, short stories, screenplays, and even an essay about the creative process, On Writing (2000).
What is really astonishing is that, in nearly 50 years of literary career, he managed to create an intricate net of stories, which are deeply entangled one another. From this large web of novels and short stories, the careful reader can recognize a set of common themes which, as a whole, constitute the core of King’s philosophical vision.
Common themes in Stephen King's works
1. There are two Forces, the Purpose and the Random, which are constantly at war with each other. The embodiment of the Random is the Crimson King, and, at large, the color red is often a symptom of the Random at work.
The goal of the Random is the destruction of all worlds. The goal of the Purpose is to keep the Random at bay and maintain the balance between the two.
The Purpose “chooses” humans to achieve its aims; the Random too enlists his own agents, which may be human or supernatural beings. The humans chosen by the Purpose, although they retain free will, are in the hands of Fate, which King calls “KA”.
2. Ordinary people, when they come together, can achieve extraordinary things. When people form a bond to fight against a common enemy, what they achieve is a lot greater than the sum of each part. These bonds are inspired by the Purpose and, whenever this happens, the group which is formed is called a KA-TET. This term appears only in The Dark Tower series , but groups with the same features appear in many other novels (for instance in The Body [1982], It [1987], The Stand [1978], Under the Dome [2009]).
4. Creation is a powerful weapon in the service of the Purpose. If the Random’s goal is destruction, then creation is the ultimate hope against it. This may account for writers figures appearing so prominently in King’s works. As a writer is a creator of worlds, it is easy to understand why he can contrast the destruction brought by the Random.
Writers are main characters, or at least appear, in many of King’s novels, such as Bag of Bones (1998), The Dark Half (1989), Misery (1988) and, once again, It .
5. The innocent and uncorrupted are closest to the Purpose, which makes them unexpectedly powerful. Generally the innocents are children, as in The Body, It, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), but they could also be the mentally disabled, as in The Green Mile (1996) or Dreamcatcher (2001).
There are also novels in which adolescence is seen as a time when the innocents are most vulnerable to corruption, and their power may be turned to Evil, as in Carrie (1974) or Christine (1983).
6. The greatest evil that humans do is abuse of the weak by the strong, particularly of animals, women and children. Abuse of the weak is typical of human nature (rather than an abstract evil like the Random), but it can lead the abuser to be corrupted by the Random.
Child abuse takes place, for example, in Carrie, Insomnia (1994), The Shining (1977), The Talisman ( written with Peter Straub, 1984).
Women abuse takes place, among the others, in Dolores Claiborne (1993), Gerald’s Game (1992), in the collection of four novellas Full Dark, No Stars (2010), and in Rose Madder (1995), the latter a clear instance of an abusing husband gradually corrupted by the Random.
7. Everything in space and time is cyclical and all events are fundamentally connected. This idea is symbolized by a wheel. In The Dark Tower series, King describes his idea of universe as a wheel made up of infinite numbers of worlds, with the Dark Tower itself as a center, held together by the spokes, that King calls the “Beams”. It is also often said, throughout The Dark Tower series that “Ka is a wheel”.
This cyclical repetition appears also, in its negative face, as Hell, where people are forced to repeat the same things in an infinite loop.
This last feature is exactly what this article focuses on. In order to provide examples, I chose two short stories, You Know They Got a Hell of a Band and That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French, as well as a general overview of the development of the plot in The Dark Tower series, and just a glimpse of it in Storm of The Century.
"You Know They Got a Hell of a Band"
This short story was first published in Shock Rock, and then collected in 1993 in the book Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
It begins with a married couple, who is taking a trip through Oregon. Clark, the husband, decides to take a short cut, and they get lost along a countryside road. They decide to proceed along the road, which leads them to a small town, pompously named “Rock and Roll Heaven”. Clark immediately decides to explore the town, while Mary, his wife, has a bad feeling: as a matter of fact, there seems to be something strange in the “perfectness” of the town:
“[…] but it was more than the geography, and she supposed Clark knew it as well as she did. There was something too sweetly balanced about the church steeples, for instance[…]
Clark insists that her feeling is pointless, and they enter the town. There are people all around, but Mary has the strong impression of knowing some of them:
“ It was so strong that it was almost a feeling of déjà vu […]”
“ […] for the second time in as many minutes, Mary had the strong sensation that she knew someone in this town.”
Mary keeps on having this bad sensation, but Clark decides to stop in the restaurant of the town for a drink. The restaurant, like the rest of the town, reminds them of the 1950s and, even stranger thing, the waitress looks very much like Janis Joplin, the dead singer.
“Please God, make him see it’s not a joke. Make him see it’s not a joke because that woman doesn’t just look like Janis Joplin, that woman is Janis Joplin, and I’ve got a horrible feeling about this town, a really horrible feeling.”
From this moment on, things start to worsen, as more dead singers make their appearance in the restaurant one after the other: Rick Nelson, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison. At this point, Clark too has realized that there is something completely wrong with the town, and decides to try and escape. They take the car, but they are stopped by a local police officer, who looks a lot like Otis Redding.
Here, also the Mayor of Rock and Roll Heaven makes his appearance, and he’s none other than Elvis Presley. Elvis invites the couple to stay for the evening, when a huge concert is going to take place. It is clear that they can’t refuse , and, as they head towards the concert, they see other people who, like them, are stuck in the town. Mary talks to one of these people, to know how long are they going to be obliged to remain in town for the show. The answer is not at all comforting:
“A long time. I mean, the show will be over by midnight, they always are, it’s a town ordinance, but still…they go on a long time. Because time is different here. It might be…oh, I dunno…I think when the guys really get cooking, they sometimes go on for a year or more.”
It becomes now clear that Mary, Clark and all the people around them are literally condemned to remain in town for an indefinite period of time (perhaps forever) to act as audience for all the dead singers. In fact, when Mary asks Mayor Elvis Presley if they can leave after the show, his answer leaves no hope:
“Well, you know ma’am […] we’re real far out in the boonies here, and attractin’an audience is kinda slow work…although once they hear us, everybody stays around for more…and we was kinda hopin’you’d stick around yourselves for awhile[…] you might even decide you want to settle down.”
The bad feeling that Mary had at the beginning, reveals itself in all its horror: the town is nothing else than a giant trap to allure passers-by and so to create an audience for the singers, who reveal their true nature of monsters as the story proceeds.
“Mary suddenly realized that the eye behind the cracked lens had filled up with blood. As Holly’s grin widened, pushing the corners of his eyes into a squint, a single, scarlet drop spilled over his lower lid and tracked down his cheek like a tear.”
“Buddy […] reached behind Janis and goosed her. She screamed indignantly, and as she did, a flood of maggots flew from her mouth.”
It is only towards the end of the story that Mary becomes aware of the fact that this place might be Hell, even though she can’t understand why this has happened to them:
“She and Clark had stumbled into Rock and Roll Heaven, but it was actually Rock and Roll Hell. This had not happened because they were evil people; it had not happened because the old gods were punishing them; it had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody.”
It is quite clear, from this quote, that the Random is something always working and that everyone can be trapped in its machinations.
"That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French"
The idea of being trapped in a loop of infinite repetition returns in another short story, That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French, first appeared in The New Yorker and then published in the collection Everything’s Eventual in 2002.
In this short story, also the structure of the narration throws the reader in a constant repetition of the same episode . Similarly to the previous short story, here too the main characters are a married couple, on their way for a trip to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. They are travelling by car and the wife, Carol, starts having a weird feeling of déjà vu. She hears a voice in her mind ( “Floyd, what’s that over there? Oh, shit.”) but she doesn’t know whose voice it is, or who on earth might that person, Floyd, be. Furthermore, as they travel along the sunny roads of a touristic resort in Florida, she sees a little girl in a red dress who seems really out of place:
“ […] the little girl in the red dress turned her solemn face in Carol’s direction [… ] although what a girl from the toolies could be doing there in rich folks’ tourist county, her and her dirty yellow-haired doll, Carol didn’t know.”
Here, the careful reader might already have noticed that the girl in the red dress is a symptom of the Random at work and, in fact, as soon as Carol sees her, her feeling of déjà vu grows stronger. She starts perceiving what will come after the next turn of the road, and soon she has the confirmation that her sensation was right. She seems to know exactly what awaits them on the road, even though they have never been there before. Her feelings start to become more and more creepy, until the point in which Carol, scratching her head, sees small pieces of burned paper falling from it. These pieces are actually fragments of a photo of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
At this point the reader is really puzzled, but this vision stops abruptly when Carol wakes up, and we discover that it has been nothing but a bad dream. Carol had fallen asleep on the plane that is taking her and her husband to Florida, for their second honeymoon.
The reader is a bit reassured but, as they get off the plane, Carol’s feeling of déjà vu starts troubling her again, as she sees the car they have rent for their trip, that very same car on which we have found her at the beginning.
The whole episode repeats itself in pretty much the same way, but it is intermingled with Carol’s memories from the past. We now understand that Carol, in their first years of marriage, had an abortion and she seems to regret that decision, taken for the sake of her husband’s career.
The story once again reaches its peak and, once again, Carol wakes up on the plane.
In the end we understand that she will never get off that plane, that there will be an accident in which she and her husband will die. We discover that Floyd (“Floyd, what’s that over there? Oh, shit.”) is the pilot, so the voice she heard was probably the last sentence of the co-pilot before the crash. In Carol’s hands there is a magazine, on the cover of which a photo of Mother Teresa is printed, the same photo that will burn during the crash, along with the plane and its passengers.
Carol has just discovered what Hell is.
In this short story, there are many interesting features. First of all, the idea of déjà vu:
“’Oh-oh, I’m getting that feeling’ Carol said, […] ‘What feeling?’ Bill asked. ‘You know. The one you can only say what it is in French. Help me here.’ ‘Déjà vu’, he said.”
This concept, the feeling of having already been in a certain place, said a certain sentence or experienced a certain situation, has been explored by both art and science since the 19th century.
In march 2007, the journal Antithesis devoted a whole issue to the theme of déjà vu, collecting the works of various scholars in the fields of cinema, literature, history, psychology. In the Editorial of this issue, the déjà vu is interestingly defined as “a glitch in the fabric of space and time”.
In the light of what we know about King’s vision of different dimensions that sometimes collide, it is clear that he masters the subject, using this narrative device not only to obtain an “uncanny” effect ( which will be explained later in this article), but also to remark his philosophical ideas about the universe.
It might also be interesting to note that relatively recent studies about the déjà vu have put forward a slight different kind of reading of this phenomenon. As a matter of fact, Peter Krapp, in his essay Déjà vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory, unveils that at a certain moment in western history (after the World Wars), déjà vu has changed from its former meaning to a more contemporary one. The new meaning is more related to something always present and always repetitive. Once again, this is the exact sensation that King achieves.
Of course, the discomforting feeling created by repetition and déjà vu is always there. In his essay, The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud included these two phenomena as a source for the sensation of uneasiness that he defines uncanny, and that he associates to the helplessness felt in dreams:
“ The factor of the repetition of the same thing will perhaps not be acknowledged by everyone as a source of the uncanny. According to my own observations it undoubtedly evokes such a feeling under particular conditions, and in combination with particular circumstances- a feeling, moreover, that recalls the helplessness we experience in certain dream-states.”
The association between repetition and dream is exploited by King in the short story we are talking about. In fact, as I explained before, he leads the reader to think, at first, that Carol’s experience is nothing more than a vivid dream. The reader is at first relieved, because he can associate that feeling of uncanny to the dreamlike status, in which such a feeling is, so to say, legitimate.
Freud also introduces the hypothesis according to which repetition is a source of the uncanny because it evokes in us the sensation of being doomed, of something that we cannot escape:
“ […] we have no difficulty in recognizing that it is only the factor of unintended repetition that transforms what would otherwise seem quite harmless into something uncanny and forces us to entertain the idea of the fateful and the inescapable, when we should normally speak of ‘chance’”
Here is a difference between the first short story that has been analyzed and the second one. In the first one, the idea of being stuck in a perpetual loop is perceived by the victims as a sort of trick of fate, or, better, the Random at work. In the second story, on the contrary, the infinite repetition is perceived by Carol as a punishment for her sins. In the story it is said that Carol comes from a Catholic family, and has received a Catholic education. It is since Dante’s Inferno that Hell has been thought about as a sort of infinite repetition of the same acts, as a punishment by God for breaking his laws. This is well-known to Carol:
“ […] Sister Dormatilla would tell you that a million years was but the first tick of eternity’s endless clock (and you could spend eternity in Hell, most people did, it was easy). In Hell you would live forever with your skin on fire and your bones roasting.”
Maybe because of her strict religious education, Carol has lived all her life with the fear of Hell, since the abortion of their child:
“Once she had been in fear of Hell, had lain half-drugged in steel stirrups, thinking, I’m damned, I’ve come to damnation. A million years, and that’s only the first tick of the clock.”
Of course, in the end she understands that her fears were true, that Hell exists and that she is actually burning in it . This is why the image of burning pieces of paper that seem to be parts of her skin is so strong: it is a recollection of what she has been told about Hell. She has just discovered that what Sister Dormatilla used to say was nothing but the truth.
Warning! The following part contains spoilers for The Dark Tower saga
Repetition in other works by Stephen King: The Dark Tower and Storm of the Century
Another interesting use that King makes of repetition and infinite loop can be found in what has been defined his “opus magnum”: The Dark Tower series.
It took more than 20 years to King to complete his saga: the first book , The Gunslinger, was published in 1982, while the seventh and conclusive chapter, The Dark Tower, arrived only in 2004. King took his inspiration for the novel from a long poem written by Robert Browning in 1855, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, but he turned Browning’s hints into a saga of seven books which represents the sum of his vision and philosophy.
The Dark Tower is the complex story of a man, Roland of Gilead, and of his quest to find the Dark Tower, which is the pivotal center of many parallel worlds. Roland comes from one of these, the Mid-World ( clearly a reference to J. R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth); he is helped in his search by people mainly coming from our world, who are drawn into the Mid-World through dimensional gates (or “Doors”).
What is interesting for this article is the way in which the saga ends: Roland finally reaches the Dark Tower, he climbs its many steps and opens the door on top of it, only to find himself back at the beginning of the whole story.
As a matter of fact, the saga begins and ends with the same sentence:
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
[ “The Gunslinger”, 1982, p.3]
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
[“The Dark Tower”, 2004, p. 789]
The readers are often disappointed by such an ending, but, if a reader is aware of King’s vision, this ending is not only acceptable, but it is also the fulfillment of his whole work. The fact that Roland is doomed to repeat his quest for an infinite number of times is the consequence of the sin he has committed. In fact, when he was young, he killed his mother after discovering that she was betraying his father with another man or, more precisely, with a wizard called Marten Broadcloak, the Crimson King’s right arm. An interesting thing is that this powerful wizard is exactly that man in black who Roland follows at the beginning of the novel and that, apparently, he is doomed to follow for eternity, every time his story starts once again.
It is to be noted that, every time Roland repeats his story, there are slight changes, that create sorts of alternative versions of the future.
In his essay, Making Time: Narrative Temporality in Twentieth-century Literature, Brian Richardson includes temporal loops into the larger field of modern and postmodern temporal arrangements that broke with the Victorian convention of mainly chronological narrative. He quotes, as instances, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) where, more or less as in The Dark Tower, the final sentence leads back to the first sentence , thus connecting the whole story in a sort of never-ending circle; or Philip K. Dick’s short story A little something for us Tempunauts (1974), where once again there is the endless repetition of a situation. Richardson considers this literary device as
“ […] an incarnation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. The doctrine […] goes as follows: after our world is destroyed, it will eventually be reconstituted as the power quanta that make up the universe once again reach a previous configuration and then repeat all the following patterns. What is, has already occurred, and will happen again innumerable times at immense intervals.”
Richardson also claims that temporal loops and bifurcations
“ […] provide vivid examples of alternative universes that exist simultaneously […]”
In this perspective, it is clear that King’s choice for a looping plot is the best possible expression that he could have used to convey his idea of infinite parallel worlds.
Heading towards the conclusion of this article, just a small glimpse at King’s Storm of the Century, written as a screenplay in 1999 and then turned into a three-part TV movie in the same year.
“ She is waiting for you in Hell, and she’s turned cannibal. When you get there, she’s going to eat you alive – over and over again. Because that’s what Hell is all about, Robbie, repetition. I think in our hearts, most of us know that.”
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