Is Stephen “King of Terror” King Guilty of Subliminal Racism in “The Shining”? Part I, 11/03/09

Lately I have been reading Stephen King’s books and getting sick to my stomach and I dont give two  or three shits how “politically correct” he appears to be. The “horror king’s” content and writing style  is repulsive to me as a  person of  African ancestry. His handling of  so called “black” characters sickens me and I feel like Ive been metaphysically poisoned so to speak. Maybe I should go to the good doctor from Jamaica and get this “Manichean erzats” checked out. Or maybe the Goatttfish should give Mr. king of terror a check up from the neck up today.Yes I.

One problem to start with is his “treatment” of the character Hallorann and every other “black” who symbolically carries most of the weight of King’s “unhappy aggressive impulses.” In an interview quoted in Wikipedia which attempts to give a break down of  the story and characters in “Shining” he states: “Sometimes you confess, You always hide what you’re confessing to. That’s one of the reasons you make up the story” claiming that the book is a “confessional” about antagonistic feelings and anger towards his children whom he apparently loves  to death. The story apparently began as a five act play and evolved into an extravaganza of “white” mystical numerology and racially motivated contrasts. The  “Shining” which “included many of King’s “own personal demons” and “unhappy aggressive impulses”  was made into a Hollywood blockbuster movie starring Jack Nicholson and Scatman Crothers as Hallorann, the black cook. It was directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick   who also wrote and directed “2001: Space Odyssey” known for its sweeping scenery and the black monkeys who become smarter after “sighting” a black obelisk then learned how to use their hands to grab a thigh bone or jaw bone (or something) to kill other black monkeys and/or gorrillas. Anyways, King coyly claims in an interview to have encoded these “personal demons” and “unhappy aggressive impulses” into Jack Torrance, the father in the story. Today we need to overstand the depths of those “personal demons” that this  “horror master” born and raised in Maine is really dealing with and how he probably uses this story to “cover sins with smooth names.”

 King goes on to say in the interview how he wrote the story to get that anger “out of my system, but it was also a confession.” What type of “confession”  Mr. Terror King born and bred in Maine ? What wicked “demons” was he getting out of his system? I must admit that I immediately wondered if it would be  like St. Augustine’s Confessions written in A.D. 397 where Augustine demonized “Faustus” a Manichee preacher or is it like Thomas R. Gray’s 1831 “Nat Turner’s Confessions” who demonized a mythical, made up “bad negro” to scare white folks into defending slavery or maybe like William Styron’s  1967’s psychosexual “Confessions” whom Graham quoted in “the Manichean Leitmotif” as “allowing himself “the utmost freedom of imagination” to meditate on history.”  Since these slick ass, white boy writers tend to “meditate upon history” and  fabricate  and interpolate things from different genres to overwhelm the unknowing reader with their great scholarship and vast creativity, we must be very, very careful when reading their “distorted meditations.”  He (King) goes on ‘”yes, there are times when I felt very angry towards my children and have even felt as though I could hurt them. ” A “confession” admitting to the possibility of hurting his children, huh?  But which pair of  “children” do you really feel like hurting sometimes Mr. Terror King from Maine? Is it your “real” children or is it your “mythic” children Mr. king of terror and horror?  Or is is both of your  children real and “imagined” Mr. King? We will hopefully  plumb a pair of  those depths in this “reading” of two or three of King’s stories .

An absolute bestseller “The Shining”  is set in a  “beautiful” Colorado resort town called “Overlook.” A “beautiful” idyllic  mountain setting if you the reader  can “overlook” the “ugly”  treatment of black “figures” which he twists and turns from the ridiculous to the racially sublime. He does this systematically and repetitiously throughout the story. The writer warns us that the town and its people exist “only in my imagination.” The five year old son in the story who “shines” or is clairvoyant tells his father that “Tony” his imaginary friend showed him ” Overlook at night, with a skull and crossbones in front.” In other words, a death’s head. A  death  is close a-head warning symbol. Something like what you see on a can of rat poison. The boy also tells his parents later in the story that ” Mr. Hallorann got me alone because he was worried, said this was a bad place for people who shine.” The old negro “had seen something in room 217 worse than any picture in  any book”  and he was warning the five year old sitting outside the resort in a parked car before he left for Florida, the deep south on  vacation. While the boy sat in the car his mother Wendy watched from upstairs and thought ” a kidnaping was afoot” and felt a “sharp pang of fear” looking at her five year old sit in the passenger seat next to Hallorann whom they had just met a little earlier. It was all in her mind because in the end it was Hallorann who came back “up” from the deep south, Florida to save her and her son from the demon possesed father, Jack who was trying to murder them. What kind of subliminal racist blame-game is Stephen King playing here? Watch out unknowing reader!  

  Dick Hallorann is the “cook.”  A “big black cook” having “large brown fingers” whom King very early on notes as being different from a  “chef.” In the “Shining Study Guide” online King describes Hallorann’s appearance as surprising to “Wendy” the mother in the story who was “expecting the typical “dough boy” chef, Wendy instead meets a large black man with graying afro and a soft southern accent.”  And he (King) keeps piling on the signs of “difference”. King describes him further, “Hallorann is a black man with a modest afro that was beginning to powder white.” This is like the many  “whitened old negroes ” and salt and pepper haired”  loyal negroes in most American fiction who save “white” girls and boys  almost everytime. These images are based upon literary ancestors,  “body servants ” and loyal slaves such as “Jupiter” in Edgar Allan Poe’s ” The Gold Bug,” also identified by Graham in his classic “The Manichean Leitmotif” (1980) and are the literary precursors of some of Morgan Freeman’s characters in movies like “Along Came The Spider” who almost always saves the “white girl” but never kisses them like a Brad Pitt or a Harrison Ford most surely would. No disrespect to our illustrious and pugnacious brother actor. 

 I also noticed that Hallorann’s name is very similar to the “hellwain,” the black faced “hellequin” and the red and black cap wearing “harlequin” who were said to chase the wicked into the arms of hell every night  at story time during the Middle Ages of Europe. Graham in his masterpiece of aesthetic criticism” The Manichean Leitmotif” (1980) identifies the” hellwain and harlequin as “dark” figures of terror used in European literature associated with the Romantic movement; namely love, death and illicit sexual themes.  Hallorann “a man of sixty” has an extended converstation with Danny the couples’  five year old clairvoyant  son in “Shining” about  two co workers at Overlook. A “dirty old woman with an itch” named  Mrs. Bryant wanted to have sex with another co worker and the boy didnt get the meaning  of “get in his pants.” King’s dirty little joke goes on between the elder cook and the five year old sitting in a car. The boy had “read” her mind when she had wanted to “get into” another employee’s pants named “Mike.” Danny had “wondered why” the woman had wanted the man’s pants. Hallorann threw his head back and let out ” a rich, dark laughter” from his chest. The five year old could not understand and he likened it to learning how to to “read” from his father Jack with much frustration. Can’t “read” huh, little boy? But the inside joke is on the old “black ” male figure paired with a  five year old “white” boy and unsuspecting black “readers” of King’s works. It is a classic pairing of an old black and a young white male figure somewhat like “big” black  Jim and Huckleberry Finn discussing life shuttling up and down the Mississippi river. But more significantly, it is a usage of a “black” male image identified by Graham in his work which has been in use since the 1800’s to satirize the “low life” intrigues, “dirty sex games”  and the “roguery” of slaveowners on their  plantations. King’s  story will bear out that this is no passing coincidence but a sign that our king of terror more than likely “covers sins with smooth names” and keeps dirty little  secrets in his vest pocket and in his fiction.

Hallorann is  Dick  the “black giant in blue serge.” But  he is also  one of  “the army niggers” from King’s  other “big” seller  “It” which was touted as ” a landmark in American literature” by the Chicago Sun-Times.   Hallorann who sometimes forgot his own name and “wet himself” while driving his Cadillac is  “Dick” to his so called “friends.”  Dick  appears in “It” as  “‘ a Pfc. who was a mess cook.”  He worked at the  notorious “Black Spot”  which was burned down in a fire by “men wearing their peaky white hoods”  and had saved a white man’s life in true “body-servant ” fashion. In “It” a white character was “sitting half way down the east wall” with two men,  two “army niggers,”   none other than “Trev Dawson and Dick Hallorann” when the “Black Spot”  was  engulfed in flames.  In keeping with Mr. terror king’s description of “black” people the “white” character told of a “big shoe’ landing on his head and how “Trev” saved him by stretching his “big brown hand” out to him. No “white” characters mind you, have “big” hands or feet or “grin widely”  in either book. Only the “blacks.” I dont have time to catalogue or number everytime King describes “differences” between the “two” people, this is just to expose his “Grand Tour Lie ” of enumerating traits  and mythically naming “blacks” like a subliminally racist Adam in the “new” garden of Eden (USA) which lives only in his “own imagination.” Who taught him to write with these allegorical tendencies which  lean so aggressively towards a derogative presentation of “blacks”? 

In “Shining” King uses the words “darkness” and “blackness” always associated with deathly situations and morbidity and the colors “yellow” and “red” with disease and epiphanic moments of being close to dying so much I couldnt hold back the anger  reading this  fake, bullshit portrayal of “black” people. Now where did this muthafuck who claims to be born and raised and lived most of his adult life in Maine meet these depressing “types” of “black ” people. Yet he writes in the beginning that Colorado has some of the most beautiful resort areas in the world and that Overlook (as if the  reader should overlook the ridiculously drawn “ugly” or “black” figures  ) and the people in the story only exist in his imagination? And if you say he is using poetic license then why doesnt he use that same artistic freedom to freely associate the color “white,” “white” objects  and  “white” characters with all the death and destruction and disease in his bullshit storyline? This is some sick ass shit. Sick ass aesthetics rooted in a “form” of literature which was created when “black” people in America were chattel slaves. Thats why. 

The entire book is written like this and they sell by the truck loads according to what I read elsewhere. So where did he get the idea to present black people in this disgusting manner if he didnt grow up around us? Who the fuck is he that he can become a millionaire on the backs of “black” images  which he admits live only in his imagination and then walk around like it is nothing? Everytime a black object or black person is mentioned here comes  a negative twist after a negative turn in an already depressing story. He uses black objects , dark scenery and black people like hooks in a song which does a few verses then the hook comes back to remind you of the main theme. A few more words or  paragraphs then the hooks sink into your mind subliminally. It is so disgustingly obvious and dont write  the Fish any ignorant ass comments  telling me that if I dont like Stephen King’s malignant books then dont read them.There is something very deliberate about how this muthafuck  is portraying these characters and he needs to be called on it publicly and brazenly.  And why does he keep writing this bullshit and getting richer with it? Because from the beginning of American literature these “ugly” and derisive portrayals of black life  has been socially and financially profitable to its writers. No wonder “Birth of A Nation” is still considered a movie masterpice, it is based upon these same”type” of  “poetic juxtapositions” using “black” and “white” characters whether people behave like that in real life or not. The mental well being and social sensitivity of the average, every day thinking person  in America or the world for that matter, does not concern these people in the least when theyre writing these fabricated realities and who then peddle it as some great work of art and entertainment . It doesnt matter to these smug ass writers and film makers if the country is going down in flames as they keep pouring gasoline on the fires of racial animosity and stereotyping. It really doesn’t matter to these “no job born, rat soup eatin’ muthafuckas” as Dolemite would say.

The Fish chose “Shining” because I saw the movie ( with Jack Nicholson and Scatman Crothers)when it came out and decided to just take a look at the book since the I never read it before. That book thoroughly demonizes the image of its “black” characters as if Mr. King of Terror   has a problem or as some like to call it a “cognitive dissonance” when it comes to non white characters. It seems too that the name of the book is a play on the word “shine”, as in a nigger who “shines” for white folks, hence the name “The Shining.”

So what does this have to do with losing my job in this bad economy and having to go to the war in Iraq and or Obama’s health care plan or Republicans winning in Virginia this week and whatnot Mr. Goatttfish? If you have to ask that question then my friend you need to go get a check up from the neck up with the quickness. Go waste someone elses’ time with that dumb shit.

This is not some rant or rave about  every “white” person being a slick racist and every “black” person being a dumb victim but  it is a presentation of Dr. Graham’s tetranalysis, a very sophisticated approach and methodology to “reading” texts and which brings “out of the dark into the light” the mechanism of how  “racial attitudes” are formed which stem from negative linguistic patterns and image formation devices pervading all media. It is a critical tool that can be used to unlock “codes” and subliminal messages which  innundate our perspectives one and all. Regardless of race, gender,nationality, sexual preference and educational background these undecoded messages are what makes for little African American boys and girls still choosing “white dolls over “black” dolls in 2005 as “better” or more “beautifull” than the “black” ones, even after all the laws have been passed and a black president is in the White House. It is also a part of the answer to the “why” of  “white” racialistic attitudes which persist in American society even among the better educated “whites.”And we wont mention the famous and well paid “black” writers who use the same “forms” unknowingly. Its in the language itself dear reader.But thats for another time.  Part II of “Is Stephen King Guilty of White Paternalism and Subliminal Racism In the “Shining”? will be posted maybe tomorrow. The I will go more into the “Confession” of guilt in King’s book. He actually “confesses to some shit. At least thats what his own words bear out as you “read” them in tetranalysis. The Goatttfish has been writing for nine hours straight ( since 4am) and the I needs to take care of some other pertinent biz.  We own the heights! Jah Guide.