Part II Is Stephen “king of terror” King Guilty of Subliminal Racism in “The Shining”? 11/06/09

“If a man confesses to You, he does not reveal his inmost thoughts to You as though You did not know them.” Book 5, The Confessions of St. Augustine

“Sometimes you confess. You always hide what you’re confessing to.” Stephen King  interview

“Run, feet,run!” from 1971’s Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song  by Melvin Van Peebles.(The first Black Power movie and probably the last)  

Air. This is Part 2 of my  look  into Stephen King’s self admitted confessional which he named “The Shining.”  Fish is not happy with this guy’s “confession” or writing at all. It is replete with malignant imagery of black people on a subliminal, psychic level. Im trying not to use curse words because the I wants everyone to read it without offending daintier sensibilities or “higher” moral standards. But I must ask, what standards are Mr.King maintaining? Is it a just standard based on “fair” play and sensitivity towards people who dont look like him and his family? If he can malign black people in his stories like it’s nothing then he should expect someone to call him out one day and malign him in the same way, dont you think that’s  “fair” dear reader?

 This type of writing ( like Edgar Allan Poe’s and many other so called literary giants) of which Stephen King is called “a master”  is poisoning the hearts and minds of countless young people  who “read” this nonsense . The older ones may need to go roam the wilderness with a certain Moses for forty years or more but children need not be exposed to the metaphysical slaughter purveyed in such books as “Shining” and “It.” Read carefully. We should probably do with his books what  a certain Emperor did  right after he took over rulership  several thousand years ago.  And with so many of his books in print and movies based on stories out there, I know that generations of young people will be susceptible to his relentless attacks upon their psyches and sensibilities. This is where my anger and curse words come from. And Im not apologizing for calling him a mf either because my consciousness has been slammed hard after “reading” this shit. As comedian St. Redd Foxx used to say” ” Don’t tell me the Pope doesn’t cuss. Let me take his thumb and slam it in a car door and he’ll say: “Shit, fuck and muthafucker too!” 

I must quote our beloved St. Joe Louis’ famous words for Max Schmeling before one of their fights: “You can run, but you can’t hide!” That’s for Mr. King who hides behind a facade of “smooth names” and seeminglycomplex plot schemes. It’s nothing personal. But how do you pull the cover off of these slick you know whats without calling them out for the shit they are doing  right in our face? End of editorial. Back to work.

In this new installment, (yes people, a new mentality needs to be installed with the quickness) the I will look at the book  but also sift the movie “Shining” (maybe just a little bit) which was directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick of 2001: Space Odyssey fame. This post will deal with Kubrick’s interpretation of the story along with King’s “confession” which flows through the book like a “white” mystic Air and intelligence. The overall intent is to find a “just balance” and offer “readers” other means to overstand these vile portrayals and distortions instead of just relegating this critique to personal opinion or rant.

In his 1971 classic Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles  plays Sweetback, a black boy  taken off the streets and raised by black prostitutes who grows up into a man doing live sex shows. Two white cops do the ‘Rodney King” on a young black man and Sweetback rose up like a fearless, black revolutionary messiah in that moment to beat their asses good and they run away to their God-given freedom. The entire black community in the story helps Sweetback against the evil police and their machinations. And Sweetback saved the day and kissed the girls too!

The unmatched genius, Melvin Van Peebles in a Newsweek interview at the time explained: “All the movies about black people up to now have been told through the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon majority  in their rhythms and speech and pace. In my film, the black audience finally gets a chance to see some of their own fantasies acted out rising out of the mud and kicking ass.” The movie (shot on a shoestring budget) couldnt get any major “white’ studio support but went on to be the first indie film ever  (black or white or whatever) to gross millions of dollars even with plenty ‘bad” press  and “negative” reviews. Then the “big white” studios began to invest in movies like “Shaft” and  “Super Fly” and others to make a untold millions at the box office from the very same “black” audience they had previously ignored and viciously maligned in the imagery of their films. Remember Stepin Fetchit , Hattie McDaniel and Bill Bojangles? God bless them! But after Star Wars came out in the late seventies the movie industry dumped the black actors and all those movie projects like it was nothing. Remember?

And what does this have to do with the subject at hand Mr. Goatttfish? Plenty because when you read a novel  or watch a film (Im assuming you paid for it) currency circulates and everybody is happy(banks,publishers,movie producers etc) and the whole economy benefits right?

All of those projects begin with a writer who sits alone and imagines these stories or bases them on fantasies, mythologies or other story lines taken from the Bible, real life history and many other areas where the raw material for stories can be mined out from. An old teacher of mine used to say: “When someone takes a picture of you and prints it, who do you look for in the picture first?” He would answer,”you look for yourself.” I ask you this reader, how would you feel inside if almost every picture taken of you all of your life you looked like a beast or an Orang gutang for some unexplainable reason? Think that over for a minute before reading on.

Stephen King admits in an interview from around the time of  “Shining” to antagonistic feelings towards his own “real life” children: “Sometimes you confess. You always hide what you’re confessing,” but he is speaking about the “Shining” and seems to be hinting at something else too. His antagonism towards his literary”children” must be called into question too. By literary “children” I mean the many characters whom he has symbolically “fathered” such as Hallorann an “outside party and “a nigger cook” as one character called him towards the end of the story.

I didnt choose King because he is  some great writer, I chose him because he’s popular and many people of all ages and “races” read his stories and enjoy them. Im not telling anyone what to read or not to read but you should know about a product before you consume it. These are “products” of someone’s (King’s) imagination .King describes Hallorann as “one scared nigger” and a”dirty nigger” and a “jungle bunny coon”, a “wild eyed black man”  and a “dirty interfering nigger” but Im not here to report every time King used the N word or labeled a black character condescendingly. Does that sound “antagonistic” enough for your ass, you doubters? His “antagonism” goes much deeper than that. He not only uses black people in this story as (in E.M Forster’s slick masking of Manichean designs) “flat” characters as opposed to the white ones which are usually “round” because they have many facets.But he uses a deliberate design of demonizing  the color black, whether in objects, scenery or persons to create a sinister atmosphere in the tale. 

In the beginning of the tale when Halloran meets Jack Torrance,  his wife Wendy and their clairvoyant son Danny who “shines” he makes an interesting statement. Hallorann gives them a tour of the kitchen facilities (where many black characters are usually kept in many of these  stories) and he shows them the bread bin: “”you got your bread, thirty loaves of white, twenty of dark. We try to keep racial balance at the Overlook, dont you know.” Thirty and twenty is not a balance in anyones books.King is serving up this slick little narrative hook and some “white” mystical numerology as he does throughout the whole book. And in the end, if this story were a football or basketball game the “white” team would always be ten points ahead of the “black” team. These are not “cherry picked” to prove some conspiracy theory that  racism is hidden under every rock and tree.  The overall design of the story bears out that King set up a pattern for demonizing Halloran and entering his figure as some kind of ghostly apparition who “runs” back from hot Florida to freezing Colorado temperatures like a scared ass Scooby Doo dog to save two white people he didnt even know. 

As far as “keeping racial balance” in the story there is none. Everything black is associated with something bad. Wendy the wife at some point felt a “terror as black as midnight.” A black snow mobile with a “bright, sneering yellow” painted on it looked like a “monstruous mechanized wasp” and on and on.This is throughout the story yet thats not all of it. These are just a few examples which when associated with the action , “appearances” and “disappearances” of Hallorann and a few other characters the reader can begin to discern an overall pattern of negative,insiduous skin color symbolism.

With the “tetranalysis” a term coined by Graham we look at  four aesthetic elements. We look at forms, sounds, colors and motions and how these are shaped to give a sense of elevation to some characters and a sense of degradation to others. If the tetranalysis seems a bit confusing it is because we are tracking four things at the same time and making sense of it for the reader to discern an overall pattern or design operating subliminally. It can be applied to any text to uncover negative imagery.And this is  not only racial but any other form of degradation and distortion of  what is true to life.

Hallorann is described as a “big black cook” with “large brown fingers” who is “rolling his eyeballs,” and “grinning broadly” when no “white” characters are described as such. King also makes the character mention death and tell stories of “white” people dying from his first appearance. When Hallorann is  doing the  the kitchen tour the “Grand Tour Lie” is set in metaphysical motion. As he gave them the kitchen tour he opened a freezer pointing out all the  poultry and  meats and fish available to them during their stay at the resort and the boy mentioned that he didnt like fish to which Halloran responded: “youre dead wrong.” Then he forgot his own name, snapping his fingers “Dick, to your friends. he continues “and you being a friend, you make it Dick.” (twice mentioned) Halloran tells them the story of the original owner of the place whose son “Watson” still works around there and will tell you about Overlook “twice a day.” Watson’s father,who built the place (on an Indian burial ground in the movie) “plugged his finger in a light socket by mistake and that was the end of him.” Hallorann even jokes about what it would be like to poison “eighty richest folks in America,” how he smelled oranges before he had a vision of his brother “Carl die on railroad tracks” and  how in the end ” the boy was going to die right inside his head” and many more instances of death by association or by the character “remembering” deaths and narrating them autotelicaly. By “autotelic” I mean the writer is placing these words and  stories in the “black” characters mouth with a predetermined purpose to demonize him and make him into a “death’s head” or reminder of death in comparison to the “white.”  

 With all due respect to Levi Strauss and Derrida their “structuralism” and “deconstructionism” does not account for these types of “contrasted extremes” as found in American literature and fiction. And to those academic naysayers who make fun of the tetranalysis  and tell me to go read this and that because Im being  “narrow” and whatever other nonsense go lick your self inflicted wounds somewhere else.

King named the book “The Shining” and Hallorann tells the boy Danny ” you shine the hardest.” He confides to the boy, “you shine the harder than anyone I ever met in my life. And Im sixty years old this January.” The month of January is named after Janus a figure from Greek mythology.  Wikipedia calls “Janus” “god of the door way”  since “January is the door of the year.” He is also “often depicted as having two faces or heads” hence Stephen King’s constant mention of the number two throughout his story. This two faced god is “frequently used to symbolize change and transition such as the progression of past to future, of one condition to another, one vision to another, the growing up of young people” etc. This is part of King’s play on the number “two”   and the concept of “pairing” characters as a means to “compare and contrast” them in racial,sexist or whatever terms he sees fit. “But Hallorann is set up as a “shine” in contrast to the five year old Danny who “shines” harder than anyone he had ever seen in his life.

This “shine” on Hallorann brings to mind the repulsion I felt  years ago when searching in a “special collections” department of a certain library. I had found a book I had been looking for on some 19th century French writer, a contemporay of the poet Baudelaire. When I opened the book and got to the section I needed to quote from it described Satan as a “big, black man with shining, gleaming skin.” Just imagine, the Devil having “shining,gleaming skin. I felt something very sick in my stomach after reading that, left the book right there and walked away from the table. It also brought to mind (then and there)  forcefully an illustrated children’s Bible given to me as a child by my mother(bless her sweet heart). There is a page where a blond haired, blue eyed Jesus is sitting up on a mountain and the Devil is trying to tempt him. The Devil was my color with a little more tinges of red,having wooly hair, a sisnister look on his face and cloven hooves. That also was sickening to me as a five or six year old who loved to look at paintings and pictures and read anything placed in front of me. This is my experience and not some “critical theory” or mouthing someone else’s philosophy. And I have been aware of these sickening and repulsive “images” of black people ever since. I didnt need structuralism or deconstructionism or a tetranalysis to tell me as a child that something was wrong with that “image.” So I give thanks to the Most High for brothers like Graham among many other brothers and sisters who have struggled for years in obscurity an even scorn while researching these negative portrayals to bring some overstanding to this very critical subject. 

Hallorann places his “large hands on the small boys shoulder” as they sit in a car and tells him that he calls this clairvoyant power “shining” and how “the Bible calls it having visions.” He goes on to confide in five year old Danny how he “smells oranges” before having these “visions” and “dreams” as he also calls them. For those who dont know, the 1831 Gray’s Nat Turner Confessions is a forgery(first documented by Graham) but in that book the character “Nat Turner” is described as having visions and hearing voices just like our friend Hallorann is described in Kings bestseller. Just for the record.  

Hallorann “had come to terms with his blackness-happy terms” toward story’s end and did not “want to mess up” his good life as a “large black cook” at Overlook by leaving his vacation in Florida to fly back to cold Colorado and save white folks (Wendy and son Danny) he barely knew. While in hot Florida Halloran was driving his “Cadillac” and hearing the boys’ voice in his head”(Come Dick Please Come Dick Please)” this is repeated over and over as he drove and carried out his errands one day.When I first saw this while perusing the book it sounded to me like this old black man was talking to his own “dick’ as if he was impotent and could not ejaculate. This is not an unreasonable or far fetched reading of the text either. But Hallorannn continues hearing the boy’s voice “dick come please come dick” like some sick joke King is playing on the reader using the “black” character who wore a St Christopher’s medal around his neck.

St Christopher is known as a Christian martyr and in legend is said to be “18 feet tall with a fearsome face.” (Wiki) Also known as the “patron saint of travelers” who carries a small, very heavy child across a river who later turns out to be  a little boy Jesus.  St. Christopher in legend is sometimes represented with the head of a dog. He is also said to have served the Devil after seeing how much fear a king had when the Devil was mentioned. So he went looking for the Devil to serve the Devil. But when he found the Devil and saw how the Devil feared Jesus he went looking for Jesus to serve him. These are associations suggested by King’s descriptions of the person Hallorann, his actions and even his jewelry and not my judicious commentary.King is deliberately crafting the image to resonate in a “peculiar” manner with certain readers. 

What is the point of all this Goatttfish? Im showing you that there are multiple levels or structures which can be looked at in a text and not just some “accepted” academic explication or whatever else you are being told by these other people who are the so called “experts” in this area.Please read on.

Hallorann comes across as a “decoy of the devil” at times, then a Janus faced figure who “opens the doors” for the story to flow thru conflict and climax and also as a “ghostly” St. Christopher like negro figure crossing a river of “red death” with little boy and mother with him. Take your pick. But we have to look more into this.

While on vacation in Florida Hallorann goes “upstairs” to a “Mc Ivers” office to get his will done so everything he owned would go to his sister in the the event that he died. He had been “smelling oranges all day” so he knew he was about to have a “vision” or some kind of premonition of death. During their conversation Mc Iver asked: “And if your sister predeceases you?” Hallorann had him write it anyways. He completed it in three hours. He left and as he drove his Cadillac (black people stereotypicaly drive Cadillacs) he realized what was happening, “eyes widening” as he looked in the rear view mirror.He felt as if “someone had put a psychic gun to his head and shot him with a .45 caliber scream.” And as he continued hearing the boys’ voice in his head the ” Cadillac was drifting off the road and some whites driving in the opposite direction saw “a big black man bolt upright behind the wheel, his eyes looking vaguely upward.” The white guy driving told his wife how he could see his “niggery hands” and that “it looked as if every hair on that coon’s head was standing on end.” He even “thought the black man was having a heart attack” and “invited” Hallorann to”perform an illegal sex act on himself.” (remember “Dick Come Oh Dick Please Come”?)  Also to “engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds” and screamed at him that “all persons of negro blood return” to Africa. The white driver also said that “he is going to hell for sure and that he had met Hallorann’s mom” in a whore house in New Orleans. When Hallorann was “out of danger” he realized he had “wet his pants” and  the voice kept repeating “(Come Dick Please Come Dick Please). Now reader, what the hell was King imagining when he wrote this? Does this sound like any black person you know?

King’s “treatment” of Hallorann is full of mixed feelings and antagonism.Why is the “black” character’s image given over to all this vicious sexual denigration? Hallorann goes to the office of a “Mr. Queems”an “Ole Miss” alumni and business administration graduate who seems to run a bookie joint. As they spoke Mr. Queems wore a “peculiar tight expression of concern on his face.” An expression that Hallorann knew. “It was as close an expression of sympathy as a white man who thought of himself as good with the coloreds could get when the object was a black man or his mythical son.”(my italics)

From my reading of this text, King is also “confessing” to his “antagonistic feelings” towards his “mythical” sons and daughters in his stories  and possibly to black people in general. Think about it for a minute. It is not far fetched at all. He gives ample evidence of “antagonistic feelings” in his literary “treatment” of Hallorann and other non white characters in a relentless, vicious manner from beginning to end.At one pointJack speaks these words: ” Get out of here you dirty nigger. This is none of your business. You nigger turn around, turn around or we’ll kill you, hang you up from a tree limb, you fucking jungle bunny coon, and then burn the body thats what we do with niggers so turn around right now.” Do you still want to believe that King is just being an artist making up a story with this type of language and context in it? What about all the black men and women unjustly lynched in America? What about their families? King says these people “exist only in my imagination.” What the f***? I dont think any self respecting Jewish person would think that any German writer could write about the Holocast and use Jewish characters in such a degraging manner then mention the Holocast as if it is just some “local color” do you discerning reader? Think about this carefully.

King even describes how  everything was coming to Hallorann “in a series of rebus like images.”Webster’s Collegiate dictionary defines the term “rebus”  as ” a representation of words or syllables by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound: also a riddle made up of such pictures or symbols.”

In a scene in the middle of the book Jack, the father is talking about his son’s paranormal experiences and calls it “precognitive trances” and how Freud said”the subconscious never speaks to us in a literal language. Only in symbols.” This is how these guys write and they think theyre clever. Placing hints all throughout the story like a riddle as part of the characters dialogue and in the imagery itself in a “series of rebus like images.” These are King’s words not mine. He aint so slick and clever. Jack goes on,”William Carlos Williams knew that, he was a pediatrician. When we grow up, concepts gradually get easier and we leave the images to the poets.” Jack was saying that his son was like the people in the Middle Ages who believed  they where impaled like Christ on the cross that they actually showed signs of “stigmata” on their hands and feet.  Danny his father claimed,believed so much (being in a “precognitive trance” also “shining”) that things became real when believed in that strongly.This “precognitive” form of mindset is what Hallorann and his grandmother also exhibited because they also “shined.”

The clues and hints as to what Stephen King is alluding to about “mythical” sons and “precognitive trances” and “series of rebus like images” run throughout the story. Like a riddle strewn all over the story he is “confessing” to some very antagonistic feelings in a symbolic way towards black people. You can take it or leave it alone.

More in Part III of Is Stephen “king of terror” Guilty Of White Paternalism and Subliminal Racism? You the reader decide.So until next time, we own the heights,Jah guide up. Goatttfish out.