The following is the text of a paper I presented several years back at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts down in Ft. Lauderdale. I will post the first half today, and the conclusion of the piece tomorrow.
The Dark Rites of Assent: The Town Meeting Goes Gothic in King's Storm of the Century
Meandering through four hours of melodrama and not-so-special effects, the 1999 miniseries developed from Stephen King's teleplay Storm of the Century hardly gets off to a compelling start. The arrival of the evil Linoge as Maine's Little Tall Island is battered by a massive winter storm seems but a tedious rehash of the Randall Flagg plotline in The Stand: a supernatural antagonist manifests just as disaster threatens the breakdown of social order. Linoge's endlessly reiterated demand in Storm of the Century--"Give me what I want, and I'll go away"--creates perhaps less a sense of suspense than of irritation and impatience. The faithful viewer (the telematic analogue of King's Constant Reader) is almost tempted to hold up the TV remote like Linoge's cane and intone, "Give me what I want, or I'll go away."
On its third and final night, though, the miniseries takes a gripping turn. Linoge finally reveals the motivation behind his menacing:
the sinister sorcerer wants Little Tall to hand over one of the town's children to him, a boy or a girl whom Linoge subsequently will raise in his own image. At first, King might seem to have fallen back on familiar territory once again, considering that the parental anxiety over child welfare forms a leitmotif in the author's works. But what proves particularly striking in this case is the moral dilemma Linoge creates--he threatens to kill all the children and all the parents if Little Tall does not give him what he wants--and the sociopolitical forum Linoge has Little Tall adopt when making its torturous decision: a good old-fashioned New England town meeting.
In his introduction to the published teleplay version of Storm of the Century, King attests that the Little Tall setting does not merely offer a convenient atmosphere of claustrophobia as the island is cut off from the mainland by the snowstorm and forced to fall back on its own resources: "The final impetus was provided by the realization that if I set my story on Little Tall Island, I had a chance to say something interesting and provocative about the very nature of community...because there is no community in America as tightly knit as the island communities off the coast of Maine. The people in them are bound together by situation, tradition, common interests, common religious practices." King's climactic town meeting thus might be viewed in light of Sacvan Bercovitch's critique (in his 1993 study, The Rites of Assent) of the rhetoric and rituals of American consensus. These "strategies of symbolic cohesion" inform the American Gothicism of Storm of the Century:
"Is the result of pulling together always the common good?" King wonders in the introduction. "Does the idea of 'community' always warm the cockles of the heart, or does it on occasion chill the blood?" When King broaches the subject of communal formation and revitalization in Storm of the Century, he affords himself the opportunity to say something interesting and provocative about the poetics and politics of the horror genre itself.
Before turning to the miniseries' climactic town meeting, I would like to consider the three source texts for Storm of the Century. Two of these are readily identified in King's published intro-duction: "Most of my small-town tales--those of Jerusalem's Lot, those of Castle Rock, those of Little Tall Island--owe a debt to Mark Twain ('The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg') and Nathaniel Hawthorne ('Young Goodman Brown')." Given this acknowledgment of Hawthorne, it's worth noting how King's Storm of the Century hearkens back to Puritan times. For example, stage directions in the teleplay point the viewer's gaze first to the exterior of the Little Tall Island Town Hall--"a white wooden building, stark in the New England style, and the center of the town's public life"--before zooming inside to the actual hall where the town meetings take place: "This consists of many straight-backed benches, like Puritan pews, and a bare wooden lectern with a microphone. Looks more like church than government." When Linoge calls for his "little unscheduled town meeting," the gathering of islanders is described in another King stage note as a "spectral" sight: "They look eerie by candlelight, like villagers from an earlier time...the time of Salem and Roanoke, let us say." Such setting recalls the unsanctioned nighttime gathering in "Young Goodman Brown," where the forest outside Salem village is eerily aglow with pine trees blazing "like candles at an evening meeting."
Various other parallels between Hawthorne's and King's narratives reinforce this intertextual echo. The satanic figure in "Young Goodman Brown" sports a staff bearing "the likeness of a great black snake," while King's demonic Linoge leans on the supernatural prop of a wolf's head cane. Also, just as the figure in Hawthorne's story insists that "evil is the nature of mankind" and endeavors to expose the sinful "secret deeds" of the hypocritical Puritans, Linoge professes that "the good is an illusion" and airs the dirty laundry of Little Tall--a town "full of adulterers, pedophiles, thieves, gluttons, murderers, bullies, scoundrels, and covetous morons." The perennial debate about whether Goodman Brown in fact observed a witch's meeting or merely hallucinated the event perhaps find an analogue in Storm of the Century in the ambiguous nature of Linoge's power (i.e. can he carry out his threats, or is he the embodiment of a nightmare that will ultimately pass like the
titular winter storm?). In both narratives, though, the reality of the antagonist proves less important than the social and psychological effects on the protagonist. Goodman Brown has his rhetorical armor that he comes from "a race of honest men and good Christians" pierced by his experiences in the forest, and he loses
"Faith" in his wife after witnessing her dealings with the devil. Similarly, King's update of the Hawthornian everyman, Mike Anderson, no longer trusts in the communal and familial bond following the deal that is struck with Linoge at the town meeting. Anderson resigns as town constable and shuns his wife Molly, a key participant in the dark ritual at the town hall.
If Hawthorne's story of a mysterious meeting in the forest lends some Gothic overtones to King's town meeting, Twain's "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" forms an even more obvious parallel with Storm of the Century in terms of setting. While Twain's story climaxes with an 8 o'clock meeting called by the devious title character, King's narrative follows with a 9 o'clock meeting declared by Linoge. Having suffered an unspecified slight while in Hadleyburg, Twain's enigmatic stranger plots a revenge drama that reaches its final act in a communal gathering at the town hall. Recognizing that the vaunted honesty upon which Hadleyburg has built its reputation is but an artificial construct that will crumble the first time it is tested, the stranger works to expose the greed and duplicity of the town's nineteen principal citizens by leading them to lay false claim to a spurious sack of gold. My interest here, though, does not lie in recounting the elaborate confidence game orchestrated by this man, nor in noting the satiric glee with which Twain narrates the puncture of Hadleyburg's pretensions. Instead, I want us to consider that Twain's story furnishes a gloss on the abilities and motivations of Linoge in Storm of the Century. Twain's eponymous antagonist admits to the populace of Hadleyburg that "I could not kill you all"; by analogy, Linoge might also be seen as incapable of carrying out his threat of marching all of the islanders into the seas if his demand isn't met. After all, if Linoge possesses such powers of persuasion, why doesn't he simply take what he wants? Why does he insist that the child must be freely given to him, and that the decision must be reached at a town meeting? The answer, I would suggest, is that Linoge seeks less to divest Little Tall of a single child than to invest himself in the civic fabric of the island.
Simply put, Linoge aims to be the man that corrupted Little Tall. In both the Twain and King narratives, such corruption is achieved under the guise of public ritual. The pomp and circumstance of the Hadleyburg meeting devolves into pandemonium as the nineteen prominent citizens (like the Puritan elect in "Young Goodman Brown") have their dirty secrets exposed. At the start of the meeting, the town hall is said to have "never looked finer," clothed in its "showy draping of flags," but by tale's end Twain writes that
"the town was stripped of the last rag of its ancient glory." The stranger's deconstruction of Hadleyburg is finally evident in the alteration of "the motto that for many generations had graced the town's official seal": "Lead US Not Into Temptation" has now been emblematically revised as "Lead Us Into Temptation." By comparison, Little Tall seems to have its rhetoric hollowed out by the events of its own town meeting. At the start of the meeting, King's scene description points us outside the town hall, to a cupola containing a bell and a plaque listing the island's war dead (a memorial inscribed with the heading "WHEN WE RING FOR THE LIVING WE HONOR THE DEAD"). This slogan, though, rings false at the conclusion of the narrative, when the name of the child handed over to Linoge is listed on the plaque (in the pretense that he died during the storm of the century). Henceforth neither the living nor the dead are honored by the sounding of the bell; the islanders are guiltily reminded of the awful deal they struck with Linoge at the town meeting, and the child himself is not actually deceased but sentenced to warped, demonic existence under Linoge's tutelage.
We might move even closer to an understanding of King's use of the town meeting by considering a third source text for Storm of the Century. When Little Tall capitulates to Linoge's demand for a young protege, the particular child is chosen through a lottery in which the parents draw colored "weirding" stones from Linoge's bag. Here King invokes a story by a revered precursor, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Granted, King shifts the setting from the summer solstice to a heart-of-winter storm, and Jackson's stones of punishment become the tools of the lottery itself in King's narrative. In other instances, though, King does make direct echo of Jackson--Molly Anderson's protest that Linoge's lottery wasn't fair matches the cries of Jackson's maternal figure. Still, the most compelling parallel between the two narratives is the discourse about the nature of community. Both Jackson's village lottery and King's town meeting represent public ceremonies that work toward communal renewal via scapegoating and callous individual to individual human suffering. The ritual lottery in Jackson's story--which is compared to other "civic activities" like square dances, the teenage club, and the Halloween program--is accompanied by a mantra promising a bountiful harvest: "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." In turn, we might imagine Little Tall's chant regarding Linoge's lottery as "Assent to this one thing, live to see the spring." Nevertheless, both Jackson and King endeavor to demonstrate the violence and victimization that attends to the process of communal cohesion. The "winner" of Jackson's lottery, an arbitrarily chosen Other, is stoned to death by the rest of the villagers; likewise, the child chosen by Linoge's lottery is an appeasing sacrifice made in order to save Little Tall from dreaded cataclysm.
Hopefully, we can begin to recognize here the relevance of Sacvan Bercovitch's work--his critique of consensus, of "the simultaneity of violence and culture formation." Jackson underscores such notion in the very name she gives to her scapegoated protagonist: Mrs.
"Hutchinson" brings to mind the historical figure Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from Massachusetts to Rhode Island by Governor John Winthrop due to her Antinomian interpretations of Puritan theology. In his famous lay sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered as the Arbella sailed toward the New World in 1630, Winthrop attempted to mold private interest to the public good and to get Puritans to consent to their errand in the howling wilderness, so they "might be all knit more neatly together in the bonds of brotherly affection." In his subsequent journal entries regarding the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, though, Winthrop unwittingly reveals the verbal violence inflecting the rhetoric of consensus, the acts of exclusion used to achieve communal cohesion. Drawing on the same language and symbology of his Arbella sermon, Winthrop depicts the dissenting Hutchinson as some witch who has delivered a stillborn monster, a premature fetus whose grotesque, lumpen body is "so confusedly knit together...distinct and not joined together."
No less so than Jackson's christening of her main character, the name King gives to his respective scapegoat (the son Mike and Molly Anderson surrender to Linoge) has some significant historical resonance. "Ralph Emerick Anderson" carries definite phonetic echoes of that champion of American individualism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his essay "Self-Reliance," Emerson declares that "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Ironically, in Storm of the Century it is Ralph Emerick Anderson who suffers Little Tall's conspiracy against his natural manhood, and who will see (in Emersonian terms) "the sacred integrity of his own mind" profaned by Linoge's teachings.
[Come on back to Macabre Republic tomorrow to read Part 2 of this essay.]
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