Part 7: Stephen King

King's everyman seems to get involved in out of this world situations. King also got used to the idea that he was a voice inside your head. The magic thinking of telepathy can only be pinned to the emotions and feelings, in the easily understood Monster or Ghost.

But King's everyman portraiture is more essential than the trappings of horror/confrontation with the inner self. It seems intimate, got to be more than just this world of realism and pragmatics. His everyman was a grasp of that phenomenon in America of the false consciousness of narcissism, This aspect to America is probably worthy of its own essay.
But King's popularity is due to addressing this false consciousness of narcissism. Its a magic that turns on the character and betrays it, a theme consistently in those early stories. King doesn't deny the reality that Christianity defines, shame, guilt, magical thinking...most of all and obviously, good and evil. But those emotions negatively associated with Christianity; guilt, shame, humility, these also go out the door, as emotions that cramp MY LIFESTYLE.
In other words, remove Christianity, its engineering of guilt and shame, replace it with self, and the false consciousness that "I am free of shame and guilt" becomes all to easy to embrace. Along with that comes magical thinking. Enter Stephan King.
No matter the intent of the narcissist, the result of narcissistic work creates a shock at the end of life in confronting a lie. The lie being the important of one's work.
A great misanthrope would care most about their own hatred for humanity! But, its a distraction out of step. Its a historical misstep, this narcissism.
To me the moment of the advent of the digtal age, the Last Days of Literacy (A good title for these numbered articles), over represented themselves, as market producers and consumers.
Affirming the statistics whenever politically possible.
I always, or a habit a strong habit of mind to exclude politics. It might be because I hit my head so many times, hard. I developed the sidelong lobes in memory and reduced the frontal lobe, for planning. Herein, lays the essence of politics: what has the initiative in the moment.
Speechwise, I could not keep up.
Sorta like I gave up. Developing a habit, a strong habit, can be done by just not caring however due to a high standard of writing...so its a opposition.
Writing is, to politics. See. I am also usually a step behind everyone. So I get to be the fall guy.
There is a disturbing bit of immorality...which must be explained! It wrecking into a car, denting it slightly...just the door, going into the Bar, coming out having drunk too much, to then leave and not leave a note.
That was criminal, but there is more...but I digress...

Stephan King identified a problem, I think in being in this liminal generation, the baby boomer, in between, sorta of fashioning their own implements of destruction: the computer.
They wont be best represented by it. Neither will our Gen X, nor will the upcoming generations, however labeled.
The overall compression of the memory will create a virtual model, and that is when its a foundational change in memory technology.

So, the idea that images King's ghosts and characters in modernity, their emotions...each a cameo in a sphere of glass or a hologram projection, or some other near 3-d issue, going down a production line.
The Glass Bead Game...or, take a episode of The Day the Universe Changed, which is kind of haunting, and combine those glass beads...little gif like 3-d animation suspended in the air, or holograms, all animated sequence seen, in a slightly later angle...by the last row in the gallery facing the production line.
Or, the first row gets to see the animation vignettes in glass or hologram begin first...and then it glitters, perhaps having a brief moment of repeat yet from only the front row.

You get that from King...being "in the front row", having Shamu splash you, and it being a haunted feeling.

This is a later idea, a haunting/psychic idea, where the Internet is a hallucisphere...a abstract swirling, should look like Pollock, or Gibson's hallucinatory piercings, chemicals and biological interfaces, or Stephansons more "virtual MMO" to, and on, into Theater.



King was right there. King was the supreme writer of the TV people...he covers two generations strongly. He and Nicholson can turn on and have mastered 'the rage guy'.
Great fun. Local guy that, but I think the stand up have the resolution.

And this everyman became a kind of redemption for his generation and those who grew up a little later, my generation.
The point has been made earlier that the Baby Boomers are a generation that has to bear witness to greater generations than itself. Knowing, either subconsciously or consciously, that they were born in the wrong time. Born after an "action" generation they could never aspire to (why would anyone...all those GI were probably insufferable, and worldly beyond their suburban retirements), and the subjects of another generation that had the greater ideals already championed.
Furthermore, the future was indeed a century of engineers, the greatest event yet in human history was incubating right before their eyes. What computer would do was up for speculation, and wild indeed...but always out of the grasp of the Baby Boomer youth.
Baby boomers also subconsciously or consciously could own coming from a Nation that was 'best' of all possible worlds.
Yet, they were a generation that would die out probably before near immortality had been achievable.
They had nothing except each other to refer to for substance and therein birthed a over bearing celebrity culture, wherein, validation was more religiously possible, globally speaking, than Mohammed could concieve.
They picked up on their parents narcissism, it seemed okay, and then one upped it with the Generation preceding them (the Silent Generation...which is a label the baby boom adopted for their master generation, whom indeed were more eloquent: the Beatles and Civil Rights and some great writers and reporters) by fanatically imposing a Politics of Being.
Hence, King's fine instincts stepped in with the politics of imaginative being...something the overly public baby boomer too easily shucked aside as that old tyme religion they had outgrown.

So to keep their spirits they commenced to make a big noise about their own importance. Which of course, my generation could not echo (much to their surprise) but instead put our noses to the grindstone and became the mere hands that built the computer world, incidentally, as envisioned originally, and righteously promoted. by the Bush family (Vannever Bush was George H. Bush uncle or cousins...someone GH grew up listening to, as least).

King  made a accurate spiritual diagnosis, and created these lost means of redemption, as novels. That is what most of them are about. Narcissistic hysteria might include such ideas a vampires and ghosts and revenants (the vengeful ghost or zombie) plaguing these everyman characters.
Monsters, as we know from Tolkien, represent profound spiritual and or psychological realities, which of course rear their heads once in awhile as reality. Even more relevant dispensing with the delusions of religion of the past (not speaking for myself).

King's everyman idea is compassionate, as he muses about his own cruelty in subjecting people to terror and horror. Its instructive.

Grisham of course, makes this moral instruction and narcissistic error (narcissism here is defined as a sense of one's importance, out of touch with reality, or the old Greek hubris) obvious, perhaps too much so.

John D. MacDonald and King share a kind of intensity in their writing the Grisham does not have. Though all have a distance enough to compose "art", or audience manipulation coming from a clear objecting thinking about the forms they are creating...there is something more intense coming from MaDonald and King...perhaps a more obsessive condition, or a greater focus due to a lack of objectivity, a kind of participatory intensity predating interactivity...interactivity being the dawn of a new age of Art.
Grisham might agree: "yes, I see the universe in a grain of sand but then looking away from the sand I see the universe more conventionally embodied in the sky and horizon and earth beneath my feet, and the souls of those who err and then find redemption in the welfare of others".
Meanwhile, John D and King both continue to work out the universe in the grain of sand, like scientists, who can indeed find more than just one universe in a grain of sand!