(no subject)
So when I got home this morning I posted the following to my Twitter:
also, major DT realization: king's gender-and-race-fail=roland's left hand. this makes sense, i promise.
And it does.
Here's the thing--way back in the seventies, you were my as a brand-new author, King was already owning up to his weaknesses. There's an interview with Playboy from this era where the interviewer calls him out for writing weak female characters; King doubles down and not only admits to this, but points out that he sucks at writing black people, too. But he wants to work on it, he says. He wants to improve.
I've noticed before that it's convenient for King that Susannah starts out shattered. Her process of synthesizing a real, whole human person out of the shards of her old selves, out of two equal and opposite racist caricatures, pretty well mirrors King's attempt to do the same. It's a very deft excuse for the fact that the guy who wrote The Drawing of Three just wasn't as good at writing people Other from himself as the one who wrote Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower.
Did he do it on purpose? By that I mean, did he give himself room for error and growth, so he could say legitimately, yes, she talks like a minstrel show, but that was ON PURPOSE, I swear, and hey, she got better. I got better.? Maybe so. I think maybe yeah. But until last night the other sense of the question had never occurred to me--did he do it on purpose, as in, did he deliberately stack Roland's deck with a black woman in a wheelchair in order to force himself to grow or die trying? This was meant to be his magnum opus, after all; that's doubling down in a big way. That's writing one big-ass check and hoping the money will be there to cash it, thirty years down the road.
I don't know. But there's something that makes me think maybe so, once again, and that's a line in TDo3. Near the beginning of that book Roland loses half the fingers on his right hand. He's basically GOT to, narratively speaking; it's the only way he'd ever give up one of his guns, the only way he'd ever admit that he needs the people he finds along the beach.
But when this happens, he's forced to rely on his left hand, and it isn't as good as his right; it's talented, but it's weak. And at the end of the book Roland goes to make a cut, and his left hand fails him, and he looks down at it and he thinks you are going to learn to be smart.
And then--Susannah herself shows up, her first time on stage as her united self, and she helps him do the job he's set for himself. And I think about the decision, later on, that King makes--that the two who die are going to be the dark-haired smart aleck sensitive-but-macho creative type and the golden haired sweetheart eternal boy, the two most sympathetic characters and the two he's spent his career writing over and over again. Leaving him with a hateful grumpy old man and a heartbroken legless black lady as his protagonists. And I do think--I've said this before--that by then, they're co-protagonists.
Whether or not it was on purpose, I think it's a pretty good motto whenever we set out to leave our comfort zone and write a character that's different from us in some fundamental way; when we try to close that impossible gap and put ourselves in someone else's shoes, knowing we're almost certainly going to fuck up again and again along the way:
You are going to learn to be smart.
also, major DT realization: king's gender-and-race-fail=roland's left hand. this makes sense, i promise.
And it does.
Here's the thing--way back in the seventies, you were my as a brand-new author, King was already owning up to his weaknesses. There's an interview with Playboy from this era where the interviewer calls him out for writing weak female characters; King doubles down and not only admits to this, but points out that he sucks at writing black people, too. But he wants to work on it, he says. He wants to improve.
I've noticed before that it's convenient for King that Susannah starts out shattered. Her process of synthesizing a real, whole human person out of the shards of her old selves, out of two equal and opposite racist caricatures, pretty well mirrors King's attempt to do the same. It's a very deft excuse for the fact that the guy who wrote The Drawing of Three just wasn't as good at writing people Other from himself as the one who wrote Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower.
Did he do it on purpose? By that I mean, did he give himself room for error and growth, so he could say legitimately, yes, she talks like a minstrel show, but that was ON PURPOSE, I swear, and hey, she got better. I got better.? Maybe so. I think maybe yeah. But until last night the other sense of the question had never occurred to me--did he do it on purpose, as in, did he deliberately stack Roland's deck with a black woman in a wheelchair in order to force himself to grow or die trying? This was meant to be his magnum opus, after all; that's doubling down in a big way. That's writing one big-ass check and hoping the money will be there to cash it, thirty years down the road.
I don't know. But there's something that makes me think maybe so, once again, and that's a line in TDo3. Near the beginning of that book Roland loses half the fingers on his right hand. He's basically GOT to, narratively speaking; it's the only way he'd ever give up one of his guns, the only way he'd ever admit that he needs the people he finds along the beach.
But when this happens, he's forced to rely on his left hand, and it isn't as good as his right; it's talented, but it's weak. And at the end of the book Roland goes to make a cut, and his left hand fails him, and he looks down at it and he thinks you are going to learn to be smart.
And then--Susannah herself shows up, her first time on stage as her united self, and she helps him do the job he's set for himself. And I think about the decision, later on, that King makes--that the two who die are going to be the dark-haired smart aleck sensitive-but-macho creative type and the golden haired sweetheart eternal boy, the two most sympathetic characters and the two he's spent his career writing over and over again. Leaving him with a hateful grumpy old man and a heartbroken legless black lady as his protagonists. And I do think--I've said this before--that by then, they're co-protagonists.
Whether or not it was on purpose, I think it's a pretty good motto whenever we set out to leave our comfort zone and write a character that's different from us in some fundamental way; when we try to close that impossible gap and put ourselves in someone else's shoes, knowing we're almost certainly going to fuck up again and again along the way:
You are going to learn to be smart.