The Dark Tower and the Quest of Writing
The Dark Tower is an unusual piece of fiction in many respects. It manages to weave together cowboy-knights and psychopathic robot trains, succubi and light saber-wielding wolves, a semi-magical land and a very real New York City. Stephen King intended it to be the longest novel ever written. King himself becomes a character.
I originally regarded much of this as a haphazard combination of tangential threads and filler material in service of a vain quest for sheer volume, and yet, I have come to understand a deeper reading at play: The Dark Tower is a moving allegory for the act of narrative creative writing, which itself embodies a quest for self-understanding that we all undertake.
The Origins of a Story
The Dark Tower series begins, as I suspect most stories do in the minds of their creators, with a single arresting image: “The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.” Who is the man in Black? Who is the Gunslinger? We don’t know, and at the first moment of creative conception, neither does the author. Truly, the characters are in a desert unto themselves — if there is anything to be found over the far horizon, it is not yet materialized.
Step-by-step, the world is progressively populated: hazy mountains in the distance, sparse devil-grass, a series of abandoned campfires leading the way forward into the story. King quickly begins building a rich world of bird-men and corrupted towns. As he later writes in the series’ final volume, “A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time” (The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower).
And yet, King did not take up The Dark Tower entirely empty-handed. The image of the dark tower and the desert were gleaned from Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” which King encountered as an undergraduate.
The poem paints a grim picture of a disgraced knight plodding across a wasteland in search of a dark tower. He is utterly alone, and despises the dead wreck about him. Failure is more than likely:
Thus, I had so long suffer’d, in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
Ultimately, Browning’s Roland encounters the tower almost by surprise, and finds it to be a low sitting fortress of brown stone, windowless and doorless. Lining the hills are the specters of his fallen comrades. As if rousing for a charge into battle, Roland bravely takes up his horn:
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”
Taken by this image, King began developing the story that would eventually become The Dark Tower. In doing so, a young King took up his own epic quest. In King’s 2003 introduction and forward for The Gunslinger, he describes, “And in my enthusiasm — the sort only a young person can muster, I think — I wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history.”
Just as the Childe Roland faced self-doubt, so too must King and all authors as they set forth. It is only with equal measures of fortitude and foolishness that they take up the path. That journey took King over three decades to complete.
The product of that journey is extremely meta — it is an allegory for the creative act itself. In it, we find many of King’s explicit observations about writing made literary flesh.
Building a World
Although King has been extremely productive as an author, as measured by sheer volume, he has forcefully argued that observers shouldn’t confuse that for ease:
“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
~ Stephen King
On reading this, I imagine King passing by a solitary flower, perhaps a rose, growing outside of an abandoned home. What secrets does this building keep? What is special about this rose that it should survive in such a inhospitable place? That is the stuff of new ideas.
Jake, like those story ideas coming “quite literally from nowhere,” arrives into Mid-World and Roland’s tale quite literally from nowhere.
There are other sources of ideas as well: namely, creative borrowing. In 1920, T.S. Eliot wrote, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” King borrows from Eliot generously across The Dark Tower (an excerpt from Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is one of two epigraphs for The Waste Lands), and he borrows from others as well. In fact, as as he does with the death of Jake Chambers, he instantiates this literary truism overtly. The Wolves of Calla are an explicit amalgamation of third party material — they wield light sabers, they appear similar to the comic book villain Dr. Doom, and they have weapons called “sneetches” that bear a striking resemblance to golden snitches from the Harry Potter universe. This isn’t Ready Player One; this is an overt commentary on the alchemic process of creative borrowing.
Killing Our Darlings
I had heard the quote, “Kill your darlings,” but had not realized it was King who had written it until conducting background research for this essay. The quote in full: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings” (Stephen King, On Writing).
Jake Chambers so clearly personifies this quote. It kills my little reader’s heart to visualize Roland letting Jake fall into the void, but Jake got in the way of the Roland’s quest — he had to be left behind as must have so many wonderful story elements that King has left on the cutting room floor over the decades. And yet, almost as an absolution, Jake reassures Roland and King too, “Go then. There are other worlds than these.” King is famous for re-using story elements across his works, and surely has a rich backlog of abandoned concepts to weave into new works. We can kill our darlings, as who knows when and where they may be resurrected. A good idea is never dead.
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
In fact, King resurrects many of his own previously published ideas in the work. Throughout the tale, King weaves characters from his other works: Dandelo, Randall Flagg, Donald Callahan, and others. This again underlines that Roland exists in the universe of King’s entire creative consciousness.
Doorways Between Worlds
Just as King pierces the walls between his works, he also pierces the veil between fiction and reality. In his weaving of Mid-World and a realistic New York City, King is again drawing attention to the nature of literature and writing: stories are the doorway.
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
~ Stephen King, On Writing
More than a hackneyed Reading Rainbow-esque takeaway, King is exploring the very nature of literary heroism. Joseph Campbell explains, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces that the hero, having returned victorious at the culmination of the adventure has become a “master of two worlds” — the mundane and the supernatural. Campbell explains, “Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division… is the talent of the master.” King overtly instantiates this concept in the travels of the ka-tet between worlds — between the mundane and the supernatural. They are fictional; they are real. In fact, Susan passes through a door labeled “The Artist” which brings her into the real world. Ultimately, it is King himself that bridges these realms as he becomes a character in his own writing. He is the master of many worlds. King is the literary hero incarnate. King is Roland. Roland is King. Roland is each of us.
Roland is Each of Us
There is still a deeper level of allegory play: that Roland is Stephen King, and that Roland is in fact each of us in our quest for self-understanding and greater connection in a world of profound isolation.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
~ Stephen King
The Gunslinger features the following epigraph by Thomas Wolfe:
. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a leaf, a stone, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb, we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
. . . O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
~ Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
This passage, drawn from Thomas Wolfe’s first and highly autobiographical novel gives a strong hint as to King’s true purpose. Of this passage, another commentator has observed: “All of us, Southern or not, are keeping our eyes peeled for that stone, that leaf, that unfound door — all things we hope to turn over to discover the truth of who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going.”
Returning to Robert Browning’s poem, Margaret Atwood interpreted it as a metaphor for the author approaching his own dark center through writing. More broadly, it can be understood as each individual’s quest to approach their inner self. That dark center is remote. It is treacherous. It may be inaccessible. That core, that lynchpin, is at the center of each of our realities. Was it set by a god? Can it be destroyed? We can only conjecture.
And so, The Dark Tower is the story of King seeking his own self-understanding… the Unfound door become Found. In this, King deeply invokes the concept of the Jungian shadow — that part hidden within each of us that embodies our darkest desires and motivations.
The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world. It is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.
~ Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow
King again makes the conceptual literal. Roland’s search for the Tower is in fact a search for his own integration.
To own one’s own shadow is to reach a holy place — an inner center — not attainable in any other way. To fail this is to fail one’s own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life.
~ Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow
Even the ka-tet’s literal shadows orient themselves along the beams toward the center… toward the Dark Tower. Like the Dark Tower, the Jungian Shadow is both awesome and terrifying. Carolyn Kaufman wrote that “in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness — or perhaps because of this — the shadow is the seat of creativity” (Three-Dimensional Villains: Finding Your Character’s Shadow).
In King’s vision, the Tower is surrounded by a field of roses that, though beautiful, are unbreakable and razor-sharp. These might represent our memories which at a distance we view fondly, but up close hold repressed regret, shame, and so many other negative feelings. They call to us, they torment us.
When the sound of it had died out, the blast of a great horn replied, not from the Tower itself but from the roses that lay in a carpet all around it. That horn was the voice of the roses, and cried him welcome with a kingly blast.”
~ The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
On the Dark Tower’s ramparts stands the Crimson King — he is resistance manifested. Psychotherapist David Richo penned the following in 1999, which might as well have been written about The Dark Tower: “Inherent in the ego is a resistance to spiritual progress because it entails the letting go of the ego’s favorite props: control, retaliation, entitlement. The ramparts of our ego defend against change, against the work on ourselves that might alter our character and lead us to spiritual heights” (Shadow Dance).
I find it not coincidental that this defending figure is the Crimson KING, as in Stephen KING. The withered demon-man represents the personal demon in each of us that strives to protect the persona and the ego from whatever dark but enlightening truths exist in the tower. In fact, by destroying the beams, the Crimson King strives to eradicate the Tower altogether under the delusion that life can exist without it.
Ultimately, the Crimson King is substantially reduced, though not entirely disappeared, by means of a mute innocent’s art. Force cannot handle the roses of that dark place, nor can it defeat the Crimson King… for each can only be processed through the vulnerability of art. King is the artist. King is erasing his demons.
Cycles Without End
And at last, in 2004, King penned the only ending that could be. He warned us it could not be what we hoped for:
Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one key left on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked . What’s behind it won’t improve your love-life, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal “Once upon a time.” Endings are heartless. Ending is just another word for goodbye.
~ The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
The Man in Black warned Roland of the same: “Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity ” (The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger).
All the same, Roland believes he has reached his life’s goal:
Yonder it is, he thought. Yonder is my destiny, the end of my life’s road.
~ The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
Notably, the journey must end as it began: alone.
Roland enters the tower and finds his life manifest — 19 steps at a time. Spiraling upward to those spiritual heights Richo alluded to, Roland finds his birth, his successes, his failures, all leading to the current moment. The final door is marked “Found,” cycling us back to that first epigraph at the beginning of The Gunslinger. And so too is Roland carried back to the beginning.
He saw and understood at once, the knowledge falling upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many times had he climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might have been changed and time’s curse lifted), but to that moment in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately succeed? How many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip that had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan? How many times would he travel it?
“Oh, no!” he screamed. “Please, not again! Have pity! Have mercy!”
~ The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
As a reader it is a torment. Thankfully Roland’s memory is mercifully wiped of the realization of this purgatorial cycle calling to mind Freud’s trauma theory for childhood amnesia.
If we are back at the beginning, what has the journey, or these thousands of pages for that matter, been worth? We are back at the start, with only a horn to show that it wasn’t for naught.
I have a new appreciation for the essentialness of this ending: the story completed, the author must return to the desert to craft a story anew. But the revelation is not only true of the act of story telling, but also the act of self-discovery.
And Vannay: Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
Approaching the Tower by arduous means, we are returned back to the beginning in a karmic cycle… an eternal loop of losing the thread, of forgetting, and yet hopefully starting against with some token of incremental growth.
Roland is stuck, as we all are, in the cycle of Samsara, the Buddhist concept of the cycle of life and death. It is again almost too perfect that the word “samsara” itself means “wandering.”
Roland has been immersed in cycles all along: distances measured in wheels, the hands of Roland’s watch spin unpredictably at times, and of course the will of Gan is referred to as “the wheel of ka”:
“Ka is a wheel; its one purpose is to turn. The spin of ka always brings us back to the same place, to face and reface our mistakes and defeats until we can learn from them.”
~ Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Concordance
In that brutal moment of Roland’s realization, Gan speaks to Roland:
“Each time you forget the last time. For you, each time is the first time.”
~ The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
The Man in Black had understood this cycle. In his palaver with Roland, he taunted:
“Yet you have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, as you resume your quest. Worlds turn about your head.”
“What do you mean, resume? I never left off.”
~ The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
And yet, perhaps it is not from spite that he taunts Roland — perhaps he speaks as one might to a child who cannot comprehend a deeper complexity.
“Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries… Do you see? Of course you don’t. You’ve reached the limits of your ability to comprehend. But never mind-that’s beside the point.”
~ The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
In this regard, Walter is a strange inversion of Dante’s Virgil — he is Roland’s tormentor and also his guide. In their palaver, he guides Roland forward and even reads his fortune.
“The Hanged Man,” the man in black said. The darkness had given him back his hood. “Yet here, in conjunction with nothing else, it signifies strength, not death. You, gunslinger, are the Hanged Man, plodding ever onward toward your goal over the pits of Na’ar. You’ve already dropped one co-traveler into that pit, have you not?”
~ The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
In tarot, the Hanged Man is one who seeks the inverted perspective by his own will. He is calm, rooted to the heavens, and a halo symbolizes insight, awareness, and enlightenment. And yet, Roland’s card is covered by the Tower, which signifies ambitions and goals made on false premises. Roland will seek, but he will not find all that he wishes. Salvation cannot be won by force. Furthermore, salvation is not found in the triumph of good over evil, or Roland over The Man in Black, but the synthesis of the two.
We like to think that a story is based on the triumph of good over evil; but the deeper truth is that good and evil are superseded and the two become one. Since our capacity for synthesis is limited, many stories can only hint at this unity. But any unity, even a hint, is healing.
~ Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow
Ultimately, Robert Browning does not reveal the ending for his Roland, but King does have the temerity to do so, even if it is unfulfilling. In fact, there is no ending. There is no victory. There is no salvation. Not until our final dissolution can we be at rest. And so, at the end, Roland, King, and each of us brave enough to do so, set forth as we have done before and as we always will: alone, wandering, repeating vaguely remembered paths, and yet inexorably and dogmatically willed to take up the hard quest of living.
