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.King features a ghoulish young all-American boy ina small California town, a boy who happens to learn that an old man livingnearby is a fugitive Nazi war criminal, a  death doctor in charge ofconcentration camps.What else would this boy do than come suckingaround, plaguing the German for details of the Holocaust?The plot sounds like a great gimmick for a story, like Bradbury sgimmick for The Small Assassin hey, let s have a baby crawl around killingpeople.I can see how The Small Assassin appealed at first to the audience ofteenage boys who originally read it in its pulp magazine appearance, and tothe succeeding generations of teenage boys who discover it in some printingor another of a Bradbury book or an anthology.Unfortunately, I didn t readthe story until after I had had a baby, and I found it hopelessly stupid a greatgimmick for a story, but only a gimmick.Of course, I see the parallels between King s story of a boy s infatuationwith a  real monster and Peter Bogdanovich s film Targets (1968) which starsBoris Karloff in one of his last great roles, as a man who has played moviemonsters all his life.The theme of sniper killers in both is obvious too.Manypeople in America, many people we d consider all-American such asKing do love monsters.What could be better than to have a monster, aNazi war criminal, for your very own?In the notes at the end of SKELETON CREW King calls Apt Pupil  aparticularly good example of this disease I have literary elephantiasis,indicating the story is too long.True, if it had been shorter it would have hadmore impact strictly as a gimmick story I think THINNER is a great shortgimmick story lost in novel-length packaging.But what King does in Apt Pupil is worth the added wordage.He goesbeyond the mere idea of the gimmick to establish a mythic picture of themental decay of the American boy, a boy interested in monsters who in duecourse of time becomes interested in murder, and the parasitic relationshipof the Nazi and the monster fan.It is one of the few King stories in whichthe material he normally presents as sub-text becomes the text: we maybecome monsters too here s how.It is Stephen King, bestselling horrorwriter, working with material I think no one else could exploit as well,40 Don Herroncreating a tale of such large proportions and such resonance that it will defyeasy pigeonholing by the academic hordes.In a word, it is the story where King takes the material which seemsmost uniquely his own, and makes literature out of it.CLARE HANSONStephen King: Powers of HorrorPREFATORY MATTERSIn order to approach the power of horror in Stephen King s work we mustmove circuitously, towards the glimpsed abyss via accounts of the origins ofpersonality offered by psychoanalytic theory, specifically by Freud, Lacanand Julia Kristeva.King s fiction is concerned above all with origins, with thegrounds of being.His work betrays a fascination with those primary/primalmovements and experiences which impel or force the construction of the selfas a gendered social being.I shall argue that his work itself displays or followsan exemplarily  masculine trajectory, moving as it were from  mother to text : in order to show this I must reverse this experiential order to followthe epistemological order of psychoanalytic theory, which developed from aconcentration on  text to a concentration on  mother in its movementfrom Freud to Kristeva.I begin with Freud, and his account of the development of the self.According to Freud, one of the most striking and distinguishing features ofthe human animal is its extreme and extended dependence on its parentsafter birth.The human being is born, so to speak, prematurely, and requiresunceasing vigilance and care before it is able to function independently of itsparents.The  family situation is thus more or less  given in theconstruction of human personality, although the nature of the family willFrom American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, ed.Brian Docherty, pp.135 154.© 1990 by The Macmillan Press.4142 Clare Hansonvary from society to society.Freud also suggests that, while we are born withcertain fixed biological needs, such as our need for food, these needs soonbecome  perverted as they become associated/confused with sensations ofpleasure (for instance, the pleasure which the infant derives from sucking atthe breast).A drive to pleasure is thus established existing independently ofneed: the object of desire in this sense is by no means fixed (unlike the objectof biological need the breast, for instance).Displacement is thus aninherent part of desire from its inception as part of human experience.The child in this early stage of development is asocial.She or he cannotbe a social animal without a preliminary sense of the self as distinct fromothers.The movement into social life occurs, according to Freud, via theOedipus complex, or Oedipal moment.In the early months of life the childexists in a dyadic relationship with the mother, unable to distinguish betweenself and (m)other.The child is forced out of this blissful state through the intervention of the father.The shadow of the father falls between the childand the mother as the father acts to prohibit the child s incestuous desire forits mother.At this point, the child is initiated into selfhood, perceiving itselffor the first time as a being separate from the mother, who is now consciouslydesired because absent, forbidden.The origin of self thus lies for Freud inthis absence and sense of loss.It is too at the point of repression of desire forthe mother that the unconscious is formed, as a place to receive that lostdesire, and it is at this point of repression that the child s early transgressivedrives become organised and forced towards genital (and gendered) sexuality.It is now generally agreed that Freud s account of the little boy spassage through the Oedipus is much more satisfactory than his account ofthe little girl s: it is hard to escape the conclusion that this was because thetheory was originally founded on the case of the boy, the theory for the girlbeing something of a lame extrapolation from an already gendered theory.Yet we must look briefly at Freud s account of both the male and femalepassage through the Oedipus, as it provides the basis for almost allsubsequent theories of the origins of sexual identity.For the male child at theOedipal moment, it is the father s threat of castration which forces him toabandon his incestuous desire for the mother.As the desire is repressed thechild has to move away from the mother, but, in giving up the hope ofpossessing the mother now, the male child does not give up the hope of atsome time occupying the place of the father.He is able from this moment toaspire to fatherhood himself, to train himself to occupy the position offather/patriarch.For the little girl the case is far different [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]