meta-fiction: On Stephen King and the Dark Tower. (Spoilers)

2009 February 09 in general by corprew | 4 comments

When Stephen King came to the end of his Dark Tower series, he felt that he had to rewrite the first book The Gunslinger because it was now no longer in sync with the rest of the series.

(Spoiler follows)

I’ve often thought that this reflects the nature of the series as an endless cycle — the first edition of the gunslinger reflects one stage of the cycle, and the revised edition, which has been edited to be a coherent whole with the entire series rather than a collection of short stories, reflects the reality of the book ‘the gunslinger’ in the next cycle of the series.

In general, I think this parallels the end of the series. The gunslinger is a tool of the tower, the last of his kind frozen like a fly in amber until things start to go wrong, then released to solve the problem. The same problem occurs time after time, but with variations on a theme.

For some reason, this idea of the gunslinger as a tool of the tower held in reserve from some iteration of events really appeals to me; I think in part this is because I enjoyed the The Talisman books (the series also includesBlack House, which I greatly recommend.) The books are similar in structure and central conflict, Talisman is in some ways a summary of the Dark Tower books.

To follow through on the metafiction/cycle metaphor, the revised book is (to me) a different run through the cycle than the first. It would be really interesting if the variations on a theme were made explicit, but that’s too large a task for a single author, I suspect.

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  1. corprew’s avatar

    corprew on 2009 February 09 at 1:32 am

    Although I’m not sure to what extent you can have spoilers on a book that’s been in print for this period of time, honestly.

    Also, it’s the sled.

  2. J. T. Glover’s avatar

    J. T. Glover on 2009 February 09 at 4:50 am

    I’d never thought of the revised first edition as an iteration, simply as a revision. Hmm, hmm, and hmmmm. Have to think about that a bit. It’s so strange the mental gymnastics we go through to think about how to understand a series that took about 25 years to write and changed with his style, even if the conclusion of the final book invites us to do so.

    I don’t know what the literary term for this is (if there is a term for it), but I admire those situations where an author frames a story in such a way that its flaws are understood as part of the nature of the story itself. The most recent example of this I’ve read was Theodore Judson’s Fitzpatrick’s War, which is a memoir from a soldier hundreds of years down the road, annotated a century or so after the fact by a scholar. Lot’s of room in there for a reader to say to himself/herself “well, [x] is a problem, but it fits the conventions of memoir,” or something like that. I guess any well-written narrator can serve to subsume flaws and gaps as artifacts of his/her viewpoint.

    Neat post.

  3. elena’s avatar

    elena on 2009 February 27 at 11:08 pm

    King admitted that the direction of the book changed after his near-fatal accident. I remember reading he had the metafiction notion all along but no clear idea of how it was going to play out until he was more or less forced to sit and just FINISH the thing. Many writers of ambtious multipart series have this problem. GRRMartin has run into the same wall.

  4. asiaaaaaa’s avatar

    asiaaaaaa on 2009 March 05 at 6:11 pm

    i just want to say that i am in love with DT. OK.