My MA thesis (2019, Sogang University, Seoul, South Korea) analyzes Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining in terms of reading and writing. The spatial setting of the novel, the Overlook hotel, is a place where the past and the present are indistinguishable. Focusing on this inseparable timeframes, this thesis pays attention to the process in which the past and the present becomes destructed through writing, and the ways in which reading can lead the hauntings of the past into a different future. Firstly, this thesis redefines the father-son relationship between Jack and Danny Torrance as that of the writer as a reader. Defining Jack’s death in terms of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (1967), this thesis locates the source of Jack’s death in his possessive desire to own and represent the past. However, the past is already in the present, making ‘re-presentation,’ an act of bringing the past into the present again, is impossible. Secondly, this thesis anlayzes Danny’s shining ability as a reading ability. The shining ability which renders Danny a vision for the past and the future, is defined as the ability to carefully read the unstable signifiers. Danny does not share his father’s possessive desire for representation and survives from the Overlook hotel as a reader. This survival gives him a chance to continue his life in the future. However, this thesis pays attention to the fact that Tony, Danny’s future self, is already haunted by the past. The name of Tony comes from Danny’s abusive grandfather Anthony, and the undesirable past is repeated in the form of the name-inheritance. Lastly, if the signifier of the future is already haunted by the past, the only way to produce newness for the future is to read the past in different ways. This thesis concludes that Danny can read the past in ways that has not been done before, and that he can open up a future that is different from the past, through such reading.
The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of the thesis. The full text is available on riss.kr
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology defines “represent” as “bring into one’s presence; bring before the mind; [...] RE + PRESENT” (“represent”). The prefix ‘re-’ indicates something “with the sense ‘again’” (“re-”). “Present” derives from “presence,” which means “make [something] present” (“presence”). Going further, “presence” is constituted by “PRE + sēns,”: ‘pre,’ “before” (“pre-”) and ‘sēns,’ “feel” (“sense”). Therefore, representation, in terms of writing, refers to the act of making a past feeling come into presence again by reconstructing that feeling with words. It is interesting that none of the definitions of the fragments that make up the word ‘represent’ are rooted in palpable reality. It is the “sense” of something present, rather than the ‘fact’ that is being re-presented. Already in its etymology, this word that has been problematized from Plato through Roland Barthes to Jacques Derrida is exuding a sense of hauntedness. The word ‘representation,’ in that it is rooted in senses, can easily be explained as an act of re-presenting a feeling that has passed, but somehow remaining in traces, to present it again in the here and now. The act of representation is shaped by the desire to restore the senses of the past into a text; and what is represented is haunted by such senses that surface in the writing process. Therefore, writing, if it is indeed an act of mimesis, cannot be discussed apart from the haunting of the past, or temporalities in general.
This thesis, reading Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining as an allegory of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of an Author,” ##(1)## reconsiders the father-son relationship of Jack and Danny Torrance as that of a writer and a reader. Jack Torrance is an aspiring writer, and Danny is a reader who has just begun to learn how to read. While Jack is destroyed in his obsession to write about the history of the Overlook, Danny survives the haunting powers of that history by reading it in collaboration/cooperation with his mother Wendy, and the head chef of the hotel Dick Hallorann. All three characters who survive have a special ability called ‘shining,’ which I define as fundamentally the ability to read constantly shifting and mutating signifiers that consist of the seemingly unreadable textuality of the hotel. Ultimately, this thesis aims to interrogate how The Shining warns against the possessive writing of the past, and appeal to the responsibility of the reader in rearranging the signifiers of the past in the present so that it opens up the possibility of moving forward into the future. In this sense, the future is a rereading of the past. The past is already haunting the present, as deeply embedded and vividly resuscitated in the haunted present of the Overlook hotel. What is not so apparent is the ways in which The Shining depicts the future as a reflection of the past. Investigating this closely interconnected relationship between the past, the present, and the future, this thesis concludes that the collective and flexible reading of signifiers is a key to reading the past and regenerate its meaning in the present to take us into the future.
The Shining captures the horrors that derive from the unforgotten past which haunts the present, and with the two central characters being a writer and a reader put in the midst of those horrors, exemplifies a situation where the representational activities cannot be separated from temporalities. Indeed, in any representational experience, it is apparent that the text being read in the present has originally been produced in the past. Going back to the hauntedness of representation itself, the text produced in the past in turn embodies in itself the traces of other pasts. Furthermore, because any reading generates interpretations, reading can be understood as a kind of (re)writing. Then, a text produced in the past is not only just read in the present, but it is simultaneously to be reconstituted and rewritten in the future and for the future, although the moment of original inscription would be irrecoverably lost. As such, every text is palimpsestuous. A palimpsest, which means a manuscript or a piece of writing on which old writings have been covered by new writings, serves as an appropriate metaphor in understanding the peculiar timeframe inherent in any literary text. The process of writing and reading the text creates an arena where layers of signs of the past, present, and the future at once come to be accumulated and eventually lose differences from one another. Signifiers are sedimented, and the future can only be imagined in that same arena where the past has an irrepressible existence. In this sense, literary works are inseparably linked to the concepts of time: they are haunted by what has been written, what is being written, and what will be written by all subjects who encounter a text. This is how a text, like an organic being with an agency of its own, comes to trespass and deconstruct the supposed divisions of the past, present, and the future.
Accordingly, this thesis explores the question of presentation revolving around the two axes. One is that of the reading and writing, and the other is that of timeframes. As reading, in its production of interpretations, becomes a form of writing, the binary in the axis of reading-writing can no longer be sustained. They are not dichotomously opposing categories, and activities that happen simultaneously. An evident example is Jack’s writing of the Overlook’s history, which originated in his reading of the haunted hotel’s complex and concealed past. Another is Danny’s reading of signs that are given to him through the shining, such as REDRUM that he eventually reads it as a murder of himself and Wendy by Jack but comes to write it anew as that of his father. The axis of timeframes is revealed to be all haunted by the past. The past persists into the present at the Overlook, as past events, like the masquerade of 1945, reoccur over and over during the Torrances’ stay at the hotel. Also, Jack’s abusive past, such as breaking Danny’s arm in a violent fit of anger, repeat in different forms during their stay. Ultimately, this axis of the past, the present, and the future intersects with the aforementioned axis of reading and writing, because the indistinguishability of reading (the text of the past) and writing (generating new meanings into the future) opens up the possibility that the repetition of the past can be read in different ways by rearranging the signifiers of the past in ways otherwise unknown in the past. In this sense, reading and writing repeat the haunting of the past yet expand it in different directions.
While defining The Shining as a Gothic text is not the central concern of this thesis, it is necessary to situate the issues of deconstructed reading and writing through timeframes in this novel in terms of ‘horror.’ Perhaps what can define The Shining as a Gothic text is its blatant presence of ghosts. In Literature of Terror (1996), David Punter argues that “the elements which seem most universal in the [Gothic] genre are the apparent presence of a ghost” (12). The ghost, who is a revenant from the past, is a representative embodiment of the haunting of the past in the present. Punter, further trying to define gothic literature, argues that “the Gothic [has] a way of relating to the real, to historical and psychological facts,” which is why “Gothic fiction has, above all, to do with terror” (12). Gothic, then, has to do with the terror in the idea of the unending past, past that is indistinguishable from the present. This comes to attest that what is terrifying in gothic literature is the persistence and the return of the past. However, the fact that the idea of the past should invoke terror fundamentally suppresses ‘the other,’ as the past, what is not in the present myself is also a form of the other. This other, the past, constantly invading my present is terrifying, and should be sublimated. By the definition of ‘representation,’ the suppression of the other that does not belong in the presence is an impossible project in literature: the word already embraces in itself the bombardment of what has passed. In this sense, I argue that the Gothic representation has, above all, to do with deconstruction. It is time to embrace, not terrorize, the deconstructions Gothic fiction has been depicting.
Scholars locate the horror in Stephen King as arising from a certain anxiety about how one thing may not be the thing it seems to be. Regarding King and horror fiction, Bernard J. Gallagher argues that “the insight which King offers into the work of horror is based upon a bimodal or dualistic vision which insists upon the necessity of reading between lines” (37). The “dualistic vision” refers to the conventional notion of representation in which a thing is either articulatable or not and it, if the latter, has to be adjusted or compromised according to an acceptable ways of understanding so as to be articulated. However, I do not regard The Shining as a novel that is dictated by such “bimodal” logic. The ghosts in The Shining appear to the characters in the form of their grotesque, terrifying faces, bodies, and voices. As such, they seem to be recognizable in terms of our conventionally Gothic understanding of them as ghosts. Yet, those ghosts are not fully adjusted or compromised in the conventional gothic manner. What they truly signify is much more than how they look on the surface. Furthermore, the relationship between the signifier and the signified at the Overlook is not one to one. It is one to many. Signifiers are unregulated, unpredictable, and explosive at this haunted hotel. This is why I maintain that what lies at the core of The Shining is the deconstruction of the process in writing and reading. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne argue that, “in The Shining, the supernatural motif of the novel is the haunted hotel, but the actual horror elements of the story center more with the disintegration of the Torrance family” (6). Yet what causes that “disintegration of the Torrance family” is the already latent yet increasingly intensified conflict between the writer-Jack and the reader-Danny regarding how to comprehend the “horror elements” that are the ghostly signifiers of the hotel. Indeed, as Heidi Strengell argues, “King has been so concerned with ontology that he constantly writes about multidimensional worlds, universes within universes” (19). While the multidimensional world of significances is how the haunting is represented at the Overlook, in the form of mutative timeframes embodied in signifiers, what I read from The Shining is not so much a “concern” about ontological stability of things, but how a deliberate reading of unstable signifiers can be a means of precarious yet ontological survival itself amidst the inescapable powers of the past.
Despite its limitation, it is important to reflect upon the deconstructive and reconstructive implication of The Shining in relation with Gothic fiction because the genre has been characterized by doubles and binaries. The issue of this dichotomy is crucial in terms of writing, as the division between the representable and the unrepresentable dictates the logic of representation in Gothic novels. In her decisive work The Coherency of Gothic Conventions (1980), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the futile force trying to reunite the split back into its original unified form is the most vital drive in the Gothic novel. She argues,
The self and whatever it is that is outside have a proper, natural, necessary connection to each other, but one that the self is suddenly incapable of making. The inside life and the outside life have to continue separately, becoming counterparts rather than partners, the relationship between them one of parallels and correspondences rather than communication. This, though it may happen in an instant, is a fundamental reorganization, creating a doubleness where singleness should be. And the lengths there are to go to reintegrate the sundered elements—finally, the impossibility of restoring them to their original oneness—are the most characteristic energies of the Gothic novel. (13)
The spatial division of the inside and outside cannot be unified in Gothic literature, and Sedgwick identifies the Freudian psychoanalysis as the locus of such dichotomous critical convention of the genre. She says: “[i]n congruence with this [i.e. divided between the inner and the outer] map of the self, critics of the Gothic, and not only those who describe themselves as psychoanalytic, find it easy to group together on the one hand the surface, reason, and repression and on the other the depths, the irrational, and the sexual” (142). However, I stress that, in The Shining, it is not the “repression” that leads to unrepresentability. It is the always-already haunting presence of the past that makes representation impossible: naturally, one cannot bring into presence what is already present. Again, the binary between the representable and the unrepresentable in The Shining is deconstructed by the inherent persistence of the past.
Reading and writing through the layers of time, the reader and the writer come to be in“separately” related to one another. Putting Sedgwick’s argument in terms of reading and writing, writing can be equated to the “inside life” which refers to an expression of the inner self, and reading can be equated to the “outside life” as the text to be read lies outside to the self and is heterogenous to the self. Sedgwick articulates that “the most characteristic energies of the Gothic novel” is rooted in the impossibility of reconciling the “counterparts” of “the inside life and the outside life”(13). However, when the axis of reading and writing is placed in the center of discussing The Shining, the two seemingly opposing activities of reading and writing indeed “reorganize” themselves into a “communicative” relationship. Then, understanding The Shining through the axes of reading and writing and time not only deconstructs the division of the two textual activities and of the past-present-future, but it also reconstructs the categories previously thought to be irreconcilable as in fact interdependent and incessantly haunting and influencing one another. Jodey Castricano conceptualizes writing in Cryptomimesis (2001) as follows: “writing [...] is learning to let the plurivocal spirit speak, a task which is the gothic equivalent of pursuing a phantom through labyrinthine vaults, being led onwards by the echoes of footsteps” (120). However, in The Shining, it is the reader who learns to speak in such “plurivocal spirit” while the writer deteriorates in his own obsession with authority. And this reader generates meanings like a writer. Reading and writing become a simultaneous process.
In response to various issues of representation as examined above, the thesis presents a discussion of The Shining in the following structure. The first chapter deals with Jack as a writer, exploring the ways in which writing can be understood in terms of playing(1). Despite some apparent resonances between the two activities as pointed out by both Freud and Barthes, writing and playing can potentially be a dangerously combined attempt when the textual material is the past. To do this, I first focus on the fact that Jack wishes to write a play about his personal past, The Little School. The play-writing is significant because Jack is later possessed by the Overlook and reduced to an agent of the autonomy the hotel exerts over him. In other words, he attempts to play with his own past only to be played by the Overlook’s past. Moving onto the concept of writing as representation, I probe into why Jack is inevitably destroyed in his desire to write, yet avoid framing this destruction simply as a writerly failure. Instead, I identify the locus of Jack’s destruction as his obsession with the futile idea of Author-ity. Authority in this sense is the control an author has over his textual material, the power to authoritatively produce a new narrative. Jack is rejected having this power, because the past, his primary inspiration, is essentially ungraspable and inescapably haunting. Then, Jack’s ‘failure’ is not a personal failure but a failure inherent in writing as a representation. Seàn Burke argues that “[w]hat Roland Barthes has been talking of all along is not the death of the author, but the closure of representation” (48). In the case of The Shining, the author literally dies, because representation cannot happen in the haunted hotel.
The second chapter analyzes Danny as a reader. Danny begins by being a reader who is terrified by the fact that signs can mutate. Due to his shining ability, he witnesses certain signifiers like a perfectly ordinary hotel door can mutate into an unexpected signified that hides a not so ordinary, haunted room inside with a bloated corpse of a lady. He also learns to read in order to please the authoritative writer, who happens to be the authoritative member of his family: his father. However, Danny in the end realizing that the meanings embedded in certain signifiers can indeed shift, and that reading these shifting signifieds is a way to escape the Overlook’s inescapably haunting powers. He becomes capable to read the signifiers and rewrites them according to the meanings required for his survival. In this discussion of Danny, I steer away from understanding him as a child hero. As his middle name repeats the abusive figure of Anthony, who also shares the name with Danny’s future self Tony, Danny inherits a piece of the past in himself regardless of his will. In this sense, he is neither young, nor is he a hero. Yet it is ironic that this seemingly powerless and decentralized character, which embodies a certain undesired past, is telepathic with the future, and has comes to secure a future for himself through his survival. This chapter focuses on how reading-writing and past-present-future are deconstructed. These deconstructions derive from the indistinguishable divisions between the two representational activities and the timeframes. Lastly, this chapter concludes that the future is already haunted by the past, which renders reading-rewriting as a viable means to change the significations of sinister repetition of the past.
The ultimate purpose of this thesis is to show how reading is writing, and how the future is already rooted in the past. The repetition of the past is in fact an omnipresent condition and not a horrifying state. The past has inescapable powers, and the dead is always already alive at the Overlook. I propose to think about the future as a rearrangement of textual signs, or signifiers. It is such rearrangement that allows a construction of the future. As Derrida argues in “Signature Event Context” (1988), every sign can be “put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable” (12) ##(2)##. The future is none other than the illimitably generated new contexts. This construction is, however, essentially a reconstruction: it is not an “absolutely new” that eschatologically breaks off from the past, but it is cyclical, because haunting is a semiotic condition in which signs are inescapably circulated among themselves. Understanding this repetition of time foremost as a textual phenomenon opens up a mode of rearranging, reconstructing, and reimagining the future: and the prefix ‘re-’ already manifests that the future, as much as the present, is related to the past. The harm of repetition of time is not healed but rehabilitated through reading and writing, by the replacement and displacement of signifiers. It could not, and should not, be healed, but still would be liberating. The ever-repeated presence of the past can be undone and redone through textual activities of reading and writing.
(Winter 2019)
