Excavating Stephen King: A Darwinist Hermeneutic Study of the Fiction

Stephen King is one of the most popular novelists of our time, and probably the one with the highest number of fiction-induced nightmares on his conscience. His horror stories resonate with people across the globe, but why? What is it about King’s fiction that has catapulted him to the top of the best-seller charts? What, exactly, makes his particular brand of nightmare fuel so incredibly volatile? James Arthur Anderson, a professor of writing and literature at Johnson and Wales University, sets out to answer those questions in his new book. How, he asks, “do we account for Stephen King’s unparalleled popular success as a writer of horror fiction?” The answer, according to Anderson, “may not lie in the traditional realms of the literature departments of the academy, but in the fields of evolutionary psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience” (xv).Anderson’s claim is bold one, and one eminently worth pursuing. It would be highly surprising if the sciences of mind and language had nothing to say about the ability of King’s literary art to resonate with people. And while academic scrutiny of King has grown rapidly over the past several decades, there is almost no research on King’s fiction from an evolutionary perspective, even as evolutionary literary theory has been flourishing during that same period (but see Clasen, “Hauntings of Human Nature”). Anderson’s aim with his book is both ambitious and praiseworthy, but I am not convinced that he fully succeeds. His engagement with evolutionary science—evolutionary literary study in particular—is inadequate, and so his book comes off as a slightly awkward love letter to King, illuminated with scientific doodles in the margins, rather than a probingly consilient theoretical and critical synthesis.I do not mean that to sound as disparagingly condescending as it probably does; after all, I wrote my own awkward love letter to King in the form of a critical essay only a few years ago (a book chapter entitled “Why the World Is a Better Place with Stephen King in It”). I certainly understand the compulsion to mobilize science to prove to the world—in particular, perhaps, a snobbish critical establishment that historically has been dismissive of King—why his fiction has value and how it is so much more than the literary equivalent of a forgettable summer blockbuster. But Anderson’s main claim, which seems to be that King’s popularity is an effect of his ability to “tap into [human] universals” (xx), remains underwhelming. I think the claim is basically true, but it is trivially true. Anderson does develop that claim through the book, but not much. It remains too general and vague. It is almost like saying that houses are popular because they provide shelter for people. In the book’s conclusion, Anderson says that King “appeals to human universals, or basic human nature, if you will. His stories are actually about something and contain the conflict and suspense that people crave. His characters are real human beings . . . His stories are accessible . . . And, finally, they are both enjoyable and say something important and truthful about the human condition” (218). Well, yes. Who could disagree with that? Probably, only radical constructivists who do not believe in “human universals” or “basic human nature,” but Anderson’s book does not carry enough force to sway them anyway. The claim is so broad that it could be used to characterize any number of successful novelists, which robs it of explanatory power, and the problem, I think, is that Anderson’s theoreti-cal toolkit is too crude.The book is divided into four parts. The first part attempts to revive Campbell’s and Jung’s ideas of story archetypes with the aid of evolutionary theory; the second part dives into human universals and their role in King’s fiction; the third part explores what Anderson calls “affective emotions” and King’s ability to depict and evoke emotions; and the fourth part aims to tackle higher-order concepts such as art and storytelling with reference to King. The structure may sound a bit confusing, and that is because it is a bit confusing—meandering, in places associative, not tightly guided by a strong thesis.Anderson’s theoretical toolkit, which he calls “Darwinist Hermeneutics,” aims to “utilize and blend the often-conflicting theories of postmodernism, which privileges language and style, and Literary Darwinism, which incorporates theories of evolution, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, narratology, and even neurolinguistics” (xviii). In practice, though, Anderson rarely reaches for the tool of postmodernism (which is just as well—why would you even try to “blend” “conflicting” theories?). Indeed, he seems a bit embarrassed about some of the tools in his kit, which he self-deprecatingly refers to as a “witches’ brew” (215). For instance, he says that “I will avail myself of multiple theories, including narratology, semiotics, structuralism, deconstructionism, formalism, and Marxism, as needed, and also employ ideas from psychology, sociology, natural selection, and even neuroscience” (xix–xx). Why the “as needed”? Is he referring to Marxism, or to the whole string of items before the comma? Is this like a general physician prescribing antihistamines for your hay fever and then adding, sotto voce, that you might also consider taking a homeopathic treatment, as needed? One gets the impression of a traditionally trained literary scholar who has discovered evolutionary psychology and its raw explanatory power, and who would actually just as soon lose his now-obsolete theoretical baggage by the wayside but feels that maybe that would be a step too radical.Anderson appeals to E. O. Wilson’s idea of consilience—the deep integration of knowledge from the cosmic building blocks of physics to the airy nothings of the humanities—but seems reluctant to fully adopt Wilson’s vision, defaulting instead to a pluralist position. As he says, “multiple approaches allow the critic to look at different elements in a work of literature, and . . . a merger of these analyses gives richer meaning to a text” (xix). I am not convinced by this claim. Such a “multi-faceted” approach lends itself too easily to blandness, to readings with no guiding principle, no overarching claim, or integrated theoretical framework—readings that consist mainly of impressionistic commentary peppered with theoretical claims on an ad hoc basis. Some of Anderson’s readings have that quality.Anderson should be applauded for having recognized the potential of evolutionary psychology to inform literary theory and interpretation, and for attempting to harness that potential in his analysis of King’s popularity, but his engagement with evolutionary literary theory, or literary Darwinism, remains underwhelming. While he refers to a few key works in the field—books by Joseph Carroll (Evolution and Literary Theory, Literary Darwinism), Jonathan Gottschall (The Storytelling Animal), and Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories), for instance—he fails to engage with the most recent theorizing about the adaptive functions of literature, which has been propelled by exciting empirical discoveries as well as substantial conceptual refinements (for an overview, see Jonsson). This oversight may explain why Anderson occasionally veers dangerously close to “vulgar Darwinism” (Carroll, “Three Scenarios”). Vulgar forms of literary Darwinism risk either reducing literature to depictions of universal human behavior or reducing it to a medium for information transmission. Both forms of reduction can carry truth—stories do tend to depict universal human behavior, and they can contain factual information—but such reductions do not make for very interesting literary criticism. Take, for instance, Anderson’s comments on how King’s stories “force us to imagine ourselves in situations of life or death” (218). I think that the basic idea is true, and it aligns with the threat simulation account of horror, which is founded in evolutionary theory (Clasen et al.). But when Anderson then goes on to ask himself, “What would I do if I became lost in the woods?” and then responds that “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon might help me with that problem” (218), the ground gets shaky under his feet. That slim novel, about a nine-year-old who gets lost and almost dies in the wilderness of New England’s vast woodlands, is not a survival manual. Indeed, it holds very little actionable advice about wilderness survival, and the survival advice you can glean from the book—be careful about drinking from streams in the woods, say, or try to avoid bears—could be gained much more economically through a Google search. Or take Anderson’s comment that since “romance and love are a major human universal driven by the need for genes to reproduce themselves, it is no surprise that this theme should appear in King’s fiction” (6). Right, but we need more than that, a more systematic, probing investigation of how King engages with those themes.It is not all vulgarity and reduction, however. Anderson is quite convincing in his reading of King’s The Stand, an apocalyptic epic about a super-flu and its aftermath, when he explains how the good guys are motivated by prosocial, altruistic desire while the bad guys are driven by a selfish thirst for power, and how that dynamic can be explained with reference to human evolution and the egalitarian syndrome. He has some interesting things to say about free will and its depiction in King, and about King’s engagement with gender and gendered violence (even if evolutionary theory plays a negligible role in those discussions, just as it dissolves into the background in the quite long, digressive chapter on foreshadowing and other narratological pyrotechnics in King’s oeuvre). In one of the final chapters, Anderson sets out to give a comprehensive reading of King’s recent short story “Cookie Jar” (2016) in an attempt to demonstrate King’s literary chops. Perhaps tellingly, though, evolutionary theory plays almost no role in that attempt. It is a missed opportunity, one of several, and possibly a symptom of a theoretical synthesis that has not had time to mature and solidify—a toolkit that is too crude. As another example, Anderson observes that while King’s books “can certainly be read for fun on the beach or in an airplane, there is more to them than that. His most powerful scenes are not just read and forgotten. They stay with you long after the book has been put up on the shelf” (219). Yes, but why? We do not get an answer, even though evolutionary psychology could profitably be mobilized to provide such an answer, for instance, with reference to adaptive memory and the kinds of scenarios that enjoy mnemonic advantages in our species.While Anderson’s book is a refreshing corrective to some of the wilder Theory-inflected King criticism out there, it is unlikely to have a big impact on academic King study or evolutionary literary study. But maybe that is not really Anderson’s true ambition—maybe his true ambition is much more modest. He says, toward the end of the book, that he hopes his book has “helped you, Constant Reader [King’s affectionate term for his fans], understand and appreciate King’s fiction a little more” (216). The main barriers to that ambition may be the exorbitant price of the book (for which Anderson cannot be blamed) and its unfortunate tendency toward theoretical and analytical superficiality. But from one King scholar to another—hell, from one infatuated Constant Reader to another: I’m with you! King is the best, and we do need more books and articles to make that case. And while I agree that evolutionary psychology has the potential to be a crucial component in that case, we still need a book-length study to realize that potential.