STEPHEN KINGTHE SHINING

THE SPACE OF THE HOTELDomestic horror = intrusion of danger into a safe place – home.Hotels = similar to homes, but also exactly the opposite, because they conflate

the sense of familiarity and belonging with that of extraneousness and anonymity; in Lotman’s terms, they belong both to the IN-space, the protective space of the known, and to the OUT-space, the dangerous space of the unknown.

Hotel = liminal space, located at the intersection of two worlds. In this space, the subject can be both him/herself or another, totally different person, according to the kind of space he/she wants to inhabit in the hotel.

Hotel = place where the conventions of the IN-space (where the self is defined by the network of personal, social and cultural connections and by the rules that govern them) may be suspended, and the inner self, or what we think it is our inner self, may be free to come out.

The OUT-space allows for the emergence of the inner self, thus becoming a reverse image of the IN-space → hotel = space of a reverse uncanny: “traditional” uncanny consists in the sudden de-familiarization of the familiar, but the space of the hotel is a non-familiar space invested by a new familiarity, different from that of the home, and providing the space for a new self (or for the expression of the repressed self).

When Jack Torrance and his family move to the Overlook, he confesses that the hotel very “homey,” a place he would “like to stay forever,” and which causes him a feeling of déjà vu. The Overlook has a womb-like quality to Jack, inside which he engages with a regressive involution, therefore isolating himself, pushing him back to his deeper self.

DOUBLING AND MIRRORING

The Shining: extended metaphor of doubling and mirroring.

Shining refers to Danny’s and Hallorann’s special power: Danny and Hallorann are reverse doubles (a small white child and a gigantic black middle-aged man). But “shining” also means reflecting light – doubling it.

LOOKING AND NOT SEEINGThe name of the hotel, “Overlook,” is an indication

of its duplicitous nature: it refers first to its panoramic landscape view, but it means also both to control, dominate, survey, and to fail to notice, ignore, disregard. And it also means to look on with the evil eye, to bewitch.

Jack Torrance = double of the hotel, because its last name etymologically means “overlooking tower,” and his work is that of “overlooking” the Overlook hotel, while failing to see what the hotel really wants from him.

Constant use of word play → oblique manifestation of the repressed.

GHOSTS AND SPIRITSThe isolation of the Overlook Hotel causes Jack’s

desire for alcohol, but it contains none, and it has no communication with the outside, where alcohol can be found: it is both the drive that triggers desire (the unconscious search for an unchecked pleasure) and the authority function that prevents its fulfillment (the superego sanctioning that those desires are forbidden).

The absence of alcohol is balanced by the presence of ghosts. In the hotel there are no spirits (alcohol), but there are spirits (ghosts) – once again, the hotel is one thing and its opposite.

A GOTHIC HOTELThe physical space of the Overlook recalls

that of Gothic castles, sealed off and isolated from society and with a life of its own, far larger than those of the people inhabiting it, and creating an overwhelming pressure on them: Jack “could almost feel the weight of the Overlook bearing down on him from above, one hundred and ten guest rooms, the storage rooms, kitchen, pantry, freezer, lounge, ballroom, dining room…”

BOILING PRESSURESThe hotel exasperates pressures that are already at

work in Jack before he arrives at the Overlook, as in the episode that leads to his firing at Stovington : “It had nothing to do with willpower, or the morality of drinking, or the weakening or strength of his own character. There was a broken switch somewhere inside, or a circuit breaker that didn’t work, and he had been propelled down the chute willy-nilly, slowly at first, then accelerating as Stovington applied its pressures on him.”

The hotel literalizes/materializes Jack’s fears and inner drives, because his main task as a caretaker is keeping the pressure of the giant boiler that heats the place below the safety level.

JACK = DELBERTStuart Ullman, the Overlook general manager, judged

Jack’s predecessor, Delbert Grady, as being able to handle the isolation because poorly educated (he thought a “less imaginative individual would be less susceptible to the rigors, the loneliness”). Jack replies that it is precisely this lack of imagination that made Grady feel even more heavily the pressure of isolation. But when we meet Grady, we realize he has the capacity for “imaginative thought,” the same faculty Jack possesses as a writer of fiction and plays. Jack is Grady’s double, or better, he is his “original”, because, as Grady says, he has “always been the caretaker.”

THE (DIS-)EDUCATION OF JACK TORRANCE

“Overlooking” means also supervising, superintending, thus hinting at the world of education.

Both Grady and Jack leaves education, the former as a student, the latter as a teacher, and the Overlook hotel becomes a surrogate educational institution for them.

Grady tells Jack that he “left organised education very early, sir. But the manager takes care of his help,” and remarks that Jack has shown “a great interest in learning more about the Overlook Hotel,” adding that a “certain scrapbook was left in the basement for you to find,” because he is a “true scholar”: “Pursue the topic to the end. Exhaust all sources.”

A METALITERARY AUTOBIOGRAPHYJack’s character has clear autobiographical features: King too

had an abusive father and, before the success of his first published novel, Carrie (1974), was an alcoholic, oppressed by the fear of failing as a writer, a husband and a father.

Jack’s “pursuing the topic to its end” is the reverse, negative image of King’s own digging into his own worst fears: Jack falls victim of his search for his inner self, King transforms his anxieties into a creative force.

Shining is autobiographical as well as metaliterary: it focuses both on the inside of the literary work, on its most inner core, on its authors’ deepest fears and anxieties, and on the outside, on the relationships the text has with other texts (Shakespeare, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Stevenson, Shirley Jackson, gothic fiction in general) and on how these links create the networks of meanings of the novel, by using that same education Jack has been excluded from, and keeps being out of his reach when he unsuccessfully tries to write his play.

RISE AND SHINEThe book’s title refers to his son’s telepathic and

prophetic powers. The function of “shining” is a textbook example of the “return of the repressed.” What the conscious mind rejects finds an expression when the subconscious emerges in dreams. Danny’s shining is a way of avoiding the control of the conscious mind and having direct access to the unconscious in a state of dream-like trance.

But, in a book so full of word plays and sayings, “shining” may also refer to the expression “rise and shine” (the word “rise” often recurs in the novel, and the fast-paced action at the end partly takes place on the hotel’s “risers”). The shining is also a metaphor for Danny’s growing awareness of the world, for his “rising” in it.

IMAGINARY AND REAL HORRORS

Concealed behind the ghosts of the hotel’s Imaginary which seduce Jack, the horrors that stalk the Overlook belong to the Real, that which keeps repeating but it cannot be directly seen and recognized, and invisibly re-asserts itself no matter how one seeks to flee it (or worse, it re-asserts itself through the attempts to flee it: the fate of Oedipus, who literalizes his blindness to the Real by pulling out his own eyes). Danny’s obscure visions are manifestation of his fearful awareness of the horrors of the Real.

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHERIn Freud’s account, there are two Fathers: the obscene

“Pére Jouissance” (Lacan) who has access to total enjoyment, and the Name/No (Nom/Non) of the Father – the Father of Law, the Symbolic Order in person, who forbids and mortifies. But, as Slavoj Zizek has shown, the Father of Symbolic Law is not a pre-existent block to enjoyment – rather, it comes into place once the father is killed, in the form of guilt. The Shining twice reverts this dynamics, first because it is the Father who wants to kill his own son in order to have access to his role as Pére Jouissance (pure enjoyment) by pretending to be the Name of the Father, and second because he ends up dying in the attempt. The novel also reverts the Oedipus myth, because it liberates the son from the obscene power of the father without forcing him to kill his father, who is the only repository of the sense of guilt.