Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed:

King’s The Shining as Dark Carnival

Linda J. Holland-Toll

One of the more common claims for the manner in which horror fic-
tion functions argues that it affirms societal values. This argument is
extremely problematic as it implies that there are both monolithic social
values and a monolithic voice which can affirm them. The argument,
mounted by numerous critics of horror fiction, among them Stephen
King in his critical work Dame Macabre, claims that horror fiction
works to reaffirm our sense of community and our essential humanity. In
Nietzschean terms, for example, King sees the Dionysian, the forces of
ecstacy and disorder, constantly subsumed into and appropriated by, the
Apollonian, the voices of harmony and control and order. Horror fiction,
in other words, showcases the Dionysian in order to foreground and
privilege the Apollonian. According to this paradigm, the restoral of
order is the main concern of horror fiction (75). In Dame Macabre, King
claims that horror fiction is as conservative as a Republican in a three
piece suit (which is pretty conservative of late) and that this fiction
works for restoral of community norms by introducing disorder akin to
Bakhtin’s carnivalization, and then containing and resolving the threat-
ening disorder into order again (42). For many texts, this is indeed true,
at least on the surface, but many, if not most, horror texts raise questions
of what exactly is being affirmed and by and for whom; to which
voice/s, in other words, do we listen? As Jeremy Hawthorn points out,
“A voice...refers the listener not just to an originating person, but to a
network of beliefs and power relations which attempt to place and situ-
ate the listener in certain ways” (153). But any attempt to situate the lis-
tener in terms of certain specific meanings is doomed to failure as most
horror texts are too open-ended to be read as one voice or one situation,
which problematizes the view of affirmation and restoral. Much horror
fiction is temporarily affirmative of certain agendas at best and much
other horror fiction begs the question of exactly what affirmation is,
what exactly it affirms, if anything, as well a? to, for, and q whom the
affirmation is made. I would argue that a text which leaves many prob-
lems unresolved, which works by fragmenting and disestablishing the
131
I32 . Journal of Popular Culture

community mores, by excluding certain groups from its community, by

utilizing the upsetting of hierarchy so intrinsic to carnival, by resisting
resolution and closure, which has the result of bringing a searchlight to
play on the hidden depths of the human psyche, the place where the
monsters live, may be enlightening or cathartic, but may not necessarily
affirm anything whatsoever. An apt metaphor for horror fiction is that of
the warped but true carnival mirror, the mirror that sees the soul and
reveals all the disleases, simultaneously forcing us to recognize all the
hidden monster-seeds within ourselves and within our society. Horror
fiction not only turns the carnival mirror on us, giving us a sense of the
truths beneath the surfaces, but also uses this mirror to examine the cul-
ture from which w e take our values and in which we shape them.
Bakhtin’s views of carnival, with its emphasis on ambivalency and
eccentricity, life-in-death, paired and antinomous images, and multiplic-
ity are useful in discussing how certain types of horror fiction work; in
this article, I will employ some of Bakhtin’s critical terminology dis-
cussed in his text The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, notably
polyphony, heteroglossia, and carnivalization, to discuss ways in which
Stephen King’s The Shining is non-affirmative in nature. Polyphony, the
plurality of voices, is of great importance because there are so many
competing voices in The Shining; heteroglossia, the multiplicity of
social languages, comes into play because as Bakhtin notes, “all utter-
ances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces prac-
tically impossible to recoup” (Dialogic 428). Polyphony and heteroglos-
sia are intrinsic to an understanding of the function of carnival as it
occurs in The Shining.
In Problems of Dostoevsky S Poetics, Bakhtin discusses carnivaliza-
tion at length; he, defines carnivalization as forging a new relationship to
reality, as being consciously based on experience as opposed to legend,
and as employing deliberate multifariousness and discordance (Problems
87-89). He notes the carnival genres deliberately refuse unity by utiliz-
ing a multiplicity of tone and also argues that

The primary carnival performance is the mock crowning and subsequent dis-
crowning of the king of carnival .... The basis of the ritual performance of
crowning and discrowning the king is at the very core of the carnivalistic atti-
tude to the world-the pathos of vicissitudes and changes, of death and
renewal. (Problems 102)

When the ccmnection t 3 masquerade is added, and when the reader

remembers iack’s belief that the Overlook Hotel wants him and not his
son, a scene which is placed during a masquerade, with the cries of
 Bakhtin ’s Carnival Reversed . 133

Unmask, unmask, permeating the air, when the use of ambivalence, the
use of eccentricity, the ritual of violation of the usual and accepted,
comes into play and finally, when the idea of fire as destroyer-and-
renewer is added, carnivalization illuminates the text although perhaps in
a way somewhat different from the original usage of the term (Problems
104).
In Bakhtinian terms, furthermore, the use of both carnival and het-
eroglossia subverts authoritative discourse, and this is exactly what
much horror fiction does. The sense of capering glee, to which King
referred when writing his epic novel of apocalypse, The Stand, in which
he writes he felt like he was doing “a fast happy tapdance on the grave
of the world,” which informs much of King’s work, for example, does
not precisely work to privilege the Apollonian, but instead works to
overthrow all the authoritative discourse which is often used to construct
social norms by constantly revealing the inherent instability and contra-
dictory status of “authoritative discourse” itself (Danse 398). When King
employs rampant polyphony, in which competing voices have equal
rights, he also employs carnival, which works well to extend the
DionysiadApollonian matrix, though I will argue that his sense of carni-
valization is substantially darker than Bakhtin’s original definition of the
term. Bakhtin’s idea of reduced, i.e., ironic or parodic laughter, is also of
great importance in King’s The Shining (Problems 137). King’s carnival
has laughter, of course, but it is often exclusionary laughter; the laughter
in the dark carnival provides neither a safety valve nor a site for working
out, but often, I would argue, a site for contention or entrapment, both of
which refuse resolution. Jack Torrance laughs quite a bit during his stay
at the Overlook Hotel, but much of the laughter is parodic and ironic;
most of it is also very didease provoking. King employs Jack’s increas-
ingly manic laughter to foreground both the carnivalization and het-
eroglossialpolyphony Bahktin discusses, which reveal the Dionysian
influences that constantly work to subvert and destroy the Apollonian
overlay of American society. The malicious entity that is the Overlook
Hotel attempts unsuccessfully to incorporate Wendy and Danny into its
control; the hotel quite successfully appropriates Jack, but is less suc-
cessful with the rest of the family who do successfully resist the siren
call of the Overlook. The laughter itself is polyphonous, composed as it
is of the many voices of many “ghosts” who haunt the Overlook.
The strategies of carnivalization as polyphony and heteroglossia thus
work to lay bare the less affirmative stance horror fiction frequently
employs. The Overlook Hotel in King’s The Shining functions as a
polyphonous repository of the darker aspects of carnival. The allusions
to Poe’s The Masque ofthe Red Death, with its constant reiteration of
134 . Journal of Popular Culture

Unmask, unmask, serves to both evoke the images of a masquerade, the

inverse of the carnival mirror, and remind the reader of the fatal aspects
of a carnival. To extend the concept of carnival a bit further, if indeed
carnival and polyphony imply the working out “in a concretely sensuous,
half-real and half-play acted form, a new relationship between individu-
als, counterpoised to the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of
non-carnival life,” then what happens when the working out goes awry
becomes a very interesting question (Problems 101). If the carnival life
becomes destructive, becomes a dark carnival instead of a site for work-
ing out or a safety valve, what effect might the nonresolution of the con-
flict between the carnival and authoritative discourse have? What if, like
the boiler at The Overlook, in which a failed safety valve blows the hotel
sky high, carnivalization works to blow the societal constructs we accept
sky high?
King continually employs Bahktin’s view of the novel as dialogic
and open-ended, composed of heteroglossic voices in constant competi-
tion; this view works extremely well as a framework and referent to dis-
cuss exactly what competing forces work to shape the characters and
action of The Shining. As Bakhtin notes, the novel must be composed of
these heteroglossic voices and must reflect not a privileged, distanced
and monolithic discourse, but the speech of every day, Sasseure’s parole,
embedded in the langue (Dialogic 263). Voices dead and alive, past and
present, authoritative and subversive, internally persuasive and societally
grounded, real and unreal, privileged and unprivileged, from different
regions and different classes and different economic levels, with differ-
ing interests and agendas clash all the way through the novel, thus show-
casing the various all-powerful and contradictory societal aspects of the
characters who live within and are necessarily formed by, their society.
King’s The Shining aptly illustrates the manner in which a text can
deconstruct both the man and the society he inhabits. In The Shining,
Stephen King creates Jack Torrance, human monstedman. Jack Torrance
is easily one of the most dichotomous and terrifying characters King
brings to life. He is at one and the same time a devoted father and hus-
band and an alcoholic homicidal maniac. Who is the “real” Jack
Torrance? Is he the rising young fiction writer and teacher of English at
Stovington Preparatory School or the man who broke his three-year-old
son’s arm for spilling beer on his papers and who later chases him
through the hall of the Overlook Hotel armed with a roque mallet? The
nurturing male model or a homicidal maniacal alcoholic? And more
important than what, is, of course, why. If Jack Torrance is not what he
initially appears to be, that is, a positive and affirmative being, but
 Bakhtin ’s Carnival Reversed . 135

instead is a monster inhabiting the “man suit,” what forces have shaped
him as a monster? To what voices does Jack listen?
The constant evocation of booze-filled parties, filled with fragments
of speech, both real and unreal, the voices of the dead owners of the
Overlook Hotel, the hallucinatory cries of “unmask, unmask” which res-
onate back to Poe’s discourse on the unreal, the radio blaring the authori-
tative and reactionary discourse of Jack’s dead father, and the priggish
voice of Stuart Ullman, the Hotel’s manager and concretization of
authoritative discourse, all undercut and contradict the image of Jack as
a proponent of the forces of the Apollonian.
In the opening scene, for example, Jack nods, apparently agreeing
with Ullman’s pedantic and priggish rhetoric, while his internal speech,
flashes, italicized, as “oficious little prick” (Shining 3 ) and he smiles, “a
PR smile, large and insultingly toothy” (Shining 6). In spite of the fact
that Jack desperately needs this job, he can control neither his inner dia-
logue, his own reaction, nor the outer manifestation of his contempt for
Ullman, the insulting grin. In counterpoint, his wife, Wendy, uneasily
observes and voices internal womes about the whole situation while
Danny’s instant dislike of the Hotel also resonates internally. When these
voices are coupled with Danny picking up fragmented flashes of the
departing clientele-Danny wonders why a woman depicted as snobbish
and stem, for example, would like to get into the bellman’s pants-a
polyphonic atmosphere, which continues and increases through the
novel, is established. In addition, Danny has an “invisible friend,” named
Tony, who warns him of approaching danger; Tony is not only Danny’s
friend, but Danny himself as he will be in 10 years. And Tony functions
not only to reassure Danny but also to frighten him as well. Dick
Halloran, the black chef who shares the strong telepathic and precogni-
tive abilities that he calls “the shine,” with Danny and who talks to
Danny about the Overlook, is yet another layer of the voices which com-
pete for authority within the text. All these voices jostle over the seem-
ingly empty Overlook Hotel, but all of them, as it turns out, link with the
past voices of the Overlook, which is, in turn, a metaphor for the society.
And all the past voices entice Jack into the “carnival mode,” which ulti-
mately destroys him.
The unease within The Shining, which is reflected by the constant
array of voices competing for attention, concentrates on various societal
uneases and various ways of defining and talking about these uneases.
Certainly it is an easy text to interpret in accordance with the contention
that horror fiction uses heteroglossia and polyphony, by definition
aspects of carnival, to examine societal unease. Jack could be readily
susceptible to the alienating and inhuman song of the Overlook precisely
136 . Journal of Popular Culture

because he is damaged from his childhood by the authoritative and con-

servative discourse of his father and the meek and submissive response
of his mother, which form a contradictory dialogic, or because the siren
call of the Overlook, with its constant emphasis on the dark carnival is
already present within Jack; the all-too-alluring call to Dionysian revelry
is too tempting to be readily resisted. Jack, after all, ends by rejecting
almost every societal standard which exists in favor of the carnival of the
Overlook. As Jack inhabits the Overlook, he becomes increasingly prone
to overthrowing existing hierarchies and commonly accepted societal
mores as well as constantly challenging previously accepted standards of
behavior in a manner considerably less innocent than the eccentricity
which characterizes Bakhtin’s carnivalization. A recurring motif con-
cerning the hotel is that “This inhuman place makes human monsters”
(Shining 142). Jack chases his son down the hall, brandishing the roque
mallet, a double-headed croquet mallet, with commands to “...come and
take your medicine like a man” (417). If carnival employs the mild
eccentricities of using household utensils as weapons, wearing clothes
inside out, etc., the darker carnival ends with Jack reversing every single
societal more which exists; one does not administer a child’s medicine
with a roque mallet, but with a spoon; the ironic reversal here from
Bakhtin’s utensil as weapon to Jack’s murderous weapon as utensil, is
devastating (Problems 104). The concept of carnival as a working out is
reversed as well; nothing is being worked out at the carnivalistic
Overlook, despite the many aspects of carnivalization. Everyone at the
Overlook is indeed a participant; the Overlook is both stage and world,
but instead of temporarily and positively upsetting the hierarchies and
bringing people into “$freefamiliar contact,” this carnival alienates and
kills (Problems 101).
If, however, this temptation is so desirable, this carnival so irre-
sistible, the process of monster making so inevitable, then Wendy and
Danny and Dick Halloran’s instinctive unease amounting to repulsion
must be accounted for. Why are they not only immune to the forces that
Jack finds ultimately irresistible, but how and why do they instantly rec-
ognize the dangers of the hotel? To what voices do they listen? Amid the
rampant atmosphere of carnival and heteroglossia, only Jack succumbs.
As Tony says, “Your father...is with the hotel now, Danny. It’s where he
wants to be” (Shining 420).
A useful reading of King’s novel concentrates on how the het-
eroglossia is orchestrated to reveal the contradictory attitudes within
society. But society is too amorphous, too large a construct, to deal with
in one novel. Thus, King uses the isolation of the Overlook Hotel, a
famous hotel with an infamous history, to discuss how easily the het-
 Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed . 137

eroglossic societal forces which humans have shaped and live with can
create monsters out of perfectly nice guys.
In many ways, The Shining is one of King’s most dideaseful novels.
It is not easy to identify and isolate the monsters in this novel because
we have too many languages present to isolate a “one size fits all” defin-
ition of monster. It is not the idea that Jack is a monster which is so dis-
comforting; it is that Jack Torrance reflects so many people in the soci-
ety, who would not like to think of themselves as monsters, and who,
indeed, to all appearances, are not monsters. As Jack Torrance says, in
the midst of his devolution to monster status, “Please God. I’m not a son
of a bitch” (Shining 114). But this comment embodies several types of
speech, a prayer, Jack’s personal vision of, and hope for, himself, and
acknowledgment buried beneath the prayer that he is, indeed, a son of a
bitch. At the root of his vision of himself, though, is the view that he has
been shaped by societal forces, which the narrator, yet another voice in
the novel, articulates:

For he still felt that the whole range of unhappy Stovington experiences had to
be looked at with Jack Torrance in the passive mode. He had not done things;
things had been done to him .... When you stuck your hand into the wasps’ nest
[of life] you hadn’t made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self
with its trappings o f love and respect and honor. It just happened to you.
Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the mind and became a
creature of the nerve endings; from college educated man to wailing ape in five
seconds. (Shining 110)

In this very short passage, yet more voices emerge; the devil counter-
points the God with whom Jack pleads; the psychological jargon of
“passive mode,” emerges, logical speech, with its undertones of Western
tradition, Enlightenment thinking, and Darwinian evolution, is present-
all are embedded within the text, all in opposition. Which is Jack-the
wailing ape or the college educated man?
At other times, Jack sees himself as a whining self-pitying failure,
and at still other times, the voices he hears in the Overlook define who
he is. This interwoven multiplicity of voices makes it extremely difficult,
if not impossible, to follow a single voice through the maze and define
that single voice as “the voice.”
All of the discordant voices of society coupled with all the causality
assigning speeches in society also make it very difficult indeed to define
a norm of any kind. The Shining is clearly concerned with abuse+hild
abuse, wife abuse, self abuse, substance abuse-all figure heavily in The
Shining. After all, the many kinds of conflicting voices postulate many
138 . Journal of Popuhzr Culture

disparate speakers and experiences. Too many readers can think, a shade
uneasily, “I know someone like Jack ....” Who, after all, does not know
the guy who’s a great guy until he has that last drink and turns a little,
well-perhaps a lot-mean. Indeed, what parent has not experienced
times when overstepping the boundary between discipline and abuse
would be all too easy. Take the child who whines in K-Mart until the
impatient father yanks him by the arm.Instead of the intended and mild
come-along, the child ends up screaming from a dislocated shoulder, or
the harassed mother who, finally unable to cope, shakes the colicky
child, not just into silence but also into brain death. And the question is
not whether these happen but why, what forces work within our culture
to shape the attitudes on child rearing which we, as citizens of the com-
munity, reflect. To what voices do we listen? It is here that the uses of
heteroglossiu in all its contradictory levels is a useful tool. The authorita-
tive discourse which Bakhtin views as attempting to be monolithic
deconstructs in this society and works to foreground the pervading sense
of unease. His definition of polyphony,

A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness; a genuine

polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact a chief characteristicof Dostoevsky’s,
[as well as most modernist] novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude
of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single
authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousness, with equal rights
and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the
event. (Problems 4)

indicates the possibilities for contradictory and irreconcilable discourse

and hence for unease. Although Bakhtin is referring to Dostoevsky,
polyphony has a more universal application; certainly King employs it
extensively.
What does one do with a case of child abuse? Where do we assign
the blame for abuse-on the perpetrator or on the generational example,
or on the substance abuse? To what voices do we listen? Which dis-
course do we employ? The Biblical language which bids us “Spare the
rod and spoil the child?’ Our parents’ voices? The views espoused in
magazines proliferating in kiosks? Voices which dominate trash TV
retailing chilling and horrible abuse? Tearful confessional voices? The
voices of doctors and psychologists? The voice of reason or the voice of
intuition? All of these voices have their own validity; furthermore, all
these voices claim authority, and by their very jostling existence serve to
undercut any idea of monolithic authority. Rejecting the medical doctor’s
reassuring view on Danny’s telepathic ability, for example, Wendy,
 Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed . 139

Jack’s wife, recognizes the conflict when she says flatly, “The doctor
was full of shit and we both know it. We’ve known it all the time”
(Shining 247). But rejecting the comforting and authoritative medical
discourse leaves her prey to the forces of unreality. In the doctor’s office,
she hesitantly offers another kind of speech, the speech of wise women,
when she says Danny was born with a caul, a reference to the old wives’
tale, yet another example of heteroglossia and laughs with relief at his
kindly dismissal, which is, after all, simply a refutation of the discourse
we label “folk wisdom,” or less kindly, “old wives’ tales.” But, as one
would expect in horror fiction, the conflicting and unprivileged view is
more accurate than the authoritative medical discourse, which again
works to call into question all the societal views we have formed. As in
the more usual carnivalization, eccentricity, the overturning of hierar-
chies, provides more useful knowledge than the privileged medical dis-
course.
As noted earlier, a recurring motif in The Shining is that an inhuman
place makes human monsters. The Overlook Hotel is a repository of the
evil acts committed on its premises and like a battery it discharges evil,
in this case by way of seductive speech and laughter. The whole idea of
the multivoiced, many-faceted speech of the Overlook Hotel is that it
serves as a metaphor for the conflicting speech of American society. In
this reading, the Torrance family is indeed “microbes trapped in the
intestine of a monster...” (Shining 21 1). Theoretically, the caretaking
position for which Jack has been hired will enable him to save his mar-
riage and preserve his family, finish his play, reestablish his academic
reputation, and perhaps regain his teaching position; in reality, the
Overlook is a metaphor for a society run amok. If the Torrances are the
microcosm, then the Overlook, isolated and self-contained, is the macro-
cosm. Within the hotel, the environment reflects America’s love affair
with the twin corruptions of alcohol and violence-it is little wonder
Jack reverts to an alcoholic mindset despite the total absence of actual
alcohol. As a culture we are very ambivalent about alcohol-we guard
its use with various taboos and rituals and prohibitions, but efforts to
make it illegal have never prospered. We do not see alcohol in terms of
blighted lives, but in terms of sophisticated and glamorous people: to
drink is to be one of these privileged people. Societal icons hawk beer on
television, billboards strongly imply that drinking Black Velvet will get
one a svelte beauty encased in same, rites of passage to adulthood
employ alcohol as does the American idea of gracious living and the
good life. Even when a sit-com portrays a hangover, there is something
humorous about it, something worth bragging about in its acquisition. In
addition, alcohol is the touchstone by which many men define their man-
140 . Journal of Popuhr Culture

hood. To be unable to handle alcohol is to be, by definition, emasculated.

On the other hand, these same billboards and commercials, regulated by
another type of authoritative discourse, to whit, legal requirements, state
bluntly that alcohol causes health hazards and must be restricted. The
liquor bottle from which one pours a glamorous glass also informs the
imbiber that this substance causes birth defects if used during pregnancy
and may cause other health problems. Of course, the descriptions and the
advertising do tend to overshadow the Surgeon General’s legitimate
warnings. To which conflicting language do we listen? The possibility of
the blonde in black velvet, the idea of charm and sexual magnetism
intertwined with alcoholic consumption, or the possibility of death by
the decidedly unglamorous death of drunken driving or cirrhosis of the
liver? Alcohol, in its hereroglossic and polyphonic guise, is thus heavily
freighted culturally by many different voices, all of which dispute and
claim sole authority. What is more, these voices are all considered valid.
And King exploits this conflict to the full.
There is more to Jack Torrance than a susceptibility to atmosphere.
One of the most tormented characters in King’s novels, Torrance is also
himself a victim of alcoholism and child abuse, who recognizes these
forces, but is nevertheless destroyed by them. King weaves a very tan-
gled history for Jack, a frustrated teacher and writer, with an “anger con-
trol” problem and a penchant for destroying his chances of success. It is
with alcohol that Jack both celebrates his victories and consoles himself
in defeat, a situation that mirrors the current situation in the society. Get
a raise? Have a drink! Get fired? Have a drink, or perhaps two, or
three.... When he has to quit drinking because he is becoming increas-
ingly unstable and violent, he proceeds, perhaps subconsciously, to sabo-
tage not only his own life but that of his family’s. In effect, he recreates
himself as his father, an abusive violent drunk. His father’s voice, the
iconic authority of his childhood instructing him through a radio, a
symbol of mass media influence, will finish the metaphoric function of
the hotel. In addition, one of the minor characters in the novel also meta-
morphosed by the Overlook, works with another kind of discourse to
push Jack into the final monster status. Delbert Grady, the caretaker
prior to Jack, killed his wife, his daughters and himself the previous
winter. Delbert Grady, says the priggish Stuart Ullman, the hotel’s gen-
eral manager, drank and became a victim of cabin fever. He was also
uneducated. Jack identifies the problem, apparently correctly, as a lack
of resources other than television and “cabin fever.” Since h e has
stopped drinking and is highly educated, he does not feel that the situa-
tions are synonymous. But of course they are. What is more, as Jack
descends both figuratively and literally ever deeper into bowels of the
 Bakhtin ’s Carnival Reversed . I41

monster breeding Overlook, he sees revenants of the Overlook. Among

them is Delbert Grady, who has metamorphosed to a very suave, very
elegant and precisely spoken British butler type who proceeds to chastise
Jack for having less than perfect control over his family and to explain
that he effectively chastised his family. Indeed, he did. An axe is an
effective chastiser. He also points out that the Overlook has no need for
Jack in any capacity if he cannot both drink and control his family. Jack,
seduced by the Overlook with its tarnished and sinister reputation, antin-
omously loving and hating the hotel and his wife and child, and long
past the ability to differentiate between voices, which Wendy, Danny and
Dick Halloran do possess, falls easy prey to this rhetoric of appropria-
tion. But it is not the physical horror hotel and the physical horror hotel
only which King is discussing. It is also a society which defines man-
hood and parenting in various destructive ways and then recoils in horror
from those that fall victim to the siren song. Unlike the readily identifi-
able monsters, we recoil the more in horror from Jack because he could
so easily be one of us. Jack is the guy next door, the one who likes a
good time a little too much, hoists a few “martooneys,” or beers, or
whatever, a little too often, gets a little on edge, and tries to murder his
wife and kid.
As the hotel reflects in miniature the isolation we experience in soci-
ety, so the conflicting voices carefully delineate the contradictory feel-
ings we have on domestic abuse. In general, we feel parents have the
right to discipline their children as they see fit; we are chary of too many
laws restricting parental rights. Many proponents of the Christian Right
would have us believe that the father has absolute rights of discipline
over not only over his children but also over his wife. St. Paul’s ukase,
“Wives, be subject to your husbands...” is a favorite text (5:22). Wives
who do not hit the deck running, so to speak, are subject to “home cor-
rection,” and rightly so in Jack’s increasingly seduced mind. This has
been the case in Jack’s family; when his father beats his mother insensi-
ble with a cane, the mother, instead of pressing charges, holds the hand
of the parish priest and refuses to press charges. Jack’s father lies, claim-
ing a fall down the stairs, at which the family doctor sneers, and the chil-
dren are dumbfounded into a complicitous silence. Here indeed are a
jumble of discourses jostling for attention and validity, but temporarily
silenced by the authoritative discourse of the father. Jack’s father’s patri-
archal authority and the religious discourse of the Catholic priest
(Wives...) occupy one reach of the spectrum and the fact that Jack has
heard and seen his father lash out in a senseless rage fueled by alcohol,
the other; these points must necessarily conflict with each other. Either
Jack’s father has a right, validated by the patriarchal culture he espouses
142 . Journal of Popular Culture

and the religious and misogynistic fascism of the Catholic Church, to

beat his wife with a cane for disobeying a command to get him coffee
and being tacitly rebellious by silence and inaction, or he does not.
These are definitely competing situations and competing voices. As a
result of his mother’s complicity in the authoritative discourse, which
effectively silences the legal voice, Jack’s older brothers leave the family
in disgust at his father’s abuse and his mother’s meek acceptance.
Although Jack is only nine at the time, he recognizes that his father is
abusive. At least on the conscious level, he rejects both the patriarchal
authority and matriarchal submissiveness. Consequently, he both loves
and hates, fears and admires, accepts and rejects his father, a fact clearly
evidenced to the reader by the constant appearance of these same con-
flicting voices. Once again, Bakhtin’s carnivalization illuminates the
text:

all images of carnival are two-in-one images; they unite within themselves poles
of change and crisis; birth and death...benediction and damnation...praise and
condemnation,youth and age, top and bottom, face and backside, stupidity and
wisdom. Paired images...are characteristic of the carnival mode....” (Problems
103-04)

And under the influence of the monstermaking hotel, under the influence
of society’s contradictory voices on child abuse, Jack becomes the child
who is father to the man. In the process of turning from Jack Torrance to
a human monster, he hears his father’s voice, on the radio, the medium
which is the voice of society, and his father’s raging pig-like squeal com-
mands him to take control. And Jack Torrance, loving husband and
father and human monster, decides to assert his masculine rights and
administer the so called “medicine,” the necessary discipline. He runs
raging through the halls, chasing his terrified wife and son with a roque
mallet. Bakhtin’s carnival has metastasized from the temporary and con-
tained overturning of societal hierarchies and expectations to unre-
strained disorder. And we, as readers, are shocked and appalled by his
rabid viciousness. But why should we be shocked? How much of this
horror text lies in the realm of fantasy? Granted, we do not usually
encounter a physical space impregnated with evil; nor would we readily
accept an argument that a mere physical structure could so influence
behavior. Yet, if the Overlook is read as a metaphor for a corrupted soci-
ety, a society corrupted by power and money and skewed values, a soci-
ety in which the competing voices are so myriad and the proponents of
alcohol so internally persuasive, the contradiction dissolves.
 Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed . 143

The problem of child abuse does not resolve itself so easily, but the
process works in the same way as the heteroglossia surrounding alcohol.
Our electronic and print media, after all, make certain we are no stranger
to children tortured to death by their parents. Particular cases come read-
ily to mind. Children tortured to death by parents who claim substance
abuse and demonic possession are commonplace in this particular soci-
ety. So is society’s short attention span and fascinated horror. The prob-
lem, unfortunately, does not exist in tracking down such stories, but in
the ease with which they are tracked down. The horror also exists in the
ease with which a heteroglossic society uses various authoritative dis-
courses to explain, and, by unspoken speech, excuse or mitigate child
abuse. Sociologists and psychologists call on environmental and heredi-
tary forces, church leaders speak of demonic possession, or attempts to
save the child from demonic possession, “bleeding heart” liberals blame
the system, the system blames the political rhetoric of retrenchment, the
conservative view casts the blame on the liberal machinations which
degrade “family values,” at the same time employing a monolithic and
nonexistent construct of those values, and the average citizen, head
whirling with heterglossic overdose, is both pitying and repulsed.
Thus, King’s masterly portrayal of a man caught in forces he does
not understand and cannot master aptly reflects camivalization as a state
of fragmentation and antinomy; the fragmenting and conflicting voices
occur because Jack is still human, and we recognize him as such. There
are no easy answers in The Shining-not for the surviving characters and
not for the readers. What does this particular novel affirm? Nothing, in
and of itself. By itself, it is nothing more than a horrorbook about a psy-
chic kid with a “shine,” a monstrous parent and a hotel possessed by
evil. But because King so perfectly employs a seductive array of polyph-
onous voices, all cast to some extent to resonate with authority, and
because he sets them in opposition to each other, not speaking to, but
arguing with, he sets The Shining against an affirmative and conservative
reading. The conflict inherent in the dark carnival the voices evoke is too
many faceted for an affirmative reading to hold. Perhaps the Apollonian,
battered, bloody and unbowed, raises it head over the Dionysian, but I
would argue that affirmation and restoral suffer a pyrrhic victory at best.
Because King forces us to recognize Jack Torrances’s humanity, how-
ever tormented and warped, he forces us to confront unresolvable issues
which we would, perhaps, rather close with the book; a monster, an
“Other,” would be much easier to dismiss and much more comfortable.
Thus, King calls his own theory on the function of horror fiction into
sharp question. Which conservative Republican values are concretized in
The Shining? To which discourse do we listen? Which do we ignore?
I44 . Journal of Popular Culture

Certainly the scenes which detail the seduction of Jack Torrance

from loving husband and father to crazed human monster, sketch a tem-
fying portrait of man’s inhumanity to man. Yet within this madness,
within this alienation, lies a spark of humanity. At the last moment, the
raging monster which has subsumed Danny Torrance’s much loved
father, the voice of Jack Torrance, Danny’s still much loved father,
speaks out-over the voice of the Overlook, and the voice of Grady and
the voice of Jack’s father and the voice of alcohol and his own destruc-
tive impulses-and tells his son to run. And Danny, responding to that
last shred of humanity, that last heteroglossic remnant of his father,
chooses to stay with his father. This is the apparent nexus within which
the best horror texts work: what it means to be human and how we can
best guard those qualities which make us human. As monstrous as
Torrance becomes, he yet retains a vestige of human feeling, at least
enough for his widow and orphan to remember and mourn, and thus
seems, to a high degree, affirmative. Love does, after all, survive.
Whether The Shining is an affirmative text, however, remains prob-
lematic. Neither Danny, nor his wife Wendy, nor Dick Halloran, the
Black cook with whom Danny shares “the shine,” a strong telepathic
ability, could be blamed for considering Jack Torrance as a human mon-
ster. Consciously, they may retrieve the humanity, but in their uncon-
scious minds, what images will percolate through of Jack Torrance?
Reaffirmation, I would contend can exist, uneasily at best, cheek by jowl
with the knowledge of evil; eventually, the conscious mind must choose
to hide it away in the monster closet and hope the rituals will keep it
safely locked away. But what nightmares Wendy and Danny have, when
the conscious mind shuts down and the unconscious runs riot, would be
enough to chill the soul. Wendy and Danny Torrance do survive their
encounter with the monster, but they also make the frightening discovery
that love is not always a redeeming force. Love was enough to stay
Jack’s hand from Danny, but not enough to save him from the call of the
Overlook. As long as their memories of the Overlook Hotel are intact,
and nothing short of death or a pre-frontal lobotomy is likely to erase
those memories, they will see and hear Jack Torrance, loving father and
husband, overlaid by the monster. In a classic evocation of Bakhtin’s
contention that carnival is a “two-in-one image,” neither Wendy
Torrance nor Danny will ever be able to remember Jack Torrance, loving
husband and father, without also seeing the monster with the roque
mallet. In the supremely ironic reversal so closely associated with
Bakhtin’s carnival, Jack, like the Overlook, becomes a sort of psychic
battery, leaking monstrous fumes, despite the effect of the consuming
 Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed . I45

fire which cleanses the Overlook. Like the pictures Danny uneasily
ruminates about, in which ten Indians are hidden, but a presence never-
theless, the hidden Jack is paramount. And if this transformation can
happen so completely to Danny’s beloved father, on what basis can he
function in the world around him?
The heteroglossiu contained within the Overlook Hotel mimics the
heteroglossia in society; by employing heteroglossiu to subvert the view
of the carnival as safety valve and by using the dark carnival to symbol-
ize the reality of the societal conflicts, the reality of myriad voices com-
peting for authority and simultaneously undercutting authority, King
calls into question any sense at all of accepted values. To which voices
do we listen? King’s “melodies of disintegration and fragmentation,”
defined by the constant parade of voices or the comforting and sooth-
ingly monolithic voice that says everything is quite all right? (Danse 13).
I contend that the very presence of voices makes the latter an impossibly
simplistic reading and the former, however uncomfortable, the more rep-
resentative of contemporary American society. The Shining does not
affirm the foundations of many of our accepted beliefs. Love does not
“work” in the dystopic world of the Overlook Hotel; reason is com-
pletely undependable; the bonds of family mean nothing as Jack dives
more deeply into the Hotel’s history; he discards his wife and son with
the same facility he discards his chance at rehabilitation. In his self-
destructive drive, Jack, in fact, points up how often institutions such as
marriage and fatherhood, with their concern with authoritative discourse
are extremely destructive. The competing voices serve to remind us that
even the most revered of institutions, institutions society uses to buttress
its very existence are, at root, only constructs we have built against the
dark. Whether the deconstructing and exposure of these institutions is
affirmative remains problematic at best. What paradigms can serve to
replace the constructs King so effectively exposes?

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Ed. Michael

Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas
P, 1981.
-. Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. R. W. Rotsel. Ardis, 1973.
Hawthorn, Jeremy. A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory. 2nd
ed. London: Edward Arnold, 1994.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books, 1982.
146 . Journal of Popular Culture

-. The Shining. New York: Signet, 1977.

Paul. “Letter to the Ephesians.” The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Bruce
M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

Linda J. Holland-Toll holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Reno; her
interest lies in the role horror fictions play in society. She is presently an adjunct
faculty member at UNR and Western Nevada Community College. Presently,
she resides in Carson City, Nevada, with assorted livestock.