The Road to The Dark Tower

by Vincent, Bev

  “It’s the one project I’ve ever had that seems to wait for me,” King said in 1988.6 “Epileptics, I have heard, either see or sense aura of some sort before a seizure. In much the same way I would, from time to time, find myself thinking of Roland and his queer, sad world . . . and then there would be a brief writing seizure.”7 Within the story, King attributes these long lapses to the phenomenon of waiting to hear the song that carries the tale.

  Roland’s quest to reach the Dark Tower is an Aristotelian epic, in which a hero who was already larger than life, possessed of unique strengths, sets out on a journey, encounters great challenges and learns from both his travels and his encounters with others.

  Unlike Odysseus, Roland doesn’t have a large company of men. He starts out alone and fully intends to complete his journey alone until events conspire against him. When it seems like his goal is within his grasp, though it is still thousands of miles away, he is disabled. He loses some of his unique strength and is forced to rely on others who are conscripted to assist him but who ultimately adopt his quest as their own. Roland’s obsession with the Tower infects them. If he were to fall, the others would carry on without him.

  Roland’s primary calling is to save all of existence, a task that has been prophesied and the one that fate and destiny—called ka—conspire to facilitate. The Dark Tower, the axis around which an infinity of universes and realities rotate, is failing. It will collapse if Roland cannot stop its decline, and if it does, existence will come to an end, to be replaced by a vast chaos known as Discordia.

  However, saving the Tower is a means to an end for Roland. If the Tower were to fall, he wouldn’t be able to climb the staircase to the room at the top. The Tower is made of the flesh of creation, and those who know of it and believe in it think that something dwells—or once dwelled—there. God? No one knows for sure, but Roland, Walter and the Crimson King all believe that by reaching the Tower they will be able to discover what is at the root of existence. The latter two aspire to control, destroy or replace it. Walter is worried that he might be called to account for all he has done in his life. Roland’s fear is that he will mount the stairs and find nothing.

  Nothing drives Roland to go beyond saving the Tower other than his own curiosity, the age-old drive to discover the nature of existence. Is there a God? Does He control creation from atop the Tower, or has He abdicated or passed on to the clearing at the end of the path? In biblical times, the people of Babel attempted to build a similar tower that would reach to heaven to find their maker.

  After completing The Drawing of the Three, King told an interviewer, “I think everybody keeps a Dark Tower in their heart that they want to find and they know it’s destructive and it will probably mean the end of them, but there’s that urge to make it your own or to destroy it, one or the other. So I thought: Maybe it’s different things to different people. . . . And as I write along I’ll find out what it is to Roland.”8

  Roland’s choice to continue past the Crimson King’s castle and confront the Tower carries enormous risks. The Crimson King, unable to conquer the Tower on his own, waits for someone to bring him a sigul that will readmit him from the balcony where he is trapped. If Roland turns back, the dead king will be trapped forever where he is. However, if he carries on, confronts the Crimson King and loses, he will undo everything he and his ka-tet have fought and died for. He will live up to Walter’s expectations and become an instrument of creation’s destruction. Nothing sends him farther—not Gan, not the prophecies of Arthur Eld and certainly not the Tet Corporation, which will defeat Sombra and North Central Positronics in the years to come and scatter their remains to every point of the compass.

  Towers are often used to symbolize an individual’s self-constructed existence, perception, philosophy or consciousness. Unlike a mountain, a tower is man-made, though both stand alone. A quest to conquer a tower may be seen as a voyage of self-discovery.

  Walter tells Roland’s future during the long night in the Golgotha using a special—and probably stacked—deck of tarot cards. The first card represents Roland, and the next four symbolize people he will need to accomplish his quest. Walter spreads them around Roland’s Hanged Man like satellites surrounding a star. The sixth card is the Tower, which he places directly on top of the Hanged Man, refusing to tell the gunslinger what it represents.

  The Tower is one of the major tarot arcana, known as a villain card because very little good is ever implied by it, regardless of its orientation. On the card, a lightning bolt strikes a tower, setting it on fire or separating the top from the base. Two figures—thought to represent madness and despair or the conscious and subconscious minds—tumble from it as if they’ve been cast out of their high place.

  At its worst, it represents the complete destruction of an existing way of life, the overturning of beliefs. It can also foretell the loss of love or long-term friendships. Old systems will be broken down or replaced through a cosmic intervention that is usually external and impersonal. In Roland’s world, the old ways are already breaking down. Technology is failing. He has lost his one love and his childhood friends are all dead.

  Even at its best, the card stands for necessary change, sometimes a blessing in disguise. For Roland, this may be the transition from an insular lifestyle to opening himself to others. By the time he finds Walter’s trail, Roland has become a hard man and his isolation makes him harder still. His eye is fixed on his goal, and he wants to remain invulnerable until he accomplishes it. As soon as he becomes the leader of a group, he loses autonomy and becomes susceptible to the whims and needs of others. A threat to one of his ka-tet is a threat to him. What he wants cannot always be paramount, as much as he might wish otherwise.

  His ka-given objective is worthy—what purer goal could there be than to save all of creation or die trying? Roland can easily justify sacrificing the lives of countless others en route to his destiny. Without sacrificing his hawk, David, when he is only fourteen, he can’t become a gunslinger and try to restore family unity when Marten the enchanter comes between his parents. Without sacrificing Jake, an innocent plucked from one harsh world and dropped into another like a pawn in a game of multidimensional chess, Roland cannot catch the man in black, who he believes holds the key to the opening phases of his quest.

  It’s the same theme debated in the Star Trek movie The Wrath of Khan. Should one person be sacrificed to save others? Which is paramount, the good of the one or the good of the many? Roland nearly always chooses the abstract good of everyone in creation, though the harsh question he never answers is whether he is acting selflessly or merely trying to achieve his own selfish objective. Father Callahan understands that Roland is prone to confusing his own desires with the will of ka.

  STEPHEN KING ISN’T THE FIRST PERSON to write about a man named Roland whose goal was to find and perhaps conquer a mysterious Dark Tower. He was inspired by the feel of Robert Browning’s somewhat obtuse “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” written in Paris on January 2, 1852, during the denouement of Napoleon’s coup d’état. The poem, which King had been assigned in a class covering the earlier romantics poets, combines romance and existentialism, atypical of Browning’s other work and ahead of its time in its Weltschmerz. “Childe” refers to a young or unproven knight. Roland tells Susannah that to him the word is a formal, ancient and almost holy term that describes a gunslinger who has been chosen by ka for a quest.

  Browning, in turn, borrowed his title from a line in Shakespeare’s King Lear uttered by Edgar during his mad ravings while disguised as Poor Tom: “Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower came, His word was so still—Fie, foh and fom / I smell the blood of a British man.”9 King clearly knew of this reference; he named the creatures Roland and Susannah encounter at the Crimson King’s castle Feemalo, Fimalo and Fumalo.

  Tom was likely referring to an old Scottish ballad titled “Child Rowland and Burd Ellen” wherein Rowland, a son of King Arthur, rescues his sister, Lady Ellen, from the King of Elf
land’s Dark Tower after his older brothers try and fail to return. Merlin the magician tells Rowland that, to avoid being caught by the king, he must lop off the heads of everyone who speaks to him in the land of Fairy until he finds his sister. He is also to refuse any food offered to him. In The Dark Tower, Roland and Susannah also must resist the temptation of food at the Crimson King’s castle. The King of Elfland utters the legendary words, “Fee, fi, fo, fum,” which also connects to the scene at the Crimson King’s castle.

  In the Scottish ballad, Rowland uses his father’s sword Excalibur—the source of metal for Roland Deschain’s guns—to strike the King of Elfland to the ground. The king begs for his life and agrees to set not only Roland’s sister, but also his two brothers, free.10

  In the early books of the series, King does not rely heavily on Browning’s poem. He extracts some details from the text (Roland’s boyhood friend Cuthbert is mentioned in stanza XVI) and ignores others (a character named Giles in stanza XVII, for example, has no counterpart in the Dark Tower series). However, in the final book, The Dark Tower, King makes more extensive and literal use of the poem. He physically delivers it into Roland’s hands with important stanzas highlighted. Roland and Susannah’s encounter with the vampire Dandelo is strongly influenced by Browning, a fact King acknowledges by naming Dandelo’s horse Lippy, as in “Fra Lippo Lippi.” Stanzas XIII and XIV describe the beast: “One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare.”11

  Browning’s poem is far from a beaming light of clarity. King told Matt Lauer on the Today Show that he didn’t understand what it was about. The poet wrote in 1887, “I was conscious of no allegorical intention in writing it. . . . Childe Roland came upon me as a kind of dream. I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day, I believe. But it was simply that I had to do it. I did not know then what I meant beyond that, and I’m sure I don’t know now. But I’m very fond of it.” Since Browning writes of Roland’s adventures, perhaps he was one of Stephen King’s predecessors as the channel of Gan.

  The mood of Browning’s poem is even bleaker than that of The Gunslinger. The poem’s persona—and everyone else—feels that his quest is doomed to fail: “Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ / So many times.” He is depressed by the loss of his companions and continues his journey because “naught else remained to do.” The reason for his nightmarish quest is clear neither to the protagonist nor to the reader.

  The terrain Browning’s speaker crosses is as desolate as the wastelands in Mid-World, places so ruined that “Last Judgement’s fire must cure” them. The poem pauses in the middle for “one taste of the old time,” a period of reflection analogous to Roland’s long story in Wizard and Glass.

  Most of the poem is taken up with the protagonist’s journey through hateful lands. Everything he encounters is terrible; his adversary seems to be nature itself. In the final stanzas he emerges from the last of this horrible terrain to encounter what he has spent a life training to reach. Browning’s Tower is a squat brown turret, apparently inspired by a tower the author saw in Italy.12 It is built of an unusual stone not known anywhere else in the world. King’s Tower is not made of stone at all, but the living essence of creation: Gan.

  Browning’s Roland, like King’s, hears the names of all his lost friends as he approaches the Tower and reflects on their individual strengths (“How such a one was strong, and such was bold / And such was fortunate . . . one moment knelled the woe of years”). In the end, he puts his “slug-horn”13 to his lips and blows. What he hopes to challenge is left unsaid—a situation King addresses when his own Roland reaches the Tower.

  Victor Kelleher turned the poem into a children’s book called To the Dark Tower. When the hero, Tom Roland, reaches the goal of his long quest, he finds that it has been a delusion and there is no paradise to be won. Critic Harold Bloom—not King’s number one fan—suggests that Browning’s poem may begin again to form a closed cycle, an infinite loop.14

  Roland lost his horn, handed down through the generations from Arthur Eld, and thus cannot blow it in challenge or celebration. He left it beside the body of his friend Cuthbert, who had borrowed it because he claimed he could blow it sweeter than Roland could. “Neglect not to pick it up, Roland, for it’s your property,” Cuthbert said, anticipating his death and Roland’s survival. Roland was so focused on his quest that he ignored Cuthbert’s advice. “In his grief and bloodlust he will forget all about Eld’s Horn.” [DT5]

  Though he may have been inspired by the Scottish ballad, Browning’s use of the horn calls to mind the original Roland, who was immortalized in the “Chanson de Roland,” an epic poem probably written by the Norman poet Turold around A.D. 1100.15 The historical Roland—Hruodlandus, governor of a borderland of Brittany—was killed by the Basques in the Pyrenees Mountains in 788 while leading the rear guard of future emperor Charlemagne’s forces returning from their invasion of Spain. In some legends, Charlemagne is both Roland’s uncle and father, having sired him via an incestuous relationship with his sister, bringing to mind the Arthurian legend of Mordred, which King exploits in the Dark Tower series. The poet transformed the Basque enemies into the Saracens,16 and moved the battle to Roncesvalles.

  Roland’s stepfather, Ganelon, is sent to negotiate peace with the Saracens at Roland’s suggestion. Already resentful of his stepson’s arrogance and prowess—Ganelon isn’t pleased at being nominated for such hazardous duty—he plots with the Saracens, who were ready to accept peace, to bring about Roland’s defeat. They attack his forces in the mountain pass.

  Roland carried with him the legendary sword Durendal, which contained the tooth of St. Peter and the blood of St. Basil secreted in its hilt. Brave, but also reckless and proud, he refused to call for help until their situation was desperate.17 In the face of defeat, he blew his ivory horn, named Oliphant or Olivant, cracking his own temples with the strain. Roland is the last of his men to die. On his deathbed, he tries to destroy Durendal, reminiscent of King Arthur’s attempts to return Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake before he died.

  Charlemagne heard Roland’s call for help, but arrived in time only to avenge Roland and his lost army. He discovers Ganelon’s treason and has him tried and executed.18

  THE SYMBOL OF THE TOWER appears often in epic fiction. It conjures an image of isolation, strength and impenetrability. Where else would Sauron have dwelt and schemed if not in a Black Tower in the land of Mordor? Even Dr. Who tries to breach the Dark Tower of Rassilon, which President Borusa hopes to enter and claim immortality in The Five Doctors.

  C. S. Lewis19 was inspired, at least in part, by Browning in Lewis’s unfinished novella The Dark Tower, written in 1938 and published in 1974.20 Five men gather in a room at Cambridge University to use their newly invented chronoscope, a kind of projecting telescope that allows them to look in on other times.21 They have no control over what the projector will reveal—akin to Rhea’s experience with the pink Wizard’s Glass—but the locations they see are always close to a Dark Tower, which they associate with Browning. Slaves supervised by automatons called Jerkies are constructing the Tower. The Jerkies report to the Stingingman, who has a stinger protruding from his forehead.

  The men realize that the Tower is identical to the one at the Cambridge library, and some of the faces they see are familiar, including a facsimile of one of the men watching the scene. The duplicate grows a forehead stinger and replaces the Stingingman. Enraged, the original viewer dashes at the projection screen and switches places with his evil double (his Twinner), ending up in another time frame, a parallel reality.

  Also inspired by Browning’s poem, Louis MacNeice wrote a radio play called The Dark Tower at the end of the Second World War. In his introduction to a collection of scripts, MacNeice comments that the poem eludes analysis and its moral and meaning are unclear.22

  The self-described parable play is cast as a dream. Roland is the seventh son of a family in which every male for generations has learned to play a trumpet challenge
call before setting out by ship in search of the Dark Tower, never to return, as in the old Scottish ballad. As Aunt Talitha of River Crossing tells Roland and his ka-tet in The Waste Lands, “No one who ever went in search of that black dog ever came back.”

  MacNeice’s Dark Tower, sometimes called a Dragon, is the source of evil throughout the world. Though it is immortal, men are compelled to try to defeat it. When Roland asks his tutor what would happen if people decided to just leave the Tower alone, he is told that some people would live longer (that is, those who die trying to defeat it) but everyone’s lives would be degraded and the Dragon (evil) would reign supreme. “Honor” and “duty” are obsolete terms—Roland and his family quest after the Tower because of tradition. The play ends, like Browning’s poem, with Roland uttering a challenge on his trumpet, a phrase that he has perfected under intense tutelage. What happens thereafter is not revealed.

  IN THE DARK TOWER SERIES, King constructed a new world and, over the course of the seven main books and ancillary novels, composed its history back to the beginning of time. He posited parallel realities, some that are mostly the same as our own and others that are starkly different. King acknowledges drawing inspiration from Clifford D. Simak’s novel Ring Around the Sun, which “postulates the idea that there are a number of worlds like ours. Not other planets but other Earths, parallel Earths, in a kind of ring around the sun.” [HA]

  As Jack Sawyer comes to realize, “Worlds spin around him, worlds within worlds and other worlds along side them, separated by a thin membrane composed of a thousand thousand doors, if you only know how to find them.” [BH] Death is one of these doorways, as Jake and Callahan discover.

  It’s not unreasonable to speculate that the parallel universes in King’s creation all began from the same spark and were propagated independently, which would explain why so many of them are similar. Michael Moorcock coined the term “multiverse” to describe these infinite alternate realities that sometimes intersect, and addressed the possibility that one could meet a different version of oneself when traveling between realities. While King’s characters never meet themselves when they reality hop, different versions of themselves come into play. For example, a young Eddie points Jake in the right direction to get back to Mid-World while his older self works to create a doorway on the other side.