Here are Parts I, II, III, IV, and V, if you haven't read them yet.
XXVI: The Circle Closes
In this chapter, we return to the involvement of Tom Rogan and Audra in the story. In fact, the first two sections of this chapter are named Tom and Audra (pages 1278 and 1283). Both of these characters are having nightmares.
Tom's dream is fascinating in how he's seeing everything through the eyes of a similar psychopath, teen Henry. First, he sees himself pressing the button on the switchblade and stabbing Butch Bowers in the neck. Then, he sees himself in the sewers with Victor and Belch, chasing the Losers (page 1279).
It's fitting that Tom should see himself as Henry, not just because both are abusive, but also because both were abused...by their fathers. One crucial difference, though, is that--as despicable as Tom is--he wouldn't kill: he didn't kill, and wouldn't have killed, his father as Henry did, so seeing himself about to commit patricide is more than disturbing for him.
We recall the many patterns and parallels of abusive relationships in the novel: Al/Tom vs Beverly, Eddie vs his mom/Myra, Butch vs Henry, Eddie Corcoran vs his father, and Henry's gang vs the Losers. What's important in emphasizing the parallels between Tom and Henry is how both were abused by their fathers, so both learned that one 'solves' relationship problems through power and control in the form of abuse. To reinforce the parallel between Tom's and Henry's fathers, both fathers have alliterative names--Ralph Rogan, and Butch Bowers (page 1278).
Just as Tom imagined, from what he'd learned about getting "whoppins" if his younger brother and sisters--put in his charge from a young age--ever did wrong, he now imagines that the kids he's chasing in the sewers need "a whoppin" (pages 1278-1279).
Tom's fear of his father, just like teen Henry's fear of his, is enough to make his killing of Ralph unthinkable...just as coward Henry's would have been, had Henry not lived in the Trauma-town of Derry. So with Tom's entrance into Trauma-town, now he is having the same unconscious murderous phantasies as every other resident there. His nightmare is actually wish-fulfillment.
Chasing the Losers in the sewers is also wish-fulfillment for Tom, since little Bev is one of the people being chased. All of these parallels of abusers and abused, especially when embodied in people within the city limits of Derry, reflect how It personifies not just the violent aspects of the Shadow, but of the Collective Shadow in general.
Tom deems the sewers to be a smelly purgatory (page 1279), which they are, since as representations of the unconscious mind, they can purge one of one's trauma (i.e., through Jungian Shadow work and Active Imagination), provided that one navigates these passages correctly and has the courage to face It head on, as the young Losers, under Bill's leadership, are trying to do.
Tom, like Henry, does not have the strength of character to be able to face his dark sides, so even dreaming about doing so is too much for him (page 1280). Just as Al, who recall had just been chasing after Bev out of suspicions that she'd been messing around with boys, so is Tom now chasing her out of suspicions that she's fooling around with one of them, Bill, and has been sneaking (phallic) smokes. It's easier to project aggression and wield control over her than to control himself, therefore it's easy to equate Tom with Henry.
Tom wakes up, and for a moment he isn't sure if he's awake or still dreaming (page 1281), since he thinks he's seeing one of Pennywise's balloons. He also gets the feeling that this has been more than just a nightmare: after all, the unconscious is a world of a much deeper and higher truth--this is why surrealism is called what it is called.
Like Henry, Tom is also hearing voices (page 1282). He's hearing a voice from a balloon tied to the knob of the bathroom door. The voice is telling him to give Beverly and the other Losers "a whoppin". Hypnotized by the voice no less than Henry has been, Tom obeys Its commands and gets dressed (page 1283).
As I said above, Audra is also having bad dreams. Like Tom, she feels as though she's in some strange place, and in a different body.
That would be the body of little Beverly in the sewers, being chased by Henry, Victor, and Belch.
Bill is with her, which is fitting, since Audra has been pursuing Bill to Derry. Recall that, when Bill is about to make love with Beverly, he notes how Audra looks like her, so what we have in these shared dreams and experiences are examples of synchronicity.
In Audra's dream, she-as-Bev is holding his hand, reminding us of his adulterous lovemaking with her, as well as Bev's cheating on Tom, with whose cuckoldry we of course have no sympathy. We do feel bad for Audra, though, especially when we consider what's soon to happen to her.
Them all experiencing the sewers, whether in dream or as a distant, repressed memory, or the soon-to-be-experienced second confrontation with It as adults, is an experience of the sewers as the collective unconscious, where all minds merge. Audra feels the terror of the experience (page 1284) because it's the terror of the Shadow.
The terror is so vivid that she hears the voice of Pennywise telling her that they all float down there after she wakes up and finds herself in bed in a hotel room in the Derry area (pages 1284-1286). She calls the Derry Town House to contact Bill, and the annoyed clerk wonders why so many calls for Bill have to happen that night (page 1287). Bill isn't in his room because he has to deal with Eddie, as we'll soon see; but Audra's getting suspicions that her husband is with another woman (which of course he is--pages 1287-1288). And we can see again just how synchronistic events are getting.
As she's trying to calm down and reassure herself that, after a bad dream, her suspicions are just over-reactions, she sees the bathroom light go on, and she hears that voice say, "We all float down here, Audra" (page 1288). The TV turns on, and she sees Pennywise.
Terrified, she races out of her room and out of the hotel to the parking lot, the only thing on her mind being finding Bill in the Derry Town House (page 1289). She finds her rented Datsun, not knowing the significance of it being parked nose-to-nose with the LTD wagon Tom Rogan is using (pages 1289-1290). He's been in the car, having been goaded by It to go there no less than she's been.
She feels his hand on her shoulder, it forcing her to turn around. He recognizes her as an actress in the movies, then he kidnaps her and takes her to the very sewers she's just been dreaming of.
We can see why this chapter is named "The Circle Closes." So many separate strands are being brought together here. Not just the return of the adult Losers to Derry to be reunited with Mike, not just the three uninvited guests of Tom, Audra, and Henry being added to the mix, but there's also the back-and-forth between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s and the parallelism of these moments. Finally, there's a kind of merging of the past and present and of inside and outside of Derry, through the unconscious world of dreams...and therefore a fusion of conscious and unconscious.
Fully understood, It narrates the story of a universe where all is one. Different people, even those living far away from each other, are united in one consciousness. The past and present are one. Good and evil are juxtaposed, and therefore one. Wildly differing actions are united through the non-causal, but meaningful coincidences of synchronicity. And the meeting place of all of these separate strands is the collective unconscious, the Collective Shadow, as symbolized by the hellish, smelly, filthy, dark sewer system under Derry.
In the section, Eddie's Room, beginning on page 1290, Bev and Bill get dressed after receiving the call and go to Eddie's room. Eddie's arm is broken again, after the fight with Henry--again, we see the present paralleling the past.
They can't tell the police about dead Henry, for Eddie will be charged with murder in a town that looks the other way whenever real evil happens (pages 1292-1292). There's no proof of Eddie killing in self-defense, for Henry's knife is gone.
They call Richie and Ben, who will arrive right away (page 1293). They try calling Mike, who of course isn't at home, so they try the library, too. Instead of Mike answering the phone, the Chief of Police answers, and he tells Beverly that Mike is at the Derry Home Hospital, having been "assaulted and badly wounded a short time ago" (page 1294). Since she doesn't want to tell the cop who she is and what she knows of the assault, he starts to suspect her, being someone who is oddly calling the library so late at night (page 1295).
With Beverly's stress over the cop's suspicions, we come to another major theme coalescing here from the experiences of many of the characters: guilt, and accompanying guilt, the fear of being caught in the guilty act. We've already dealt with Bill's guilt over the murder of Georgie, which as I explained above is based on unconscious wish-fulfillment. Now, there's Bill's guilt over cheating on Audra with Bev...and Audra's on her way, with suspicions of him!
There's the guilt that Eddie's mom tried to impose on him for hanging out with friends she didn't want him to be with. There's the guilt Al was imposing on little Bev (via his abuse of her) for hanging out with boys.
There's also the guilt of having really done things (regardless of whether or not they really should be deemed bad) that others disapprove of. Bill was really cheating on Audra. Bev has really cheated on Tom with Bill. Little Bev really had sexual relations with all of the kid Losers, just as her dad feared.
Audra is trying to find the husband she rightly suspects of cheating on her. Tom is trying to find the wife he correctly suspects of cheating with Bill. Al chased after little Bev suspecting (correctly, as I've argued above) that her hymen is gone. The cop rightly suspects that Beverly knows a lot more about the circumstances of the assault on Mike than she's letting on.
Guilt and the fear of punishment (regardless of whether or not that punishment is deserved) are manifestations of the traumatic feelings all of these characters are having, and having them all coalesce right now--with either dreams of, memories of, or plans of going very soon to the sewers--is significant because of how the sewers symbolize the unconscious, that place where everything merges into one.
Of course, there's also the guilt of the actual antagonists of the novel: Pennywise, Al Marsh, Tom, Henry and his gang, Eddie Cocoran's abusive father, Eddie Kaspbrak's mom, the homophobic killers of Adrian Mellon, etc.--not that any of them feel much of any remorse for their actions, since it's their positions of power and/or authority that makes them feel immune to remorse. Still, guilt--whether acknowledged or not--has its home, among all the other negative, rejected feelings, in the sewers.
To get back to the phone call with the Chief of Police, Beverly is worried that Henry's assault on Mike could kill him (pages 1295-1296). This fear is tied in with her guilt, since her not telling the cop what she knows about Henry is obstructing the investigation.
She hangs up on the cop, and looks over at Henry's corpse, which has one eye closed and the other open (page 1296), this opened eye oozing blood from its injury. He seems "to be winking at her," adding to her guilt, fear, and sense that It, like her father and living Henry, are all coming to get her. Of course they are: they're all one in Pennywise.
The Losers need to know how Mike is doing, so Richie calls the hospital, but pretends to be a news reporter, so he and his friends won't be linked to the assault on Mike and the killing of Henry (pages 1296-1297). Richie calls himself "Mr. Kerpaskian," which the one on the other end understands to be a "Czech-Jewish" name. After hanging up and finishing his act, Richie curses "Jesus!" four times. The "Czech-Jewish" name he assumed for himself must have made him think of suicide-Stan, and therefore must have given him the feeling that all the Losers were about to destroy themselves.
With the fear of being linked to all of this violence and therefore of being arrested, they all decide immediately to go to the Barrens and face It in the sewers (page 1298). As they're driving over there, the car radio is playing the kind of classic, mid-to-late 1950s rock 'n' roll that they as kids would have heard all the time: "Be-Bop-A-Lula," Buddy Holly, and "Summertime Blues."
The problem is that Pennywise gets involved, reminding Richie of his "All-Dead Rock Show" that he saw near the Paul Bunyan statue (page 1299). Everyone wants the radio turned off, especially Bill when he hears the voice of Georgie blaming him for being murdered by Pennywise (page 1300).
They arrive at the Barrens, and already a number of things to parallel the late 1950s experience have arrived: assaults by Henry, Eddie's broken arm, the Fifties music, and the rain and thunder (pages 1299-1300). Ben is to lead them past the old clubhouse to the pumping station's concrete cylinder (pages 1301-1302), though Ben can hardly be expected to remember where it is after twenty-seven years. He is leading them just as he did the last time. Bill is stuttering just as he did as a kid.
All of these parallels, just as with the previous chapter's mid-sentence transitions back and forth between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s, are indications of the unity between the past and the present in It, how everything is one in It.
The cylinder is "almost completely buried in a wallow of blackberry bushes" (page 1302), suggesting the obscure, repressed nature of unconscious feelings; yet the iron manhole cover has been pushed off, Ben assuming that its removal has been fairly recent (page 1303). Has Pennywise removed it, to lure the Losers in?
In a sense, Pennywise did. There are fresh scratches, those of someone who has gone in recently. With matches that Richie brought from Eddie's room, they light up the darkness. Bill sees a strap...the strap of Audra's purse (pages 1303-1304). This is where Tom--possessed by Pennywise--has taken her.
Bill can't believe Audra's here--she should be in England. He imagines what he's seeing is another one of Pennywise's illusions...but it isn't. He looks through the contents of her purse (page 1305), and he sees things too accurately hers to be a mere illusion. She's really down there in the sewers!
That Bill is wondering--since Henry, Victor, and Belch are all dead (Hockstetter, too, recall)--who could have got Audra down into the sewers (page 1305), and no one concludes that it was Pennywise who got her, adds weight to my speculation that It is a metaphor rather than an actual entity in the story. They of course don't know that Tom is the one who got her.
The Losers go down the cylinder, Bill praying to God that Audra is all right (page 1306). Going back to the guilt/fear-of-reprisals motif discussed above, he is worrying that Audra's abduction could be punishment for his adultery with Beverly, or even his fooling around with her when they were kids.
Bill starts having vivid memories of the underground place once he feels the cold water down below--the feel and the smell, the sense of claustrophobia...and yet, he forgets one of the most important memories...how did they get out?
XXVII: Under the City
Since we're going into the sewers for the final confrontation with It, and the sewers symbolize the unconscious, where the secrets of everything live, and where all is one, it is fitting finally to have a glimpse of things from Its perspective.
Derry, that is, up above in the sunlight, is representative of the conscious mind--always trying to look good in public, cheerful and pleasant, what Jung would have called the Persona. Derry also hides its slimy underbelly, fittingly, in the sewers, just as the Persona tries to hide the Shadow.
But now that we're down in those sewers, what is dark is coming to light--thanks to those matches that Richie took from Eddie's room, to the extent that they're of much use.
As It, in August 1958, comes to realize that there's something new about--namely, those potentially threatening kids--It contemplates Its place in the universe, and Its relationship with the Turtle (page 1307). Recall that the Turtle corresponds to God, or Ahura Mazda, the principle of light, the spirit, and goodness, however one prefers to conceptualize Maturin. Recall also that It, a giant spider, corresponds to Satan, Angra Mainyu, or the principle of darkness, the flesh, and evil.
Just as Satan's first sin was pride, leading him to believe that he could run the universe better than God, so does It think of the Turtle as stupid and passive, never leaving its shell. It may have vomited out the entire universe at the dawn of creation, but it hasn't done much since then. Many people--that is, those who believe God exists but aren't religious--tend to think similarly of Him.
The Turtle withdrew into its shell, and It came to Earth, to Derry, to be the god of this world as Satan is understood to be (2 Corinthians 4:4). Here's an interesting quote from It: "It had created a place in Its own image, and It looked upon this place with favor from the deadlights which were Its eyes" (page 1307), reminding us of Genesis 1:26 and Genesis 1:31. Such a quote suggests a Gnostic interpretation of the God of Creation, a Satanic Demiurge creating the physical world, as opposed to Maturin's spiritual world, one hidden in its shell.
It finds there to be, in the imagination of these kids coming into the sewers to confront It, both good and bad qualities. For It, their imagination is good in how their fear gives them a good taste when It eats them. Their imagination can be bad, however, when it is used against It, as it was used when Beverly fired the silver projectiles at It, hurting It and causing It to feel fear, a new experience that It doesn't like. So in this, we see yet another example of the good/bad duality in the novel.
It doesn't like change. It wants a reliable, cyclical world in which It wakes, eats, and sleeps in a state of hibernation for twenty-seven years before repeating the cycle. In bravely facing It and proving that It can be hurt, the kids have broken the routine.
This breaking of Its cyclical routine, of introducing change and the new element that It can be hurt, defeated, and even killed, has brought to Its attention the notion of an Other. No, It is not the centre of the universe, where everything else, like the Turtle, is stupid, timidly hiding, and exists only in terms of its relationship with It.
This "Other" that It is so worried about (page 1309) sounds a lot like Lacan's notion of the Other, as opposed to an other that exists only as a narcissistic, metaphorical mirror of oneself, rather than a distinct entity in its own right. Such independent entities are what is so threatening to it, for as existing outside of It, they can take away Its power and control. The hurt that It has felt from the silver projectile is narcissistic injury. It is afraid of not being alone (page 1309), because not being alone means sharing the world with others, a break from the narcissistic world of a dyadic relationship in which the 'other' is really oneself reflected to oneself like the image in a mirror.
This is all significant when seen in light of how I interpreted the murder of Georgie. Recall how I said that the tearing-off of Georgie's arm is a symbolic castration, the little boy's traumatic need to leave the dyadic mother-to-son relationship and enter the larger society, to go from other to Other (see Part I, section III).
It is fitting that the first killing in the novel, George, should be thematically linked with its last killing, the destroying of It. It, as I've always said, personifies trauma, and the Oedipus complex, properly understood, is the ultimate, universal, narcissistic trauma in which a child has to give up his or her perceived 'ownership' of the desired parent, to accept sharing him or her (and by extension, all people) with others.
Though It has lived since the beginning of the universe, vomited out by the Turtle (which is, as the creator of the universe, its 'mother,' in effect), It has the personality of a child--selfish, grasping, impetuous, and violent if he doesn't get his way. By feeding off of children's fears, It is projecting Its inadequacies onto them.
Georgie is a sweetheart compared to babyish It.
It hopes to defeat the kids by having them see "the deadlights of Its eyes" (page 1309, King's emphasis), by having them "cast [...] one by one into the macroverse".
In Stephen King's cosmology, the macroverse is the home of It and Maturin, probably created by Gan, a much higher and more powerful being than the other two--'God' in a far truer sense that I conceived Maturin of being (which was really just to contrast the Turtle with Satanic It, in the dualist sense), and the Other that It fears (see above). Gan emerged from primordial Chaos and is a character in King's Dark Tower series, so a deeper discussion of Gan is outside the scope of this already gargantuan article. Gan may have created Maturin and It, though, so I'll leave it at that.
The point is, from the strictly limited perspective of this novel, casting the Losers out into the macroverse--that is, outside of the mainstream universe that the Turtle puked out, our everyday reality being a part of it--is symbolically a throwing of the kids outside of anything they could possibly understand, verbalize, or mentally process. The macroverse, for the Losers, is just another manifestation of Lacan's traumatic, ineffable Real.
Note that It, the personification of trauma and the embodiment of the Shadow, lurking in those dark sewers, is comprised of the deadlights, Its very life-essence. These are orange, ghostly lights that originated from the macroverse, and if one looks into them, one suffers insanity, if not death.
Again, the deadlights can be seen to symbolize the Real. It's paradoxical that, in a world where darkness is considered evil and the light symbolic of goodness, that looking into these lights can cause madness or death, rather than enlightenment and bliss.
Reality is much deeper and more complex than that. As I've stated a number of times here, in It, in the world of the unconscious and all that is beyond our ordinary, sensory perception, all is one. Past and present are one, as seen in, for example, the jumping back and forth between the late Fifties and the mid-Eighties in those mid-sentence transitions we discussed above. The characters' experiences are made one (e.g., Tom dreaming that he's Henry, Audra dreaming that she's Beverly, etc.), and good and bad juxtaposed are made one. Similarly, the light and dark can be juxtaposed and made one, in their extreme forms in the sewers.
As I've argued in many blog posts, the ouroboros can be used as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between opposites: the serpent's biting head is one extreme, its bitten tail is the opposite extreme, and its coiled body represents a circular continuum where every intermediate point is found. Seeing the deadlights, especially when in the infinite black of the sewers, is a blinding light that shocks and terrifies rather than edifies you. Sometimes the light of truth is too painful to see, and the extremes of dark and light, the ouroboros' biting place, are like Wilfred Bion's O as much as it is Lacan's Real, Rudolph Otto's mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the numinous.
Part of the meaning behind the duality of good and bad that runs throughout this novel is how the two are dialectically linked, and the terror of seeing the deadlights is equivalent to the terror of the dark unknown in the sewers. The Losers' running from Henry's gang, yet also running straight into Its lair, out of the light and into the darkness, only to confront the deadlights, is part of this paradox.
Speaking of darkness and light, the kid Losers have maybe ten matches that Bill wants to save for later, since they still have dim light in the drains that they can use for now (page 1309). Since this part of the story directly deals with, in a symbolic sense, confronting the Shadow, a preference of dark over light is fitting.
They're going in deeper water now, with such dead animals as a rat, a kitten, and what seems to be a bloated woodchuck floating around them (page 1310). Such ghastly things, combined with the darkness and the stink, symbolize how an exploration of the Shadow is, however in the end therapeutic, a perilous enterprise, which if done incorrectly and carelessly, can lead to the opposite of therapy and mental health.
And while the water they're going through is relatively placid for the moment, it will soon roar out at them. The shapelessness of water is symbolic of the undifferentiated, indescribable nature of the Real. Again, this all adds to the uncertainty of the end of the Losers' pursuit.
As we know, each of the Losers seems to have his (or in Bev's case, her) special talent. Hers is marksmanship with Bill's slingshot and the silver projectiles she's shot at It-as-Werewolf. "Big Bill" is the leader of the group. Richie's (potential) talent is as the self-proclaimed comedian. Mike is the town historian. Ben is the engineer. Stan can shout out bird names from his bird book to protect them. And Eddie is the one who knows which way to go, how to get found again when they're lost (pages 1310-1311).
Again, it's paradoxical that Eddie, the weak, germ-phobic 'mama's boy,' would be the one who can lead the group through the treacherous sewers, hellish symbol of the unconscious, home of trauma, and the centre of the Shadow, but here we are. This paradox is yet another example of the good/bad duality of It, for Eddie is a mix of strength and weakness, of helplessness and helpfulness.
Eddie's only answer to Bill's question of which pipe to go through, however, is that it depends on where they all want to go (page 1311). Bill, in frustration, reminds Eddie that they're trying to find It. Richie, Bev, Ben, Stan, and Mike all agree that It is near or under the Canal. This means going down the lower of the pipes to get to It.
Stan unhappily points out that this lower pipe is "a shit-pipe" (page 1312). Bill isn't surprised to know this unpleasant fact, and neither should we be. The unconscious is a place of repressed feelings. The Shadow is all that is rejected from us. Part of that rejecting and repressing involves projection and splitting off of what we don't like about ourselves. What better metaphor for such rejected, projected material is there than shit?
As reluctant as they all are to go through a pipe and get immersed in excrement, though, there is a strong motivation to go in that's coming at them from behind: Henry and his gang. Here again, we have a fusion of opposites, in this case, in front with behind. They're going forward to find It, and they're fleeing Henry, who's behind them. And in my interpretation, Henry-as-murderer is equivalent to It-as-murderer. The sewers are a world of non-differentiation: here, all is one.
As fetid as the smell of the sewage is, Bill is aware of an "undersmell," the smell of some kind of animal...It. For Bill, recognizing such a smell is good news, for he knows they're all going in the right--if rank--direction (page 1312). Again, good and bad are united.
Twenty feet inside this giant, metal rectum, they find the air to be worse than rancid--it's outright poisonous. The bad things that other people project end up getting introjected by us, toxic smells symbolically breathed in. Such exchanged pain is the basis of all of our trauma.
Bill calls out to Eddie for guidance: the leader of the group, "Big Bill," the one brave enough to face It, the one hungering for revenge for George, needs Eddie, the one regarded as the weakest, the most afraid, and the most averse to this paradise of germs in the shit-pipe. All is one here, including strength and weakness, large and small, bravery and fear.
All the light is gone now. It's no longer dark...now, it's black (page 1313). Sounds are magnified and echoing, including those of the Losers shuffling along in the pipe, and the "sewage running in controlled bursts" (page 1313). The pipe is defecating on them. Indeed, they all scream when they get doused with it at one point, "a shit-shower," as Richie calls it (page 1314). Now, in the absolute black, Bill could use one of those matches (page 1315).
They've come out of the shit-pipe, and with a lit match they can look around. Patrick Hockstetter's body is to Bill's right. This would seem to be an omen, for Henry and his gang are coming (page 1315). The Losers hear them coming from the pipes' echoing acoustics.
After Richie taunts Henry and his threat of "We'll get youuuuuu--" (page 1316, King's emphasis) with the name "banana heels," they all hear "a shriek of...mad fear and pain...through the pipe". One of Henry's gang...Victor, or Belch?...has been killed by It. Mike thinks it's "some monster."
The Losers continue toward the Canal, while the storm outside rages and brings "an early darkness to Derry" (page 1317). This storm has an apocalyptic quality similar to the one that destroys downtown Derry at the climax of the novel. This one has screaming winds, stuttering electric fire, and the racket of falling trees, all of which sound "like the death-cries of huge prehistoric creatures."
Next, we have another narration from Its point of view, but in May of 1985. It knows that the adult Losers have returned, and It also senses the return of "that maddening, galling fear...that sense of Another." (page 1317) It feels that the Losers are agents of this Other (page 1309). I mentioned above that a higher God named Gan is this Other, from the macroverse and therefore a reminder to It that there's much more to the world than just our mainstream universe, with the Turtle (as its creator) and It as the only two major powers. And since the Turtle remains in its shell and is, in Its estimation, "stupid," then It, as god of our world, of Derry, is the only true power.
As I explained above, these higher powers are symbols of the Oedipal triangle we all go through that pulls us out of the dyadic, narcissistic, one-on-one parent-to-child relationship of the Imaginary and into the larger culture and society of the Symbolic, represented by a third party, the other parent, the Non! du Père that forbids the original dyadic relationship of the second party, the Oedipally-desired parent, as a mirror of the self.
In King's cosmology, It corresponds to the child, Maturin corresponds to the Oedipally-desired parent (though It gets Its narcissistic supply not from the Turtle's love and attention, but from a sense of superiority over the Turtle's perceived stupidity and ineffectiveness), and Gan--the Other--corresponds to the intrusive third party that forces It to acknowledge that there's a much larger world out there than the one It has power over. The Losers, as the apparent agents of Gan, are making It feel as though It's about to be the real loser.
It feels somewhat encouraged in how now there are only five Losers to deal with: Stan has killed himself, and Its dogsbody--Henry--has put Mike in the hospital. It plans to send a nurse to Mike to finish him off (page 1318). It remembers how, when Mike was a baby, a large crow was pecking at him until his mother hit the bird with her fist and drove it away. The trauma of the crow would stay in Mike's unconscious until he saw the giant bird.
Its other dogsbody, Tom Rogan, has arrived in Its lair with Audra. He has also died of shock from seeing It in Its naked, undisguised form (page 1318). Audra has seen the horror of the deadlights, and she realizes that It, the giant spider, is FEMALE (page 1319).
This kids should have killed It when they had the chance, when It was hurt and therefore at Its most vulnerable. Instead, the adult Losers, older and fewer in number, will have to face It healed, renewed after Its twenty-seven-year rest (page 1320). What's more, the adult Losers no longer have their vivid, childhood imaginations to give them power to fight It.
Now, their imaginations have been stifled by TV. They need Dr. Ruth to help them fuck, and Jerry Falwell to help them to be saved. It realizes, however, that their imaginations aren't as weak as It thought they would be, especially when the five's imaginations are combined.
It heartens Itself by remembering that "Big Bill," the leader and the strongest of the group (and as "the writer," he's also the most imaginative of them), has been weakened by his fear for his wife and what's happened to her. After killing and feeding on him, killing the remaining four should be all the easier.
Now we come to the adult Losers going through the pipes (page 1321). Them all being bigger now, it's much harder going through such tight pipes. As they're going through, they get to a part of the sewer system that's moldered, 'and the bodies of Victor Criss and Belch Huggins had moldered along with it. Like Peter Pan's Wild Boys, Victor and Belch had never grown up." (page 1323)
Since the sewers represent the unconscious and the Shadow, and the sense of danger down there is linked with trauma, then the deaths of the two teen bullies represent how trauma has a way of putting its child victims in a state of arrested development, like those Wild Boys who never grew up. Trauma responses that serve a vital survival purpose in childhood become dysfunctional in adulthood, making the adult who was traumatized as a child still, in a way, a child. This is why the adult Losers have to confront It: their adventure underground is a symbolic facing of their childhood pain in order to be freed of it.
There's yet another mid-sentence transition, from the adult Losers in the sewers to the kid Losers there, on page 1325. Richie begins asking Bill, "Do you have any idea..." then we go to "how long they had been wandering through the tunnels under Derry..." in the narration on page 1326.
With the ending of the adult Losers section, just before Richie's question, Bill has found Audra's wedding ring and put it on his finger. His match has also blown out, leaving them all in darkness. Richie's unfinished question leaves them all in an even greater darkness of uncertainty, but the finding of her ring represents a sense of hope. The darkness and unfinished question transitioning back to the late Fifties, when the kid Losers have much less of an idea that they can defeat It, diminishes their sense of hope all the more.
There is, if anything, a far greater sense of hopelessness now, since Bill knows he won't ever find his way back out of the sewers (page 1326). He remembers how his dad once told him that "You could wander for weeks." They are desperately relying on Eddie's guidance. They don't have to be killed by It. They could die of endless wandering, get lost in the wrong pipes, or get drowned in the piss and shit.
An exploration of the Shadow can be similarly treacherous. One can be, without the guidance of a Jungian analyst, lost in the darkness of one's negative, trauma-induced thoughts, driven mad, as Jung himself almost was.
As the kids are crawling through and smelling the filth, their traumatic memories and associations are all coming to mind, as one would expect to experience while doing Shadow work. Ben remembers the mummy from the smell. Eddie imagines it's the smell of the leper. Richie thinks the stink is that of a moldering, rotting lumberjack's jacket, big enough to fit Paul Bunyan. Beverly thinks of the smell of her dad's sock-drawer (which in turn might remind one of that smell she and her dad made between them--page 1047). Stan remembers the smell of clay mixed with oil, which he associates with the demonic Golem. Mike thinks of the dry smell of feathers in a dead nest (pages 1326-1327).
Recall again how these smells are symbolic of introjections from what bullies and other abusers are projecting from themselves, what the abusers hate about themselves thrown onto their victims, the shit that gives off the stink, toxic fumes from toxic people.
Eddie directs them all to where the Canal is, which he says is less than half a mile away, provided they can keep going in a straight line (page 1328).
Then they hear a scream: "--gonna get you sons of bitches. We're gonna get youuuuuuu--" (page 1329, King's emphasis). Henry is still coming. They have no idea how far back he is, since the echoes give a distorted sense of distance.
About fifteen minutes later, they hear something coming toward them. Richie is so scared, he feels like a helpless three-year-old. One is reminded of adult Richie's fortune cookie, for they all see, once Bill lights another match, "the Crawling Eye!" (page 1230).
It's a gigantic eye filling the tunnel, with a black pupil two feet across, the iris a reddish-brown colour. The white of the eye is "laced with red veins." It moves with tentacles, suggesting the crawling of It-as-spider. It's looking at the kids greedily. Then, Bill's match goes out. It's as though the Eye can see them, but not vice versa.
This Eye is full of symbolism. This Eye stares at them just as the little eye in Richie's fortune cookie stares at him: it's a critical stare. The black iris is the black of the sewers, the world of the feared unknown. The russet colour of the iris suggests the red of blood from being hurt or killed (just as the red veins on the white of the eye) and the brown of shit. Henry (identified with It-as-killer) is right behind the kids, his own eyes watching for signs of them. Everything this Eye is implying is a death right there in the sewers...and even though we know the kids survive this incursion into the sewers, we also know there will be another incursion, with not all of the adult Losers surviving.
Bill feels the Eye's tentacles touching his ankles (page 1330). He feels Its heat, the heat of passion and hate. Beverly also feels a tentacle touch her ear and painfully tighten like a noose around her. As It's pulling her, she feels as if a strict schoolteacher were forcing her to sit wearing a dunce cap in the corner of the classroom (pages 1330-1331). In this, we can see how the terror of the Eye represents the pain of being criticized.
Eddie senses the tentacles around him but not landing on him (page 1331). He feels as if he were in a dream--a fitting feeling, given how the sewers represent the unconscious, and a giant eye with tentacles is a surreal image, the illogical, dreamlike kind that the unconscious would like to express.
His mind is screaming out to him to run home to his mamma, since he can find his way out. He's much braver than that, though, and as we'll learn by the end of the novel, adult Eddie is not only the Loser brave enough to face death, he's also the one whose body will be left in the sewers, because the other adult Losers won't be able to carry him out.
One thing we should never forget about the Shadow is that it is not all evil. It just represents aspects of ourselves that we don't want to accept are there; sometimes they're vices, but other times, they're virtues. In Eddie's case, he has strength and bravery he doesn't even know he has.
He shouts "No!" with "a Norse-warrior sound" that one would never guess such a thin chest could ever bellow (page 1332). He does more violent shouting, he kicks at the Eye, his foot going deep into the cornea, and he shouts at the others to fight It, for "It's just a fucking Eye!" He's calling his friends "pussies", he's fighting It, and he's "GOT A BROKEN ARM!"
Eddie, the weak one with "asthma," is actually the strong one of the Losers. All opposites combine into oneness in the sewers. Here, weakness becomes strength, and vice versa. Eddie is so much more than the Persona his mother would have him show the world.
The other Losers start fighting the Eye, and they cause It to withdraw (page 1333). Stan can hear Henry still coming, so they have to move out (page 1334). The tunnel is going downward, and the stench is getting stronger. They have a feeling of disconnection, as they had in the house at Neibolt Street, as if they're over the edge of the world, in nothingness, "Derry's dark and ruined heart" (pages 1334-1335). I'm reminded of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now, where there are similar depths of evil, of a sense of the end of the world.
Part of that apocalyptic evil is a sense that they're drifting apart, isolated and alone, as Bev is feeling. She tells the others to hold hands, so they'll all stay together, because it's only through their solidarity that they can hope to defeat It.
They come to a widened-out part of the tunnel. The area is huge. Bill is stuttering that they must go, for Henry will reach them soon (page 1336). Then, Stan notices the giant bird coming. Since It is the bird, and Henry is understood to be coming soon, we can see again how the bully and the evil entity can be at least symbolically equated.
It attacks Eddie first. As they're trying to fight It off, Stan tries to do what he did with his bird book the last time he had to face It alone: he's calling out the names of birds he believes in--scarlet tanagers, vultures, New Guinea mudlark, flamingos of Brazil, and golden bald eagles (page 1338).
With a large silence indicating that the bird has disappeared into the darkness, the Losers check Eddie's cuts. Henry shouts out that he and Belch are coming (page 1338). Bill stutters that Henry should go back while there's still time, for It is far more dangerous than Henry could ever be. The bullies, of course, won't go back, for as I've explained, and what Bill and the other Losers don't fully comprehend, is that the murderous instinct of It and the bullies is one and the same. In the subterranean unconscious, all is one.
The Losers reach a wall, where there's a small door with a mark on it. Bill sees it as a paper boat. Stan sees a rising bird (page 1339). Mike sees a hooded face, maybe Butch Bowers's. Richie sees eyes behind a pair of glasses. Beverly sees a balled-up fist (Al's, presumably). Eddie sees the leper's face, all disease and sickness on it. Ben sees "a tattered pile of wrappings"--the mummy's? (page 1340)
In other words, they all see their traumas.
The door isn't locked, so Bill pushes it open, letting out "a flow of sick yellow-green light" and a powerful "zoo smell." As the kids pass through and into Its lair, we have another mid-sentence transition to the next section, beginning with "Bill..."
We return to the adult Losers in the sewers. Bill has stopped abruptly, and he tells the others that It was where they are now. He and Richie remember that It was in the form of the Eye, so we see how these two sections are lined, and it's easy to know why Richie would remember the Eye (page 1341).
Bill mentions how Audra came to Derry because he told her the name of the town. Since Henry didn't take her into the sewers, though, how could she have gotten in there? Ben assumes that It brought her down there, to rob Bill of his courage (page 1342).
Beverly correctly suspects it was Tom who brought Audra into the sewers, because Bev also mentioned that it was Derry where she had to go to when she fought him and left him.
There's a discussion of how everyone's lives are intertwined: Bill and Audra, Bev and Tom, Henry, etc. Richie compares this interconnectedness to a soap opera, where Bill thinks it's better compared to the circus (page 1342). In any case, here in the sewers, all is one.
Bill seems to have an intuitive sense of object relations theory, though he gets the names mixed up. He imagines that in abusive Tom, Beverly has married Henry, when she corrects him and says that in Tom she really married her father.
Bill knows they're getting closer because he can smell It. He remembers, down the passageway, there's that door with the mark on it. Again, in this moment, we see a link unifying the past with the present--all of time is one. He can't, however, remember what's behind the door. When exploring the depths of the Shadow, one always comes across ever darker, more repressed things one cannot discover because one doesn't want to discover them. He remembers how scared he was when he opened the little door, the flood of light that came out, and the zoo-smell...but nothing more (page 1343).
He asks the others if they remember what It really was; none of them can. Beverly remembers they used the ritual of Chüd to fight It. They hear the approach of dragging feet, and Bill lights a match.
We next switch to a section with a sample of the residents of Derry responding to a number of 'wrong things happening' (pages 1343-1346). They start happening at 5:00 AM, just before the sunrise.
The first of these wrong things is the clock of the Grace Baptist Church not chiming that morning, the way it has unfailingly done at each hour and each half (except one time, at the noon-hour, supposedly a deliberate omission to mourn the deaths of some children from an explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks, though it actually just didn't chime because it didn't--page 1344).
Every old-timer in Derry has woken up at this time, sensing that something's wrong, but not knowing what it is. It's a sense of the lack of something that's supposed to have happened. Norbert Keene, who has told Mike about the Bradley Gang and told Eddie about his asthma placebo, is now looking out his window to see a darkening sky, when the weather report of the night before has called for clear skies (page 1345). It's going to rain.
He remembers the day the Bradley Gang was gunned down. He's scared, thinking, "Those kids...[are] monkeying around." Does he mean the Losers Club? If so, he's sensing a synchronicity.
Egbert Thoroughgood, who was in the Silver Dollar when Claude Heroux used his axe and gave those men so many whacks, wakes with a scream and having wet the bed after a dream about Claude. He, too, knows that something is terribly wrong. His terrifying dream (and dreams are part of the royal road to an understanding of the unconscious, as Freud observed) is connected through synchronicity to the apocalyptic events about to occur in Derry.
Dave Gardener, who found Georgie's bloody, one-armed body on that other day of flooding, is now disturbed by the conspicuous lack of a chime from the local church clock. He sees the clouds coming in, and he's even more worried (page 1346). He senses the danger because another Great Flood is coming.
The Derry Chief of Police, who has done his best to solve the new string of child-killings, and the one who suspects that Bev knows more about the circumstances surrounding the attack on Mike in the library than she's let on, sees the clouds out there, and feels the same worry as Keene, Thoroughgood, and Gardener. He senses that it will do more than just "pour buckets" (page 1346, King's emphasis).
The great, apocalyptic thunderstorm is about to come. The cop sees the huge raindrops beginning to fall. He hears the rumbling in the sky, and he is shuddering with fear.
These men all instinctively know that this won't be just any thunderstorm, or even any old flooding. The morning has been full of omens. The lack of chiming from a church clock known to be faithful with it implies 'the end of time,' in a sense. Dreams and memories of horrific violence, both past and present, add to the ominous energy.
This merging of the inner and outer worlds, a fearful sense inside the mind from bad dreams, and the sense of things going wrong out there, in the physical world, is the essence of synchronicity...but not the sentimental kind we learn of in YouTube videos, of good news from the universe.
Back in the sewers, after Bill has lit a match and held it up to see, he seems an apparition of George further up the tunnel, in his yellow rainslicker (page 1347). He's blaming Bill for allowing him to die, plaguing Bill further with guilt.
The apparition, of course, is a projection of Bill's guilt feelings, his unconscious running wild. He feels as if his friends are abandoning him, though Richie, Beverly, and Eddie are shouting at him to fight It and kill It (page 1348).
Bill tries to fight It off, saying the couplet for his stuttering therapy. As he does, Richie remembers that Bill stutters only in his own voice; he never stutters when he pretends to be someone else (page 1349).
This stuttering when he's himself, but not stuttering when he's not himself, ties in with what I was saying back in Part I of this analysis, when I related the stuttering to Bill's difficulty transitioning from Lacan's Imaginary--a narcissistic mindset in which a child's Oedipally-desired parent is a metaphorical mirror reflecting his ego--to the Symbolic, a sociocultural mindset expressed through language, in which one interacts with many Others who exist as entities unto themselves, not just as extensions of oneself.
Another aspect of this transition from dyadic relationships to the larger society involves engaging in that society's fakery while acting as if it were sincere, even believing it's sincere, something Lacan expressed in his French pun of le Non! du père and les non-dupes errent. To be able to adjust to society and gain its healthy benefits, one must 'play the game,' or participate in the hypocrisies and play-acting that everyone does in order to fit in. Hence, for Bill to be free of his stutter, he must speak in a voice other than his own. Entering society, which must be done through language, means speaking an actor's lines, so to speak.
Bill must recite that couplet like an actor reciting Shakespeare's blank verse, so to speak, so that he can immerse himself in the cultural world of the Symbolic and its use of language. As he repeats the couplet, not stuttering, he gains strength and can advance on It, making It back off (page 1350).
A little later, though, he falters, and the real Bill starts coming back, consumed with guilt. Weeping, he says sorry to George, and his stuttering returns as well (pages 1350-1351).
Outside, and as of 5:30 in the morning, it's raining hard. Weather forecasters are apologizing for the misleading predictions of good weather from the day before, which have raised the hopes of people planning picnics and other outings only to be disappointed today. Such disappointments, though, will be the least of their worries.
Though the rain is heavy, everyone agrees there won't be flooding; still, everyone's uneasy about the growing storm (page 1352). There are explosions: one from a power-transformer at 5:45, then an underground explosion is felt at 6:05. A number of people are killed (page 1353).
Mike wakes up in his hospital room at 6:46 after having "an anxiety dream." Once again, the inner and outer worlds are united through synchronicity. He slowly starts to remember how he was in the library, about to write in his notebook, when Henry appeared. Since he doesn't know any more after the attack, he can only worry that Henry has gone after the other Losers (page 1354).
He uses the call-bell to get help. A male nurse comes in the room, Mark Lamonica, whose sister was killed back in 1958, so this is a bad omen. Mark doesn't want to hear anything Mike has to say, another bad sign. He just wants to give Mike a shot.
Just as the shot from the syringe is symbolic of projection, the kind of projection one would get from an abuser, the unwillingness to listen to the words of the one an abuser is preying on is just as bad, for one must be able to rid oneself of the pain the abuser is putting into one. The shot will put Mike to sleep, as in "to die, to sleep, no more." The shot is a projection of the badness inside the abuser, like the projections that Eddie and Bev receive from his mother and her father respectively.
This kind of projection is projective identification, where the recipient is manipulated into manifesting the projections, hence, Eddie's germ-phobia and fragility, Bev's promiscuity with the Loser boys when she was a girl, and Mike's receiving of the Thanatos the nurse wants to inject into him.
Back in the tunnels, Bill wants everyone to be quiet (page 1355). Since Richie has lit a match, everyone looks around, expecting to see It in the form of another monster, a new surprise: perhaps Rodan, or a xenomorph from Alien.
This isn't the problem that Bill is worried about, though. He senses that Mike is in danger back in the hospital. Ben feels it, too. Bill wants everyone to hold hands immediately.
It's interesting how, in the sewers, symbolic of the collective unconscious and a place where all is one, the Losers can psychically feel Mike's current state of danger, all the way from there to the hospital.
Bill shouts out, "Send him our power!" in a strange, deep voice, as if he were a shaman in a trance (page 1356, King's emphasis). Beverly feels something leave all of their bodies and go out toward Mike. Again, the tunnels have a mystical quality rather like the Shining, which allows the Losers to send out a kind of divine energy to help Mike.
And indeed, this power gets to Mike, and in spite of being injured, weakened, and bedridden, he is able to use this power to pick up a glass and smash Mark the nurse in the face with it (page 1357), making him drop the syringe and saving Mike from getting the fatal injection.
Back in the tunnels again, Bill senses that Mike is all right. Ben has felt the power going out from them and coming back, but he doesn't know where it went or what it did...if it even existed (page 1358).
They all continue through the tunnel, Ben recalling the thick zoo smell. They've reached the door they'd found when they were kids, that small door. Ben's heart is beating faster. The place is triggering painful childhood memories for him. He feels fat again.
Since they're all grown up, it will be hard for them to get through the door. They see that mark on it, the one that evokes different things for each of them to see, as it did when they were kids. Bev sees Tom; Bill sees Audra's severed head, with accusing eyes to guilt-trip him the way Georgie's apparition has done (the severed head might also remind us of Stan's in the library fridge--page 909); Eddie sees a skull over two crossed bones, the poison symbol, Richie sees Paul Bunyan's face; and Ben sees Henry Bowers (page 1359).
Bill pushes the door open, letting out that flood of sick yellow-green light again, as well as more of the zoo smell, "the smell of the past become the present" (page 1359). Once again, we see how all is one in this subterranean place of the unconscious, where all times are the same time.
They all crawl through, and Bill is the first of them to see It in Its original form...or, at least, the form that is the closest that their minds can come to comprehend what It really is. They see a giant spider-like thing, but to see exactly what Its form is would be to confront Lacan's traumatic, inexpressible, indescribable Real.
So shocking a thing makes it easy for Bill to understand why Stan killed himself...and now, Bill wishes he'd done so, too (page 1360). Seeing exactly what It is...the deadlights...is something Bill would never want to see--the Real.
Ben senses that he can read Its mind (page 1361). Once again, we get an idea of how all is one down here in the sewers; there is a kind of shared consciousness where Ben can sense Its thoughts, and all of the Losers can send their psychic energy to aid Mike. Ben senses Its egg-sac, and he shudders at its implications (page 1361).
It is a She, and She is pregnant.
Stan is the only one who understood what they were all up against, and this is why he killed himself. It is a She, a pregnant She who will produce a litter of baby-Its that will continue to terrorize Derry even if the Losers manage to kill the mother.
They have to kill every single It out there. No matter how well you defeat evil, it keeps coming back. This is the offensive thing that Stan could never accept--the reality of the Real.
Bill goes forward, toward It, thinking, Got to become a child again (page 1361), recalling the same Biblical idea I discussed when Mike, writing in his notebook in his library, was thinking about how one must have the right child-like quality--faith--to confront It (pages 1159-1160) as the Losers had faced It in the late Fifties.
Now that Bill knows that It is a She, when he accuses It of killing his brother, instead of calling It a bastard, he calls It a "fuh-fuh-fucking BITCH!" (page 1362, King's emphasis). He's going over to It, and It is going up to him, "burying Bill in Its shadow," a fitting way to express something symbolic of Shadow work.
"Shadow" is also fittingly juxtaposed with the fact that Ben is looking into Its eyes, and for an instant he can see "the shape behind the shape," the orange deadlights "that mocked life" (page 1362).
And now what begins, for the second time, what is the subject of the next chapter.
XXVIII: The Ritual of Chüd
Bill's confrontation with It-as-giant-spider was greatly influenced by The Lord of the Rings, in particular, Frodo's predicament in the lair of Shelob, also a giant spider. The confrontation to begin at the end of the previous chapter was that of the adult Losers; the one beginning this chapter is the one with the kids in 1958.
Bill is showing incredible bravery as he crosses the room toward It (page 1364), again accusing It of killing his brother and him wanting revenge. The same language used in adult Bill's facing of It is used here with little Bill's confrontation: "It was rearing up over Bill...It buried Bill in Its shadow, Its legs pawing at the air." This should be compared with King's near-identical words on page 1362.
The point is that these repeated words suggest once again how the late Fifties experience is paralleled by the mid-Eighties one, that in this subterranean world that represents the collective unconscious, the past is at one with the present, because here, all is one--the Spider's lair symbolizes the traumatic, undifferentiated realm of Lacan's Real.
Again, though, just as at the end of the previous chapter, we have that juxtaposition of Bill "buried...in Its shadow" with Ben beholding that "insane light" (page 1364). We get a repeat of the language of the end of the previous chapter, too, from page 1362, again on page 1364 in this chapter: "Ben...heard Its eager mewling, looked into Its timeless, evil eyes, and saw something behind the shape". All of this once again reinforces the idea that the past and present are one, a cyclical repetition, synchronicity.
Richie seems to anticipate knowledge of Its sex when he says to Ben, "Let's get her, Haystack!" (page 1365). Ben is surprised to hear that It might be a She; Her? he thinks. Again, Richie's synchronistic anticipation strengthens our understanding that in the sewers, past and present are one because in the collective unconscious, all is one.
Richie runs toward Bill and into the shadow of It, and soon after, soon enough to be a near-juxtaposition, we read of Bill looking into the orange deadlights of Its eyes. Chüd has begun, just as it has at the end of the previous chapter.
Bill is in the void, confronting It directly, even conversing with It in their minds. Both are threatening each other, trying to intimidate each other (page 1365).
It would seem absurd to think that a little boy could even attempt to intimidate the "eternal...the Eater of Worlds", but Bill can actually do it. His youthful imagination, as I've said before, while tasty to It, can also be used as a weapon against It, that childlike faith that Mike has observed.
Bill begins mentally chanting the "thrusts his fists against the posts" couplet, and It fires him like the Human Cannonball across the Spider's chamber in an attempt to make him stop. Bill reminds himself that It's only in his head, and he's right--It, or Pennywise, is only a metaphor, a personification of his mental state.
As he's thrown about, past piles of human and animal bones, Bill keeps trying to recite the couplet, a few words at a time (page 1366). He is surrounded in darkness, total black. It is telling him to stop reciting the couplet, but he gets to the point of reciting it in its entirety. It is getting intimidated.
Bill wishes he could say it out loud without stuttering, instead of just reciting it in his mind. He would thus have so much more power to defeat It. As I've said previously, his stuttering, or difficulty using language to connect with others socially, stems from an inability to enter what Lacan called the Symbolic--the sociocultural world of language as a cure for the traumatizing, maddening world of the Real (the deadlights) that he's experiencing in the Spider's lair.
Still, It is desperately trying to make the boy continue to believe that Its illusion is real. It has to try to destroy Bill's confidence, to make him believe that he has already lost the fight.
Soon, though, Bill starts to sense that there is another being among them, a huge presence that is giving him a sense of awe, something with far greater power than It (page 1367).
Bill has encountered the Turtle.
The Turtle has kind eyes. It is the principle of goodness, but it is passive, the dark yin to Its bright yang, the maddening brightness of the deadlights. The Turtle won't actively help Bill defeat It, but he is getting a feeling, through knowing the existence of the Turtle, that there is an Other, not just the dyadic existence of It on the one side, and on the other side, all of these child victims who exist only to sate Its hunger, only to be mirror reflections of Its narcissism in Lacan's Imaginary.
The Turtle represents a God-like third party, opening up the possibility of there being a Final Other, Gan, the real, ultimate God of Stephen King's cosmology. The existence of these so many others means that the dyadic, narcissistic world of It can be broken down and destroyed, the Imaginary supplanted by the Symbolic...Bill just has to say the couplet, use spoken language to bring on the Other of society.
Bill begs for help from the Turtle, but he doesn't even get a "God helps those who help themselves" kind of response. Bill must help himself, and apart from the Turtle's advice to recite the couplet out loud (page 1368), Bill has to rely on Chüd alone.
Bill is also getting a sense that It is only bluffing in Its threats (page 1370). He has only the ritual of Chüd to fight It with...and maybe, that's all he needs.
To recite the couplet out loud without stuttering, Bill has to use a voice other than his own, so he drops his voice a full register to make it like his father's voice (page 1371). He shouts the couplet out loud like this, making It scream in his mind in frustration. It's writhing and pushing him away.
Recall what I said before about entering the Symbolic not just through language, but also through a belief in the phoniness of social interaction--to be duped by that phoniness is, paradoxically, not to err...le Non! du père is les non-dupes errent. In speaking in a voice that isn't his own, his father's voice, Bill is engaging in the fakery of society; and so, he isn't erring, and in entering the Symbolic thus, he can defeat It. That he uses, of all voices, his father's, is most fitting in this connection.
He repeats his screaming of the couplet, making It scream again and feel even more intense pain (page 1371). It's still trying to push him away, to get rid of him, but he won't stop fighting. He knows the importance of a child's faith, as Mike will later observe as an adult in the library. Bill affirms his belief in all of those childhood things, like the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Captain Midnight, etc. (page 1372) Believing in such things is yet another example of being duped by ideas that society teaches children about...but Bill isn't erring.
He's made It scream again. The Turtle is impressed with Bill, but tells him to continue, to finish It off. He mustn't let It get away (page 1373). The Turtle's head withdrawn back into its shell, its voice fades away. It is in agonizing pain, begging Bill to let It go.
He touches Its web, and his hand goes numb (page 1374). Ben warns him not to touch it. It is retreating back into the darkness of Its chamber at the back. Strands of Its web are floating down. Mike warns Bill to watch out for the falling web. Bill can't see the Spider, but he can mentally hear It mewling and crying out in pain.
He doesn't know if It's retreated to hide, to die, or to escape. He's come out of the void-state, and Richie is asking him what happened. Bill knows they have to make sure It is dead (page 1375).
Up above, the spiderweb is drooping and collapsing, "losing its fearful symmetry," an amusing nod to William Blake's poem, "The Tyger," in which the duality of the Tyger's beauty and ferocity finds a parallel in the good/bad duality pervading It.
This reference to the Blake poem is also illuminating in how it's part of his Songs of Experience, as opposed to his Songs of Innocence. Consider what's been happening to the Loser kids: throughout this novel, they have been going through a transition from innocence to experience. We see the Losers as kids and as adults. The traumas It has been putting them through are the crucial part of that transition.
"The Tyger" is mostly verses that are questions posed to the animal. There is a terrible mystery surrounding the Tyger. And since the spiderweb also has a "fearful symmetry," It, too, has a terrible mystery about it; but the spiderweb is "losing its fearful symmetry," because the Losers have entered Its lair, confronted It, scared It, and hurt It.
The novel then brings us back to the mid-80s, with adult Bill confronting It, who taunts him about his baldness (page 1377). Bill, doing the ritual of Chüd a second time, is full of vengeful thoughts again: he accuses It of killing not only his brother, but also Stan, and of trying to kill Mike. Bill plans to finish what he'd only started as a boy with the previous ritual of Chüd.
It tells him that the "stupid" Turtle is dead. It also promises that Bill will see the deadlights. He senses, though, that It is still hurt from the last time (page 1378).
In a section titled Richie, the other four adult Losers are watching Bill in his confrontation with It, paralyzed. At first, this confrontation is "an exact replay of what had happened before," suggesting again the idea that here in the sewers, past and present are one. It has thrown Bill, and he is intent on seizing Its tongue.
Since I've compared the Turtle to God, we can see how Bill's having heard that "the Turtle is dead oh God the Turtle is really dead" would cause him to feel "sickening...despair." (page 1379) This despair is like that of anyone who has contemplated what Nietzsche meant by "God is dead," that the Christian God can no longer be believed in.
In a world where evil, in one form or another, very much exists, to think that a powerful force of good doesn't exist, to help us fight that evil, is terrifying. I dealt with such terrors in my analyses of films like The Exorcist and The Omen. Since the Turtle, even when alive, hasn't helped the Losers in any substantive capacity, we can see how It is also a terrifying story with its lack of a powerful force of good. The non-intervening Turtle is more the God of the deists than the actual Christian God.
Still, the Losers won't give up. Richie, for a change, puts one of his inane voices to good use, in this case, his Irish Cop Voice, to distract It from using Its stinger on Bill (page 1379). Richie senses pain and anger in Its head. He jumps into the void, joining Bill there, and manages to do what Bill hasn't been able to: having hurt It, Richie grabs hold of Its tongue (page 1380). It's thought only Bill would challenge It, and now It has to shake Richie off while he's doing a Spanish accent.
In the next section, titled Eddie, Eddie is watching Bill, and especially Richie, confronting It (page 1384). He's impressed that Richie has improved his act: his Irish Cop Voice really sounds like Mr. Nell, the cop who, back when the Losers were kids in the Barrens, wanted them to take down their dam.
Eddie senses the connection between Richie and the Spider, how they're staring at each other and swirling their talking and emotions together (page 1385). Naturally, there's connection, a swirling together: as a symbol of trauma, the Spider is like a mirror that Richie is looking into. His voices, his humor, are a way of dealing with his trauma, as I've said before.
By doing his voices, Richie, like Bill, is not speaking in his own voice. Thus, like Bill, Richie is leaving Lacan's traumatic Real and entering the sociocultural world of the Symbolic, the world of the Other (i.e., many others, not one other as an extension of oneself, as in the narcissistic Imaginary), via the social fakery of les non-dupes errent. Since It cannot bear the multiple Other, Richie is succeeding in hurting It.
Bill is slumped on the floor, his nose and ears bleeding (page 1385). Eddie is thinking that they can hurt It while It's distracted with Richie. He hears Richie in his head, crying out for help (page 1386). Eddie take out his aspirator, ready to use it as a weapon...as odd as that must sound.
Recall how Eddie, from the time he'd learned from Mr. Keene that the medicine was just a watery placebo, nonetheless continued to use it, and blackmailed his mom into letting him be with his friends if he continued to use it. (Recall also when all the Losers, before entering the house at Neibolt Street, borrowed his aspirator--pages 1107-1108.) His use of the aspirator now, to spray it in the Spider's eye while believing that it really works against asthma (page 1386), is another example of les non-dupes errent. He's let himself be a dupe of the placebo's supposed efficacy, and paradoxically, he isn't erring in his attack on It.
As he does so, though, he hears the voice of his mother forbidding him to go near It, for fear of It giving him cancer. Eddie, however, won't stay in the cocoon of his mother's excessive protection; he wants out of the dyadic world of the Imaginary and into that of the Symbolic, out of the one-on-one other and into the societal Other, and being duped by the 'efficacy' of the placebo is his ticket there, where he'll unerringly go.
His childlike belief in the sprayed 'medicine' is enough to make It scream in pain. He calls out to Bill to come back from the void. Unlike any conceptions we may have that Eddie is a weak 'mama's boy,' he has proven his bravery.
He'll have to pay the price for his bravery, though, and like Georgie, he'll pay with his arm (page 1387). His defying of his domineering mother's voice is his accepting of le Non! du père via les non-dupes errent, his leaving of the Imaginary to enter the Symbolic; and as with Georgie, the loss of Eddie's arm is a symbolic castration.
Recall how, back in Part I, when was discussing Georgie's death, I interpreted the tearing-off of his arm as being also a symbolic castration, and that his trauma is also symbolically the result of the Oedipus complex, a universal narcissistic trauma. His leaving the house, to go out and play with his paper boat in the torrential rain, is symbolically a leaving of the protective womb of his family, of his mother (who has been at the piano, playing Für Elise, among other things--pages 4 and 7), to go out into the real world, into society, a leaving of the Imaginary to enter the Symbolic. The symbolic castration, in Lacanian terms, is a realization that one cannot be the fulfillment of one's mother's desire: one cannot be the phallus for her, and so one cannot hog her to oneself; one must share her with one's father.
Anyway, the dissolution of Georgie's Oedipus complex, linked with Eddie's renunciation of his mother's dominance, leading to their symbolic castrations/literal deaths, is accompanied by other parallels with Eddie's death. Both deaths have occurred during a Deluge-like rainfall. The apocalyptic nature of the novel's climax, with the destruction of downtown Derry, can be linked with the end of the Oedipal relationship that both George and Eddie have had with their mothers. In leaving the comfort of the dyadic relationship to go out into the uncertainties of the social world, both of them have experienced a kind of 'paradise lost.' Both have shown great bravery, too: Georgie in first going down into the scary cellar to get the paraffin, and Eddie in directly confronting It with his aspirator. Both have left Mom.
These parallels also reinforce the unity of the past with the present via their cyclical recurrences. With the kid Losers' confrontation of It in the sewers, there was also torrential rain symbolically associated with the Great Flood, as well as with Lacan's traumatic Real.
The next section describes the destruction going on outside in Derry because of the growing storm (pages 1388-1393). The winds are blowing much faster now, at 7:00 AM. All the power on the Kansas Street side of the Barrens has been killed by the explosion of the power-transformer at Tracker Brothers'. An old maple tree has fallen, flattening a Nite-Owl store and pulling down enough power lines to knock out the power in both the Old Cape and Sherburn Woods development beyond it (page 1389).
The rain is now a tropical downpour. The streets going downhill into the downtown shopping area are foaming and running with water. It's easy to associate all of this rain, symbolically at least, with the Deluge.
People are getting killed. Raymond Fogarty, the minister who presided over George's burial rites, has been killed by a toppling beer cooler (pages 1389). Mr. Nell, now 77, has been watching the storm, and he suffers a fatal stroke at 7:32 (page 1391).
What's especially interesting about this whole section is that, except for the very last sentence ("And the wind continued to rise."--page 1393), it is all one continuous, unbroken paragraph...for about five and a half pages. This general lack of paragraph breaks suggests the non-differentiation of Lacan's Real, a traumatic place whose chaos cannot be expressed in words. The apocalyptic destruction cannot be verbalized, emotionally processed, or healed from.
The next section brings us back to the late 1950s in the tunnels, a fact made immediately apparent from the presentation of a very living little Eddie leading the kid Losers through the dark tunnels (page 1393). He has to admit, for the first time in his life, that he is lost.
Bill is really scared: he remembers what his dad told him about getting lost here. Because the blueprints have disappeared, "nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why" (page 1394, King's emphasis). Not even Eddie knows how to get out. Bill's dad told him people have gotten lost down here before. "It's happened before." Bill's seen the bones here.
He doesn't even know for sure if they've killed It or not.
Bill is also troubled by the feeling that the bond between him and the rest of the Losers is dissolving--they're fading away from each other (page 1395). He knows that through their solidarity, they have been able to defeat It, if not yet kill It. It's only a spider, after all. It seems as though the human mind can cope with anything...except "(the deadlights)".
The Other, through their friendship, seems to have made the Losers more than children (page 1396). This is the therapeutic strength of the Symbolic, to leave narcissistic dyads and enter the society of many people.
There's no sense of that Other now, though. Instead of being in the Symbolic, being trapped in these dark, labyrinthine tunnels is to be trapped in Lacan's traumatic, undifferentiated Real. Worse, Henry is still out there, looking for them. He could turn a corner and find them at any time. I equate him with It, as a murderer. Even if they're not one and the same, though, and even if It, though not dead, isn't going to reappear any time soon, Henry very well could.
Bill wanted to have his friends all come down here to help him in his personal vendetta with It. It's his responsibility that he and his friends should not be lost down here, so it's on him to get them all back out. His dad has told him how nearly-impossible it is to find one's way back out, and not even Eddie can find the way out. Bill is feeling the weight of his selfishness pressing down on him.
Recall how he also feels that he and his friends are drifting apart from each other, getting alienated from each other, the worst thing to happen to kids trapped in such a dangerous, dark place. Bev, on the other hand, has the solution to their feelings of mutual estrangement: each boy is to have a turn making love to her. They are shocked to hear her unzipping and undressing right in front of them (pages 1396-1397). Her father's told her about this kind of thing...which should tell us all something about her relationship with him.
She asks, in all insouciance, who will be the first boy to have her, then she says, "I think...", and there's another mid-sentence transition into the next section, back to the mid-80s in the tunnels, when adult Beverly finishes her own sentence by tearfully saying she thinks Eddie is dying (page 1397). Note how this transition links a moment--leading up to an act that would result in the beginning of life--to a moment leading to the end of a life.
The tunnels, subterranean symbols of the unconscious, are a place where all is one. This means that all opposites are united here: good and evil (the Shadow, remember, isn't always bad), male and female (Bev's sexual union with the boys being symbolic of this), past and present (what these mid-sentence transitions, as well all the cyclical recurrences, represent, as I've said before), dark and light as both representing evil (the dark as well as the deadlights), birth and death, Eros and Thanatos, etc.
Bill and Richie are arguing over whether to go after It and resume the fight, or to put a tourniquet on Eddie to control the bleeding, save him, and get him to safety. Bev, knowing Eddie's going to die, tells the two men to go after It and kill It, for if It lives to kill again after the next quarter-century goes by, then Eddie will have died in vain (page 1398).
Bill and Richie are about to chase It, but Bill looks up and sees Audra in the spiderweb. He screams out her name as she's dropping in starts and stops, with the web falling all around. Ben and Richie insist that Bill leave her there for the moment so they can all go after and kill It. Bill can't help hesitating for a moment, then he goes with them after It (page 1399).
In the next section, titled Ben, he, Bill, and Richie are following Its trail of black blood (page 1399). Ben soon discovers a trail of Its eggs, about the size of ostrich eggs. He can see through them and see all of the black fetuses. Bill and Richie also stop and gape at the eggs for a moment, but Ben, planning on dealing with the problem himself, tells them to continue going after It.
Since the eggs are miscarried offspring, Ben assumes they'll all die...but what if even one survives after Bill and Richie have killed the mother? Again, Eddie's death would be in vain. Ben must kill them.
He stomps on the first egg with his boot (page 1400). He sees a rat-sized baby spider trying to get away, so he goes after it and crushes it with his boot, feeling it crunch and splatter.
There could be thousands, even millions, of these eggs, if It is anything like a normal spider. Having already vomited from the stomping, Ben thinks he'll go mad having to kill so many; still, he must.
He keeps stomping on one egg after the other in the growing darkness, using the matches Richie gave him to provide him with what little light he can have. This stomping on the eggs can be seen as yet another instance of the duality of good and evil that I've mentioned so many times as manifesting in this novel: if we think of these babies as having the sentience and consciousness of human beings, it's awful to massacre the innocent--hence, Ben's nausea from doing it. How it's good to kill them needn't be explained.
The next, brief section tells us of Its fear, pain, and grief over Ben's killing of Its young (page 1401). It ponders the possibility of Its not being eternal after all. It's blind in one eye, and It feels a poisonous pain down Its throat, thanks to Eddie's aspirator.
That such an originally intimidating monster can now be so vulnerable, so afraid because of the modest efforts of three unassuming men--one of them using his aspirator, of all things, as a weapon to poison and partially blind It, another to hurt It by merely reciting a couplet originally meant to help cure his stutter, and another awkwardly hanging onto Its tongue--shows us how weak It really is underneath that intimidating façade.
In other words, It is in this way also like Henry--intimidating on the surface, but weak and cowardly on the inside. We see here another duality made one in the sewers, the duality of weak vs strong. Similarly, the Losers--as kids and as adults--have seemed weak on the outside, but inside of each of them is a surprising strength and courage.
Nonetheless, in spite of Its fear, It knows It must fight Ben, Bill, and Richie. Its fight-or-flight response has switched back to the former, so It tuns around to face them.
In the next section, titled Beverly, she can barely make out, in an enveloping darkness that's turning to black, Audra falling another twenty feet, "then fetch up again" (pages 1401-1402). Bev remembers how she was Bill's first love; then, feeling Eddie's dead body with her, she remembers that all of the Losers were her first loves. She tries to remember that time in the tunnels when she gave herself to all of them, and then we come to the next section.
Another mid-sentence transition takes us back to 1958, starting with "Her thoughts broke off as she realized that Eddie" [...] "comes to her first" (page 1403, King's emphasis). Again, what links these two sections is Eddie's death and his lovemaking with her, Eros and Thanatos; but also, we learn that little Eddie goes to Bev first because he's scared and he wants her to comfort him as his mother would do. Adult Eddie's body, lying dead with her, is also like a helpless child being held by his mother; Beverly is thus like an Oedipal transference for him, whether alive or dead, and since all is one down here, life (Eros) and death (Thanatos) are yet another two opposites to be dialectically united.
She instructs him to put his "thing" in her (page 1403). Again, this reference to his penis links this section to the last one in that, adult Eddie's lost arm being a symbolic castration as I've described above (as with Georgie), we have another set of unified dialectical opposites (castrated vs intact). And since the Lacanian notion of symbolic castration involves the boy's not being able to be the phallus for his mother, and Bev is his Oedipal mother transference, then we have another unity of opposites in his having his 'mother' vs not having her.
As with the scene of Beverly seeing Henry and Patrick Hockstetter engaging in mutual masturbation, Stephen King is really pushing the envelope here by having a sex scene with pre-teen kids. For obvious reasons, there are no pornographic details being given here; but the very idea of having such a scene is enough to raise eyebrows all on its own.
Naturally, the focus is on the psychology of the experience rather than its physicality. We sense Eddie's fear and awkwardness, and finally his love for Beverly (pages 1403-1405).
The point of the sexual union between her and all of the other boys is not to be titillating in some sick, perverted way, but rather to cement the Losers' sense of solidarity, to bring them all closer together in love and oneness, as a cure for that drifting apart that Bill has been fearing has been happening to all of them.
After Eddie, it's Mike's turn (Egad! Interracial sex...in the late 50s!) then Richie's (page 1405), then Stan's. Then Ben has her (page 1406).
He is, like Eddie, afraid and awkward, thinking he can't do it. She finds that he is "too big [...] and too old for her"; it makes her think of "Henry's M-80s, something not meant for kids," suggesting that Ben inside her is making her think of the sexual abuse I suspect Al is guilty of with her.
Her union with Ben is about the longest one described, about two and a half pages, which is fitting, since at the end of the novel, Ben and Bev will leave Derry together and become a couple. Naturally, the emotional connection between the two is strongest during sex, because deep down, they really love each other. She even says, "If you wrote the poem, show me." (page 1407)
As they're doing it, she starts thinking about how giggling kids will refer to sex as "It" (page 1408). She thinks, "for many of them sex must be some unrealized undefined monster." She reflects how one laughs at what's fearful and unknown as well as at what's funny...like a clown, It. This unrealized, undefined monster also sounds like Lacan's Real. Sex is heaven and hell combined, Eros and Thanatos.
When she's finished with Ben, it's Bill's turn (page 1409). Of course, he's stuttering all over the place. The lovemaking is passionate, but not the same as it was with Ben. Bill is almost calm; his eagerness is held back by his anxiety for her. They cannot talk of what they've been doing, not even with each other. After all, Bev has just done exactly what her father has been worried about her doing, what he's been accusing her of. The slut-shaming she's experienced has prodded her to do with the boys something no pre-teen girl would ever normally do, especially in the 'innocent' late 1950s. This is partly why I suspect Al of sexually abusing her.
When Eddie was to enter her, she thought of Al wanting to see if she was intact. Eddie rammed in hard, and it hurt, but this doesn't come across as a broken hymen (page 1404). But now that they have all finished having her, the Losers can think about getting...
Please wait for the final part.
Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986
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