Here are links to Parts I, II, and III, if you haven’t read them yet.
XVI: Three Uninvited Guests
While on the literal level, Pennywise is of course the killer in It, on a symbolic level, It is trauma personified. Henry Bowers has been blamed for all the murders in the late 1950s, while we know he actually killed his father and Mike’s old dog, Mr. Chips. I suspect, however, that Henry and Patrick Hockstetter are psychopathic enough, at least, to have committed all the killings. Pennywise’s presence in all these proceedings, including his own manifested violence, seem merely symbolic.
In this chapter, three people are getting involved in the Losers’ mission to destroy It. Two of them, Henry and Tom Rogan, Bev’s abusive husband, seem apt to be included, since they’re both trauma-inflicting bullies. The third, however, is Audra, Bill’s wife, and she’ll wind up on the receiving end of trauma.
As I mentioned previously in section XI: Georgie’s Room and The House On Neibolt Street from Part III, Henry is associated with the werewolf because, as we see in this chapter, he as an adult inmate in a mental hospital is hearing voices from the moon; thus he’s a lunatic of a sort comparable to how the full moon causes a lycanthrope to change into a wolf. The voice of the moon is the voice of Pennywise in the forms of Victor and Belch (page 791).
Since Pennywise is trauma personified, and since It represents the Collective Shadow, then it makes sense to understand these voices to be projections of Henry’s own traumas and madness. For him to see and hear Pennywise in the moon is to confront himself in a metaphorical mirror reflection.
So when Henry hears voices taunting him about his failures in such situations as the Apocalyptic Rock Fight (to be dealt with two chapters later, after the third Derry interlude), and they tell him to go back to Derry and kill all of the Losers, what on the surface would seem to be the clown is actually a projection of Henry’s mad thoughts (page 797).
Pennywise, in the voice of Victor Criss, tells Henry to get out of the mental hospital and get revenge on the Losers for the rock fight. Vic offers to help by taking care of a guard named Koontz, named apparently after Dean Koontz, who as a fellow horror/suspense thriller writer was something of a rival to Stephen King. Pennywise appears before this guard with the head of a Doberman pinscher, terrifying the guard and killing him (pages 802-803). That King would write a killing of a man named Koontz thus sounds like a form of wish-fulfillment.
Next, we learn of how Tom Rogan has found out where Beverly is going. After escaping Tom’s clutches, Bev got help from a friend named Kay McCall. Tom manages to find out that Kay has helped Beverly, so he finds Kay and gets the information of where his wife is going, by literally beating that information out of Kay (page 809). Feeling guilty over having told Tom, who threatened to slice up her face if she didn’t, Kay tries to contact Bev in Derry by phone to warn her that he’s on his way there (page 813).
On the plane from Chicago to Derry, Tom has a copy of Bill Denbrough’s novel, The Black Rapids. He’s read and reread the note on the author at the back of the book (page 813). He knows Bill is from New England; he also knows Bill’s wife, Audra Phillips, is a noted actress, and he’s trying to remember what movies he’s seen her in.
He remembers that Audra is a redhead, and therefore she looks a lot like Beverly. Since Bev wants to go to Derry to see her old childhood friends, including Bill, and since Bill seems to have a thing for redheads, does all of this mean that, not only were Bill and Bev an item as kids, but do they now want to revive their old love?
Tom has some insight into psychology, though as a narcissist and a psychopath, he uses that insight to manipulate and control, not to help, people like Bev (page 814). He has an instinct that people do transferences of those they knew as kids onto those they know now as adults, including transferences of love.
Eddie’s made such a transference of his obese, overprotective mother onto Myra (whose overprotectiveness, surprisingly, hasn’t motivated her to join Henry, Tom, and Audra in a search for the Losers in Derry). Bev did a transference from her father onto Tom. And Bill, Tom intuits, has done a transference of Beverly onto Audra…yet this transference seems to be insufficient for Bill, so he needs Beverly again. Tom’s intuition and his wild, sociopathic jealousy are welded together here.
This jealousy of his is extensively paralleled with that of Bev’s father, who always ‘worried about her…a lot,’ that she’d fall into vice with other boys. Tom similarly doesn’t like Bev to be smoking, and he’s bringing her a carton of cigarettes…not to smoke, but to eat (page 817).
Cigarettes are phallic symbols, too. Tom’s not liking Bev smoking is unconsciously linked to the idea of her practicing fellatio on an object other than his own phallus. Making her “eat” the cigarettes is a way of ‘curing’ her of her smoking habit by a kind of ironic overkill, punishing her with the sin.
Audra argues with her bad-tempered movie producer, Fredde Firestone, about her and Bill suddenly having to leave England and go to Derry (pages 817-822). In the US, she rents a Datsun to drive into the city.
She and Tom take rooms in motels that are side by side. In fact, the LTD wagon he’s bought and the Datsun she’s rented are parked nose-to-nose (page 824), with only a raised concrete sidewalk to separate them.
Such a coincidence is the kind of synchronicity that can happen only in Derry, it seems. The inner world of Tom’s mind, jealously preoccupied with the red hair of Audra and Beverly, is coinciding with the outer-world proximity of Audra’s Datsun.
XVII: Derry: The Third Interlude
Mike is reflecting on the period of killings that included the fire in the Black Spot. He imagines the killings to have been a kind of huge human sacrifice to satisfy Pennywise, as if It were a pagan god.
These cycles of killings of every twenty-seven years or so, these mass human sacrifices, as it were, would come to an end, and It being thus satisfied, would then go to sleep for about a quarter century. Yet just as there is a cause to end the killings for the moment, there’s also a cause to begin them.
And in the case of the spate of killings from 1929 to 1930, the cause was the incident with the Bradley Gang (page 827).
As usual, whenever there’s such horror as the shootout that killed the Bradley Gang in a bloodbath, the people of Derry, for the most part, pretend to forget what happened, either claiming they were out of town that day, or napping that afternoon and not knowing what happened until they’d heard about it on the news, or straight out lying about it.
As I’ve mentioned previously, Derry is the kind of town where people, on the surface, affect sweetness, kindness, gentleness, and good manners, all the while hiding the town’s slimy underbelly. It’s far easier to engage in denial and projection than it is to be honest about one’s traumas and confront the scary stuff. And as I’ve also said previously, confronting the scary stuff is what It is all about.
Mike manages to get the true story about the Bradley Gang shootout from Norbert Keene, owner of the Center Street Drug Store from 1925 to 1975 (page 828). The gang was led by the brothers George and Al Bradley; they would rob stores across Derry throughout the late 1920s, until of course the locals got fed up with them and gunned them all down. Even Pennywise was among the shooters.
The gang had been hitting banks across the Midwest and even kidnapped a banker for ransom (page 831). They got paid thirty thousand dollars for the ransom, a lot of money back in the late 1920s, but they still killed the banker.
The Midwest was getting sick of gangs like the Bradleys always terrorizing them, so the gang went up northeast and into the Derry area. They’d been lying low in a big farmhouse they’d rented there, but they were getting bored and wanted to do some hunting. They had the guns, but not the ammo, so they went to Machen’s Sporting Goods to get it. The owner, Lal Machen, was shocked to learn just how much ammo the gang wanted to buy (page 832), but said he’d have rather made the sale than his competition in a store up in Bangor. Lal knew exactly who his customers were, of course.
The gang was supposed to pick up the ammo two days later, at two in the afternoon (page 833). When the gang left the store, Lal told as many people as possible that the Bradley Gang would be at his store at the agreed time, and he knew that if the gang wanted ammo, they were sure to get a lot of it (page 834)…but in a way they hadn’t been expecting to get it.
When the time of reckoning came, Lal told Al Bradley, sitting in a La Salle, to put his hands up and that he was surrounded (page 838). Lal started firing, hitting Al in the shoulder. The shootout was all over in about four or five minutes. George, running away, got a bullet in the back of his head (page 841).
As I said above, it’s understood by Keene that one of the gunmen who massacred the Bradley Gang was a clown (page 843). We should consider how every shooter saw Pennywise using the same gun that he was using. Keene fired a Winchester, and he saw the clown fire a Winchester. Biff Marlow used a Remington, and he saw Pennywise shoot with a Remington. Jimmy Gordon used an old Springfield, and he saw the clown use one just like his.
This use of the same guns reinforces the idea that Pennywise is not someone there in the real, physical world. He’s a dagger of the mind, so to speak, proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain. He’s a projection of the gunmen’s own aggression, a personification of their trauma, of their fight-or-flight response…here, with an emphasis on fight.
Keene imagines the man was wearing clown makeup to hide his identity, as a Klansman might do with the white hood. This sounds like an unconscious wish-fulfillment and projection of a group of murderers who wanted to remain anonymous, just as so many in Derry ‘didn’t know’ what really happened that day.
XVIII: The Apocalyptic Rockfight
It’s interesting that the rockfight between the Losers Club–all seven of them now, with Mike finally joining them–and Henry Bowers’s Gang is described as being ‘apocalyptic,’ of all things. Recall that both the flooding in Derry at the novel’s beginning, when Georgie is murdered, and at the end, when the adult Losers confront and defeat It once and for all, are associated with the Great Flood, another world-ending event.
Pennywise, or It in Its giant spider form, must be seen in Its context of the whole cosmology of King’s novels, as must the Turtle, Maturin, in the Macroverse in which the Turtle vomited out our mainstream universe. Maturin is the God, or Ahura Mazda, the principle of good in this dualistic cosmology; and It is the Devil, or Angra Mainyu, the principle of evil, in this universe.
Good and evil are at war with each other throughout sacred histories like those of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, or the mythography King has created in novels like It. At the end of these sacred histories, the war between the powers of light and darkness comes to a head, and we get the apocalyptic final confrontation, like Ragnarök–a great, epic battle.
Just as the adult Losers have their ultimate confrontation with It at the end of the novel, with a fitting Deluge and destruction of downtown Derry, so do the pre-teen Losers have their great fight–no less a battle between good and evil, in its own way–with Henry Bowers’s gang. Depicting both battles as, each in its own way, apocalyptic is fitting, even if calling the rockfight ‘apocalyptic’ sounds a tad melodramatic on the surface. For the point is that fighting It is perfectly paralleled with fighting Henry and his bullies; it’s all about confronting trauma, facing one’s fears.
Pennywise is Henry…and his bullies, his father, Bev’s father and her husband, Eddie’s mother and his wife, the racist secret society (the Maine Legion of White Decency) that killed all the blacks in the Black Spot, Adrian Mellon’s homophobic murderers, etc. Pennywise is the Collective Shadow.
After having looked around Derry to jog their memories and confront Pennywise in various forms, the adult Losers go to the library to meet up with Mike, Bill being the first to arrive. Bill is thinking about Silver in Mike’s garage, the day the kids met in the Barrens (except Mike) and told their scary stories about It, and–looking over at Mike–Bill remembers the day Mike joined the Losers, the day of the apocalyptic rockfight (pages 850-851).
A number of the Losers, when they were kids, each had his own set of reasons why he thought Henry hated him the most, these being Ben, Richie, Stan, and Bill. To be sure, Henry virulently hates all four of them, but the kid Henry hated the most was Mike (pages 854-855). This hate stemmed from how Mike’s father’s farm so fully outclassed Butch Bowers’s farm, as I’ve already mentioned.
Now, Butch was as crazy and sociopathic as his son, and he hated Mike and his father as much as Henry did. Butch is how Henry learned racism against blacks. Parents teaching their kids bigoted ideas is a form of emotional abuse; in fact, Butch rewarded Henry with his first beer (page 858) for having killed Mr. Chips, Mike’s dog, by poisoning burger meat (psychopathic Henry even sat and watched the dog die after eating the meat–page 857).
Naturally, Henry wanted his father’s love, something difficult to get from a man plagued with PTSD after fighting the Japanese in WWII. Henry was afraid of crazy Butch, just as his bully friends, Victor et al, were afraid of the vicious man, who was as abusive to them as he was to Henry. Even Butch’s wife left him after he beat her almost to death.
The point is that abuse and the trauma resulting from it are contagious. This is how that It-spider has existed throughout the sacred history of King’s cosmology. It feeds on human flesh, but finds that the fear of children makes that flesh taste better. So trauma and abuse are like the original sin that is passed from generation to generation, nourishing It the whole time. Killing It thus ends the sacred history, an apocalyptic moment like the rockfight, since It is manifested in Henry and his gang of bullies.
Hurt people hurt people. Henry hurts everyone, because he himself has been hurt so much. It feeds on everyone’s pain.
Henry, Victor, Belch, and two other bullies named Peter Gordon and Steve “Moose” Sadler are chasing Mike toward the Barrens, while on the bank of the Kenduskeag Stream, the six Losers are discussing how It is terrorizing them. They realize It lives in the sewers (pages 863-864).
Bill’s father, Zack Denbrough, told him that the whole sewer area was originally marsh. Zack explained that the machinery used to pump the sewage is old and needs to be replaced, but the city council doesn’t want to pay for new machinery whenever the issue is brought up at budget meetings. So the sewers are never fixed.
Recall that I see the underground, including of course the sewers, as a symbol of the unconscious. The sewers reek of piss and shit, the filth ejected from our bodies, which in turn is symbolic of all that we project and deny, pain that the unconscious mind wants to pretend doesn’t exist, just as the residents of Derry look the other way when It terrorizes somebody.
Replacing the old machinery with new machinery is like a psychoanalyst giving therapy to an analysand, delving into the unconscious and bringing repressed traumas out to the surface so we can recognize them as they are, not to be tricked into thinking they’re something else, hiding in plain sight in an unrecognizable form. The council’s refusal to replace the sewers’ machinery is like a patient’s resistance to his therapist’s probing into the secrets of his mind.
The rockfight happens near the Barrens, by the bank of the Kenduskeag, because this area represents the unconscious. This battle represents a struggle between different parts of the unconscious mind.
As Henry’s gang is chasing Mike, Henry admits that it was he who killed Mr. Chips, enraging Mike (page 887). He gets his revenge by hurling a chunk of coal at Henry, hitting him on the forehead (page (889). A while later, Bill seems to have a premonition, and he tells the other Losers to gather rocks as ammo (page 894). They all start gathering lots of rocks, as if they know Mike is coming, Henry’s gang close behind.
Mike reaches the Losers, and he’s standing beside Bill, panting, when Henry and his gang arrive. Henry taunts the Losers, calling Richie “four eyes,” Ben the “fatboy,” and Stan “the Jew” (page 897). Of course, Mike is referred to as “that nigger,” whom Henry wants at the moment. Bill is called a “stuttering freak” (King’s emphasis).
Mike isn’t the only one seething with rage at Henry for all the wrongs he’s caused. The rest of the Losers are sick of Henry’s crap, and they have the rocks to prove it. The rockfight begins.
Henry gets a rock from Bill on the shoulder, then one on the head (page 898). Rocks from Richie, Eddie, Stan, and Beverly also hit him, making Henry scream out in disbelief that these little kids could actually hurt him. His shouts for help from his gang make him sound like the weakling. Henry’s wimpish reaction is a reminder to all of us of just what bullies really are: they’re cowards, always picking on kids who are weaker and who can’t fight back…because bullies can’t handle people who fight back.
And so, of course, Henry and his gang of bullies lose the fight and have to retreat. A badly injured Henry threatens that he’ll kill all the Losers (page 902). We know he’ll follow up on that promise by chasing the Losers into the sewers, though the only ones who will die then are his own gang, while he himself goes insane, confesses to all the murders, and ends up in Juniper Hill Asylum.
So the chapter ends with yet another mix of good and bad: it’s bad that Mike was bullied and chased, and it’s bad that there was a fight; but it’s good that the Losers Club became the Winners Club for that day, and it’s good that the kids have found a new friend in Mike.
XIX: The Album
The rest of the adult Losers arrive in Mike’s library, and they all bring booze (page 905). We all have our ways of dealing with trauma, and isn’t the use of alcohol a common way to cope?
As we all know, Stan had his own way of dealing with trauma–escaping it through death. Mike is reminded of Stan’s suicide when he opens the library refrigerator and sees, inside it, Stan’s severed head next to Mike’s sixpack of Bud Light (page 909). Just as alcohol is an escape from trauma, so is suicide, so it’s fitting, though ghoulish, to see the two side by side.
Stan’s eyes change into those of Pennywise, who then taunts Mike. Then Mike has his own flashback…
A few days after the rockfight, Mike meets up with the other six Losers in the Barrens again. He learns that, with Ben’s guidance, they’re making an ‘underground treehouse,’ since with an actual treehouse, there’s the fear of falling out and hurting oneself (page 914).
Another good reason to have an underground treehouse is as an effective hiding spot for when Henry and his gang come along, as will indeed happen later in the story. Having this underground hideout in the Barrens, symbolic of the unconscious, will be a good safe space for the Losers in a symbolic sense, too, for here, the Losers can soothe each other’s unconscious traumas and validate each other. Mike is already feeling better with his new friends.
Indeed, the kids start talking about their scary experiences of It (page 917), and now Mike can feel safe about talking about the clown, too (page 918). He can also talk about the big bird (page 921), as well as mention some old photos his dad has in an album. The Losers are relieved to know that Mike doesn’t think they’re all crazy with their clown stories. Mike’s bird story makes Stan’s story about the Standpipe, and his shouting out the names of birds to stop the horror, feel valid.
For Mike, the presence of that giant bird in his dreams and unconscious is a shadow in his mind’s darker corners…the Shadow. (page 922).
Some time has passed since these discussions about It, at least a week, and the underground clubhouse is almost finished (page 926). Mike brings his father’s photograph album to the clubhouse. Inside the album are old pictures and clippings about Derry. He’s brought the album because he’s sure he’s seen the clown in it before, and he wants the other Losers to see It.
Since only Mike and Richie are at the clubhouse for the moment, with Ben down at work in the hole, Mike wants to wait for all the others to get there before looking at the pictures and seeing Pennywise in them. Richie is reluctant to look into any photo albums at all, since he’s had that disturbing experience with Bill looking into the photo album with Georgie’s pictures (page 928).
George’s and Mike’s photo albums are symbolic of all the traumatic memories the people of Derry have suffered–moments frozen in time, motionless photographs, yet thanks to the pain those moments inflict, the memories have lives of their own, hence the pictures move, like short films.
When Bill and Eddie have arrived, and Ben’s come out of the hole, Bill notices Mike’s album (page 936). Mike says he’ll show them all photos of the clown when Stan and Beverly arrive, making Bill and Richie nervous because of Georgie’s photos. More work is done on the hole until Stan and Bev come back.
Since the underground clubhouse, like the Barrens, sewers, and cellars, are all symbolic of the unconscious, and traumatic feelings are associated with the album photos, both working in the hole and looking in the album are symbolic of doing the inner work to make the unconscious conscious–they’re two sides of the same coin, so to speak. It’s rewarding, healing work, but it’s also scary.
Mike says that some of the pictures his dad has put in the album go back a hundred years (page 936). So having photos with Pennywise, the personification of Derry’s collective, accumulated traumas, is a representation of not only the personal Shadow of Mike’s father, but of Derry’s collective Shadow.
Mike’s dad collects this old stuff because it was there before the Hanlon family came to Derry, rather like coming into a theatre in the middle of a movie and wanting to know how it starts, according to an analogy Mike and Bill make (page 937). Of course, coming into Derry late and not knowing the town’s early years is like how all of us not only don’t know the inner workings of our personal unconscious, but also don’t know the collective unconscious–the archived, as it were, accumulation of old experiences shared by all of humanity going back to the dawn of Homo sapiens.
Mike wants to show the Losers the clown in the photo album so they can all get to the bottom of what It is and what It is trying to do to all of them…just like digging the hole in the underground clubhouse, fixing it up down there, is also the Losers’ getting to the bottom of their traumas, in a symbolic sense.
As they’re looking through the album, thumbing through the pages, Bill flips out, warning them not to touch the pages and using a fist to gesture at the album for fear of cutting up his fingers again. Everyone gets a scare from his reaction, but Richie of course understands because he was there when they were looking through George’s album (page 937).
They look at one of the first pages, which Mike thinks is from the early to mid-seventeen-hundreds (page 938). The picture is a woodcut that Mike’s father put under a protective plastic cover, which relieves Bill. It shows a juggler on a muddy street. He has a huge grin on his face, with no makeup, though Bill’s sure it’s the clown’s face.
Mike flips some more pages and finds a picture from 1856 (page 939), a colour picture, like a cartoon, showing drunks in front of a saloon. A fat politician is also seen holding a pitcher of beer. Women are seen looking at the drunks disapprovingly. A caption at the bottom says, “POLITICS IN DERRY IS THIRSTY WORK, SEZ SENATOR GARNER!” (page 940).
This image of drunks in Derry ties in with the beginning of the chapter, with the adult Losers coming into Mike’s library, all of them bringing booze. The use of alcohol to drink away one’s fears was as common a way to deal with Derry’s traumas then as it is now. It’s all about escaping the pain, rather than facing it.
The clown is seen in the picture, just as he was seen in the previous one. So many years had gone by, from around the 1750s to 1856, yet Pennywise is there, in both pictures.
Then Mike shows them a picture from 1891. The clown can be seen to the left (pages 940-941). Then they see a photograph from 1933. Pennywise is seen drinking champagne from a lady’s high-heeled shoe. The clown seems to want to encourage drinking as a way of avoiding one’s pain.
Next, a newspaper article from 1945, about the surrender of Japan. A parade celebrating the American victory is seen in the photo…with Pennywise in the background. To Bill, however, there doesn’t seem to be any victory. The matrix of dots that make up the grainy photo suddenly disappear, and the picture starts to move (page 942). He’s terrified.
He points out the supernatural occurrence to the others, and they all see it. It’s just like what Bill and Richie saw of Georgie’s pictures. Then Ben notes that there are sounds emanating from the photo: the band playing a marching tune, the cheering of the crowd in the parade, popping noises…firecrackers (page 942).
As I said above, these moments of the past may have seemed frozen in time, but trauma–as personified by Pennywise–brings them back to life, making them move and make sounds.
It’s interesting that Pennywise is appearing in photos from years when he was supposed to be dormant. In part, he’s appearing in the pictures now, in 1958, because he isn’t dormant, and he wants to scare the kids. But his appearance in photos from his dormant years also reflects how trauma resides in the unconscious and stays there, in spite of not coming out into recognizable, conscious view. He appears in the photos because unconscious material appears in consciousness, hiding in plain sight.
As the parade is seen moving away in the photo, Pennywise comes forward, climbs up a lamppost, and looks straight at the kids up close, his nose pushing against the protective plastic covering (page 944) Mike’s dad put over the pictures. I’m reminded of the fly in Bill’s unopened fortune cookie, pushing in it and making it bulge out (page 685). Those unconscious traumas are trying to come out and be known, but our protective coverings (defence mechanisms like repression, denial, projection, etc.) try to keep them inside and hidden…hence, the bulges.
Pennywise threatens to drive all the kids mad and kill them. He presents himself as the Teenage Werewolf, to give Richie a scare, as the leper, to give Eddie a scare, as the mummy, to give Ben a scare, and as the dead boys in the Standpipe, to scare Stan. We presumably would have seen more (i.e., the bloody sinkhole, Georgie, and the giant bird), but Stan, unable to bear any more, grabs the photo album and slams it shut (page 945).
Stan objects to the whole thing, saying “No” over and over again. Bill thinks his denials are more worrisome than the existence of the clown, that Pennywise wants everyone to deny Its existence, so It needn’t fear any attempts to kill It, as Bill is aiming for.
Certainly killing It is of the utmost importance, on the literal level, to save Derry from future killings, and on the symbolic level, to cure the Losers of their traumas. Bill’s personal reasons for wanting to kill It, however, seem a lot more selfish.
Bill insists on changing Stan’s nos into yeses, even shaking him as he tries to change them; and Ben, Richie, Mike, Bev, and Eddie all add their own yeses into the mix to persuade Stan, whose nos are a foreshadowing of his eventual suicide, his inability to face his traumas, what he thinks has offended him (pages 557-558), has outraged his sense of what is rational, explicable, and what can be put into words…Lacan’s undifferentiated, traumatic Real.
Stan eventually relents and says yes, to appease Bill and the others, though deep down, he still wants to say no (page 946). And though Bill would like to believe that his wish to kill It is selfless, for the sake of all the Losers and for everyone in Derry, deep down, he knows he wants to kill It as a personal vendetta against the killer of his little brother, and that he’s using his friends, even risking their lives, to help him assuage his guilt over Georgie’s death.
And these private thoughts are making Bill feel all the guiltier.
XX: The Smoke-Hole
Because of the pain in his eyes from his contact lenses, Richie has switched back to glasses (page 948). All the adult Losers in the library are continuing their alcoholic drinking (page 949), though they aren’t getting drunk.
Suddenly, the burning in Richie’s eyes gets to be too great to bear, even with glasses replacing contact lenses (page 950). He now knows what’s causing this pain. He remembers the incident, when they were all kids, and they were doing an old Native American ceremony Ben had read about, involving sitting in an enclosed, smoke-filled area and trying to endure the smoke as long as they could. Richie and Mike lasted the longest, but the smoke had hurt Richie’s eyes then, and he remembers the pain now. Memories of Derry have triggered the pain in his unconscious (pages 951-952).
The purpose of sitting in and enduring the smoke-filled, enclosed area, a smoke-hole, is to have visions. The Losers hope that a vision in the smoke will help them find a way to defeat It (pages 958-959). The kids decide to make their underground clubhouse into a smoke-hole.
Since, as I’ve said above, any underground area–the sewer, the cellars, the Losers’ clubhouse, etc.–is symbolic of the unconscious, the use of a smoke-hole to get mystical visions is an attempt, symbolically, to make conscious contact with the unconscious, what Jung would have called Active Imagination. One conjures up images from the unconscious to gain insights into psychic truth.
Now, gaining this insight can be dangerous–one can go mad without someone, outside of the foray into the unconscious, as a guide to pull one out if one goes too far inside. The kids consider having someone stay outside of the smoke-hole in case those inside, coughing and choking from the smoke, need help to get out. They want Beverly to be the one outside, because she’s a girl. She’s furious with them for their sexist, over-protective traditionalism (page 963).
Because she insists on being included, they decide instead to use matches, one of them burnt, for drawing straws (page 964). She ends up stuck with the last match, but miraculously, it isn’t burnt. It seems to be a divine sign that all seven of them are to go into the smoke-hole (page 966).
We can see, in this experience they’re about to have, a dialectical combination of good and bad, that theme I’ve said is a recurring one throughout the novel. It’s good to have the vision and gain the insight from it on how to defeat Pennywise, but it’s bad to put oneself–especially when one is just a child–through such an ordeal, one that could kill you. But any mystical experience is a kind of paradoxical meeting of the extremes of heaven and hell–like Jesus’ passion, death, harrowing of hell, resurrection, and ascension to heaven.
One by one, the kids–finding the smoke too difficult to bear–leave the smoke-hole, and Mike and Richie are the only remaining two (page 972). Again, the intensity of the smoke is unbearable–at its worst–but these two are the ones to receive the vision.
They see a world from long ago, before the dawn of man (page 977). There’s even an allusion to John 1:1, to give us a sense that this really must be the beginning of time: “(the word in the beginning was the word the world the) (page 978, King’s emphasis). Mike feels a vibration, a steady, low one, the kind of thing that makes us think of the foundation of all matter, of all creation. The vibration is growing and growing.
Richie thinks they’re about to see the coming of It (page 979). He sees a huge, electric object in the sky; he thinks it’s a spaceship, but it isn’t, even though it must have come through space to get to Earth. There are explosions. He’s convinced he’s seeing It.
The other kids pull Mike and Richie out of the smoke-hole (page 980). They ask the two boys what they saw. What’s interesting about their description of what they saw is how they describe it in evil terms, yet they don’t understand what they saw, and their descriptions imply divine things, in spite of how devilish they think it all was.
It was the beginning of time, yet Mike says it was “like the end of the world” (page 985). Richie thinks he saw It come (page 984), but the “spaceship,” in spite of his denial that it was God, was “like the Ark of the Covenant…that was supposed to have the Spirit of God inside…” (page 985).
In other words, the Turtle, as I see it. Those explosions must have been the Turtle vomiting out the universe.
Part V is coming soon.
Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986
Infinite Ocean 
You must be logged in to post a comment.