The Shining and the Annihilated Face

I recently re-read The Shining after reading Doctor Sleep, and I was struck by two things: it really might be one of the best American novels of the 20th century; it hinges on a moment of annihilation.

The film of The Shining follows Jack Torrance's slow dissolution by the Overlook Hotel (and then what he does to his family after he is fully dissolved), and that film really stresses that everything that occurs in the film is latent in Torrance. It is about a man giving himself over to something monstrous and becoming a semi-willing tool of that monstrosity.

The novel The Shining is much more nuanced and sad. Torrance is lured. He's an alcoholic. He has clear anger and control issues. He is slowly, over so much time, brought into the fold of the Overlook by the promises that it will solve all of those problems for him, and it preys on his addiction by literally manifesting liquor into the world. There's a strong sense that Torrance is being assailed, constantly, and that the cards are stacked against him in the final calculus (the hotel wins out in the end).

And, of course, in both versions his wife Wendy and his son Danny can only stand by and witness or be brutalized by this process (although Wendy, in both film and novel, shows moments of extreme strength [which makes it all so much worse, really]).

What I found so interesting about the novel is the ending and how it treats the material body of Jack Torrance. He's fully within the grasp of the Hotel now, having attacked his wife Wendy and the cook/savior Halloran with a mallet. He's raging around the building looking for his son Danny, who must be sacrificed to the Hotel in order to fulfill Jack's explicit contract with the psychic presence there.

At some point, Jack Torrance's humanity disappears:

The thing that was after him screamed and howled and cursed. Dream and reality had joined together without a seam. It came around the corner. In a way, what Danny felt was relief. It was not his father. The mask of face and body had been ripped and shredded and made into a bad joke. It was not his daddy, not this Saturday Night Shock Show horror with its rolling eyes and hunched and hulking shoulders and blood-drenched shirt. It was not his daddy. [629]

and later

It bent over, exposing the knife handle in its back. Its hands closed around the mallet again, but instead of aiming at Danny, it reversed the handle, aiming the hard side of the roque mallet at its own face. Understanding rushed through Danny. Then the mallet began to rise and descend, destroying the last of Jack Torrance's image. The thing in the hall danced an eerie, shuffling polka, the beat counterpointed by the hideous sound of the mallet head striking again and again. Blood splattered across the wallpaper. Shards of bone leaped into the air like broken piano keys. It was impossible to say just how long it went on. But when it turned its attention back to Danny, his father was gone forever. What remained of the face became a strange, shifting composite, many faces mixed imperfectly into one. Danny saw the woman in 217; the dogman; the hungry boy-thing that had been in the concrete ring.
"Masks off, then," it whispered. "No more interruptions." [634]

And I love these sections because it drives deep into some kind of deep-seated fear in horror around the face as as mask or how appearances can be deceiving. In the same way that Robert Chambers leveraged one of my favorite lines in all of fiction ("No mask? No mask!") to reveal the awfulness that what a character is seeing might be the truth, The Shining gives us an Overlook Hotel that wipes away the "mask" of Jack Torrance.

The ambiguity here is around what work the mask is performing. Was Jack Torrance, the tragic figure, always a mask? Was he always just a thin sliver of humanity between a rotten core and the world outside of it? Or is the Overlook Hotel's possession rendering him into that mask? His visions, fantasies, and flashbacks about hurting his child through the novel tend to support the former, but we want to believe the latter. 

Any faith in humanity wants us to imagine Jack Torrance as tragically taken over by the hotel and for the removal of the mask to be the demolishing of his identity. It's better to think of Jack Torrance as a puppet who is torn from the fabric of life against his will. It's much more disturbing, but maybe more supportable by the text, to take the "masks off" line as the unleashing of whatever lived inside him the entire time. His nature, his proclivity, his predilections finally set free.

And then he hunts his family with a mallet.