I've been wanting to read Stephen King's The Dead Zone for a few decades, and I'm glad I finally did because it's now one of my favorite Stephen King novels. It's more focused than his longer books, but still intricate and well put-together enough to be interesting. And there are some great thoughts to be had on love, death, religion, and politics, but perhaps most philosophically interesting (to me, anyway) are the questions about knowledge -- what is it, what do you do with it, and how much of it do you really want?
Teacher Johnny Smith (no, really) is in a car accident after a date with fellow teacher Sarah in 1970. He goes into a coma and wakes up in 1975, which gives King an interesting way to tell the story of 1970's America but also the heartache of lost love (Sarah has married someone else and has a child). His dad is still a kindly father figure, but his mom has become even more of a religious fundamentalist/conspiracy theorist than she was before. Her particular type of religious mania was actually pretty new in the 70's, and there's some nice, but not overdone, treatment of this sort of religious fervor as a shallow form of desire for wish fulfillment rather than a deeper, more authentic religious commitment.
But I've buried the lead: Johnny also has some kind of psychic powers (or at least more intense ones than he had earlier). When he touches people he sometimes has visions of their past or future. This power is never precisely described or explained, which is why it works in the novel. Johnny becomes a reluctant celebrity, deals with his relationships with Sarah and his parents, helps out with a murder investigation in Castle Rock (the first appearance of this fictional town in King's corpus), and eventually gets interested in politics. He even shakes Jimmy Carter's hand!
I don't want to spoil the rest of the novel, but among the questions it brings up are: Can fascism arise in America? If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you? Given one of the story lines, it's tempting to think King foresaw the political rise of Donald Trump 35 years ahead of time: the analogy doesn't quite work (for spoilery reasons), but it adds an extra chill to the novel for me that I wouldn't have had even five or six years ago.
The Dead Zone is not a huge novel -- not compared to King's behemoth tomes, anyway, but quite a bit happens. And none of it is fluff, even the stuff that seems like fluff when you first read it. It all comes together. Every scene, every plot thread has its place. The structure of the novel is a thing to behold. And the ending is perfect.
The Horror of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Horror
A lot of King's early novels focus on psychic powers (Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, etc.), which brings up the question of whether we could ever know whether such powers are real. (Full disclosure: I do not believe in such things in real life, mostly because the evidence doesn't stack up, but I'm fascinated by the whole phenomenon).
There are other questions in the part of philosophy known as epistemology (theory of knowledge). Johnny often says he "knows" things through his psychic ability. But does he really know anything, especially if he can't explain at all how he knows things? If we say he knows things, what's the difference between Johnny and someone with a lot of lucky guesses?
Some philosophers, most famously Alvin Goldman, have said that knowledge is a matter of being the result of a reliable process, so if Johnny's psychic power regularly leads to true beliefs, then these philosophers ("reliabilists") would say he really does know. And the novel has at least four instances where it really does seem like Johnny's power produced true beliefs, so maybe his power really is a reliable source.
But other philosophers have suggested that knowledge requires something more: some kind of account of how one knows. Think of it like showing, or being able to show, your work on a math problem versus relying only on having a hunch or guessing the correct answer. The philosopher Laurence BonJour, in his book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, even used an example of a psychic named Norman with powers somewhat similar to Johnny's as a counter-example to reliabilism. We wouldn't say Norman knows, so neither should we say Johnny knows (according to BonJour, anyway).
Johnny repeatedly claims that he "knows" things, but he also says he can't explain how he knows these things. And it seems doubtful that either he or his doctors (not even the friendly Dr. Weizak) can explain his abilities even in principle. He couldn't "show his work" even if he wanted to, which is of course complicated by the fact that his visions aren't entirely reliable as some things lie within the eponymous "dead zone" where he can't see.
So this raises a practical issue: should he really put so much stock in his visions if they don't really constitute knowledge? How would it change the novel if he regarded his visions as statistical predictions or hunches? But can he do that, or is he, like a mystic, prophet, or religious seer, unable to disbelieve his own visions?
And, just to till the philosophical soil a bit more, if his visions are accurate (whether we call them "knowledge" or not), what does that say about the structure of the universe? Must we live in a somewhat deterministic universe (at least beyond the quantum level) for his visions to be true? What does this say about "free will"? And how can he change the future? If he changes it, then he wasn't really seeing the future, was he? He was seeing what "would have been," but how can we make sense of that? Do we need multiple universes? Is this where King's Dark Tower multiverse comes in? Is this how someone in The Dead Zone can mention a novel called Carrie (p. 320)? Which universe are we in now?
(For more on this topic, I recommend Tuomas W. Mannien's "Notes on Foreknowledge, Truth-Making, and Counterfactuals from The Dead Zone" in the excellent volume, Stephen King and Philosophy, edited by Jacob M. Held).
Of course, The Dead Zone is novel, not a philosophical treatise. It doesn't try to give definitive or systematic answers these questions. King may not have meant to even ask all of them. But they are there to ask wrapped up within this well-constructed narrative. The answers to such philosophical questions probably lie within the dead zone of the human intellect.
See also my Goodreads review.
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