Imagine my surprise when the local news radio station mentioned one of my favorite collections of "weird tales" from the 19th/20th century cusp- sure enough, Robert Chambers' King in Yellow is now on the Amazon bestseller list due to the popularity of the Cable TV series True Detective.
The tales which make up Chambers' "King in Yellow" sequence are in the public domain. The first The Repairer of Reputations, is a science fiction story set in New York City twenty-five years in the future (1920), when suicide by means of "Government Lethal Chambers" has been made legal. The second tale, The Mask concerns a fatal love triangle among Parisian artists, one of whom has invented a chemical which can petrify organic matter. The third story in the cycle, also set in Paris In the Court of the Dragon, is about a man obsessed by a "hateful" church organist. The final tale, The Yellow Sign returns to a Manhattan setting and involves an artist who is coming to grips with his new-found love for one of his models.
The common thread among these stories is the fictional play The King in Yellow, a literary work that has the power to drive readers to madness:
I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced literary anarchists. No definite principals had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.
Chambers drops vignettes from the play into his stories- the play concerns the inhabitants of Carcosa, a locale borrowed from a short-short story by Ambrose Bierce. The Carcosa of Chambers' play-within-a-story is a dreamscape of black stars and twin suns:
Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
SF author James Blish "added" to Chambers' text of The King in Yellow in his story More Light, and other authors have attempted to "reconstruct" the entire play. Of course, if the entire "play" could be produced, the resultant work would leave madness and horror in its wake... could this explain the rise of the Tea Party?
Here's some bonus content regarding The Court of the Dragon featuring commentary by everyone's favorite sexy antipodean Doktor. In honor of Herr Doktor Awesome, here's Blue Öyster Cult's E.T.I., which references the "King in Yellow":
Now, after writing all that about Robert Chambers' book, I feel I may have to track down the TV series that sparked its newfound popularity. Any readers out there hooked on the show?
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7 comments:
I think True Detective MIGHT have been one I'd have sampled, but it's on HBO, which you have to pay for to get on the cable teevee you have to pay for, and while I think everybody should make a living, my income is about 20% of what it was in the 90s and I actually have to give a shit about these things.
I've been reading the recaps on Vulture, Boing Boing and such as, something I actually do with teevee shows more than actually, you know, watching them - it's an information density thang, see, I can get the gestalt of a whole episode in six or seven minutes reading the recap - and it sounds dense and rich and kind of interesting.
Sometimes when I'm watching Justified I suddenly become aware of how incredibly stupid GREAT the whole thing is, every minute a gem, every set piece a joy, every bit of dialog a perfect piece of teevee drama, and I suppose I'd like to find a few more teevee shows that make me feel that. Of course, there are storage limitations on the murder recorder, but I'm not at all shy about wading into the bit torrents, so I may eventually check it out anyway....
I think True Detective MIGHT have been one I'd have sampled, but it's on HBO, which you have to pay for to get on the cable teevee you have to pay for, and while I think everybody should make a living, my income is about 20% of what it was in the 90s and I actually have to give a shit about these things
I don't have cable TV. I may have to resort to unconventional means to watch this thing. Generally speaking, I don't like to "commit" to long-form television series. Even with "Sleepy Hollow", which is based loosely on matters of local interest, I only watched the first episode.
Thanks for the link to the Blish story... I had no idea that he had extended his gift for pastiche to encompass 'The King in Yellow'. Blish's version of the play is more in the style of Dunsany -- as filtered through Blish's admiration for Branch Cabell -- but still good.
If memory serves, I first came across THiY in a essay by Sprague de Camp, on "Books that Never Were", from 1972 (now available on the Internet Archive but the job of digitising it was a butchery).
Thanks for the link to the Blish story... I had no idea that he had extended his gift for pastiche to encompass 'The King in Yellow'. Blish's version of the play is more in the style of Dunsany -- as filtered through Blish's admiration for Branch Cabell -- but still good.
Lin Carter also wrote a continuation of the play, which I've never bothered to seek out. While I think Carter had great taste as an editor and anthologizer (his Ballantine Adult Fantasy series is justly famous), his own fiction (mainly pastiches) sucked donkey dongs, IMNSHO.
King Crimson Counters!
~
[Lin Cater's] own fiction (mainly pastiches) sucked donkey dongs
Oh I hear you brother.
It occurred to me last night -- after the second bottle of "Age of Raisin" sent me strolling down the memory corridors -- that "TKiY" belongs to the tradition of Jacobean revenge tragedy (Blish was playing on this connection when he introduced implications of incest to his version of the Court). More specifically, Chambers' blank verse reminds me no end of "Death's Jest-Book" -- which Thomas Beddoes wrote in the Jacobean style, a few centuries too late, as an exercise in antiquarian revival. I can't be arsed checking whether Chambers was known as a scholar of Beddoes' work.
I was inspired to start reading revenge tragedies after first reading "The Crying of Lot 49"... in which part of the slow revelation of silent Tristero's Empire consists of a fictitious "Courier's Tragedy". Anyway, the staging of this play may or may not send its audience insane, but it is certainly described as having this effect on the director. So I am prepared to argue that "Lot 49" nods to the literary tradition of stories which drive the reader mad.
King Crimson Counters!
I was considering an embed of that video. One has to wonder if Robert Fripp and the boys were fans... "The yellow jester does not play, but gently pulls the strings And smiles as the puppets dance, in the court of the Crimson King"
It occurred to me last night -- after the second bottle of "Age of Raisin" sent me strolling down the memory corridors -- that "TKiY" belongs to the tradition of Jacobean revenge tragedy (Blish was playing on this connection when he introduced implications of incest to his version of the Court).
Are you a fan of the conte cruel, old chum?
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