Starting to read The King..., we find this passage, written in 1895 or earlier, describing the US in 1920:
"We had profited well by the latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of national self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent Negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalization and the gradual centralization of power in the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity."
-Robert W. Chambers, The King In Yellow (New York, undated), p. 9.
On p. 8, we had read that the massive army is "...organized according to the Prussian system..."
Maybe horror is in the eye of the reader? I am horrified by the notions that foreign Jews are a national threat and that black people need an independent state. I think that this novel should be republished unabridged but with a publisher's introduction commenting on such passages.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, the bit you quoted from THE KING IN YELLOW is distasteful. Albeit, training and organizing an army "...according to the Prussian system" is rather vague. Churchill, for example, as he made plain in his histories of WW I and II, had nothing but respect for the fighting qualities of the German Army.
Sean
Note that "The King In Yellow" is an early (and rather extreme) example of what's technically known as an 'unreliable narrator'.
That is, the narrative 'voice' cannot be relied on -- what it says is not necessarily true -in the context of the story-.
Eg., the narrator thinks he has a jeweled crown in a timer-controlled safe. His cousin thinks he has some costume jewelry in a breadbox. You can't tell who's right.
Is the "repairer of reputations' superaturally wise... or a loathsome madman... or both?
This is a story that has to be read in full-on ironic mode.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Other writers of SF and F have used the idea of the "unreliable narrator." Such as Gene Wolfe in his four volume BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, featuring Severian the Torturer (who also became the Autarch of Urth, as our Earth was called in the remote future). Severian is not always truthful in what he says.
Sean
Yeah, but it's a bit more extreme in "The King in Yellow", because the narrator is insane -- he's totally sincere, but you can't tell what he's actually seeing and what he's hallucinating.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Understood! Gene Wolfe's Severian is not insane, merely sometimes untruthful. The King in Yellow BELIEVES in what he says, but is insane.
Sean
Chamber's structure is sort of three-stage; there's what the other characters think is objectively real, what the narrator thinks is real... but which may or may not be real.
Eg., in-story the play "The King in Yellow" itself seems to be real because the 'sane' characters recognize it and know of its malignant powers, which include hallucinations and destructive delusions among those who read it.
The things people who've read the play see may be delusions... or they may be part of a greater hidden reality that the 'sane' characters can't detect. They may just be mad (thinking costume jewelry in a breadbox is a crown) or they may be seeing through the veil of sanity to the insane reality of the world. It may be 1895, or the "utopian" (dystopian) 1920 that the narrator thinks he inhabits.
Mr. Wilde seems to genuinely know things he shouldn't, for example the location of the suit of armor Hauberk (a pun-name) finds; he also knows Hauberk's secret identity as an exiled British nobleman.
It's as if the reality that the narrator sees is trying to break through and subsume the one the 'sane' characters are living in -- two realities struggling for actualization. Reality itself is unstable and contingent in the story; what's real may depend on the actions and decisions of the characters. If the plot succeeds, the narrator becomes Emperor of America and the King In Yellow reigns, even over mens' unspoken thoughts. If the plot fails, none of that was ever real and he's just a lunatic.
That's the literary frame I play off in THE SEA PEOPLES, providing a "hidden" reason why things turned out as they did. The "future" of the KIY story "the Repairer of Reputations" is the one they frustrate by their actions -- which none of the characters see.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thanks for commenting on your own book, THE SEA PEOPLES. It does help to clarify my understanding of that work. I had thought it a difficult book to grasp--and still do. And I mean that as a commendation, not a criticism. Really good writers should at least sometimes go beyond their comfort zones. As Poul Anderson did in "Night Piece", the HARVEST OF STARS books, and GENESIS. These were all works I had to reread more than once before I could properly appreciate them.
Sean
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