Bibliography
The King in Yellow - Robert Chambers
The only reason I read this is because G wanted to read it, and as it is a short book with an interesting premise, I thought I'd have a go too. It is a collection of short stories which interlock with each other; the first four very obviously center around the titluar King in Yellow, although the others have interconnecting themes and characters too. Chambers is fond of examining themes of artistic creation, of love and virtue (feminine virtue in a rather thin way for the last few stories, but more interestingly to begin with), and is also very taken with Paris and the life of an art student. The final stories are pretty much all about Americans in France, living one sort of life or another. All the stories are ghost stories of sorts; they're rather redolent of Sheridan le Fanu and his ghost stories.
The first four stories, though, are the gem of the collection; G actually stopped reading the book once he'd finished them. They all are involved with a fictional play called The King in Yellow; the first act is rather dull and insipid and virtuous, but reading the second act makes people go mad. And really, really quite mad. We never get told the plot of the play, although the locations and characters and snippets of dialogue occasionally are waved in front of us, and indeed enter into the real world. The people who experience this madness are, in the main, Creatives; hence my comment about Chambers' fascination with the process of artistic creation.
What particularly interests me, though, is the fact that Chambers thinks to give a work of fiction this kind of force. The collection was published in 1895. Marx died in 1893; Lenin was beginning to become politically active in Russia, starting what would eventually grow into the Russian Revolution and the Communist state. On the other hand, the women's suffrage movements in both the UK and America were growing and making noise, and their opponents were making some rather unpleasant comments about women's education and what it was safe for women to read - that is, that women shouldn't be bothering with technical serious stuff, but at the same time that the Modern Novel was a corrupting influence because it was generally full of fluff and harmful to the brain. This was hardly a new criticism of the fiction read by women, as Jane Austen had lampooned the influence of the Gothic Novel upon impressionable young girls in Northanger Abbey, posthumously published in 1817 - but the force of literature to rot young minds was a concern, whether in terms of political influence or moral character.
So, then, it is particularly interesting to see Chambers choose to make a play script the object that causes madness, and one that strikes equally at male and female readers. The first story does have a political turn, and one I believe that actually deliberately references the Marxists (although not by that name), but the other stories are much less politically driven and far more about art, the creation of art and so forth. It's an interesting conceptual riff on the modern discussions that were going on around Chambers, and creates some excellent stories.
The rest of the collection - eh. The final story contains a hilarious vignette involving flowers and a cactus that convinces me Chambers missed his calling as a comic writer. The rest of the stories are perfectly enjoyable (although one screams 'look, I have just learnt about medieval falconry and am going to write a fic in which to show off my new-found knowledge!'), but nothing compared to the first four. If you choose to emulate G in picking the book up just for those and nothing else, or indeed to see what the whole of the collection is like, I suspect you'll probably enjoy it.
The only reason I read this is because G wanted to read it, and as it is a short book with an interesting premise, I thought I'd have a go too. It is a collection of short stories which interlock with each other; the first four very obviously center around the titluar King in Yellow, although the others have interconnecting themes and characters too. Chambers is fond of examining themes of artistic creation, of love and virtue (feminine virtue in a rather thin way for the last few stories, but more interestingly to begin with), and is also very taken with Paris and the life of an art student. The final stories are pretty much all about Americans in France, living one sort of life or another. All the stories are ghost stories of sorts; they're rather redolent of Sheridan le Fanu and his ghost stories.
The first four stories, though, are the gem of the collection; G actually stopped reading the book once he'd finished them. They all are involved with a fictional play called The King in Yellow; the first act is rather dull and insipid and virtuous, but reading the second act makes people go mad. And really, really quite mad. We never get told the plot of the play, although the locations and characters and snippets of dialogue occasionally are waved in front of us, and indeed enter into the real world. The people who experience this madness are, in the main, Creatives; hence my comment about Chambers' fascination with the process of artistic creation.
What particularly interests me, though, is the fact that Chambers thinks to give a work of fiction this kind of force. The collection was published in 1895. Marx died in 1893; Lenin was beginning to become politically active in Russia, starting what would eventually grow into the Russian Revolution and the Communist state. On the other hand, the women's suffrage movements in both the UK and America were growing and making noise, and their opponents were making some rather unpleasant comments about women's education and what it was safe for women to read - that is, that women shouldn't be bothering with technical serious stuff, but at the same time that the Modern Novel was a corrupting influence because it was generally full of fluff and harmful to the brain. This was hardly a new criticism of the fiction read by women, as Jane Austen had lampooned the influence of the Gothic Novel upon impressionable young girls in Northanger Abbey, posthumously published in 1817 - but the force of literature to rot young minds was a concern, whether in terms of political influence or moral character.
So, then, it is particularly interesting to see Chambers choose to make a play script the object that causes madness, and one that strikes equally at male and female readers. The first story does have a political turn, and one I believe that actually deliberately references the Marxists (although not by that name), but the other stories are much less politically driven and far more about art, the creation of art and so forth. It's an interesting conceptual riff on the modern discussions that were going on around Chambers, and creates some excellent stories.
The rest of the collection - eh. The final story contains a hilarious vignette involving flowers and a cactus that convinces me Chambers missed his calling as a comic writer. The rest of the stories are perfectly enjoyable (although one screams 'look, I have just learnt about medieval falconry and am going to write a fic in which to show off my new-found knowledge!'), but nothing compared to the first four. If you choose to emulate G in picking the book up just for those and nothing else, or indeed to see what the whole of the collection is like, I suspect you'll probably enjoy it.