I Read, You Listen | The Repairer of Reputations

Well, trying to upload a YouTube video for tomorrow, but the darn thing’s been sitting at 1% for an hour or so. I don’t have high hopes this will actually work, so, even though I’m pasting in a link to the video, I’ll add a little something to this post in case it doesn’t work.

[Warning: Spoilers and Ramblings lie ahead]

I’ve been thinking about The King in Yellow quite a bit lately. It’s been all this talk of M.A.I.D. In The Repairer of Reputations, the narration begins with the opening of a suicide chamber, and the eponymous Repairer’s plans are undermined when one of the victims of his blackmail kills himself instead of carrying out the insane orders he’s given. Then again, the Repairer never learns this; he’s killed offscreen by a predictable (and foreshadowed) accident. When the narrator discovers all this and sees that his plans have gone awry, he has a moment of understanding blossoming out of his misunderstanding; for, from his madness, though he cannot grasp that his cousin does not covet what he himself covets, he recognizes the ruin and tragedy of his own fate as he shouts:

“Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!”

He understands in that moment the self-defeating nature of such a crown.

We never really learn who the Yellow King is, not in this nor any of the other short stories, but we see what he inspires: madness and death. Speaking from my own suspicions, I think the King laughs as he brings about doom.

I have a few scattered thoughts about all this:

• The narrator needs his reputation repaired; he cannot live with the shame of being called insane. However, he is actually insane, and the only way the repairer can repair his reputation is to make him king over all the earth. This is true of any lie; it can only grow or die, drown out all dissent or be vanquished by the mere whisper of truth.
• There’s a sexual aspect to all this: the accident that addles the narrator and leads to his first reading The King in Yellow involves the mercy killing of the narrator’s horse, which might be a symbol for the loss of sexual ability. The narrator’s plans are also driven by the need to stop the budding romance between his cousin and Constance.
• The narrator kills the cat, but we know he’s unreliable. Does he actually kill his friend?

My real question revolves around the suicide chamber. It itself is like the Yellow King, there in the beginning and always in the background; unhelpful details are given which never reveal the nature of what they are other than that both are beautifully artistic but evil.