Intimidation



I told a family member about the Gutenberg website and gave them the link. It appears they sat before the main page completely intimidated because they "couldn't think of a single good book to read." So they clicked on the most popular books, but that had things like "The Karma Sutra," a surgical anatomy text, and a health textbook from the early 1900s. Now I must send them a list of classic books that I KNOW they wanted to read.

The webpage kind of intimidates me, too. It does so in a way Wikipedia never will. The latter website always seemed to be the genius friend that "knew everything," but suffered from occasional bouts of insanity.

Lately, I've been interested in the "false document" device, non-existent texts used in a larger work. Here are some quick examples:

• The Hitchhiker's Gude to the Galaxy (Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy series)


• The original copy of The Princess Bride (William Goldman's The Princess Bride)


• Tom Riddle's diary and the textbooks/library books at Hogwarts (J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series)


• The Necronomicon (H. P. Lovecraft)


• A mysterious book given to Dorian Gray by Henry Wotten and the picture created by Basil Hallward (Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray)


• The student film in The Blair Witch Project

In other words, it's a common device. The King in Yellow, which I finished reading yesterday, caught my attention because it's false document, a play, was supposedly the inspiration for Lovecraft's Necronomicon and it appeared to contain references to Oscar Wilde's Salome and Dorian Gray. It's not a terrible book. I haven't had the time, nor the resources, to research the critical stuff that's out there on it, but there seems to be a pronounced lack of interest in it. As Scott D. Emmert wrote in the Journal of American Culture (1999), "little criticism exists on this influential work."

The false document in The King in Yellow is a supressed play that shares its name with the books title. The play's history resembles Salome's: it is never produced, rumored to be beautiful and contain "terrible truths," and is having a cultural impact in spite of its censorship. In the first part of the book, copies of the play turn up at random. Nobody wants to read it. Nobody admits to reading it. Yet everyone has heard about the play and it seems to be always lurking about, ready to turn up in the most innocent of places.

It seems to me (having just read the book for the first time), that play functions by attacking the supports of either Western or American society. The first act seems to argue in favor of what everyone assumes to be true and contains a great hook. The second act dismantles the false claims of society and establishes a "real" and "terrible" truth. In the first part of The King in Yellow, the play infects our beliefs about history, the American goverment, society, religion, art, and love. After it's accomplished this feat, the play drops out of the narrative completely. Shortly after its disappearence, the book seems to be infected with it. There are a number of "paths" that lead out of the infection, but several seem to lead to isolation and an inability to connect with the Other.

My thoughts on this aren't clear right now because I just read the book and haven't read it again. It doesn't help that there is little to confirm or deny my hypothesis. There has to be more critical writing about book. I probably should have kept my old university account active . . . Why has no one said anything about the book's apparent connection with Wilde?