THE DEEP ONES: "The Mask" by Robert W. Chambers

"The Mask" by Robert W. Chambers

Discussion begins on April 10, 2019.

First published in The King in Yellow (1895).



ONLINE VERSIONS

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chambers/robert_w/king_in_yellow/chapter2.html
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm#THE_MASK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?63179

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Out of the Dark
The King in Yellow
The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W. Chambers

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Chambers
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/dliterature/authors/chambers/bio/rwcbio1...
https://lovecraftzine.com/2015/03/20/the-foundations-of-the-king-in-yellow-and-t...
https://tinyurl.com/y27octng

Reading from my recently-acquired Pushkin Press edition, which only includes the four King In Yellow stories. Think I'll take the opportunity to read all four together.

I've been pretty absent from the Deep lately, but I'll have to grab my copy of The Yellow Sign and Other Stories to re-read for this one.

I've been absent of late too, but I'll make an effort this week. And I'll read the story from this charity shop find (dated 1989 on the copyright page).

Alec's fever dream of Carcosa and Lake Hali recalls Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa", except that in this case our narrator is lucky enough to escape becoming a permanent resident.

I'll accept that Boris's solution wears off after a certain amount of time, but having the flower, the goldfish, the bunny, and Geneviève all revive at the same instant is a bit too fairy tale. But then, maybe Chambers intends for Sleeping Beauty to come to mind. It's quite a happy ending, at any rate, and it's a harbinger of the author's impending run of popular romance novels.

Re the ending, I've taken it as happy on previous reads, but this time I found myself wondering what Geneviève's mental state is likely to be upon awakening - after all, last she new she was trying to kill herself. And how will she react to hearing that Boris shot himself upon her apparent death? A happy ever after for her and Alec seems, on a bit of reflection, anything but certain.

Our favorite play plays a small role here; presumably, Alec would have undergone a mental and physical collapse without it, if perhaps a less visionary one. Speaking of it, though, what do we make of the prefatory "quotation"? Alec clearly is wearing a mask, and so, I take it, is Geneviève.

>5 gwendetenebre:

Chambers, as I understand it, started out writing romance; his preceding book, In the Quarter, is a romance sharing characters with some of the later, romance, stories in The King in Yellow.

(For whatever reason, LT won't let me touchstone In the Quarter, even if I try to force i.)

>6 AndreasJ:

Now sure how In the Quarter compares with the later string of best-selling romances that sustained his literary career. I was surprised to find on the Chambers Wikipedia page that about two dozen of his novels were adapted to film, mostly in the silent era. Between the movies and the books, he must have been quite wealthy!

>6 AndreasJ: Our favorite play plays a small role here

I noticed that Alec succumbed to a fever only after reading the play, and wondered if perhaps we're intended to infer that Geneviève had read it, too, before playing on the spinet. That would account for her otherwise uncharacteristic melancholy and subsequent fever.

I'm reading the four stories in sequence and couldn't help notice that both in "The Mask" and "The Repairer of Reputations", the Pallid Mask is mentioned with reference to mental states of characters who have read (or whom we can infer has read) the play. In TM the mental state appears to be fever, while in TRoR it would be insanity. Either would seem to fulfill the alleged malevolent influence of the play.

With the suicides of both Boris and Geneviève, I wondered if perhaps Hildred Castaigne killed himself, too. The editor at the end of TRoR notes merely "Mr. Castaigne died yesterday in the Asylum for Criminal Insane."

>6 AndreasJ: Alec clearly is wearing a mask, and so, I take it, is Geneviève.

I took Alec's mask to be his self-acknowledged "mask of self-deception"; despite outwardly accepting Boris as the winning suitor, evidently he was not as equanimous as he let on. Geneviève doesn't confess to us that she's apparently made a mistake in selecting Boris over Alec, is that the mask you mean, @AndreasJ?

This is the second time I've read this story. It's premise, that petrifying liquid, actually reminds me of the sort of peculiar invention stories you can find in Brian Stableford's anthology Scientific Romance, but, for me, the only point of interest was the passing refences to The King in Yellow and the fact Boris gets mentioned in "The Repairer of Reputations".

>9 RandyStafford: Boris gets mentioned in "The Repairer of Reputations"

Having now read "The Mask", I like how the passing reference in TRoR can be seen as a symbol of the full story. Jack mentioned that Boris put his own face on the middle Fate in his group sculpture, the very one which sits in Washington Square alongside the Lethal Chamber. It's as though he's encapsulated the fact he came between Alec and Geneviève, a position which leads to at least two of them taking their own lives.

>8 elenchus:

Yes, those are the masks I meant.

Put that way, of course, the one who is not wearing a mask is Boris; but unlike the case of The Stranger, there doesn't seem to be anything terrifying in that.

About that Stranger, here's a bit from the Lovecraft Zine article linked under MISCELLANY:

Robert W. Chambers was also a student of Poe’s works. The opening scene of “The Mask” in The King in Yellow had a stranger at a masquerade ball shocking the other guests. This scene was inspired by a similar event in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Other than the odd term ("opening scene") for the epigraph to the story, there is a recurring motif of masks and those not wearing them.

>12 elenchus:

In Stars of Black by Julian M. Miles, the story "Thirteen of the Clock" expands on this connection.

>13 paradoxosalpha:

Well, that's another for the wishlist. At least the e-book is commendably affordable.

Some stories I feel I can assess on their own merits, others I feel a need for more background, which might be more examples of an author's storytelling or just hs particular voice. Or it might be to see what other authors did with their ideas. I still haven't read any jauniste tales not by Chambers (apart from the one by Joseph Pulver nominated a couple of years ago, but which I didn't say anything about at the time). @paradoxalpha's review of In Stars of Black confirmed a growing suspicion that those later authors had taken Carcosa et al quite a distance from Chambers' original conception (well, original after allowing for the borrowings from Bierce and Poe).

I have to admit to reading the King in Yellow stories out of order, and years apart, so I never picked up on the running threads between them, such as Boris' sculpture.

However having read on into the non-weird stories in my edition of The King in Yellow, I feel that some general points can be made about Chambers' storytelling:

He is drawn to the "Bohemian" lifestyle of e.g. ex-pat artists in late nineteenth century Paris. I'd suspect the influence (if not conscious emulation of) Henri Murger but for the fact that Chambers had himself gone to Paris to study art.

Despite this attraction he is at heart very conventional and likes to tug the heart-strings before (sometimes) allowing his lovers to live happily ever after. I think he's genuine with these endings, trite as they seem.

This creates what seems like a strange unevenness of tone; the non-weird story set during the siege of Paris by the Prussians has very tough scenes (hungry, frightened Parisians turned into a mob, hand to hand fighting on the barricades) with scenes that quite honestly could have "hearts and flowers" playing over them. But that might be to put the cart before the horse, as @kentonsem notes that many of Chambers' works were adapted for silent cinema.

Turning to "The Mask", the point of this story, I think, and what Chambers really cared about, was the love-triangle. The Scientific Romance petrifying solution and its implications for society were never explored so its not a piece of "real" serious science fiction. The weird element is treated even more off-handedly - characters glancing through the play "The King in Yellow" but it probably does have an effect on the plot, or justifies some of the plot points - precipitately attempting suicide or falling into a fever, as noted by @elenchus (It's a subtlety I hadn't taken notice of, I have to confess).

There is, though, the suggestion raised by the opening epigraph from the play, that it reveals an unbearable truth ("no mask", which gives an Existential turn to things - surprisingly early (a generation before Jean Paul Sartre, and providentially set in Paris!)

I've been meaning to read "The King in Yellow" for a while and this is the first I've read. I guess I've heard so much about the book's influence, but had no real idea what that influence was supposed to be, that it pretty much felt like a name drop mid story.

On second thought, it isn't the first time I've bumped into it. A short graphic tale in one of the Cthulhu Tales graphic novels is about a young boy who stars in a production of The King in Yellow and he's wearing a mask, and everything goes to hellfire during his recitation. Not sure if that's original or borrowing from something.

I did forget about the intro with the masks (which, personally, reminded me of The Phantom of the Opera play), and I attached the 'mask' part of the title to the underlying attitudes of Alec and Genevieve, though hers shows up later, it would seem. As a general note, it wouldn't surprise me if she picked Boris to start, and then changed her mind later.

Here's a part where I wonder if I missed something. I know they put the rabbit in the solution, but when did the solution get into the pool? I was listening to this on youtube, and in three sessions so I might have just missed a couple points. My impression of the bath was that it was quite large, like perhaps a bath house style for many people. On my first listen I thought that she might have encountered the solution elsewhere, and then fallen into the bath during transformation. Later, I thought that maybe it was in the pool and the pool was smaller than I thought or he had a lot more solution. John (?)'s clean-up sounds like a larger pool, though on a consistency side, it's never said how he got her out of the solution. Admittedly though, Boris said he didn't know if it was save to touch after that moment of sunlight.

Because it was seemed that Genevieve was ill as well, I also didn't think right away that she committed suicide. Since Boris and Alec talked about how horrible it was, and how Boris would not share it with anyone, I thought at first that it was a horrible accident, and that Genevieve had stumbled into the basin or something while delirious, and a sort of irony for Boris and company after the talk of testing it on larger living beings.

Back to my initial thought about the story though, about The King in Yellow feeling like a namedrop, I'm wondering if that's in part from not reading them in order, even though it's still a complete story without knowing.