Richard Snowden-Leak
Decadent Fears in The King
in Yellow
In this creative writing peice Richard Snowden-Leak tells the story of a streamer discovering a painting that contextualises Robert W . Chambers ’ ‘ The King in Yellow ’, and looks at the Decadent movement and how it prisons society . Much like how Chamber ’ s insists upon the danger of the blurring of the artistic and of the real that comes with the supposedly deranged art of the Decadent movement , so too does the streamer serve that point as he slowly loses grip on reality .
[ What follows is the transcription of a livestream a streamer gave last year originally titled , ‘ The Horror of the Self in The King in Yellow ’, which is released here as a transcript by S and is now retitled ‘ Decadent Fears in The King in Yellow ’. The original stream , which was meant to last only for thirty minutes , has been cut down from its 6-hour run , and presented here in a transcript . While most of the rambling has been cut , S asserts that some of it is important to ‘ the process of interpreting the void ’.]
S : I have long wondered what made The King in Yellow by Robert W . Chambers so terrifying to people , as for me it never really was scary . But having found this painting [ S holds up painting to camera : see appendix 1 ] called ‘ Hildred Regards Himself ’, a depiction of a scene in the first story of the collection , I think the horror comes from a fear of Decadent art in the fin de siècle . Kenneth Hite , in an annotated edition of The King in Yellow , writes , ‘ as a bourgeois art student with typically American beliefs in progress , romantic love , and nature ’, ‘ Chambers and the Decadents were natural opposites .’ 1 Arthur Symons , too , writes that in Decadence there is ‘ an intense selfconsciousness , […] an over- subtilizing refinement upon
92