Carcosa and The King in Yellow ~ True Detective and American Literature

I loved the HBO Series "True Detective" because it was as darkly Southern Gothic as it could be, and you could write several books just on the use of religious symbolism in the plot. They really went all the way with every character, especially the flawed and misunderstood Rust Cohle who is becomes identical to Jesus by the end, scarred by a knife wound (like a Roman sword) and resurrected after the battle against the evil killer Childress in the Coliseum-like Carcosa, sitting up in bed like the figure from the Shroud of Turin with a large computer tablet beside him that resembles a Bible on a pulpit, Rust transforms into the Light of the World. And of course in the end he explains to his friend Marty that he really did die and go to heaven where he felt the love of his daughter (and his Father) but was sent back to earth again again for reasons he didn't understand. But I totally understood and enjoyed all the religious symbolism, having grown up a Southern Baptist.



However, the English Major in me kept wondering who the "Yellow King" was, and where did the name "Carcosa"  come from? I racked my brain from William Faulkner to Shakespeare, but could remember nothing on those two references.

Well, it turns out there is a long literary tradition about both the Yellow King and Carcosa, and it goes back to two American writers: Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers.

Ambrose Bierce wrote the story called "An Inhabitant of Carcosa."
Read it Here

The King in Yellow Wikia Site has a snippet about the Ambrose Bierce connection:

Ambrose Bierce's tale An Inhabitant of Carcosa is arguably the wellspring of the whole Yellow Mythos. It employs an exoticism of setting unusual for the author, and sprang from the alienation that dogged Bierce all his life. The story's genesis came from a terrible dream he had in his youth, in which he wandered through a blasted landscape and entered a colossal, deserted castle. The castle's dusty, echoing corriders filled him with the feeling that the entire universe was long extinct:

Man is long ages dead in every zone
The angels all are gone to graves unknown
The devils, too, are cold enough at last
And God lies dead before the great white throne.

In this cosmic tomb, young Ambrose found a bed on which lay a horribly decayed corpse. The cadaver's eyes opened, and Bierce saw, to his horror, that they were his own: "That hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient after the death of God and his angels, was I!"

That story by Bierce inspired Robert Chambers, who in 1895 wrote a collection of short stories that mention a play called "The King in Yellow." The place-name "Carcosa" is mentioned in the epigraph to the story collection as an excerpt from the fictional play.

Free eBook Here on Project Gutenberg

THE KING IN YELLOW
BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Original publication date: 1895

THE KING IN YELLOW
IS DEDICATED
TO
MY BROTHER

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

Cassilda's Song in "The King in Yellow," Act i, Scene 2.

Rust Enters the Ruins of Carcosa


More from the University of Texas

Journalist and short-story writer Ambrose Bierce wrote the horror story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” in 1886. The story explores death, light, and darkness and is about a man who awakens from a sickness-induced sleep to find himself lost in an unfamiliar wilderness. Sound familiar?
. . . Writer Robert W. Chambers borrows the name of Ambrose’s ancient city, Carcosa, and builds it into a mysterious and cursed city in his collection of short stories The King in Yellow. The stories in the book are linked by a fictional play of the same name, which induces despair and insanity in those who read it or see it performed. Considered “weird fiction” under the subgenre of speculative fiction, Chamber’s The King in Yellow has inspired many writers, including H. P. Lovecraft.

In "The Call of the Cthulu" by Lovecraft there's even a Louisiana connection in this passage about an Inspector Legrasse out of New Orleans who goes out in the Bayou to investigate some type of Voodoo worship of the First Evil Cthulu (which is something like the "Green Spaghetti Monster" mentioned in True Detective):

On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypus thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.

. . . In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ringshaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

And if there's still any doubt that True Detective has deep literary roots, the screenwriter of True Detective himself has mentioned that Chambers/Bierce were indeed his sources, although not his favorite writers. Instead, he was merely inspired by the American mythos of the names involved. And he also suggests checking out Faulkner and Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness" to be sure), plus the Holy Bible, too, so my own analysis was pretty close to what he intended. :)

From HitFix

. . . you wrote this entire thing in a vacuum, as someone relatively new to television, not knowing how it was received. And the show comes on, and people go nuts about it, they are penning raves, coming up with elaborate theories about the Yellow King and Lovecraft and everything else. How did it feel to see your creation being received in all of these ways?

Nic Pizzolatto: I felt like, look, it's all good, and I really mean that. To me, that is what it means to connect and resonate with people. It means that they are going to project onto the work. There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it. That said, I think I've made clear that my only interest in the Chambers stuff (Robert W. Chambers wrote "The King in Yellow") is as a story that has a place in American myth. And it's a story about a story that drives people into madness. That was mainly it. Beyond that, I'm interested in the atmosphere of cosmic horror, but that's about all I have to say about weird fiction. I did feel the perception was tilted more towards weird fiction than perhaps it should have been. For instance, if someone needs a book to read along with season 1 of "True Detective," I would recommend the King James Old Testament. I wouldn't tell anyone to go buy Robert Chambers. It's not that great a book. Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner I think are in there far more than Chambers or Lovecraft. But again, I guess I hope that these 8 chapters, once the totality of it is evident, it might provoke a re-evaluation. But if it doesn't, I'm very happy with the reaction we've had. It couldn't have been better. I'm just surprised by it. I remember talking to you three months ago and having to convince you: "This just sounds like every other show," "I know, I know." And now my wife read a comment the other day that said I live out in the desert, and I run some kind of cult. (laughs) I don't know what I can say about that. I think this show answers everything it told you to ask. The questions it didn't tell you to ask are questions best left to one's self.