The White Shadow
One way that Robert W. Chambers creates mystery is by offering
alternate timelines or histories that may be real or merely the delusions of a narrator.
These sometimes involve Carcosa, but not always. From “The Repairer of
Reputations” to “In The Court of the Dragon” to “The Demoiselle d’Ys,”
timeslips drive much of the weirdness in The King in Yellow. Arguably, even
in “The Yellow Sign,” temporal anomalies are at work to explain the decomposed
body of the church watchman discovered at the end of the story.
“The White Shadow” from The Mystery of Choice is a
wonderfully weird tale about the liminal space between childhood and adulthood,
and between life and death. It is an “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge” kind of
story that focuses on the “magic second” before death that expands for the
protagonist into a year of experiences.
Reading “The White Shadow” as a prequel to “The Yellow Sign,” it tells the story of the inciting incident that makes Jack Scott
vulnerable or open to the influence of the King in Yellow, which will later be
his downfall. Like Hildred, Jack, in “The White Shadow,” suffers a fall and with
it a strange near-death experience. These “falls” that result in gaining
forbidden knowledge (both Hildred’s and Jack’s) certainly suggest the biblical.
This is reiterated when Tessie tempts Jack into reading the serpent-skinned
copy of “The King in Yellow” that ultimately leads to his death. But when the Jack of “The White Shadow” slips from
the cliff’s edge, he experiences a timeslip of sorts, and in that magical second,
lives a year with his beloved as an artist in Paris and then later loses her in
Brittany.
This incident explains the hope and longing for Sylvia that
Jack Scott expresses in “The Yellow Sign.” Do you think that the Sweetheart of “The
White Shadow” is the lost Sylvia of “The Yellow Sign”? And, if so, what
interpretive payoff do we get with that identification?
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