The Repairer of Reputations is a short story published by Robert W. Chambers in the collection The King in Yellow in 1895. The story is an example of Chambers' horror fiction, and is one of the stories in the collection which contains the motif of the Yellow Sign and the King in Yellow.
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The story is set in New York City in the year 1920, 25 years in the future of the story's publication. It is told from the view of one Hildred Castaigne, a young man whose personality changed drastically following a head injury sustained by falling from his horse. He was subsequently committed to an asylum for treatment of insanity by a Dr. Archer. Due to his accident, Castaigne is a prime example of an unreliable narrator.
As related by Castaigne, the United States has apparently prospered in the meantime, significantly improving its infrastructure. The rise of a new aristocratic elite in the United States has reduced the influence and immigration of foreigners, and this is particularly evident in the case of Jews. Suicide has been legalized, and has been made generally and readily accessible in the newly established "Government Lethal Chambers" being rapidly rolled out across other towns and cities.
While still recovering from his accident, Castaigne obtained and read The King In Yellow, a false document within the story which is represented as a universally censored play which deeply disturbed him. Once a wealthy dilettante and affable man-about-town, after his accident Castaigne became an eccentric recluse who spent his days poring over old books and maps and associating with a more eccentric character, a Mr. Wilde, the "Repairer of Reputations" of the story's title.
Wilde claims to be the architect of a vast conspiracy which uses, amongst other devices, blackmail to influence and command powerful men whose reputations the conspiracy has saved from scandal. Hildred imagines that, with Wilde's help, he will become the heir of the "Last King" of "The Imperial Dynasty of America," which Wilde says is descended of a lost kingdom from distant stars in the Hyades. However, Castaigne perceives his cousin Louis standing before him in the line of succession, thus he plans to force Louis to abdicate his claim to the throne, accept exile, and never marry.
Louis, who believes that Hildred is still mentally ill, humours him by agreeing to abdicate his claim, but becomes angry when Hildred insists that Louis cannot marry his fiancee, Constance Hawberk. Hildred shocks Louis by claiming that he has murdered Dr. Archer and had Constance assassinated. When Hildred runs back to the apartment of Mr. Wilde, he finds that Wilde's feral cat has torn out his throat, utterly wrecking his plans to conquer the United States with the help of Wilde's conspiracy. The police arrive, and Hildred sees Constance crying as he is dragged away. It is unknown whether or not Hildred actually committed any murders.
The story ends with a note that Hildred Castaigne died in an asylum for the criminally insane.
Robert Chambers produced in this piece an early version of what has since become called the "anti-story."[1] This is a type of fiction writing where one (or more) of the fundamental rules of short story telling is broken in some way, often resulting in what most readers would consider "experimental literature."[2] In the case of "The Repairer of Reputations," Chambers all but invites the reader to doubt every single detail the unreliable narrator relates. The rule of story narration which Chambers breaks in "anti-story" fashion is basic contract between a normal storyteller and the reader, which is that the narrator is relating something that is both the "truth" (even given the "suspension of disbelief" required for much of fiction) and interesting.[3] He makes this clear at a point in the story when Hildred removes his imperial "crown" from a "safe," which Louis dismisses as a "biscuit box" while showing impatience at the unnecessary wait for the supposed minutes it takes the "time lock" to cycle.
Once the reader latches on to the notion that Hildred is reporting virtually everything except the other character's names in a highly distorted fashion, the entire tale takes on a Through the Looking-Glass quality as the reader is reduced to fits of guesswork as to what every stated observation might really represent. Hildred’s reporting of 1920s New York City includes many dubious details such as Louis's involvement in the daily Prussian-style military parades (police walking a patrol?), suicide booths (entrances to a subway station? a telephone booth?), Mr. Wilde's list of conspiracies (political) with their Byzantine complexity (almost certainly fake) and even the threat posed by Mr. Wilde's supposedly dangerous cat. All that Hildred claims about the future Imperial North America is called into question, vitiating the notion that it is an accurate vision of things to come. Even the climax of the story is open for the reader to try to interpret: did the wild cat kill Mr. Wilde, or did Hildred commit homicide in an act he does not care to remember? Or is Mr. Wilde even really dead? The reader is left with far more questions than answers by this dark tale.
There is some mystery about whether the futuristic date is part of Hildred’s delusions, since some details in the story appear to contradict the idea of the year being 1920. Castaigne writes that the statue of Garibaldi, a “monstrosity”, has been replaced by one of Peter Stuyvesant; yet in the story “The Yellow Sign”, which is set post-“Repairer”, the Garibaldi statue in back in situ. Thomas the Cockney bellboy in “The Yellow Sign” has fought at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir in 1882. He would be in his fifties or sixties post-1920, yet he is clearly a young man. Hildred’s cousin Louis Castaigne is born in 1877 and so would be 42 in 1920: rather old for the young Constance Hawberk, and perhaps for winning promotion to army captain. Hildred is described as a young man yet he has been at school with Louis. The allusion in the story to St Francis Xavier’s “new spire” is ambiguous. Does it refer to the church itself, at 30th West 16th Street, which opened in 1882, or merely the spire?