Duma Key

Literature has often plumbed the dark side of art, imagination, and creativity. In Western philosophical tradition, the dualistic view of art can be traced to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who saw art as powerful yet destructive, truthlike yet false. Plato’s position was based on the ability of music, sculpture, and poetry to stir up people: He viewed anything that rouses extreme emotions as inherently dangerous.

The suspicion of visual art in particular can be seen throughout the Western literary canon. One fear is that having such strong influence over others can lead artists to play God. Narratives from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a gifted sculptor who falls in love with the sculpture of the perfect woman he crafts as an insult to real women, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which scientist Viktor Frankenstein creates a creature that ends up horrifying him, showcase creators drunk enough on their own artistic potency to want to reinvent reality.

Another fear is of artists mining the hidden self so deeply to make art that they endanger themselves. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), Dorian’s beloved portrait changes for the worse as he grows crueler; however, when Dorian stabs the painting in disgust, it is Dorian who dies while the painting is restored to its original beauty—the artwork has absorbed its subject.

King too takes the cultural fear of the dark side of art and uses the metaphor of the supernatural to process it. In Duma Key, art becomes a conduit between the protagonist and malevolent supernatural forces. Both Elizabeth and Edgar use surrealism in their artwork, an aesthetic style in which the real is presented in an uncanny manner. For instance, in one of Elizabeth’s drawings, a line of frogs is depicted in such a fashion that the furthest is the tallest, in defiance of the laws of perspective. When otherworldly forces make contact with these characters, the supernatural link is a metaphor for the artists’ ability to access the subconscious or see a heightened version of reality.