Just recently there lived an emperor who was so fond of all things “literal,” as he called them, that he neglected most matters of state in order to spend his time at court surrounded by the finest poets, essayists, novelists, stage actors and scholars he could find. The emperor, a self-styled artist, presented many little works of his own creation at court, in the sumptuous performance space where his throne usually sat in the front row (though it was often moved to center stage as a dramatic prop for the many plays he commissioned, or to seat His Highness while he gave a particularly long reading). The emperor called these readings “command performances,” and enjoyed much acclaim throughout the land for his talent and wit, as well as much polite applause from his learned and pampered audiences.

  The emperor’s “most favoritist” kind of creations was stories and poems for the palace children, but being rather eccentric, he liked to intersperse readings of them with little passages of nonsense, which made all of the young children and clap, and all of the adults redden and cough. Finding these the strongest reactions he received, the emperor began to insert such passages randomly into all of his works. Thusly, while he was reading from his latest romance, styled after those popular currently at the grocery checkout aisle, (which, to his credit, he had never seen), the audience would hear:

“As Florianna lowered her violet lids in impatient trembling, Hans bent, his golden ringlets brushing her cheek, to whisper “--Tlush, tlush, twitteryama-la La, la, melikoma pah pah.””

 But as children often do, they soon tired, and trailed off to return only infrequently, leaving the jester to nod off at the corner of the stage, his bells gently tinkling as his chest rose and fell; a kind of incidental refrain to the emperor’s utterances.  The emperor was disgruntled. He couldn’t decide whether he should make attendance of these command performances truly compulsory, or just give them up. He could not bear the thought of returning to the evening when those brilliant artists of his usual cortege went on to perform without him—certainly, it was all for his royal amusement, but they always seemed to eclipse the star of his own glorious talent; all eyes, including that of the spotlight, would be on some earnest, sweaty young  poet. This left the emperor on his throne, to be sure, seated a bit higher than those in the more minimally gilded seating, but indistinct from the anonymous, indistinct mass of spectators.

  Two young, roguish scholars, who had been  to several of the emperor’s increasingly unsuccessful performances, thought of a clever scheme by which to profit from his obvious dissatisfaction. Gaining a private audience with the despondent monarch, they told him:

        “Sir, you are of such a rare and pure breed of genius    
          that even you yourself
          are hard pressed to understand it.”

 This certainly got the emperor’s attention, as he liked the way they called him “Sir,” as among true colleagues, rather than the usual boring “Your Grace,” “Your Most High,” etc. “Put yourself in our hands, Sir, and we will encourage your singular talent to its maximum fruition.” They went on to explain that what the emperor had (unwittingly) fallen upon was a new kind of prose, neither fiction nor non—, but a vehicle for the purest of thought. Anyone who did not understand it was obviously an insensitive lout, and a “literal” fraud. The monarch was completely sold, and anxious to know the truth about his courtiers, as he had accepted many of them on the sheer force of their artistic reputations in their countries of origin. He poured generously from the royal coffers into the pockets of these two scholars in payment for their “treatments,” which lasted exactly a year and a day.

  Under their constant care, the emperor walked, or strutted around the palace gardens completely nude but for a coat of bright yellow paint, crowing like a rooster; he bathed in tubs of milk strewn with daisies while screaming “Plip plop, plip, flop;” he hopped on one royal foot along the river bank, while the two scholars followed slowly in the emperor’s Maybach Benz, shouting at him excerpts from the works of Joyce around mouthfuls of rich Belgian chocolate, and the emperor’s best wines. They devised many more activities for the emperor that would be altogether too time consuming to list, but the most important component of the training instructions allowed the emperor to converse with all of his subjects (save the two scholars) only in the new prose. This did not interfere greatly with the emperor’s communications with his personal household staff, for they already knew all of his customary habits and wants. Despite his eccentricities, the emperor was a rather predictable fellow; when for example, at precisely ten ‘o clock in the evening he yelled “Fri rtta clopki!” the chambermaid knew to scuttle smartly to bring him a warm mug of cocoa with five mini-marshmellows floating on top.

  It was for the learned courtiers of the palace that this rule became excruciatingly difficult, and even dangerous. Every Thursday evening, for so long as they could remember, the emperor had held a “literal” salon for his silver-tongued pets, who were used to directing their erudite banter toward his approving presence, beaming from the throne in the first row. Thanks to the two roguish scholars, now titled the “Royal High Interpreters,” the essayists, poets, and authors of the written word of all sorts, cringed in fear of wrongly interpreting the emphatic “Chooka chooka looh nah” or the delicate “Xrebralaba mrinna schen?” directed at them with a benign twist of the royal brow. In this way, the Royal High Interpreters were able to take control of most of the affairs of the monarchy;  it may not need repeating that this did not particularly concern the emperor. His new prose had gained a whole new respect from the most luminous minds of esoterica presented at any court; true, they still reddened and coughed when he spoke, and even more profusely than ever in some cases, but all that now seemed a result of their being rendered inarticulate by, as they protested, the profound wisdom of his “schlaahs” and “gleeds.” “All hail the emperor’s new prose!” they toasted loudly and frequently. Not to be outdone, the two Royal High Interpreters might lift their glasses and return with “Grin quarre klamen frompas nit dclat!” adding modestly that, though it would be too difficult for anyone else to master this new prose of the emperor’s, it was only fitting that they all learn how to properly praise it.

 At last, the Royal High Interpreters informed His Grace that training was complete; with the royal brain and tongue working in perfect synchronicity, whatever utterance might slip from the celestial lips, from the simplest command, must be considered not only law, but the purest expression of the most perfect art of its kind. The emperor was ecstatic. This meant that he was indeed ready to present to the whole of his country the new prose, a phenomenon which, outside the palace walls, had hitherto only been rumored to exist.

  The emperor’s personal valet and the aforementioned chambermaid earned a great deal of extra cash by translating the emperor’s common “new prose” commands to them into the King’s plain English. Therefore, sort of in the way South Koreans under Kim Jong-il have touted banners with slogans like “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day,” the emperor’s court used sayings like “Gas up the Benz!” or “Bring me my cocoa with marshmellows!” to mean a wide variety of exclamatory things, such as “That’s cool!” “I’m in!” or “Do the best you can for me on this one!”

  On the night of his first public performance, all gathered in the newly enlarged space, built especially to accommodate the commoners with standing room around its periphery, a strangely tense hush could be felt by the crowd waiting for the curtain to rise. The tension was mainly due to the pressure upon the emperor’s close circle of literati, carefully pruned down by the Royal High Interpreters. They were expected to begin writing reviews the very next day on the emperor’s much awaited debut, so they gnashed their teeth worriedly, and wiped their constantly steaming spectacles on their best tunics.

  The curtain rose, revealing the emperor standing in a fierce pool of spotlight, the brightest the royal generators could muster. (The Royal High Interpretors had tried to convince him to deliver from his throne, but he was too excited to sit). He began by reciting from memory passages of a large tome the Interpreters had compiled of his daily utterances during his training, but soon lapsed into a two hour monologue of such exquisite extemporanea that it would do not the least bit of justice to recount it here. He had just finished the first part of a concluding statement with:

                      “Zuba, zuba, rencococo lentlpla
                       Zubra, flubra blagronotra flenka…”

…when he stopped to wipe his brow, and the eager audience, taking this as cue for intermission, filled the house with thunderous applause. The curtain began to descend slowly and creakily—for someone had forgotten to oil the pulley coils—and numbed legs continued to shift in their seats or from foot to foot, when, picked up by the stadium-like amplificatory quality of the room, a small sharp voice protested:

           "But that wasn’t any kind of prose at all—
            it was just sound poetry,
            and bloody nonsense at that!”

 All had heard this voice clearly, and for a moment reigned a sudden and profound shock of silence. The literati squirmed in their seats in an almost-hope of relief, and the good people of the land wondered if the voice had some truth to it; in looking around themselves, they found the voice to have come from a rather innocent looking undergraduate student, the child of a dignitary sitting in the front row. Immediately, the Royal High Interpreters pounced upon the stage, almost knocking over the emperor, who was still oblivious to any outburst than that of the applause (of which he had never before heard the like). The scholars yelled:

          “Ignorance! Who among us but the most learned qualify  
         to speak on matters of difference between poetry and  
         prose! Find that ridiculous child and banish it!”

The crowd, needing some release after sitting or standing quiet for so long, erupted in deafeningly jubilant “ayes,” (including the dignitary who had fathered the child, hoping to keep his post). There was much clapping of hands and stomping of feet, a response which had likely less to do with the sagacity of the Interpreters’ statements than with the fact that the room had been held without so much as a blowing of a nose for two hours. Palace guards ushered the unruly crowd out to cups of beer and kraut dogs in the foyer, and the emperor’s command performance continued after this intermission for another two hours (or more precisely, until the emperor lost his voice), as everyone had forgotten the whole matter after such a delicious snack.

  The exiled student, really just an overspoiled little palace brat who generally wrote stilted verse, at first attacked the emperor by pen most passionately and scathingly, but no one paid any attention, and she couldn’t find a following in the new town in which she lived, as it was inhabited mainly by swineherds and their flocks. She gave up the cause, and eventually began to write reviews in support of the emperor’s superb mastery of assonance and consonance. The very first of a series of collected reviews was entitled:

“Krin nit Fassen Blon Bga Karr” or—

“Never Underestimate the Power of Art”