by Douglas Messerli
Julien Gracq Le Roi
Cophetua, translated from the French as King Cophetua by
Ingeborg M. Kohn (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2003)
King Cophetua is one of those wonderful fictions which call up more questions than they answer, a work that so involves the reader that he or she will find it difficult to transform the experience of reading into an easy analysis or summarization of the text. In short, the sensuous pleasure of reading this work is at one with the meaning of the work, and one feels one could easily return to the text with little diminution of that enjoyment.
The story is
nearly invisible, in fact, is so transparent that it has little substance. A
man who has fought and been injured in the “Great” War feels all of the fatigue
of the years of battle. Living in wartime Paris, he is invited to the country
by a long-time friend, an experimental composer and aviator, Jacques Nueil, to
visit his villa. A somewhat dandyish figure who reminds the narrator of a time
before the war (of Apollinaire’s poems, of the stories of the gentleman-thief
Arsène Lupin, and of images of Mauriace Chevalier with his fashionable sailor
hat “set jauntily over one eye”), Nueil, a “voisin” (neighborhood) pilot
fighter, has been granted leave and will meet him there on the afternoon of All
Saints’ Day.
As the storm
brews, blowing piles of dead leaves across the lawns of the villa, the narrator
awaits the arrival of Nueil. As night comes on, the guest, left in Nueil’s
studio by the servant girl, begins to hear the far-off sounds of warfare. His
emotions—alternating between the excitement stirred up by the sounds and smells
of the storm and the despair and terror he feels in the distant flashes of
bombs exploding and volleys of cannons—exhausts him as he sits alone in his
host’s house, attempting to makes sense of the invitation and events of the
day. The mix of sounds of tree branches scraping against the house, the raging
storm and the sound of distant gunfire calls up an image of Goya’s La Mala Noche, which seems to parallel
his feelings:
La mala noche…. These words came to
mind, opening up
a
stream of thoughts. In the trembling twilight of the candles,
images slipped in and out without resistance; suddenly, the
memory of an etching by Goya blotted out all others. Against
the
dark background of black graphite, two women emerge
from a stormy night: one black form, the other white. What is
happening on that lonely moor, in the middle of that moonless
night: Sabbath—kidnapping—infanticide? All the forbidden,
disputed elements of this nocturnal meeting seem to have taken
cover underneath the heavy, billowing skirts of the child ravisher’s
black silhouette, and in her shadowed face with its Mongolian,
impassible traits and slanted, heavy-lidded eyes. But the light
of
the limestone which sharply outlines the white silhouette
against the night, and the furious wind blowing a light-colored
petticoat high up on her hips, revealing perfect legs, wind that
whips her veil like a flag and outlines the draped contours of a
shoulder and a charming head, are entirely the forces of desire.
The combination, indeed, of the forces of nature, beauty,
terror and desire—all silhouetted, hidden, confused, interfused—become the
themes of this novella, as the narrator sinks into the silence of the house and
experiences a time apart from the world which he has temporarily escaped.
He realizes at
last that his host will not be returning that night, that he is left alone in
this strangely unfurnished, museum-like home with the servant girl, whom it
suddenly flashes upon him, perhaps, is a servant-mistress
of the master of the house.
The girl leads
him into the dining room where he is served dinner. As he observes her silent
ceremonies of serving the food in a nearby mirror, he begins to feel an
excitement in her very presence: “whenever she approached to serve me, even at
a distance from the faint yet vital warmth of her bare arm, I instantly felt a
burning sensation on the back of my hand.”
When she
momentarily leaves the room, he rises to look more closely at the only image
hung upon the walls—the second picture that dominates Gracq’s tale—King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (Sir
Edward Coley Burne-Jones’ version of which hangs in the Tate Gallery). The
image is based on the ancient tales of the African king who, apparently,
disdained women (“From natures lawes he did decline, / For sure he was not of
my minde, / He cared not for women-kind”) until one day, upon glimpsing a
barefoot beggar-girl dressed in grey, he fell suddenly in love with her and
asked her to marry him.
Mentioned in
several Shakespeare plays, set to poetry by Lord Alfred Tennyson and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, this story is also sometimes cited as a source for the Pygmalion
myth used by George Bernard Shaw, and is even referred to by Agatha Christie in
the novel The Body in the Library as
the “Cophetua syndrome,” a malady that strikes the upper-class Englishman who
becomes infatuated with a working-class girl.
That is generally
what happens in Gracq’s work, for as the evening progresses the narrator
becomes more and more agitated, temporarily escaping the house, and returning
to the village to discern whether a message has been left in the post office.
But after ringing the bell, which no one answers, he is left with no choice but
to return to the villa, where he is led silently upstairs by the girl into her
bed.
In Gracq’s
version, the girl is, like the figure in the Goya painting, all in silhouette,
her long black hair almost indistinguishable from her dress, her face turned
away from him, even in their sexual embraces. Only after they fall asleep and
he awakens to watch her, does he have the opportunity to look into her face.
Upon rising in
the morning, he escapes the house to a nearby café for coffee, realizing that a
“parenthesis had closed, but it left in its wake something tender and burning
inside of me that only time could erase.” Even in the last line, “and I thought
that today, all day long, it would still be Sunday,” we are unsure whether or
not he will return to the house and resume his relationship or perceive it as
simply an enlivening episode in an otherwise fatigued life.
As I suggested
previously, more questions arise than are answered. Had Nueil intended to show
up? Has he been killed in battle? The narrator even seems to ponder—quickly
dismissing the idea—that perhaps Nueil (as Herminien brought his lover Heide
for his friend’s approval in Gracq’s The
Castle of Argol) has planned for the encounter between the narrator and
servant.
One thing seems
to be clear: despite her near total silence and subservient position
throughout, the serving girl apparently is in complete control. Twice, the
narrator recognizes in her demeanor an acceptance of things “as they are,”
almost imagines her speaking:, “This is how things are.” Even here, however, we
wonder, is this a justification for his sexual encounter? Although she seems to
have been a willing participant, has she simply acquiesced to an act over which
she recognizes she has no control? In a
sense, the story is not at all about the male “conquerors,” in either their
wartime battles or their sexual encounters, but concerns the silent woman and
the power she holds within which keeps her apart from the would-be conquerors
of her heart. As in several of Gracq’s works, there is an unsettling homoerotic
element in the heterosexual act; as the narrator observes the sleeping woman,
he is overwhelmed not as much by her
presence as by Nueil’s:
Suddenly, I visualized quite clearly the loaded airplane flying in
the
midst of its roar high up in the starry night, its course charted
by
readings of the earth down below punctured by fires and lined
like a
map by the criss-cross network of piano strings—the dust-
encrusted bulk of the pilot, barely awake, wrapped in his shawls
and
furs, the face illuminated from below, not so much by the
lights
of the instrument panel as by the fixed image of that woman,
appeasing yet cruel, perhaps the only image where she could
again
take shape and live only for him.
In Gracq’s mysteriously sensuous world, men seem to enjoy
sex most fully only through the eyes of their fellow men. Man, in short, is an
eternal outsider to his own sexual appetites, and, accordingly, is never truly
at home with the pleasures of life.
What does that,
in turn, say about the very causes of war and the suffering which results?
Perhaps if men could find a home within which, like Nueil’s servant, to live
peacefully with “how things are,” they would not need to destroy others in
their searches and struggles for satisfaction. If the narrator has found, at
least, a temporary peace, we recognize that time will eventually erase it and
the war resume.
Los Angeles,
December 16, 2006
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (October 2008).
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