D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. A graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University’s BookEnds Fellowship, he is the Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review, serves as Prose Editor for West Trade Review, and Executive Editor and Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Versailles by Kathryn Davis; Graywolf Press; 224 pages; $17.00.
For Bertrand Russell, discussions of the present King of France represented a paradox: how could statements be at once not true, not false, and not without meaning? After all, in Edwardian England as in modern America, there is no King of France to which one might look across the water and refer. The sentence, however, persists in its communication: we understand its meaning even with nothing out in the world to relate it to. In this foray into ordinary language philosophy, we can make out the, well, logic of the historical novel. The world created in fiction might have never quite existed in such a way, but the meaning nonetheless remains. In Kathryn Davis’ Versailles, in which the King of France is all too extant, meaning comes not through truth or falsity but from the sheer positing of creation, an imagined world of history, realized in ambitious and playful scope and thoroughly, unquestionably, real.
The novel, ostensibly, is about Marie Antoinette’s life in the French court as Queen, married to the noted puzzle and hunting enthusiast Louis XVI and beset by a ceaseless parade of attendants and hangers-on. These latter enjoy crowding into her bedroom to observe the royal eating of croissants, doing of hair, or giving of birth; the former enjoys fiddling with mechanical locks, eating chickens, and crashing stomach-first into history. But Davis is far more ambitious than that, moving her technique around both narrationally by encompassing everything from plays, monologues, and minute description of the palace; and narratively by examining the lives of the royal couple, courtiers, domestic staff, and harried dogs, in building out a playful, subtly precise novel.
Marie Antoinette is firmly at the center of the court and the account. Roughly a third of the novel’s short, quick chapters are given over to the Queen’s first-person storytelling, a retrospective that builds organic tension through its very construction: the vast majority of readers know how Marie Antoinette’s story, at least in the “real” world ends, and her diaristic entries push against this bracket with productive mystery. Davis’ approach to her voice is a bit insouciant, a bit intellectual, and a greatly entertaining; there is never a doubt where the novel’s (or the readers’) sympathies lie:
Whatever I did, everyone wanted to do; whatever I wore, everyone coveted. First they wanted to copy me, then they began to hate me.
But, comme on dit, one must suffer to be beautiful. It took forever, the royal lever.
By the time Louis got there he’d have been up for hours, hammering away on his forge, shooting at cats, or watching the arriving guests through his telescope…
“Bonjour, la Reine,” he would say. Never one for nicknames or wordplay of any sort, my Lou-Lou, draw- ing up his chair, companionable. After our initial awkwardness, once we got the fact out of the way that two people couldn’t possibly have less in common than a reclusive locksmith and his impudent wife, we actually became quite close, more or less along the lines of Aphrodite and Hephaestus.
Davis’ comfort with the intimate moments—and at times intimate is not enough of a word, NB the chapter entitled, with Joycean glee, “The King’s Penis”—of the Queen’s life bleed naturally into the ominous sense of ending, apocalyptic and ineluctable, that we from our vantage point high atop l’avenir can see. This in turn accelerates the whimsical, ambitious form of Versailles into a deeply human and emotional story. Marie Antoinette is made real, the layers of time and the unknowable brushed aside to render a strikingly true portrait.
Historical fiction is perhaps best read by those well-versed with the era in question. As with Hilary Mantel’s A Place Of Greater Safety, the French Revolution is so rich, multivalent, and simply engrossing a subject that it must be a locale at once enticing and daunting for one wishing to craft her own narrative. For all the raw material, there is always the risk that the subject matter will, like the Revolution itself, take over, overawing the book in sheer strength of narrative. And as with Mantel’s work, Davis has obviated that risk by allowing herself license to create, to imagine, and to fabricate: after all, it is a novel we’re discussing here. The narrational movement, the epistolary bent, the humorous tone, they all serve to ground real characters in the historical space, informed by research but not belaboring over the details. Was Marie Antoinette really “like that”? An impossible question to answer, and varying depending on who and when one asks. Is that the novel’s concern? Fortunately, for us, not at all.
Which is not to say that the history is sidelined or malformed. Davis clearly has done her homework and for those who enjoy reading and learning about the pre- and intra-Revolutionary era, there are plenty of wonderfully precise details in the novel’s intricate architecture. Everything from the specifics of Versailles, the nuances of Louis’ odd fascination with clocks and other mechanical fiddlings, sideline characters such as Axel von Fersen and the King’s family are drawn in sharp relief, infusing the historical into the novel. As the book moves along the passing of time marked by the flowing seasons drifting explosively towards 1789, the astute reader will pick up the small hints of disaster that await the world beyond the Court, to which all seem blissfully unaware.
Even if the details were not so well done, Davis’ narration alone would be worth the price of admission. Her movement into drama especially is seamless, capturing the deadly-serious frivolity that paradoxically suffused Versailles in the years leading up to the Revolution, a royal estate more concerned with arcane matters of preference than the unrest on the streets. The Beckett-esq strangeness works well in these moments—“CLIO, angry: Then what more do you expect? You of all people should know that the future is off-limits, even to the dead…POUNCE: Nowhere but nowhere, don’t you mean?”—reflecting the bizarre nature of life in the French Court in productive novelistic terms.
And that is the strength of Davis’ work: even centuries after the events of its story, through the oft-impermeable veil of history and the cosmic divide separating the contemporary reader from its subject, Versailles imparts its meaning. The book persistently reaches out, communicates, and exists. It is neither true nor false, neither completely accurate nor wholly fabricated. It is half historical record, half dexterous novel. It is someplace between that world and our own. It is, however, quite clearly real—and worth the read.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Who's History? The Logic of Reality in Kathryn Davis's Versailles
FICTION REVIEW
by D.W. White
November 12, 2024
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Image by Steve Chai from Pexels
