Originally published in French, The Radiance of the King is the most famous novel of Camara Laye (1928–80), whose name is sometimes listed as Laye Camara. In contrast with a number of early African novels that focused on an African protagonist’s problematic encounter with Western (usually European) culture, Laye’s white European protagonist is summarily rejected (for unpaid gambling debts; he never gambled before coming to Africa) by the white enclave in an unnamed African country and then becomes increasingly immersed in black African culture. In doing so he finds his rationalistic Western worldview and even his personal identity as a rational being dissolving in the fluid, often dreamlike African world. Paradoxically, however, his apparent degeneration culminates in salvation as he merges mystically with the black African child/king/god whose arrival in a remote village he has long awaited. So in this African novel, African perspectives and values triumph over Western attitudes in the beneficent transformation of at least one European.
Laye reveals almost nothing about Clarence’s European past, why he came to Africa, or what (besides gambling) he was doing there before the novel begins. We first meet him in the esplanade of the town Adrame, surrounded by thousands of African men eagerly awaiting the arrival of their king. The now penniless, nearly homeless Clarence has desperately joined the throng in the hope of applying for employment with the king. An authoritative-sounding beggar in the crowd offers to intercede for Clarence with the king; Clarence’s desperate acceptance of the implausible offer initiates his deeper journey into the labyrinthine, magical African world.
To Clarence’s surprise, the king is a slender adolescent so laden with gold rings around his limbs that he cannot walk without help. Moreover, his palace repeatedly seems to change shape as Clarence watches, and after the king slowly climbs to the top parapet he seems literally to walk off into the sky. Shortly afterward he seems to hear screams from inside the palace that two African boys now accompanying him argue may come from either victims being sacrificed or loyal subjects sacrificing themselves. The beggar contemptuously dismisses the boys’ conjectures about human sacrifice when he returns to report to Clarence that he could not obtain an interview with the king. But Clarence is already beginning to learn that in Africa appearance and reality have a much more complex relationship than he is accustomed to.
That same evening Clarence is arrested and tried for stealing his own coat, pawned with his innkeeper, in a comically Kafkaesque parody of the Western justice system. Clarence escapes from the courtroom with the help of a voluptuous young woman through a maze of official corridors and then town streets, only to end up in the house of the logically perverse judge he has just fled. This magistrate, who turns out to be the young woman’s father, is cordially conversing with Clarence’s new companions, the beggar and two rascally young boys (the latter actually stole his coat, pawned with the innkeeper Clarence cannot pay). Thus, even in the first section (of three) of the novel, the ironically named Clarence becomes increasingly confused by the profoundly non-Western worldview of his African acquaintances, by his own increasingly chronic sleepiness, by shifting physical appearances, and by the dreamlike quality of his experiences.
After Clarence leaves Adrame to await the king’s arrival in the southern jungle village of Aziana, his experience becomes even more insistently dreamlike. The beggar leads the way through the mazelike hidden paths of the jungle; while stumbling and half-asleep, Clarence is led, sometimes literally, by the hand by the two boys in what seems like a circle repeated each day. They spend their evenings copiously drinking palm wine in the apparently identical villages in which they rest each night; the impish boys insinuate that numerous village women offer Clarence another kind of nocturnal hospitality that may also contribute to his daytime torpor.
As in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the forest seems to Clarence a mysterious, living entity; he is both repelled and attracted by “that utter abandonment . . . the surreptitious exploration and sinister probing that animate the forest . . . where everything attracts and is attracted, where everything is split open like a ripe fruit bursting with warm and heavy juices, where everything opens itself to every other thing, where everything is penetrated by everything else.” The erotically charged language corresponds to the transformation occurring in Clarence’s consciousness. His Western rationalism seems increasingly inapplicable to his African experience; he now exists primarily at a sensual, especially sexual level. He spends his evenings during his trek drinking copious amounts of palm wine and, according to the boys’ insinuation, entertaining compliant village women who enter the guest hut at night.
After arriving at Aziana, the boys’ home, the itinerant beggar negotiates with the local chief (the boys’ grandfather) for Clarence’s accommodation, then resumes his journey, this time accompanied by a woman and a mule provided by the chief. Clarence settles in to await the arrival of the king, when he hopes to have a better chance for an interview. Apparently without asking anything in return, the local chief provides him with food, clothing, a hut, and even a comely sleep-in housekeeper, who cooks for him and helps him bathe.
Clarence at first enjoys his carefree days but soon becomes bored because he has nothing to do except sleep, eat, drink palm wine filched from the chief’s supply by the two boys, and chat with them and Baloum, the fat eunuch who is keeper of the chief’s harem. As before, he finds himself chronically sleepy during the days. Each night, despite his ineffectual protests, his comely housekeeper, Akissi, deposits an intoxicatingly fragrant sheaf of forest flowers in his hut. Those flowers may have something to do with his vague sense that, instead of sleeping at night, he becomes a rampaging sexual beast, a “stallion,” as he himself says. Baloum and the boys teasingly refer to him as a cock.
Clarence senses that Akissi seems different every night, and the hostile, puritanical master of ceremonies for the village strongly insinuates that Akissi is not his only sexual partner. For this indiscretion the master of ceremonies is tried and sentenced by the village elders to a severe public beating; Clarence and the boys secretly observe the trial after traversing a maze of hidden underground corridors that reminds Clarence of the labyrinthine court building in Adrame. During the trial he hears that nearly all the women of the impotent chief’s harem have been sent to his hut at night and that most of them have become pregnant. A little later Baloum shows him the harem, a number of whose members have mulatto babies. Invited by the chief to view the punishment of the master of ceremonies, Clarence cannot stand the cruelty of the beating, which all the others present obviously enjoy. He insists that the punishment be stopped, to the keen disappointment of the others, for whom the combination of justice and cruelty presents no contradiction; in fact, they accuse him of being cruel and unjust by halting the punishment. Later, back in his hut, Clarence finally admits to himself that he had been half-aware of his situation all along; he is ashamed of what he considers his moral degradation and even his loss of identity but feels helpless to do anything about it.
In horror and self-disgust, Clarence runs away from the village to the nearby forest. When he arrives at a river he falls into another dream vision, in which he drifts downriver, surrounded increasingly closely by sirens with large, luxuriant breasts. Just as he feels smothered by these creatures, whom he finds both attractive and repellent, he is awakened from his nightmare by his friends, who are dragging him away from the riverbank. They tell him the sirens were probably manatees. Back in the village, he realizes that he cannot distinguish dream from reality, even in daytime. On the other hand, he finally admits to himself the truth of his situation, so the harem wives who visit him at night no longer have to pretend to be Akissi, and she no longer has to lie.
Clarence despairs about himself and his situation but still yearns for the coming of the king to “deliver” him, though he fully understands that he deserves nothing. To learn more specifically when the king will arrive, he seeks out an allegedly clairvoyant old crone who consorts with snakes. During this visit he has a vision within a vision. After she tells him the king has already begun his journey from his palace in Adrame, he seems to see her copulating with some of her snakes while others encircle and hold him captive. As he tries to avoid watching her ecstatic writhing, he seems to see, in an exact, filmic reversal of his earlier experience of the king’s arrival in Adrame, the child/savior’s departure from the royal palace, apparently confirming the crone’s prophecy that the king will arrive very soon. But when, in his vision, he tries to catch the king’s eye, he is dismayed by the apparent indifference of the king toward everything around him. After they leave the old woman, the two boys, who accompanied him, report that they saw him having sex with the hag.
Soon afterward, as the king actually approaches the village, the master of ceremonies first denies Clarence access to the ceremonies; then, after Clarence manages to circumvent that ploy, the dignitary again describes to Clarence in crushing detail his unworthiness to greet the king. He discloses that the beggar had actually sold Clarence to the local chief in exchange for the donkey and the woman, so that Clarence is literally the chief’s sexual slave. Clarence is so overwhelmed by this new disclosure and by the reminders of his complete degradation, of which he was already too aware, that he refuses to join the throng welcoming the arriving king, despite the encouragement of his friends, who dismiss both the words and the judgmental puritanism of the master of ceremonies.
Instead of joining them, Clarence remains in his hut and watches the king as he accepts gifts from the local people with the same apparent indifference he had noticed in his earlier vision. Suddenly, however, the king’s eye falls upon the naked Clarence, and then with mysterious power the king draws him right through the walls of his hut. As Clarence stumbles in a daze toward the king, he wonders whether the king is offended by the stench of baseness that he believes clings to him, or by his nakedness. The king seems to reply that he loves Clarence “because of your very nakedness. . . . that terrifying void that is within you and which opens to receive me; your hunger which calls to my hunger; your very baseness which did not exist until I gave it leave; and the great shame you feel.” Then the king opens his arms to enfold Clarence, as the latter kisses the king’s bared breast above his faintly pulsating heart. Thus the novel ends.
The fact that the attractive power of the boy/king/ savior emanated from his presumably sacred heart might well suggest Catholicism to a Western reader. And it is Clarence’s overwhelming conviction of his sinfulness that prevents him from approaching the king. On the other hand, Laye came from a religious background of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam. Likely, neither tradition would regard complete immersion in debauchery as a prerequisite for salvation, let alone apotheosis. On the other hand, either tradition might allow that salvation, or transformation into wholeness, requires a breaking down of the old, constricted sense of self. Whatever the religious implications, Clarence’s journey from Europe, across the threatening barrier reef protecting Africa (referred to repeatedly in the novel), and into the heart of Africa does apparently symbolize a descent into the unconscious dream world with which modern, rationalistic Europeans had increasingly lost contact.
Like Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, isolated from all Western influences in the jungle of Africa, Laye’s Clarence in The Radiance of the King regresses from a rationalist view of himself and the world to what even he acknowledges as a more primitive state than that of the Africans among whom he finds himself. His rather shallow, unconsidered rationalism does not so much disintegrate as dissolve in the fluid, shifting African dream world, where it simply does not seem to apply. He does remain aware of what is happening to him, though he cannot will himself to halt or even resist the process.
His is not a conventional hero’s journey in which the protagonist battles and overcomes the powers of darkness; instead, he succumbs to those powers within himself. However, unlike Kurtz, whose corrupted will both destroys him and degrades others around him, the will-less Clarence causes no harm and helps create a number of new lives in the village. And although he never feels fully a part of the village community, the village members do accept him, if on special terms, and he is much less isolated among Africans than he was in the European enclave in Adrame.
Ultimately, instead of Kurtz’s lonely damnation, Clarence finds community and salvation in the African dream world. What he regards as a moral and intellectual fall, the author presents as a descent into the twilight world (notwithstanding the blazing African sun) in which the conscious realm is subsumed in the unconscious, nocturnal realm of the psyche. In Laye’s novel this somnambulistic process of discovery (or perhaps recovery) leads through sensual abandonment to spiritual integration and apotheosis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Laye, Camara. The Dark Child. Translated by James Kirkup. New York: Noonday Press, 1954. ———. The Radiance of the King. Translated by James Kirkup. New York: Collins Books, 1971. Palmer, Eustace. An Introduction to the African Novel: A Critical Study of Twelve Books by Chinua Achebe, James Ngugi, Camara Laye, Elechi Amadi, Ayi Kwei Armach, Mongo Beti, and Gabriel Okara. New York: Africana Publications, 1972
Categories: French Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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