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Marina Warner
Soon after experiencing the Blitz in London, the Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen published a short story that has become one of her most admired and best loved writings: "Mysterious Kôr" (Bowen 1999, 728–40). Kôr sounds to the ear like the core of something, and indeed in the story it figures as an ultimate elsewhere, which the story's heroine, Pepita, yearns to reach. Arthur, "Pepita's boy," is on leave, but the lovers have nowhere to go. The moon is full, and London eerily, implacably illuminated; as Pepita wanders with Arthur, Kôr appears in her mind's eye: an elusive, distant place, its mysteriousness intensified by its name, attached to no known city on the globe, the circumflex on the O adding glamour and exoticism to the monosyllable's percussive sound. But the word also conjures London as "a ghost city" that cannot be known.
Bowen's story is spiky, reproducing in its jagged, interrupted scenes and brusque relations the enigma of the imaginary lost and enchanted city where Pepita later drifts. Frustrated, exasperated by the littleness of the here and now, sleeping uneasily in her moon-washed room, she dreams of Kôr.
Kôr first appears in the 1886–87 novel She by Rider Haggard, a creator of torrid imperialist adventures, including King Solomon's Mines; his virulent fantasies epitomize the passionate repulsion and attraction [End Page 29] that the empire-builders felt for the territories the British and others had invaded and taken possession of, which they often cast as female in their mental imagery. (As Hélène Cixous identified in her classic work, "The Laugh of the Medusa," women were a dark continent too [Cixous, Cohen, and Cohen 1976, 877–78].) Kôr is a queendom ruled by Ayesha—"She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed"—who has passed through the fire of eternal life. At the arrival of the explorer hero Leo Vincey, however, She crumbles into dust, her body and her dominion laid to waste by the advent of the white man and the modern world.
Bowen read She when she was 12 and, in a radio talk in l947, singled it out as a turning point of her life. "The book," she said in a radio interview, "stands for the first totally violent impact I ever received from print. After She, print was to fill me with apprehension. I was prepared to handle any book like a bomb." In this talk for the BBC, Bowen went on to make the crucial point that "it was not the woman that attracted her … but the man Holly, the writer [in the story]. It was he [Holly] 'not ever, really, She-who-must-be-obeyed, who controlled the magic'… It was the power of the pen … 'the inventive pen' that was the revelation, the 'power in the cave'…." (Haule 1986, 206).
The scholar James M. Haule comments, very perceptively: "Though it is the writer's power that Bowen acknowledged openly, the image of the female capable of a power beyond moral control would not be forgotten. It would return in her work in various guises; but like She, it would be always 'veiled, veiled'" (1986, 206).
The image of Kôr communicates a heady fin-de-siècle mixture of women, death, desire, beauty, exoticism. Haggard is riffing on the lost cities of the desert in A Thousand and One Nights, and especially the tale called "The City of Brass," where everything is stilled around the effigy of its queen, who is mummified, her eye sockets filled with quicksilver so she looks alive; round her bier stand automata that slice off the head of anyone approaching her body to take the jewels that cover her (Lyons and Irwin 2008, 2: 518–548). Bowen likewise explicitly invokes territorial ambitions of empire, but Kôr, the matriarchal [End Page 30] ghost city, lies beyond their—our—reach. These associations hover in her story, and the effect is highly charged, thrilling as if live adrenalin were delivered directly from the Haggard novel via Bowen's moonlit scenes into our nervous...
