I think everyone here can agree that there’s really no possible way to entirely wrap our heads around this story but like intellectual buffoons we’re going to try. Here’s what’s got me all twisted – what happened to Nathanael’s eyes and whether he is human or automaton. I mean, what is going on, really? Let’s break it down.
Coppelius supposedly lets Nathanael keep his eyes at the plea of his father (47) but later on we Spalanzani throw Nathanael’s eyes at his chest (95). Interestingly enough, these were the same eyes that animated Olimpia, or so we understand from Spalanzani.
Question is, are these physical eyes or a metaphor for insight? Olimpia functioning on Nathanael’s eyes would make more sense in a literal sense but if she’s had his literal eyes all this time, we can’t exactly explain how Nathanael’s been walking around with these ‘black cavities’ (47) (95) in his head that this story loves to keep bringing up (that one gets the award of most morbid motif in Arts One Term 1, I’ll get chip in for the trophy). If they’re metaphorical, it would make more sense in Nathanael’s case, because we can see he has succumbed to paranoia and infidelity, loosing his sense of self. But again, Olimpia can’t be functioning on insight, especially since she seems to have none as her eyes are ‘devoid of the power to see’ (89) and all she can contribute in terms imparting insight is her repeating “ah!” (I think we got her point the first time). So, either explanation seems flawed in at least one way.
Now, that’s not even the tip of the iceberg concerning our troubles with the main character. We don’t even know if this man is human or automaton. Coppelius unscrews Nathanael’s limbs and mixes and matches them (47) as if he was an automaton but what’s even more interesting and perhaps not discussed at all is Coppelius’ comments while doing so. He says, “They’re best the way they were!– The old man knew what he was doing!” Who is this old man?
If he was talking about Nathanael’s creator, and this seems to be the case, that would rationally be Nathanael’s father but Coppelius speaking in third person suggests that he doesn’t believe that to be the case, because Nathanael’s father was right in the room and very much capable of being addressed directly. So, could it be that Nathanael is an automaton created by someone else and only Coppelius is aware of it, or perhaps Nathanael’s father as well? This might explain why Coppelius chose to kill Nathanael’s father, perhaps the father wasn’t comfortable with the secret – wanting to share it with his wife or Nathanael himself. Another thing that people don’t talk about is Coppelius’ sudden urge to murder the man after a year of radio silence on his part; perhaps this is because not much is known about the father and while Coppelius is definitely a more significant character he’s still just as mysterious if not more. Regardless of these unsolvable questions, Nathanael being an automaton might explain his attraction to Olimpia even when his peers seemed to see through her.
But Nathanael shown to have ‘inner warmth’ that ignites his cheeks and he is seen with ‘tears pouring from his eyes’ (73) so this seems to go against that theory. In this case, Nathanael’s fascination with Olimpia might be explained by Coppola’s eye glass that twisted his perception of her and made it seem like ‘her power of vision had been ignited’ though he had found her to be rigid and cold initially as his peers had.
So, yeah those would be my thoughts for the week. A penny for yours?
Christina Hendricks
November 30, 2016 — 5:58 pm
Great points here, Shivz! I’m going to start with the second, because I had that thought about Nathanael possibly being an automaton too. I think we’re invited to wonder about that from the scene where N says Coppelius took his limbs off and tried to put them in other places. One reading is that this is just N’s hallucination, but another reading, if we are taking what is happening to N as real and not just in his mind, is that he really is an automaton.
Going down that road, I also wondered if maybe the “old man” in that quote from Coppelius, talking about putting Nathanael’s limbs in different places, could have been Spalanzani. Later, Spalanzani and Coppelius are shown to have worked together on Olimpia, with Spalanzani (the physics profs) having created the mechanism, which suggests that Coppola/Coppelius created the eyes. And maybe (perhaps I’m going too far here) Coppelius in the early scene needs eyes for this or some other automaton, and decides to take them from Nathanael the automaton. He needs eyes for some other project and thinks he’ll take them from Nathanael. As you suggest above, perhaps we could read the story that he does do so, and gives them to Olimpia.
But, going back to your first question, this doesn’t quite work because then what is Nathanael seeing with this whole time?
So yeah, things don’t wrap up nicely.
I was thinking on the “metaphorical” reading of taking N’s eyes and giving them to Olimpia, something like the following: Coppelius metaphorically takes N’s eyes in that the way N sees the world after this is coloured by his experience with Coppelius. And then when N buys the spyglass his sight is literally changed by Coppelius/Coppola: he now sees Olimpia in a new way than he did before (at first he thinks her eyes are lifeless and dead (59, 75-77)) when he looks at her through the spyglass. So Coppelius “steals” his eyes in the sense that he affects how Nathanael sees the world, including Olimpia. How does Olimpia have N’s eyes, then? This may be stretching the reading I’ve been giving so far, but Nathanael looks at Olimpia’s eyes and sees himself–as discussed in seminar, he sees in her what he wants to see, and even says at one point that he sees in her a reflection of himself (85).
That’s about all the speculation I can muster at this point, but your post really resonated with some things I had been thinking, but hadn’t articulated in class, so I thought I’d say them here!