I admit I’ve been putting off this review [note: since early summer??!!] because I don’t even know where to begin with Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid. If I were to begin on the first page, I would note how enamored I was with it immediately. It starts with a lengthy discussion of lice and their transparent carapaces. The level of focus, the imagery, and the introduction of a motif around transparency was just beautiful in its weird way. From there, the book (I hesitate to call it a novel for reasons that will become clear) takes a wild journey through strange realities and stranger dreams.
The book is not structured as a typical novel, and the narrator explicitly mentions this many times. He sees novels as doors painted on walls—endless doors that do not offer true guidance to readers. So, the book eschews novel conventions and instead offers a series of connected vignettes, the relationship between which often being hard to parse. On its surface, the book is about a man who was raised as a girl for the first several years of his life; much later, he attempts to be a writer and presents his poem The Fall, which is a terrible gaffe and leads him to give up his pretensions of being a novelist. Instead, he is a teacher in Bucharest in a Kafkaesque building where he seems to drift between shifting classrooms, getting lost until he finally stumbles into his own. Teachers probably know what I’m talking about if I say that this is a midsummer ‘first-day-back’ nightmare.
At the same time, the narrator is drawn along his path seemingly by an unknown force. This leads him to buy a boat-shaped house that also seems to have a tower and a mysterious door that leads to a dentist’s chair. In the house, there is the titular solenoid, which has a mysterious force that allows him to levitate. It also has to do, I think, with the parallel universes and fates that can exist for a person. I mention that because there are a number of references to the narrator giving up on his writing career and then he imagines how other versions of his life might have played out.
One of the key symbols in the book is that of a coin. Recounting an early memory, the narrator talks about being seven years old “when a woman stepped out of the bus in a printed dress and pink hoop earrings [...] and put this gilded copper coin in [his] hand” (71). After contemplating the gift, he finds that the two sides of the coin have “A, O, R” on one side and “M and U on the other” (71). He solves the mystery “when on a whim [he] flicked the coin and it spun so quickly in its metal frame that it became a gold sphere, as free and transparent as a dandelion, with the ghostly word ARMOUR in the middle” (71). The two dimensional object is rendered three dimensional by spinning it and the full truth (the word) is revealed only through motion and velocity. He elaborates, “This is what my life is like, how it has always seemed: the singular, uniform, and tangible world on one side of the coin,and the secret, private, phantasmagoric world of my mind’s dreams on the other side” (71). He notes that
Neither is complete and true without the other. Only the rotation, only the whirling only vestibular syndromes, only a god’s careless finger spins the coin, adds a dimension, and makes visible (but for whose eyes?) the inscription engraved in our minds---on one side and the other, on day and night, lucidity and dream, woman and man, animal and god, while we remain eternally ignorant because we cannot see both sides at the same time. (71)
The symbolism of the spinning coin gives voice to the multidimensionality of the text. It points to just how complex our reality is and how much is required for understanding:
And it doesn’t end there, because you need to comprehend the transparent inscription of liquid gold in the middle of the sphere, and in order to understand it with your mind, not just to see it with your eyes, your mind must become an eye in a higher dimension. The dandelion sphere must itself be spun, on a plane impossible to imagine, in order to become, in relation to the sphere, what the sphere is in relation to the flat disk. The meaning lies in the hypersphere, in the unnameable, transparent object that results from spinning the sphere in the fourth dimension. (71)
The multidimensionality of the coin is a compelling symbol for addressing some core issues of the book. The idea of transparency—specifically the transparency of the dandelion sphere—is a recurring idea, as well, which gives the book some beautiful coherence. It resonates in multiple directions at once.
The book has a magical strangeness to it. It’s certainly one of the most distinctive books I’ve read lately, and there are a number of ‘movements’ in the text that are cobbled together into a semi-cohesive whole. There is no way to remember it all, which is a blessing and a curse—I wish I could remember every detail of life (and this book); at the same time, the fact that my memory is fallible will give me an excuse to re-read the text later. Here are a few of the movements I remember and think about:
The book’s first movement is about getting lice from students and the reflections that that inspires.
In another part, the narrator investigates a girl in his class who has each of her nails painted a different colour. He and another teacher stumble upon a youthful conspiracy slash secret society that takes place in a decrepit factory, with parallel paints to the girl’s fingernails.
There’s a section about a movement: a group of protestors who rise up against the very concept of death. They wield signs and rebel against funerals and things like that, arguing that there should be no such thing as death anymore.
There are flashbacks to the main character’s youth. One part of it is about having a younger sibling (a brother? a sister?) that passed away and another part is about how he was raised as a girl and the realization of the doctor’s visit that ‘changed’ him—though he still feels there’s a femininity within.
One of the more substantial scenes is an account of being sent to a sanatorium-like institution as a young person. While there, the kids are all medicated and another child convinces the narrator of some paranoiac delusions that the drugs are keeping them sedated and unaware of reality. They plot an escape into the woods, giving up their meds for days at a time so that they can enact their plan.
There’s a movement that offers a history of mathematicians and authors that have had a profound influence on the narrator. It delves into their histories and offers essentially a lengthy biography.
Oh, also, there’s a groundskeeper at the school that is convinced he is going to get abducted by aliens and then he disappears.
The main character finds a love interest. There are pages on pages about a thought experiment of a building being in flames and you have the option to save a great work of art or a human child. Both members of the couple agree that they would save the child every time, no matter the consequences. The couple eventually gets pregnant and, with the power of solenoids, wander into an extra-dimensional space to ‘choose’ their child.
There are some thorough dream sequences about strange and haunting figures that visit the narrator at various points in his life.
The narrator finds a series of clues in a library and tries to track down a manuscript of a book he found profoundly moving as a child. It sends him on the path of finding secret codes and he ultimately is led to read a manuscript of bizarre non-human language and he tracks down a series of solenoids under buildings in Bucharest.
Oh, and there’s a part where he transforms into a mite and lives in a mite community for a while until giving up his mite life and returning to human form..
This list is nowhere near exhaustive. Solenoid has so much strange, rich material to offer. I admit that there are some sections of the book that might fall a little flat, and the book maybe goes on a bit too long (supposedly it was written in one draft with no edits). For the most part, though, it’s a hypnotic work that is a complete behemoth of creativity.
Arguably, the key theme of Solenoid is that there are other realities out there, and we can reach them if we train ourselves to be interdimensional beings. In one passage, the narrator recounts a prisoner who is mysteriously saved from his cell by a voice that calls out to him—a voice that is objectively not there. It’s implied that the voice was his own, but from another dimension. It’s kind of like The Alchemist if The Alchemist was at all artful or creative. In other places of Solenoid, there are references to writing vertically, to move off of the horizontal plane, to be the edge of a coin rather than one of its faces, to occupy a space that exists only by contorting the way we think about the conventions of our reality.
Fair warning, but I’m going to quote some really lengthy passages from the book in the commentary that follows.I have probably ten pages or more of quotes and I’m having a really hard time putting it all together. So here we go.
The book plays with dimension and size all throughout. In an early section, the narrator engages in some literal navel gazing, which also sets up a motif where the narrator collects weird little artifacts of their own life (string from his bellybutton, baby teeth, and so on)---[also, oh my gosh(!), upon review, there’s a kind of fabric solenoid in his bellybutton before we even get introduced to the real one]. Cărtărescu writes:
Yes, there was the pale knot, sticking out a little more than usual, because as you approach thirty the stomach muscles start to sag. A scab the size of a child’s fingernail, in one of the knot’s volutes, turned out to be some dirt. But on the other side, a stiff and painful black-green stump stuck out, the thing my fingertip had felt. I couldn’t imagine what it could be. [...] Over the course of our lives, we excrete plenty of moles, warts, dead bones, and other refuse, things we carry around patiently, not to mention how our hair, nails, and teeth fall out: pieces of ourselves stop belonging to us and take on another life, all their own. I have, thanks to my mother, an empty Tic-Tac box with all my baby teeth, and also thanks to her I have my braids from when I was three. Photographs on cracked enamel, with little serrations along the edges like a postage stamp, are similar testimonies: our body really was once in between the sun and the camera lens, and it left a shadow on the film no different than the one the moon, during an eclipse, leave across the solar disk. (14)
It’s passages like these that just rope me right in. I find it oddly relatable and human, this archivism of the self. Beyond that, the poetry of the passage is just stunning. The last few sentences are so evocative in their imagery but also the philosophical reflection of passing time: “our body really was once in between the sun and the camera lens, and it left a shadow on the film.” The passage continues as follows:
But one week later, again in the bath, my navel felt unusual and irritated again: the unidentified piece had grown a little longer, and it felt different, more disturbing than painful. When we have a toothache, we rub our tongue against our molars, even at the risk of hitting a livid pain. Anything unusual on the sensitive map of our bodies makes us unsettled, nervous: we’ll do anything to escape a constant discomfort. Sometimes, at night, as I’m going to bed, I take off my socks and touch the thickening, hornlike, transparent-yellow flesh on the side of my big toe. I pinch at the growth, I pull it, and after about a half hour I have the edge up, and I keep pulling, with the smarting tips of my fingers, as I become more irritated and more worried, until I remove a thick, shiny layer, with fingerprint-like striations, a whole centimeter of dead skin, now hanging disgracefully from my finger. I can’t pull off any more, since I have already reached the living flesh underneath, the part where I feel pain, but still I have to put a stop to the irritation, the unease. I take a pair of scissors and cut it in half, then I examine it for a long time: a white shell that I made, without knowing how, just as I don’t remember how I made my own bones. (14)
Cărtărescu has such a beautiful way of blending the bodily and the cerebral, of charting the “sensitive map of our bodies.” I also appreciate how the passage explores the self-exploration is focused on absences and pain as a vehicle for insight. The narrator digs deeper and deeper until he feels compelled by pain to stop.
The psychic architecture of the book stands out, too. I neglected to mention there’s a whole part where the narrator digs into the earth through to his own skull, which stands out as a literalization of the blend of architecture, archeology, and psychic space, but Cărtărescu sets up the motif early on in the text. As the narrator travels across town, he notes the following: “The hospital wings were lined up over the vast grounds like brickwork battleships. Each one had a different shape, as though the tenants’ various diseases had determined their building’s bizarre architecture. Or perhaps each wing’s architect had been chosen for his disease, and he had attempted to create an allegory of his suffering” (17). The narrator is taken back to a memory of being in a “pink building with paper-thin walls, the neurology wing” (17). He explains that he stayed there for a month, had facial paralysis, and ongoing dreams of wandering the hospital’s wing, where he “enter[s] unknown, hostile buildings, their walls covered with anatomical diagrams” (17)---again a reference to the blending of the architecture and the body.
Alongside psychic architecture, Cărtărescu also offers a more literal mapping of urban blight. Describing Bucharest as “the saddest city on the face of the earth” (98), he describes the factory wherein there is the secret society. It “had been designed as a ruin from the start, as a saturnine witness to time devouring its children, as an illustration of the unforgiving second law of thermodynamics, as a silent, submissive, masochistic bowing of the head in the face of the destruction of all things and the pointlessness of all activity, from the effort of carbon to form crystals to the efforts of our minds to understand the tragedy in which we live” (98). I appreciate the punning around being “saturnine witness to time devouring its children” and the resonance with Goya’s painting of Saturn eating his son. It’s also engaging to me since there are literal children going into the factory as part of their secret society. The linguistic and allusive play helps to elevate the already-developed doom and gloom of the passage. The Kafkaesque description continues: “Bucharest was born on a drawing board from a philosophical impulse to imagine a city that would most poignantly illustrate human destiny: a city of ruin, decline, illness, debris, and rust” (98). The symbolism of the factory takes on an engaging significance in producing and centralizing the doom and gloom: “The old factory’s production lines, driven by long-immobile motors, had produced—and perhaps, in quiet isolation beyond humanity, continued to produce—the fear and grief, the unhappiness and agony, the melancholy and suffering of our life on Earth, in sufficient quantities for the surrounding neighbourhood” (98). The setting takes on a life of its own.
Of course, one of the things that I found most engrossing about it was its metacommentary on literature as a medium for actually communicating. The narrator professes over and over that he does not want to write a novel: “If I had wanted to write literature, I would have started ten years ago” (23). He seeks a way of automatic writing, without consciousness, “the way you want your leg to take a step and it does. You don’t have to say, “I order you to step,” you don’t have to think through the complicated process by which your will becomes deed. You just have to believe, to have belief as small as a mustard seed” (23). He continues, “If you are a writer, you write. Your books come without your knowing how to make them come, they come according to your gift, just as your mother is made to give birth, and she really does give birth to the child who grew in her uterus, without her mind participating in the complicated origami of her flesh” (23). First off, let’s just mention the beauty of the phrase “complicated origami of her flesh”, but the narrator then continues that he would have written fiction: “I would have had ten, fifteen novels by now without making any more effort than I make to secrete insulin or to send nourishment, day by day, from one orifice of my digestive system to another” (23). It has an almost Beckettian anti-literature bodies-as-machines ethos. The approach to literature also stands in as a parallel to the multiplicity of dimensions. He imagines a “moment long ago when [his] life still could have chosen one of an undefined multitude of directions, ordered my mind to produce fiction and nothing happened” (23). Literature is both endless possibility and false hope.
There’s a passage later in the text that reaffirms an ethos of writing. Cărtărescu attempts to redefine literature in a sentiment that feels to me like the work of Jon Fosse. He writes that literature, in order to mean anything, must be “an act of levitation over the page, a pneumatic text without any point of contact with the material world” (317). Despite the levitation, at the same time, this requires “burrow[ing] into the page, [being] buried within its ditches and tunnels like semantic mites, the way all storytellers wrote, all the authors of books ‘about something.’” (317). In turn, he says, “I knew that you shouldn’t really write anything but Bibles, anything but Gospels. And that the most miserable fate on Earth belongs to him who used his own mind and his own voice to utter words that had never been dictated to him, had not been placed in his mouth: the false prophets of all literature” (317). Just incredible.
Writing, though, is a deeply personal act. The narrator offers a compelling account of writing “the first and only map” of his mind, a poem called The Fall. Reading the poem aloud to the group, he “never recovered from the trauma” (32). He elaborates, “I remember everything with the clarity of a magic lantern, just as a torture victim remembers how his fingernails and teeth were pulled out, when, many years later, he wakes up screaming and drenched in sweat” (32). I love the connection to the magic lantern because the book is such a spiralling adventure like the 1001 Nights.** He continues on discussing how the reading was a “catastrophe” unlike a “building collapsing or a car accident” but in “the sense of a coin flipped toward the ceiling and falling on the wrong side. Of one straw shorter than the others that decides your fate on the raft of the Medusa” (32). The disaster is framed as a choice that precludes other possibilities (c.f. Karl Jaspers’ philosophy): “With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown, by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse” (32). I love the way the narrator frames choices as a way of solidifying and fossilizing, recalling the callus from earlier. There’s another parallel with translucidity between lice and the stems vegetating here, too, I notice. In any case, every miniscule choice is imbued with cosmic significance: “If I blink, my life forms: I could not have blinked, and then I would have been far different from the one who did, like streets that radiate out from a narrow piata” (32). Drawing again on the insect symbolism, Cărtărescu elaborates that, “In the end, I will be wrapped in a cocoon made of transparent threads of millions of virtual lives, of billions of paths I could have taken, each infinitesimally changing the angle of approach. After an adventure lasting as long as my life, I will meet them again, the millions of other selves, the possible, the probably, the happenstance, and the necessary, all at the end of their stories; we will tell each other about our successes and failures, our adventures and boredoms, our glory and shame. None of us will be more valuable than any other, because each will carry a world just as concrete as the one I call ‘reality’” (32). What a passage. What a vision for our identities all converging across multiple dimensions at a single cocooned point.
**The resemblance to 1001 Nights is explicitly acknowledged at least once in the book, but is referenced with ire: “books about endless stories, why it is I hate Scheherazade and all her children who labor to produce narrations so we can learn morals or wile our lazy hours” (209). The narrator explains that it’s because of books like that that he “never wanted to write from pleasure or for pleasure” (209). The passage extends the discussion of literature painting doors on walls and he says how he didn’t want to “draw monumental gates, or even little cat doors, on the walls of literature” (209).
There’s a passage that feels deeply ironic and hit a little close to home. The distrust Cărtărescu’s narrator has towards literature may be well-founded when you consider that “Like sex, like drugs, like all the manipulations of our minds that attempt to break out of the skull, literature is a machine for producing first beatitude, then disappointment” (42). It’s a sad state of affairs, and Cărtărescu asks a stinging question: “After you’ve read tens of thousands of books, you can’t help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go?” (42). He continues:
You’ve gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you—but again and again, you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had. (42).
Well, darn. That’s a devastating passage to me. I also can’t help but notice the “frozen crust of reality” and hear the resonance in Kafka’s phrase that “a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Here it’s an inversion.
Cărtărescu continues on to discuss the harm literature does to writers, too. Cărtărescu notes that “As a writer, you make yourself less real with each book you write. You always try to write about your life, and you never write about anything but literature. It is a curse, a Fata Morgana, a falsification of the simple fact that you are alive, you are real in a real world” (42). Everywhere I am, there I am not. The narrator continues, “You multiply your worlds, but your own world would be enough to fill billions of lives” (42). Rather than being Kafka’s axe for the frozen sea within us, literature instead takes us away from ourselves:
With every page you write the pressure of the enormous house of literature on top of you grows, it forces your hand to make movements it doesn’t want to make, it confines you to the level of the page, even though you could just burst through the paper and write perpendicular to its surface, just as a painter is constrained to use color and a musician sound and a sculptor volume, endlessly, until they feel disgusted and hateful, and only because we cannot imagine any other way. Could you get out of your own cranium by painting a door on the smooth, yellow interior of your brow? The despair you feel is that of one who lives in two dimensions and is trapped inside a square, in the middle of an infinite piece of paper. How can you escape this terrifying prison? Even if you could cross one side of the square, the paper extends endlessly---but that’s not the real reason the side can’t be crossed; rather, the two-dimensional mind cannot conceive of rising, perpendicular to the level of the world, between the prison walls. (42)
There’s a lot to talk about in this passage. First of all, it’s about the way that literary conventions limit true expression (can the subaltern ever speak?). It also makes reference to the idea of being perpendicular. That motif comes up in many forms: it’s a break with the conventional experience of the world by going into a totally new dimension (literally). Cărtărescu is trying to find a way to break free using imagination. How do we get out of our own heads? How do we find a new way that isn’t a false lead?
The discussion of writing intersects with the exploration of selfhood. The narrator keeps a journal and “many of [his] anomalies are recorded there, in pages that feel almost soldered together” (75). The writing of the self is haphazard: “each entry is dated and sometimes recorded in passing, sometimes shaking with a terror that runs transparently throughout the text” (75). This haphazardness, paradoxically, creates “facts [he] cannot doubt” because they were “embedded within the irreal reality of [his] life” (75). Solenoid gets reframed as an extension of the narrator’s diary, implying it’s an extension of the self: “I would have fallen out of the habit of writing, of writing even nonliterary texts, of filling pages with inky curls” (75). There’s a digression in here, which I’ll return to momentarily, but Cărtărescu continues to elaborate on the importance of the diary: “I would have forgotten what has happened to me” (75). The diary, rather than literature, is comprised of “pages [that] are living folds of [his] memory, the curls and braids of the letters are flexible, raw synapses, like tendrils of vines” (75). The passage extends how the narrator has not written any novels, but if he had, they all would have been “veins and arteries branching into further networks of tunnels where each node is an umbilical cord where a chubby fetus grows, whose face looks like [his]” (75), all extending from the diary. If we return to the geography and architecture of personhood, the diary serves as “a place with precise coordinates” (75) where “the world opened up, there was a breach, and the charming and terrifying pseudopods arrived from another world, not the world of fiction, not the world of a feverish brain, but a world embedded in what we still call reality” (75). You may get the sense of the nightmarish quality, and indeed dreams connect with selfhood, and these unrealities are more real to him than literature: “Not in a dream, not in hallucinations did the visitors arrive, not in hypnagogic or hypnopomptic states was I hurdled against the wardrobe after I was yanked, sheets and all, from my bed by an irresistible force, and not within the secondary game of fiction did I dissolve in flames of mad ecstasy, not in overexcited fantasies was I forced into horrible, horrible couplings” (75).
What is interesting is how the diaristic mode of writing lays claim to identity while literature proper does not. It also creates a context in which the narrator says, “I define myself by illnesses and insanities, not through my books” (209). There’s a resonance here, too, with Kafka: “This fragment from Kafka answers all. You will not find sentences like this one in any book, because not even Kafka dared to transform them into the tiny ear bones of any narrative. They were left in the obscure pages of his journal, destined for the flames” (209). The aims of literature and the aims of selfhood are at a disconnect with one another. Literature, Cărtărescu implies, aims to instruct people on how to live, while a diary has “pages that did not delectate and did not instruct, pages that did not exist but were more meaningful than all those that have ever existed. You don’t need a thousand pages for a psychodrama, just five lines about Issachar and Hermana” (209). Cărtărescu opines, “No novel ever gave us a path; all of them, absolutely all of them sink back into the useless void of literature” (209). As a means of understanding ourselves, Cărtărescu seems skeptical: “The world is full of the millions of novels that elide the only sense that writing ever had: to understand yourself to the very end, up to the only chamber in the mind’s labyrinth you are not permitted to enter” (209). Again, the narrator suggests that “the only texts that should ever be read are the unartistic and unliterary ones, bitter and incomprehensible books that their authors were crazy to write, but which flowed from their dementia, sadness, and despair like springs of holy water. [...] And hundreds of faceless voices whose every page is written with the only word that matters: me. Never him, never her, never you. Me, the section through time of the impossible fourth person” (209). There are two key observations that intersect here. First, is that selfhood is linked to all the anomalies and pains of our existence: “dementia, sadness, and despair”, for example. The other intersection is that literature’s flaw is that it reaches beyond itself, and here he reaffirms that novels can only ever be about the self. Attempting to talk about anything else is a betrayal of the medium.
The narrator struggles to find his identity and does so only through writing. He notes, “I had always thought you couldn’t talk about things that reveal yourself. Not face-to-face with the other person. That is why I write instead of talk” (255). This refusal of self-disclosure extends from and perpetuates a lack of self-understanding. The whole tenor of the discussion becomes a strange geometric breakdown: “When you’re face-to-face, eye-to-eye with someone close to you, as though your face were actually poured into his and your eyes were enclosed by his, like in a spherical box, only then do you feel the insurmountable wall between your minds (“What does blue look like to you?”, “How can I feel your toothache?). That’s why people used books to say important things, because a book assumes an absence, on one side or the other: while it is being written, the reader is missing. While it is being read, the writer is missing” (255). Cărtărescu offers a commentary on the fundamental disconnect in our ability to perceive things in the same way as each other, and hence our lack of understanding. This runs parallel to the idea of a pharmakon: writing as both erasure and creation of identity.
Returning to the idea of selfhood, we should take some time to identify how the novel comes to identify selfhood, particularly with respect to gender. Early in the text, there’s a mystery of the narrator’s identity. There’s a compelling scene in which the narrator works up the courage to ask his mother what happened at the hospital, asking questions that his mother deflects: “Don’t you have anything better to ask me?” (155). The narrator reflects on his “mother’s mismatched statements and contradictions and silences and confusions” and sees “even more clearly that [he] cannot rely on her to explain the enigma and melancholy of [his life]” (155). There is no ‘core’ to being that explains all things. Then, there are the factual mismatches. The physical description his mom gives matches his cousin and he gets paranoid about how she could make such a mistake: “Does she mix things up on purpose, not even hiding her attempts to derail my obsessive questioning?” (155). The narrator says, “she doesn’t understand that her mistakes only provoke me, that they are clues, like the slips of a suspect under cross-examination? Or is my mother on my side, trying as hard as she can to send some message, desperate to communicate, even through her clumsy mistakes, that the enigma exists, that my uneasiness is justified? Maybe she is hostage to some bizarre power that keeps her under close watch, and she can only let these absurdities slip out, flagrant absurdities: not facts, not information, but warnings” (155). It’s a rare feat to extend paranoiac thinking to the level of selfhood. Often, paranoia is outward-focused but here the mystery is the self, and mistakes appear to be clues to some deeper level of understanding.
One key area of uncertainty in selfhood is gender, and the novel points to gender as a construction. While the narrator is brought up as a girl for the first several years of his life, a doctor corrects his mother at a fateful appointment. Yet, the narrator senses a femininity in himself that is like a missing twin:
My femininity is nothing new or surprising for me. I have always felt that my hidden sister—manifest in me via the strange imagination of my mother, who dressed me, until I was four, in girl’s clothes (until the vision of the circular room with an operating table in the middle, under bare, raw stars)—was still inside me, a shrunken conjoined twin but not dead, there in my mind, in a space from which I have heard continual whispers, pleadings, sighs. An oppressed discourse, thin and pure, lives permanently inside me, lacking the resonating chamber of an Adam’s apple, as though within my being, the sun of masculinity blocked the feminine moon, but her phantom still floats in the luminous evening sky. (402)
I appreciate how the book goes beyond binaries in all kinds of ways, and the discussion of masculinity and femininity is an extension of that. Identities are not able to be categorized so easily; within us, there are other versions of us and imagined versions of what we could be. Cărtărescu describes the phenomenon as “the ambiguity of [the] mind!” (402)). It gets raised up to a mythic phenomenon:
I have always believed in a deep casual connection between Tiresias’s androgyny and his ability to see the future. You cannot truly see the temporal being of your body except through two eyes: a man’s and a woman’s, simultaneously, the way that both sexes are necessary to give birth to the temporal navigator that is the newborn. [...] In dreams, all characters are interchangeable. Essentially, it was about a miraculous fertilization and birth. I participated in that scene, I may have seen it, and the dream mechanism, came to destroy mythical images, assigned me the role of mother, perhaps because of my femininity. Sometimes I feel the extreme power of the subterranean connection. (402).
Like selfhood and writing, dreams become a vehicle for identity exploration. He dreams himself into motherhood. Ironically, the dream mechanism “came to destroy mythical images.” It’s as if dreams are more real than the mythic. The “subterranean connection” weaves through dreams and identity and writing, all together at multiple levels.
The shaping of identity is not bound by identity, but so too is it not bound by species. The narrator, as I mentioned earlier, transforms himself into a mite and lives essentially a full life as a mite before returning to his ‘real’ identity. He wonders whether the creatures really live: “They doubtless sensed the world around them, but how? And what did the fact that they sensed it mean? What kind of life was that?” (111). He wonders what it would have been like to be “born as a mite or a louse, or one of the billions of polyps on coral reefs” (111). He imagines that he “would have lived without knowing that [he] lived, [his] life would have been a moment of obscure agitation, with pains and pleasures and contacts and alarms and urges, far from thought and far from consciousness, in some abject hole, in a blind dot, in total oblivion” (111). The narrator is too astute not to recognize that this is indeed our condition. The symbolism of “blind mites stumbling along our piece of dust in an unknown, irrational infinity, in the horrible dead end of this world” (111) is literalized later in the text, but brings up the idea of the role of consciousness as part of our experience of life. How can we say we have lived if we cannot articulate our own consciousness—but at the same time, that consciousness is inaccessible to us: “We think we have access to the logical-mathematical structure of the world, but we continue to live without self-consciousness and without understanding, digging tunnels through the skin of God, causing him nothing but fits and irritation” (111-112). Again, it’s a matter of scope. We are both infinitesimally small and infinitesimally large compared to other beings. The mite under our skin does not understand us: “its ganglions of nerves are not made for it. Its sensor organs do not spread their sails more than a few milimeters around the body it does not know it has” (112). We, too, though, are parasites to other entities and “neither can we know the miraculous creatures that are to us what we are to the parasites in our skin and the mites on the pillow where we sleep” (112). Considering it this way, we might also think back to the landscape of the body. At what point do mites see our ginormous heads as a living entity rather than a passive mountain? This fundamental lack of understanding of ourselves extends into not understanding the experience of others: “We cannot detect [the mites’] chemical secrets, and our thought is equally powerless. All our knowledge is a stammering tactility” (112). Again we return to the body as the standard of existence; meanwhile, “our thoughts are the same substance as those creatures who are nothing but thought. To know them,however, you need thought of another creature and on another level, thought of a body of thought we cannot conceive of, just as the mite cannot conceive of our thought and cannot, truly, think” (112).
Returning to dreams and mythic connections, they serve as an effective vehicle for the strangeness of the book and the possibilities it can offer. To deal with Solenoid effectively, you have to accept the strangeness of the world. In the words of the text, it’s a child’s perspective: “Nothing is strange to a child, because he lives in the strange, thus dreams and old memories seem made from the same substance” (148). The realness of dreams has been previously addressed, but Cărtărescu also inverts the idea because “The strange at that time was just the banality of the world” (148).
The narrator elevates dreams to the status of “pearls we manage to keep” (477). There’s a hierarchy within dreams and “not all are of the same quality” (477). He elaborates that
the texture and color, the size and the softness to the touch vary so much—and our state of enchantment and magic is so different—that even in times when dreams were accessories for parables and stories, and set in long tables beside unambiguous explications (“if you dream of urinating eastward, you will become king”), they carefully taxonomized the night into so many oneiric insect collections. (477)
I appreciate here that Cărtărescu brings nuance back to the analysis of dreams. Rather than stock explanations, he’s exploring the way that these dreams can be nuanced and textured. He then outlines a series of different types of dreams, citing an obscure theologian-philosopher. The first two types of dreams come from our souls. There’s an “inferior, sublunar, and one above the moon” (477). There’s a whole taxonomy of types of dreams that are produced by “exterior impressions or the mnesic remains of previous days” (477). These dreams are dismissed as unimportant, “a distant rumor of the world filtered through the walls of our closed eyelids” (477). The soul “produces enigmatic dreams, mazes where the mind loses its way” (477), but they “do not have lofty meanings” (477). The second category of dreams “contains those sent by angels or demons” and are dreams that “obsess you” (477) because they promise revelations but are “not yet concretized” (477). They’re like a “word on the top of your tongue” (477). These dreams are rare but unforgettable: “you meet beings dear to you, who died long ago, or you encounter frightening spiders who scour the underground of your mind and wrap you in silk” (477). These descriptions, I’m telling you! Even these dreams, though, do not reveal anything about your true self.
Ultimately, though, dreams become the vehicle for truth. The highest level of dream gets its own lengthy description. Cărtărescu equates dreams and understanding: “Revelation, the kind you receive only a few times in your life, the essential dream, truer than reality and the only tunnel that opens in the walls of time, a tunnel through which you might escape, is only conveyed by the third type of dream, the supreme dream, the dream of escape” (448). The language alone points to how grandiose this experience is. It’s an impactful description of those fleeting moments where everything falls into place. Cărtărescu says that these “supreme dreams” come “from another dimension” (448). There are tiers of knowledge and a kind of hierarchy of epistemes, some of which are accessible only through dream: “It is the clear, unambiguous dream, because the enigma, converted into a hyperenigma, reveals the soul with hallucinatory clarity, without shadow, like a crystal pyramid in the center of our mind” (448). Here, truth, dreams, and identity all intersect. There’s an additional paradox that who you are is where you’re not yet. These dreams are “the escape plan you receive in your cell through taps on a wall dozens of meters above the sea. Clear in front of you, if still strange and unusable, like a typewritten page for an illiterate person, like lines of equations for a layperson” (448). Reading the passage is encouraging because it feels like so many of the passages in Solenoid. It elevates and “You see everything clearly, every letter with its serifs, each number with its absurdity, but what is written there? And how does what is written there connect to your fate? You receive vital instructions in an unknown language or in a code imperceptible to your senses, but you know that there is the code and there is the response, and you strive to decrypt them” (448). I have to say, as I age I’ve gotten less invested in literature that discusses dreams. It feels too disconnected from experience or too surface-level without impacting the reality of the world. Cărtărescu, though, gets it. I think we’re all familiar with that sensation of having a complete knowledge of something in a dream, only to be incapable of recalling or making use of it in reality. I’ve written whole books in my sleep before, only to have no recollection of what made them so brilliant. These dreams, Cărtărescu suggests, are “the whispering vice, without vocal cords or phonic trajectory, that calls you by name in the middle of the night. It is what you whisper to yourself, you, who know much more, who know in fact everything, to yourself, who does not know he knows” (448). I think Cărtărescu is hitting on a particular way of thinking about dreams and truth that feels resonant, but the issue is how to cling to the knowledge of the unconscious and bridge the worlds together.
Taken together, the book offers an epistemology and a philosophy that is as alluring as it is difficult to navigate. As I alluded to earlier with the narrator’s reflection on identity as seen through the mistakes his mother made, a lot of the epistemology of the book is rooted in paranoiac thinking. The narrator describes the “paranoid motor” that drives us since “all metaphysics is actually paranoia” (160). It’s a matter of noticing patterns, and it’s a relatable observation:
There’s a day when you see three or four blind people, after not seeing any for years, not even in a dream. You meet a woman named Olimpia, and a few minutes later you open a dictionary to the page showing Manet’s Olympia, then two hours later, on the street, you pass Olimpia’s Flowershop. These are nodes of meaning, plexuses of the world’s neural system, they connect organs and events, signals that you ought to pursue until they wave a white flag---and you would, if you didn’t have this stupid prejudice for reality. (160)
Epistemology and knowledge seems to happen externally to ourselves. It’s almost framed as though the world is plotting to provide you knowledge, rather than your own noticing of it. Knowledge, like so much else in the book, is described as bodily: “the world’s neural system” and the “organs and events” through which we’re traveling like parasites. What I really like is how the passage continues:
We ought to have a sensory organ that can tell sign from coincidence. In a single day, you see three pregnant women one after another: what does this mean? If there had only been two, would the coincidence have affected you as much? What if these three were joined by one more, suddenly emerging from a house and walking down the street (160).
The idea of having a sensory organ detecting signs is a compelling idea. I love that way of pointing to the disconnect between the body and knowledge. We gather so much using our organs, but have no specific organ for coincidence.
One of my favourite aspects of the epistemology of the book is when the narrator is discussing the incohesive nature of his book and offers different levels of intelligibility. He outlines how “You can understand the intelligible, and this is calm; you can understand the unintelligible, and this is power, you can not understand the intelligible, and this is terror; you can not understand the unintelligible, and this is enlightenment” (411). I think this is such a concise framework for thinking about that which we can and cannot understand. It has a simple elegance that I think is worth bearing in mind.
Despite this high-concept material, Cărtărescu offers sincere and compelling descriptions of youth. In one scene that I won’t quote at length here, one of the narrator’s fellow sanatorium-goers describes a vision of the afterlife in which people wander around passing each other and deciding to trade fates and walking each others’ paths, wandering forever amidst people all with the same inhuman face. He describes the vision in great detail and the other children respond with terror. They stumble back to bed in the dark and sleep “like the statues carved into sarcophagi” (373). They stare up at “fixtures on the ceiling [that] looked like spheres levitating in the dark air, without a stem to hang from” (373). The imagery is beautiful and creates this tense mood where the kids are absolutely terrified. It’s excellent.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the narrator is a teacher and trying to escape his monotonous life. He talks about how “stultifying the profession of teaching is” and “how much you degenerate, year after year, correcting homework and goading students to learn, repeating the same phrase dozens or hundreds of times, reading the same text aloud ‘with feeling,’ talking to the same colleagues in whose eyes you perceive the same desperation and helplessness that they see in yours (and which you see in the mirror, every morning as you shave)” (75). Jeeze, Cărtărescu, tell us how you really feel. I mean, he’s not wrong—there is a repetitive monotony to teaching. The result, though, is that “you know you are decaying, that your mind is a pool of bombastic vomit and cliched questions, and still you can do nothing but scream, silently, like someone being tortured in an underground cell, alone with his executioner, watching in complete lucidity as the fabric of his body is rent, and he is eviscerated alive and unable to object” (75). The maximal description and elaboration on the core idea really helps to drive home the despair in Cărtărescu’s work.
There are two notes I’d like to close on, both related to the idea of literature and art. Throughout the book, there’s a lengthy discussion of whether to save artwork or a baby from a burning building. Cărtărescu derides writers, philosophers, musicians and painters, circus magicians, and flea trainers because what they do is “save the masterpiece and let the child burn” (492). Cărtărescu is trying to do something totally different. The narrator notes himself as a “solitary person, waiting behind a window” (411) and gives a description of the manuscript. The manuscript is “a heap of jigsaw puzzle pieces, each one in itself incomprehensible, each one falling faceup or facedown onto the others, scattering across the vast field of play” (411). Essentially, it’s a complete mess and it is only “the long fingers of the logic of dreams” that could “through meticulous maneuvers of combination, rotation, positioning, augmentation, and diminution, centralization and lateralization, highlighting and blurring” that could render them “partially coherent” (411). There is no intention to forcefully bring everything together as a singular unit: “for everyone else it would remain absurd, because there are both intelligible and unintelligible coherences, just as there are comprehensible and incomprehensible absurdities” (411). All of this to say that Cărtărescu is playing in the framework not of the incoherent, but of the incomprehensible. He refuses to craft the artwork that limits the open-ended trails and instead metaphorically preserves the baby. He saves the baby that is complete in all its complexity and potential rather than the calcified work of art. Elsewhere, the narrator says, “What I am writing here, evening after evening, in my house in the center of my city, of my universe, of my world, is an anti-book, the forever obscure work of an anti-author” (492). It’s a little full of itself, perhaps, but I can’t help but recognize the intention as being achieved. It’s kind of a masterpiece.
Since I also have no desire to bring everything together into coherence, I’m going to close the review with the author’s own words without offering a final comment. In advance, happy reading.
I am no one and I will stay that way, I am alone and there’s no cure for being alone: but I don’t like [...] painting doors that will never open on the walls of this Piranesian world. I could take my story to a newspaper. It could appear in a Sunday literature supplement. I could write more and publish a small, hundred-page book. Even Kafka, even Rotluft, even Fyoritos did this. I could go into the teachers’ lounge one day with my freshly published book, I could show it off, with well-played modesty, to Florabela, Goia, Mrs. Gionea, and Mrs. Uzun, I could approach the drawing teacher, Spirescu, and ask him, ingeniously, what he thought of the cover (he, the great specialist…), and I would hear “Congratulations, dom professor” everywhere, even from the green paintings that line the room, even from the janitors, even from the students’ ink-stained lips. That’s how it would start. It could still start. The nightmare of my transformation, after a night of restless sleep, into the Other. (492)
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