Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium
"The soul is the weakest thing within us."
The wildfires that hit California in 2018 were the worst in the state’s recorded history (a record that lasted all of two years). Our Oakland home was in no danger, but in late fall the skies were frequently black with smoke, with the air quality index flitting between the red and purple danger zones. My oldest child, then one-and-a-half years old, was not enjoying being confined to the house, so our family decided to tag along with some friends to a cabin up in the Sierras as soon as school let out for Thanksgiving break.
The drive east was surreal: as we dipped into the Central Valley the inferno that was the sky above us grew steadily more ominous and oppressive. We wondered whether we driving to safety or into the fires themselves? And then, without warning, the foothills emerged and we were above it, out of the smoke, under a dome of pure blue, breathing glorious fresh air once again. There was no snow, so we sat around the cabin, talked and played games, and hiked around the alpine forest.
Had it been a hundred years earlier, we might have taken a similar trip to the mountains in a futile effort to cure tuberculosis. What better way to heal the lungs than to take walks in that cold mountain air? While it’s true that sanatoriums were ineffective from a medical standpoint, their gift to literature has been far more pronounced, from Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain to Olga Tokarczuk’s recently translated novel The Empusium, which I finished reading this week. The sanatorium is the perfect setting for the novel of ideas, as the characters have little to do other than talk to one another and think, and there’s no problem with how to end the story. Death is always around the corner.
Now that the intro’s out of the way, it’s time for me to admit that I did not really enjoy reading The Magic Mountain1, despite the fact that it’s acknowledged by just about everyone as an “important novel,” including Tokarczuk, who says that she rereads it every couple years. I like ideas as much as the next guy, but I don’t like them so much that I want read about them for hundreds of pages on end. So in that sense, I was quite pleased to discover that Tokarczuk’s way of paying homage to Mann’s novel was to imbue her book with a healthy dose of horror in the style of M. Night Shyamalan.
To explain where this horror comes from, let’s backtrack to 1957, the year that the critic Northrop Frye publishes The Anatomy of Criticism, in which he defines this literary concept called the green world2. There’s a rational, human world with all kinds of rules and expectations that can cause no end of problems. And so the characters escape into the forest, the green world, where the human rules no longer apply and the problems of romance and plot can be solved. Now that they’re out of the woods3, the protagonists can return to their old lives, and everyone lives happily ever after. Once you start looking for the green world, you find it everywhere: in the novels of Haruki Murakami, the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel, the swamp where Luke Skywalker finds Yoda on Dagobah4.
To ascend the mountain, to become a resident of the sanatorium5, is inhabit a liminal space between these two worlds. On the one hand, the conversations with one’s fellow patients are a constant reminder of the world of civilization left behind and below. One the other hand, breathe in that fresh mountain air! Explore the dark forest lurking just beyond the village! These woods are the home of fairytales, with all the promise and terror that such tales contain, and the patients in The Empusium are both drawn to and repelled by them.
At the beginning of the novel, the characters are rooted in civilization. Our hero, the ailing Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, states that “I was brought up in the spirit of rationalism to believe there’s always an explanation for the strangest things.” To say that rationalism is heavily gendered in this novel is a massive understatement. The cast of male characters at the lodging house indulge themselves with discussions of philosophy and politics that always return to the same topic: misogyny. Women are irrational, they all agree, incapable of political thought or producing works of science or art, weak in both body and mind6. Wojnicz seems particularly confused by women. His mother died young and he was raised by his father, who believed in “the public good, rationalism, pragmatism.” Tokarczuk adds that,
In Mieczyslaw Wojnicz’s family world, the women had vague, short, dangerous lives, and then they died, remaining in people’s memories as fleeting shapes without contour. They were reduced to a remote, unclear impulse placed in the universe only temporarily, for the sole purpose of its biological consequences.
The green world is not to be denied. It appears first as physical symptoms in the bodies of the sickly men. I’ve never read a novel that describes the sound of the human cough as wonderfully as this one does, as a series of sounds originating from some alien landscape:
August’s cough, for example, was deep and powerful, entirely at odds with his puny physique. It seemed to come from the tube of his body, from the deepest spot, sounding baritone, cavernous, as if leaving an echo behind it. In the way of an engineer, Wojnicz often wondered how Herr August’s feeble lungs could produce such strong resonance, as if his small but well-proportioned body were like a guitar on which the illness played its chords.
And a few lines later:
“Poor Thilo coughed in a completely different way. From this room came a bubbling noise, the sound of rotting matter, age-old fermentation, as if the boy’s body were being boiled in retorts by damp miasmas, as if some primeval substance the consistency of mud, from which millions of years ago life had emerged, were making itself heard.”
This is a horrifying passage, a precursor to the horrors that follow: humanlike figures in the woods, a mysterious chair with leather bindings in the attic, a meal made of rabbit hearts. The rational world holds no sway here, no matter how many times it is remembered or how fervently it is invoked.
Tokarczuk’s project in The Empusium is a repudiation of the rational, patriarchal world7 and a celebration of its alternative. Weakness, irrationality, emotion: this is how the men of the novel understand what it is to be female, but it’s also a description of the power of the green world she has created. The Empusium contains just two moments of real empathy, and both involve others who help Wojnicz see that the green world actually is the real world. The rational world held in the minds of the men of the lodging house is nothing but a pale imitation, a human construct straight out of Plato’s allegory of the cave. In a beautiful passage towards the end of the novel, Wojnicz’s doctor imparts this knowledge to his patient:
He had learned to think that each person, each human organism, possessed a point of least resistance, a weakest point, this was the famous Achilles’ heel, and it was like the law of the pearl: just as in a mollusk the grain of sand that chafes it is neutralized by mother-of-pearl, ultimately forming a jewel that we find valuable, so all the developmental lines of our psyche will arrange themselves around this weakest spot. Each anomaly, claimed Semperweiss (for he certainly did not want to use the word defect), stimulates a particular mental activity, a particular development, and collects it around itself. We are shaped not by what is strong in us but by the anomaly, by whatever is weak and not accepted.
“If you, young person, were to ask me what the soul is, I would answer like this: The soul is the weakest thing within us. Your soul is your morbid symptoms.”
To survive, according to Dr. Semperweiss, the human mind simplifies the world by organizing everything into categories, opposites, dichotomies that can be rationally understood. Wojnicz is understandably perplexed:
“But what is the world like?”
“Blurred, out of focus, flickering, now like this, now like that, depending on one’s point of view.”
Wojnicz found it all too complicated, too far away from himself. Could one live in such a world? How would one design sewage systems in the city of Lwów?
This tension is what stuck with me at the close of the novel. Becoming enlightened is a laudable goal, but who is making sure that human waste isn’t piling up in the streets? There’s a reason that American politicians love to employ the absurd metaphor of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, that Chinese bureaucrats of the 1700s nailed Confucian edicts praising hard work all over the countryside, that the communists made a religion out of the shared sacrifice and struggle of workers everywhere. Human society seems to only function if we overlay the complexity of the real world with a set of beliefs, customs, rules.
It’s the rare individual who has the time to come closer to understanding the world as it really is, time spent reading or meditating or wandering into the green world that stretches beyond the borders of the sanatorium, on and on, as limitless as the human imagination.
With the caveat that I was 15 years younger then than I am now, and might appreciate it differently today.
Frye used the green world as a way of explaining the structure of Shakespeare’s comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Pun point!
As further evidence that the green world is a terrifying place at times: Luke: “I’m not scared.” Yoda: “You will be.”
Or, in the case of The Empusium, a resident of a lodging house nearby.
It’s worth noting that Tokarczuk lifts her character’s misogynist ideas straight from the most influential men of the western cannon: Shakespeare and Darwin and Freud, etc. She lists them all at the end of the book.
In this way it also feels like an overtly political novel, a repudiation of the strongmen and autocrats of the early 21st century who have resurrected some of the more horrifying ideas of the early 20th century through word and action.
I really enjoyed reading this one. 🙏