Tag: Olga

One of the Opitz guests, a Viennese socialist named Herr August, dismisses a local legend that tells of a collective of women who ran off into the mountains in the 17th century after two of them were condemned to death for witchcraft and who now, as the legend goes, reside in mossy holes in the forest. But he also acknowledges that this story might have hints of something real: He cites a passage from Aristophanes’ The Frogs, of a moment when Xanthias and Dionysus encounter a terrifying and beautiful monster—”the Empusa!”—who keeps changing form, from a bull to a mule to a woman. The empusium represents the underside of the sanatorium: the irrational space that undermines the Enlightenment project of European modernity.

Before she turned to writing fiction, Tokarczuk trained as a clinical psychologist, and Jungian themes run through her work. Her interest in psychoanalysis is manifest in the detective work in the novel—whether of a criminal matter or not—that reveals what is hidden in plain sight. In Tokarczuk’s view, this detective work is often the result of those hidden elements that the men in modern society struggle to see: women in their material, autonomous reality. Much of this unfolds in a puckish way that often approaches slapstick, as when the policeman investigating Klara’s death asks Wojnicz whether he knew her:

Wojnicz wondered what to say.

“Yes, I did, but not all of her.”

“What do you mean?” asked the policeman in alarm.

“I saw bits of her. You see, sir, in that short time she was always on the move, and I saw either a hand holding a tray or a shoe holding the door open.” Wojnicz blinked, as if images of Frau Opitz were passing before his eyes.

As Wojnicz contemplates Klara’s death and the strange totemic dolls of the charcoal burners, he also hears an account of other mysterious deaths from a resident artist named Thilo von Hahn, who is at work on a doctoral thesis on the 16th-century Flemish painter Herri met de Bles. Von Hahn trains Wojnicz to read the landscape around him, as we are encouraged to train our eyes, through her revision of the realist novel, to see something more veritable than apparent reality.

Among the many mysterious elements of the novel is its location. Lower Silesia, now in contemporary Poland and where Tokarczuk lives, has historically been split along the violently shifting seams of Europe’s empires. It has been part of Poland, Bohemia, and the Habsburg Empire. In the 18th century, it was a province of Prussia, and in the century following, it became part of the German Empire. During World War II, Hitler established labor camps in the region, and most of the area’s Jewish population was exterminated. When the Soviet Union redrew Poland’s borders, the majority-German population was removed and replaced with Poles from the eastern territory of Galicia, which is now part of Ukraine.

The implications of these shifting borders in The Empusium are vast, yet also specific. In representing Poland as a mercurial geographic and linguistic terrain, Tokarczuk reveals the nation-state to be a recent historical invention: a fantasy that has proved so compelling in part because the European novel has given the impression that nations are a perennial reality. The Empusium’s idiom drifts away from official German and Polish toward the home of one of Tokarczuk’s greatest influences, the writer Bruno Schulz (killed by the Gestapo on his way home from getting bread in 1942): “Galicia and its singsong, slanty…language, in which the words seemed slightly flattened like old slippers—one could feel safe and at home in it.” This language has been rendered by Lloyd-Jones into English in a translation that is at once evanescent and precise.

Tokarczuk uses language as if it always required translating. She renders borderline states legible and gives form to emergent realities. In this way, her novels might seem like perfect products of world literature, a field that is grounded in notions of readability and universal appeal. But in their translingual arcaneness, they also reveal world literature, as much as world history, to be a fantastical organization of reality, which always unfolds at a remove from the way ordinary people experience the movement of historical events. Skimming the surface of history, the novel is oriented toward the not-yet-historical event that emerges at the point that a common worldview is revealed to be no longer operative.

The Empusium is the first novel that Tokarczuk has published since delivering her Nobel Prize lecture, in which she called—in somewhat utopian terms—for a “fourth-person” narrator who will preserve literature’s “eccentricities, phantasmagoria, provocation, parody and lunacy” and who is also “capable of expressing the vaguest intuition.” We encounter this fourth-person narrator in The Empusium as an all-seeing “we,” a narrative consciousness that goes beyond what might be observed empirically. It is at once an undramatic, witty Greek chorus and a psychoanalyst in an invisibility cloak. “No, we do not regard it as an obsession,” this voice says of Wojnicz’s self-consciousness about his appearance, “at most as innocent oversensitivity. People should get used to the fact that they are being watched.” This is not the voice of paranoia; it is simply one attuned to the collective unconscious.

Tokarczuk’s novels give the impression—much like the historical novels of Hilary Mantel and Penelope Fitzgerald —of a strange, mystical distance between the narrator and the reader, as if reading were not simply an experience of mimesis but of communing with ghosts. The fourth-person narrator taps into the resonances that cross national and historical time and that take her back to a black-and-white photograph of her mother sitting by the radio, waiting for her daughter to arrive in the world. She is attuned to the uncanniness of maternal time. She also seems to have something in common with the three strange women who are glimpsed on occasion in the health resort: “Frau Weber and Frau Brecht” (presumably a reference to the feminist Marianne Weber, author of Marriage, Motherhood, and the Law, and the actress and director Helene Weigel, who is known for her roles in Brecht’s plays, especially Mother Courage and Her Children), as well as a third, unnamed woman who hasn’t been seen in years. The narrator also seems to have some continuity with the otherworldly knowledge of the centuries-old vagrant women who live on in the witch holes and with the all-seeing eye of the forest. At moments, this narrator presses tightly up against the consciousness of our young protagonist, so that he starts to sense something about the world he hasn’t seen in it before:

Suddenly everything dies down, and Wojnicz feels as if it is not Willi Opitz taking their picture, but the entire curved horizon that has become the edge of a gigantic lens…for a split second Mieczyslaw notices…the light of magnesium bounces off the spruce trees and returns to them, briefly coating their bodies in ash…as if this is the overture to an opera, and the spectators in this theatre are the trees.

Ways of seeing in this beguiling narrative landscape are neither partial nor total; the view of reality on offer includes almost everything that is beyond the central character’s own radius. Such a view can be demanding. It can, Tokarczuk implies, also end up being overwhelming.

The Magic Mountain’s narrative rapidly speeds up as it nears its end, as the Balkan conflict encroaches on the stilled time of the sanatorium. In this landscape, Hans Castorp’s Bildung—his coming of age—can only be read as darkly parodic. The sanatorium provides a temporary relief from the constraining reality of bourgeois life. But Mann’s protagonist leaves the inert world of the sanatorium only to enter the deathly battleground of the First World War, from which few of Europe’s young men made it out alive.

Tokarczuk’s novel doesn’t diverge from this violent historical trajectory. But Wojnicz undergoes an unexpected, curious Bildung that allows him to escape the fate of his predecessor. The Empusium ends with Wojnicz, the unlikely moral center of the story, leaving the health resort for a wild, improbable, uncertain future. As he exits with a different name and nationality from the ones with which he arrived, he thinks he glimpses, with the certainty of a ghostly mirage surveyed from a moving carriage, the third invisible woman—but she can’t be sure. The Empusium is easy to follow, yet difficult to fathom; it is cannily constructed and uncompromisingly surreal. By jauntily cleaving to Mann’s text while also inverting it, Tokarczuk has created a narrative in which the parable sits like a temperamental bolt of electricity in the historical orbit of the European novel.

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