But in this “crepuscular” city of despair, often when you least expect it, a conspicuous door opens to a palatial grotto of translucent stone “with gently phosphorescent air”; or a stairwell in a home descends for hours into the bowels of the earth, where the cables and plumbing blend into the entrails of a slumbering cosmic horror; or a passage through an outwardly ordinary building leads to an oneiric museum, displaying otherworldly organisms, things from the past as well as the future. In the surreal literary universe of Cărtărescu’s fiction, which he has published along with poetry since the early 1980s as well as theory and criticism since the early '90s, such “anomalies”—as the narrator of Solenoid calls them—permeate a deprived and stultifying day-to-day urban life. That he has crafted a meganovel of Solenoid’s capaciousness that sustains both the quotidian and absurdist tenors, without one trivializing the other, is itself a bizarre act amounting to sorcery.
Solenoid was first published in 2016 and has been translated by Sean Cotter into exceptionally graceful English prose. On the one hand, the book is a continuation of Cărtărescu’s project to mine the experiences of his childhood and youth, “the trunk of those twenty-two years,” to create long, dense novels that, despite their common material, contain unique atmospheres (to go off the fable-like Nostalgia, translated by Julian Semilian and the ecstatic Blinding, translated by Sean Cotter—the only other texts available in English of Cărtărescu’s significant oeuvre). On the other hand, it also presents a “crucial switch point” in the adult years of this life story, as if the trunk had forked in two and branched out into a possible future of Cărtărescu’s imagination.
Solenoid is ambitious, esoteric, grotesque, sometimes grisly, and constantly brandishing a surly egotism worthy of Dostoevsky’s underground man. It could well be one of the most successful pieces of fabulism in recent decades. And as we’ll see, it serves as a kind of summation of surrealism, as well as the major trends of twentieth-century thought that accompanied the history of modernist art. A reductive summary would only create an impression of eclectic chaos, but every element encompassed in Solenoid’s 638 pages seems to be consonant with all the others, along with the wide field of literary references: Kafka’s scrapbooks of inner experience; the manic and detailed self-exposure along with the elaborate conspiracies of Rousseau’s Confessions; the ironic fantasias of Mann’s Doctor Faustus; the lyrical philosophy of Borges; the schoolboy trials of Musil’s Young Törless; the surly disgust of the human body in Hamsun’s Hunger; the ludic mathematical fables of Carroll and Abbott; the liminal piazzas and arcades of de Chirico’s paintings, with the great spindly land mammals of Dalí’s; and the memoir-fictions of Rilke, Nabokov, and Poe.
First things first: Solenoid is “not a novel” according to the narrator of this document, who describes it instead as a long diary made up of several notebooks recording the anomalies he has experienced for most of his conscious and unconscious life. It can’t be a novel for him because these anomalies—nocturnal bedside ghosts, a floating blue sphere, a gender-swapped mirror image—are not fictitious, not figments of dreams, but entities making their entrance from some “difference in quantum phase” or dimensional rupture that is still “embedded in reality.” Later in his second notebook, he says that what he is writing can’t be a novel, since novels are about stuff happening, “endless stories” to while away the time. And if this book is not a novel, then its author must not actually be a writer. Indeed, he devotes several passages early in the first notebook to attempting to answer “the question of why I never became a writer.” After all of his studies and ambitions, he conceives of Literature as a “hermetically sealed museum” whose doors have been “meticulously” painted onto the walls. The illusory doors offer nothing but disappointment and pain, the oil paint fumigating the corridors forever.
How could one assume that these gray blocks of text have any connection to the colors and sensations of lived experience? “Why would I, a three-dimensional creature, take as a guide the two dimensions of an ordinary text? Where will I find the cubical page where reality is modeled? Where is the hypercubic book whose covers gather the hundreds of cubes of its pages?” There can be no correspondence between the representation and what is represented, and the pictures of portals will never open themselves. The task of writing this diary, a “real book,” is for its author to understand himself “to the very end,” to plumb his own mental labyrinth and compose a text that is “unartistic and unliterary,” a “bitter and incomprehensible” book. By retreating within, perhaps he will find “a real door scrawled onto the air” rather than one drawn on the wall, and produce a work that is genuinely “outside the museum of literature” and outside the prison-house of consciousness. For all its escapist pleasures, fiction fastens its readers to the world; its promises are always empty. “True” writing must furnish a true escape.
So the diarist is not a writer, but something like a modern mystic. Solenoid contains the thoughts of a man absolutely convinced of the universe’s fundamental uncertainty. Early in the first notebook he talks about a lifelong “pure” fear that came from life itself, from “the fact that we don’t know what the world is like, we only know the facet our senses illuminate. We only know the world our senses construct inside our minds, the way you might build a dollhouse under a bell jar.” Much later in the third notebook, he takes up this subjective idealism again: “I live inside my skull, my world extends as far as its porous, yellow walls, and it consists, almost entirely, of a floating Bucharest, carved in there like the temples chiseled into the pink cliffs at Petra.” The “reality” of the external world only asserts itself when it crushes us into bones and jelly (sometimes literally). “Pain is another word for reality.”
But there is a concrete explanation for why the narrator “never became a writer,” and it speaks to Solenoid’s fundamental concerns. One fateful evening in the autumn of 1977, the aspiring writer reads his ambitious, encyclopedic epic poem—“an amalgam of the church fathers and quantum physics, genetics, and topology,” among other things—called The Fall at the Workshop of the Moon, where it is promptly eviscerated by his colleagues. It could have been the beginning of greatness, but “the coin fell on the wrong side.” “I drew the short straw, and my career as a writer continued, perhaps, within another possible world, wrapped in glory and splendor . . .” The “possible world” we read about in this line is in fact “our” world of Solenoid’s production, where Cărtărescu is indeed a big-shot literary author. In this world, a young Cărtărescu had debuted his poem The Levant at a workshop, where it was a smash hit. It is the “reality” of the author of the notebooks comprising Solenoid that is a possible world from our perspective, a “quantum flux” emerging from the wave function. “The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny,” the narrator says, reflecting on this pivotal experience, “while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse.” If fiction doesn’t offer genuine escape, it still seems to create these possible worlds without end or grounding (at one point the narrator recalls reading Strindberg and feeling aware for a moment that he was “leaning against the rough rock of the Stockholm bridge,” reading a book about someone in Bucharest). It is one of these divergent, hypothetical worlds—like the imagined worlds of high modernism, of Kafka and Musil, for instance—that Solenoid explores.
And what a drab, desolate world it is, with the author’s life as ruinous as Bucharest, that “open-air museum” of melancholia, where the hellish industrial zones traversed by his tram commute to his job as Romanian teacher at School 86 seems like “the end of reality itself.” “This is what is called reality?” he laments later in the book. “This is what my life will be: home-school-home-school, with no chance of breaking this vicious and destructive circle?” His school is made of dirty, “Nile-green” hallways with white doors labeled in Latin as well as “Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, then Arab and Indian signs,” and populated by caricatures of Romanian citizens and children that inspire in the narrator both fear and empathy. His home, meanwhile, is a “boat-shaped” house built and sold to him by the eccentric Mr. Mikola, who wished to confirm the existence of a “planet-wide magnetic network,” and in the process invented (but did not patent) the “Borina Solenoid.” This strange device resembles a wire coiling onward and upward, like the solenoids we know, but it can suspend people and objects in the air.
As the marvelous events of Solenoid mount, an occult conspiracy unfolds across history and the narrator’s life’s story, embracing multiple solenoids deliberately placed across Bucharest, a piece of non-Euclidian glassware, an inscrutable medieval manuscript, Charles Howard Hinton’s theories of the fourth dimension, arcane tattooing, and all sorts of cabbalistic number sets, symbols, and colored patterns. The latter clue is revealed during an excursion by the narrator and a math teacher to an abandoned factory on the principal’s orders, to see what the kids are getting up to there. The prose relating this set piece, stuffed with surreal visualizations and memories, could stand alone as a fantastic novella.
If our diarist is chronicling a lifelong quest to escape himself, the people in his life also contrive to flee the crudity of their conditions of existence. In one of the many darkly comic episodes at School 86, we learn about Mrs. Bernini the music teacher and her algae cure: a jar full of “a few pallid, translucent creatures” that grant perfect health upon drinking. Irina, the physics teacher and the narrator’s romantic partner, is fascinated by spiritualists of the Madame Blavatsky type and considers matter in motion to be illusory. Most resonant of all is a sect known as the Picketists, in which Irina enlists and involves the narrator. Their ideology is purely against Death, that universal assault on human dignity. They take up “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the famous villanelle by Dylan Thomas, as their anthem.
As the narration rolls on, an impression of the author’s attitude builds into a sense that there is simply no future in any of the means of escape on offer. Not in Literature, not in magical thinking, not in socialist atheism. The children at School 86 are instructed to spit on the icon of the Mother of God in the classroom and accept the state religion of a corrupt Marxism-Leninism: a religion because they must believe it without knowing why. True escape is an impossible perpendicular movement into the fourth dimension. The dream of zero gravity evoked by the solenoid’s levitation powers—the aspirational, utopian aspect of modernism—can never come to fruition.
Late in the third notebook, the diarist riffs on Marx’s eleventh thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways . . .—the point is to escape it.” The modification encapsulates his position in epistemology: the world is unknowable and can’t be rationally explained. Transformation is out of the question. The narrator had begun by turning his back on Literature, and now he retreats from classical philosophy as well. The “anomalies” of his life are terrible in many ways, but they punctured the rhythm of life in Bucharest like more aggressive daydreams. The diarist sees his notebooks as a way to present a unity of “the tangible world” and the world of “my mind’s dreams” within his consciousness. “The object of my thought is my thought, and my world is the same as my mind.” To him, consciousness is like a coin with two pictures on each side, that forms a single image in its whirling: “neither [side] is complete and true without the other. Only the rotation, only the whirling.” There is no place here for an external objective reality, only a sort of internal harmonization between the self and the outside.
The diarist’s theorization follows the general trajectory of western intellectual history (via existentialism), along with European modernism, into an agnostic refusal to pick a side. Neither existence nor consciousness, but the “unanimous hallucination” in the mind. And neither reform nor the revolutionary romanticism of The Gadfly, which he’d loved as a child and now finds sentimental and hoaky, but a tormented resignation to oppression—not merely banal social oppression, but that of the unnamable outer beings, to whom we are transparent and malleable, and the microscopic monsters nested inside us, and so on till perhaps the ultimate monster-mind, from which our fragmentary knowledge and cognition first emanated. Our narrator acknowledges that he can’t get outside his head or his reality, and on another level he can’t go beyond his social conditions in the Romania of the 1980s: the dingy interiors, the headlice, the barbarous healthcare, the austerity policies imposed by “the picture of the man over the chalkboard” in Mrs. Rădulescu’s history classroom. Solenoid ultimately reads as a monument to the feelings of pessimism and apocalypse evoked by this period in Eastern Europe, and that have come to predominate in the cultures of the major capitalist countries. It also powerfully discloses the philosophical and aesthetic tendencies (and their relationship to math and science) that have led up to this darkened juncture.
I have only just begun to unpack the contents of Cărtărescu’s great book—I left out the sanatorium visit and the abduction of the school porter, for example. Its immaculate non-linear structure is experienced by the reader like a hyperdimensional chest of innumerable items. Under no circumstance is the general investigation finished, for there is still so little of Cărtărescu we have encountered. Out of his large output of poetry and prose, only two other books have appeared in English in the last three decades: Nostalgia, and Blinding, the first volume of a trilogy. Meanwhile the author has received acclaim all across the Romance language-speaking world and has won awards not just in Romania but in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland—as well as international European and Latin American prizes. It’s a striking but perhaps unsurprising situation: the concentrated wisdom on bourgeois art within Cărtărescu’s body of work (as well as the criticism of that work) is still largely unavailable in English, the supposed lingua-franca of today’s global bourgeoisie. It will be good news indeed when access to this work is furnished. Otherwise, we Anglophone critics have not even started to get a grip on the science of Cărtărescu’s art.
