The Solenoid Notebooks is a series of letters reporting on the capacious field of literary and bibliographical references within Cărtărescu’s big book, translated by Sean Cotter.
Solenoid is a massive, ambitious novel that, in addition to spinning a long conspiratorial narrative, kind of summarizes the last century of modernist aesthetics and art in Europe and their relationship with scientific and mathematical knowledge. We’ll try to elucidate the many literary historical threads woven into this meganovel, one book at a time.
I know nothing about Anatole France. Britannica tells us that for some time at least he was the epitome of a Francophone man of letters, steeped in books and humanist learning from birth, and consciously continuing a neoclassical tradition inherited from the moral and philosophical fictions of Diderot and Voltaire.
In 1890 he published Thaïs, inspired by a love affair. This short novel can be read in one sitting. Other than a section in the middle that spun its wheels for a while (a dinner scene that palely imitates Plato’s Symposium on love), this was a compelling and tightly composed work of prose.
It begins with the young ascetic abbot Paphnutius in Roman Alexandria of the 4th century BC. There he sees the famous courtesan Thaïs, and he resolves to turn her into a repentant saint. “With God’s help, I must save her.”
And he does, all too successfully. For after she renounces her former life as an educated prostitute and goes into a convent, Paphnutius realizes all too late that he is merely a man of flesh and blood—a thirsty man, as both Herman Hesse and a typical millennial would say.
His descent into amorous madness is delivered in a clean narrative arc. France honors the neoclassical standard of the unities of time place and action. Indeed the novel could work as a play, complete with the mock-archaic dialog.
The narration has a stately cadence to it. Characteristic is this passage, from the perspective of Ahmes, a Nubian house-slave who was effectively Thaïs’s foster parent during her childhood. Ahmes is actually the one who first introduced her to Christianity and baptism. He visits her where she sleeps in a barn stable, sharing Biblical stories. The paragraph outlines the whole scene precisely as a tableau.
He gently approached the mat on which she lay, and sat down on his heels, his legs bent and his body straight—a position hereditary to his race. His face and his body, which was clothed in black, were invisible in the darkness; but his big white eyes shone out, and there came from them a light like a ray of dawn through the chinks of a door. He spoke in a husky, monotonous tone, with a slight nasal twang that gave it the soft melody of music heard at night in the streets. Sometimes the breathing of an ass, or the soft lowing of an ox, accompanied, like a chorus of invisible spirits, the voice of the slave as he recited the gospels. His words flowed gently in the darkness, which they filled with zeal, mercy, and hope; and the neophyte, her hand in that of Ahmes, lulled by the monotonous sounds, and the vague visions in her mind, slept calm and smiling, amid the harmonies of the dark night and the holy mysteries, gazed down on by a star, which twinkled between the joists of the stable-roof.
The phrases that stitch sharp imagery together with the gentle sounds are excellent. And that interruptive clause about “hereditary” is clearly stamped by France’s epoch, we note.
Haunted by Thaïs’s beauty, Paphnutius flees to the desert in self-exile a la Saint Jerome, but her image follows him. After a dream of sitting on a pillar, he makes it come true by climbing to the top of a column in a ruined pagan temple. He becomes quite the public spectacle, as grand a media event as could be managed in classical antiquity.
City dwellers and religious folk alike make pilgrimages to him, leading to this line, which should remain immortal in the halls of western Literature:
[T]here came from Alexandria, Bubastis and Sais, women who had long been barren, hoping to obtain children by the intercession of the holy man and the virtues of his pillar.
Then, he starts getting harassed by a disembodied voice. Paphnutius thinks it’s a demon that has been driving him all along. He flees to a crypt in an abandoned settlement.
But there the voice compels him to look at the wall paintings, representations of the bygone pagan existence:
Then, raising his head, he saw, on the walls of the chamber, paintings which represented lively and domestic scenes. They were of very old work, and marvellously lifelike. There were cooks who blew the fire, with their cheeks all puffed out; others plucked geese, or cooked quarters of sheep in stew-pans. A little farther, a hunter carried on his shoulders a gazelle pierced with arrows. In one place, peasants were sowing, reaping, or gathering. In another, women danced to the sounds of viols, flutes, and harp. A young girl played the theorbo. The lotus flower shone in her hair, which was neatly braided. Her transparent dress let the pure forms of her body be seen. Her bosom and mouth were perfect. The face was turned in profile, and the beautiful eye looked straight before her. The whole figure was exquisite. Paphnutius having examined it, lowered his eyes, and replied to the voice—
“Why dost thou command me to look at these images? No doubt they represent the terrestrial life of the idolater whose body rests here, under my feet, at the bottom of a well, in a coffin of black basalt. They recall the life of a dead man, and are, despite their bright colours, the shadows of a shadow. The life of a dead man! O vanity!”
“He is dead, but he lived,” replied the voice; “and thou wilt die, and wilt not have lived.”
Everything Paphnutius has strived to avoid and reject as vulgar and dirty, as all too human, is in fact the stuff of life: work, production, food, music, culture, intercourse.
And Thaïs, the center of the well-known Madonna-whore paradigm, is not a means for masculine self-realization, but a kind atonement and grace that is both Christian and Hellenic in its flavor.
But did Pahnutius learn his lesson in time? There’s room for one more Twilight Zone-style twist…
Thaïs is mentioned by Solenoid’s narrator a decent way into the text. Chronologically speaking, however, it falls in the earliest period of his notebook keeping, which he started in the early 70s.
This should be an occasion to relate the thematic strands evoked thus far to the narrator as a sexual being. At an earlier point in Solenoid’s first notebook, the narrator reminisces about his involuntary celibacy.
I was twenty, and I had never embraced, not even at a dance or at a tea (as parties were called then), a girl. Women were as foreign to me as the far-off worlds of luxury villas, yachts, Western cities, and restaurants I never went into—as though they had doors nailed shut or they were women’s restrooms. They were not for me, they were not part of the reality I was given to touch.
Not at all too distant from the asceticism of France’s hermits, refusing all the elements of the good life that can reconcile them with the exploitation and oppression of civilization.
At the point when the narrator mentions France’s book, he feels compelled to take a “scientific interest” in the anomalies—like the mirror image in the previous letter, and a ghostly nocturnal visitor—and what they could be pointing to.
Is he some kind of Chosen One, “for who knows what mystical or magical operation”? Or is he merely the object of a cruel experiment by a “foreign intelligence,” a “guinea pig,” “repeatedly placed inside Plexiglass labyrinths with constantly changing and more and more complicated paths, where the bit of cheese is always harder to find …”?
In this “masochistic pride” there too is a smack of Paphnutius, perhaps.