De Chirico's Hebdomeros
Ignore the lobster...
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.
The previous post dealt with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and his fundamental influence—really not just on Solenoid but on every great modern novel written from the subjectivity of a hysterical man; seriously, Notes From Underground walked so Gass’s The Tunnel could run. And this influence, I try to suggest, has a clear philosophical and ultimately social basis.
For this letter we turn to a text that is explicitly mentioned by the narrator, and also stands in for the surrealist influence on Cărtărescu’s book and, in particular, the influence of of De Chirico’s aesthetic.
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Now on with the book report:
Hebdomeros is a philosopher and a gentleman. He discourses to his disciples and animals alike in the countryside. He uses a cane and carries an automatic pistol. He feels “every emotion more intensely than other people.” He will have something to say about eating habits and lobsters later on.
This is, in a nutshell, the hero of De Chirico’s short third-person novel, first published in 1929. Hebdomeros was the surrealist painter’s major fictive statement.
“Everything about Hebdomeros is mysterious,” John Ashbery wrote in his 1966 review of the English translation, included in this edition as an introduction.
De Chirico wrote it a decade after his genius as a painter had mysteriously evaporated. He wrote it in French, a language not his own, and he invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel which he was not to use again, but which could be of great interest to writers today who are trying to extend the novel form.
Even the identity of the translator remains a mystery—unless it was Ashbery himself, perhaps using time travel.
As far as extending the form goes, Hebdomeros is a steeply difficult reading experience, that no one that I know of has seriously imitated.
At the start, the text indeed gives the sense of stepping into one of De Chirico’s famous pictures. There’s a bit of showmanship in the word choice of these opening line, “And then began the visit to that strange building,” on an “austerely respectable” street, like a typical De Chirico piazza.
Seen from outside, the building looked like a German consulate in Melbourne. Large shops took up the whole ground floor. Though it was neither a Sunday nor a holiday the shops were closed at the time, which gave to this portion of the street a weary, melancholy air, …
and later, in the same paragraph:
The idea that the building resembled a German consulate in Melbourne was a purely personal one of Hebdomeros’, and when he spoke about it to his friends they smiled and said they found the comparison odd, but they immediately dropped the subject and went on to talk about something else. Hebdomeros concluded from this that perhaps they had not really understood what he meant, and he reflected on the difficulty of making oneself understood when one’s thoughts reached a certain height or depth.
This well illustrates the core cycle that unfolds in this book: Hebdomeros sees, reflects aloud to his friends or companions or disciples, which leads to another reflection, or memory, or something pictured from imagination, like a “wingless genii” lying among the “great white statuesque clouds” in the sky, viewed from a balcony attached to a room “whose walls were covered with furs and with photographs depicting ships, as black as ink against the whiteness of ice floes…”
You can see how the imagery can drift on, regardless of paragraph breaks, like the boat drifting on water atop the hardwood floor of a bedroom, that turns into another scene entirely. From a gambling-addicted general and his family, Hebdomeros’s mind’s eye zooms out to the “luxurious hotels along the waterfront,” “the soft light of the moon,” “a gentle mist” blanketing the shore—a whole ‘nother coherent world.
Many, actually most of these asides, flashbacks, and hypotheticals are comic in nature.
Early on, Hebdomeros recalls the hotel dinners served on the beach during the summer season: “rotting red mullet” that takes out the vacationers,
causing then to writhe all night in the throes of colic as they lay in their hotel rooms on sheets made hot by the midsummer heat, in a stifling atmosphere that stank of dirty toilets and linoleum; through the open window came the sound of the waves as they broke at regular intervals on the shore, somewhere out there in the darkness.
A few pages later, we briefly enter the world of a maid cleaning a soldier’s room, who sees Hebdomeros through the window looking onto the hotel’s courtyard. The vision prompts a memory of a crush she had on the philosopher figure that was shattered one day when she saw him horsing around with an old shoe with a “flapping sole” along with some friends, in an “improvised soccer game.” Hebdomeros “jumped about like a savage, howling with joy each time his toes, coming in contact with the old shoe, sent it soaring off among his friends who ducked, shouting, having a wonderful time.” “‘And I,’ she thought sadly, ‘who believed that he, at least, was not like the others!”
As the text goes on relating H’s routine activities in the resort, we get a scene of some older guests (one with a urination-related ailment) hanging out in the parks, “which smelled of plants rotted by extreme dampness.” When one of these “ghosts” won’t stop “posing invariably the same questions” about where it’s all going, others choose to break the mood by “imitating with their mouths the sound of a long and sonorous fart.”
De Chirico’s paintings of empty piazzas in liminal crepuscular lighting had always seemed, well, like the liminal spaces that have become so popular. Only a smokestack casting an evening shadow, or a walking stick left leaning against the arcade wall, or a train making its way along the distant countryside give any hint to commerce, production, human society.
But these incidents suggest that these worlds can in fact be stuffed with vaudeville goofiness when it comes to the actual humans. The gags pile on in these long dense paragraphs. (Maybe this is where Pynchon got his shtick.) One phrase, coming seemingly out of nowhere in the middle of a long paragraph, illustrates the tone in a single image: “at evening, when the square is deserted, huge dysenteric mares come to graze…”
As a work of prose, it’s tempting to think that Hebdomeros takes after the forms of Germanic philosophical novels like those by Hesse and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The substance of the book is indeed H’s philosophical discourses, chained together as he moves through a rather protean environment.
His opinions seem to amount to a rejection of the world surrounding him. The most resonant example comes from this passage of gastronomical commentary:
He had a moral theory about different dishes, in fact about food in general, which earned him the antipathy and exasperated sarcasm of many of his contemporaries. He divided dishes into two categories: moral and immoral. He was utterly disgusted by the sight of certain restaurants where gourmets go to satisfy the obscene desires of their gastrointestinal apparatus, and his soul was filled with a righteous and holy indignation. Like Orestes pursued by the Furies he fled from those who ate lobsters, first taking a nutcracker to break the paws and pincers of these hideous, armored monsters, and then sucking at them with bestial delight. But what upset him most was to see, at the beginning of a meal, the oyster addicts swallowing this disgusting mollusk with all the accompanying paraphernalia of carefully buttered slices of black bread, small glasses of special white wine, thin slivers of lemon, etc…
Equally repugnant, “devoid of all sense of decency or self-control” to Hebdomeros, is eating ice cream, taking your drink with ice cubes, and enjoying any raw vegetable of any kind. “He considered strawberries and figs the most immoral of fruits.”
De Chirico is open elsewhere about his admiration for Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. In his art writings, he says that the principal role of painting is revelation, that “a picture reveals itself to us,” and that Nietzsche was the theorist of revelation.
“When Nietzsche talks of how Zarathustra was conceived, and says: ‘I was surprised by Zarathustra,’ in this participle—surprised, is contained the whole of sudden revelation.”
Schopenhauer also to De Chirico’s mind articulated the turning-point moment of revelation. He is quoted saying:
To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence.
The influence from these thinkers is clear, and at the same time Hebdomeros is kind of like an inverted parody of a Zarathustra-type narrative.
Toward the end of the story, we find Hebdomeros in a kind of salon with some other classy intellectuals. As the conversation goes on past nightfall, H proposes to “dispel the Stimmung,” one of his favorite words, by lighting the lamps.
But as he gets up to do so, another salon guest stops him. “Wait; don’t light the lamps yet,” he says. “Let’s stay in this semidarkness while it lasts. Notice how people and objects all look more mysterious in this dim light.” He goes on for quite a while about how this light affects the outlines of things—it becomes clear this man is a painter.
Hebdomeros has to “force himself to listen to all this,” and can see in this discourse only the thoughts of a man with “dubious romantic yearnings.”
In a sense, H is the opposite of Nietzsche’s madman at the marketplace. Hebdomeros thinks he is the only sane man in a world of stupidity and “incommensurate selfishness.”
Either way, that of the mystic or the straight man, we’re dealing with a rejection of society so characteristic of this intellectual atmosphere, and the stamp it’s left on the history of modern Literature.
Very late into Solenoid, the narrator is searching for a scrap of paper on which he’d written lines “without understanding what they meant, but knowing they were important.” It turns up in “a tattered copy, almost rotted away, eaten by miniscule, transparent insects, of Hebdomeros.”