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.
And you can now read my review piece in Asymptote Journal!
Thanks so much for visiting either the essay or these ancillary letters and directing traffic to Deep Vellum. Let’s keep supporting small independent literary production!
I don’t believe I ever in my life have actually read a Victorian triple-decker in just three long sittings before. What a blockbuster this novel is, with martyrdom, the crisp dialogue, betrayal, imprisonment, redemption—the whole shebang.
It’s a compelling story that resonated throughout the 20th century and its own history of revolutions. It’s like the standard-bearer of revolutionary romanticism.
The Gadfly covers some tumultuous years in Europe during the middle of the 19th century, and it’s probably worth a refresher.
The war against the holy order
The 1830s saw a movement for the national liberation of Italy from Austrian domination that culminated in a democratic war in 1848, with similar struggles taking place in Hungary and Bohemia. Our hero Arthur is an idealistic youth, a devout Catholic and star pupil in his seminary school. He’s close to Padre Montanelli, and an early sequence in the novel relates their travels together to the scenic borderlands with France and Switzerland. These picturesque descriptive lines won’t discharge their full pathos and foreshadowing till you’ve read the whole thing:
Arthur was peculiarly sensitive to the influence of scenery, and the first waterfall that they passed threw him into an ecstacy which was delightful to see; but as they drew nearer to the snow-peaks he passed out of this rapturous mood into one of dreamy exaltation that Montanelli had not seen before. There seemed to be a kind of mystical relationship between him and the mountains. He would lie for hours motionless in the dark, secret, echoing pine-forests, looking out between the straight, tall trunks into the sunlit outer world of flashing peaks and barren cliffs. Montanelli watched him with a kind of sad envy.
After a betrayal, Arthur is so disenchanted with religion that in an epic scene he rips the bronze crucifix from the wall in his room and smashes it with a hammer—like when they pronounce the death of the pope—before stowing away on a boat to South America. Years later, on the eve of the storms of 1848, a strange figure known as the Gadfly has come to Europe, ready to do battle against clericalism and the moribund feudal elements.
Like I said, there’s intrigue, imprisonment and torture, stealth missions, illness, a love triangle, guilt, and a pretty amazing martyrdom scene with grisly splatterpunk violence. If I had been assigned this book along with Wilkie Collins in high school instead of Dickens and the Brontës, I would’ve come away with a quite different impression of Victorian literature.
Lessons in revolutionary conduct
The Gadfly can do it all: not just partisan muscle, intellectually he is a sharp satirist.
Gemma, a childhood sweetheart who becomes an able revolutionary operative, struggles with the Gadfly over the tone of his latest missive. Does that mean Gemma disagrees with the line decided on by the committee? It does, but she recognizes her minority position:
“I quite agree with you that Italy is being led away by a will-o'-the-wisp and that all this enthusiasm and rejoicing will probably land her in a terrible bog; and I should be most heartily glad to have that openly and boldly said, even at the cost of offending or alienating some of our present supporters. But as a member of a body the large majority of which holds the opposite view, I cannot insist upon my personal opinion; and I certainly think that if things of that kind are to be said at all, they should be said temperately and quietly; not in the tone adopted in this pamphlet.”
In retrospect, Gemma seems to be a model practical revolutionary through the whole narrative.
The limitations of bourgeois revolution
During the pre-climactic scene, when the Gadfly is giving his pre-execution confession to the priest—none other than his padre Montanelli—he delivers an epic rant about just what happened in South America that forged him into such a revolutionary badass.
It’s pretty horrendous to modern ears, with loaded phrases about “filthy half-caste brothels,” “Creole farmers…worse brutes than their own cattle,” and all sorts:
“How much had you for me when your lies drove me out to be slave to the blacks on the sugar-plantations? You shudder at that--ah, these tender-hearted saints! This is the man after God's own heart--the man that repents of his sin and lives. No one dies but his son. You say you love me,--your love has cost me dear enough! Do you think I can blot out everything, and turn back into Arthur at a few soft words--I, that have been dish-washer in filthy half-caste brothels and stable-boy to Creole farmers that were worse brutes than their own cattle? I, that have been zany in cap and bells for a strolling variety show--drudge and Jack-of-all-trades to the matadors in the bull-fighting ring; I, that have been slave to every black beast who cared to set his foot on my neck; I, that have been starved and spat upon and trampled under foot; I, that have begged for mouldy scraps and been refused because the dogs had the first right? Oh, what is the use of all this! How can I tell you what you have brought on me? And now--you love me! How much do you love me? Enough to give up your God for me? Oh, what has He done for you, this everlasting Jesus,--what has He suffered for you, that you should love Him more than me? Is it for the pierced hands He is so dear to you? Look at mine! Look here, and here, and here----”
Politically, this speech speaks to the limitations of the bourgeois revolution. What Arthur’s saying here is indeed unspeakable, in the sense that it’s about the fate of the working class and the colonized peoples. This class reality is truly not legible in certain corners of the English canon.
Recall, in Pride and Prejudice, that the worst mentionable thing that can happen to Elizabeth’s sister Lydia is becoming a prostitute. That’s more tolerable than joining the female and children proletariat in the mills.
The colonial reality is like the bourgeois revolutionary’s hell, the scars of exploitation are his own stigmata.
Gadfly is of deep, resonating significance in Solenoid.
It’s one of the earliest remembered elements of the diarist’s literary upbringing. A battered copy existed among his parents’ meager library. His father says something about it being “boyish.” His mother informs him that a gadfly is “One of those big, gray flies, with big eyes.” Insects of all kinds crop up in Solenoid as well.
There must be a moment for all readers when they realize books are created by individual authors with proper names and living expenses and all the rest. That happens when the diarist becomes aware of E. L. Voynich. “Ethel Lilian Voynich, as I read her full name on the card, alongside the year that The Gadfly was published: 1909. I felt I’d achieved a small victory, I had cleared up a mystery almost ten years old.”
The name Voynich will stand as two different points in the emerging, historical, and occult-y conspiracy—a conspiracy of his life’s meaning—traced by the narrator. There are two texts as well: the Gadfly and the Voynich manuscript.
For The Gadfly, “my tears had literally soaked page after page one afternoon in the sixth grade, reading in my unmade, ragged bed in my room on Ştefan cel Mare.” That’s what he remembers, checking a library copy out to read it again. Here is a dense passage full of details, of the book and the place of the reading—an essential part of the reading experience that seems to be particular to physical books and not carried over to digital.
The Gadfly would become my madeleine, the irregularities of my macadam, the flash that suddenly set fire, like a billion-watt bulb, to the endless realm of my mind. I wanted to reread the book and cry again, to be shut again inside the body and mind that had disappeared from my world eight years ago. I wanted to see the aloe pot on the table, the paint with glints of mica on the walls of my room, and especially the panoramic view of Bucharest through the triple window above the street, the mixture of houses and trees spread to the edge of sight, under motionless summer clouds in the dusty sky. I wanted to pass the tongue I had then over the chapped lips I had then, to wrap myself in the sweaty sheets I had then. The long hours of that afternoon felt in my mind like a single scene, a single moment, a synthetic and motionless fragment of a kind of diffuse, unfocused and yet precise reality, where I felt (or reconstructed) the sting of my tear-wet eyelashes, the musty, stale air of my room, the sordid bedclothes and their sweaty smell, the phantomatic fragments of the story and text of The Gadfly, which tore my soul, which made my breath burn, as though I was suffering the worst of love. The library book gave me the clandestine and unnatural chance to steal again into a universe illuminated by a younger sun.
Of course, on a re-read at an older age, it’s boring and “sentimental.”
He learns everything he can about E. L. Voynich, the source of the Gadfly in the anarchist Sidney Reilly, the popularity of the book in the US and the Soviet Union, and her translations of Russian. “Yuri Gagarin read The Gadfly and adopted it as his touchstone. Shostakovich wrote music inspired by the novel. Sergei Bondarchuk played Father Montanelli in the film version.”
(Another connection exists, between Voynich and the mathemetician Boole, leading to the higher dimensional aspect of this project that’s yet to be uncovered.)
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Friedrich Engels briefly discusses the revolutionary storm in Italy for his 1893 Preface to the Italian edition of the Manifesto. His concluding lines about Italy being “the first capitalist nation” and the significance of Dante, it seems to me, are more illuminating on the construction of the Western canon than most current cultural critique:
The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?