Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf
Dwarfs never play...
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 letters thus far have been mainly thematic and cerebral, as far as the connections between the books and Solenoid are concerned. But as with Thais we’re switching gears to the earthier aspects of experience.
A note on style: the plural of dwarf is dwarfs, as employed here and in the text. Only Tolkien’s dwarves are dwarves.
The Dwarf is a short novel by Swedish author and Nobel laureate Pär Lagerkvist. It unfolds as a diary kept by a being 26 inches tall, who lives and works in the court of a certain Renaissance-era city-state.
Apparently the Dwarf is not human. “We dwarfs are descended from a race older than that which now populates the world, and therefore we are old as soon as we are born.” They don’t have their own national territory, and have been confined to jesters, paupers, and attendants. They are often forced to play with children, which our Dwarf narrator especially detests.
At the same time, however, Dwarfs don’t beget other dwarfs. “We are sterile by virtue of our own nature. We have nothing to do with the perpetuation of life; we do not even desire it.” Dwarfs are non-human yet, it is humanity that perpetuates them. Quite a riddle.
The Dwarf holds humankind in absolute physical abhorrence. He watches the Prince carousing with disgust: “I cannot understand the love that human beings feel for each other. It merely revolts me.”
At the peace ceremony and feast that concludes the war that takes up the middle of the novel, the Dwarf notices princess Angelica flash a smile at Giovanni. “I was surprised to see the girl smile, for as far as I remember I have never seen her do so before…” It’s a “careful” smile according to him. “Perhaps she knew that her smile was not beautiful. But then I never think that human beings are beautiful when they smile.”
The only thing the dwarf values, morally and aesthetically, is war and violence: “War is no game to me, but grim reality. I want to fight. I want to kill! Not for the glory of it, but for the deed alone! I want to see men fall, see death and destruction around me.”
The plague times, which make up the final arc of the novel, are simply another occasion for the Dwarf to express his repulsion:
The filth and stench from all these people camping in the squares and streets is appalling. All this foulness is unbearable to me who am scrupulously clean about my person and very sensitive to any unpleasant features in my surroundings. Many consider that I am unduly susceptible in my detestation of human excrement and its smell. These primitive creatures are like the cattle with which they associate, and relieve themselves anywhere. It is too swinish for words.
The Dwarf seems to take an exception with The Prince, “a great and powerful man,” both a great scholar and a great schemer. He admits he doesn’t “understand” the Prince, but that’s precisely because he doesn’t hate him.
The Prince confers with men of learning, including a certain Master Bernardo, who takes residence in the castle, working on a painting of the Last Supper, as well as a portrait of the Princess.
Bernardo gives lectures, essentially anthems to the glories of renaissance humanism, which is flowering at this time. It all goes right over our Dwarf’s anti-humanist mentality. “I do not understand him. I understand nothing.”
The Dwarf single-handedly ruins the one chance of humane happiness that existed in the narrative.
So—who is the Dwarf?
Is he the specter of European fascism, supposedly locked away after the last continental struggle, but still biding its time?
Does he stand in for an intractably metaphysical base human nature?
Is he in fact just the Prince’s own perverse and misanthropic aspects, psychically displaced, like a renaissance-era Mr. Hyde?
Is he none other than Machiavelli?
Here’s another reading: The Prince is the Big Guy and the Dwarf is the Little Guy.
Generally, the Little Guy looks up to the Big Guy, admires the latter’s capabilities, resources, and size. The Big guy is cultivated, and he calls the shots. The Little Guy bounces between the dominance of the Big Guy and his disgust of the anonymous masses. So there are times when a pact gets arranged between the two of them, though more often than not the Little Guy ends up in practice as the Big Guy’s stooge.
The Dwarf is one of the three books the Solenoid’s narrator brought with him on a sort of working trip to stay with an agricultural engineer in his high school days (his peak reading period).
When it comes to The Dwarf’s influence on Solenoid, the obvious formal point is that both are fundamentally simple epistolary structures. Both narrators break from their recollections, then start a new entry when they resume their chronicling.
But perhaps the Dwarf’s anti-humanism was so striking because of how it reflected on the Solenoid narrator’s own repugnance at the state of being embodied, of being a mind “compartmentalized” in a flesh and skeleton, “slippery,” “mucinous", and frail. This extended passage can give an idea of the febrile pitch created by the imagery and phrasing, reaching toward a dark mysticism:
The idea that I live inside an animal, that even when I’m in a library, when I’m reading Prolegomena by Kant or In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, I house gluey guts, gurgling systems and apparatuses, that my glands secrete hormones, that my blood carries sugar, that I have intestinal flora, that within my brain cells vesicles full of chemical substances descend through microtubes and release them into the spaces between synapses, that all this happens without my knowledge or consent, for reasons that are not my own—even today this seems monstrous to me, the product of a saturnine, sadistic mind, that probably spent eons in order to imagine the most brutal ways to humiliate, terrorize, and torture a conscious mind.
The drive to produce literature is just another form of this nasty process of shedding, secreting, and sloughing our organic tissues and leaving them around, like teeth, skin flakes, and snail shells and trails.
This is the chronic, heightened sense of being ill-at-ease that the dualistic, subjective idealism that these letters have been outlining thus far can lead you.
We are all gastropods, soft, sticky creatures pulling ourselves along the earth from which we came and leaving a trail of silvery drool behind. But the snail, a worm that eternally slides along the horizon, lifts into the air, from its soft bivalve back, the geometrical wonder of its spiral shell, seemingly unrelated to the body that produced it in fear and loneliness. We secrete our shell in the sweat and mucous of our skin, in the transparent, scaly flesh of the foot we use to drag ourselves along. Through an alchemical transmutation, our drool turns to ivory and the spasms of the flesh into an undisturbed stillness.