THE EMPUSIUM by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) — reviewed by Thomas

He had read, he said, that Olga Tokarczuk, the author of the book he was reading and the author of many other books for which she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, a couple of which other books he had also read, he said, was intending to stop writing books because of the pain she experienced in her spine when writing them, pain she experienced in fact as a consequence of writing them. Pain in the spine is an occupational hazard of writing books, he said, but pain in the spine is an occupational hazard of other occupations, too, writing books is not special in that regard. For instance, he said, pain in the spine is an occupational hazard of my occupation, and I frequently suffer from what could be called intolerable pain in the spine if it were not for the fact that I tolerate it somehow, sometimes with the help of morphine sulphate. Pain in the spine is an occupational hazard of my cut-and-paste occupation, he said, just as it is an occupational hazard of Olga Tokarczuk’s occupation of writing books, pain in the spine is a way in which my cut-and-paste occupation becomes intolerable other than the extent to which I tolerate it. I spend hours each day, cutting and pasting, he said, mostly metaphorically, as actions performed on a computer are generally done metaphorically rather than literally, but, it seems, he said, that most of my other non-computer actions are actually nothing more than the application of digital cut-and-paste principles to the physical world, removing objects or persons from one context and inserting them into other contexts in accordance with the desires or duties that comprise my wider existential job description, so to call it. Very occasionally, he said, he did perform literal actions of cutting and pasting using some sort of literal cutting blade and some sort of literal adhesive substance, but, he said, almost all my actions are either metaphorical cut-and-paste actions performed on the computer or meta-metaphorical cut-and-paste actions performed by the application of digital cut-and-paste principles to the physical world. He hoped that he was in the running, he said, for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Cut-and-Paste, if that prize will be awarded this year, because the pain he experienced in his spine while cutting-and-pasting made him want to stop his occupation at the highest level, just as Olga Tokarczuk was wanting to stop her occupation of writing books at the highest level. In fact, he said, the pain in his spine made him want to stop his cut-and-paste occupation even if he could not do so at its highest level, he would like to stop it at any level, Nobel Prize in Cut-and-Paste or not, he said, he would like to stop, but not, perhaps, after all, to write books. Maybe to spend more time reading books, he said after a little thought, maybe if I had the time I would read more books and read them better, more and better, he repeated as if more and better were some sort of ideal in themselves. Certainly, he said, my career in cut-and-paste and my other activities which are actually no more than the application of digital cut-and-paste principles to the physical world, leave me very much less than a good amount of time for reading and certainly nowhere near enough for reading well. When asked whether he thought the reading of books was in itself a form of cut-and-paste, the cutting of words from the page and the pasting of these into his brain, or into his mind, or whatever he might choose to call it, and, by extension, whether all awareness is nothing more than the cutting of experience and the pasting of it into the brain or mind, he affected not to understand the question and suggested that there was in any case no such thing as the mind and that the whole idea of inside-and-outside was an illusion resulting from the reading of literature, the very thing he had just said he wanted to have more time to do. At least by now I might have finished the book that I am reading, if I had spent and had more time to spend reading it, he said. This was not much of an assertion, he admitted, though he was reading to a deadline and had fallen short and would inevitably fall short of the reading performance to which he was committed, entirely, he admitted, through his own fault, both in the committing and in the falling short of the commitment. Not that the task was remotely a burden he said, or not a heavy one, the novel he was reading was an enjoyable one, a satire of the misogyny inherent in the literary canon, a novel bulging with the twitterings of men proclaiming ersatz profundities on the world and its operations as men tend to do in, for instance, so-called great novels of ideas. In fact, he said, he had read that Olga Tokarczuk had cut and paste portions of the actual dialogue directly from several such great novels of ideas in which men proclaim upon the world and upon its operations and in which women have a role so narrow that they are hardly seen at all. Perhaps they are thankful for that, he said, perhaps not being seen is in itself a liberation, if seen from the other side, not being seen and not therefore being known preserves the possibilities of nature from the confines of knowledge, so to call it, he thought. Certainly in this novel, a sort of mirror to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a sort of reflection caught by an excess of light upon some surface inadvertently shiny, is written with such perfect lightness that the intended profundities of the so-called great novels of ideas will here-ever-after be seen as nothing but the twitterings of clowns, if it is true that clowns twitter, the chirrupings of ignoramuses, or ignorami, perhaps, he wondered. Who could be content hereafter, in literature or in life, with the vapidity and narrow knowledge here so eloquently lampooned? “To be a man means learning to ignore whatever causes trouble. That’s the whole mystery,” writes Olga Tokarczuk in this book, he said. To know is to achieve an ignorance, he said, for the world is not either one thing or another thing, but both one thing and another thing and everything in between, he said. Convenience makes liars of us all. In this novel by Olga Tokarczuk, he said, the conversations, if we could call them that, that make a farce of the great ideas of its characters are rather passively witnessed by one Mieczysław Wojnicz, seemingly a young man staying at a Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the health resort of Görbersdorf in 1913, just before the Great War of Men, while he and the other residents of the Guesthouse wait for rooms to become available at the main sanitorium in Görbersdorf, rooms that never, it seems, become available because nobody ever gets better. Death is inside each of them, he said, but it is scrupulously denied and mostly it does not seem to affect them much except for when it does. Knowing, or thinking to know, he said, is inseparable from illness, both as consequence and cause, knowing, so to call it, he said, is just the scrupulous denial of death. “Here there are only the living. The dead disappear, and we have no further interest in them. We disregard death,” he said, quoting the novel once more. There is no cemetery in Görbersdorf, despite it all, he said. What is the illness, he asked, though it was not clear who he was asking, that can never be cured by what takes place in a novel if that illness is not inherent in the novel itself? Mieczysław Wojnicz does not contribute to the conversations, so to call them, but is more or less subjected to them, as he is to all that he sees, and he is uncomfortable when it seems that he himself may be seen, unlike the other guests, who are continually polishing themselves to be seen, he observed, polishing themselves and striving to define how the world should see them and be seen. There is nothing more ludicrous than that, he said, there is nothing more ludicrous or more common everywhere than that. But, he said, occasionally in the text a voice breaks in, another tone of voice, though it is unclear just whose voice this may be, he said, often at the ends of chapters, or at other places in the text, a transcendent voice not limited to a person but a kind of fluid transpersonal awareness of rotting and sprouting, detail without definition, very different from the literary twitterings of the clowns, if clowns do twitter, the voice of all that is excluded from their clownish theories of the world, or unreachable by their clownish theories and thereby preserved from them, chthonically active, neither one thing nor another but somehow borderless, both one thing and the other and everything in between. All my cutting and pasting, he said, just reinforces the borders across which I cut and paste, I will cut and paste no more, he said. At least, no more today.