Intro

While maybe overlong and meandering at many points, this book is a challenging exploration of the trauma of scale. By that I mean, the traumatic experience of being a Subject in a world improbably bigger than one’s self. Life abounds with promises and assertions, some provable and some sublime, but we are forever searching for a reason we’re here at all. This passage probably best defines the struggle of this book:

The white mouse running through plexiglass hallways doesn’t know its memory is being tested—it’s just living its life. Its brain is not capable of asking: Why am I here? How did I end up in this maze? But isn’t the maze, with its symmetries, its piece of cheese at the farthest end, itself the marker of a higher realm, of an intelligence, in comparison to which my poor little mind is just babbling in the darkness? (78)

Existence at its most lonely is “babbling in the darkness.” Solenoid grasps for some unifying meaning or theory, some rent in the fabric of reality that, while maybe unexplainable, at least affirms a higher dimension. It’s only identification with this void that we can find some freedom from incessant searching, if only for a little while.

It’s a little disconcerting that so many published reviews of this book just allude to the lice & bedbugs at the beginning of the book because it feels like a total lack of engagement with the next 720 pages. It’s a tome, yet we’re caught up in him pulling string from his belly button in the first few pages. At one point he’s transformed into a blind mite beneath the skin of a librarian to prove the existence of a higher reality to his fellow mites, but the string is what’s worth mentioning. I hope more people engage with this book because it’s really a fantastically bizarre, albeit long, dissection of the human mind.

Solenoid & Technology

The solenoids appear to primarily enable access to some higher dimension. The one beneath the narrator’s house is almost exclusively used for levitating him above his bed during sex & sleep. Often it seemed his waking life could be so miserable that he had to turn to freak shit and floating secretions to connect with something bigger. The depictions of sex were tinged with the book’s anatomical detachment, where the sex sounds less passionate and more odorous & wet, floating above a bed and exploring each other’s bodies surrounded by sweat & semen. One would maybe think given the consistently detached & maudlin tone that a moment of real passion would prove a recess from the dreadful gloom, the way the weird starts to appear logical in a world of its own. However, the sex only exacerbates the hyper-sensual nature of the writing, maybe being one of the more sickening elements of the book.

I hadn’t considered the solenoids as symbols or metaphors for control until I asked a chatbot to generate me some questions about the book (I’m but a mere man - no one I know has read this book so I had to have finger puppets ask me discussion questions). The solenoids are so enigmatic in grand purpose until the denouement, where the activated solenoids propel Bucharest into the air. Furthermore, the narrator only ever makes passing references to the Soviet control over Romania, especially in the school where reports & bureaucratic meetings only exist to serve an invisible but omnipresent State apparatus. The solenoids’ humming, unseen influence over the city is indeed a sort of metaphor for that ambient power governments (and ideology) have.

Though set in the 1980s, the solenoids encapsulate the influence and promises of technology of any era, but particularly those symbols of the Information Era: smartphones (no intention of using this as a springboard for a cynical tirade on how “Smartphones are ruining our lives! We used to play with sticks on the tracks when I was a kid!”). The elevator pitch for info-rich technology is still, to a large degree, the bodaciousness of surfing the world wide web, a world of interconnected netizens with infinite potential to imagine, create, and share with each other online. It’s the ecstasy of boundlessly floating in your own home, the freedom of open space (virtual & literal). The obverse reality is the networks of pain, sadness, boredom, loneliness, and aimlessness that define & uphold these technologies. Like the solenoids, the internet is a physical network of wound cables & humming machines, yet it projects something much larger than itself, and at its most powerful reveals the dark, unfeeling cruelty squirming beneath it at all times (like the insectoid parasites feeding on pain & agony beneath Bucharest). It’s a dialectic of pain & suffering: “Pain is another word for reality” (116).

The magnitude of power the solenoids have proves unreal: “I can transfer, through the power of my solenoid, a human’s entire interior being into the body of a blind mite, born & raised there in the blind world of its tunnels, among heaps of eggs & droppings” (680). Not to navel-gaze, as this book sometimes does both literally & figuratively, but this description of the solenoid’s capacity mirrors, in a chimeric way, the effect of social media. Algorithms are so exceptional at tailoring feeds to users that they are debased to insectoid impulses, guided only by enjoyment instead of need, still ultimately a drive than a reflective or introspective state. Technology, and particularly the algorithmic technology of the 21st century, is an emblematic example of jouissance, that is, enjoyment being defined in part by pain in pleasure and vice versa.

Coming back for oxygen from the navel, we actually see very little of the pleasure half of enjoyment aside from ultimately nauseating sex (e.g., “if there were ever a moment of insemination, when the twilit sperm penetrated her ivory, organic receptacle” (619) - God have mercy). The narrator is more fixated on the enduring suffering of existence in Bucharest, on the city being a horizon for experience.

The solenoids are enigmatic insofar as the actual effects they have, because their origin is akin to any Promethean tale of discovery or invention: someone created something for one purpose (usually irrelevant in the scope of history), and it monstrously transformed into something far more terrifying.

Dreams

I’m rarely invested in other people’s dreams. If you don’t have a close enough relationship with the person, their mother appearing to them as a goldfish means basically nothing to you. I think if you know the person well enough to wager what the psychic valence of those symbols means, then maybe it can provide some insight into, perhaps, how they’re feeling at the time or how they’re processing something. This is the most substantial drawback of this book: we spend an outsize amount of pages with the narrator’s frankly uninteresting dreamscapes, exploring apparently nonsensical imagery while being assured some of it is almost too horrific to be put to paper.

In the interest of fairness, I want to dissect that critique for parts, because despite finding it personally uninteresting, it speaks to an important theme in the book.

1. “An outsize amount of pages”

Though it was often unenjoyable (and literature is admittedly not always intended to be enjoyable or fun, but challenging), this amount of pages being devoted to dreams is a reflection of how much our lives are absorbed by sleep & dreams, often a third of our lives. If this book is supposed to be an anti-book or anti-fiction (meaning it challenges the need for a driving narrative, a sense of linear time, the shifting of perspective, or a fourth wall), then it is only fitting we fail to escape the confines of a single character’s conscious and unconscious mind. We are subjected to total subjectivity. As the narrator states early on, “I feel I have something to say. And I will say it poorly and truthfully, the way anything worth putting down on paper should be said" (Page 43)

1. “Exploring apparently nonsensical imagery”

Any guide or dictionary claiming to be a reference for dream symbols is total bunk. There’s the popular cliché that if you dream of your teeth falling out, it’s because you said something you regret. Unless we all miraculously share the same metaphorical understanding of teeth, it’s simply nonsense to claim this to be the definitive meaning. However, one’s private dream imagery mangles psychic detritus in a kind of beautiful way, and one’s unconscious imagination seems to employ metaphor in its screenings (as someone who intuited a goldfish to be their mother would know).

The import of Solenoid seems to be drawing a comparison between dreams and a theorized fourth dimension. Where our conscious lives are the three-dimensional cube, dreams may be the almost spectral lines of the tesseract, a confusing assemblage of interconnected vectors we can’t quite grasp in a consciousness limited to three dimensions. Dreams gesture toward a manner of perception we are incapable of achieving in our waking lives: “When the master points at something with his finger, the cat looks at the finger, sniffs it, licks it. That is how we understand the Godly: incomprehensible beyond good & evil” (668). Though this is stated in the context of religion (and implicitly borrows from a Buddhist aphorism about pointing at the moon), the narrator treats dreams as a kind of cosmic gesture. The surreal or magically real moments of this book occur alongside dream journal entries, blurring the line between reality & dream.

The surreal and dreamlike narrative has a political aspect: people disappear; buildings turn to museums of enigmatic organisms, instruments, & furniture; citizens are pulped by prodigious statues. Materially it is impossible, but in an abstract sense these are things that occur under domineering governments. What are some corners of the government but big, nondescript buildings of ineffable horrors? Think of the panoply of horrors perpetrated by the American C.I.A. in the 20th century (and maybe now - it’s not exactly tinfoil territory to assume these things are ongoing), or the Nazis, or the Soviet Union, or just about any colonized country. There’s a “gypsy” janitor who one day disappears from an athletic field near the school, no trace save for his boot prints. One day he returns completely different, as though re-educated or experimented upon. Is this altogether different from any victim of government disappearance? Reality feels like a dream when you’re told one thing and witness another. The surreality of this book can be read as a metaphor for trauma, and one of the strengths of Cărtărescu’s writing is how transferable it is to any victim of fascist forces.

Ẑiẑek & Bugs

As a big bug guy, this book’s hyperfixation on parasites and insects immediately transfixed me. Bugs are, in my opinion, the unsung class of the Animal Kingdom. It’s a disparaging term to be called an insect, a louse, a fly in the ointment, a flea, tick, gnat or mosquito, an ant or a worm. If you’re bugging someone, you’re pissing them off. We stomp them out with extreme prejudice. Children liberally torture them, often without consequence. If you trap and torture a squirrel, you’re exhibiting symptoms of psychopathy; if you trap and torture a fly, you’re Billy from down the street and we’re all getting ice cream later, and Billy can I play on your Gamecube, your mom said you have to share.

While the narrator treats them with a certain derision, it’s only a derision derived from observing how they actually live on this planet, and how much of ourselves we find in these creatures. They’re an entity not altogether different from us, despite how much we may exempt ourselves:

And the parasites begin to drop out, two, five, eight, fifteen … Their bodies and my body, wet and naked, leaning over the sink, are made of the same organic tissues. They have analogous organs and anatomical functions. They have eyes that see the same reality, they have legs that take them through the same unending and unintelligible world. They want to live, just as I do. I wash them off the sides of the sink with a stream of water. They travel through the pipes below, into the sewers underground. (11)

They’re so diminutive that we don’t consider their, for lack of a better term, humanity. We’re made of the same material, yet there’s some psychic filter that enables us to take their lives without hesitation, like how hunters view game as a means to an end and nothing more. Our perception of scale is also one of significance. Bugs are insignificant, so we squish them. But are they?

Cărtărescu, in his many gestures to something cosmically larger than ourselves, illustrates a relationship wherein we are the insects. The picketists are a sect of Romanian society protesting death in all forms, signaling their “in” status by presenting an insect in their palm, as if affirming its right to live by holding and not crushing. The picketists follow a leader named Virgil (a reference that’s a smidge on the nose for me) into a building ornamented by gigantic statues of humans in a tableau of suffering. The top-most statue is a woman actually suspended in air by the massive solenoids built into the roof. She descends upon Virgil and the picketists like insects, and listens to Virgil monologue about mortality. At the end of his chittering, she smashes him beneath her foot like a bug, sending the picketists scrambling out of the building. It’s a vulgar display of dominion over the humans in the room, a testament to their insignificance.

In another big moment for bugs, the narrator discovers a solenoid that can reduce him to the size of a mite, and enters the body of a librarian from his childhood in an attempt to convince the mites of a really existing world beyond their senses. The narrator, however, loses himself in the bustle of this bug society. There’s a social hierarchy, there’s intimacy, there’s geography and language. He communicates through odor and strives to convey a world transcending their reality. It’s a fruitless pursuit.

The conditions of these bugs’ existence, the structure of their reality, precludes them from understanding something so sublime. It is the same transcendent reality discussed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The sublime is something we can only consider conceptually, like the tesseract - it is unknowable, and, for the narrator, that is the tragedy of human life:

I wanted a drop of certainty, even if it meant abandoning all hope. Can You hear my voice, You, who have no tympanum or internal ear? Can You see me from heaven, without a cornea, or lens, or retina, or optic nerves; can You see me, me, the one living for a nanosecond on a speck of dust in a world with billions and billions of stars? And if You could talk to me, how could I hear You? (684)

Violence, suffering, and pain are what condition existence, according to the narrator. Bucharest is built upon an unseen network of nightmarish parasites feeding upon the suffering above, unbeknownst to the hosts. They’re depicted as lost and anguished souls trudging like slugs through a dimension without place. There is no instruction for how one transcends this reality of suffering (“Pain is another word for reality” (116)). It was only by sacrificing all the contents constituting his identity that the narrator was not squashed by the same statue as Virgil, but instead triggered the total destruction of Bucharest.

This is where I find the book loses itself a little. The narrator escapes the destruction of Bucharest and finds pastoral peace in some forest glade with his partner & child. It feels like a treacly conclusion for a book so mired in unrelenting pessimism. When it appears the incessant suffering is conditioned not on Bucharest per se, but existence itself, it feels ironic to find an answer in Luddist, back-to-nature imagery.

To counter my own critique, the miserable urban ruin of a late Soviet satellite like Romania is a major motif. The suffering of every character, their insipid desires embalmed in Bucharest’s grey skies and concrete, stem from a sense of being undead. The city is described as a decaying mass of cracked asphalt and ramshackle housing. The solenoids are technology promising  paradise, images of a radical future, but serve instead as tools enabling an introspection that suspends one existence (as the narrator literally suspends himself above his bed, dreaming wildly). One’s captivity is what conditions their freedom.

There is no freedom without a concept of captivity. Prisonhood is personhood. It is not through decorated doors “of utter beauty that [remain] on the level of the door, fooling our mind’s naïve eye” that we find escape, but the miracle “made by opening the door, breaking through the wall, and leaving the museum, with all of the risk of leaving literature behind” (693).

Earlier, the narrator describes literature as a museum of ornately decorated doors to nowhere, doors which cannot be opened. In Sublime Object, Žižek analogizes ideology to the trompe-l’oeil, and the ancient Greek story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, wherein Zeuxis’ painting of grapes is so real as to trick the birds, but Parrhasius’ painting of curtains concealing a painting tricks Zeuxis himself. Ideology is the painted door. It structures one’s world, but nothing lies behind it - it simply decorates an expanse. Though Žižek is certainly not a solipsist, Solenoid is definitively a book about clamoring in one’s own skull: “The object of my thought is my thought, and my world is the same as my mind. My mission is, thus, that of a surveyor and cartographer, an explorer of organs and caves, of the oubliettes and prisons of my mind” (Solenoid 82). Subjectivity circumscribed to an ideology could be described as a series of oubliettes and prisons of one’s mind. There is virtually no escape from ideology, only the trauma of identifying with a fissure in one’s being.

If we refer back to the narrator’s assertion that “Pain is another word for reality,” we can compare it to the definition of Reality in Sublime Object: “‘Reality’ is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire” (SOI 75). One of Žižek’s refrains is how painful it is to puncture reality and discover one’s desire for what it is: a void. In this way, reality is the constant, painful discovery of a hole where one expects a whole, a unifying identity that makes everything finally make sense. However, “The analysis achieves its end when the patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom, the only support of his being” (SOI 112). In the end, the narrator appears to recognize the nothingness that constitutes himself: "I am now writing a few final pages, so my world will not be left unfinished. And these, too, will be read, passionately or indifferently, after my death, by the same fire, the great reader of all the libraries of the world" (728). He stubbornly insists on finishing a survey of his mind, but accepts finally that it cannot access some sublime, constitutive reality beyond his three dimensions. The fire, the consuming void, is the reader to whom and for whom we write.