Prelude
As much as I would love to give the impression that I have a long history of literary scholarship, I don’t consider myself particularly well-read. I’ve only been really been close-reading difficult and demanding works for the past five years or so, and in that time have become increasingly aware of the incredible amount of brilliant fiction I have yet to make space for. In spite of these gaps in my experience, I’ve found through the reading that I have done, that I’ve developed a personal sense of taste and literary preference, which I’m sure this show – early in its development as it may be – has also made apparent. Long, discursive, maximalist works with high concept preoccupations tend to occupy the majority of my reading time. And these sorts of books tend to come part and parcel with labyrinthian, complicated plots and narrative structures; the sort of novels that demand multiple readings and companion guides to truly gain a sense of understanding toward them.
While these works will always capture and maintain my attention, I’ve also become increasingly aware, and more so appreciative, of novels that have done away with byzantine storylines in favour of a more plotless approach. The kind of novel where the story isn’t the priority, but rather the way in which it’s told. This has been the topic of discourse for decades now, an intellectual standoff between those who feel that art should exist for its own sake vs those who feel that it should contain an ideological or rhetorical thesis. I sit comfortably in the former camp, holding true to the belief that the means can absolutely be their own ends. There is a strong case to be made for books that function primarily (if not exclusively) as a vehicle for nothing more than exquisite prose.
And to that end, I’d like to discuss a particularly stunning work of Romanian fiction with you today.
Preamble & Context
Welcome to Episode 4 of W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List, I’m your host Seth.
Today, we’re moving away from the western hemisphere. In thinking about what I want to accomplish with this video series, I want to ensure I’m providing a space to examine works that are written outside the English-speaking west. The last two novels I’ve covered have been from American authors, so I figured it would be a good time to return to a work in translation, which is how this show started in the first place. As you may have already realised, today’s episode is departing a bit from my usual, talking-head format, in favour of a more stylised approach that better reflects the content of the novel I’m covering. That novel in question, is Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu.
This novel came to my attention last year when Chris Via lauded it as the best work of fiction in his 2021 Leaf x Leaf awards, as well as an effusively favourable review of it in its own video. If my regular mentions of him on this channel haven’t already made this abundantly clear, I trust Chris’ judgement implicitly and will read pretty much anything he speaks of with such positivity. I’m also eagerly anticipating the release of Cărtărescu’s massive, genre-defying novel, Solenoid, which is in contention for the author’s masterwork. The publishing team at Deep Vellum were kind enough to send me an unfinished version of Solenoid which I’ve briefly taste tested and it too looks like a surreal, bizarre experience. But you’ll have to wait until later in the year for that discussion.
As per usual, if you can’t stomach the prospect of watching a video this long, there’s also an audio link available here. Now let’s cut the preamble and get right to it.
Cărtărescu’s Opus
I’m going to limit the granular biographical details of Cărtărescu’s life here, and just include what is necessary within the context of the book. If you want to read a little more about his life outside the novel, I’ll link to a great interview below.
Cărtărescu emerged as a formative voice in the Romanian beatnik poetry scene and is regularly associated with the “Blue Jeans” generation. I’m a little hesitant with my words when I evoke the beatniks because this may drag up baggy associations with samizdat printings and underground literary communities, from which Cărtărescu couldn’t be further away. His translator Sean Cotter has stated that “to refer to him as a rock star would be knocking him down a peg”. That is to say, he’s a massive literary celebrity in Romania.
This novel is the first of Cărtărescu’s Orbitor or “Blinding” trilogy: a 1300-page fictive dream-memoir of the author’s life and ancestry. Again, I’m treading lightly with the word “memoir” here, as it might evoke associations with Oprah’s Book Club stickers and airport bestseller stands. I make a promise to you right now, comfortably and confidently, that this is nothing like any other memoir you’ve ever read.
He wrote this trilogy over the course of 15 years, in long-hand, without revision, in a sort of Kerouac “On the Road” original scroll style of the manuscript. This is a small sample of what the original looked like.
You can see for yourself it’s pretty much just an uninterrupted, Joycean stream-of-consciousness with very few corrections or insertions. There’s a real assuredness in his commitment of words to the page, which I think gels well with what I suspect was his authorial intent (I’ll get to that near the end).
In an interview with Ella Veres in 2011, Cărtărescu cited Proust and Kafka as two of his most formative models for introspective fiction. And of course, being a man after my own heart, he’s also claimed Pynchon [drink] to be a major influence across his career. It’s funny, for someone who comes across as so humble and gentle in conversion, he does have a bit of an ego to him, albeit one I admire.
“I tried—and maybe in a few privileged pages, I succeeded—to descend deeper into myself than other writers did in general. And I think that I brought out from there, from certain obscure rooms of my mind, a few crystal/mineral flowers that live in obscurity and sometimes are brought up to the surface. I think that those few pages that contain them are the most successful pages that I have written.”
This should give you a fairly clear sense of what to expect with Blinding: a subterranean tunnelling deep into the fractured, sedimentary psyche of a man who’s lived a strange life at an equally strange point in post-war European history.
Publication History
Blinding was originally released in 1996 by the Romanian publishing house, Editura Humanitas, under the title Orbitor: Aripa stângă. The following two entries in the Orbitor trilogy were published in 2002, and 2007, respectively.
I’d like to insert a brief note on the original publisher, as I think it’s an interesting story as to how they came about. Editura Humanitas was founded as a sort of corrective to the decommissioning of publishing houses all over Romania during the years of active communist control. The press was formed in 1990 with the explicit intention to champion works that were unable to reach publication in the 40-odd years under communism. Cărtărescu, among other names you may know such as Eugene Ionesco, and Gabriel Licceanu were some of the big names to reach the public under Humanitas.
If in hearing this, you’re picking up the early warnings of a politically-charged work, you can relax. While the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain are prominent historical touchstones in the book, Cărtărescu has gone to painstaking lengths to avoid the label of a political writer. Like Krasznahorkai and other big names in the Eastern European literary scene, he’s resistant to his work being viewed through a strictly political lens. Despite the presence of communism– most notably during a sequence detailing the Allied firebombing over Bucharest - the politics of the novel is much more the stage than the scene itself; a contextual apparatus rather than an objective plot point.
Here’s what he has to say on it:
“I am not an ideologist; I don’t even call myself an intellectual, but a mere artist. I am a man that has an emotional reaction and an ethical reaction against the entire evil that happens in the world. I don’t see matters in their immediacy as political or ideological but as a human reaction to evil. I think there is very much evil in the world, and any man, not just an artist or a celebrity, has the duty to react to the evil he sees around him.”
I myself read the 2013 reprint released by the American non-profit press, Archipelago Books. Archipelago is a Brooklyn-based publisher, founded in 2003 by Jill Schoolman, with a focus on international literature in translation. As a little tidbit for you, of the thousands of books released every year under the major American publishing umbrellas, less than three percent are from writers and in languages outside the English speaking west. Much in the same way Humanitas was founded with a particular agenda, Schoolman sought to course correct the paucity of international literature available in the US. If you haven’t read anything from Archipelago, I urge you to seek out anything from their catalogue, this being as good a place as any to start.
Translation
The English edition published by Archipelago is translated by Sean Cotter, an Associate Professor of Literature and Literary Translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. As a native English speaking American, he came to the Romanian language through his work with the Peace Corps after graduation.
Cotter made a name for himself translating a variety of works from Romanian, notably those from Liliana Ursu and Nichita Stănescu, the latter of which is also published by Archipelago and won him the Best Translated Poetry award in 2012. As a result of his notoriety, he was contacted by the independent publisher, Open Letter Press who commissioned him to write a sample of this novel, still under its original title, Orbitor. That sample was the first chapter of the book, one of the most dazzling (intentional word choice here) first chapters I’ve read in translated fiction.
Cotter sent this chapter back to Open Letter who passed it on to Editura Humanitas in an effort to gain the rights for a full translation. Interestingly, Humanitas rejected it, not on account of the quality of the translation but rather their lack of familiarity with Open Letter. Humanitas – and indeed Cărtărescu himself – are giants in the Romanian literary scene, and as such, they were hesitant to farm the rights out to anyone whose name wasn’t a known quantity already. So, Cotter’s sample was shelved for a number of years before Jill Schoolman of Archipelago approached Cotter again with a similar request to Open Letter. Sean sent the same sample off to her, she appealed to Humanitas once again and this time, Humanitas agreed.
Cotter is very forthright about the difficulty involved in this translation. In an interview with the Huffington Post in 2016, he had this to say about the early process of adapting it:
“I decided to translate Blinding after providing a sample for a publisher. Only the first chapter—before doing the sample, I hadn’t read any further. But there is an arresting moment near the beginning, when the narrator looks out his window over Bucharest as a storm passes, and the sun penetrates the crack between the grey of the buildings and the charcoal of the clouds. Once I found the English for the colors of the sun dazzling the horizon, I felt I could translate the novel. I read the book after I signed the contract, and I discovered that I had had no idea how demanding the rest of the book would be, how horrifying and how sublime.”
“Demanding” is a charitable way of putting it. If you’ve read this novel, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Between the interwoven religious references, dense physiological imagery, and Eastern European colloquialisms, Cotter truly had his work cut out for him. Surprisingly, he managed to turn out his first draft over 7 months when on sabbatical between teaching semesters, which is a pretty quick turnaround time when compared with someone like Szirtes who took eight years to translate The Melancholy of Resistance. But speed is hardly a correlate to the quality of prose, as both of these works read amazingly well in English.
Cotter has talked at length about Cărtărescu’s involvement (or lack thereof) in the translation process, as he admits that his English wasn’t sufficient to aid much in the process. His various translators (twelve by Cotter’s count) refer to themselves as “survivors” which should give some inkling of the technical and emotional difficulty required in adapting this work into English (let alone the many other languages that have already been done).
This is as good a time as any to address the unfortunate fact of the matter: this novel here – The Left Wing – is only the first of the trilogy to be translated. The other two – The Body, and The Right Wing – remain untranslated, and may never reach English readers. In a 2014 interview at the Center for the Art of Translation, Cotter was asked directly if he could see himself continuing on with the remaining volumes in the Orbitor trilogy, to which he gave a noncommittal reply. I sent him an email a few weeks back asking the same question but have yet to hear from him. He’s currently working on Cărtărescu’s other major novel, Solenoid, which will be released by Deep Vellum later this year. Suffice it to say, I don’t think we can expect the other two any time soon. My hope is the release of Solenoid will help bolster Cărtărescu’s profile in the English speaking west and compel publishers and or translators to continue where Cotter left off.
The Tyranny of Plot
“Maybe, in the heart of this book, there nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling”
– p. 338
I opened this video with a sort of anti-interpretation of this novel, characterising it as a plotless experience, that serves as mainly a platform for truly brilliant writing. This perspective was largely informed by Sam Pulham in his SherdsTube series. In an episode titled “The Tyranny of Plot”, he makes an impassioned defence of books that privilege atmosphere above plot, as well as offer a number of recommendations. I was raised as a reader of plot-heavy novels, as this was largely what was available to me in my house, but have found myself drifting further and further away from narratively-focussed novels in favour of something more… I might use the word “nebulous”.
Again, I want to be mindful of my words here. Terms like “aimless” and “plotless” don’t entirely do Orbitor justice, as Cărtărescu has set out with a clear intention with the trilogy (which I’ll be discussing near the end of this video). If you’ve read the book yourself, you’ll know it’s not even close to a linear, cause-and-effect sequential experience. It’s a wandering, liminal dreamscape which passes seamlessly between memory, through dreams, into other peoples’ lives, and into projections of the future as well. Cărtărescu’s relationship with time and place is loose at best and doesn’t adhere to the conventions of the typical autofictional form. I think this may be what has driven other readers away from it in the past. It’s a deeply disorienting experience to read as someone who is new to this style of writing, I was no exception here. So much so that I actually had to read the book twice. Yes, it’s one of those books that I finished, went “what the fuck did I just read?” and immediately started over again from the beginning again. Having now read it twice through, I feel as though I have a reasonable sense as to what actually occurred throughout.
In saying that, I’m also sympathetic to those who aren’t compelled by the prospect of having to read a book twice to understand it. Taking into account that my intention here (at least in part) is to bring new readers into the book, it is worthwhile to give you an idea as to what to expect in terms of plot (to whatever extent there is a plot at all). Although I will preface this plot description by paraphrasing Ryan at @therepublicofbadtaste:
“A novel is not simply the culmination of events therein. I will die on this hill.”
Much in the same way Gaddis structured his 1956 debut The Recognitions, Blinding is a functional triptych, broken into three separate acts or frames. The first act opens in postwar Bucharest with an adolescent Mircea surveying the ever-changing city from his bedroom window. Much of this first part is devoted to Mircea’s aimless wandering throughout the city, projecting his consciousness into the architecture of his surroundings and the people he encounters along the way. The second part is focalised through the perspective of his mother in her young life leading up to her son’s birth. The third and final frame of the book transfers its perspective back to Mircea as he is incarcerated in a medical facility for sickly youth and the sedated experiences he has during this period of his life.
While many of the signal events in this Mircea’s life align with the author’s experiences, it’s fairly apparent from the beginning that this is not intended to be a simple linear recollection of events, least of all because the “events” are the least interesting aspect of it. Blinding is far less concerned with the experiences of Cărtărescu’s youth than it is with establishing an epistemological framework of how he perceives those events. This is, as he describes it himself, an interior novel, that tunnels so deeply into his own consciousness that you forget what the exterior world ever looked like by the end. His world, his Bucharest, his Blinding, is a bizarre carnival of grotesque bodily functions, technicolour butterflies, and architecture built from memory, constantly in the process of construction and reconstruction. The result is a patchwork quilt of elements you may have read in novels before individually, but likely have never seen together in a single narrative space – that’s what makes it such a confounding experience to read.
The style of writing he employs reflects this chaos of his narrative; form mirroring function and vice versa. The prose is delivered in overlapping layers, with varying sources of narration interrupting and undercutting one another, creating this crystalline mosaic of authorial voice; a collected consciousness between the fictive Mircea, his mother, and ancestors, and the city of Bucharest itself. What you find by the end, is the chorus line of narrations – this “howl of the interior”– becomes so overwhelming that it gives the impression of deafening you; of blinding you. Not just a pretty title after all. Disorienting and surreal as it may be, there is a certain method to be found within the madness.
Structural Conceit
As I’ve alluded to briefly already, Cărtărescu is an artist of both form and function. While the individual events within the book have their own emotional, thematic, and aesthetic relevance, I’d argue that the way in which he’s structured it as a whole is of equal importance; Seeing the forest for the trees, as it were. In my reading, there are two ways to view the overall “shape” of Blinding: as a fractal, and as a butterfly. Let’s start with the former.
In a 1996 interview on Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace stated that he modelled Infinite Jest on a Sierpiński Gasket, a triangular fractal that recursively subdivides in on itself, so that every triangle has three within it, and within each of those three there were another three, and so on [show]. I always thought that was a load of shit, and just Wallace trying to overcomplicate what is ultimately a fairly straightforward book (but that’s a different video altogether). In the case of Blinding, however, I think a very strong case can be made for it having a Sierpiński structure, despite Cărtărescu never claiming to this directly.
Let’s look at the book in broad terms, within the framework of this fractal structure with a base of three, and work our way inward from the outermost layers. Orbitor is a trilogy, comprising obviously, three separate novels, this [show] being the first. Within The Left Wing here, the book is subdivided into three parts, as I mentioned before. The first focuses on Mircea’s solipsistic childhood wandering around Bucharest, the second about his Mother’s courtship with his father, and the third about his sickly transition into adolescence. Within each of these three parts, we see a central mythos emerge, a sort of hallucinogenic dream sequence that splits each part into yet another three divisions: the events that lead to, culminate in, and decline from this mythic action.
In part one, there’s a lengthy analepsis to Mircea’s ancestors, the Badislav Clan, which climaxes in the insemination of a witch – this, Baba Yaga – who eventually gives birth to their “chosen one” a boy named Vasili who would go on to progenate Mircea’s distant relatives. In part two, the central myth is this bizarre scene in which a character Ionel suffers a sort of horrific brain rape from a butterfly that impregnates his skull with an egg, and is later revealed to be also woven into Mircea’s family tree. And in the final Part 3 of the book, the action culminates in the bizarre ritualistic rape of a woman who gives birth to a butterfly, the egg from which it came shaped like Mircea’s face. And within each of these subdivisions of the larger stories, we see recurrent symbology appear that interlinks each of these disparate points in his narrative history; the iconography of his own mythic story. What we can take from this, is a continuum of subdivisions that can be broken down endlessly, creating a mosaic chronology in which all these series of individual moments combine to create a life, but also each moment contains a life of its own.
“The me of today englobes the me of yesterday, who encompasses the one from the day before yesterday and so on and so on, until I am only an immense line of Russian dolls buried one in the next, each one pregnant with its predecessor, but still being born from it, emanating from it like a halo [...] Take a biopsy of my real being, the way you would cut down a tree, and you will find the concentric circles of Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea…”
– p. 311/313
These moments can be divided endlessly, approaching but never reaching the zero, constantly existing on a spectrum between the past and the future in perpetuity. Cărtărescu claims, “we exist between the past and future like a vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings”, which may give us some inclination as to why he chose a butterfly as his principle unit of symbology in the book. This leads us to the next structural framework to view the novel: the butterfly. To him, the function of the butterfly far exceeds its beauty. But don’t take my word for it:
“it is an all-encompassing novel, that I constructed as a butterfly, having a left wing, a body and a right wing, because the butterfly has always been the symbol of the human destiny: the Greeks represented the soul through a woman (Psyche) with butterfly wings. The butterfly, because at the beginning of its life goes through a metamorphosis, starting as a caterpillar, shuts itself in a chrysalis and comes out a winged creature, represents our projection of ourselves: on earth we are crawling beings (caterpillars), then we shut in the chrysalis of the tomb, so that after that we can hope that we’ll have this resurrection as spiritual beings, as winged beings, so the butterfly’s destiny is the best metaphor for human destiny.”
As I mentioned up top, this is the first entry in his Orbitor trilogy, which he wrote in the shape of a butterfly, encompassing his nuclear family unit. Part 1 – The Left Wing – focuses in part on his mother, Part 2 – The Corpus, or Body – principally on himself, and Part 3 – The Right Wing – on his father. Within each divisive unit of the fractal, you can find more and more instances of butterflies strewn throughout the book.
There’s a sort of urban myth among Cărtărescu’s native Romanian readers that there is a butterfly on every page. While it certainly gives that impression given the many, many instances of lepidopteran imagery throughout, Cotter debunked this in an interview with the Centre of Art and Translation. He did, however, point readers toward a passage that gives an additional, structural resonance to the book:
“It is impossible to tell where, on the tridimensional, endless cobweb map of your place in the world, you find yourself and your fear and fascination: in the dead-end of Illusion, in the street of Reverie, in the park of Memory, in the bus station of Hallucination, in the borough of Reality… It's easier to imagine that you have pierced the folded map with a needle, uniting incompatible and disparate places in an incomprehensible trajectory, perpendicular to the paper, hidden, penetrating existence out of nothing into nothing, as we ourselves unite emotional incongruencies with the paradoxical transit of our lives: birth and love, art and madness, happiness and death.”
– p. 309
As Ryan so aptly pointed out, fans of Event Horizon should find this concept of folding space-time to be quite familiar. But Cărtărescu uses it to a different end. If you were to do exactly as he described in the passage above, and fold each page over every time you see a mention of a butterfly, you would find a single geographical point in the centre of Bucharest, with layers of disparate chronological moments stacked atop another, creating a tunnel of butterflies that passes through the text and through time itself, from Mircea’s ancestors to his mother, to him.
While Sam Neil would undoubtedly be proud, I think a closer analogue is the way in which Freedenberg & Walton use the “Pool of Cosmic Neologism” to create a tunnel through the text in America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic.
In this way, you could perceive the book as four-dimensional; a technicolour tesseract that folds into and out from itself at any given moment. Maybe some readers will find this to be contrived or gimmicky, but I thought it added such a thought-provoking depth to my reading. Your mileage may vary.
Regardless of how you view it – as a mosaic, a fractal, a butterfly – it’s clear there is an intentionality to the way in which he’s structured the book. Sure, it’s gorgeous reading on a moment-to-moment basis, but I argue that the work as a whole is greater than the sum of its constituent scenes.
“A novel is not simply the culmination of events therein. I will die on this hill.”
I’m with you on that Ryan. I love novels that push the boundaries of formal construction and find new and innovative ways to create a fictional world. And on the note of creation, that brings me to my next point.
Memory and Imaginative Construction
“I remember, that is, I invent. I transmute the ghosts of moments into weighty, oily gold.”
– p. 88
As I see it, Cărtărescu’s mode of operation is subjectivity taken to its irrational extreme. Solipsism, in the truest sense of the word, is the perspective he employs when conjuring his image of his past and the city that embodies it. His mind is the only thing he can truly know exists, and so he uses it (and all its contents) to create the world he presents to his readers. That’s why, in its own twisted way, there’s a certain logic to the bizarre physiological imagery of the book, as these are the images that intrude on his consciousness; his consciousness being the lens through which we experience the world of Blinding. This world is a singular image, entirely unique to his personal preoccupations and fantasies.
Let me give you an idea of this works. There’s a prolonged sequence in the third act where Mircea is committed to a medical institution for various invasive tests and treatments, which fosters a perverse fascination with biological processes, and in turn informs the way in which he imagines all features of his world to function: biologically. Taking into account his experience of hospitalisation, the memories he acquired there bleed into the memories which proceeded and followed this experience. I found this to be quite a clever conceit, as it closely reflects how we access our memories. We don’t recall moments of our past neatly and sequentially, but rather simply retrieve individual images at random. As we know, memory is a malleable process, in which the original event (such as it were) can diffuse into others creating a warped image of what actually happened. And what we see in this novel, is that every moment that’s built up in his consciousness influences other memories around it, creating a fractal of chronological interactions across an entire lifetime. In this Mircea’s eye view of the world, we see a disparate array of religious iconography, butterflies, and grotesque intestinal imagery all infused together, as these are all objects which captured his fascination at various points in his life. Since they occupy his consciousness, he includes them all, in all their hideousness, in his story.
“We are already part of the machinery that invents us from moment by moment, we participate second by second in our own drawing, sculpting, conception, and knitting together.” – p. 284
It’s a sort of meta-textual paradox, he acts as both the subject of his story, and the story itself. Given that the stage for this endless introspection is the city of Bucharest, the labyrinthian streets end up swallowing him whole and the set-piece becomes part of his consciousness as well. I absolutely believe the city of Bucharest itself is written with a life of its own; establishing itself as a character.
One of the strongest sequences in the book is actually its opening: an insomniac rendering of Mircea’s childhood watching the city live and breathe from his bedroom window, which is uncoincidentally a three-panelled window; a triptych. He sits with his feet up on the radiator under his windowsill and watches the city grow and develop in a timeless sequence that lasts only a single night but also decades at the same time. His relationship with time is tenuous and malleable, much in the same way that entire periods of our own personal histories can be compressed into a single composite memory, or individual moments stretched out to occupy cavernous spaces in our mind’s eye.
“The Bucharest of my writings is a total imaginary one, a mixture of true dreams and fake memories. For over ten years I’ve patiently reconstructed, from such fragments with strange and unverifiable origin, a city identifiable with a book and a brain: my “Blinding”, my Bucharest.”
In exactly the way he describes above, his image of the city is a messy confluence of dream, memory, and approximation. While many of the places he depicts are real locations – his home street Stefan del Mar principally among them – his interest isn’t recreating an objective rendering of the city, but rather his personal interpretation of it, fragmented through his psyche. Given that it’s through his memory that he evokes the city of Bucharest, there’s a sort of philosophical question to be posed as to whether or not we could actually consider him part of the city itself, and in turn, the city as part of him.
As I read it, within his recollection, he clearly is part of the city, and the city is part of him; the creator and the experiencer. What we can take from this, if we adopt his constructive view of memory, is every time he evokes an image of his past, he’s creating it anew. Now, if you’ll indulge me for a few moments, I’d like to give a brief impression of what that image looks like:
“I had already squinted, blinded by the flame of sunrise, in one of the canals of this impossible Venice. Pipes ran between dreams, they were connected the way buildings in Bucharest were connected with each other, the way each of the days of my life, at a distance of years or months, or one night alone, was bound, by imperceptible threadlike tubes, to all of the others, but the catacombs, tubes, cables, wires, and passages were not all equally important. The dream highways would abruptly pour onto reality's thorough fares, making constellations and engrams that someone, from a great height, could read like a multicolored tattoo, and someone from a great depth could feel on his own skin, like the sadistic torture of tattooing.”
– p. 40
"These were the forgotten compartments of my spiral shell, built by my mind, one after the other, like a line of ever-larger skulls, and left behind to decay like molars, down to the bloody rot of their roots. I knew that I had lived in those places. I retained some images, but no experiences, no emotions, nothing real. The three or four buildings were like the deformed teeth of my mother's dentures, untouched by the nerves or irrigating threads of her veins and arteries. Plastic, cheap, stupid plastic. I imagined that their doors were only etched on the walls, that their interiors were full and massive, like fillings in praline candies, and that, therefore, everything was a crude, fairground imitation. But I searched around these edifices more and more stubbornly, because they still were my only landmarks. I tried to reconstitute my cerebral animal in their strange dance through time, touching the bumps of the buildings, the housing of its successive skulls, built from calcium spittle. Patiently, the flesh of my mind built rooms and roofs, scenes and deeds."
– p. 43
“I know when I entered that tunnel of unsettling houses, walking with small steps, I was trying as hard as I could to recognize, to reconstruct, and to relive. Id only glimpsed this completely walled-off part of my life in my deepest dreams, and even then as something ambiguous and surreal, something combined with disparate objects from other layers of my mind. I walked with the feeling that nothing was real, that I was entering my own brain.”
– p. 128
While everything I’ve just read is from the first act of the novel or “triptych”, this framework occupies his entire Orbitor. To mix metaphors a bit here, his mind and his memories are the paint, the brush, and the canvas, and he has given himself complete license to blend the grounded reality of objective events with the phantasmagorical expansiveness of his imagination. Yet for all its hallucinogenic projections, it always comes back to memory, just like it did for Joyce in Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’d like to boldly suggest, however, that Cărtărescu takes it further than either of them did though.
His view of memory is extended even further, beyond the boundaries of his own mind, and across his entire lineage. Cărtărescu proposes a schema whereby memories not only transfer through the mind of an individual as they age but actually across generations. This is how the second act of the novel relates to the first. The author focalises his narrative through his mother and shows how the Cărtărescu lineage is the mythos upon which a world – his world – is built. The memories of his ancestors are passed down from one generation to the next, creating a collective consciousness that culminates with the birth of Mircea. His mother being his direct progenitor is given special dispensation to dominate the second act of the text, as she is the final conduit through which his ancestral history may pass into him.
“The first Badislavs in Muntenia became the land's inhabitants -they lived, they procreated, and they forgot their old language and learned what the people around them spoke. They extended their lands and drank their brains out at the bodega that soon appeared in the village center. The bar was a place to toast the Devil, the Lord's little brother (as the older ones believed), to kill each other with tomato stakes over a woman, to hold vigils over old men in agony, so that they wouldn't have to die without a candle on their chests, and to look for rainclouds in the sky, all without ever imagining that, in fact, they weren't building houses, plowing land, or planting seeds on anything more than a gray speck in a great-grandson's right parietal lobe, and that all their existence and striving in the world was just as fleeting and illusory as that fragment of anatomy in the mind that dreamed them.”
– p. 74
“Existence was just as fleeting and illusory as that fragment of anatomy in the mind that dreamed them”. I’d argue we can identify a clear philosophical worldview in this line. Cărtărescu sees the mind as the foundation of the world, as one cannot perceive without the material of the mind, and thus the world can only be as real as the mind that perceives it. In this way, Mircea is both the storyteller and the story itself. Or put another way:
“You can never experience an enigma if you weren’t the one who created it.”
– p. 339
The storyteller is both a messenger and a creator in his own way. This leads me to my clearest attempt at interpreting the novel. ‘Cause as I see it, if you look at the novel in its entirety, I think it’s critical that one closely examines what it means to be a “creator”, in the grandest sense of the word.
A New Religion
Of the scant supply of reviews and analyses I’ve come across, very few make any conceited effort to interpret what Blinding is actually about. This isn’t without reason – it’s an incredibly abstract work with narrative threads and thematic preoccupations that stretch in a dozen different directions at once, making it exceedingly difficult to summarise. Most of the responsive material I’ve seen talks primarily about the key plot points or fixates on the imagery and eclectic use of language. While these are elements that can (and should) be examined in their own right, I also immediately recognise this as the type of book that will leave readers scratching their heads as to what the author aimed to say underneath all the pyrotechnics. So, in amassing everything I’ve read on it so far, let me offer one way to read it, in the broad sense.
Scott Esposito wrote about this book in the Kenyon Review back in 2014, and identified a line that had also caught my eye in my first reading, but didn’t entirely click in its function until my second:
“There is no other annunciation than a person’s birth. And every birth creates a religion.”
- p. 462
Religion plays an elliptical role within Cărtărescu’s Bucharest. While Christian teachings and iconography punctuate various points in both his and his mother’s lives, his interest seem to extend far outside the boundaries of conventional Christian belief. He’s almost acting as a sort of mediator between various spiritual practices, both western and eastern. He seamlessly interpolates the iconography of Hinduism, with the karmic balances of Buddhism with the structured discipline of Catholicism, creating this melting pot where the values and touchstones of various spiritual practices come to merge. He’s taken all these disparate relics of various practices and grafted them together in a bizarre patchwork quilt, with himself at the centre of it. So, what the hell do we make of all this? As I read it, he sees himself as the deity of a new religion, with his birth acting as its inciting event. There is no other annunciation than his birth, from which a religion is formed.
Because he frames the mind as the foundation of the world – his world – he is positioned as the God of his own experience; the creator and the experiencer. This is in part what gives Bucharest such an important role within this “religion”, such as it is. Like I said before since Bucharest comprised his entire world as a child, it stands to reason that in his mind’s eye, he is both an occupant of the city and an element of the city itself; part of its brick and mortar. Remember the line I mentioned earlier: “You can’t experience an enigma if you weren’t the one who created it”. He aggregates every story he’s been told, every moment he spent wandering the street of his city, every doctrine of religious belief he’s been exposed to and combines it all into a fundamentally unique perception of the world.
This, importantly, includes the stories his mother passes down to him. Very early on, Mircea poses the introspective and rhetorical question, “What was going on with this mythologizing of my mother?” (p. 22). At the end of the genealogical line, he is the nexus point that absorbs everything his ancestors ever experienced and explodes outward in a blinding burst of creative energy. His mother the final point of contact that connects the generations from the Badislav clan all the way to him. I think this myth of the mother is important as she’s almost a Virgin Mary figure, giving birth to the new Lord which would in turn precipitate the new religion. He doesn’t exactly make this vague – her name is literally Maria; Mary.
In the second act when the narrative focalises through her, we see her questioning her role in the larger schema of Blinding:
“Maria's impression that she was hallucinating, her awkward feeling - one that got stronger as she got older - that her mind did not belong to her, that it was only the theater for a play that was completely beyond her control or understanding, which granted her an unequaled importance in the world.” – p. 252
I think there’s an answer to her rhetorical question here. Her mind is the theatre for the play of Mircea, as this is his story, and she is a conduit through which to share a crucial element of it. Although there is a recognisable egoism in Mircea’s solipsistic worldview, he is also patently aware that his presence as the sole creator and occupant cannot occur without her bringing him into it. I often talk about this idea of the systems novel, wherein the author examines the way in which broader societal, economic, or cultural forces come to influence the central characters of a book. This could be what I might call a “bipolar systems novel”, wherein the influences of the Eastern European world converge through Maria into the focal point of Mircea, and Mircea in turn acts as the ultimate influential force as he creates his own world in his mind; the world which we’re given here in Blinding. It’s not just how the systems affect him, but also how he affects the systems. It has an hourglass shape to it or – humour me here – a butterfly.
It’s one of those novels that the more you meditate on it, the more you’ll find within it. That’s in spite of it being a sort of aimless, atmospheric wander through this dreamy rendering of Bucharest. That’s why I offered a disclaimer early on, that despite the shaggy, narcotic impression it gives at first glance, there is an incredible depth to it if you examine it beyond the level of its surface-level aimlessness. This is, in my mind, the most rewarding kind of literature, the kind that appreciates with each successive read.
In a lesser set of hands, I think this message of “every birth creates a religion” could come across like a Hallmark greeting card. But Cărtărescu’s confidence and earnestness in his message combined with the incredible beauty in his prose make it a deeply resonant experience. If in hearing all of this, you’re wondering whether or not you really want to commit to nearly 500 pages from a person who regards himself as some sort of God, let me leave you on this note. When asked to defend his solipsistic selfishness with respect to his Orbitor, Cărtărescu had this to say. Because I think if we all adopted this approach to both literature and… life in general, we would probably find ourselves feeling much less alone.
“People can’t communicate literally with one another. The great philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, demonstrated this very clearly. Instead they communicate indirectly; they communicate through empathy. This empathy makes people able to understand what happens in other people’s souls, enables them to understand indirectly the suffering of others. You cannot feel it directly, but indirectly, through accessing your own feelings, you can understand it. This also is the mechanism that makes possible the human understanding through art and literature. Through literature you can communicate your own pain, your own suffering, your own joy, your own love to other people, who can thus feel it too. They can actually reconstruct it, with the material of their memories”
If that’s not the reason we read in the first place, I don’t know what is.
End Notes
Alright, we made it. Thanks for sticking around. Today’s episode comes with an effusive thanks to Chris Robinson for giving me permission to use his music in today’s episode. The tracks I used here are from his second volume of Reading Music, which as I understand it, was inspired by Proust’s work. You can access all his music on Bandcamp, and I highly encourage you to do so. Keep an eye on this space and Instagram as there may be some more work coming from Chris and I in the near future which I’ve really excited to talk about. When the time is right, of course
As per usual, all the resources I drew from you can find in that description box as well, as well as links to the text and audio versions of today’s episode. If you want to chat, feel free to send me a message on Twitter, Instagram, all that nonsense – you can find me, it’s 2022, it’s not hard. And if there are any other books you’re incredibly keen to have closely examined and think would fit the theme of this show, feel free to drop me some suggestions below. I’m always keen for new ideas.
That’s all from me. See you next month Paranoids.
I found your blog by googling around for responses to Blinding, which blew my mind permanently when I read it seven years ago. Overall I appreciate the review, the depth you went into, how you sort of circled around its creation and context before delving into the nitty-gritty. In passing I'd like to register my disagreement about Wallace and his Sierpinski gasket; although you made a clever and apt comparison in extending it to Blinding, Infinite Jest just fulfills that same structure in a different way, one that relates to theme rather than plot. The outer triangle is something like America, the lesser triangles the halfway house and the tennis academy, and every exfoliation of the themes unfolds within those structures, from country, to institution, to person. The three brothers, modeled the Brothers Karamazov, represent another triangle... and so on. Infinite Jest seems confusing, but treat it as a primarily conceptual work and it becomes instantly clear, with a thematic thoroughline that develops without break until the last fifty pages or so.
If Blinding has a meaning overarching its parts, then I'd say you've made a good stab at summarizing it. But I am not sure whether such a meaning predominates. It's almost too much to ask what it is all about, because every page is directly about its themes. You can point to anything and say, 'This is what it is about.' We know Cartarescu was improvising, therefore he was sort of writing in the moment, existing within the space of the sentence, the paragraph. That's why he can contradict himself, or argue opposite viewpoints as in the Big Bang chapter - he's just right there saying whatever he feels, following the thoughts wherever they take him. Whatever binding themes arise are simply the ones moving through his subconscious, as you can see by the repetition of nearly all these ideas in Solenoid (your review of which I will read soon!).
I wish Cartarescu would gain more recognition. In my opinion he's just as exciting an author as Pynchon, and he has broken new ground in how to write novels. Pynchon is amazing, but he casts the reader out; his stream-of-consciousness often doesn't include any handholds for the struggling reader. But Cartarescu works at the level of images and rhetoric, rather than deconstructing the structure of sentences, so his work remains brilliantly clear, building upon itself into images of almost unbearable intensity.
This last quote about how we communicate through empathy is explicit and fascinating. When u add that to the points about atmosphere over plot, these 2 perspectives together are to me at the level of fundamental truth, and very apparent to an active visual artist and psychotherapist . These things are true. That’s what spending time with clients reveals , and that’s what painting reveals , as people look for the one that speaks to them.