The Nobel Laureate Who Takes the Supernatural Seriously

A classic bildungsroman follows the growth and development of a young person, who typically matures from a dreamer into a rational being. Jane Austen was a master of the genre: In her posthumously published novel Northanger Abbey, she satirizes the overly imaginative Catherine Morland, a voracious reader who perceives her life as a Gothic story. Catherine finds intrigue and plot everywhere she looks: A cabinet in her room might hold morbid secrets; a laundry bill might be a clue to a dark scheme. Her salacious imagination gets her into trouble, but like a good heroine, she eventually sees things as they really are. She becomes an adult, a person of reason, and learns to live in the real world.

The Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, is also a bildungsroman, following the education of a young man. But in contrast with Northanger Abbey, The Empusium charts the opposite trajectory: What if a person could instead be taught to see the world as an unreasonable place, dominated by the supernatural or mystical? Pulling from folktales, mythology, art, and literature, Tokarczuk’s novel spins a story that feels eerily familiar and yet totally new. The book challenges the supremacy of the “rational” that has held sway since the Enlightenment, painting a picture of a world that is illogical, fantastical, and often simply unexplainable.

The Empusium, which has been translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, opens at a train station, where “the view is obscured by clouds of steam from the locomotive that trails along the platform. To see everything we must look beneath them, let ourselves be momentarily blinded by the gray haze, until the vision that emerges after this trial run is sharp, incisive, and all-seeing.” Like a camera panning across a set, the collective first-person narration slowly scans across the train platform, where a left shoe appears, then a right one: a new arrival. This is “our” protagonist, to adopt the novel’s language, a young Mieczysław Wojnicz, who has arrived at Görbersdorf, a sanatorium in the Prussian province of Silesia, now part of Poland. Wojnicz is here, as many other gentlemen would have been in September 1913, to pursue a rest cure for tuberculosis.

The novel’s opening signals that Tokarczuk is returning to hallowed literary ground: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, on its 100th anniversary. The older novel follows a young man’s lengthy stay at Davos, a Swiss sanatorium. Like Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, Wojnicz has studied to be an engineer, and like Castorp, he mostly passes the time in the sanatorium by listening to debates among other, older guests. But unlike Castorp, who lived at Davos for seven years, Wojnicz finds himself a spot at a discounted inn, the Guesthouse for Gentlemen in Görbersdorf, while waiting for a vacancy at the main resort, the Kurhaus.

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In The Magic Mountain, Castorp learns a great deal from his fellow guests. The resort acts as a microcosm of the intellectual climate in Europe before World War I: Over the course of the novel, the guests represent and dissect ideas put forth by Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and Freud, among other thinkers. In contrast, Wojnicz has a front seat to what reads hilariously as a cut-rate, drunken version down the street. The debates in the guesthouse never soar to the intellectual heights reached in Mann’s book, or even come to a definitive conclusion, instead petering out as the local liquor takes hold. By parodying Mann’s discourse, The Empusium seems designed to take The Magic Mountain down a peg or two.

Though Wojnicz is a keen observer of the social dynamics that unfurl around him, he prefers to listen to the debates and rarely weighs in. He is naive, “an odd creature, so completely unaware, so innocent.” He spends his long afternoon rest cures reflecting on his past: his childhood after his mother’s early death, his strict education in Lwów and then Dresden, his torment by a father determined to toughen a sensitive son. Wojnicz is clearly at Görbersdorf at the insistence of his father, who believes that it will make him into more of a man. “To be a man,” Wojnicz reflects sadly, “means learning to ignore whatever causes trouble. That’s the whole mystery.”

Yet as the novel progresses, Wojnicz is unable to disregard disturbing events. The guesthouse proprietor’s wife hangs herself the day after his arrival, and sensitive Wojnicz is alarmed that no one, including her husband, Willi Opitz, appears to care. Wojnicz registers other oddities as September turns into October, then November. The attic emits cooing noises at night. The town’s residents claim that witches live in the forest. The liquor that the guesthouse gentlemen imbibe at night, Schwärmerei (German for “excessive sentiment”), seems to have hallucinogenic properties. On a hike in the woods, Wojnicz is horrified to come across earthen sculptures called Tuntschi—objects that, according to his companions, are used as sex toys by the local coal burners. The nearby cemetery is full of tombstones for young men who recently died; the previous year, a young man had been found ripped apart in the forest. Is all this mere coincidence, as Dr. Semperweiss, a psychoanalyst who works at the main sanatorium, suggests? Or is there something sinister, maybe even supernatural, in the woods beyond Görbersdorf?

The answer to these questions might be a matter of perspective. Wojnicz’s only friend in the guesthouse, a young landscape painter named Thilo von Hahn, encourages him to pay attention to these odd events. On his own, Wojnicz doesn’t notice anything interesting about the tombstones; it’s not until Thilo presses him to look more closely that Wojnicz realizes that a young man seems to die each November. Together they look at Thilo’s prized possession, a painting by the Flemish artist Herri met de Bles called Landscape With the Offering of Isaac. The canvas looks normal to Wojnicz until he moves in closer: “Once the viewer’s attention was well and truly put to sleep, a new sight loomed out of the picture, the old contours arranged themselves into something completely different that had not seemed to be there before.” Wojnicz is horrified by what emerges—something “alive,” a grotesque face or body. Thilo then tells Wojnicz that once a year in Görbersdorf, the land “takes its sacrifice and kills a man.” Wojnicz thinks that his friend might be delusional from fever, but the eerie sense of being “watched by the local landscape” persists. Everything visible might be mirrored by a shadowy world.

[Read: A novel in which nightmares are all too real]

Yet for all the creepiness of Görbersdorf, one of the most disturbing parts of The Empusium is Tokarczuk’s depiction of the everyday misogyny of the time. No matter the topic at hand, each debate among the men at the guesthouse seems to come back to the problem of women. Do they have souls? Are they merely minor men? What social purpose do they serve? “We cannot regard the act of a woman as entirely conscious,” one character opines. “Female psychology has proved that a woman is at once a subject and object, and so her choices can only be partly conscious.” Not long after the death of his wife, Willi Opitz concludes that “motherhood is the one and only thing that justifies the existence of this troublesome sex.” In a note at the end of the novel, Tokarczuk explains that these conversations are paraphrased from more than 30 male authors, ranging from Ovid to Saint Augustine, Henry Fielding to William Butler Yeats. Underneath their discussions about democracy, rationalism, and religion lies one consensus: Women are subordinate and subhuman. If the narrative of the 20th century is one of male greatness and genius, a pantheon of figures such as Nietzsche and Freud, Tokarczuk insists that this history obscures a world of shameful sexism.

Female inferiority is perhaps the only topic on which the gentlemen of the guesthouse can agree. In one scene, a character proffers that the “surest sign” of brilliant literature “is that women do not like it.” Puffing on a cigar, he contends that women writers “often yield to the attraction of all manner of oddities: ghosts, dreams and nightmares, but also coincidences and other chance circumstances, with which they try to conceal their lack of talent in sustaining a consistent plot.” It’s easy to picture Tokarczuk writing this line with a kind of satirical glee, perhaps because her own work has consistently incorporated supernatural elements, through characters such as the Jewish mystic Jacob Frank in The Books of Jacob and the devoted astrologer Janina Duszejko in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Her oeuvre is marked by a dedication to the strange and the unbelievable.

For Tokarczuk, telling odd and sometimes incredible stories seems to be a political choice, a way of challenging the official histories that get passed down. She wants her reader to recognize that the history of modern, rational thought that has been so prized since the Enlightenment—the kind of thinking memorialized in The Magic Mountain—is simply one side of the story. Tokarczuk’s work points to an alternative world where humans may not be the only actors and reason is not the end of knowledge, an alternative history that finds its roots in the kinds of stories that go unrecorded.
The Empusium is a masterful novel, with a breadth of possible readings. I won’t spoil the twists and turns of its deft story—“sustaining a consistent plot” is just one of Tokarczuk’s many gifts—but I will say that the novel defied my expectations, turning me into Wojnicz confronted with the de Bles landscape. It’s fitting, then, that The Empusium’s title comes from a creature from Greek mythology: Empusa, a shape-shifting female who feeds on young men. Just when you think you have this novel in your sight, it shimmers into something else entirely.