Something Is Surviving

‘The mycological turn’ is a phrase coined ‘half-jokingly’ by Natalia Cecire and Samuel Solomon in an essay published last year in Critical Inquiry. It refers to ‘an enthusiasm for fungi in the various registers of engineering, business, art, medicine and wellness, and popular culture’: a fascination with the material properties of these strange organisms that tips into a sort of messianism, a forlorn hope that fungi may ‘save the world’, or at least live on ‘in capitalist ruins’, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wrote ten years ago in The Mushroom at the End of the World. They make an appearance in Star Trek: Discovery, crossing space and time and the life-death barrier; they are nature’s own revolutionary movement, subterranean, occult. They are ‘nature’s internet’, and like the internet, will survive, emitting their signals, long after all of us are gone.

‘If I weren’t a person, I’d be a mushroom,’ the narrator thinks in Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night.* In Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, when nature fights back against the hunters, a murder happens at the annual Mushroom Pickers’ Ball. In The Empusium, the key ingredient of Schwärmerei, the local liqueur, turns out to be Psilocybe semilanceata, the hallucinogenic liberty cap. ‘Sweet and bitter all at once’, it has ‘a hint of moss’ and of ‘slightly mouldy apples’, ‘a flavour of ants’, ‘the smell of a dog’s paws’. To drink it is to feel your attention sharpen, then comes ‘that sense of being tangled in minutiae’, ‘invaded by an entire system of offshoots of time’.

A character in the stupendous Books of Jacob is writing a Life of Sabbatai Tzvi, the so-called messiah of Smyrna, who elated then horrified Jews across the early modern diaspora by announcing himself in 1665, only to convert to Islam and take a job at the Ottoman court. Out here in the real world, the standard work on him is The Mystical Messiah by Gershom Scholem, whose Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is cited by Tokarczuk in an afterword as ‘foundational’ to the research she did for her enormous novel. The Sabbateans persisted long after their leader’s apostasy, meeting in secret, studying the Kabbalah, practising their peculiar, sacrilegious rites: they offered hope, anticipatory escapism, in a time of plague and pogroms, when ‘misery was so great it seemed … the machinery of the world [was] breaking down.’ They brought beauty and intellectual excitement to those who sought it, in the Zohar – the mysterious ‘Book of Splendour’ – and their other ancient, hidden works:

Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, his body – so naked and delicate – feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for the emergence – at once and out of nowhere – of a world.

This world, Tokarczuk tells us, ‘comes quick, though at first it resembles mould, delicate and pale’. Soon enough ‘it grows, and individual fibres connect, creating a powerful surrounding tissue,’ then hardens, ‘accompanied by … a gloomy vibration that makes the anxious atoms quake’, then turns to sand and drops of water. The earth, the turf, the mycelium, the horrible sex dolls the men make in The Empusium out of moss and twigs – all of these started out as God’s droppings, and all are still connected in a great network underground. Worms push down, ‘perhaps hoping to find the deeply hidden ruins of paradise’. A squirrel looks at a nut and sees ‘its future, dressed in this strange form’. ‘The mushroom spawn quivers, that vast, immense motherly structure transmits information to itself – where the intruders are, and in which direction they are bending their steps.’

‘We do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now,’ Tokarczuk said in the lecture she gave when she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize. The internet, she went on, has given rise to a massive ‘agora’ of competing first-person narratives, limited and draining, quite unable to comprehend the ‘systems of mutual connections and influences’ that join ‘people, plants, animals and objects’ in the ‘common space’ she calls ‘the world’. But this world is dying, what with the ‘climate emergency and the political crisis’, and ‘we are failing to notice.’ ‘Everything is separate from everything else.’

‘Could there be a story,’ Tokarczuk wonders, ‘that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self?’ Yes there can, she thinks, and it will be told by ‘a new kind of narrator – a “fourth-person” one … a mysterious, tender narrator … a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen’. ‘Seeing everything,’ she continues, ‘means recognising the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected,’ which results in ‘a completely different kind of responsibility for the world’.

It’s easy to see why such a ‘tender narrator’ would be keen on mushrooms for the ‘range’, in Cecire and Solomon’s phrase, of ‘aesthetic resources’ they appear to offer. They spread unnoticed, underground, over waste land and ruined spaces, networking across their hyphae, chatting to the trees. Besides which Poland is one of the most mycophilic countries in the world: lots of mushrooms in its national dishes, mushroom-picking as a national hobby, immortalised in Adam Mickiewicz’s nation-building romantic epic Pan Tadeusz (1834). But the problem with the mushrooms-as-metaphor aesthetic is that it encourages ‘modes of allegorical thinking that produce sites of hope … conducive to cruel optimism’ – as discussed in Lauren Berlant’s book of that name, hope that traps you and leaves you stuck. Mushrooms exist, in all their weird and wonderful glory, and humans eat them, study them, draw them, stand on them, make them stand for other things. But they can’t do the work necessary to save the world from the ‘climate emergency and the political crisis’, and it’s worse than idle to imagine that they can.

Is this fallacy mycological only, or is there a bigger problem with ‘sites of hope’ in other spheres? In novels, for example, no matter how full of life and tenderness and connection, no matter how much their ‘fourth-person’ narrator can see and know and care? ‘No doubt a genius will soon appear,’ Tokarczuk says in her Nobel lecture, ‘capable of constructing an entirely different, as yet unimaginable narrative … all-inclusive, rooted in nature,’ neither high nor lowbrow and taking ‘the division into genres very lightly’ – all of which sounds great, and pretty much like the novels she writes herself. Does she really think these novels have a role in ‘saving the world’ from the ‘climate emergency and the political crisis’? Or is that just the sort of thing you say when you win the Nobel Prize?

On the one hand, Tokarczuk deplores the internet for its shrillness and solipsism. On the other, her work would not be possible without its layers and hyperlinks, the infinite opportunities it opens for research: on John Amos Comenius, for example, whose idea of ‘pansophism … a dream of information available to everyone’ she discusses as a precursor to ‘Wikipedia, which I admire and support’. In The Books of Jacob, the news about the mycelial origins of the world does indeed come to the reader via a ‘mysterious, tender narrator’, as does a vision towards the end of the novel of Tokarczuk herself, typing on her computer, ‘fingers on a bright flat rectangle of light’. Imagine the world, then, as made of ‘nature’s internet’. What does that do to the way you think about the ‘climate emergency and the political crisis’? Does it mean you don’t have to think much about them at all?

The Empusium was Tokarczuk’s tenth novel to be published in Poland, where it came out in 2022. It is only the sixth of her books to appear in English. Like Drive Your Plow and House of Day, House of Night, it is set in mappable locations around the Sudety mountains of Lower Silesia, where Tokarczuk has had a house since the 1990s – thus presumably the ‘writer woman’ in Drive Your Plow, whose house Janina Duszejko keeps an eye on over the winter, and who drives down in May (‘Many people can afford to have one house in the city,’ Duszejko tells us early in her story, ‘and another – a sort of frivolous, childish one – in the country’). Like Drive Your Plow, The Empusium is short and fun and proudly generic in form – ‘a horror’, Tokarczuk called it in a recent conversation with the pop star Dua Lipa, who runs an online book club (‘We use a defence mechanism not to know about what hurts us, don’t we?’ Tokarczuk said of the endemic cruelty behind the murder-story structure of Drive Your Plow. ‘Slowly and slowly’ the familiar plotline takes the reader ‘closer and closer to this painful subject’). And like Drive Your Plow, The Empusium seems to be a side-project, written fast and to a deadline – Tokarczuk told Dua Lipa that Drive Your Plow only took her ‘three or four months’, while on a break from working on the 900-page, exceedingly research-heavy Books of Jacob. I don’t think it’s coincidental that The Empusium, with its echoes of Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain, came out as The Magic Mountain hit its centenary, an anniversary marked everywhere with articles about ‘Mann’s many prophetic ironies’ and ‘nuanced discussions’ and so on. No mention at all of the ‘painful subject’ that, as Tokarczuk sees it, powers his novel from deep within.

The Empusium is set in September 1913, in a mountain resort now called Sokołowsko and part of the Lower Silesian voivodeship of Poland, then called Görbersdorf and part of the German Reich. In 1854, Görbersdorf became the site of Europe’s first tuberculosis sanatorium, its 570-metre altitude placing it well within ‘the essential range for treating lung diseases’, its air clean and rich in ozone, its height not so excessive as to strain the heart. The idea was copied by Alexander Spengler in Davos, Switzerland, which is where Thomas Mann set the tale of Hans Castorp, the ‘simple-minded hero’ whose three-week trip to visit his ailing cousin morphs into seven years. Tokarczuk herself has called The Empusium a ‘retelling’ of The Magic Mountain, which she has read ‘at least six times’, she told Marta Figlerowicz in an interview for the Paris Review in 2023, the third or fourth time finding it ‘extremely funny’. You don’t need to have read Mann’s novel to enjoy the Tokarczuk, but if you do look at the way she shuffles the two of them together, it quickly becomes apparent where the hilarity – or something – lies.

‘Empusium’, Tokarczuk explained to Dua Lipa, is a word she invented, a cross between ‘symposium’ – ‘the men’s feast in ancient Greece, attended by all the philosophers’ – and ‘Empusa’, a chthonic she-monster mentioned by Aristophanes in The Frogs, which is acted out by one of Tokarczuk’s consumptives during a therapeutic picnic on a hill. The precise form of the Empusa is never clear, but they speak as a collective throughout the novel, and make themselves heard from the very first sentence: ‘The view is obscured by clouds of steam from the locomotive … To see everything we must look beneath them.’ ‘Here beneath the table there are five pairs of feet, and soon a sixth will appear.’ ‘We are drawn to the cracks between the floorboards.’ ‘We like inspecting boots.’

The novel’s hero – or its Hans Castorp substitute – is a young man called Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student of hydroengineering and sewage systems from Lwów in Galicia, better known since the Second World War as Lviv in Ukraine. His father has sent him to the Görbersdorf Kurhaus for treatment of his various ailments, which include a cough, a spot of phthisis on the lung, nipples and lymph nodes that are ‘slightly enlarged’, as well as ‘apathy’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘inability to conform’. Thilo Von Hahn, a young, thin and extremely unwell art historian from Berlin, keeps looking at him, ‘a touch ironic and a touch expectant, as if willing Wojnicz to guess something’.

Like The Magic Mountain, The Empusium contains a great many long and portentous conversations among a group of patients with nothing better to do than to drink in the ‘strange mixture of death and light-headedness’, as Mann put it in an essay from 1953, of the pre-Streptomycin mountain cure. As a young reader, Tokarczuk confessed, she’d drawn out ‘diagrams’ of the debates staged between the liberal, progressive Settembrini, ‘on his penny-pipe of reason’, and the ‘luxurious and spiteful’ Naphta, said to be based on the younger Georg Lukács. Her text barely distinguishes between her Settembrini and Naphta stand-ins. Both perorate about ‘female psychology’, ‘the female brain’ and about woman representing ‘a form of atavism’. She has paraphrased these bits from Augustine, Burroughs, Cato, Darwin and more than thirty other exemplars of ‘the misogyny that pops like a blackhead if you press the surface of most canonical prose even slightly’. You could call it slapdash, this cutting-and-pasting-in of sages, or you can see it as strategic. Reduce them to background, and who knows what will come to the foreground instead.

In The Magic Mountain, Castorp has been an orphan since his parents ‘dropped away in the brief period between his fifth and seventh birthdays’. Wojnicz’s mother died only a couple of months after giving birth to him, ‘enfeebled by the effort of producing a child and by some sort of inexplicable depression’: ‘There was something wrong with these mothers; it was as if they did a terribly dangerous job.’ So he is brought up by his father, with the help of his peasant nanny, Gliceria, who pets and hugs him and cuts him the crusty heel off the bread: he remembers her fondly when the Görbersdorf landlady brings him a wonderful breakfast of coffee and cocoa, sheep’s cheese, lard, cherry jam and ‘hard-boiled eggs, two, in lovely faience cups, covered with little hen-shaped hats’. By evening, however, the landlady is dead, her corpse laid out on the dining-room table in all its womanly pleats and frills. ‘In Mieczysław Wojnicz’s family world, the women had vague, short, dangerous lives, and then they died, remaining in people’s memories as fleeting shapes without contour.’

Mann hinted at complications in Castorp’s sexuality by giving his female crush-object, the ‘listless, worm-eaten and Kirghiz-eyed’ Clavdia Chauchat, a look of Hippe, the (male) schoolmate he once tremulously asked to lend him a pencil. Like the boy who gave Wojnicz a ‘shiver of pleasure’ when he used to rummage in his wooden pencil-box, ‘touching the graphite points with a fingertip’, Tokarczuk’s method hints glancingly, and yet with menace, at what might lie beneath the tops of Mann’s monstrosities. An Empusa figure, for example, appears only once in Mann’s novel, when ‘our good Hans Castorp’ gets lost in a blizzard and falls into a dream of sun-kissed nymphs and goatherds that ends in a Doric temple with ‘half-naked old women … their drooping witches’ breasts and tits long as fingers’, dismembering a baby and eating it. Tokarczuk’s update links this tedious vision with Mann’s slighting mentions of Emerentia, the ‘dwarf’ who works in the Magic Mountain restaurant, finding a saint of the same name in the recently built and tiny Görbersdorf Eastern Orthodox church. Tokarczuk has long been keen on little churches and local folk saints: House of Day, House of Night has a strand about Wilgefortis, a bearded woman usually depicted being crucified. Emerentia, The Empusium tells us, represents Christ’s great-grandmother, sometimes seen with a tree growing from her abdomen, sometimes with Jesus, Mary and Mary’s mother in a matrilineal embrace.

As the horror plot progresses, the satire is laid on thicker and thicker. The grotesque overeating, for example, that was such a feature of sanatorium cures gives us a stew made from the exploded hearts of terrified rabbits, as well as stringy white noodles that are actually strands of semen gathered from ‘a certain parasite of freshwater fish’. And yet, the peripety, when it comes, is gentle. Thilo, the dying art historian, shows Wojnicz a 16th-century Flemish painting, Landscape with the Offering of Isaac by Herri met de Bles, and our hero learns to pay attention to the things you see and yet don’t see, because your focus has been trained on something else:

The image converted into its essential components – spots and streaks, brush strokes and tiny flecks that grouped into vague, imprecise shapes. And 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, but must have been, since now he could see it.

Out on the hillside for a final woodland walk, Wojnicz is forced to confront the mysterious presence he had been avoiding, although it has been there, quietly watching, all the time. ‘Our bodies have an experimental consistency, they are occasional, dependent on tides and air pressure … Our eyes penetrate deep inside.’ At the end of his seven-year stay on the Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp returns to ‘the flatland’, where he is last seen under fire, staggering through mud and over the bodies of his comrades. Wojnicz is in Görbersdorf for barely a single season. And yet it is long enough for the Empusa to show him their way to a more human sort of life.

Olga Tokarczuk​ was born in the small town of Sulechów in western Poland in 1962, the older daughter of teacher parents, her father a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party. She was nineteen and studying psychology in Warsaw when martial law was declared, but never liked the Catholic religiosity of the Solidarity movement: ‘I identified as an anarchist and then a Maoist,’ she told Figlerowicz. ‘I wanted total revolution.’ She was living in Wałbrzych in Lower Silesia, not far from the Czech border, in 1989, married with a child, reading Jung and working as a therapist: ‘I knew that the world was changing, but working with alcoholics had exposed me to such human misery that I couldn’t bring myself to be optimistic.’ The collapse of communism did however leave her able to travel, read freely, make her way as a writer of fiction. Her first novel, the as yet untranslated Journey of the People of the Book, was published in 1993.

The first of her novels to be widely read in English was Flights, originally published in Polish in 2007 and in English in 2017. Like House of Day, House of Night, it is a collection – a ‘constellation’, she calls it – of memoir, short essays, dream diary, as well as antiquarian interludes, interrupted short stories, metaphysical musings, old maps. Unlike her other translated novels, however, it isn’t committed to place but to the joy of travel, seeing constant movement as a form of escape: Bieguni, its Polish title, refers to an Eastern Orthodox sect that saw endless pilgrimage as a way of absolving original sin. It was much admired, but I didn’t get it. I found it bland and soft and too easy somehow, too empty of ‘disagreeables’, as Tom Paulin once said about the interestingly comparable Angela Carter. Instead of finding a way at least to acknowledge that travel in the 21st century for millions of people is forced, she dots her book with anecdotal extracts from a well-worn history of anatomical curiosities: Chopin’s heart, pickled in cognac, plastination as practised by Gunther von Hagens, and so on. But why?

By the time Flights came out, Tokarczuk had already been working for a decade on what would become The Books of Jacob, published in Polish in 2014 and in Jennifer Croft’s English translation in 2021. The figure at the heart of it, Jacob Frank, called by some ‘the Jewish Luther’ and by others ‘the false messiah’, is drawn from historical fact. Born in a muddy corner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1726, he travelled throughout the Ottoman Empire as a merchant, living among the Dönmeh, a Sabbatean sect that lived outwardly as Muslims while privately continuing with their ‘strange deeds’ – including pork-eating – as before. Tokarczuk’s Jacob is ‘tall, well-built’, foreign and yet familiar, fearless, with ‘that inexplicable self-confidence, founded in nothing, or perhaps in the existence of some internal centre of gravity that makes the person feel like a king’. His ideas were wild and yet compelling, and carried hidden inside them ‘a strange, almost inconceivable gift’:

It is a question of uniting the three religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity … At around noon, the idea seems shameful. By the afternoon, it’s up for discussion. By evening it’s been assimilated, and late at night it’s perfectly obvious that everything’s exactly as Jacob says.

Late at night, yet another aspect of the idea, which they hadn’t really taken into consideration before, occurs to them – that once they are baptised, they will cease to be Jews, at least as far as anyone can tell. They will become people – Christians. They will be able to purchase land, open shops in town … Their heads spin with possibilities.

Tokarczuk began researching the Frankists as part of what she calls her ‘private studies’, ‘a long and unflagging fascination with every kind of heterodoxy’. Like many alternative-minded people of her generation, she may have come across the Kabbalah first via Jung, along with astrology and mandalas and all the rest. Poland, she discovered, had its very own home-grown mystic multitude, with roots in the Zohar and branches across the Eastern Borderlands: the topic was a gift for a writer of her interests, a gift she has returned in spades. One reason for the novel’s strange and enormous shape is that it mostly sticks close to the historical records of the Frankists and their times: I skimmed what I could of Tokarczuk’s sources, and I was astonished to see how much research she had done. Another is that it is a family saga, basically, gathering and rising and spreading and diminishing, with a long tail that dwindles into the present day. Dozens of far-flung relatives and contacts are given paragraphs and chapters in which they are seen, mostly, from the outside, like figures on a frieze: the clever wife, the antisemitic bishop, the prophetess who looks ‘sunny and bright’ when ‘carrying a little bowl of onion’, but who goes all droopy and gloomy, ‘with dishevelled hair, sloppy clothing, an absent gaze’, when she makes her way to the candlelit ceremony in which she must stand half-naked while Jacob and his elders queue up to suck her breasts.

I was gloomy myself, stuck in a place and situation I could not get away from, when I started reading The Books of Jacob towards the end of last year. It cheered me up so much that I immediately read it twice more, finding new details and connections, more and more things to love in it. Stories sprout and link up with one another in markets and marriages and riots and crowd scenes, over decades and across the great Eurasian trade routes, building a world that shifts and breathes as ideas change about that world and its foundations, Jewish and Christian, mercantile and bourgeois, practical and mystical, gnostic and occult. People pop up, vanish, then reappear hundreds of pages later, only now they’re in the Habsburg Empire and have changed their names. Pages are numbered backwards, ‘in a nod to books written in Hebrew’, which also plays with the very best thing about immensely long novels, the countdown of pages to the end times: the impending loss, the eager excitement, and then the secret thrill when you realise you’ve forgotten what happened at the beginning, so now you’ll get to read it all again. It was like watching that boy riffling the tips of Mieczysław Wojnicz’s pencils, shiver after shiver of the purest pleasure of the text.

Frankly, if you knew what I had to do during my period of stuckness, you would agree that I deserved all the fun I could get. But I was aware that much worse things were happening in the world beyond me, and that I was hiding from them, as has been my lifelong habit, in a book. Unless what I was doing was in some way bigger than merely reading a fun novel, if reading a fun novel could be, in itself, a useful world-historical act: if I might be, for example, the capital-R Reader of Tokarczuk’s Nobel lecture, sympoietic sidekick to ‘the Author’ in the struggle to save ‘the common world’.

In his rave review for the LRB (24 March 2022), Fredric Jameson wrote that Tokarczuk had in The Books of Jacob ‘learned to do the impossible: to write the novel of the collective’, a novel that, as he explained in The Antinomies of Realism (2013), demonstrated ‘the incorporation of individual characters into a greater totality’, which ‘alone can certify the presence of History as such’. And it’s true, I think, that she does do this, with her teeming characters, every one of them particular and yet seen mainly in relation to others, and the way she slips into an indirect they-voice when Jacob has his followers around him: ‘They nod. They know these stories … So this is how it is: everything is connected with everything, carefully linked.’ But I’m not as sure as Jameson was what these connections amount to. Of course ‘everything is connected with everything’ in Jacob’s stories, because connecting everything with everything is a core skill for a charismatic leader. In 1760, for example, Jacob was imprisoned for thirteen years in the monastery of Częstochowa, famous for its Black Madonna: the icon hid, he said, the Shekhinah, the Kabbalistic divine in its feminine aspect, which, like him, had to be ‘raised from the ashes and allowed to save the world’. A nearby cave system links up to another, five hundred miles away, ‘in the shape of the letter alef’, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and to the Cave of the Patriarchs, last resting place of Abraham, ‘that travelled here after us from Hebron’. A messiah needs a personal mythology, and will make it from whatever bits and bobs he finds.

But a problem noted by Jameson for ‘the historical novel today’ is that of historicity within the novel itself, which as he says ‘demands a temporal span far exceeding the biological limits of the individual human organism’. Tokarczuk clearly felt the weight of this problem too – no wonder Jameson loved her novel so much – and attempts to solve it by cantilevering the cave-shaped-like-the-alef business far beyond the frame of the narrative by giving Jacob an ancient and invented grandma called Yente, whom we see in an early chapter bridging realism and magic by swallowing an amulet that suspends her for ever on the point of death. Encumbered and embarrassed, her relatives hide her inconveniently undying body in the ‘cave shaped like the alef’, from which her spirit rises to hover over everything, ‘always present and see[ing] all’– rivers, borders, lights, farmland, dead people, babies, clerical desks and whole metaphysical systems, ‘all those bridges, hinges, gears and bolts’. In terms of technique, it’s beautifully done: a folk-art omniscient narrator that both contains and is contained by the technical sophistication of the author, stitches that are also pixels, pixels placed on a computer keyboard with a loving human hand. In terms of authenticity, I guess it depends on what you think authenticity needs to be: craft, artefact, deepfake, witty museum shop souvenir tea towel, pastiche Jewish magic-realist cliché.

And it turns out to be Yente, as the novel speeds up towards the end times, who is the projected ‘fourth-person’ narrator, rising even further to engage in a brief tussle of infinite-regress ping-pong with her creator on page 27, after which the diegetic body of the novel stops. And it is Yente, too, who sees ‘the messianic machine, how it works … like that mill standing over the river’, during one of her Chagall-like astral flights – and thus the wonderful quote with which Jameson ended his review:

The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person – it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists. And that’s why you have to cultivate it like the most delicate plant, blow on it, water it with tears, put it in the sun during the day, move it into a warm room in the night-time.

‘The delicate seedling that must be watered, and sheltered, and sunned, and grieved, sounds like socialism,’ Mark Greif wrote in a Harper’s tribute to Jameson when he died last year. It sounds like socialism, but it twists and bends for ever, like a screensaver, far beyond the horizon of history, on a laptop outside time.

There really is a ‘cave shaped like the alef’, by the way, close to Koroliwka in the west of Ukraine, which is thought to be the historic Frank’s birthplace. ‘Thanks to the pansophy of the internet’, Tokarczuk discovered that in the 1940s, five Jewish families hid in it for a year, surviving to emigrate to Canada, where ‘they tell their story, so improbable that few believe them.’ You can see why she would want to fit in this ‘miracle’ somewhere. It’s true, it’s amazing, it acknowledges in a small way the Polish Jewish lives and cultures destroyed in the Holocaust, a gesture felt, perhaps, to be especially necessary when The Books of Jacob was being finished, with the Law and Justice Party on the rise.

But isn’t this the worst thing about the ‘pansophy of the internet’ too: there will always turn out to be a true story, and ways to link it to lots of others, and to build whatever sort of arc you want to build. Conspiracy or soteriology, it’s all the same to the machine, and good things happen sometimes, but that is not the same as salvation existing, any more than the survival of that flower on your sill. ‘The memory of the cave in the shape of the alef … had been preserved,’ Tokarczuk writes, when Yente’s great-great-great-great-great-grand-daughter tells her relatives not to go to Barszczów to register with the Germans. ‘Never trust any authority,’ she also tells them. Which is surely much more to the point.

Mushrooms,​ trees, turf, twigs, bushes, moss-covered stones: nature is a force in The Empusium, incoherent and disorganised, yet also personified, sort of, in the collective voice that tells the story, that sees and knows it all. It sits there, in its Lower Silesian valley, in much the way that Janina Duszejko sits in hers in Drive Your Plow. Genres enclose these novels like rings of mountains, which is to say, they bring shelter and containment, though there are always gaps and passes. Part satire, part scrapbook, part picture-postcard tribute to a beloved piece of country, both these novels work really well. The old forms impose limits on Tokarczuk’s immense pansophic ambition, and from that tension emerges something new.

The Yente-in-her-cave stuff in The Books of Jacob occasions beauty and mystery, but the sprawl of the image – to infinity and beyond – becomes folksy and sentimental, and worse, weirdly 1990s, early internet even, in its utopian faith in connection as an inherent good. And yet Tokarczuk frets throughout her Nobel lecture about the consequences of this easy access to infinite information for storytelling, narrative, literature, ‘the world’. She worries about internet TV series, the way they can go on for ever, if they have the ratings, dropping all consistency and catharsis, inducing ‘in us a trance’. She worries about fake facts, fake news, Cambridge Analytica, ‘market processes’. ‘A dream fulfilled is often disappointing. It has turned out we are not capable of bearing this enormity of information.’

An essay from 2022 called ‘Ognosia’ extends the argument, with the word defined as ‘a narratively oriented, ultrasynthetic process’ that looks for order ‘both in narratives themselves and in details … the so-called ontological odds and ends’. This makes sense as an author’s personal allegory of what she’s doing as she’s writing – ‘ontological odds and ends’, it seems to me, exactly describes all the rocks and trees and sex dolls in The Empusium. And yet, it’s terribly Tokarczuk, somehow, to invent a new word instead of thinking a bit harder about the old words she might have used instead. Pleroma, for example – Gnostic-Jungian divine fullness. Or totality, which would have thrilled Jameson even more: history being, as Tokarczuk notes at the very end – no, really, the very very end – of The Books of Jacob, ‘the unceasing attempt to understand what it is that has happened alongside all that might have happened as well or instead’.

Tokarczuk, I’m sure, is properly serious about the ‘climate emergency and the political crisis’ and well aware that Gnostic-Jungian mysticism doesn’t cut it. But she seems too engrossed in fictional world-building to think as carefully about the conjuncture as using a word like ‘totality’ might entail. The ‘Ognosia’ essay in particular reminded me of that Barrel of Monkeys game: chaos theory swings on Lynn Margulis swings on ‘sesamicity’ (‘the trove is wide open, overwhelming us with the wealth of services offered, of goods, types, patterns, varieties, cuts, styles, trends’); metaphor swings on metaphor swings on metaphor. ‘That traditional, elaborate construction of man apart from the rest of the world is collapsing, like the collapse of a massive, rotted tree.’ And yet,

the tree does not cease to exist, after all – only its status changes. From now on it will be a place of even more intense life: the germination of other plants upon it, its colonisation by fungi and saprophytes, settlement by insects and other animals. The tree itself will be reborn out of its growths, seeds, roots.

Such allegories, Cecire and Solomon write in their essay on ‘Mycoaesthetics’, appear to offer ‘survival in the abstract’: ‘something is surviving,’ ‘the bodies of the dead are recycled,’ ‘there is hope’ – but not for ‘marginalised populations’ vulnerable to ‘premature death from climate change, austerity, accumulation by dispossession … labour exploitation’. And, surely, attempting to understand ‘what it is that has happened alongside all that might have happened as well or instead’ involves thinking about such populations too. In the words of one of my favourite bits in The Books of Jacob: ‘Suddenly it seems to him that aside from all those lofty theses … there remains something very important, a kind of dark ground with the sticky consistency of cake batter onto which all words and ideas fall as though into tar.’

The obduracy of this ‘dark ground’ returns at the ending before the very end of The Books of Jacob: ‘There is a buzzing sound, the grim sound of matter, and the world falls into obscurity’ – the author has powered down her laptop. There follows some more Gnostic twiddling to take the edge off while we all slink away. Mieczysław Wojnicz ends The Empusium more modestly, with ‘somewhere at the very bottom of his body … a sort of gentle vibration, something small and happy, something exciting,’ as he leaves the valley of Görbersdorf behind. All her characters know it, though Tokarczuk herself can’t quite face up to it: the work to make the world more liveable can only start once the novel has been finished. Out there, with everybody else, in the actual world.