The Brooklyn Rail

Tuberculosis is one of those diseases that is endlessly “encumbered by the trappings of metaphor,” as Susan Sontag put it. When characters appear with wan faces and flushed cheeks, insatiable appetites and an unshakable languor, we are to understand them not just as sick, but as living symbols. In such circumstances, it is possible to imagine that the disease is caused not by bacteria, but by misplaced or misspent energy. “In TB,” Sontag writes in Illness as Metaphor, “you are eating yourself up, being refined, getting down to the core, the real you.”

It is this thick layering of associations that Thomas Mann toyed with in his grand novel of ideas The Magic Mountain, in which the young Hans Castorp enters a tuberculosis sanatorium for a brief vacation and winds up staying for seven years. And it is also in this network of illness and metaphor that we find The Empusium, Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s retelling of The Magic Mountain, and her latest novel to be translated into English after the publication of Book of Jacobs in 2021 and winning the Nobel Prize in 2018.

Like Mann’s wide-eyed Castorp, The Empusium follows Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young Polish patient seeking treatment in the mountain town of Görbersdorf at the cusp of World War I. Wojnicz strolls and takes rest cures, eats and recuperates, but most of all listens. Herr Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen is full of opinions, and the humanist philologist August August, the Catholic traditionalist Longin Lukas, and the delicate artist Thilo von Hahn jab and parry late into the night. “Does man have a soul,” they wonder? “Does he always act selfishly? Monarchy or democracy? Is socialism an opportunity for mankind? Can one tell whether a text was written by a man or a woman? Are women responsible enough to be allowed voting rights?”

Heightening the chauvinism that was only subterranean in The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk places into the mouths of her characters misogynistic theories culled from the literary canon, from Augustine to Kerouac, Milton to Conrad. Amplified, too, is the sense of ambient dread that comes with cloistered living. The supposedly curative air on the mountain is so still as to be nearly claustrophobic, undisturbed even by the death of the town’s residents. (True to its subtitle, “A Health Resort Horror Story,” The Empusium is punctuated by mysterious deaths, and their perpetrator, as in Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, is rumored to be the landscape itself.)

By excavating the misogyny and diffuse threat that lie at the heart of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk is engaging in her own act of diagnosis. The novel seems to ask: what repressed energies exist in Mann’s novel that threaten to curdle it? And, by extension, what is making the social world, whether in 1913 or the present, so sick?

Her characters provide some hypotheses. Herr Lukas insists that disease is the result of the decline of Western civilization. Dr. Semperweiss claims that binaristic thinking is to blame, asserting that “if anyone thinks the world is a set of stark opposites, he is sick.”

The novel as a whole seems sympathetic to the latter claim—when Wojnicz finds self-fulfillment outside of the gender binary, their disease is miraculously cured. Such a turn of events is narratively satisfying, but on another level somewhat disappointing. Sontag, after all, wrote witheringly of the outsized responsibility for one’s own health that emerges when we imagine that “cure is thought to depend principally on the patient’s already sorely tested or enfeebled capacity for self-love.”

What’s more, by linking disease and individual repression, the novel risks falling into the very dynamics of exposure that it otherwise seeks to critique. Wojnicz’s anatomy gradually becomes one of the propulsive mysteries of the novel, and the doctors who attempt to uncover it are rightly framed as harbingers of violence. And yet, at a crucial moment, that prurient desire to see is granted full sway: readers are recruited into the ranks of these probing physicians as the narrator peers inside Wojnicz’s body and lays all its specificities bare.

The all-seeing narrator that facilitates such exposure is the voice of Tuntschi—doll-like effigies created by local charcoal burners for the sake of sexual release which in folklore grow animate in order to take their revenge. Their collective speech is an experiment in what Tokarczuk has called fourth-person narration, “a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen.” For all of the ways in which the urge to see is characteristic of the romantic vision of tuberculosis (exhuming the authentic self) and the harsh medical gaze, Tokarczuk insists that this perspective emerges not from extractive interest, but from a place of tenderness. “Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole,” she has said, a fact which demands, “a completely different kind of responsibility for the world.”

Perhaps, then, Tuntschi’s probing vision is best directed not at individuals, but at the body politic. Dr. Semperweiss insists that the residents of the town “take no notice of death,” but from the perspective of Tuntschi, death is not absent but merely obscured. It’s present in stewed rabbit heart and cooked goose. It’s latent in the violence directed towards women, both living and constructed. It even haunts Semperweiss’s own language, when he frames his patients as “soldiers fighting for the health of their lungs.” Though Semperweiss may view such buttoned-up regimentation as having nothing to do with death, Thilo will later dispel such a fantasy. “A uniform is an absolutely astonishing disguise,” he reflects. “What exactly do those men in uniforms do? They kill. What do they take pride in? Violence.”

What makes these men sick? If, in the metaphorical logic of tuberculosis, illness is an index of repression, then we might have our diagnosis. In pre-war Görbersdorf, as in the present day, barely-suppressed masculinist and nationalist violence can make it difficult to breathe.