Rating the most trans passages in Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid
I recently read the colossal surrealist novel Solenoid (first published in 2015, with the English translation by Sean Cotter debuting in 2022), and one of my most persistent reactions was ... "is anybody else seeing how fucking trans this book is?"
The esteemed Romanian novelist Mircea Cărtărescu is, as far as the world knows, a cis man. (Presumably as far as he knows, too.) And yet, passage after passage of Solenoid gagged me with how vividly it described extremely specific – honestly almost on-the-nose – transfeminine feelings. It feels palpably like the kind of book a trans woman might write if they were haunted by gender dysphoria their whole life, never transitioned, but just got incredibly good at squeezing those feelings for every drop of surreal melancholy literary juice.
Obviously: I do not know Mircea Cărtărescu, and I cannot actually claim with certainty that he is trans. But when you've spent decades nursing the specific weirdness of suppressed transness in yourself, you can often smell the same thing on others. Solenoid is pungent with this smell, and honestly not in a way that requires drawing a particularly long bow. Like, shit gets pretty goddamn explicit. In context, the following passages are surrounded by a lot of dazzle camouflage – weird stuff is always happening in this book, so a lot of readers probably simply don't dwell on how often this gender stuff seems to come up – but let's take a trip through Solenoid's transest passages, and you can tell me if you're seeing what I'm seeing.
My femininity is nothing new or surprising for me. I have always felt that my hidden sister—manifest in me via the strange imagination of my mother, who dressed me, until I was four, in girl’s clothes (until the vision of the circular room with an operating table in the middle, under bare, raw stars)—was still inside me, a shrunken conjoined twin but not dead, there in my mind, in a space from which I have heard continual whispers, pleadings, sighs. An oppressed discourse, thin and pure, lives permanently inside me, lacking the resonating chamber of an Adam’s apple, as though within my being, the sun of masculinity blocked the feminine moon, but her phantom still floats in the luminous evening sky. What a relief for me to be feminine! How much do I owe to the ambiguity of my mind!
TRANS RATING: 7/10. The sun of masculinity is blocking your feminine moon, Mircea? You treasure the 'hidden sister' living silently inside you? You're taking refuge in the genderlessness of your mind? I know that tactic all too well, honey, and it has limits.
As always, I tremble: seeing myself, in mirrors or photographs, has always felt sinister to me, as paradoxical as a sword that cuts itself. I am sure that for the better part of my childhood, if I accidentally saw myself in the mirror, the broken one with worn silver my mother kept on a nail, I didn’t recognize myself, or, better put, I didn’t recognize that it was me. [...] Suddenly, I saw myself in the mirror, for the first time in my life I saw and recognized myself, with horror, like in autoscopic dreams, as though without my knowledge a mad scientist had cloned me and, without warning, put my doppelganger in front of me. It only lasted a moment, but it was a moment of unique and violent brilliance. That was the moment I saw myself, surrounded by a golden fluid that made the rest of the world seem dark: a little, brown-haired girl, darker than the other kids, and thin, much thinner than anyone. Eyes so black they looked violet, surrounded by circles most kids didn’t have. A long, pale neck, two clavicles bulging under the skin, above the stiff, open collar of my printed pajamas. A little body, light as paper, a child that was me and yet had its own age and its own world, a special and strange world, there, behind the glass wall.
TRANS RATING: 9/10. Sure, sometimes people hate seeing their own reflections for trans-unrelated reasons – but then the narrator does recognise him/herself in the mirror for the first time, and she's a fucking girl. A jarring, autoscopic experience of recognition in a childhood where every other experience of the 'boy' reflection felt sinister. I mean, the only way this could get more on-the-nose is if ...
I can remember how happy I was to be a girl, how proud I was of my braids tied with elastic from old underpants, I remember my red, patent leather sandals that my mother kept for a long time … But the feminine part of the chimera that I was disappeared the day my mother took me, along an unknown path, through the unbearable whiteness of the blizzard, “to play with Doru’s toys.” My dresses and braids disappeared that day, forever, and no one ever took me for a girl again. Today, it feels as though I had been a girl in a previous life, as though the girl left a hole shaped like her body in the petrified ash of my mind, like those left by the people incinerated at Pompeii. I have kept the ash-blond braids in their yellowed paper bag. One end is cut and tied tightly with a rubber band, the other is frayed, emerging from the soft braid of hair like the tip of a delicate brush. Often, at night, when I am looking at my poor little treasures, I take the braids out, I lay them across my palm like soft animals, then I go to the mirror and hold them up to either side of my head. A strange chimera looks back at me: adult-child and man-woman, happy-unhappy in his only certainty: loneliness.
TRANS RATING: 10/10. Okay, Jesus Christ. The dysphoric misery of this passage is genuinely overwhelming. The holding of her cut-off childhood braids to the side of her head? The confusion of all identity except for that of loneliness? 'A girl left a hole shaped like her body in the petrified ash of my mind'??!?!? 😭
Let's retreat to the comforts of literature; surely that will help.
“The master of dreams, the great Issachar, sat in front of the mirror, his spine against its surface, his head hanging far back, sunk deep into the mirror. Then Hermana appeared, master of the twilight, and she melted into Issachar’s chest, until she completely disappeared.” [...] This fragment from Kafka answers all. [...]
Last night I read Kafka until one in the morning, stopping at the fragment with Issachar and Hermana. I couldn’t go any farther. I don’t think a truer thing has ever been written in the world. Master of dreams, master of twilight. Issachar losing himself in the mirror, Hermana melting into Issachar’s chest like it was another mirror, infesting his flesh and blood with melancholy. I placed the book facedown on the bed and walked to the mirror. I stared at the mirror for the rest of night. From the start, I realized I should be naked, like Issachar, like Hermana. I quickly removed my clothes and was shocked to see that in the mirror, I was a woman. I had golden hair that lit up the entire bedroom, I had slightly saggy, pear-shaped breasts. In the room I was Issachar, in the mirror I was Hermana, my sister hidden by the all-too-powerful light of reality. “That’s why,” I said to myself, looking into the eyes of the woman with my features, wrapped in the spiderweb of her hair, “that’s why the master of dreams sank his head so deeply into the mirror: there he could see Hermana, who had melted into his chest.” Because Hermana is always on the other side of the mirror, she is, in fact, the other side, the parallel world in which Issachar is a woman.
I pressed my hands to hers, my chest to her breasts, my lips to her lips. And then she melted into my chest, where I feel her even now, like an overwhelming emotion.
TRANS RATING: 15/10. This fragment of Kafka's diary 'answers all', we are told, and what does it concern? The way that a woman can exist inside a man, 'hidden by the all-too-powerful light of reality'. Again the motif of mirrors as a portal to other, better realities: 'the parallel world in which Issachar is a woman.' In this world, of course, Cărtărescu just writes shit like this and makes me lose my fucking mind.
Here's the last one, and by far the longest. You won't regret reading it through.
Yes, I remembered that nausea again, that vertigo: I had been raised as a girl, with long, soft braids my mother didn’t cut until I was four. Since then I’ve kept them in a paper envelope, by now yellowed with time. I had somehow passed, even now I don’t know in what way, from one side of the mountain of sex and humanity to the other. Somewhere in my interior palace of frozen marble, perhaps in its forbidden chamber, the little prisoner was still living, a dirty and starving little girl, her dress in tatters, her lips sewn shut, her black eyes glaring insanely: my eyes. At night I could hear her desperate fists against the cold wall that separated us, thumps that I converted into crosses, stars, gears, and other symbols that eventually spelled out the great escape plan. For my captive sister (or, perhaps, for my daughter), I wrote, over the course of last night, a kind of story; I finished it only at dawn, after which I decided to not go to school and slept until afternoon. I am copying it down here, not from pride, but from the feeling that this is where it is meant to be:
Once, in a suffocating and incomprehensible world, a woman became pregnant. Since it was not a man but a kind of foreboding whose shadow she felt, she knew from the start that she would bear a girl. The woman had once inhabited a creature like her, and now she was also inhabited. Out of the four hundred transparent eggs she carried, like an insect, in her abdomen, one had filled her stomach like an enormous grape.
Just after the girl was born, at a hospital in a distant neighborhood, her mother told the doctors to wait, because she felt something else in her womb. And under their amazed eyes, she gave birth to a sack of ivory skin, like a fish bladder, but the size of a child. There were unclear markings on the soft skin, scribbled in chemical pencil. The doctors resected the sack with a shining scalpel and took it apart on the birthing table, next to the exhausted mother. An unbelievable sight appeared before them. Inside, nicely arranged in little pockets, there were warm, living organs. Fingers, teeth, an eye with a brown gaze, some little bones, some soft tubes, a kidney … And in three larger pockets, made of the same rosy skin, three hearts beat lazily: one made of crystal, one of iron, and one of lead. “This is the first child to come into the world with spare parts,” one of the doctors said, suddenly calm. In fact, it was a good idea, he repeated with a smile. You don’t have to be a doctor to understand that one of the biggest mistakes in the divine plan was to let the delicate human body go through life without its delicate little features—braided into a complicated, soft machine—being able to regenerate. Maybe from now on all children will be born like this, the doctor thought, full of hope. But neither before nor after did another child appear with such enhancements.
The child grew up on the edge of town, in the yard of a house with yellow walls. She had no heart. In the sole tree in the yard, a pear tree loaded with juicy fruits, her mother made a little swing. But the girl preferred to torture the critters that lived in the grass and dirt. She never looked anyone in the eyes. She only spoke when she was alone. For hours, she would stand at the wrought iron gate, watching the rust slowly advance over the rain-wet metal.
Despairing, her mother remembered the hearts from the skin packet. One afternoon, while the girl napped faceup, as she always did, in her room filled with useless toys, her mother approached and unfastened two of the skin buttons, like little navels, on the left side of her chest. An organic door opened and an oval space, lined in pink and violet, appeared behind her ribs. Her mother, with infinite delicacy, inserted the heart made of warm, soft crystal.
The girl woke overcome with a happiness she had never known before. Her skin and hair glowed, her eyes became lively and quick. For the first time, she saw the dolls that literally filled the room. For the first time, too, she saw her mother, the biggest doll of all, and she hugged her with all her heart. They went outside, and suddenly the blue sky, full of summer clouds, and the giant flowers overwhelmed her. She smelled the tree sap, she touched the crumbs of the earth. For the first time, she opened the door of the house and saw the street that went from the house to the neighborhood school.
After a few years, she went to that school; she looked at her classmates through the prism of her plastic ruler. She tasted bitter ink on her tongue. She drew letters in chalk that screeched terribly on the glass-cov-ered blackboard. At lunch, she ate her sandwich and grapes, then she played with her classmates, in a daze, in the schoolyard with melancholy basketball hoops.
As she grew, her girl’s body changed in subtle ways. In the afternoons after school, she closed herself in her room and began a strange ritual. She opened the cooler at the head of her bed, kept in the chest with sheets and blankets, and she took out the old sack of spare organs, and she began to attach them to certain specially shaped places on her body. She became the girl with seven fingers on each hand, the girl with an eye in her forehead, the girl with ears on her knees, the girl with lips on her stomach. She looked at herself in the mirror with the amusement of a child wearing her mother’s dress and high heels.
This is how she came to change her heart. First, she put the iron one in, and, inside her chest, the iron turned red, like in a forge. It burned, it stunned her, it made her long for an unknown thing, unwanted but as necessary as air, the lack of which suffocated her. She immediately pulled this raw and ravishing heart from her chest, determined to never use it again. Next she put in the lead heart, and it became a sack of thick, gray liquid, with somber glints of indigo. An unbelievable sadness and a rending, dark melancholy, without horizon and without a future, overwhelmed her. Nothing really existed, the world was absurd, bound in infinite night and oblivion. Better you had never been born, better to get through your days as fast as possible. It was unbearable. She took out the new heart with the last of her strength and decided to leave it forever in the sack with organic pockets. Only the crystal heart was real. That was the only one she wanted ever to feel in her chest.
But the spare hearts didn’t last forever. In the fall, when the school-yard chestnuts hung low under a stormy sky, the girl felt the light from the crystal heart grow dim. As the days went on, it beat more and more quietly. When she held it in her hands, in front of the mirror, she could clearly see a kind of salt, a kind of calcium cloud over what was once clear, like pearls aging inside a jewelry box. In the end, the crystal heart turned dull and cracked.
Since anything was better than an inhuman life without a heart, the girl started to wear the incandescent iron heart. She lived with her new heart through her adolescence and youth. She fell in love, and from love she suffered terribly. She married, had children, then divorced. She remarried. Happiness and unhappiness alternated rapidly with this restless heart, both of them pushed to the threshold where they became unbearable pain. As an adult, she who had been a girl gave birth in turn to two children and raised them until they grew and left her as well. A confused life dragged her to the bottom of the river, without a straw to cling to.
After the woman’s second child married, the incandescence of the iron heart burned out, little by little. The metal had been cooling for years, but now it became a heavy, dark sludge under her left breast. Looking at her second heart in the mirror, the woman saw it was covered in ash. She didn’t dare to look any higher up her body, afraid to see a face devastated by time. Resigned, she knew that there was nothing left but the fearsome heart of lead.
She returned to her childhood house. The lead heart hung heavy in its place in her chest. It spread a black light around her body, a light of extinction and erasure. She lay down on her mother’s old bed and waited for the end. Images from her childhood and her adolescence flashed through her mind. She lived for years in complete solitude, in the stale air, in the scent of medication. Rarely would she rise from the sheets to look in the mirror at the heart she held in her hands. One evening when she felt more abandoned and more unhappy than ever, she pulled out her heart, determined to break it against the floor. But one unexpected twitch made her stop. She suddenly felt how her lead heart, instead of destroying itself like the others, had become as fleshy and heavy as a fruit. Frightened, she put it back inside her weak, emaciated chest. Now she knew that the miracle would happen, that a fourth, unearthly heart would be given to her, from now on, forever.
The fist-sized organ, fed with her suffering and disappointment, metamorphosed little by little, it took on soft corners and curves like the ends of a growing fern. The old woman could hardly wait for the end of her days to see how her heart had changed. Soon she saw a little head with its chin on its chest, eyes still veiled in mist, with soft and transparent skin. Her hands came to hold a heavy, palpitating infant, well formed and resting, a child the size of an orange. “Blessed be my last birth,” the old woman said, and she pushed the new body, full of a tender light, into the waters of the mirror. There, her minuscule, frail daughter swam away toward the kingdom from which we all came and to which we all return.
Only then, in a quiet she had never before felt with any of her other hearts, the old woman closed her eyes forever. At that same moment, in a hospital in a far-off neighborhood, a wonderful girl was born.
TRANS RATING: A BILLION OUT OF TEN. This is the transest passage in Solenoid, and possibly in anything ever??? I'm crying about it again, fucking hell. This poor girl. This poor girl.
