I am a fan of all genres of books. I love mystery, science fiction and history the most. I have also recently become fascinated with the works of foreign authors. I have never been a huge fan of horror, But, recently, I stumbled across a trilogy of recently translated books by a Danish author, Harald Voetmann, who was inspired by a nightmare he had in Ascea, Italy. He did not describe the dream in any public forum, but whatever darkness visited him that night seemingly persisted throughout the writing process. He admits that he was very unhappy with the first two books in the trilogy, Awake and Sublunar, but came to a point where his depression made it impossible for him to write anything for six months.
Reading Voetmann’s slender, bilious historical novels is not unlike descending into a nightmare. This is in part because of their lurid lyricism. But it is also because they prompt the irreducible fascination that is characteristic of nightmares, hallucinations, and mystical visions, in which horror approaches the sublimity of beauty and arrives with the force of revealed truth.
The horror in these novels is the cruelty of nature, a subject that has been relegated to history and is plausible only in the realm of historical fiction. Awake is set in the early Roman Empire, and Sublunar in 16th-century Scandinavia, but their protagonists are prototypically modern: men of science who are intent on outrunning this primal nightmare. Both, crucially, are insomniacs.
Awake centers on Pliny the Elder, whose obsessive desire to name and classify the world’s miseries in his encyclopedic Natural History keeps him up at all hours. Throughout the novel he lies in bed with a nosebleed, wheezing, his nostrils stuffed with wool soaked in rose oil, dictating passages to Diocles, his slave and secretary. His narration drifts freely from scholarly observations to childhood memories.
Awake is structured like an antique drama: episodes of action alternate with excerpts from Natural History, letters, and interludes devoted to ancillary characters. Several sections are narrated by Diocles, who suffers from nightmares and, when he is not transcribing, roams around the house seeking distraction. Pliny is more than a little stifled himself, but unlike Diocles, he has sublimated the masculine drive for domination into intellectual pursuits.
The best form of revenge against nature’s sublime cruelty, he concludes, is knowledge. The novel is acutely aware of the futility of this quest and takes a certain delight in undermining it. During the day, as Pliny tries to nap, he is kept awake by crowing cocks, barking dogs, and hissing cicadas - all the creatures his zoology strives to classify. His taxonomies, one senses, are a form of taxidermy, motivated by a desire to silence nature into the clean austerity of a system.
Voetmann likes to reiterate in interviews that Pliny once called nature humanity’s evil stepmother. Readers of Pliny may be bewildered by this characterization of his work - or suspect Voetmann of projecting onto it some of his own psychic darkness. Natural History clearly contains less rage than wonder. Its pages spill over with ornate arcana, exotic mirabilia, and those delightful follies our more dogmatic age insists on calling misinformation: the assertion that goats breathe through their ears or that hyenas change from male to female.
Voetmann, of course, is well aware that the biases of the present often color and distort the past. Throughout the novel he intersperses these actual excerpts from Natural History with fictional commentary by Pliny’s nephew, the Younger, whose voice is more urbane and detached, and who steps in to correct his uncle’s errors - often with errors of his own.
Awake and Sublunar are like neighboring constellations - two clusters of themes and patterns whose borders overlap - and it is fitting that stars serve as their ligature. Pliny the Elder was among the first to propose that the stars we think are fixed actually move, citing Hipparchus’s documentation of a new star in Scorpius in 134 BC. It was not until 1572 that another stella nova was spotted, above Denmark. The astronomer and nobleman Tycho Brahe saw it one November night while walking home from his uncle’s laboratory. He did not believe his eyes.
The very notion of a new star was heretical to Christian doctrine, which insisted that all change and decay were confined to the sublunary realm - the fallen, sin-stricken earth. The sky belonged to the eighth sphere, the realm of eternity and cosmic perfection. Tycho spent the next 15 years in the throes of manic sky watching, inventing new and more exact instruments, trying to understand the meaning of this new star. His quest was enabled by King Frederick II, who funded Tycho’s astronomical research on the island of Hven, where he built the whimsical Uraniborg, a sandstone castle equipped with an underground laboratory and a tower from which he and his attendant scholars could observe the sky.
Sublunar, the second novel in Voetmann’s trilogy, follows the life of Tycho and his assistants at Uraniborg as they document the stars and struggle to ignore the ground shifting beneath their feet. The scholars stay up all night conducting stationary observations of the clouded sky, measuring parallax with their compasses and sextants. He complained that fog created poor visibility at times.
There is a strain of dramatic irony here for readers who grasp the historical context: it was not fog and poor visibility that obstructed Tycho’s understanding, but his own intellectual prejudices. Although his data clearly proved that Earth revolves around the Sun, he remained unwilling to accept this conclusion; it would be left to Kepler to make that leap. In Voetmann’s telling, Tycho’s dreams suggest that his unconscious has begun to grasp the truth his waking mind resists - that there is no longer a clear boundary between heaven and earth, that the snow globe of medieval cosmology has already fractured into the Pascalian terror of infinite spaces and eternal silence.
The jacket copy of Sublunar refers to Tycho as the most illustrious noseless man of his time, a nod to the fact that he lost part of his nose in a duel. When a physician suggests recreating the nose with a graft from his arm, Tycho rebuffs the offer, recalling that Pythagoras had a thigh made of gold. Instead, he wears a wax prosthetic. It is another link between him and Pliny, with his wool-stuffed nostrils. Smell is the most primal animal sense, and its obstruction in both men literalizes science’s fear of physicality.
For Tycho, as for Pliny, the desire to transcend the sublunary world of sense and physicality is fundamentally aggressive and misogynistic, with nature imagined as essentially feminine and science as an instrument of domination. Uraniborg was named after Urania, the muse of astronomy, whom Tycho dreamed of imprisoning in the dungeon of his castle.
Like Awake, Sublunar borrows a form - the Renaissance almanac - native to the era it dramatizes, and is a bricolage of poems, letters, and excerpts from an unfinished alchemical treatise. Roughly half the book is structured as a weather log written by a melancholy scholar who dutifully notes changes in precipitation, cloud cover, wind direction, and the position of the stars - a task that irresistibly tilts into lyricism.
We learn very little about this anonymous assistant - his origins, his biography - apart from what he observes of daily life on Hven. Throughout the long Nordic winters, the assistants sleep beneath wolfskin, eat liver loaves and bird pâtés with their fingers, and occasionally look up to see a peasant staring at them through windows hoary with frost. Visitors are always arriving and departing, princes and dukes, bands of musicians from Elsinore and Copenhagen. Evenings are given over to lavish banquets and are entertained late into the night by Jeppe, Tycho’s dwarf. The plague has already descended upon Europe.
Although he is tasked with watching the stars, the assistant’s eye is hopelessly drawn to the fallen earth. Much like Pliny’s slave Diocles, the assistant serves as a tragic counterpoint to his master’s longing for Platonic perfection, bringing the novel’s gaze back to nature’s perpetual cycles and the impossibility of transcendence.
History may not have favored his pessimism - Tycho is now celebrated as one of the fathers of modern astronomy - but Sublunar gestures toward those darker truths that are often obscured in celebratory accounts of the Enlightenment. The star Tycho spotted was not in fact the birth of something new, but the death of something very old: novae stellae, today known as supernovas, are dwarf stars at the end of their life cycle, their brilliance the product of their impending death. That this dying star initiated the birth of modern astronomy appears, from our vantage, largely accidental, and Tycho in any case did not live to see his discoveries bear fruit. An undercurrent of futility similarly runs through Awake, whose final chapter dramatizes the tragic fate of Pliny: the man who insisted on conquering nature was killed by the eruption of Vesuvius. The human drama, the novels suggest, lacks the novelistic arc we moderns have imposed on it and is instead one perpetual cycle of hybris and nemesis, a tragicomedy in which Mother Nature always has the last laugh.
Voetmann’s trilogy contains more than a trace of Nietzsche.
But ultimately, the trilogy is not satirizing science so much as systems themselves (the third novel, Visions and Temptations, not yet published in English, is about medieval Christianity) and the dominating impulse that tends to murder what it loves. The human desire for knowledge begins with mystery and awe and calcifies into dogma.
Yet the novels suggest other ways of knowing. While systems operate from the top down, imposing rules on chaotic reality, there are also those convictions that arise from the ground up: the sudden insights that arrive in nightmares and visions, the associative patterns of augury and alchemy. It is telling that the only character in Sublunar who understands the implications of the new star is Falk Gøye, an alchemist.
Unlike the dream of eternal perfection - the stars fixed in their eternal place - alchemy allows for the necessity of transmutation, and is perhaps more reflective of nature’s restlessness, which is always changing one thing into another and is difficult to predict or control.
Given the slender line that once separated astronomy from astrology and chemistry from alchemy, it is arguable that these two epistemologies are not inimical but complementary. Just as Columbus discovered the New World while searching for India, so the exact laws of modern physics emerged from the brume of Pythagorean mysticism that preoccupied men like Tycho, Newton, and Kepler.
It is a conclusion that similarly guides Arthur Koestler’s history of astronomy, The Sleepwalkers. The haphazard, accidental way that most fundamental discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker’s performance than an electronic brain’s. It is an insight that feels enduringly relevant.
Voetmann, too, seems to work from the ground up. Although Awake and Sublunar might be called novels of ideas, Voetmann’s intellectual concerns are not forcefully imposed upon fictional dramas arbitrarily designed to illustrate them but rather arise from particulars that are irreducible. Each page of the books contains a richness of detail and a depth of attention that has all but vanished from the contemporary novel - or, for that matter, any other mass-produced object. His narrators frequently pause to admire a fine piece of craftsmanship.
The novels themselves - each scarcely more than 100 pages - are miniatures that appear to have been less written than chiseled. Images glow in stark relief against the somber backdrops and recur with slight variations
After a century or so of proclamations of its death, it is difficult to recall that the novel is, as its name announces, a stella nova, a form that is by its very nature devoted to novelty, the new, the modern.
The more generous understanding of nature - as an artist and a creative source - is largely absent in Voetmann’s portrayal of Pliny and Tycho, who cannot see beyond the world’s cruelty and their own desire for conquest. Their historical counterparts were not so single-minded, and the one blight on Voetmann’s novels stems from his failure to grant his characters the complexity of vision that is evident in their own work. The notion that nature was a patient artist, guided by the principles of cosmic balance, appears throughout Natural History, which was not only an encyclopedia but the first work of art history in the Western tradition. Pliny’s discussion of marble, crystals, agate, and fossils inspired countless Renaissance goldsmiths and engravers who sought to emulate this geological craftsmanship.
Gifts that come at a cruel price: artists and alchemists have always understood this better than men of science, whose fundamental error is the belief that you can get something for nothing, that progress, transcendence, and beauty do not exact devastating costs. The rotting fruit produces the full-bodied wine. The painful grain of sand engenders a perfect pearl. The suffering of the artist is transmuted in the furnace of the creative process.
Comments