On its surface, Max Blecher’s The Lighted Burrow (written from 1937–38) belongs to the tradition of the sanatorium novel. Which is to say the sanatorium is both its setting and its exegesis. Like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), it begins with an arrival and is followed by the trials, failures, and miserable procedures of a recovery. This is not unfamiliar ground for Blecher, whose earlier, semi-autobiographical novel Scarred Hearts (1937) deals in these experiences by adopting the genre’s more traditional patterns, using the sanatorium’s narrative structure (from sequestration to cure, or the lack thereof) as both scaffolding and hermeneutic. In this framework, the character-patient faces an internal crisis reified in their surroundings: the sanatorium becomes the space for the impersonal dramatization of a deeply personal struggle. The paradox is that despite the sanatorium novel’s tendency to externalize internal dramas, the onus of transformation still rests on the shoulders of the individual. It is they who must change. Scarred Hearts, like The Magic Mountain, plays into this model, albeit with a wink. It begins with an arrival and is followed by an attempt at a recovery (Emmanuel, the novel’s protagonist, doesn’t so much recover as stabilize—enough, at least, to depart the sanatorium at the novel’s end). The Lighted Burrow, however, does not. In its sanatorium milieu, recovery is not only impossible, it is irrelevant. Blecher, writing on the brink of death in Roman, Romania, was far more interested in creating a record of the embodied experience of spinal tuberculosis, one that could retain its disorienting fullness without sublimating it to a rhetoric of illness that underlies normative concepts of health.
In part, this means sublimating the sanatorium novel’s dynamics of domination and passivity. The Lighted Burrow achieves this primarily through two simple techniques. The first is its use of the journal form. Unlike Scarred Hearts, which follows its hero, Emmanuel, throughout his time at the Berck Sanatorium from a removed, third-person perspective, Burrow utilizes the journal, with its inherent disjointedness, to escape the trappings of story. Of course, the journal, or diary, has its own history as the deceptive tool of narrative, approximating the shape of “real life” so as to better pass as a historical record. Burrow escapes this, or at the very least minimizes our suspicions that the journal is just another authorial gimmick, when we learn in the introduction that these pages really were, to some degree, Blecher’s account of his own years in sanatoria. “Everything I write was once real life,” the narrator says, echoing the opening of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto (3).[1] This is illness not as metaphor but as fact. After being diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis (or Pott’s Disease) at the age of nineteen, Blecher spent the remainder of his short life either in sanatoria or in convalescence in Roman. What we have in Burrow, the introduction informs us, is a record of his final year, when he could no longer afford the luxury of his “well-controlled” earlier work (x). The result is a kind of paratactic jaggedness, more a collection of tableaux and scenes than your “typical” novel. It’s what the narrator describes as a “row of rooms with different lights,” (181) or elsewhere characterizes with a similar claustrophobia:
In the moment when I write, on small obscure channels, in slithering living streams, through dark cavities dug into the flesh, with a small pulsating rhythmic gurgling, my blood flows through the flesh, through nerves and through bones. (79)
This passage is emblematic of the way Blecher interrupts story with exposition, constantly drawing our attention away from narrative and toward its embodied author. We are never allowed to forget that The Lighted Burrow is the product of the consciousness it presents: the text as direct representation of lived experience, more fossil than record.
The second way The Lighted Burrow radicalizes the sanatorium novel is by repetition, specifically of place. Repetition is the principal mode of sanatorium life, but Blecher doesn’t so much locate this mode within the sanatorium (via routines and procedures) as make the sanatorium itself into a repeated unit. Emmanuel, in Scarred Hearts, arrives in Berck, on the coast of France; the narrator of Burrow also starts in Berck, but when he leaves, the story isn’t over. Beyond Berck is another sanatorium, this time in Switzerland, and after that another, at last in Romania, on the coast of the Black Sea, Europe’s eastern terminus. Such repetitions undermine the sanatorium’s narrative authority—after all, how can we buy into the finality of a discharge from a sanatorium if it is immediately followed by admittance to yet another? By multiplying the sanatorium, Blecher redirects our attention away from the transformative recovery narrative and toward the ontological dilemma illness poses.
The problem established throughout The Lighted Burrow might be stated like this: How do I put myself in relation to a “healthy” self I no longer, nor can ever again, embody? At times the narrator grants this problem a kind of nostalgic legitimacy, juxtaposing his life before illness (meaningful and “well-defined” [85]) against the confused, vertiginous life (one with “no outline [or] subject” [85]) he’s led since its onset. But if that legitimacy briefly stands in his account of what spinal tuberculosis has taken from him, it falters only a page later when he rejects the kind of narrative that nostalgia so often begets by eulogizing pain into art. “I believe,” the narrator states, “that more lasting works were born from calm and plenitude than from pain and teeth grinding” (86). Suffering, in Blecher’s work, is not ennobled, no more meaningful than states of repose.
Blecher’s depictions of illness are rarely conclusive. Consider, for example, the narrator’s account of what he calls his first experience with “tremendous physical pain” after an operation. The operation takes place toward the end of the summer, so, in order to keep the wound from getting infected during sweltering days, they leave it open, under a sheet. Looking down at the wound, the narrator describes the impossibility of what he sees, how “those skinned, round, swollen, and blood-soaked muscles” once comprised the smooth uninterrupted surface of his belly. Such an image is described first as “a piece of butcher’s meat,” reducing the body to both object and product, but in the next sentence, the open wound is rendered instead as “an enormous vagina with swollen and sanguinolent edges” (88). This confluence of metaphors, commodity and genitalia, an emblem of death and an emblem of life, disallows a conclusive rendering of the patient’s body as altered and alienated.
Many of Blecher’s images center on the body as a self-sustaining, individual entity, but as the novel goes on, they begin to comprise a system. If illness is often slotted into an individualistic narrative, then the sanatorium can be seen as its societal extension: a way of demarcating, for those within, a sick present from a healthy, vital past. (This contrast is only amplified by the fact that these sanatoria are almost exclusively located in idyllic settings: usually in the mountains or on the coast.) When observing the patient populace from without, Blecher tended perhaps perversely toward especially cold, objectifying language. Late in the novel, when looking out at patients sunning on the Swiss sanatorium’s deck, the narrator sees in their “sunburned, baked, brown, earthy and dark bodies…the clay pots that were drying outside in my grandfather’s factory yard” (182). Such a depiction is disorienting, placing the object-body, seemingly without personhood, alongside the narrator’s dizzying internal worlds remade by illness.
These contractions reach their zenith in what is perhaps the novel’s most bizarre and engaging scene. In it, the narrator recounts an elaborate and symbolically charged dream he had one night while staying in the Swiss sanatorium: he visits a butcher shop in a small town and finds a strange machine the butcher calls a “manufacturing radio.” Functionally, it’s a kind of 3D printer. You feed it various objects, tell it what to create, and the radio spits it out; a box of sardines or a bottle of wine appears. To the narrator, this is alchemy, a marvel. He asks how it works, and the shopkeeper, for whom the radio is unremarkable, provides the following bizarre explanation, grounded first and foremost in the supposedly implicit banality of a radio’s function:
In a random room, where nothing can be heard, there are still musical waves and the amorphous apparatus of air, full of microbes, smoke, nitrogen and all sorts of unnecessary components, extracting only the waves it needs, the musical element of the air, cleansing it of germs, of oxygen, of everything that is not music, and giving it to the ear ready for an audience…extracted from the air where it lay mixed with impure elements. (144)
Who, or what, is doing the extracting here? Whose ear is it that is not of an audience but ready for one? We can assume how this sentence functions—the extracting apparatus is the radio and the ear is that of the listener—but its syntax obscures these assumptions by transposing them into unfamiliar realms. First, the language of machinery (“apparatus”) is liberated from its predictable subject, the radio, which is never explicitly mentioned in the sentence, and applied to the air. Second, the receiver is not the transmitter of music but its creator, its artist. A mysterious entity alchemizes the everyday and delivers the transformed product to a listening conduit. This is not the language of industry; it is the language of the muse.
From here, the shopkeeper explains, it is a short fall from the “music wave” to the “manufacturing wave.” The shopkeeper need only turn a knob and the object desired is brought forth from a great distance. “Same as in the musical radio, the tuning of waves makes it possible for the device to choose from the impure air, the notes needed for a Beethoven symphony…it’s simple” (145). The commonality here is the form the radio apparently has access to. The “impure air” becomes the waste material fed into the machine (the butcher feeds the radio scraps of meat or paper from around the shop), which metabolizes these materials into any number of goods. A fish can be made of breadcrumbs, wine from water and pins. Even a symphony becomes a simple product—drawing an even more explicit line from the factory to fine art.
But it is when the manufacturing radio malfunctions that the ontological and political implications of this dream become truly remarkable. There are times, the shopkeeper says, when instead of alchemizing raw material, the radio will digest it, producing something that resembles (or perhaps really is) shit. The shopkeeper describes this malfunction as “an infection.” The radio “falls ill” and can no longer perform. It becomes a body by approximating one. For what shits, as the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye might say, must live.[2] What is ill must live; it must have a living body to be infected. So the shopkeeper, in his condemnation, confirms the radio’s animacy, even if at the same time he refers the living radio back to its inanimate function. The living, too, Blecher reminds us, can be objectified—can be either characterized as, or supplanted by, industrial capitalism’s many machines. If the radio lives, it does so only as a worker taking a sick day. Which is to say a useless worker.
Writing on the cusp of Romania’s descent into an era of nationalism and violent anti-Semitism, Blecher was keenly aware that resentment against capitalism could serve as fodder for fascist ideologies; he was never so naïve as to think his seemingly individualized considerations could live in a vacuum. The dream of the manufacturing radio powerfully metaphorizes the political ramifications of Blecher’s work, for as one might expect, the economic consequences of such a fantastical device are steep. If “every housewife” and shopkeeper can assume the role of the factory, then what is to keep the real factory, the remote building filled with human laborers, in business (145)? The factory function is decentered and brought into the domestic sphere, turning these housewives and shopkeepers into potential captains of industry. Or so, at least, it appears.
The shopkeeper explains that, faced with the threat of obsolescence from the manufacturing radio, factories—which is to say the real factories—have only two options. One, they may become, instead of manufacturers of objects, proprietors of forms (a Portuguese sardine factory, for example, would stake legal claim to the idea of the box of Portuguese sardines); or, two, they may survive “because there are customers who prefer their products, finding the radio products to have a kind of artificial and vapid taste” (145). The first option is enabled by government regulations restricting the owner of a manufacturing radio to produce only what they are licensed for. This option, we might infer, is not an option at all; it indexes a kind of “production” so slight and insubstantial that it cannot help but read as an absurdity. The absurdity, in turn, underscores Blecher’s critique of the ways capitalism oppresses workers by replacing them with machines. Such a critique might be—and indeed was—appropriated by fascist and racist ideologues to advocate for a return to an earlier society under the banner of “authenticity.” The second option satirizes this attempt. By turning factories, the emblems of mass-produced industrial homogeneity, into a kind of new artisan, Blecher demonstrates with a sharp irony how authenticity is conditional. Sardines from a Portuguese factory are authentic when placed against the sardines of the manufacturing radio. Defined and characterized by what they are not, these qualities are reconstituted as their opposite by a manner of degrees—so the factory worker who operates the canning device under the archaism of place earns the romantic nostalgia often only reserved for farmers, fishermen, and shepherds.
Ironizing authenticity—and by extension the natural/artificial binary—the story of the manufacturing radio offers a critique of pastoralism and the romanticization of old modes of production. Such a critique had a particular valence when Blecher wrote his semi-Surrealist novels in the 1930s. The Romanian majority, like many others in Europe teetering into fascism, adopted a notion of nature as a gateway to the divine and anchored it to their cultural heritage. The especially pastoral literature of figures like Mihai Eminescu, who in varying ways celebrated or outright mythologized peasant life, formed the bedrock for a cultural narrative of both ethnic and natural “purity” carried out in a series of pogroms by the conservative Iron Guard.[3] In such an ideology, urban spaces assume the rhetoric of cultural invasion, specifically from Jewish people, as opposed to the purity of agrarian landscapes. The “natural” and the “synthetic,” when placed on lands with concrete political dimensions, acquire these connotations, as do their roots in economic power: a pre-industrial agrarian world associated with the “authentic” nation is pitted anti-Semitically against a dizzying capitalist modernity. Blecher, a Jewish writer in a country in turmoil, wrote to estrange the values that underpinned the reactionary movements of his time.
If Burrow’s central concern is how to relate to a “healthy” self you once embodied, a self that is constantly being located in the past, then it makes sense that this novel should end with the total obfuscation of that past. The sanatorium, as an institution, operates on a retrospective intention: to send the patient back to their “real” (healthy) life. No such return awaits Burrow’s doomed narrator/author. An editorial footnote informs us that Blecher stayed at the Romanian sanatorium described at the novel’s end from 1933 to 1934 (181). We know that Blecher, the writer, left it, and lived five more years before dying. The narrator, however, remains within its walls, occupying a certain ambivalence. No moral value is afforded him; rather, Blecher asks his readers to sit in his words the way the narrator sits in his room. “I was on the cement,” he writes, “shivering from the cold, and I did not know what to do” (192).
Notes:
[1] Breton’s first, 1924 manifesto opens: “So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life—real life, I mean—that in the end this belief is lost.” André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 3.
[2] Dan Cameron, “Wim Delvoye: Cloaca,” New Museum Digital Archive, https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/385.
[3] Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 14–15; Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991), 10–14.