Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Empusium” tackles being a woman by portraying the female experience in absentia. The female world is silent, visual. Their judgements are heeded, but never heard. They are the eyes that watch, the thorn in one’s side that can be ever debated about, yet never talked to.
The subtitle is quite in your face. A health resort horror story. It betrays both genre and setting. Horror has always manifested through fear of the concealed other. The dark figure in the shadows, watching. The looming threat of violence, of death, of change. Horror starts out silent. It only shouts when the danger is close to being manifest. In Tokarczuk’s novel, the feminine is the horror. The males make a show out of talking about women. They are the ones who act, who impose their will and who construct the world as it is around them. They sit on the throne of creation, but what is to be done with these others? Ever-present, yet keeping their existance a mistery.
The idea of the feminine mistery, this ineffable force of nature that artists try to contain within paintings or songs, is the way in which men cope with their status as patriarchal figures. Women cannot be understood, so why try to? Women are so different that they can hardly be called human, so why bother doing it? And in the crevaces of reality, in the places where these grand creators couldn’t or wouldn’t stick their phallic flags, you can see pairs of eyes.
Watching, judging. And the creators tremble, for there are figments of reality which they themselves cannot fully control. Death, disease, all of these have been made sense of by medicine. But these eyes, ever watching, elude understanding. Kill them? Quite sad it got to that, but these creators find it harder to be destroyers. For another set of eyes pop out. And another, and another.