Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  Yet, Tainaron is perhaps the work nearest to me. My whole philosophy of life is in there. But as I have grown older, my voice is no longer so gentle and lyrical. Tainaron is at the same time allegorical and realistic (in its entomological details). My later works like Pereat Mundus: A Sort-Of Novel, and Unelmakuolema (”Dreamdeath”) are satires about our own shattering, absurd world.

  —Leena Krohn, in an interview with Matthew Cheney, SF Site, February 2005

  Great tomes have been written by writers whose single, impossible ambition was to capture all of life. And then there are writers of short stories like Anton Chekhov or Jorge Luis Borges or Grace Paley, writers who capture the essence of life with only a few pages, a few perfect details, a few words that sink deeper into our imaginations than hundreds of pages by other writers – and we discover that literature does not need to be voluminous to catch the substance of life’s infinity. The great babbling blurt of a doorstopping novel may miss more life than the intense whisper of a fable.

  More and more, I find myself attracted to innovative writing that isn’t afraid to leave great gaps within itself, that doesn’t try to stick the world onto a postage stamp, but rather puts a postage stamp in the middle of the world’s unfathomable complexities. Leena Krohn’s short “sort-of novel” Tainaron is a book that I prefer to various massive novels of erudition and insight, a book that feels like it expands within my consciousness rather than a book I have to squeeze into the cluttered space of my cranium.

  All of which is just to say that Leena Krohn has, with a slim volume of thirty letters written from an imaginary city of insects, given us a lens of words through which to consider reality, a microscope to reveal yearning and wonder, a telescope to look for what it means to be human, a window and a mirror and an eye other than our own. Sometimes it is best to use fantasy to imagine our way back to where we actually are.

  Here, let me read to you:

  Some of [the citizens of Tainaron] carry their innermost apartment, a one-roomed flat which fits their dimensions like a glove, with them everywhere. But this has the drawback that one cannot always make sense of what they say, for it echoes and reverberates from the walls of their private apartments. It is also vexing to me that I cannot always tell where the dwelling ends and its inhabitant begins.

  Poor things, who never come among people without this innermost shield. It reflects the terrible vulnerability of their lives. Their little home may be made of the most diverse ingredients: grains of sand, bark, straw, clay, leaves . . . . But it protects them better than others are protected by armour, from every direction, and it is a direct continuation of themselves, much more so than clothes are to you or me. But if it is taken away from them, they die – perhaps simply of shame, perhaps because their skins are too soft for the outside air, or because they do not have skin at all.

  It’s a beautiful, sad image, is it not? People who carry home so close to themselves that their voices are muffled and they can die from exposure, from having the armor of where they live torn away so that they are nakedly alienated from the place where they belong. But Krohn doesn’t stop there, no, she continues and lets the imagery expand beyond any simple metaphor:

  Who would be so cruel as to tear from them this last shield! Oh, I have heard that such things, too, happen here in Tainaron; I have been startled by the moans of death-throes in the deeps of the night.

  But I have my own theory concerning why this happens. For, you see, those who constantly drag their houses with them remain unknown to other people. One can gain only a brief glimpse of them, if that; they are always in hiding.

  The idea grows roots and tentacles, particularly if you remember that the narrator, the writer of the letters, is a human who has come to visit the city, that the letters are written to the human home far across the sea, and so far there has been no response.

  We learn through this fantasy as much about the narrator as about the city, and the two entities entwine, they grow and reflect from each other, until the city is an extension of the narrator’s psyche and the narrator is one piece of the city’s mysterious mind.

  But we’re not done yet, because there is one more paragraph to this particular letter, and it adds depth to something already so deep as to be nearly unfathomable:

  And then there are those who cannot bear such a situation, those who wish to see everything face to face and to reveal, open, show the whole world the nakedness of things . . . . Now and then the temptation becomes overwhelming to them, and they split open the house of some poor unfortunate. I awake to shrieking, sigh and turn over – and soon fall asleep again.

  If I were in an even more grandiloquent mood than I already am, I would say that that paragraph contains all the contradictions, glories, and evils of humanity. Instead, I will simply say that all I have quoted here is but one example of what makes Leena Krohn such a truly great writer. She uses fantastic events, situations, and images, yes, but not merely for the pleasures inherent in oddity. Tainaron resonates because its words fuse imagination with many possible meanings, allowing the book a weight far beyond its few pages, its thirty short tales.

  In one of the letters, the narrator tells of a trip with a guide named Longhorn to an observation tower on a hill above Tainaron. As they look out over the whole of the city, Longhorn says, “Tainaron is not a place, as you perhaps think. It is an event which no one measures. It is no use anyone trying to make maps. It would be a waste of time and effort. Do you understand now?”

  Tainaron the book cannot be mapped any more than Tainaron the city could be, because with each reading it changes, and with each reader. It is not a single story, but rather a conglomeration of stories whose borders blend into each other, whose words echo other words, until the book becomes a harmony in the reader’s mind, a suggestion of even more stories than the ones told on the pages.

  Tainaron ends with impending hibernation, a stasis that promises regeneration. The reader who can resist returning to the first page and starting all over again is stronger than I, because within the words that create Leena Krohn’s imaginary city, rereading is its own rebirth.

  Q: You said that your whole philosophy of life is in Tainaron. The philosophy that I most noticed while reading was that of the cyclical nature of life – the continuing cycles of birth, death, and regeneration. Is that what you meant, or were you thinking of something else as your philosophy?

  A: I wrote in Tribar that logically impossible constructions lie at the bottom of our society. They consist of material and immaterial things, true and not true, rational and irrational. I call them “tribars” (the term is physicist Roger Penrose’s). I talk about “false” connections, where realities of different levels join into some kind of hybrid phenomena.

  Fiction and so-called reality live in an odd symbiosis. Our civilization is not based on any rational fundament. Let’s think about money, for instance. We think it as something material, but alas! – what else is as speculative, as illusionistic, as liable to metamorphoses as money? What is “real”money? Not banknotes or coins, which are only images of money, not even digital conditions. Money is a phantom phenomenon; it’s about our speculations of the future, our dreams of security. They are real, or “real” (you choose).

  Tainaron is a distant place that reminds us of every place in the world in its plasticity, strangeness, frightfulness. But its properties are the properties of our own heart.

  This essay has been adapted and revised from a review of Tainaron originally published by SF Site in 2005:

  www.sfsite.com/03b/ta196.htm

  and an interview with Leena Krohn at SF Site in February 2005:

  www.sfsite.com/03b/lk196.htm

  Change and Transformation in ‘Tainaron’

  by Desirina Boskovich

  Tainaron is the kind of work that defies classification or description. There are a few things that we may say definitively about it (and only a few things). First, it is a novella narrated through a series of thirty letters. These let
ters remain unanswered, so we see the story through the eyes of the nameless letter-writer alone. Her topic is her travels through Tainaron, an unfamiliar city peopled by sapient insects. (We might call them insects with souls.)

  Each letter is a self-contained slice of life, blending observation and introspection. Most describe a single incident, experience or conversation. Each one further illuminates the nature of life in the city. In this fragmented fashion, the letters slowly build on one another, revealing the novella’s larger arc. The structure is reminiscent of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino or Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, with a crucial difference: while both of those books devote each short chapter to describing the circumstances of a unique world, Tainaron focuses exclusively on its one eponymous city. And yet, in its fluid and fluctuating nature, Tainaron the city seems to encompass many worlds itself. At any rate, the effect is similar. Scenes of increasing surrealism paint a picture of a place that, despite its weirdness, begins to look surprisingly like home.

  What, and where, is Tainaron? It’s a city, like any other: it has its desirable neighborhoods and its slums, its streets and shops, its social structures. It’s home to “vanishing spires of cathedrals, the liquid gold of the cupolas of minarets, and the pure capitals of a Doric temple.” It is a great melting pot and a diverse ecosystem, where strange persons of all kinds live and work together. Sometimes, their insect nature is quite apparent; at other times they seem quite human. (Miss Pumilio, for example — the frail old lady who lives above the narrator in her first home in Tainaron — does not seem to be an insect at all.) Tainaron is located at the edge of a vast body of water called Oceanos, which separates the narrator from her native city. Apparently, Tainaron is also located in a volcanic zone; scientists warn of possible destruction.

  It’s a city, like any other, but it’s also a way of being, or a way of seeing. In the twelfth letter, our narrator writes, “ . . . suddenly the earth gave way beneath my feet and I remembered once more that beneath Tainaron is nothing but a crust, as insubstantial as one night’s ice.” Something about Tainaron is fleeting and fragile: like a paradigm or a metaphor, it is upheld only through belief. The city’s emblem is the Ferris wheel. “Ferris wheel, wheel of fortune . . . Sometimes my gaze fastens itself to its spinning and I seem to hear, until sleep comes, the constant humming of the wheel, which is the voice of Tainaron itself.” In the end, Tainaron is perfectly mutable. It is a city of constant change, defined only by its endless state of motion.

  In fact, in the twenty-second letter, as the narrator’s attempts to catalogue the city prove fruitless, her friend Longhorn informs her: “Tainaron is not a place, as you perhaps think. It is an event which no one measures. It is no use anyone trying to make maps.” This description of the city could equally be applied to the book. Like many groundbreaking works, Tainaron is difficult to describe. It exists at the level of language, where ambiguity and nuance hold sway. It is not quite like anything else. In its unfamiliar method of exploring an unfamiliar place, it may be inaccessible at times; and yet as the story develops, the writing becomes addictive, mesmerizing. Krohn’s language is lyrical and evocative, but there’s something else, as well — her subtle, glancing way of probing at the mysteries of life and death. Unexpected insights arise from the mundane, but they are suggested so delicately that they remain almost intangible.

  In this circuitous style, Krohn touches on ideas, backs away, then approaches from another direction; meaning accrues in the sidesteps. The central theme is change and transformation, which threads through every chapter. As one might expect in a city peopled by insects, metamorphosis is a key aspect of life in Tainaron:

  Here you can bump into a stranger, and he will come up to you like an old acquaintance and begin to remember some past amusing coincidence that you apparently experienced together. When you ask, “When?”, he laughs and answers: “When I was someone else.”

  Along with transformation, another major theme is that of individuality. As these themes develop, they find intersections and interconnections, eventually weaving their way into a single question: What is the soul, and will it survive? Or: Who will we be after we’re gone?

  Though Krohn would never state it in such simplified terms, the novella seems to stage a debate. On one side is the notion that people carry with them an essential sameness, lasting from lifetime to lifetime; that a soul survives throughout the ages, no matter what form it takes. On the other side is the assertion that we are all manifestations of a central essence, endlessly combining and recombining from pieces of what we once were and will be again.

  Of course, the debate remains unresolved. But there is a certain reassurance to that fact; each vision is comforting in its own way.

  II

  Is continuity essential to selfhood? Can one separate the self from its surroundings? And must one be someone to be? These questions linger at the edges of the narrator’s many odd encounters in Tainaron. And Krohn develops them with such subtlety, it feels a bit heavy-handed to draw them out. I do so only with the caveat that there is far more on the page.

  The question of identity is first directly addressed in the fourth letter. In this chapter, the narrator is taken to meet the queen: a vast, formless creature confined to a windowless cave and surrounded at all times by a crowd of busy servants. The narrator is astonished when the queen addresses her accusingly,

  “You think, don’t you, that I am some kind of individual, a person, admit it?”

  . . . It was a most extraordinary voice, for it seemed to be made up of the murmur of hundreds of voices.

  Baffled, the narrator agrees. But when the queen asks “So tell me, who am I?” the narrator struggles to respond.

  Before I could even think of an answer to this question, I realized at last what was happening in the back part of the room, which was filled with the queen’s great rear body . . .

  The queen was giving birth! She was giving birth incessantly.

  “You are the mother of them all, your majesty,” I replied, humbly.

  But the queen is not satisfied with this answer, because, as she says, “She from whom everything flows is not a someone.” Perhaps there is no satisfying answer; to serve as the source of life is a difficult burden. To be inseparable from everything can be unaccountably lonely.

  In the eleventh letter, the narrator is allowed audience with Tainaron’s prince (already a foil for the powerful queen). She is surprised to find him abandoned to his tower, a decrepit and lonely figure. It seems he has not entertained a visitor in quite some time. Eager for anyone who will listen, the prince tells her about his departed princess. The princess has been gone for ages, and the prince no longer searches for her, but when she first disappeared, he spent many hours exploring the city, searching for her in the faces of strangers. He says,

  “For I should have known her in any disguise, even if she had been through the most comprehensive of metamorphoses, that you may believe. For the images of shared secrets had remained in the princess’s eyes, and they, at last, would have revealed her immediately, but in the interrupted flow of on comers there flowed only the loam of strange memories . . . ”

  The prince, at least, believes that there is an essential essence to the soul, glimpsed through its windows. He clings to the idea that he’d know his lover, even if she were someone else. But perhaps this is only a fantasy.

  Finally, in the sixteenth letter, the narrator is introduced to a person whose transformations are more instantaneous. The mimic: glimpsed first as a pile of stones, then a grassy knoll. Vexed, the narrator asks her friend Longhorn to explain.

  “My dear,” Longhorn said, and looked at me, waving the extensions of his antennae, “do you believe that the Mimic could have a personality? Today he is one thing, tomorrow another. Wherever he is, that is what he is – stone a moment ago, now the summer’s grass. Who knows what form he will take tomorrow.”

  But the narrator feels a certain unexplainable pique against the very idea
of the Mimic, and declines Longhorn’s invitation to meet him. Gently, Longhorn rebukes her: “So you want everyone to be someone. You want what someone is at the beginning to be what he is at the end.”

  Perhaps the narrator’s resentment of this fickle creature reveals unexamined feelings toward the silent recipient of her letters. Letter after letter she writes to her unknown lover, receiving no answer; as readers we find ourselves the uncomfortable target of her supplications, accused of indifference yet incapable of answering. We are the lover who’s changed, or died, or simply gone away. “That you are so implacable in your silence,” the narrator writes in her twenty-first letter, “makes you gradually become more like gods or the dead. Such is your metamorphosis; and it is not entirely repugnant to me.”

  Little is revealed about this lover, nor the narrator herself. Like the Mimic, both are vague and ambiguous, serving primarily as filters for raw experience. Yet in a rare instance in the thirteenth letter, the narrator recalls a moment between herself and her lover, walking between two churches, discussing the soul. At the same time she offers a description of herself:

  I seldom look in the mirror, but always there is someone there who gives me my eyes. And the root of my nose is bluish; a line has inscribed itself at the corner of my mouth like a drypoint groove. But this is no proof copy, and the acid of everyday life corrodes, prepares that which is the soul.

  III

  Though our narrator has been meticulous about documenting Tainaron, she is a bit like a tourist who visits a human city for just one season and concludes it is always summer there. But fall comes to Tainaron, and then winter, bringing yet more changes that the narrator cannot escape.

  The first to be affected is Longhorn, her dear guide. As he’s accompanied her on her explorations of the city, she’s learned to know him intimately — and been astonished by his kindness. She feels dependent on him for her survival. But with winter comes sleep. Longhorn must retreat into his pupal cell (a kind of cocoon for beetles, constructed from mud and debris). When he emerges, he will be someone else.