House of Day, House of Night
72 pages • 2-hour read
Olga Tokarczuk, Transl. Antonia Lloyd-JonesHouse of Day, House of Night
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of illness, death, and transphobia.
Mushrooms
Mushrooms are a key motif that represent the notion of a borderland, in which competing principles can exist together. Mushrooms, even those that look exactly alike, can either sustain or kill those who eat them. The narrator describes such lurking danger: “The Amanita verna, brother of the albino Amanita phalloides, a loner that grows in the scrub on a stout stalk, is the death cap of the meadows. It smells sweet and watches the herds of meadow mushrooms from afar, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing” (141). She describes it with a simile, comparing it to a wolf in sheep’s clothing, demonstrating how easy it is for the mushrooms to be confused. Only by examining the mushrooms can someone distinguish them and their use.
A person must hold competing identities in mind when searching for mushrooms, just as many who live in the borderland do personally. The mushrooms also do not adhere to the border, demonstrating how nature does not respect man-made borders. By existing on both sides of the border, the mushrooms help characterize both sides as a borderland, with those nearby seeing similar landscapes, and eating similar food, while experiencing different national identities.
Kummernis’s Beard
House of Day, House of Night explores the story of Saint Kummernis throughout its many chapters. At the heart of this story is Kummernis’s transformation, in which her face transforms into that of God, complete with a beard. This beard is at odds at with her female body, functioning as a symbol for The Use of Folklore to Challenge Reality. Kummernis suffers from her father’s rigid control, as he, and many others, believe that it is his right to shape her life because she is a woman. To escape this, Kummernis prays for a change so that she can be a devotee of God: “You provided me, O Lord, with my sex and my woman’s body, which has become a source of contention and all manner of desire. Deliver me, O Lord, from this gift, for I do not know what I am to do with it” (67). Kummernis’s prayer challenges established gender roles, recognizing how society devalues women and exerts control over them. By growing a beard, Kummernis suddenly exists in a space between gender, her body becoming a borderland. While she expects to be unshackled from the expectations of women, free to choose her own identity, her story is largely dismissed as a sacrilegious impossibility.
Kummernis’s story challenges the reality of the gender binary the church creates. When Paschalis brings his account of Kummernis to the Bishop of Glatz, he meets resistance, his superiors unwilling to accept Kummernis as a holy figure for exhibiting the features of both a man and a woman: “But there is something unhealthy, I would say sacrilegious, in this naked body on the cross. The cross brings to mind the Savior, the Son of God. But here are naked breasts, the face of Our Lord above naked breasts…” (183). The bishop believes Kummernis is not in keeping with the church’s concept of God. They recoil at the notion that a woman could share the same imagery as God and Jesus Christ, male figures. They reject the depiction of a woman’s body on a cross, believing that her sacrifice cannot compare to that of Jesus, a man. They refuse to accept the image of God’s face on a woman’s body as holy, instead suggesting that it is sacrilege, despite nothing in her tale suggesting she is more or less holy than any other martyr. Her story allows for a space in which the concept of holiness is challenged, no longer reserved for the classically masculine or feminine.
The German Car
There is a German car in the woods near the narrator’s home that appears twice in the novel, once in the narrator’s present and once in the past. With these competing scenes, the car symbolizes The Coexistence of the Living Alongside the Dead. When the narrator and R. first encounter the car, they stumble upon it, as it is completely hidden. R. recognizes it as German, though its condition is severely deteriorated: “It was so well hidden that we stepped into its long hood, buried in pine needles. There was a small birch tree growing out of the front seat, and a strand of ivy on the steering wheel. R. said it was German” (28). The depiction of the car being slowly consumed by nature creates an image of the past (the dead), being consumed by the present (the living). Not only is it a material decomposition, with the car breaking down, but also a representation of the area’s German history and its slow fade as the time between the border changing and the present grows wider.
When the car appears later in the story, in the past, it is brand-new. One of the von Goetzens hides it in the forest from the Bolsheviks, where the narrator and R. find it decades later: “[T]he DKW vanished, simply dissolved among the restless spruce branches. By some sort of alchemy its black color blended with the black of the bark and the forest floor. The glossy veneer and windows reflected the forest, camouflaging the body of the car with interwoven images of earth and sky” (216). The car is camouflaged, suggesting that it fits in well with the nature around it. It also mirrors the imagery earlier in the novel of it being hidden in nature. Its discovery by the narrator and R. confirm that the von Goetzens never return for it. It therefore represents the end of an era, and the hidden past of the narrator’s home. While she lives in the present, signs of the past and the lives of those now gone lurk all around her.
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