The Doloriad
Soupish Thoughts. Pink Worms. Hearts Misplaced. Pipe Weaponry.
In the acknowledgements, Williams refers to the The Doloriad as “patently weird.” It is a story set in a post environmental-cataclysmic world which centres around topics of existence, sustenance, incest, hierarchy and control.
In the dawn of the second age of mankind, one family takes on the responsibility to repopulate the earth, but at what cost?
My appreciation for this story and the author have grown in the past weeks, and even in the days that I have spent drafting this post, in the minutes I spent editing the final bits. There is beauty and terror in the smallest details, which are sometimes hard to appreciate when you’re reading cover to cover. If you pick up a copy, which I encourage you to do, sit with it. Don’t rush. Read and reread and I think you’ll find something scary but inspiring.
Path to Purchase:
Royal Academy of Arts Gift Shop after visiting their Summer Exhibition 2022
Emotions:
Contempt for the Matriarch
Confusion and sympathy for the female offspring
Hope for the schoolmaster whose deluded redemption comes in the form of a moth infested pile of fabric
Nostalgia for a past time only the adults, born of the first age of mankind, could recall
Reflections:
Our existence as we know it is temporary
Grateful for a mixed gene pool
Imagery:
So strong - dropping some passages in the musings section below. This novel actually flipped a switch for me to shift from consumption mode to creator mode and has been a font of inspiration since I first cracked it open (see images in the musings section below). Page 3 and I was already taking notes on the imagery. Upon reading these a forth and fifth time they hit even deeper, especially those depicting global warming.
I noted down the pages numbers of the most evocative language on my museum ticket.
I transcribed the words into a document whilst on the tube.
I reviewed these words many times as I created digital representations of my interpretation of each passage.
I’ve included a sample of quotes and the artwork below. Do take a look!
Learnings:
Those in power are only in power until it is taken away
People will go to great lengths to for self-preservation and continuity of their accepted status quo
Plot:
If I had any initial requests of The Doloriad, it would have been for heavier plot.
I immediately reflect on my request for a heavier plot and surface my own misgivings here.
I realise that more plot would have weakened the story as it’s written. More plot runs counter to the theme, which investigates the limited mental and physical capacity of the later born generations as they are barely able to form coherent thoughts and sentences. More plot would have been too much for their “soupy” minds to handle. The eponymous character, Dolores, spends much of her time dragging herself through the mud (as she has no legs below the knee) and gurgling/burbling out something less than words, much less a sentence.
Style:
The tone is straight forward. Nothing garish in the language. Williams paints a strong sense of unease as she moves the characters through the forest and through their lives.
Musings:
The Doloriad is unique. I hesitate to even draw comparisons, but that is part of my synthesising of art, so I must. Let’s say The Doloriad contains two scoops of the chaos and heat from Lord of the Flies and a dash of the eerie, unsettling feeling of A Quiet Place.
I’ve spent the last few weeks sitting with this book in ways I have never interacted with a book before. Reading, transcribing, creating visuals, repeating.
Passages from the book:
“In the first age of mankind the body was subject to the soul and nothing could happen in the body that would be contrary to the good of the soul, neither in it’s being nor in its operations...
A diverse dignity of souls. It is necessary for the soul to be proportioned to the body. As form to matter, as mover to moved…” but all Agathe heard was “a diverse dignity of souls.”
This passage is spread across two pages and is actually first rumbled aloud in latin by the schoolmaster and then translated by one of the sibling (or cousin) students.
The text the schoolmaster reads is in Latin (which at least in our present day is considered a dead language), but he speaks of the first age of mankind. In the book we understand the first age of mankind as existence before the event which wipes out earth’s population which begs the question, who wrote about the first age in Latin?
Did the schoolmaster know Latin and write this for the students to translate? Was a prophecy which ancient cultures predicted centuries ago?
I will see what I can unearth. Hello, Missouri, if you ever read this!
“He looked at Agathe with hatred in his pale eyes because she belonged to the new world, the tumbledown second-rate reality that was their sentence for the sins of their ancestors: the old factories whirring without stopping, black smoke churning across the sky; ice tumbling into dark green waters already bereft of life; the seething, copulating virus of humanity, refusing to stop even in the face of the coming disaster, and perhaps even ——ing more furiously because of it. ”
Whew! What a statement on global warming and over population. There is not much focus on the prior state of existence within the book, but this excerpt does a stunning job of describing the conditions of the prior population which brought on the cataclysm.
How would you paint a picture of the current state of the world? Do you see our descent with a similar lens?
“The beetle was back; she wanted to talk to it, but she didn’t know how. Dolores smiled and the beetle crawled closer, craning its black antennae towards her. She opened her mouth and burbled something wordless and indistinct, the beginnings of a beetle-song, the matter of her mind working itself into the shape that she saw before her: the sounds that she made were hard, black, and shiny, and her grey eye darkened with the burrowed purple, the glossy aubergine gleam of the beetle’s shell. She laughed, shivered with delight. ”
Here we have a depiction of the offspring’s inability to comprehend and communicate. Dolores doesn’t realise that even if she were able to form words, she would not be able to communicate with the beetle.
I love the picture this describes as she tries - working her mouth into the shape of the beetle. The sound that she makes takes on the physical characteristics of the beetle (hard, black, and shiny). Though I have never thought of a sound to be hard, black or shiny, I can picture it, hear it. It’s harsh, discomforting, but feels natural for Dolores.
“It was with this mind that they had endured the mummery of the encampment: the lessons, the farming, the fetching of water and the emptying of latrines, the squealing monotony of birth; the whole damn performance of survival. ”
The squealing monotony of birth! The performance of survival!
Obsessed with these descriptions. What are we as humans actually doing?
I haven’t yet, though I still may work on a graphic representation of the latter. How would you depict this?
I see a woman, lain back in a hospital bed in delivery position wearing her gown, and from her birth canal (though covered by the dress) an escalator descending into the oblivion at the bottom of the frame with many children riding their way down, screaming.
“It was hotter than it had ever been before, Jakub had told them..
The air was full of invisible particles that trapped the heat in the atmosphere the rivers were overflowing with poison; and the light… In the past there had been a different kind of light, the light that they had made for themselves and which remained only as a dull and sporadic glimmering, vanquished by the white, indifferent radiance of the days as they were, secure in their power. Last of all he told them, that somewhere in the far north a kingdom of ice was crashing into the sea and nobody knew when it would stop.”
Much like the passage from p 95, this evokes strong imagery around the world that we are creating. I picture holes in the ozone, the corporations settling lawsuits after decades of polluting the environments around them, piles of waste stacked high full of electronics and lighting.
But the kingdom of ice crashing into the see is more aggressive than the prior description of ice tumbling into green waters. All great civilisations fall. It is the active destruction of an ice empire.
“The uncle could see the idea burrowing into his mind like a great pink worm and now that worm was in everything, everything looking like the worm, and worst of all had perhaps always been the worm, and so who could say if what he thought he saw burrowing into him had not, to repeat his earlier suspicion, simply been there from the very beginning and he had simply willed himself to ignore it, and he wailed because the planets and the stars of his memory had no fixed orbit, or rather they had changed their orbits and now their movements were malevolent and deranged, or rather it was the sun around which they orbited, his guiding principle or fixed belief, his heart, had been replaced by hers; over the years she had given him her heart and the worm buried inside it.”
This passage appears just pages before the end of the book. It was the first that struck me with the need to transform Williams’ words into a visual representation - see worm prominently placed in frame above. It’s not the first appearance from the worm, who comes to us in Dolores’ mind on p 156 causing confusion about her own heart, her own thoughts, realising she isn’t quite thinking in her own head.
While I believe this worm to be metaphorical, in reality this sick population really could have some type of parasitic worm that impairs their cognition, their mobility or even their development.
I think though, that the worm represents the proliferation of the mother’s thoughts and ways of life, which much like a parasite overwhelm and inhibit her offspring.
In the end (after a significant event which I will let you discover yourself!), Dolores does find her voice, but the fate of the uncle and his heart we are left up to our interpretation.
First hand observation of the destruction of the ice kingdom as I flew over the Hudson Bay North of Canada between London and Seattle
