ANHEDONIA
A short story by Mariano E. Rodriguez
There exists in contemporary literature a dangerous tendency: to confuse erudition with profundity, ornament with substance. Mariano E. Rodríguez, in his short story Anhedonia, challenges this false dichotomy by constructing a literary artefact that functions simultaneously as philosophical treatise, hermetic grimoire and cartography of the inner abyss. What in less skilled hands might become an exercise in academic pedantry here transforms into a reading experience that demands—and rewards—the reader's total immersion in its symbolic strata.
Lucian Umbra is not a character in the traditional sense of the term. He is an absence with a proper name, a void that has become conscious of itself. The initial description—'a man who no longer remembers what it is to feel'—immediately establishes the central problem: how does one narrate the experience of someone whose condition is the impossibility of experiencing? Rodríguez resolves this paradox through a brilliant strategy: he converts anhedonia into an epistemological lens. Lucian does not suffer from a psychiatric pathology that must be cured through therapeutic intervention; his condition is, instead, an involuntary opening towards an unbearable truth about the nature of existence. The void he inhabits is not defect but revelation. And that revelation is inscribed on every surface of the text, even in what appears purely descriptive. The stairs that Lucian descends possess specific dimensions enumerated with clinical precision: eighteen centimetres of tread, thirty-one of riser. A distracted reader might dismiss these measurements as superfluous architectural detail. But Rodríguez does not write a single line without intention: those figures operate according to principles of Hebrew gematria, where life ascends through knowledge towards final integration.
The tale's architecture replicates the very form of its central object: The Sigil of Revealing Chaos. Rodríguez does not offer a linear narrative, but rather a radial structure where multiple temporalities converge towards an empty centre. The numbered sections function as the Sigil's glyphs: each represents a seal that must be broken, a layer of meaning that must be penetrated before accessing the core. This structural decision transcends mere formal virtuosity. The author understands that form is content, that the temporal disorientation experienced by the reader replicates the dissolution of self suffered by Lucian Umbra. When we leap from the protagonist's dystopian present (2025) to the alchemical crypt of 1509, and from there to Francesco Queirolo's Neapolitan workshop (1752), we are not following ornamental digressions but tracing the lines of force in an invisible network connecting all manifestations of the same archetype: the soul imprisoned in matter, struggling for its own liberation. The interpolation of Gaspar de Montiel's manuscript constitutes the most audacious moment of this strategy. Here Rodríguez risks the reader's patience with dense passages of Gnostic theology, Renaissance alchemy and heterodox biblical exegesis. Some will find these segments excessive, even pretentious. But this objection reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what the text attempts to achieve: we are not dealing with a story that contains esoteric research; we are dealing with esoteric research that has adopted the form of a story as a transmission strategy.
This strategy of layered signification—where what appears ornamental reveals symbolic depth under close scrutiny—characterises the entirety of Rodríguez's literary project. The relationship with Aurelio, the albino assistant, functions as an inverted mirror of this dynamic. When Aurelio declares, 'I have never known pleasure', we are not dealing with a tragic confession but with the hermeneutic key to the complete text. Aurelio is Lucian's shadow, his alchemical double, the external manifestation of an internal process. The ambiguity regarding his ontological reality—is he a human being or a psychic projection? —is never resolved, nor should it be. In the Gnostic tradition that Rodríguez constantly invokes, the archons are simultaneously external entities and internal psychic structures; Aurelio functions in this dual register.
The architectural descriptions of the mansion—with their precision regarding stair treads, risers and nosings—are not exhibitions of technical rigour but linguistic materialisation of Lucian's hypervigilant consciousness, for whom the world has become mere geometry emptied of emotional content. But this clinical precision coexists with passages of visionary intensity reminiscent of the finest moments of Thomas Ligotti or Cormac McCarthy. When the text describes Queirolo's experience descending through his own darkness whilst carving Il Disinganno, or the dissolution of the three alchemists in the crypt, Rodríguez momentarily abandons his analytical style for prose with prophetic resonances that captures the numinous and terrifying quality of the encounter with the sacred. This stylistic oscillation is not inconsistency but method. The author understands that certain states of consciousness demand radically different languages. The anhedonia of the initial sections requires cold, dissociated, bureaucratic prose. Gnosis—that immediate and transformative knowledge—demands the language of ecstasy and dissolution.
The referential density of Anhedonia might intimidate or irritate the reader unfamiliar with the hermetic, Gnostic and alchemical corpus that Rodríguez mobilises. We encounter quotations from the Ars Notoria, Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, Coptic texts from Nag Hammadi, Valentinian cosmology, Rosicrucian treatises, Epicurus's philosophy, and references to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Calderón. This accumulation might seem an exhibition of narcissistic erudition. However, Rodríguez is not citing sources to demonstrate knowledge but using them as building materials. Each tradition invoked represents a historical attempt to resolve the same problem: how does one escape from the prison of matter and time? The Valentinian Gnostic seeking to remember his divine origin, the alchemist attempting to transmute lead into gold, the sculptor liberating the form imprisoned in marble, the philosopher recognising existence as suffering—all execute variations of the same archetypal process. Rodríguez's merit lies in demonstrating that these traditions are not museums of dead ideas but functional cartographies of psychic transformation. When Gaspar de Montiel combines the Ars Notoria with Gnostic texts and Renaissance hermeticism, he is not committing superficial syncretism but recognising that all these currents map the same interior territory with different symbolic systems.
The concept of 'incomplete heaven' emerges as the most disquieting and decisive theological intuition of the text. Rodríguez inverts the traditional metaphysical hierarchy: the problem is not that the material world is a prison imprisoning the divine spirit, but that heaven itself has been fractured from the origin. The seven seals do not exist to prevent the soul from ascending but to prevent something from descending. This radical Gnostic inversion—where salvation consists not in returning to the Pleroma but in accepting the impossibility of that return—resonates with currents of contemporary thought that have abandoned all nostalgia for lost totality. Rodríguez suggests that the search itself for redemption is the trap, that the desire for completeness is precisely what keeps us trapped in the cycle of suffering.
Gaspar's manuscript warns: 'The truth that there is no salvation is a truth that must not be known'. Herein lies the genuinely transgressive dimension of the text. It is not nihilistic pessimism—that would be too comfortable a position—but something more disquieting: the suggestion that knowledge of our condition offers not liberation but deeper lucidity about the nature of our prison.
Hardcover
Publisher: Nowhere
Publication: November 28, 2025
Language: English
Print Length: 98 pages
ISBN-13: 979-8276548135
Dimensions: 15.84 x 1.04 x 23.46 cm
Listen to the narration of Chapter I
Todas las obras pertenecen a ©Mariano E. Rodríguez
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