Holding chaos together by a comma: Understanding Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai through his first novel

Quoting these lines at the very beginning is not to establish the ‘genius’ of László Krasznahorkai. The attempt here is to ponder the quintessence of Krasznahorkai’s writing, its irreducibility, which eludes and resists the regimes of language and power.

The Nobel laureation of the Hungarian author has understandably invoked a slew of writings about his hefty oeuvre. But for a newreader, a good point to start with Krasznahorkai’s works is at the beginning — his debut novel Satantango (Satan’s Tango), the success of which catapulted him to the literary scene as a political provocateur.

Satantango was published in 1985, when Krasznahorkai was 31. Hungary was under ‘Goulash communism’, a sort of communism-litewhich would soon give way to a democracy. In a way, Satantango is Krasznahorkai-lite — where his themes of crisis, non-linear time, a stifling sense of decay, find play in his characteristic style, but the novel is more accessible.

But what exactly is the genesis of his writing? Why would anybody write a novel that could potentially put them under the ire and scrutiny of a communist dictatorship?

Tango and statis

Krasznahorkai opens his novel with an interesting, yet ambiguous quote from Franz Kafka— “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.” While this has been interpreted as an inevitable foreboding of the incessant act of waiting that runs throughout the novel as a thematic signpost, it could also be an utterance of his ipseity that reveals that he cannot wait for literature to give up its secrets; he must birth himself as a writer, a genealogy that has no parallels and imitators.

The birth was quite a rupture for his readers, especially the ones in his homeland, who collectively identified with the dilapidated countryside estate where the story is set. For them, it mirrored the haplessness and misery that Hungary found itself in after being ravaged by the rule of the communist regime.

It is a surprise that Hungarians do not find their situation starkly different even now, with the European Union deeming it an “electoral autocracy.” The political apocalypses of Krasznahorkai, hence, are experiential and a part of the lived reality for the Hungarians. It is not that Krasznahorkai’s writing had anything different to offer. For him, the very act of hoping was a stasis that was bound to repeat over and over. The novel and its 12-part structuring of chapters, as the title would imply, take the form of a tango dance with circular movements. The 12 chapters mimic the steps of the tango, with six steps going forward and six steps backwards (I-VI, VI-I), hinting that the novel would end exactly where it started.

What if the wait for Godot ended?

Krasznahorkai assembles a diverse cast of characters in the novel, and the narrative unfolds primarily among seven key characters. Fundamentally, all of them expect their lives to change forever, for good. They would not mind if it were to happen at the expense of others. Futaki, the character through whom the novel unfolds first, and his partners in crime, the Schmidt couple, exemplify the moral decay of the community. While Futaki is involved in a promiscuous relationship with his partner’s wife, Mrs. Schmidt, Mr. Schmidt schemes to betray Futaki and run away with the whole share of the money.

All the disingenuity is, however, superseded by their painful anticipation for the arrival of Irimiás, who decides to mysteriously reappear in his former community after being supposedly dead.

Unlike Vladimir and Estragon, who had to commit to ceaseless waiting for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (Beckett’s influence is apparent in Krasznahorkai’s other works too), the people in the estate witness the coming of Irimiás, who unscrupulously takes advantage of the death of a young girl to present himself in messianic proportions.

What really follows after this has been explained exhaustively as symptomatic of the bleak political dystopias that Krasznahorkai is associated with.

The nature of hope

Nonetheless, it is important to ask, what exactly is at the heart of this dystopia? Is it merely about absolute hopelessness, or hope being an illusion? Well, it might be the case of hope being an ‘uncanny’ feeling for Krasznahorkai.

Sigmund Freud introduced the idea of ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich) to explain the unresolved feeling of the strange being felt familiar, or the strangely familiar feeling. While the Freudian conception of the uncanny is heavily imbricated in the domain of psychoanalysis, what is fascinating here is the basic ideation around it.

In Satantango, Irimiás is presented as the beacon of hope looked upon by the villagers as their way out of the misery. Even though Irimiás is not unknown to them, his return from his supposed death, and the feeling of strangeness built around it, evoke the feeling that they are looking forward to something when it is actually a look cast inward.

Dystopia, for Krasznahorkai, then, is a mode of being where one experiences hope as a feeling that is never at home. Going by this worldview, it is only fitting that the novel ends with Irimiás dispersing the villagers to various places, leaving them with perpetual unhomeliness, whilst experiencing hope as a strangely familiar feeling.

What his long sentences need to say

Another aspect that gets discussed with respect to Krasznahorkai is his penchant for writing long, winding sentences that run to pages without any pause or breaks. From where does this language come? The answer to this probably lies in Krasznahorkai’s inquiry: what kind of language would a community of this kind create? The answer is one of excess.

Krasznahorkai identifies the populace as one driven by desires and drives of varied kinds. But they either get suspended or are superseded by other factors. Krasznahorkai is deeply psychopolitical, and he realises that unrealised desires always leave a remainder, a surplus that goes above and beyond the structures of language—one that would require a new language, a new kind of writing.

It is probably why the readers might identify with Doctor Orvos as the authorial voice. The lonesome chronicler of his community is forever caught in an alcohol-induced stupor. He goes briefly missing from the narrative after he injures himself, failing to be privy to all that has happened in the estate. He does make a return at the end of the novel, only to tell the same story the reader has just finished reading.

Krasznahorkai, just like literature, is a keeper of secrets; he does occasionally tell them; he might have already spilled the biggest of them all: “Literature can only ever hope to hold chaos together, perhaps only by a comma,” and this is probably where the genesis of his genius lies.

The author is a research scholar in English Language and Literature at the Institute of English, University of Kerala