U.R. Bowie
Book Review Article
László Krasznahorkai
The Melancholy of
Resistance
Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, New
Directions, 2000, 314 pp. English translation first published in 1998,
Hungarian original in 1989.
Part One
“An Emergency:
Introduction”
The Malaise
[Note: the part in quotes above is Krasznahorkai’s. These
brief titles for various sections of the book are all he gives the reader to go
on. I see this as a kind of perversity on the part of the storyteller, a middle
finger stuck up in the face of the reader. Figure it out for yourself,
sucker. Therefore, in my review—in aide of the reader—I sometimes provide
chapter numbers and titles, the things the writer himself should have provided.
A few breaks for paragraphs would have been a nice thing too. The words are
crammed together in huge glomps on every page, so as to squeeze the tender
brains of any reader. Dialogue is not set off in separate paragraphs, but
placed in quotation marks in amidst the glomps.]
From the very first page we are given to know that something
is badly out of kilter in the nation state of Hungary, or if not in Hungary,
then at least in the vicinity of one small unnamed Hungarian town that is the
setting of this novel. What is the prototype town? Where in Hungary are we? In
reading Krasznahorkai’s latest published novel, Herscht 07769, one can
click around briefly on the internet and discover, rather easily, the prototype
town in East Germany where the action is set. Not so in The Melancholy of
Resistance. Checking place names, street names, names of suburbs, etc.,
online gets us nowhere. The author has taken a potpourri of names from places
all over the country and placed them in his anonymous town. Nor is any date
ever mentioned. What year does the action of this novel take place? Dunno. In
the time out of mind of surrealism.
The action, we are told, is set in “the icebound estates of
the southern lowlands,” in a year in which the “bone-chilling cold” is
relentless and no snow ever falls. It has been “fifteen to twenty degrees below
freezing since the beginning of December.” Then again, “Time had somehow
stopped,” and it was “as if some vital yet undetectable modification had taken
place in the eternally stable composition of the air.” What is going on? “One’s
daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos that
rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so
haphazard that people simply assumed whatever could be imagined might come to
pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open,
that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that,
since one could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it
remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do
except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible . . .”
From the very beginning of the book this anticipation of
some hideous inevitable catastrophe is in the air. Ill omens abound, presaging
the town’s inexorable decline into chaos. The huge water tower had begun “to
sway dangerously above the tiny houses surrounding it,” “the clock of the
Catholic Church in the main square, immobile for decades, startled everyone by
beginning to strike,” and the gigantic poplar tree, “which for generations had
been the marvel of the town,” had collapsed next to the Hotel Komló
and “was lying lifeless against the hotel’s Hétvezér Square façade.”
We’re into the horrible sense of malaise before the action
of the novel even begins, before we even reach the actual town, since the story
begins with one character trying to return home by train. Continuous and
repeated mention is made of “the unusual and anarchic events of the immediate
past” (just in this town or all over Hungary?). We are never informed what
happened to create such a state of affairs, although it is certain that “the
irreversible process of ruin, schism and disintegration would continue
according to its own infrangible rules.” All of the townspeople seem resigned
to the certainty of what is soon to arrive: utter calamity. János
Valuska, the only positive character in the whole novel (more, much more on him
later), caught up in his belief in the basic goodness of the universe and the
harmony of the heavenly spheres, is the one person not affected by the
“epidemic of panic.” At one point he seems to believe that the townspeople,
through their incessant talk of calamity to come, are bringing this thing upon
themselves.
“Everyone he met was preoccupied by the notion of ‘the
collapse into anarchy’, a state that, in the general opinion, was no longer
avoidable. Everyone was talking about ‘the unstoppable stampede into chaos’,
the ‘unpredictability of daily life’ and ‘the approaching catastrophe’ without
a clear notion of the full weight of these frightening words, since, he
surmised, this epidemic of fear was not born out of some genuine, daily
increasing certainty of disaster but of an infection of the imagination whose
susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual
catastrophe . . . He tried to persuade his friends of this” [of their
self-fulfilling prophecy of calamity to come] but “they refused to listen to
him,” and “it saddened him most when in tones of unrelieved gloom they
proclaimed that the period they were living in was ‘an unfathomable hell
between a treacherous future and an unmemorable past’, . . .”
I have read certain critics who opine that The Melancholy
of Resistance is a political allegory, and that it makes veiled allusions
to the actual situation in Communist Hungary in the late eighties of the
twentieth century, when it as published. We may recall that these were times of
great ferment, not only in Hungary, but in the Soviet Union and all the
countries of the Eastern Socialist Bloc. Big changes were in the offing, and
very soon there would be no more U.S.S.R. and no more Communist Bloc. But, in the
first place, László Krasznahorkai (hereinafter L.K.) has mentioned in
interviews that his books are, largely, unconcerned with topical political
themes. In the second place, I can’t imagine that at the time of such intense
political ferment, including anticipation and hopes of better times to come,
people would become immersed in a firm belief that nothing but utter woe was in
the offing. Therefore, we can only conclude that the theme of this book
involves a kind of metaphysical malaise that has descended upon the human race.
The narrative action of the novel reinforces this notion. At any rate, this is
uniformly the state of mind of the townspeople at the point when a very strange
circus comes to town.
Chapter One
The Prologue: Mrs.
Plauf Rides a Nightmare Train Back Home
We begin the action with what is a short story in itself,
describing a nightmare train ride by one petit-bourgeois denizen of the
principal town of the novel. Mrs. Plauf, 58, is on her way home from one of her
occasional visits to see relations elsewhere in Hungary. One wonders how things
are with these relatives (we are not told), since a perennial question that
haunts the reader’s mind throughout the narrative is this: are things in such a
dire state all over Hungary—or even all over the world—as they are in the town
where the action is set?
Mrs. Plauf is the main character of the novel only in this
introductory chapter, although she is also prominently featured in the final
pages of the book, its gruesome and macabre conclusion. Here at the beginning
she is trying to get home, it is already late, and the passenger train heading
east does not show up. This creates the “emergency” of L.K.’s title for Part
One. Two old wooden-seated coaches are put into service to transport the
stranded passengers fifty miles farther eastward. As she enters the coach, good
citizen that she is, pillar of the middle class, Mrs. Plauf with her worthless
first-class ticket finds herself enveloped by the underclass, who emit “a
stench of garlic sausage blended with the aroma of mixed-fruit brandy and cheap
pungent tobacco.”
The rabble wafting that stench will end up being the prime
movers of the action of the book, “an almost [delete that almost]
menacing ring of loud-mouthed, belching ‘common peasants.’” Just think: this
book was published before the Soviet Union collapsed and Communism faded off
into history. One wonders how L.K.’s novel was received in a country still
officially espousing the glories of the peasants and workers. At any rate, Marx
and Engels, were they able to peruse The Melancholy of Resistance, would
be rolling and writhing in their graves.
If The Melancholy of Resistance were to emit an odor that
embodies the tenor of the whole book, it would be precisely the stench just
mentioned. For this novel is by no means a piece of sweet-smelling,
effervescent fiction. Those readers who want fragrance, optimism, characters of
grace and beauty, should give up on the book before they even begin. The novel
should have this caveat emptor on its cover: “Tender-hearted Readers,
Lovers of Humanity, Believers in God’s Good Grace: back off, desist, don’t touch
even the first page of this misanthropic book. It is NOT for you.”
On the train, surrounded by the utterly uncouth underclass,
poor Mrs. Plauf finds herself accosted by one particular “‘peculiarly silent’
unshaven man, swigging from a bottle of stinking brandy” and wearing “a dirty
broadcloth coat.” Note the mention of the silence, which is soon to become a
leitmotif of the whole book, a special ominous screaming silence that will
accompany men engaged in hideous acts. Note also the mention of the dirty coat.
Not since Gogol’s wonderful story, “The Overcoat” has a coat been so
prominently featured in a work of fiction.
Mrs. Plauf escapes the menace of the unshaven man by
retreating to the WC, but he follows her there and screams obscenities at her
through the locked door. She feels herself “an innocent and unsuspecting victim
of the entire hostile universe, against whose absolute chill . . . there is no
valid defense. It was as if the unshaven man had actually raped her. She swayed
in the airless, urine-smelling booth, broken, tortured by the suspicion that
she knew all there was to know, and under the spell of the formless,
inconceivable, ever-shifting terror of having to seek some protection, against
this universal threat, she was aware only of an emerging sense of agonizing
bitterness: for she felt it was deeply unfair that she should be cast as an
innocent victim rather than an untroubled survivor, she who ‘all her life had
longed for peace, and never harmed a soul,’ she was forced to concede that this
was of little consequence: there was no authority to which she could appeal, no
one to whom she might protest, and she could hardly hope that the forces of
anarchy having once been loosed could afterwards be restrained.” Soon we will
learn that the book features prominently those unrestrainable forces of
anarchy, which “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”
After the train makes a stop an even greater horde of coarse
and crude humanity boards it, and Mrs. Plauf must endure twenty more kilometers
of her encroachment by the hoi polloi. Upon her arrival at her home station she
disembarks, only to notice that “the forecourt had become a dense forest of fur
caps, greasy peasant hats and ear flaps.” She wonders “what all these people
were doing here anyway,” a question that looms throughout the whole remainder
of the book and is never adequately answered. In a word, Chaos has arrived
along with her in her home town, or, as W.G. Sebald has written in his blurb,
“This is a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned.”
Among those who disembark with Mrs. Plauf is “the man in the
broadcloth coat.” She feels as if “something inside her had whispered that her
involvement with the unshaven man—and the terrifying ordeal of the attempted
rape—was far from over.” In other words, she feels as if she has already been
virtually raped, and the fact of that virtual rape will, sooner or later,
inevitably, lead to an actual physical rape. The tension that pervades the
whole prologue of the book continues even after she leaves the train. Since
they have arrived so late no public transport is running, nor do the street
lights work, and she must make her way on foot homeward through dark and menacing,
deserted ice-laden streets.
On her way home Mrs. Plauf comes upon an advertisement
plastered on a pillar: “The Biggest Whale in the World, and Other Sensational
Secrets of Nature.” She thinks, “how can we have a circus here, when the end of
the world was all but imminent?” A graphic picture of this ad on the pillar
takes up all of p. 26. Still walking on she encounters a huge lorry: “A
shapeless hulk that smelled vaguely of fish was being drawn by a smoking, oily
and wholly antediluvian wreck of a tractor.” This “satanic conveyance,” this
“spectral contraption”—with some sort of Cyrillic or Turkish letters written on
its side, is moving slowly down the middle of the road. Driving the tractor is
“a heavily built and bewhiskered man with an indifferent expression on his
face, wearing only a vest on top, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of
his mouth.” Upon spotting the ambulating Mrs. Plauf, the man pulls a face and
slowly raises one hand from the wheel as if to greet her. We are to meet this
character again soon, as the “factotum” at the circus, and as translator of the
gibberish that comes out of the mouth of the book’s most prominent freak.
Eventually the reader gets a bit of relief from the
perpetual tension of the beginning pages, when Mrs. Plauf arrives safely back
at her flat. We learn a few background facts about her. Already in her late
fifties, she has buried two husbands and lives alone. She is estranged from her
only child, “her son from the first marriage, always on the move, with never
any improvement in prospect.” This is János Valuska, who will soon take on the
role of one of the book’s most important characters. The internet, incidentally,
informs us that the given name János means “God is
gracious.” Very appropriate name for a character who consistently preaches that
message, in defiance of the narrative voice and practically everyone else in
the book, all of whom insist that God is far from gracious.
Mrs. Plauf leads a solitary existence these days, taking
comfort in the furnishings of her flat: Persian rugs, tulle curtains and ‘gaily
colored’ blinds for her windows. In her ‘heart-warmingly homely’ little
apartment—note: L.K. uses single quotes to designate phrases spoken or thought
within the text by his characters, creating something of an ironic effect since
the phrases are often cliches—decorated with a legion of bric-a-brac and plants
provided by ‘green-fingered friends,’ she basks in her approaching old age. At
least she had so basked until the Chaos suddenly arrived.
Note that the friends named here, Dr. Provaznyik, Mrs. Mádai
and Mrs. Mahó
are among the many secondary petty-bourgeois characters in the novel who get
short shrift from the narrative. Later we are to meet “the hard-of-hearing” Mr.
Mádai, “the fat butcher” Mr. Nadabán (who is also a poet) and “the fanatical
general engineer of the boat factory” Mr. Volent, who also remain undeveloped
characters, cardboard stand-ins for real humans of flesh and blood. Others
mentioned elsewhere are Wallner, “the humpbacked tailor,” Lehel, “the
headmaster of the grammar school, whose stupidity was unsurpassed,”
Mahovenyecz, “the obsessive chess player,” and “the hopelessly mad chief of
police.” The last of these makes several appearances later in the text, and
proves to be the only chief of police in any novel ever who stays dead drunk
throughout the whole action of the book.
Secure in her petty-bourgeois comfort, Mrs. Plauf eats from a jar
of boiled cherries in rum and consoles herself that the scum of the world, the
hideous rabble she had encountered that night would eventually “scurry back
where they came from, because, thought Mrs. Plauf, that is where they belong,
beyond the pale of our fair and ordered world, excluded from it for ever
without remission . . . while things were as they were, the streets being
occupied by such, she would not so much as put her foot outside the house,
would refuse to have herself involved in any manner, would not hear another
word about it until this disgraceful state of affairs came to an end, until the
skies brightened and mutual understanding and sober restraint were once again
the order of the day.” But the skies of this book, alas, are never to brighten,
and much later in the narrative action Mrs. Plauf is to make the fatal mistake
of “putting her foot outside the house.”
Chapter
Two
Mrs.
Eszter Comes to Visit
At the end of Chapter One—which is
never so designated—a blank spot appears at the bottom of a page, informing us
tacitly that the first chapter is over. The new chapter—also not designated as
such—begins at the top of the next page. The first thirty-five pages (all of
Chapter One) do without a single use of paragraph breaks, and all dialog is
contained in parentheses within the massive glomps of text on each page. The
whole remainder of the book will continue imposing on the reader this
deliberate claustrophobic design, in what is, apparently, an effort to deprive
the reader of any chance to catch his/her breath. In the text of this
novel—and, could be, of any novel by L.K.—there is the underlying theme of the
author’s perverse intent to force the reader to digest the story on his own
recalcitrant terms. We, the readers, are babies in a high chair, and he, the
author, is force-feeding us his pablum. “Don’t spit that back out,” he seems to
be saying. Or he might be saying, “I’m writing a novel about desperate people
steeped in quotidian menace. Why, therefore, should I make it easy reading for you
petty-bourgeois consumers of that novel?”
Another major character, Mrs.
Eszter, now appears ringing the doorbell (in the dead of night?) at the flat of
Mrs. Plauf. By this point whatever sympathy the latter may have garnered—given
her ordeal on the train—has been dissipated by the clearly disapproving
narrative tone adopted to describe her basking in her bourgeois contentment.
Given the anti-bourgeois spirit of the narrative, the reader may expect the
anti-bourgeois Mrs. Eszter to be a positive character. Think again. This book
has no positive characters—excepting, perhaps, Valuska, who is something like a
holy fool or idiot savant, not in his right mind.
Mrs. Eszter, so opines the proper
Mrs. Plauf, is known about town for her “‘scandalous past, loose morals, and
currently confused family situation’.” She has a “rude, bumptious and pushy
manner, and ‘gaudy clothes, so befitting her tub-of-lard figure.’” Through the
influence of her lover, the chief of police, Mrs. Eszter has just got herself
appointed “as president of the women’s committee.” She has come to visit Mrs.
Plauf in what she sees as “the treacly prettiness of this ‘filthy little
viper’s nest.’” Why come visit someone she despises and who despises her? It
seems that Mrs. Eszter is engaged in some sort of “epoch-making campaign for
renewal” of the town. She wants to grab the comfort-loving bourgeoisie by the
gills and shake them into some new state of being. So it turns out, she has
come to persuade Mrs. Plauf to persuade her estranged son Valuska to persuade
her own estranged husband, György Eszter, to take part in her plan
for the rejuvenation of the town.
Eszter, we are told, is a
celebrity in the town, the most prominent intellectual. Years ago he had kicked
his vulgar wife out of his house and now lives the life of a hermit, having
given up his position as director of the town’s orchestra. For some reason his
wife believes that he is still influential, that he, in fact, is “the key to
the operation.” Later on, when we meet this major character in the flesh, we
wonder how she could have ever believed she needed him for her renewal project,
given his having totally rejected the outside world and every last resident of
his town. Here at the end of Chapter Two there appears to be a good deal of
muddle in the plotting of the narrative. L.K.’s strong suit, so it seems, is not
believability in the storyline, and his verisimilitude is often sagging.
Toward the end of this chapter we
meet one more character, Harrer the stonemason, a drunk and ne’er-do-well. He
is Valuska’s landlord, renting out to him sleeping space in his laundry room.
Known by his nickname, “The Vulture,” Harrer, like most of the book’s
characters, has no redeeming virtues. His function in the narrative structure
of the book is that of messenger boy, appearing in a number of scenes to help
move the plot along. We also learn now that Mrs. Eszter herself is responsible
for hiring the circus to come to town, despite misgivings in the town’s
executive committee. The “fat circus manager” has first persuaded the chief of
police to issue the necessary license, which the chief does, having “recognized
‘a gentleman from top to toe’ in the elegant though slightly fishy-smelling
figure of the director of the world-famous company.” The chapter ends with Mrs.
Eszter back home in her squalid lodgings, first copulating with the chief of
police, then sleeping, while three rats venture out from beneath her bed,
seeking to sample whatever food has been left lying about.
Part
Two “The Werckmeister Harmonies”
Chapter
Three: Valuska in the Bar and with the Whale
Closing time at the Peafeffer Bar
is eight p.m. Odd fact, that. What bar closes that early? I note that in his
film The Werckmeister Harmonies—based on L.K.’s novel—Béla
Tarr moves the time up two hours. János Valuska, a steady patron of this
low dive is depicted turning the bar into a kind of underclass planetarium,
staging his production of a solar eclipse, “the business of the erf and the
mune” and “the lowly place of man in the great order of the universe”—"an
exposition so clear that everyone could understand it.” For some reason the
regulars at the bar—the “gaggle of drivers, painters, bakers and warehousemen
who patronized the place”—never tire of this repeat performance. At least they
see it as a way to dissuade the barkeeper, Mr. Hagelmayer, from shutting down
his business at his early closing time and ushering them out. Valuska chooses
amidst them three characters, one to play the sun, another the earth, and a
third the moon. As director of the production he ushers two of them (the erf
and mune) in rotating movements around a stationary sun. Tarr makes this the
opening scene of his film, and it is one of the film’s best.
On this particular evening, like
everyone else in town (except Valuska), the patrons of the Peafeffer—“the inn
behind the watertower”—are agonizing over the general malaise that has gripped
the town. “For weeks now they had lived in a state between confusion and unease
bordering on nervous melancholy.” They see the impending performance of the
circus just arrived in town as threatening, and they fear the “almost
inevitably ill-omened whale.” Not so, Valuska, a semi-retarded character
who—unlike anyone else in the novel, including the omniscient narrative
voice—has total faith in the basic goodness of the cosmos and its “monumental
simplicity.” He has “spent over thirty-five years cleaving the silent spume of
that starry firmament,” communing bright-eyed with the stars and the planets.
Like a majority of other characters in the book the working-class men in the
Peafeffer are “mean and brutish, not inclined to respond to Valuska’s
edifications,” but respond they do; it appears that this repeat performance
always is crowned with at least moderate success.
Caught up in the exhilaration of
the artiste, Valuska is not the least concerned with the ill omen of the whale
in town, with “the days of judgment” at hand. He is interested only in “the
feverish excitement, that passionate tense feeling deep inside him experienced
in the few dramatic seconds of silence once his wholly unvaried performance was
officially over,” in the “unsurpassable sweetness and purity” that would sweep
over him. After leaving the bar, he goes about his usual nocturnal business,
making his rounds of the town in the night, delivering newspapers printed in
the early morning hours (he is a postman). This evening he comes across “dense
waves of people” pressing forward toward the main square of the town, Kossuth
Square, and when he arrives there he sees “a frozen and impatient crowd.” “What
was hardest of all to understand was what they wanted here, what drew them so
remorselessly on to what after all was only a circus bill,” this, so the rumors
went, “‘spellbound mob’ that was supposed to have grown by now into a kind of
army that followed the whale from village to village and town to town.”
Perhaps most notable of all is the
“unbroken, ill-omened silence” of this mob, this “rabble of frightening,
villainous-looking, good-for-nothing, possibly threatening characters thirsting
after the crudest and most vulgar of miracles.” Despite hours of waiting on the
part of the congregated masses, nothing seems to be going on around the huge
truck containing the whale. In fact, the two-man company running the circus
seems supremely contemptuous of the waiting audience, not in any hurry to begin
the proceedings. This company consists of the owner, “an apparently sickly and
overweight figure calling himself ‘The Director,’ and “an enormous behemoth of
a man who (according to rumors) was once a boxer but had degenerated since into
a general circus helper.” He will later be referred to as “factotum.” This
roustabout, we will later learn, is a foreigner, and he has a special talent
for translation.
As Valuska waits along with the
silent mob the “corrugated tin of the truck’s rear door” descends and the
factotum, “a great mountain of flesh, well over six feet high,” appears and
begins selling tickets. Valuska eagerly pays his way in and steps “into the
half-lit enormous vacancy of the ‘whale-house,’” where he encounters another
mountain of flesh, that of a dead whale. When he reaches the creature’s jars,
he finds them “ingeniously displayed wide open,” so that he can stare down into
the dark throat. Whether the whale has teeth or a baleen we are not told. If
it’s a sperm whale (Ahab’s obsession) it would have teeth. If it’s a right
whale, hunted by now into almost total extinction, it would have a baleen. Most
logically this enormous creature would be a blue whale (which is also a baleen
whale), the biggest of God’s creatures at sea or on the earth, but L.K., unlike
Melville, seems unconcerned with providing the reader with the specifics of the
whale. Read Moby-Dick and you discover everything you would ever want to
learn about whales, and more; read The Melancholy of Resistance and you
learn nothing about whales, except that they are humongous, and when dead, they
stink.
The Circus, The
Whale, The Prince
The so-called “circus” that makes its appearance in our
Hungarian town steeped already in malaise is the strangest circus imaginable.
It, in fact, is not really a circus at all: no dogs on unicycles, no acrobats,
no elephants, monkeys, no clowns. Just two “acts” featured, which turn out to
be not acts at all. The forementioned dead whale, advertised as spectacular and
humongous, is meant to arouse awe in the beholder, but the only awe-struck
beholder, so it turns out, is Valuska, who marvels at the fascinating variety
of creatures with which God has populated His world. We learn that the huge mob
of underclass men gathered in the central square appear to have little interest
in the whale; they are waiting for the appearance, rather, of the second
featured “act.”
Vague rumors abound about the presence of “a certain
monster” among those in the circus company. Mrs. Eszter, now in charge of a
town committee to deal with the crisis—the presence of an unruly rabble
gathered in Kossuth Square—sends Valuska back where he had just come from to
reconnoiter the situation. He sneaks into the circus truck containing the
whale, makes his way to some room at its rear, where he overhears a
conversation between the sole members of the circus company, the director and
his factotum. They are arguing about the creature who (so Harrer reports
elsewhere) “it seems, has three eyes and weighs no more than twenty pounds.”
Known as “The Prince,” this creature cannot walk and has to be carried about.
The director, apparently, has hired him as a kind of freak: “I engaged him to
show himself.” But now he has been “spinning stupid stories,” provoking the
rabble, who have begun following him from town to town.
The Prince’s appearance is presented only in hearsay, since
in the one scene in which he appears, he is not physically described. Valuska
overhears him speaking, but never gets a look at him. In his argument with the
factotum, the angry director accosts The Prince, but not directly, since this
creature cannot speak Hungarian. He babbles high-pitched gibberish, but
(miraculously) the factotum/roustabout understands his language and translates
into Hungarian. “Tell him (says the director) that I am not willing to risk the
reputation of the company again. That last time was positively the last . . .”
The factotum replies, “He says he doesn’t recognize a superior authority. And
that the director couldn’t seriously think he would . . .” The director: “What
I do know is that if he rouses the crowd rather than calming it, they will tear
this town to pieces.” The factotum: “He says he likes it when things fall to
pieces. Ruin comprises every form of making: lies and false pride are like
oxygen in the ice . . . To his followers he is ‘The Prince’ but in his own view
he is the prince of princes. Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can
see there is no whole . . .” In the upshot of this quarrel the director
announces that The Prince will not be allowed outside to commune with his
followers in the rabble. In fact, both he and the factotum are fired.
This leaves no one in the company to run the “circus” except
the director, who carries on as best he can. Going out to face the crowd in the
square, he announces that the show is over for the day. Therefore, the events
of that evening, when the mob goes wild and marauders wreck the town, seems at
first not inspired by the words of The Prince, at least not by anything he
announces that day. The director makes his final appearance the following day,
after the horrendous events in which the horde wreaks havoc on the whole town.
Under interrogation by an army officer—this comes after the army has been
called in to quell the riot—the director falls back on his faith in art,
explaining that he can help “the officers present to a clearer understanding of
the principles of art, and particularly the art of the circus.” He asserts “the
clear innocence of his company in the matter of the regrettable incidents of
the previous night,” mentioning that the member of his company known as “The
Prince” was not the chief agitator; rather, he himself was afraid of the
passions of the crowd and managed to escape when the violence began. True,
after the army has come to put down the violence, after scores of the marauders
have been rounded up, some shot, some hanged, it turns out that The Prince and
his factotum/translator have disappeared into thin air.
More is to be learned about the influence of The Prince on
the mob in a different interrogation, that of one of the marauders. But we
don’t need this scene to realize—it has been made abundantly clear
elsewhere—that The Prince is, in reality, the Prince of Darkness, or, at least,
Satan’s minion who loves and wreaks Chaos amongst men. After the riots local
vociferous townspeople report that “satanic powers” were involved in what
happened to their town, and that “there had been countless signs and portents
of this in the preceding months.”
The Disillusionment
of György
Eszter
One thing I’ve noticed in the two novels that I’ve read by
L.K. is that he is not unduly concerned about observing literary norms and
making things believable. Note that a key scene—that in which we learn much of
interest about the inner workings of the “circus”—is delivered to the reader by
way of the oldest cliché in literary plotting: the device of overhearing. One
of the book’s most puzzling plotlines involves how Tūnde Eszter goes to great
lengths to involve her husband—really ex-husband, although they have never
officially divorced—in her efforts to achieve her “moral rearmament” of the
town.
We learn that he had kicked her out of his house years ago,
although given her strength of character, and his weakness, we wonder how he
managed that so easily. Eszter is, apparently, the leading intellectual of the
town, the only intellectual, in fact, presented in this book. Local people are
in awe of him, a musical prodigy and a genius; they want him and no one else to
lead the new movement, so avers Mrs. Eszter. But it should be evident to any
reader that he is incapable of leading any movement, this feckless man who
“avoided having to give orders or indeed anything that smacked of decision.”
Eszter has a reputation in the town for doing “musicological
research,” having once been the director of the town’s symphony orchestra, “a
band of incompetents.” But now he has long since resigned his position and
retreated to his home, which he never leaves, preferring to read books in bed and
play J.S. Bach on his piano. He now concentrates on “his real mission, which he
referred to as his ‘strategic withdrawal in the face of the pathetic stupidity
of so-called human progress.’”
Eszter believes that “the once brotherly bond between heaven
and earth was well and truly broken.” He has “rid himself of the notion that
there is any suggestion of rhyme or reason in making or breaking, in birth or
death, in the constant and agonizing going round in circles, postulating some
enormous wonderful plan rather than a cold, mechanical, blindingly simple
movement . . .” He occupies a philosophical position that is the exact antipode
of the position of his acolyte and only friend, Valuska. Having given up
absolutely on his world, its human inhabitants and the universe, Eszter
preaches his pessimistic worldview to Valuska, who is too busy admiring the
planets and all of the Lord’s magnificent handiwork to ever listen.
Each of the two constantly preaches to the other his own
particular apprehension of life and the universe. Valuska believes in “the
heavenly bodies orbiting overhead,” their “silent proof of the existence of an
ineffable intellect,” while Eszter is convinced that mankind has “rambled
aimlessly through the universe since time immemorial.” Valuska hopes that his
friend Mr. Eszter, a man much more educated and intelligent than him, will some
day come to comprehend the joys and ecstasies of a harmonious universe, with a
well-meaning and benevolent Deity in charge. This is the vision by which the
starry-eyed, good-hearted Valuska has lived his whole life, and the vision of which
he will be wholly deprived by the hideous events of the night directly
following upon his encounter with the whale.
Why does Eszter, who despises every other person in the
town, so love and admire Valuska? Although he views Valuska as a “crazy
wanderer on the highways of his own transparent galaxy, with its
incorruptibility and universal, if embarrassing generosity of spirit,” Eszter
concedes that he is “proof that, despite the highly corrosive forces of
decadence in the present age, angels nevertheless did exist.” Eszter “loved him
as a lonely lepidopterist might love a rare butterfly; he loved the harmless
ethereal nature of Valuska’s imagined cosmos . . .” Eszter comes to realize
that he needs to believe at least in the possibilities of angels on earth, that
his only salvation lies in Valuska (lone companion in his isolation), since
when he enters Eszter’s life, Valuska brings with him “a self-sacrificing,
invisible, unshakeable, ever industrious, caring kind of benevolence.”
As for Eszter’s marriage to the martinet Tünde,
this too is a fact of the plotline that simply cannot stand up to the issue of
verisimilitude. We are presented with her incorrigibly vulgar and venal
personality and then asked to believe that the highly intellectual and
sensitive Eszter not only married her, but spent thirty years (30!) cohabiting
with her. Not possible.
The Imbecility of
Harmonics
For Part Two (not designated as such), which begins on p.
63, L.K. provides a title: “The Werckmeister Harmonies.” The allusion is to
Andreas Werckmeister (1645-1706), German music theorist of the Baroque Era. I
learn online (Wikipedia) that he described a system referred to as well
temperament—now known as Werckmeister temperament—in which “all keys are
playable, as in J.S. Bach’s later work The Well-Tempered Clavier.” A
great lover of Bach—as is L.K., the author—Eszter the musician, since his
withdrawal from the world at large, has spent much of his time playing Bach on
the piano.
When he was young Eszter was convinced that music, “the
omnipotent magic of harmony and echo, provided humanity’s only sure stay
against the filth and squalor of the surrounding world.” Now his researches
into tonality turn him against Werckmeister’s system, which suggests something
like a world in which God’s harmonies are embodied in the best of the great
composers.
Since I don’t have the necessary background in classical music
theory I do not pretend to understand the specifics of Eszter’s rebellion
against Werckmeister, but the text makes it clear that music, which once
provided for him consolation and belief in some beatific universal force no
longer does. He comes to the conclusion that “pure tuning was indeed a mirage
and that there was no such thing as pure tone.” Furthermore, “through his
passionate researches into tonality he had arrived at an unavoidable crisis of
faith, where he had to ask himself whether that system of harmony to which all
works of genius—with their clear and absolute authority—referred, and on which
he, who could certainly not be accused of harbouring illusions, had based his
hitherto unshaken convictions, existed at all.” In sum, “music was not the
articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of
a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the
sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete,
twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate
that functioned as an opiate.”
Here is another critic’s take on the theme of musical
tonalities in The Melancholy of Resistance:
“Ezster’s obsessive, tonal-mathematical studies into the
inner workings of harmonics have led him to a devastating discovery: the
seven-tone European scale operates at a departure from absolute purity of
pitch. The works of Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart do not adumbrate some
transcendent cosmological harmony, but are in fact, mathematically speaking,
aberrations. In ‘natural’ (i.e. tonally equidistant) tuning the works of Bach
are nothing but a horrible clamour; harmony is in fact an illusion concealing,
in Bruckner’s famous words “that screaming that men call silence.” The
masterworks that Eszter had regarded as evidence of the redeeming possibility
of the unity of object and idea are in fact merely “evidences of human failings,”
and this for Eszter has the profoundest of philosophical implications” (Review
on Danny Byrne Blog online).
The disillusioned Eszter, now utterly mired in misanthropy,
invents a form of self-torture. In a period of “revisionist tuning” he renders
his Steinway completely out of tune and then plays Bach’s Well-Tempered
Clavier in an “ear-splitting racket” for an hour each day. “As to the
famous Prelude in E-flat Minor, the sound it made on this divinely tuned
instrument reminded him of nothing so much as the scene at a village wedding,
where guests heaved and retched and slipped off their chairs growing ever more
drunk, and the fat, squint-eyed, heavily powdered bride, more drunk than any of
the rest, emerged from one of the back rooms dreaming of the future . . .”
The bride here is emblematic of practically all of the
personages who populate the pages of this novel. See also the cover
illustration of the paperback, a detail from James Ensor’s painting, “The Entry
of Christ into Brussels in 1889,” in which the figure of Christ in nowhere to
be seen. The detail depicts what looks like a carnival scene, a coterie of
grotesque, ugly human faces, some in masks, all apparently reveling in their
baseness. Mrs. Eszter, one of the book’s main characters, could easily fit into
this picture, given that she is consistently depicted as a fat and vulgar slut.
Not a single person of grace and beauty is featured in the book, except for the
angelic Valuska.
The Rampage
Nowhere is it made clear exactly how the rampage began, on
the evening that Valuska beheld the whale. Did The Prince emerge with his
factotum/translator and speak to the mob in Kossuth Square? We know for sure only
that the director of the circus fired both Prince and factotum, then came out
of the truck to inform the crowd that the show was over for the day. An episode
late in the novel, describing the interrogation of one of the marauders on the
day after the riot, hints that The Prince—accompanied by his translator—may
have made an appearance against the explicit orders of the director, and may
have incited the mob to violence. A few excerpts:
Lieutenant (interrogator): “Did The Prince tell you to shoot
yourselves in the head if the rebellion was put down?”
Marauder: “The Prince never commands.”
Lieutenant: “When did you first see The Prince?”
Marauder: “I only saw his face once. They always wrap him in
a fur coat when they bring him out of the truck for us.”
Lieutenant: “At what time did The Prince emerge from the
truck yesterday? . . . Did you personally hear what he said?”
Marauder: “Only those who were standing close to him heard
him.”
L: “Then how do you know what he said?”
M: “The general factotum understands him. He always
interprets nice and loud.”
L: “What did he say yesterday evening, for example?”
M: “That toads like you are of no use to anyone.”
L: “He commanded you to ‘tear down everything’. Correct?”
M: “The Prince never commands.”
L: “He said, ‘Build a new world upon the ruins!’ Correct?
M: “You’re pretty well informed, redshank.”
L: ‘’Is The Prince some devil out of hell?”
M: “Oh, it’s not as simple as that. He’s flesh and blood,
but his flesh and blood are different.”
Valuska twice loiters in amidst the mob on Kossuth Square,
the first time when he goes to see the whale, the second time on the
instructions of Mrs. Eszter, who tells him to find out what’s going on there
and to report back to her. In his usual naïve and friendly manner he tries to
strike up conversations with the men gathered there, but they gruffly rebuff
him. Only one man responds to his overtures, and that man—so we are to discover
later—is “the man in the gray broadcloth coat,” the same man we first met on
the train in the prologue, the one who accosted Mrs. Plauf.
When the looting and pillaging, the burnings begin, Valuska
seems to have escaped momentarily, but he never makes it back to report to Mrs.
Eszter and the town officials, who are doing their best to deal with the
situation. His first thought is to run to the house of Mr. Eszter, to warn or
protect him, and there, outside of Eszter’s house, the mob overtakes him.
“Suddenly he heard footsteps, the sound of a hundred
boot-clad feet approaching, tired, exhausted feet scraping the ground. A group
of men stood before him and slowly encircled him. He saw their hands, their
stumpy fingers, and would have liked to say something. But a voice behind them
croaked, ‘Wait!’ and, without seeing his face, he recognized the grey
broadcloth overcoat and knew immediately that the figure walking up to him
through the open ring of men couldn’t be anyone else but the new friend he had
made in the market square. ‘Don’t be afraid. You’re coming with us,’ the man
whispered in his ear and put his arm about his shoulders.” As they march on,
Valuska now with them, he looks up at the sky “and suddenly had the sensation
that the sky was not where it was supposed to be; terrified, he looked up again
and confirmed the fact that there was indeed nothing there, so he bowed his
head and surrendered to the fur caps and boots, realizing that it was no use to
search because what he sought was lost, swallowed up by this coming together of
forces, of details, or this earth, this marching.”
So ends Chapter Five, with Valuska having been recruited by
his new “friend”—one of the ringleaders of the mob, a man later described as
“the most ruthless of them all.” This man saves Valuska from a certain death,
but then forces him—for the first time in his life—to come down out of the
clouds and face grim earthly realities, which, over the course of his time with
the marauders, smash to smithereens all of his dreams of a harmonious cosmos.
In Chapter Six, parts of which can be a tough slog of a
read, we are back with the POV of Eszter. Here we get five pages detailing the
workings of his mind, his ratiocinations, as he nails boards up on his windows
and contemplates—along with a plethora of other things—the arc of the swing of
the hammer required to hit the nail on the head. This arc he cannot master—he
keeps hitting his own fingers—because he is too firmly trapped in the language
of ratiocination that whirls in circles in his mind. Most importantly in this
chapter, Eszter comes to the realization that Valuska, his only friend, is a
kind of guardian angel for him, someone who can redeem squalid humanity with
his benevolence and generosity. His friend’s “steadfastness and love” are all
that protects Eszter from a descent into utter pessimism and despondency.
Eszter resolves to live from that moment on only in the
company of Valuska, this angelic, “wholly ethereal” presence, “wholly
transformed into spirit and pure flight.” In an ironic juxtaposition of detail,
it is precisely at the moment when Eszter comes to this realization that
Valuska the angel is in the process of being divested of his angelic nature.
The cruelest of the book’s many cruelties is Valuska’s loss of angelic
innocence. His march with the marauders in the night leaves him “utterly
blinded in the first shocking and decisive moment of his complete rebirth.”
While he himself apparently commits no acts of violence, Valuska is forced to
watch his companions wreak violence not only on objects—smashing everything in
their purview, ripping up small trees by the roots, killing feral cats in their
path—but also on the bodies on innocent persons: raping and murdering.
Caught up in the spirit of the moment, accompanied all the
time by “the evil escort at his side,” Valuska comes face to face with the fact
of his own beastly nature. The escort is “the man in the broadcloth coat,” who
guides him relentlessly along, never releasing his grip on him, pouring on
occasion more brandy down his throat. Valuska is forced to look at “his
helplessness and sheer terror at the dilemma he faced when, on the one hand, he
wished to defend the person being beaten and, on the other, to be the person
administering the beating . . .” The most intelligent of all the characters in
the book, Eszter had been trying for ages to bring Valuska down from out of the
clouds: “Anyone who believes that the world is maintained through the grace of
some force for good or beauty, dear friend, is doomed to early disillusion.”
This, together with another assertion ten pages later—“chaos really was the
natural condition of the world”—seems to be the overriding message of the whole
novel.
The “evil escort” finally leaves Valuska alone in a
smashed-up laundry room, leaning against a washing machine and contemplating
the utter transmogrification of his world. Here, in what is, once again, a
totally unbelievable plot development, Valuska picks up and reads a discarded
notebook that one of his fellow marauders had left behind. How in the world do
you have time to do your marauding—smash, rape, murder, burn—and, somehow
simultaneously, write down your cri de coeur in a notebook? But never mind, let’s
take a look at the thoughts of a quite literate marauder.
The Man in the
Notebook
The notebook entry is written in a highly literate style, a
style, in fact, that resembles the narrative style of the whole book. It is
wholly unexpected, and improbable, to find the voice of the silent mob
expressed in highly literate and intelligent words. It seems as if the
narrative force behind the entire third-person voice of the book has chosen
this representative to air out its grievances.
The overall voice of the book is, it appears, disgruntled
and angry, thoroughly disgusted with the human race. At one point we are
informed that Eszter “was a living demonstration of how the fixed ideas of the
day [what day? what ideas?], in their short-sighted vanity, wanted to redefine
every human institution, and were busy tearing apart the fabric of the town and
indeed the whole country [Hungary?] (which fully deserved its fate) . . . all
the fixed ideas, all those acts of short-sighted vanity, every judgmental train
of thought that wanted to view ‘the world’ from its own limited viewpoint.”
Mixed in with the citations above are Eszter’s only hope: that Valuska, ‘the genius of the wide-eyed stare,’ can save
him. But what about the other words: “which fully deserved its fate”? Why does
the town and the whole country deserve to be smashed into bits or burned
completely down, destroyed? I’ve read the whole book twice and I’m still not
sure.
The notebook writer begins with a kind of justification of
his (and the whole mob’s) behavior. Things, it seems, have come to such a pass
that the only recourse is to tear the whole thing down and start over again.
We, says the writer “had nothing left to lose, everything having become
intolerable, unbearable,” as are “intolerable too the inexplicable ground-rules
of human conduct.” The mob, “we were a single body with one single pair of
eyes, ardent for one single act of destruction, one single fatal impulse,
impervious to entreaty.” Note also that the marauder who is interrogated by the
lieutenant the day after the riot, is utterly unrepentant as well. And he too is
presented as a man of intelligence, like the writer of the notebook, not as
some uncouth and nescient peasant brute. So, L.K. wishes us to be informed, it
was not only the underclass marching along on that night of rage.
Much of the notebook entry describes the relentless pursuit
by the mob of a man, woman and child, who have the misfortune to be out on the
street at just the wrong time. This passage, describing how the rabble takes
pleasure in the pursuit, in its knowledge that the victims cannot escape, in
contemplating in advance the pleasure it will take in finally tracking down the
prey and wreaking havoc upon the innocent creatures. This is perhaps the most
hideous scene in a book permeated with hideousness. One detail captures the
spirit of the whole rampage. The men have been murdering stray feral cats whom
they come upon as they march, and some of the marauders are described as having
“dead cats slung over their shoulders.” I am reminded of the closing stanza in
a poem by Osip Mandelstam, “The Violinist,” about the mad abandon of Dionysian
frenzy:
Play your aorta-bursting orison,
With cat’s head in your mouth,
off-tune,
Three fiends there were, and
you’re the fourth one,
The last, berserker-fiend in
bloom!
But note one big difference.
Mandelstam’s frenetic violinist, as well as the revelers on the cover of L.K.’s
book, are caught up in the carnival spirit, the joy of throwing off all
restraints and going wild. The marauders of this novel, on the contrary, are
never described as joyful, never reveling in mad abandon. They march along
silently and dolefully, and their pursuit of havoc seems to make them even more
morose.
Valuska seems to find in reading this brief narrative in the
notebook something like a confirmation that his joining the marauders had been
the proper thing to do. At least this feeling—I did the right thing; I’ve
learned what life really is—hovers somewhere over the guilt and horror
inspired by his midnight march with the mob. Another chapter ends on p. 246,
with the final appearance of Valuska. Implicated as one of the marauders, his
name on a list of those to be apprehended by the military forces called out to
protect the town, Valuska quite likely is to be hanged if caught. He makes his
way cautiously out of town, followed by the two sons of the police chief, ancillary
characters who play no role in the action of the novel, and would best have
been edited out of the book.
Later, in a scene off stage, Valuska is ushered out of the
novel and into the local looney bin. Now deprived of his visions of the
harmonious planets and a benevolent God, unable to live with the revelations
about what life really is, he is a broken man. In his film based on the novel Béla
Tarr does not have the temerity to show Valuska’s realization of his own
beastliness, as does L.K., but he does realize that this is the most
interesting character in the book and he structures his whole motion picture around
him. He gives to Valuska the penultimate, most moving scene in the film,
showing the character visited by Eszter in the psychiatric ward, sitting
unmoving, un-listening, utterly silent on a bed, his starry-eyed stare dimmed
forever.
Conclusion
A central tenet in the book’s improbable plot is that Mrs.
Eszter expects her feckless husband to “take his place at the head of some
campaign for moral rearmament.” Her project, apparently titled “A Tidy Yard, An
Orderly House,” proceeds full-bore immediately after the episode of the whale
and the rampage. By this point the army has been called in to quell the civil
disturbance. The colonel in charge works closely with the town’s de facto
leader, Mrs. Eszter, to restore order and civility. She finds herself in a
position of such power that she no longer has need of her husband at all. She
makes a bold move back into his house, where he meekly submits to her power, relegated
to a back room, where he can read his books and play Bach’s Prelude in B Major
on his piano. Meanwhile, it so turns out that Mrs. Plauf, learning that her son
Valuska had been marching with the marauders, ventured out of her home in the
midst of the rampage and was killed.
The final section of the novel, titled Sermo Super
Sepulchrum (An Oration over a Grave), describes the apotheosis of vulgarity
in the person of Mrs. Eszter. Now fully in a position to control the whole
town, she enjoys her victory over Mrs. Plauf and the bourgeoisie by feasting on
canned cherries in rum—appropriated from the cupboards of the deceased Mrs.
Plauf. For decades, we are told, Mrs. Eszter has had to cope with “a pitiable
gathering of lily-livered cowards,” including the chief of police, a character
who does nothing throughout his appearances in the book but stagger around
drunk. The biggest realist and cynic in the novel, Mrs. Eszter avers that the
leaders and bourgeois citizens of this strange town, who “chose saccharine
illusions over reality,” had never come to the realization that “life was a war
where there were winners and losers.”
The town’s “general lack of discipline,” reports Mrs.
Eszter, its “state of anarchy,” made it ripe and ready for the onslaught of
hooliganism. After the interrogations held in the town hall, Mrs. Eszter and
the colonel “talked a little about the state of the nation,” which was WHAT,
for God’s sake? The reader—or at least this reader, me—is puzzled from the very
beginning of the book about the malaise that has fallen over the whole town,
and, it appears, over the whole country (and the universe?). What has happened
to bring things to such a pass in the world of this novel’s pages? There are
hints in descriptions of the rampaging marauders that they have a righteous
cause, that they are engaged not in the joy of mindless rioting, but in a kind
of dutiful, silent, unpleasant but necessary activity. They are desperate
enough to believe that everything is so hopeless and rotten that they are
justified in tearing it all down, even murdering innocent children. But what
brought them to such a state of desperation? That question is never answered.
After the town has been ripped apart, devastated, after the
pillaging, raping and murdering have we come to a better place? Hardly. There
is no indication that the spirit of the municipality has been purged or
cleansed. We have, rather, the martinet Mrs. Eszter in control, she who now
falls “in love,” who engages in gargantuan bouts of copulation with the
colonel. So, in this book teeming with cynicism, we get, for a few ironic
pages, the cynical love story of Tünde and Peter.
Under the guidance of Mrs. Eszter the town has become
rejuvenated, regimented, full of industrious people out tidying up the mess of
frozen trash all over their gardens and streets. What kept them from doing this
earlier? Mrs. Eszter believes—and this indeed is the belief that saturates the
entire narrative of the book—that one should never “‘yield’ to illusions, such
as ‘people meant well or that there was a benevolent God or some kind of force
for good in charge of human affairs.’” Actually, this belief is the one thing
that she has in common with her husband.
So it turns out, the final section of the book features two
more appearances of the hideous “man in the broadcloth coat.” In a turn of
ironic plotting Mrs. Plauf—when she ventures out onto the streets to retrieve
her son from the marauders—meets her fate in the person of her old
acquaintance, the man in the coat, who, so we are told, has a bit of perverse
fun with her before killing her. He “‘dedicated’ five minutes of his precious
time to ‘amusing himself with her’ in the lowest way possible before ‘silencing’
her.” The coat man shows up one last time, described as trying to trade coats
with one of the locals in the riots, in an apparent attempt—successful it
seems—to evade responsibility for Mrs. Plauf’s murder and to escape the town.
The title of the final section alludes to a speech that Mrs.
Eszter makes over the grave of a person who is depicted as the quintessence of
victimhood for the whole town, Mrs. Plauf. After this speech comes perhaps the
most sui generis ending to a novel that I’ve ever read: a description of how
“the mechanized workers of decay” reduce a human body (Mrs. Plauf’s) to slime
and dust: “a redistribution of atoms in the cosmos.” As one reviewer writes,
“maggots take over the narrative in the final passage.” Here we have five pages
written as if by a pathologist, in the language of a medical textbook. A
sample:
“Now the attack was concentrated on the albuminous matter of
the muscles, culminating in an irresistibly one-sided dissimulatory exchange of
material; the adenozintriphosphatase enzymes continued their assault on the
central fortress of the general energy level, the ATP, and this resulted in the
energy of the torn cell tissue, whose position was quite indefensible, being
linked to the breakdown of actomyosin related to the ATP, which inevitably led
to the contraction of the muscles. At the same time the continuously dissolving
and naturally shrinking adenozintriphosphate could not be replenished by either
a source of oxidization or glycolysis, and owing to a complete lack of resynthesis,
the whole apparatus began to ebb, so that finally, with the concurrent support
of the accumulated lactic acid, the contraction of the muscles was succeeded by
rigor mortis. This in turn became subject to the law of gravity, and the blood
gathered at the deepest points of the weird system, which, having been the main
target of the offensive—at least until the final annihilating defeat—now faced
a two-pronged assault on its fibrin content. The fibrinogen that in the first
stages of the assault, even before the ceasefire, had been circulating in fluid
form through the cardiovascular system, now lost two pairs of peptides from its
activated thrombin, and the fibrin molecules that formed everywhere as a result
combined to form a highly resistant suspension composed of chains. None of this
lasted long though because following the outbreak of anoxia associated with
death, the plasminogens that had been activated into plasmin broke down the
fibrin chains into polypeptides . . .” etc., etc., etc.
On and on this goes until the final page when “nothing
remained and yet not one atom had been lost,” and “the realm that existed
once—once and once only—had disappeared for ever, ground into infinitesimal
pieces by the endless momentum of chaos within which crystals of order
survived, the chaos that consisted of an indifferent and unstoppable traffic
between things . . .” The translator George Szirtes has stated in an interview
that it took him about six years to translate this novel into English. You
wonder how many hours/days/weeks went into just the rendering of the final five
pages.
So, almost as if taking perverse pleasure in the inevitable
decomposition of this human body, and all human bodies, the omniscient narrator
concludes his account of the utter hopeless state of human existence. James
Wood (in his New Yorker review) has called this book “a comedy of
apocalypse,” but only one with a warped sense of humor could find much comedy
in The Melancholy of Resistance. Blurbers have sometimes compared L.K.’s
works to those of Nikolai Gogol, in particular his Dead Souls, but I see
little here in common with Gogol, whose best works are undergirded with a light
comic touch and who never wrote anything anywhere near as dark as The
Melancholy of Resistance.
L.K. has admitted to being influenced by Kafka. I am
reminded of what Kafka once said about reading books: “I think that we ought to
read only the kind of books that wound and stab us . . . we need the books that
affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we
loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone,
like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my
belief.” The Melancholy of Resistance is not for tender souls. Probably
the most pessimistic work of fiction that I’ve ever read, this book hits you
upside the head with a sledgehammer and says, Take that, petty-bourgeois
sap!
