Monday, July 14, 2025

Epigraph Page from book on Gogol: THE FUTILE SEARCH FOR A LIVING SOUL

 


The scientific viewpoint, ever persistent: There is no ‘soul’ and no ‘will’—these are fictions, universal fictions, like the Garden of Eden.

                                             Oliver Sacks, letter to a friend, May 25, 1969

 Les âmes mortes. Rabelais had to flee France to save his ears from being cropped by censorious theologues for having ventured to pun on âme (soul) and âne (ass).

B.G. Guerney

 Las almas muertas. I’ve lived a long life, I’ve searched the world over, and guess what? Nowhere no way is a living soul to be found. Look all around you, circumnavigate the planet—not a soul to be seen.

O.G. Zakamora

 Die toten Seelen. Dead Souls was the eremitic cell where Gogol the monk floundered around, prostrated himself, suffering travail and torment, until, finally, the day they bore him lifeless out of that cell.

                                                                                    P. V. Annenkov

Господи, Ты сказал в Святом Евангелии, что мертвые услышат глас Сына Божия и оживут. Так ныне сотвори, чтобы мертвые души наши услышали глас Твой и ожили бы в радости.

 Translation: Lord, Thou saith in the Holy Gospels that the dead would hear the voice of the Son of God and would come back once more to life. So that this day grant that our own dead souls might hear Thy voice and might come alive again in joy. (From the Russian Eastern Orthodox prayer book [Molitvoslov]. 

The last line of the prayer marked No. 1 in the series titled Молитвенные прошения препСилуана Афонского: Prayerful Supplications of the Reverend Silouan the Athonite.

 Your Kingdom: an infinity of being. Souls unborn, yet-to-be-born, never-to-be-born, souls transparent and light-riddled . . . Souls shifting and flowing through one another, light as the seed of dandelions, graceful as tiny rainbow-hued fish, fragile as butterflies.

                                                            Joyce Carol Oates, Son of the Morning


[epigraph page in front matter of forthcoming book by U.R. Bowie: The Futile Search for a Living Soul: A New Reading of Gogol's "Dead Souls"]



Sunday, July 13, 2025

Book Review Article, László Krasznahorkai, THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE

 

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!



Saturday, July 5, 2025

Translations: The Bestest of the Best, SIXTEEN, Aleksandr Blok, "Есть игра: осторожно войти," THE STALKING EYE

 


 

Есть игра: осторожно войти,
Чтоб вниманье людей усыпить;
И
 глазами добычу найти;
И
 за ней незаметно следить.

Как бы ни был нечуток и груб
Человек, за
 которым следят, —
Он
 почувствует пристальный взгляд
Хоть в
 углах еле дрогнувших губ.

А другой — точно сразу поймет:
Вздрогнут плечи, рука у
 него;
Обернется
 — и нет ничего;
Между тем
 — беспокойство растет.

Тем и страшен невидимый взгляд,
Что его невозможно поймать;
Чуешь ты, но
 не можешь понять,
Чьи глаза за
 тобою следят.

Не корысть, не влюбленность, не месть;
Так
 — игра, как игра у детей:
И
 в собрании каждом людей
Эти тайные сыщики есть.

Ты и сам иногда не поймешь,
Отчего так бывает порой,
Что собою ты
 к людям придешь,
А
 уйдешь от людей — не собой.

Есть дурной и хороший есть глаз,
Только лучше
 б ничей не следил:
Слишком много есть в
 каждом из нас
Неизвестных, играющих
 сил…

О, тоска! Через тысячу лет
Мы
 не сможем измерить души:
Мы
 услышим полет всех планет,
Громовые раскаты в
 тиши…

А пока — в неизвестном живем
И
 не ведаем сил мы своих,
И, как дети, играя с
 огнем,
Обжигаем себя и
 других…

December 18, 1913

 
                          d
 
                    Literal Translation
 
There’s this game: to enter circumspectly,
So as to lull people’s attention to sleep;
And find your prey with your eyes,
And begin unperceived to stalk him/her.
 
No matter how insensitive and coarse
The person whom you are stalking,
He’ll feel that intense stare,
Even if only in the corners of his barely trembling lips.
 
And some other one will seem to understand at once:
His/her shoulders, or a hand will twitch;
She/he will turn around [to look]; and there’s nothing there;
But all the same his/her unease will grow.
 
What makes an invisible gaze so frightening
Is the impossibility of grasping it;
You sense but cannot comprehend
Whose eyes are stalking you.
 
It’s not a matter of selfishness, of being in love, or vengeance;
It’s something that’s “just because,” a game, like children playing,
And in any gathering of people,
These secret private eyes are to be found.
 
Sometimes you yourself cannot grasp
Why it is that it sometimes happens
That you arrive as yourself where people are gathered
And depart from that gathering as someone else.
 
There are both evil eyes and good eyes,
Only it would be best if no one’s eyes stalked [others];
In each of us there are too many
Unknown and playful forces…
 
O, grievous thought! In a thousand years
We still will not be able to measure a soul;
We’ll hear the flight of all the planets,
The thunderclaps sounding in silence.
 
And meanwhile we live on in the unknown,
And we cannot account for our powers,
And, like children, we go on playing with fire,
Burning ourselves and others…
 
 
 
 
d
 

                                                 Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
 
                The Stalking Eye
 
A game: with circumspection enter,
Trying your best all awareness to block;
Lay eyes on your prey, all attention concenter,
As, unnoticed, you start your clandestine eye-stalk.
 
Be he insensitive, crude may he be—
The person you have in your sights—
He’ll all the same feel that stare of intensity
On timorous lips where it clings and affrights.
 
Some other, it seems, will twig on straightaway,
Her shoulders will twitch and her hand slightly shudder;
She’ll turn to look back and there nothing discover,
While deep in her soul holding unease at bay.
 
What makes an invisible gaze so alarming
Is the way you can never grasp eyes, pin them down;
That eye-stalk you sense in your innards disarming,
But whose are the eyes, are they light-blue or brown?
 
The aim of the stalk is not power, love, vengefulness;
The stalking’s a “just because” game, child’s play.
But where humankind gathers, its brains soft and nebulous,  
Private eyes will appear, dancing gumshoe ballet.
 
You yourself are at times quite confused,
Cannot fathom how your soul is undone.
You come as yourself to where eyes are misused,
Departing a totally different someone.
 
There’s the good eye and evil eye too,
But best not engage in the eye-stalk;
Each of us has in us much that’s askew,
Forces mysterious, mischievous rot.
 
Lackaday! Though a thousand years pass,
We’ll still be unable to measure the soul;
Although we have knowledge of planets en masse,
Hear something in silence of thunderclaps’ roll. 
 
But for now in our witlessness we must live on,
Unaware of inimical forces inside us,
Like children, with fire we play, singing songs,
Burning ourselves and the others beside us . . .
 

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