Let's Build a Canon: The Melancholy of Resistance
On Lázló Krasznahorkai's apocalyptic Dostoevsky riff
Let’s Build a Canon: All canon building is stupid. And I love to do stupid things! Let’s Build a Canon will be a place to celebrate good books for no reason other than that they deserve praise. You can go ahead and call me Howard Bloom, Harold’s less-serious cousin. Today’s inductee: Lázló Krasznahorkai's 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance.
In Dwight Garner’s New York Times review of Percival Everett’s new novel, James, a retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim (James), Garner writes that his “idea of hell would be to live with a library that contained only reimaginings of famous novels. It’s a wet-brained and dutiful genre, by and large … Two writers in a hundred walk away unscathed.” Everett is spared this critique, and we might extend the same grace to something like Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, but by and large he’s correct. Literary ‘reimaginings’ have been so played out by this point that they’ve almost run out of ancient Greek or Roman heroes to set in a queer love story; the next one might as well pick its leads at random from a battle scene of The Iliad. (Stay tuned for the tragic love story of Eurypylus & Astyanax!) Even with that warning in mind, there’s not much new left under the sun for novelists to write about; even if you’re not taking directly from a classic or beloved novel, we are after all only a collection of all we’ve ever read, and it’s almost impossible to make a story without borrowing or accidentally mirroring an old narrative structure, a character type, or central conflict. As James Baldwin once said to Studs Terkel, “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky,” and whatever other configuration of relationships you think you’ve put together for the first time, Balzac probably got there first. The key, then, is to accept that nothing is ever totally original, to embrace influence while at the same time putting your own unmistakable stamp on it. (“Make it new,” said Ezra Pound; his friend T.S. Eliot expanded the directive and made a schema of it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”) For the Hungarian novelist Lázsló Krasznahorkai, the old text that he seems to always be writing with is Dostoevsky’s Idiot. As he said in an interview with The Paris Review,
Dostoyevsky played a very important role for me—because of his heroes, not because of his style or his stories. Do you remember the narrator of “White Nights”? The main character is a little bit like Myshkin in The Idiot, a pre-Myshkin figure. I was a fanatical fan of this narrator and later of Myshkin—of their defenselessness. A defenseless, angelic figure. In every novel I’ve written you can find such a figure…
The Melancholy of Resistance, Krasznahorkai’s second novel, not only features a Myshkin figure - Valuska, the “village idiot” of a decaying Hungarian town – but also takes the general scaffolding of The Idiot (a Christ-like figure of pure goodness serves as a mirror to a decayed society) and turns all the dials to 10, to the end of society itself, the whole entropic unraveling of it all. If it’s not making it new, it’s certainly making it strange, and undeniably his, and undeniably a titanic literary achievement.
Like The Idiot, The Melancholy of Resistance begins on a train ride into town; unlike Dostoevsky’s introduction of preternatural goodness into the world as Myshkin comes into St. Petersburg, Krasznahorkai introduces universal menace into the world from the outset. The train is late, but,
To tell the truth, none of this really surprised anyone any more since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable, and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that 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 grown head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since once 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; which is precisely what people at the village station continued to do when, in hope of taking possession of the essentially limited seating to which they were entitled, they stormed the carriage doors, which being frozen up proved very difficult to open.1
Byzantine sentence work is Krasznahorkai’s trademark – the audacity to use both colon and semicolon! – and his novels usually lay these down back-to-back-to-back into long torrents of text that moves inexhaustibly and ever onwards. This particular one is exemplary in its pure introductory negation of the world and its experience: unpredictable, unrecallable, disintegration, unfathomable, inconceivable, essentially limited, the one imagined door of entrance actually frozen up and tough to open when that train does come in. It’s from this world-turned-upside down that the novel proceeds, with the dowdy Mrs. Plauf unfortunate enough to be on that train with a whole crew of ruffians on their way to some arcane and mysterious circus, sat across from a “‘peculiarly silent’ unshaven man, swigging from a bottle of brandy, who, now that she was clad only in a blouse and the little jacket of her suit, was staring (‘Lustfully!!’) at her perhaps too prominent, powerful breasts […] These two eyes, after all, spoke of sickeningly ‘foul desires’ – ‘worse still!’ she trembled – it was as if some sort of dry contempt burned within them.” Through some comic miscommunications, the man seems to think that Mrs. Plauf is actually propositioning him, bringing the whole inversion of the Idiot’s congenial opening to its nadir, or at least it seems that way till, finally off the train and on her way home, she sees some sort of lorry “drawn by a smoking, oily and wholly antediluvian wreck of a tractor … and it was impossible to say what purpose the thing served … or even how it got here since, if this was its normal speed, it would have taken years for it to have made it from the nearest village… the past, it seemed to say, was no longer what it had been but was crawling remorselessly ahead below below the windows of unsuspecting people.” Instead of goodness, we have some eldritch horror, traveling perhaps for years for some sinister purpose, finally wheezing its way into town.
Krasznahorkai’s vision would be just a catastrophically bleak sloughing towards being stamped under one very large boot if not for Valuska, his Myshkin analogue within the book. Amid all the grim proselytizing of the various schemers and misanthropes throughout the novel – Mrs. Eszter the town-committee conniver, her husband Mr. Eszter the abstemious shut-in who plans to “deny the function of the mind, and, from this moment on, rely only on the inexpressible joy of [his] renunciation” in developing an new discordant theory of harmony, the bumbling police chief, and the entire riled up mob that come along with the circus – there is Valuska, kind simple Valuska, whose sidereal idealism persists even under the grayest of skies. The cosmic scale of his innocence, as compared to his dingy environs, is first displayed as he sets up a diorama of the universe with the help of barflys, a different drunk standing in for the Sun, Moon, and Earth as Valuska moves them through a solar eclipse:
‘And the next moment,’ whispered Valuska in a voice choking with excitement, running his eyes to and fro in a straight line between driver, warehouseman, and house painter, ‘let us say it’s one p.m. … we shall witness a most dramatic turn of events … Because … unexpectedly … within a few minutes … the air about us cools … Can you feel it? The sky darkens … and then … grows perfectly black! Guard dogs howl! And in this terrible and incomprehensible twilight … even the birds (‘The birds!’ cried Valuska, in rapture, throwing his arms up to the sky, his ample postman’s cloak flapping open like a bat’s wings) … ‘the very birds are confused and settle on their nests! And then … silence … And every living thing is still … and we too, for whole minutes, are incapable of speech … Are the hills on the march? Will heaven fall in on us? Will earth open under our feet and swallow us? We cannot tell. It is a total eclipse of the sun.’
If you can’t make it to the path of totality this year, this will have to do for you; if you need a visual element, might I recommend the opening scene of Bela Tarr’s adaptation of the novel, The Werckmeister Harmonies?
All that for a glass of wine, but for Valuska it is all frighteningly real, “he wanted to see, and did in fact see, the light returning to the Earth; he wanted to feel, and did in reality feel, the fresh flood of warmth; he wanted to experience, and genuinely did experience, the deeply stirring sense of freedom that understanding brings to a man who has laboured in the terrifying, icy, judgemental shadow of fear.” It is this sort of communion with the higher, heavenly worlds that propels Valuska through the novel, and points towards whatever moments of transcendence might still be possible in such a fallen world. Prince Myshkin in The Idiot brings the wisdom of the holy fool to the wealthy; Valuska brings it to the most downtrodden. “While the local community ‘given its natural inclination’ regarded Valuska as no more than an idiot […] this apparently crazy wanderer on the highways of his own transparent galaxy, with his incorruptibility and universal, if embarrassing, generosity of spirit, was indeed ‘proof that, despite the highly corrosive forces of decadence in the present age, angels nevertheless did exist.’”
The novel continues to play with The Idiot in its central crisis; there is also a Prince in Melancholy of Resistance, but he comes along with the circus and inspires, through a complex system of chirrups and squeaks, his followers to run riot in the village. “He says he likes it when things fall to pieces,” the Prince’s “factotum” reports after some “more agitated chirruping”: “Ruin comprises every form of making: lies and false pride are like oxygen in the ice. Making is half: ruin is everything.” The theoretical danger of nihilism in The Idiot – that a doctrine where every and anything is permitted would destroy a moral society – is replaced here by a real destructive force, an apocalyptic mob being inspired by a mute figure of doom, though the mob is even more dangerously curtailed by the village’s higher-ups and functionaries, who seize on the (created) crisis to satisfy an atavistic desire for fascist rule. If you’re not crushed under the weight of the mob, the soldiers sent in to clean it all up will do it instead.
Yet there is a higher, more destructive force that hangs over the novel, that of the natural world. Krasznahorkai is a master of scale, telescoping from grimy streets to the celestial, always cognizant of the incomprehensible and overwhelming force of decay, the eons-long project that will extinguish life on Earth and eventually the planet itself. References to this force abound, but there is one that looms above all of them: the whale. The circus’s one attraction is the display of a massive whale, one that WG Sebald called “the Leviathan,” a Melville-ian strain in the symphony of Krasznahorkai’s influences. Even then, the whale can be thought of as an analogue to Hans Holbein’s painting Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb in Dostoevsky’s Idiot, which similarly enraptures and challenges its viewers in the totality of its vision:
to comprehend the enormous tail fin, the dried, cracked, steel-grey carapace and, halfway down the strangely bloated hulk, the top fin, which alone measured several metres, appeared a singularly hopeless task. […] it wasn’t so much the mouth, nor the sheer incomprehensible size of the creature that most astonished [Valuska], but the full and certain general knowledge purveyed by the publicity that it had witnessed the wonders of an infinitely strange and infinitely distant world, that this gentle yet terrifying denizen of great seas and oceans was actually here […]
The effect of Krasznahorkai’s book is to make its reader the witness to an infinitely strange but all too real world, as if changing the medium by which we experience life, bringing the murky deep-sea underwater to us up here on land in all its vast mystery. The Idiot ends in tragedy, The Melancholy of Resistance in decomposition, in thrall to “unchained workers of decay […] [who] would dismantle whatever had been alive once and once only, reducing it into tiny insignificant pieces under the eternally silent cover of death,” a great unraveling of a story we thought we knew better, now only revealed to us thanks to irrepressible and frighteningly new thing under the sun. Good artists borrow, great artists steal, the transcendent ones do something else altogether.
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George Szirtes’ translation is quoted throughout this piece.