Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
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László Krasznahorkai. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. New Directions, 2019 [2016]. 558 pp.
Satantango — “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it. — FK”
Melancholy of Resistance — “It passes, but it does not pass away”
War & War — “Heaven is sad.”
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming — “Eternity — will last as long as it lasts”
These are the mottoes, or epigraphs, that come with each of the four novels that make up László Krasznahorkai’s special sequence. The oppressively empty cycles of time, the material and spiritual squalor, and the pessimistic resignation to all this — all this and more come to a head in this long novel.
The denizens of the tainted farming town of Satantango drag themselves at one point to a derelict villa, presumably owned or formerly owned by this same Baron. (There are a couple other callbacks to this book, including a certain Halics Jr.)
And in Melancholy of Resistance, poor Mr. Eszther lives in a house on Baron Bela Wenckheim avenue.
And now the man himself is poised to enact the process of homecoming, as done by Korin in War & War, a novel concerned with the challenge of interpreting texts.
This “Homecoming” has been given some Messianic hype, I mean in the text itself, by the town dwellers who think the Baron is still loaded and has come to provide relief.
What will this event plus all the techniques and forms of the prior books add up to? Like Satantango we have a fiction organized as a piece of music, with a “dance card”; like Irimiás and the Whale a mysterious outside element has come to disturb an inert and decaying world. How does it all culminate in the Homecoming?
It all comes down to the voice: the particular third-person voice of this prose epic, a voice that is as homogeneous and flat as the space and time of this fiction’s universe.
Things have gotten weirder in L. K.’s little Hungarian town, if that were even possible. We start with an angry Professor, engaged in an armed standoff in his hermitage against a mob, including police and some rightwing nationalists. A massive aside informs us of the submachine gun he’s using, the peasant he bought it from, etc.
The Professor is estranged from his teenaged daughter, who is politically active and is also in the mob with a protest sign. Later on the Professor finds this signboard, “specially prepared piece of cardboard that functioned so that the words on the small pieces of paper could be inserted individually into vertical bands attached to the cardboard’s surface…so that’s how it worked, he sighed, how depravedly resourceful this girl was…”
The Professor re-inserts and shuffles the four words in two ways: YOU ARE MY PAPA, and ARE YOU MY PAPA.
Meanwhile, the Baron himself is heading back to town by train, and we learn that he’s coming from Argentina, where he’d been cleaned out by casino debts, and notice the fascist implications of the connection.
…so gritting their teeth, they paid out the entire liability, and they arranged — thanks to their excellent Argentinian connections, nurtured ever since 1944 — for the official complaint raised by the Casino to disappear from the files of the judges’ offices in Buenos Aires and finally, with the help of an intermediary, they managed to put the Baron on the first plane headed for Madrid, from where he was sent further on to Vienna, but in Vienna no one knew the least thing about him, only his scandalous passion was known, the scandalous passion which led him here;…
We notice by now that this narrative is a lot more politically referential than the prior ones, and that will only increase over the course of the book.
The biker gang (the prose at one point does a roll-call of all the different makes, Yamahas, Suzukis, Kawasakis, Hondas, etc. They overlap with the local police, and are often hanging out at their bar.
Here is one of them calling for a unified horn honk from their mounts, a fitting image for a limp petty-bourgeois nationalism.
…all we have to do is properly press down on that damned melody horn button, everyone at the same time, like one body, one soul, just press down on the button and keep pressing, and then the great flourishing will come, a new life in Hungary, and I hope that everyone has understood what has to be done here.
The Homecoming is full of these operatic gestures from a town full of caricatures. Baron Wenckheim picks up a sycophantic personal secretary named Dante on the train, in a scene full of loudly symbolic: Wenckheim is baffled by this guy kowtowing to him in the middle of the train compartment.
The Baron for his part is preoccupied with memories of a childhood sweetheart named Marika, but he calls her Marietta, and she’s no doubt just as elderly as he is now. The Baron can never go home again (as Twin Peaks fans have been saying since 2017), and his home town strikes him as a simulacra:
The city was so small and dark, the streets were so narrow, the houses were so low-built and run-down, and the sky above them was also so low, that he would be fully inclined to state that this was not the same town, and yet he was compelled to acknowledge that it was exactly the same, but it was as if somehow it had become a copy, as if he could only remember — but with hair’s breadth accuracy — the original…
After disappearing for a long while, we pick up with the Professor again, after escaping from his siege by starting a fire (which I think will spread to consume the whole town). At a train station he rants at a dog about Cantor, the inability to understand the world, and so on and so forth in confused maunderings:
…Cantor and his god — because if we’re dealing with this, then at least we’re dealing with something, namely we’re dealing with fear, and we have to deal with that if Cantor and his god are interesting and they are interesting and…
And meanwhile the prose gets stuffed with more and more voices. Each paragraph break signals a new speaker in a new situation, and it could be anybody. One such voice is that of a carpenter or skilled tradesman, who in a piece of dark comedy is stripping the screws out of an orphanage since he hasn’t been paid on time:
…and these no-good guttersnipes get a fucking chateau, well, this is where we’ve gotten to in this country of ours, but we don’t deserve anything else — he slammed the door so forcibly behind him that it opened again — just this. And he stormed out of the Orphanage.
Every Hungarian is bitter about their national situation. Society and the state feel as hollowed out as this interminable dry third-person narration that inexhaustibly rolls along.
There is seething reactionary sentiment coming from these folks, who feel so deprived in this moment, and wish only to deprive others. At a charity clothing distribution someone speaks bitterly of “Syrians lunging at food packages thrown across a border fence…” By “referential” above, I mean specifically the wave of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan in 2015.
This novel is, at a certain ideational level, a musical performance (with a rant from the ensemble’s conductor that comes before the title and even the copyright page). It divides into nine sections that are headed by these bombastic drumming tones, like a deranged marching tune that could go on for eternity:
Trrr…, Trum, Dum, Rum, Rom, Hmmm, Ra di da, Ruin, Dom.
That’s probably what they march to in hell.
Now, considering the maximalism performed here, as well as the overdrawn satire, and Krazsnahorkai’s professed admiration for Thomas Pynchon (plus the repurposing of the epigraph for Against the Day in Seiobo There Below), and the fact that the last line of this book is the same as Gravity’s Rainbow, there are big parallels to the American author in terms of form and design.
They’ve been pointed out in a review by Balázs Sipos [see postscript — Ed.]: Like Tyrone Slothrop, the Baron disappears from his own narrative, which then takes on an aimless shape and pace, and this prose had been super dry to begin with.
At a philosophical level, however, this disintegration fits into the worldview expressed by this whole cycle. Sipos uses the word “immanentism” I think specifically to mean that there’s no possibility for transcendence or evolution. The novel feels uniform and flat because the third-person generally summarizes every voice, and seemingly any voice can be added with no major effect to how you experience the text.
I want to use that word Immanentism in the sense of the late 19th century philosophers who asserted that all of experience is immanent or entirely within consciousness and the mind. The fictive world is artificial from start to finish and there’s nowhere to go but annihilation in flames.
And yet despite these particularities, Krasznahorkai here ends up sounding the same note as Pynchon and other postwar fabulators: an opposition to totality, which really means the denial of any principal determination of totality, ideology or politics or otherwise.
L. K. may extend the future for a certain employment of modernism, but he certainly hasn’t added any hope to the philosophical agnosticism of that literary tradition. He did, however, increase its pessimism.
This letter is seriously indebted to the essay on this novel by Balázs Sipos, collected in this literary journal (p. 897). Sipos also provides the tidbit that the Professor’s relationship to his daughter parallels the author’s real life.