Heads-up: Silent Friends will take a short-notice break from posting next week. I intend to do a lot of reading and writing in preparation of some exciting content for next month! See you on March 28 with more book reports.
This letter on a very short book by László Krasznahorkai is so late because Silent Friends truly didn’t know where to begin talking about this great Hungarian author.
We’re big fans of Krasznahorkai here at SF. He may be considered a Silent BFF, an author whose texts have been read multiple times over the last seven years or so.
One short passage in particular I come back to repeatedly, consulting it almost as a mantra or guided meditation practice. The first chapter of Seiobo There Below, called “Kamo-Hunter,” stamps out a picture of a Japanese crane standing in river, stock-still, waiting patiently for its prey. These lines do well to illustrate the LK reading experience, the brisk flow of clauses, the natural ambience, the arcane philosophical discourse—all come through in this sprawling sentence.
Everything around it moves, as if just this one time and one time only, as if the message of Heraclitus has arrived here through some deep current, from the distance of an entire universe, in spite of all the senseless obstacles, because the water moves, it flows, it arrives, and cascades; now and then the silken breeze sways, the mountains quiver in the scourging heat, but this heat itself also moves, trembles, and vibrates in the land, as do the tall scattered grass-islands, the grass, blade by blade, in the riverbed; each individual shallow wave, as it falls, tumbles over the low weirs, and then, every inconceivable fleeting element of this subsiding wave, and all the individual glitterings of light flashing on the surface of this fleeting element, this surface suddenly emerging and just as quickly collapsing, with its drops of light dying down, scintillating, and then reeling in all directions, inexpressible in words; clouds are gathering; the restless, jarring blue sky high above; the sun is concentrated with horrific strength, yet still indescribable, extending onto the entire momentary creation, maddeningly brilliant, blindingly radiant; the fish and the frogs and the beetles and the tiny reptiles are in the river; the cars and the buses, from the northbound number 3 to the number 32 up to the number 38, inexorably creep along on the steaming asphalt roads built parallel on both embankments, then the rapidly propelled bicycles below the breakwaters, the men and women strolling next to the river along paths that were built or inscribed into the dust, and the blocking stones, too, set down artificially and asymmetrically underneath the mass of gliding water: everything is at play or alive, so that things happen, move on, dash along, proceed forward, sink down, rise up, disappear, emerge again, run and flow and rush somewhere, only it, the Ooshirosagi, does not move at all…
And it keeps going. This unparagraphed writing that’s so popular in European modernism can be intimidating, but at least in Krasznahorkai the lines aren’t so conceptually hefty (like in Henry James).
Most important for this letter is the appeal to ancient dialectics, the “message of Heraclitus.” This is a vision of a world in the most absolute state of flux conceivable, truly nothing but a hurly-burly. Such a vision leads to doom-laden apocalyptic moods when it comes to Krasznahorkai’s social fiction, considering Satantango and Bela Tarr’s last movie The Turin Horse which he wrote.
When he’s not looking at the modern world as a chaotic tragedy, his gaze turns backward to the power of ancient wisdom and feudal high art. This is a quite conservative gaze, to be sure. Not dialectical materialism, but the primordial dialectics of pre-Socratic materialism.
Be that as it may, Krasznahorkai’s fictive world make contradiction universal. That’s my bet on why his work is so interesting, high in quality, and strikes a chord with so many readers.
What’s new with Spadework is that it’s the first story I’ve read from the POV of an American urban-dweller. But the same concerns with the overbearing transformations of reality are besotting this hero, mr herman melvill (you read that right, with no capitals or e at the end), a New York public library employee. When “catastrophe is the natural language of reality,” as he says somewhere in this 100-page long sentence, then the answer is to “find a suitable task.”
For this madman narrator that task involves braiding together facts about Manhattan, Herman Melville, Malcolm Lowry, and the imaginative architect Lebbeus Woods.
Three students of catastrophe
How mr melvill encounters Lebbeus Woods is as good a place as any to start, since it also helps establish what he’s like.
When he sees Woods’s drawings at the MoMAPS1, he is outraged that he would be exhibited along with works by other, inferior artist-architects. Woods didn’t just draw whimsical structures, but rendered them in the “penultimate fraction of a second” before their collapse.
Woods seems to trip the dialectics radar with this sensitivity to turning points and transformation.
melvill’s wife is embarassed by his “babbling” about all this “serious stuff.” “…she being a true exhibition freak who went there not for the paintings and sculpture but because of the new silk jumpsuit that she had just recently acquired at Century 21, in other words, she was there truly for exhibition…”
In any event, mr melvill begins walking the lower east side of Manhattan, retracing the routines of Melville, who lived there, and Lowry, who briefly stayed there, in an effort to “find” them.
Melville, Lowry, and Woods in melvill’s mind expressed great wisdom on “the Rock”—not Alcatraz, and not that rock either, but Manhattan, the island fortress of glass and steel.
What makes this trifecta of figures the “three students of catastrophe” is that these artists all rejected the metaphysics erected by humans to deny the true chaos.
Their rejection of the denial is what made them geniuses in their own particular ways.
Melville expressed his genius “by daring to bombard the Rock with questions, monotonously tormenting-to-the-point-of-madness questions of that Emptiness, yes, questioning this Satan-ruled World.” Lowry, by “intuiting upon this same Rock (that is, in fact, via Melville) that he himself possessed to a self-annihilating extent the tremendous courage to pose similar questions.” And Woods, by “on the one hand identifying, that is, drawing in his sketchbooks and so drawing attention to this Rock of Manhattan itself, and by possessing on the courage to reflect in a completely original manner about the very concept of catastrophe and devastation.”
Their life’s work was as restless as their life’s stories—and as restless as the current madness of mr melville.
Idealist dialectic v. metaphysical stasis
The most important insight brought about by this pervasive state of restlessness is that “THERE IS NO DUALISM IN EXISTENCE.”
This is the “supreme truth.” There is no safe place for a static and stable notion of “human dignity.” There is no structure of total reality beyond “continual destruction, permanent catastrophe.” Everything is in a state of struggle, “from the most miniscule subatomic particle to the greatest planetary dimensions.”
“… if you are truly an artist, … you have to look people in the eye as you tell them the truth about this universe in which we exist,” mr melville says,
that in fact this universe is in a state of war, there is no peace, the universe means danger, hazard, stress and destruction—nothing is whole and intact, the very notion of an intact whole is a lie—peace and tranquility, permanence and rest are illusions far more dangerous than the truth …
Catastrophe “is the natural language of reality.” Whether that catastrophe originates from nature or human evil makes no difference.
It’s easy to stay detached and enjoy how lost in the sauce this rather Bernhardian kind of narrator becomes. But he touches on something fundamental in questions of the nature of knowledge.
The opposite of dualism is monism, and Krasznahorkai’s characters often feel more at home in a monistic worldview than the dualistic one that pervades our times, with the endless discussions on ‘the subject-object’ split.
Marxism is monistic as well: nature is being scientifically, systematically understood, and this science can and must extend to society. But in mr melville’s world the monism is closer to the inverted kind of ancient cultures. In the Chinese classics, the spiritual realm coexists with the earthly one, and heaven has its own bureaucratic strata, for example.
To respond to the catastrophe in an authentic way, mr melvill elects to erect a “permanently closed library. The arc of this book tends toward the secret construction of this palace.
33 Thomas Street
And melvill finds the ideal site for the palace on his walks. It happens to be the AT&T building in Lower Manhattan. As a parting treat, here is melvill’s description of this brutalist landmark:
… this building was the Ideal Block itself, completely without windows and doors on all four sides nearly, four smooth concrete walls tinted a brown color, though to be more precise, there were two embrasures sunk into the three gigantic columns of the façade facing Worth and Thomas Street but without spoiling the effect, yes, here someone by means of four gigantic, clean and unornamented wall surfaces had created just what I had dreamt for myself (or more accurately, for all humankind) … because this was the Place, where all we have to do is just bring books in, and stack them up, all in good order, a simple library system will do just fine, and then at the end run one’s fingers over their spines on the last shelf, give it one final look, and then leave, and wall everything in, wall it in, and finally at the very end wall up that diminutive entrance, the way they’d walled it up everywhere else, ...