László Krasznahorkai's War & War
The only inconstant of war is that it never changes...
László Krasznahorkai. War and War. Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. New Directions: 2006 [1999]. 279 pp.
This is the penultimate letter on Krasnahorkai’s main tetralogy of novels: Satantango, Melancholy of Resistance, the current War and War, and then, Baron Wenkheim will be comin’ home.
I’m doing something a little out of pocket by starting the commentary on this book with its ending.
After a reproduction of a bronze plaque, a real one by Imre Bukta, commemorating the hero Korin’s suicide by gunshot, there is a black page, like the one in Tristram Shandy, a shroud of mourning for this imminent death.
But then a new section of text begins, quite different from the body of the novel that had come before, under the heading “Isaiah Has Come” without a chapter number. The font is sans-serif. This is apparently an original short piece from which the novel had been generated: it was included in the second edition of the Hungarian original, and in certain translations doesn’t appear, which is too bad.
The hero Korin enters a bar, delivers a monologue to an inattentive patron, who chain smokes by slamming his cigarettes in a single drag, “the one-straight line of the cigarette, and, later, the arc of curving ash that had resolved itself into mere powder and fallen to pieces.”
Amidst his maunderings, Korin poses the question of why have “things turned out like this”? why “greatness had passed from the world”? He makes the case in these chatty, speculative lines:
…the only thing certain being that this was one of the greatest of human enigmas, the appearance and disappearance of greatness in history, or, more accurately, the appearance and disappearance of greatness despite history, from which one might, one just might venture to conclude that history, about which, once again, one could only speak in metaphors, and from now on in metaphors only to a certain extent, was an endless series of running battles and street fights, perhaps even one continuous running battle or street fight…
All of history looks like a single war or slaughterhouse to Korin because he is “seeing clearly” for the first time, since “his brain has had to be strapped in place,” a perspective of the grandest conceivable scope: all of history is within view as a single world-landscape.
This letter will be oddly structured (and extra long) partially because this novel is pretty different from the prior two novels. No longer confined to a small Hungarian town, this is a globe-trotting novel that moves from Eastern Europe to New York City and then to Switzerland.
As we’ve progressed in these letters on Don László, it’s been a little dispiriting to keep talking about these brick-walled paragraphs and fast-flowing, discursive sentences. So to mix it up, I’m sharing a complete period from early in War & War. Korin is explaining his backstory to a travel agent stewardess, his current quest with the manuscript as well as his vocation as an archivist.
It all starts with Hermes, the god of travel and transmission, and the origin of the word hermeneutics:
It was Hermes, said Korin, Hermes lay at the heart of everything, that was his starting point, that was the foundation of his deepest intellectual experiences, and though he had never spoken of this to anyone before he simply had to tell the young lady stewardess that it was to Hermes he had been ultimately led, having time after time attempted to discover that hermetically-sealed beginning, had time after time attempted to understand it, to solve it, to get to the bottom of it, and not least of all, to recount it to those people that fate had so far brought him into contact with, to tell them how it was that he realized that he was not intended to be an ordinary archivist, not that he didn’t want to be an archivist, for indeed he was most sincerely an archivist, but not an ordinary one, and what he sought to discover, what he constantly sought the answer to, was the reason why he wasn’t ordinary;…
We’re taking up the business of interpretation, whose principles are bound up with communicating and exchange — and every “scene” of this novel consists of someone, usually but not always Korin, uttering a testimony to someone else. Transmissions all come from the past; Korin’s interpretation and re-interpretation of the past amounts to a search for origins that is impossible to complete.
and so he kept going over and over things that had happened, extending his explorations ever further back in time, and there was always something there, something new about his past that made him think, this is it, I’ve got it, or rather he searched and searched for the source, the origo of this revolution in his life which eventually, some thirty or forty hours ago, had led him here, and to ever newer potential sources and origos, ever newer starting points and beginnings, until he reached the conclusion, he was pleased to say, the actual conclusion he had been seeking and the name of that conclusion was Hermes; for truly, he said, Hermes, for him, was that absolute origo, it was that encounter with the hermetic, the day, the hour he first encountered Hermes, when — if he might so put it — he became acquainted with the world of the hermetic and was afforded a glimpse into it, into that which Hermes presented as a world, the world of which Hermes was the ruler, Hermes, this Greek god, the twelfth of twelve, with his mystery, his lack of fixity, his copiously multifaceted existence, his secret forms, the dark side of his being shrouded in a deeply suggestive silence, who had had such a mesmerizing effect on his imagination, or, more precisely, had completely captured his imaginative faculties and made him restless, had drawn him into a sphere from which there was no escape, for it was like being under a spell or a curse or an incantation, since this is what Hermes was to him, not a god who led but one who misled, swept him off course, destabilized him, called him, drew him aside, seduced him from below, whispered to him from the wings;
In these above lines the duplicity of Hermes comes out (it’s also the origin of the word hermetic, as in hermetically sealed). Korin’s studies seem to lead only to more instability.
but why him, him in particular, why this archivist working some two hundred and twenty kilometers from Budapest, he could not tell, nor should he seek after reasons, he felt, but simply accept that that was the way it was; it was the way he had learned of Hermes, possibly through the Homeric Hymns, or maybe from the psychoanalyst Kerényi, possibly from the marvelous Graves, who the hell knew or cared how, said Korin, this being, if he might so put it that way, the induction phase which was quickly followed by the next phase, the phase of deeper exploration in which the towering, unrivalled work of Walter F. Otto, that is to say his Die Götter Griechenlands, was the sole guide, and in that book, exclusively one specific chapter in the Hungarian edition, which he read and reread until it came to pieces in his hands, which was the point at which restlessness and anxiety entered his life, when things were no longer as they were, the day after which everything looked different, had changed, when the world showed him its most terrifying face, bringing on a sense of dissociation, offering the most terrifying aspect of absolute freedom, since knowledge of Hermes, said Korin, entails the loss of one’s sense of being at home in this world, of the sense of belonging, of dependence, of certainty, and this means that suddenly there is an uncertainty factor in the totality of things, because, just as suddenly, it becomes clear that this uncertainty is the only, the sole factor,
And this destabilization is another testament to the power of Hermes.
for Hermes signifies the provisional and relative nature of the laws of being, and Hermes brings and Hermes takes such laws away, or rather allows them liberty, for that is the whole point of Hermes, said Korin to the stewardess, for whoever is granted a glimpse of him can never again yield himself to any ambition or form of knowledge, because ambition and knowledge are merely ragged cloaks, if he might use such a poetic turn of phrase, that one may adapt or cast off at a whim according to the teachings of Hermes, the god of the roads of night, of night itself, a night whose domain the presence of Hermes extends into day, since as soon as he appears anywhere he immediately changes human life, appearing to let days be, appearing to acknowledge the powers of his Olympian companions, and allowing everything to appear as though life continued to proceed according to the plans and schemes of his own, while whispering to his devotees that life was not quite like this, leading them into the night, showing them the inconceivably complex and chaotic nature of all paths, making them confront the unexpected, the accidental, the out-of-the-blue, the dangerous, the deeply confused and primitive states of possession, death and sexuality, expelling them, in other words, from Zeus’s world of light and thrusting them into hermetic darkness, as he had thrust Korin ever since Korin had understood that a glimpse of him had induced a restlessness in his heart, a restlessness that could never cease once Hermes had revealed himself to him, a revelation that quite ruined him, for if there was one thing he did not wish to suggest it was that this discovery, this glimpse of Hermes, indicated that he felt any love for Hermes, said Korin, no, he had no love for Hermes whatsoever but was simply frightened of him;
And the drift of the prose takes us back to the beginning, with Korin’s encounter with the manuscript.
and this is how things were, this is what happened and no more than this, that he had been scared by Hermes as would any man have been, any man who had realized at the moment of his ruin that he had been ruined, that is to say had come into the possession of such knowledge as he did not at all wish to possess, as was precisely the case with him, with Korin, for what did he desire that others did not? he had no desire to be different, to stand out from the crowd, he had no such ambitions, preferring relationships and security, homeliness and a clear and simple life, in other words absolutely ordinary things, though he lost these in the blinking of an eye the moment Hermes entered his life, and made of him, as he is happy to admit, a servant, an underling, since from that moment the underling began rapidly to distance himself from his wife, his neighbors and his colleagues, because it seemed hopeless even to try to explain, elaborate, or confess to the fact that it was a Greek god that lay at the root of the unmistakable changes in his behavior, not that he had any chance of getting others to sympathize with him, Korin told the stewardess, for just imagine him turning one day to his wife, or to his colleagues at the archive and saying to them, I am aware that you will have noticed a peculiar change in my behavior, well, it’s all on account of a Greek god; just imagine the effect, said Korin, the way his wife would react to such a confession, or his colleagues to this explanation, in other words things could not have turned out otherwise than they did, a quick divorce, the rapid progress from peculiar looks at the office to being ignored, in fact some went so far as to avoid him altogether and refused to acknowledge him in the street, which was, said Korin, deeply hurtful, coming as it did from his own colleagues, people he met every day of his life, being utterly ignored in the street by them, thanks to Hermes, and everything flowed from that right down to the present moment, not that he was complaining, merely establishing the facts, for what cause had he for complaint, though there was a time when he was no more than a simple, perfectly orthodox archivist who had every hope of progressing to the post of chief archivist, but now instead of that, would you believe it, said Korin, here he was in Budapest, in Budapest, if he might be allowed to jump forward in time, at the Budapest offices of MALÉV where he trusted and genuinely believed that he would receive a visa and a ticket enabling him, Korin, not only to get to the world-famous city of New York, but in doing so to achieve, and here he dropped his voice, the chief aim of his hermetic state of uncertainty, not to mention the fact, he added, that should he desire compensation, which he did not; or should he wish to exchange his state for some other, which he did not;
And just for the sake of completion, the sentence ends thus:
an exchange of states might serve as a form of compensation, and though this kind of exchange was against the rules it was not in fact impossible, for it was not impossible that he might, any day now, get to see the deity, Hermes, personally, at some moment, for such moments did exist, moments when things were really calm, moments when he glanced toward a shady corner, afternoons when he had fallen asleep and woke to a flash of light in the room, or perhaps when it was getting dark and he was rushing somewhere the god might be there beside him, keeping pace with him, visible as the moon, waving his caduceus at something that was not him, in the distance before disappearing.
Each sentence in this book is numbered, as if each chapter were an itemized catalogue of periods. But it’s appropriate that a fiction about an archivist would be “processed” in this way. It is the most striking pivot from Melancholy of Resistance, where the block paragraphs would be immense; here Krasznahorkai provides more guardrails for safe travels.
Yet somehow these lines feel looser, more “formless” than in the previous novels, simply tracing wherever the minds of the speakers go. The novel’s style is as obscure as it’s liquid: Each sentence focuses on an interview between two people, and only this way does a sequence of events get parceled out.
It starts when Korin finds a document in the records office he works at filed under “family documents,” but reads like a post World War Two text of fabulation, in which a group of heroes go from place to place and time to time in antique Europe, only to find war and struggle wherever they wind up. Korin feels the need to remove the text from the archive, flee his small town in Hungary to New York, and eventually elsewhere, though it feels like a sequence of ramshackle rooms. And he does appear to be pursued, or at least someone is leaving a trail of dead bodies.
Clearly we’ve shifted gears from the anti-pastoralism of Satantango and the demoniac town-dwelling of Melancholy into a hollowed-out impression of a jet-setting thriller, though more interested in the red tape of travel agencies over tourist locales.
At another level it is also Krasznahorkai expressing, through Korin, a certain posture of the cosmopolitan writer of world significance, as Don Laszlo incontrovertibly is. Here is a man shuttling a text across borders and oceans, but there’s nothing easily illuminating about this process, it’s more like dingy rooms in Budapest, Berlin, New York, (and Zurich).
That’s because what’s significant here is no longer the hapless humans of these novels against a brute and indifferent environment, but the encounter between human and text. Under the sign of Hermes, War & War is taken up with questions of interpretation and interpreting this manuscript.
And in good modernist decorum, it’s a strange, gnomic text of “powerful poetic energy, and the way it turned its back in the most decided manner on normal literary conventions governing such works, had deafened and blinded him, in fact as good as blasted him out of existence, like having a cannon fired at you…”
Even more disturbing, the MS wasn’t even scripted with a pen or pencil, but with the writer’s nails: “scratching the text into the paper and into the mind…” This reads to your host as a gesture towards primitivism: not the weaving motion of the stylus but the “repetitive” “etching” of this more antique way of making notations.
It’s a primitivism that’s taken up in L. K.’s future work, gazing backward toward old feudal religions, older rituals and formalities of artisanal craft. It makes sense as a rejection of the present political and economic moment for central Europe and Hungary in particular, but aesthetically it’s a path I haven’t enjoyed following, going off of his short stories and other small books — but Seiobo There Below (2015), which clinched the Man Booker, deserves a revisit.
This letter feels like best time to bring to attention a great series of Substack letters from Patterns of Translation concerning Krasznahorkai’s career and the geographical movement of his work — start HERE.