Published 12.5.2017. New York: New Directions. Translated by
László Krasznahorkai’s often-compared-to-forces-liquid-in-Nature prose—described in an oft-quoted line by translator George Szirtes as “a slow lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of type,” within which river other critics variously describe themselves as “drowning” in “scenes flooded” in “breathless,” “immersive intensity,” another critic saying, “One begins a Krasznahorkai story like a free diver, with a deep inhalation before plunging in,” this veritable tsunami of prose evidently having washed the English-speaking press several miles inland and won the Hungarian author at least one Man Booker International Prize in 2015, with yet another waiting to be wafted into his arms this spring with the book we are presently reviewing, an anthology of novellas and short stories called The World Goes On, this book which so immersed me in whirlpools of frivolous hairsplittings, unnecessary antitheses, and pages, pages, and pages of Schopenhauerean the-whole-world-is-fucked pronunciations that I feel new-baptized, Krasznahorkai having “cleansed the foul body of [my] infected world,” so that after being cleansed by that holy deluge, the first exalted thought I breathed as I came in sight of Ararat was, “Huh, I guess Cubism finally has come to literature,” which unlooked-for reaction, and also this present, ongoing demonstration of how to grammatically continue a sentence without resorting to such fakery (to put the most negative spin on the source of my annoyance possible) as treating spliced independent clauses or ones connected by semi-colons singly as sentences so as to bowl over the uninitiated with scriptio continua and claim an undeserved preeminence in the ancient art of sentence-writing, make it all the more evident that the critic must be well-versed in that same ancient art of sentence-writing so as to contextualize Krasnahorkai’s style of prose and syntactic styling—prose I admit until now I have been an unsuspecting civilian in the path of, not overawed yet nor washed off my feet by those sea-surge, village-drowning sentences, nor ready to lay down my arch-traditionalist conviction (expressed in a recent Twitter rant) that those who have pretensions of writing oceanic sentences ought to obey the same grammatical rules as past heavyweight sentence-writing contenders, or else forfeit their titles, but damn if I couldn’t sustain this sentence while sustaining my prose-as-waterborne-disaster metaphor instead of crossbreeding it with a boxing one, abominating that metaphor in a way Hazlitt wouldn’t approve of though reducing the miscegenation of metaphors, I’ll admit, is a scruple not so many writers care about, for like Krasznahorkai they are only human, and any writer that is a human and not a natural language-generating machine (or a William Hazlitt) must necessarily have flaws, and one of my flaws (much-vitiated in this instance by Krasznahorkai’s non-dismissable portion of actual greatness, and that of his translators in faithfully bringing over so much of the very likable persona he conveys and his—for the most part—charming idiosyncrasies) is the inveterate pleasure I take in shooting holes into anything or anyone that others seem to either unreservedly love or be so overawed by as to be incapable of offering substantive criticisms, the implicit premise of my writing a one-sentence review of Krasznahorkai’s book—an actual one-sentence review, though Krasznahorkai’s defenders may protest that Hungarian is a more elastic language than English and these things are grammatically kosher in Hungarian, to which my reply is 1. walk up to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, Urquhart, and Swinburne, tell them English isn’t elastic enough and see if they don’t pummel you, and 2. this is not a good defense, just like my client can rhyme in Italian is not a good defense, because if any schmoe can do what you’re doing in that language then one may justly question why you deserve credit for it, though Krasznahorkai’s partisans may handwave my objections away by asking what difference it makes spliced sentences or no spliced sentences, to which my reply is that the sentence, at least as it has heretofore been practiced in English (and, I wager, French) by no less than your sacred Descartes, Pascals, Hobbeses, Berkeleys, Lockes, and Humes, is an exquisite vehicle of logical argument, the essence of that exquisiteness being how its structure implicitly demonstrates relationships between the sentence’s various members, associations of logic that are undermined (because fraudulently imputed) and rendered as meaningless as Krasznahorkai thinks the universe is when writers or translators punctuate multiple sentences as if they are one sentence—the implicit premise (of my writing this one sentence punctuated honestly) being that I can provide such needful criticisms of Krasznahorkai in substance and style, the latter especially needful since a portion of Krasznahorkai’s substance is his style, the sentences that so betide critics that they forgive the looseness and repetitiveness they would criticize in other writers, and which I would criticize but on other grounds, knowing full well this Dostoyevsky-aping device has outwardly plausible rhetorical justifications but nonetheless piercing through those justifications like the USAO for the Southern District of New York through Michael Cohen’s attorney-client privilege to examine when and where these rhetorical justifications are legitimate and when and where they are mere instances of “Baroque Cubism,” which is the label I shall affix to certain parts of certain of Krasznahorkai’s stories in order to call attention to the mechanical, telegraphed nature of some of these repetitions, which seem to serve no purpose but to bedazzle us by conjuring Dostoyevskian phantoms and Kafka’s legalistic anthitheses instead of expressing and adding some new element of meaning to the stories which contain them, a criticism that is I’ll admit difficult to make because so much of Krasznahorkai’s substance does compel interest and does require reckoning with, a more-than-modicum level of greatness to be reckoned with, the existence of which makes it all the more tempting to ignore or brush aside Krasznahorkai’s flaws, since the default mode of classifying partly-great things is to say this either is or isn’t great or to sidestep the question of greatness completely, not allowing the concept of gradations of greatness to enter into one’s judgment, to treat the various parts of an artist’s work as inseverable and requiring either full-throated praise or the kind of muted publicity that most of the world’s books are doomed to, but which, despite my reservations, criticisms, and qualifications, The World Goes On almost certainly shouldn’t be reduced to, since it is the sort of book whose merits compel the attention of critics like myself, that poses challenges to the form (as progressive comedians might say) that are interesting and worth commenting on, though if I may telegraph my own conclusions I would say that Krasznahorkai’s formal innovations I find mostly annoying and gimmicky, whereas his traditional narrative blocking-and-tackling is so robust as to genuinely class him among the great writers he emulates, to an extent that while I have found these stories flawed overall as stories I also consider them highly praiseworthy in their individual parts, a conclusion that does not gibe well with the critical fashion of deeming things successes or failures in their totality, but one that is necessary to explain why despite my annoyance, despite my not being quite so impressed as other critics seem to be by the author’s forms, I still believe the stories in The World Goes On contain abundant narrative riches and no small amount of thematic significance and I will discuss those riches and that significance presently, presently as in right now, but not quite right now because first I have to tell you what the stories in this book are about, what are their plots, what their matter—for they are full of matter, densely packed with a certain sort of geometric, stylistically-determined matter, densely packed being a key phrase here since the author’s aversion to paragraph breaks makes these stories generally longer and denser than their page lengths would seem to indicate, so that no small part of their persuasion is the demands they place on our concentration to read them, which immediate difficulty in reading we transfer to the author in the act of writing, in spite of the fact that we read books over the course of days while writers write books over the course of years, plotting the Mephistophelean architecture of their plots and (in this case) their sentences with complete access to the blueprints, complete ability to add a phrase here, add another there, add a third one in another place that perfectly repeats and riffs on those other two, and (if the writer so wishes) to unfold reality and language like an onion (or, if you prefer, like a Picasso painting) putting down not one turn of phrase, but one or two or three possible turns of phrases, flaunting one’s ability to do so as a sort of studied indeterminacy, an unfolding of possibilities, but not an arbitrary but a geometric one with suspended, elegantly spaced out repetitions, for all competent stylists know you need to space out your repetitions if you wish to avoid clowning yourself, and so Krasznahorkai does at least superficially avoid clowning himself in stories that fit into this category I’m calling Baroque Cubism such as “Wandering-Standing”, “The World Goes On,” and “One Hundred People All Told,” the first the tale of a constant traveler whose boots have been “resoled, and resoled again,” who “is known in America and he is known in Asia, he’s recognized in Europe and he’s recognized in Africa,” and though we can be sure it was the best and worst of times in all of these places, for our purposes I hope the reader will not count the invidious punctuation practices of Krasznahorkai’s translators against me when I quote them and instead observe how Krasznahorkai creates a philosophical curio of this story by making his narrator one of those classic guy-who’s-been-everywhere, but-only-in-his-own-minds, and I believe I recently read a Johannes Urzidil story with the same premise but in this case the story arises not out of any sort of copying on the author’s part but rather purely on letting the Cubism, the unfolding of fortuous turns of phrases, to determine and direct the windings of the story, the Robert Frostian vacillation between “we say this way is the right direction, or the complete opposite direction is the right direction,” and you know that Krasznahorkai’s mind was tickled (as my mind is frequently tickled) by the possibility of repeating the same words in the same order, the right direction and the right direction, feeling tickled and tickled (or to quote one of the titles of Krasznahorkai’s books, War and War), a verbal tic of duplicating phrases that goes back to the original doublemaestro himself, Dostoyevsky, who, however, I don’t recall being quite so mechanical in his repetitions as Krasznahorkai is, since Dostoyevsky’s modus operandi was the imitation of natural speech patterns, whereas what Krasznahorkai creates are abstractions of natural speech patterns, like a Warhol painting where the quotidian is decontextualized and objectified, so Krasznahorkai takes a handful of phrases and objectifies them and it is a credit to the team of that they preserve these repetitions rather than ironing them out or altering them, which would not give us a fair basis on which to judge their effectiveness and necessity, a judgment where I (as reader and critic) vacillate between ascribing some larger allegorical meaning to them or ascribing them to (as the narrator of “Wandering-Standing” puts it) “a framework adjudicated by desire,” that is, Krasznahorkai repeating himself merely because it feels like he should and not because it is in any way advancing the story, and this debate over whether what Krasznahorkai was doing was advancing his story I found recurring for me (in one of those instinctive moments of higher-level narrative awareness) in “The World Goes On,” where there is a philosophical and emotionally resonant point of great power here about the feeling the narrator had after 9/11, of the moment of crisis and uncertainty where one hears the “scraping sound” o
f the metaphorical “ropes” pulling loose (which calls to mind Yeats’s “the center cannot hold,”) of the narrator (presumably a stand-in for our author) feeling that “good god, my language, the one I could use to speak out now, was so old,” and “how useless, how helpless and crude this language is” (and how resonant a point for any one of us who dreamed that our words could hold any power whatsoever, and how powerless words feel in the face of people for whom they are meaningless, a tool of the weak), but then Krazsnahorkai ends the story merely by recapitulating these things that the narrator already said, relying on mere repetition and parallelism to imbue the idea with an added profundity that developments within the narrative itself did not supply, and ironically reinforcing the idea of the insufficiency of words and offering an example of how the mechanical nature of this manner of repetition does not necessarily amplify a story’s power but sometimes dissipates it, though it is to Krasznahorkai’s credit that the story had any emotional spark to dim, which is not the case in “On Velocity,” a story beginning with some lovely (and trochaic) fairy-tale imagery—”I dash past the bridge over the stream by the meadow, past the reindeer-feeding trough in the dark of the forest, turning at Monowitz at the corner of Schuhkammer and Kleiderhammer”—and in true fairytale fashion, the narrator does the same exact thing in the same exact words two more times later on, but in between this we have this blooming onion of a discourse on the consequences of walking east or west relative to the movement of the earth, which felt (frankly) like hard science-fiction as written by someone with a far more tenuous grasp of science than Greg Bear or Greg Egan, so that I reached a point somewhere on the third page of this story where I thought, “You know, you’ve spent about half a page now arguing a completely stupid point,” and I wanted to beg alms on behalf of Krasznahorkai’s allegory (assuming there was one), for I pity the allegory that must hitch its wagon to such a poorly-conceived metaphor, and consider this an example of a Kraznahorkai story where the parts may be some mixture of beautiful, thought-provoking, original, and ingenious, but still not ultimately add up to a coherent artistic product, the kind that provides upon completion a feeling of artistic contentment—to which Krasznahorkai’s defenders might object that Krasnahorkai’s goal is irresolution and the denial of “artistic contentment,” which as I see it is both not true and a form of special pleading on the author’s behalf, for such perorations as we see to end what I’m calling Krazsnahorkai’s Cubist-style stories demonstrate a clear aim at a poetic resolution, but the results are not poetic because the decision to repeat has no purpose other than a species of slavish formality, and so the total artistic value of these stories, to recapitulate what I’ve said in reviews of other books, is neither more nor less but rather entirely equal to the sum of their sometimes meaningful, sometimes emptily formal parts, which is not to deny that those parts are frequently brilliant but rather to say that they are not connected, not shot-through with each other, and certainly not coiled together (to advance from the least to most beautiful sorts of symbolic linkages, as Hazlitt explains in his essay on poets and their prose), and this is the main criticism I would make of the book’s longest story, the novella “Universal Theseus,” which while it does not contain the coherence of a classic, has parts that are evocative of and sometimes equal to works that are classic, beginning with the outer frame story of a professorial (we might almost say Schaherazadic) narrator who is delivering lectures to people he identifies as his captors, addressing them now and then with humorously varying iterations of “Esteemed gentlemen!” and while I like the looseness and free discourse of this narrator (and will rhapsodize further down about how charming I find him), I feel that Krasznahorkai (or rather this narrator, who is something like Krasznahorkai handing himself an open mike) somewhat abuses the privilege he’s been given, especially in a section of Lecture Three which, let’s be honest, collapses into straight didacticism, albeit not of a sort that ties anything together, and also because the topics he chooses seem arbitrary, and although the conceit is that he didn’t choose the topics, but if you essentially make yourself the narrator of your own story, and then in your authorial discretion you choose the topics your shadowy captors deliver to you-as-the-narrator, then it seems to me that you are responsible for the arbitrariness of your own topics, an arbitrariness which is never explained, though I did like the recurring (and beautifully suggestive) allusions the narrator makes to his captors that “it’s been 150 years,” which prompts the reader (in a good way) to ask what the significance of 150 years is, whether the story is taking place in the present and by 150 years is meant the Industrial Revolution, or whether this story is taking place in the future and the 150 years are something that has happened now, and what I like about this detail is that it creates a subtle, curiosity-driving ambiguity, as opposed to the pretentious yeaing and naying of so many Krasznahorkai sentences which strike me as little more than Kafka-affect, but not the simplicity and multiplicity-from-simplicity of actual Kafka, and it is fortunate that Krasznahorkai at least has a sense of humor like Kafka so that as a reader I feel myself ready to forgive the conscious artsiness of such antheses, and also ready to laugh along with Krasznahorkai when he jumps the shark, or rather jumps the whale (heh) as he does in this paragraph from the First Lecture where he writes that,
There is a book explicitly declaring that from this moment on everything went wrong in the most infernal manner possible in this town, that is to say literally all hell broke loose, and the book intimates that it knows what this hell could be like, it knows what took place subsequently, what in fact this whale had been concealing on that maker square back in the deepest hellhole of the nineteen sixties or seventies.
… and some of the funniest moments in this whole story are the amazing, lovable histrionics of Krasznahorkai when he allows himself to be an angry old man railing against all the hell breaking loose in that hellhole of a town, and it is impossible not to like Krasznahorkai in such moments on anything but the most prudish grounds, and what this shows—along with those adorable repetitions of esteemed gentlemen!—is that Krasznahorkai is hardly so desolate in his attitude as might be indicated by his repeated invocations of the meaninglessness (or rather extrinsic meaningless) of our universe, because one gets the sense that Krasznahorkai desperately wants the universe to be meaningful, is driven by a desire to infuse the universe with emotions, with pathos, with phantoms of meaning that disappear but then linger in the mind, and this is what comes across to me in the two most thrilling and most impactful sections of “Universal Theseus,” the story in Lecture Two about the homeless man and the two policemen at a train station and the story in Lecture Three about the woman desperately filling out and re-filling out a form at the post office, both stories in which an unusual situation is closely (and brilliantly) narrated moment-by-moment with a heightened situational awareness that goes beyond photorealism and into the heads of both actors and observers, and it is here that Krasznahorkai’s blooming onion manner of narration finds subjects fitting for its probing analysis in the comical (but also tragic) dynamic between a hobo and two policemen, the hobo “urinating upon the rails” in a restricted zone of the platform, blatantly violating the law by urinating and by being in the restricted zone, a violation that (so far as Krasznahorkai psychologizes the onlookers) “slowly sink back and get lost in the workaday obscurity,” and then “two policemen suddenly appeared, and with this this the entire early afternoon in August, as usually happened the world over whenever the police show up, altered radically,” an alteration which usually ends with the typical power dynamics taking hold, the suspect being subdued by the police (or as happens in America, getting shot for the crime of being black) but in this instance the normal power dynamics are thrown into disarray because the policemen are on the wrong platform, separated from the hobo by a space of ten meters, and Krasznahorkai represents this distance of ten meters, this inability to catch the crook, as an almost apocalyptic event for these powermad LEOs, who are ultimately unable to apprehend the hobo, and while Krasznahorkai’s lecturer connects this story with the lesson that “evil exists, and the good, sad to say, can never catch up with it,” I think the story (as described from the view observing the policemens’ power-madness from outside) is equally as connected with the lecturer/narrator’s attempt to empathize (or at least analyze) the motivations of his captors, which leads to this passage of analysis (probably the most succinct statement of what these lectures are about), in which he says to his audience of captors,
Please don’t misunderstand me, I do not dispute—since I too must endure the same—that the world in question indeed lacks certainty, but while you gentlemen, I suppose, lament the absence of security in the universe, I lament the absence of beauteous meaning in the human world, or—inasmuch as we measure our differences by our disillusionment—your disillusionment comprises the so-called universe, whereas mine is limited to so-called humankind, by which I mean that you gentlemen have in fact been disappointed by failing to discover the keys to the universe, while retaining this universe itself; whereas I have been disillusioned by human intelligence after realizing the key to it is commonplace prostitution
… and this is a resonant message, one that gets to the heart of both sides of the power dynamic between the lecturer and his audience—a dynamic demonstrated on the captor’s side by the inability of the policemen to cross the distance between the platforms, to defy the limitations of reality—yet there is so much more, philosophically speaking, that Krasznahorkai tries to convey didactically in the next section that the end result is that it becomes hard to make out an overall theme, a strong signal amidst the disparate philosophy spread out (and not quite consistently reinforced) across the three lectures, and there is no seeming connection (except perhaps a tangential one) between the theme of the story of Lecture Two and that of the story of Lecture Three, an equally closely wrought tale of the narrator standing in line at the post office, behind a “shattered” woman struggling to fill out a form to send a telegram to someone, all of it very memorable and leading on to a surprise ending, but not directly tied in to situation of the lecturer, though perhaps tied in some way to his ultimate conclusion that, “We possess nothing,” and this is all well and good, and perhaps it unifies the captor’s perspective with the lecturers—the captor’s perspective and the lecturers—but this all requires creative interpretation and is too diffuse to seem timeless, and in any case I’m too tired of this overlong sentence to extend it further now but, with your indulgence reader, will write a thousand or so more words on the subject at a later time, but let me close with a comment on the very last piece contained in the book (after the dozen blank pages with suggestive footnotes that make up “The Swan of Istanbul”) which is no longer than a paragraph—a normal person paragraph, not a Krasznahorkaian paragraph—and is called “I Don’t Need Anything From Here,” a short piece which anaphorizes and zeugmatizes the root-phrase “I would leave . . .” to ennumerate the things of this world the narrator would leave behind and offer what was no doubt meant as a poetic, valedictory ending for the book which I found rather beautiful, which is why I read it out loud first to someone from work, then to my mother, and I curiously got two astonishly different reactions, the lady from work immediately saying, “How depressing, he’s leaving everything here and doesn’t any of it cause it’s all meaningless and worthless,” (I’m paraphrasing) while my mother concurred, “that’s beautiful, and the lady from work doesn’t know what she’s talking about, it’s about the after-life,” and I suppose it is an indication perhaps of how ambiguous the overall sentiment is that it is left to our own individual viewpoints to determine what exactly the author’s stance is on the things he left behind, and that indicates that the piece is not only beautiful, but contains interpretive depths, depths which are to be found in many similarly evocative but ambiguous passages throughout The World Goes On.
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