Laszlo Krasznahorkai

go to the bio page

The Melancholy Of Resistance (translation by George Szirtes)

" ...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... "

" She swayed in the airless, urine-smelling booth, broken, tortured by the suspicion that she knew all there was to know, and under the spell of the formless, inconceivable, ever-shifting terror of having to seek some protection against this universal threat, she was aware only of an emerging sense of agonizing bitterness: for while she felt it was deeply unfair that she should be cast as an innocent victim rather than an untroubled survivor, she who ‘all her life had longed for peace, and never harmed a soul’, she was forced to concede that this was of little consequence: there was no authority to which she could appeal, no one to whom she might protest, and she could hardly hope that the forces of anarchy having once been loosed could afterwards be restrained. After so much gossip, so much terrifying rumour-mongering, she could now see for herself that ‘it was all going down the drain’, for she understood that while her own particular immediate danger was over, in ‘a world where such things happen’ the collapse into anarchy would inevitably follow "

" To establish one’s bearings among the ever more frightening events of the past months had become impossible, not only because there was little coherence in the mixture of news, gossip, rumour and personal experience (examples of which might include the sharp and much too early cold snap at the beginning of November, the mysterious family disasters, the rapid succession of railway accidents and those terrifying rumours of gangs of criminal children defacing public monuments in the distant capital, between any of which it was hard to find any rational connection), but also because not one of these items of news meant anything in itself, all seeming to be merely omens of what was referred to by a growing number of people as ‘the coming catastrophe’. "

" And while it was really only a matter of moments, it seemed to last an eternity, that in her hysterical sobbing and sense of desolation she saw, in a brief blinding instant, from a height, in the enormous dense darkness of night, through the lit window of the stalled train, as if in a matchbox, a little face, her face, lost, distorted, out of luck, looking out. "

" Although she continued to resist the force of circumstances which seemed to have been created expressly to challenge such resolution, in the complete absence of streetlight and the still oppressive silence she began to feel ever more like a victim cast to her fate, for wherever she looked, seeking the filtered lights of the apartments, the place assumed the look of all cities under siege, where, regarding all further effort as pointless and superfluous, the inhabitants have surrendered even the last traces of endangered human presence in the belief that while the streets and squares have been lost, the thick walls of buildings behind which they cower afford shelter from any serious harm. "

" She herself was nothing but an object among objects, one of millions of defenseless sleepers, a body, like others, returning each night to those melancholy gates of being which may be entered but once and then with no prospect of return. "

" For weeks now they had lived in a state between confusion and unease bordering on nervous melancholy. "

" But there was something else; the silence, that stifled, unbroken, ill-omened silence in which not a single voice rang out, and hundreds of people waited, growing impatient, yet obstinately stoical and utterly silent, ready to stir once the acute suspense associated with such events gave way to the ecstatic roar of the ‘performance’, each individual isolated as if he had nothing to do with anyone else, as though it was of no concern to anyone why everyone else happened to be there, or, conversely, as if they were all part of an enormous chain-gang in which the ties that bound them negated all possibility of escape thereby rendering pointless any communication or conversation between them. "

" I am dizzy, and, God forgive me, bored, like everyone else who has succeeded in ridding himself of the notion that is any suggestion of rhyme or reason in making or breaking, in birth or death, in this constant and agonizing going round in circles, postulating some enormous wonderful plan rather than a cold, mechanical, blindingly simple movement... That once perhaps... in the distant past... there might have been some feeling to the contrary. "

" One long unbroken story related in the stuttering and excitable prose his visitor had regaled him with each noon and every late afternoon for the last eight years, an endless fantasia of the planets and the stars, the sunlight, the ever-turning shadows, and the silent mechanism of the heavenly bodies orbiting overhead, which provided ‘silent proof of the existence of an ineffable intellect’ and had enchanted him all his life as he stared into the eventually over-clouded firmament on his eternal wanderings. "

" His wife, that dangerous prehistoric beast from whom he, ‘by the grace of God’, had separated years ago, who reminded him of nothing so much as one of those merciless medieval mercenaries, with whom he had tied that infernal comedy of a marriage thanks to an unforgivable moment of youthful carelessness, and who in her uniquely dismal and alarming essence summed up all that ‘multifarious spectacle of disillusionment’ the society of the town, in his view, somehow succeeded in representing. "

" He was aware of millions of propositions, and eternally restless seething mass of events conducting an austere and eternal dialogue between themselves, every one of the million incidents, each of those million relationships, millions but uniform and therefore in one single uniform relationship along with everything else, uniting in a single confluence of conflicting elements, between things that simply by existing resist and those which by virtue of being themselves strive to overcome that resistance. "

" Some of the decomposed carbohydrates melted into the air as carbon dioxide so that theoretically at least •they might, for once in their lives, take part in the process of photosynthesis. So, through various delicate channels, a superior organism welcomed them, dividing them neatly between organic and inorganic forms of being, and when, after a long and stiff resistance, the remaining tissue, cartilage and finally the bone gave up the hopeless struggle, nothing remained and yet not one atom had been lost. Everything was there, it is simply that there was no clerk capable of making an inventory of all the constituents; but the realm that existed once—once and once only—had disappeared for ever, ground into infinitesimal pieces by the endless momentum of chaos within which crystals of order survived, the chaos that consisted of an indifferent and unstoppable traffic between things. It ground the empire into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur, it took its delicate fibres and unstitched them till they were dispersed and had ceased to exist, because they had been consumed by the force of some incomprehensibly distant edict, which must also consume this book, here, now, at the full stop, after the last word. "

War and War (translation by George Szirtes)

" because he didn’t feel like going home to an empty apartment on his birthday, and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ’s sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially in the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at the age of forty-four, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last forty-four years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for forty-four years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in the effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand, was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when, after a couple of days, he noticed that there was something the matter with his head."

The manuscript was interested in one thing only, and that was reality examined to the point of madness, and the experience of all those intense mad details, the engraving by sheer manic repetition of the matter into the imagination, was, and he meant this literally, Korin explained, as if the writer had written the text not with pen and words but with his nails, scratching the paper into the paper and into the mind."

"I want to stretch open the walls, but they have tautened me here, and here I remain in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing else for me to do but howl, and now and forever I shall be nothing but my own tautening and my own howling, everything that there was for me has become nothing. . . . I have nothing in common with this space, in the entire God-given world I have nothing in common with this structure . . . so that I don’t even exist, I only howl, and howling is not identical with existence, on the contrary howling is despair."

Satantango (translation by George Szirtes)

"He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself—utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials—into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of someday finding his way back home. He turned his head toward the east, once the home of a thriving industry, now nothing but a set of dilapidated and deserted buildings, watching while the first rays of a swollen red sun broke through the topmost beams of a derelict farmhouse from which the roof tiles had been stripped."

"The rain that had been gently pouring till now suddenly turned into a veritable deluge, like a river breaking over a dam, drowning the already choking fields, the lowest lying of which were riddled with serpentine channels, and though it was impossible to see anything through the glass he did not turn away but stared at the worm-eaten wooden frame from which the putty had dropped out, when suddenly a vague form appeared at the window, one that eventually could be made out to be a human face, though he couldn’t tell at first whose it was, until he succeeded in picking out a pair of startled eyes, at which point he saw “his own careworn features” and recognized them with a shock like a stab of pain since he felt that what the rain was doing to his face was exactly what time would do. It would wash it away. There was in that reflection something enormous and alien, a kind of emptiness radiating from it, moving toward him, compounded of layers of shame, pride and fear."

"They are like fossils cushioned by damp moss"

"he seems to be swallowing light, some secret power is entering his skin; the decay resurrected from the cavity of the bones, liberated, is filling every cell of his body as if it were blood spreading to the extremities thereby announcing its unquenchable power."

"The stench of sewers mixed with mud, puddles, the smell of the odd crack of lightning, wind tugging at tiles, power lines, empty nests; the stifling heat behind low ill-fitting windows . . . impatient, annoyed half-words of lovers embracing . . . demanding wails of babies, their cries sliding off into the tin-smell of dusk; streets pliable, parks soaked to their roots lying obedient to the rain, bare oaks, half-broken dry flowers, scorched grass all prostrate, humbled by the storm, sacrifices strewn at the executioner’s feet."

"and the rain begins again, while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale-blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees one from the other, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army."

"he was lost in successive waves of time, coolly aware of the minimal speck of his own being, seeing himself as the defenseless, helpless victim of the earth’s crust, the brittle arc of his life between birth and death caught up in the dumb struggle between surging seas and rising hills, and it was as if he could already feel the gentle tremor beneath the chair supporting his bloated body, a tremor that might be the harbinger of seas about to break in on him, a pointless warning to flee before its all encompassing power made escape impossible, and he could see himself running, part of a desperate, terrified stampede comprising stags, bears, rabbits, deer, rats, insects and reptiles, dogs and men, just so many futile, meaningless lives in the common, incomprehensible devastation, while above them flapped clouds of birds, dropping in exhaustion, offering the only possible hope."

"Autumnal horse-flies were buzzing round the cracked lampshade, describing drowsy figures of eight in its weak light, time and again colliding with the filthy porcelain, so that after each dull little thud their bodies fell back into the magnetic paths they themselves had woven, to continue this endless cycle, albeit on a tight closed circuit until the light went out; but the compassionate hand that had the power to undertake such action was still supporting the unshaven face."

"There she retreated into a wounded silence, clutching the Bible to her bosom, looking over the heads of the others into a kind of heavenly haze, her eyes misting over with a blissful sense of certainty derived from above. In her own mind she stood, straight as a post, high above a magnetic field of bent heads and backs, the proud unassailable place she occupied in the inn, a space she was unwilling to vacate, like a vent in the closed bar, a vent through which foul air could escape so that numbing, frozen, poisonous drafts from outside might rush in and take its place. In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent scritch-scratch of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision; a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metalled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they no longer hang together."

"The velvety sound of the accordion stimulated the spiders of the bar to a new frenzy of activity. Every glass, every bottle, every cup and every ashtray was quickly veiled over with a light tissue of webs. The table and chair legs were woven into a co-coon and then—with the aid of one or another secret narrow strand—they were all connected up, as if it were a matter of some importance that the spiders, flattened in their secret, remote corners, should be properly advised of every slight tremor, each microscopic shift, and would be so as long as this strange, all-but-invisible network remained intact. They wove over the faces, hands, and feet of the sleepers too, then, lightning-quick, retreated to their hidey-holes so that given one barely perceptible vibration, they would be ready to start again. "

"Every glass, every bottle, every cup and every ashtray was quickly veiled over with a light tissue of webs. The table and chair legs were woven into a cocoon and then – with the aid of one or another secret narrow strand – they were all connected up, as if it were a matter of some importance that the spiders, flattened in their secret, remote corners, should be properly advised of every slight tremor, each microscopic shift, and would be so as long as this strange, all-but-invisible network remained intact. They wove over the faces, hands, and feet of the sleepers too …"

"Mrs. Schmidt was a bird happily flying through the milk of the clouds seeing someone down there waving at the her, so she descended a little and could hear Mrs. Schmidt bawling why isnt she cooking you scoundrel come down immediately but she flew over her and she chirrupped you won't die of hunger before tommorrow she felt the warm sun on her back suddenly Schmidt was there beside her, "Stop it immediately" but she paid no attention and descended further, she'd have liked to catch an insect, they were beating Futaki's back with an iron rod. He couldnt move, he had been bound with ropes to a tree tensely she felt how the rope was straining along open wound across his back she looked away she couldnt bear it she was sitting on an excavator that was digging an enormous ditch, a man came over and said hurry becauses you're not getting any more fuel however much you beg me for it, she dug the ditch ever deeper it kept collaping she tri tr tried again but in vain and she cried as she was sitting at the engine room window and had no idea what was happening it was dawn and getting lighter or evening and growing darker and she didnt want it all ever to come to an end she just sat and had no idea what was happening nothing changed outside it was neither morning nor evening it just carried on dawn or twilight whichever..."

"God was a mistake. I’ve long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There’s no sense or meaning in anything. It’s nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It’s only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay.".

"Quietly, continually, the rain fell and the inconsolable wind that died then was forever resurrected ruffled the still surfaces of puddles so lightly it failed to disturb the delicate dead skin that had covered them during the night so that instead of recovering the previous day’s tired glitter they increasingly and remorselessly absorbed the light that swam slowly out of the east."

"Grumbling and ever more embittered, they roamed through the deserted halls of the moribund building, exploring in somber chaotic fashion the dismantled parts of rusted machinery and in the funereal silence the suspicion grew in them that they had been lured into a trap, that they were, all of them, naïve victims of a low plot to dump them there, homeless, deceived, robbed and humiliated."

"He scribbled feverishly and was practically seeing everything that was happening over there, and he knew, was deadly certain, that from then on this was how it would be. He realized that all those years of arduous, painstaking work had finally borne fruit: he had become the master of a singular art that enabled him not only to describe a world whose eternal unremitting progress in one direction required such mastery but also - to a certain extent - he could also intervene in the mechanism behind an apparently chaotic swirl of events! He rose from his observation post and, eyes burning, started to walk up and down from one corner of the narrow room to the other. He tried to keep control of himself without success: the realization had come so unexpectedly, he was so unprepared for it, so much so that in those first few moments he even wondered if he had lost his mind."