Laszlo Krasznahorkai: The Melancholy of Resistance.
Wilkinson, John W.
George Szirtes, tr. New York. New Directions. 2000 (c1998). 314
pages. $25.95 ISBN 0-8112-1450-8
THE SUBSTANCE OF The Melancholy of Resistance may be loosely termed
Kafkaesque, while the manner is basically early-to-middle Henry James.
Thomas Kabdebo, while agreeing with this estimation, has suggested
additionally the influence of Krudy, whereas Viktor Hatar sees that of
Thomas Mann. At a deeper level, the book has several different manners
and borrows a number of elements from different authors; e.g., there is
a striking example of the Gidean acte gratuit in an early scene
depicting the train journey, as a stranger knocks an old peasant woman
flying for no better reason than that he has seemingly grown bored with
her garrulity. Likewise, much of the atmosphere, especially that of the
train journey and the later pub scene, is rather Dickensian, while the
initial meeting between the conspirators and the reclusive scholar Mr.
Eszter, whom they have hijacked to their cause of social and moral
reform, is Turgenev at his most mischievously parodic. Such an amalgam
of tendencies may not be important, of course, provided we are satisfied
that the author achieves a truly personal synthesis of these tendencies.
But does he?
The tale is set in a period of social and moral decline, which many
of the characters tend to see as apocalyptic. The action centers in a
small Hungarian town, visited by a vaguely sinister traveling circus,
whose most sensational exhibit is a stuffed whale, said to be the
biggest of its kind in the world. Various ugly rumors circulate about
this whale and the evil crowds which it seems to attract from outside,
whenever it happens to travel. In fact, however, the whale proves to be
a red herring, both to the gentle reader and to the townspeople. The
truly sinister exhibit is the one which the circus director does not
dare to put on show: a strange creature called the Prince, who
communicates by a series of curious high-pitched sounds which only the
circus factotum is able to interpret, in his rather bad Hungarian. Who
or what is the Prince? From the fear he inspires in the director, he may
well be the Prince of Darkness, a speculation actually hazarded by one
of the minor characters toward the end of the book. At all events, the
Prince moves out, with the aid of the factotum -- the Prince himself
being physically helpless -- and there are serious riots. These are only
put down when Mrs. Eszter, chief of the conspirators and estranged wife
of the nominal leader, summons the military, who, in suppressing the
disorder, unwittingly bring her to power. In the end, the riots
themselves turn out to be an acte gratuit, since, with the disappearance
of the Prince and the factotum, the rioters themselves are no longer
sure what they were rioting about.
The political developments in the story, e.g. the emergence of the
vaguely fascist "moral rearmament" which takes over the town
council, are naively and unconvincingly portrayed, and there are
longueurs in the middle section, where Mr. Eszter's reflections,
first on esthetics and then on metaphysics, seem designed more to
instruct than to please. And to suggest that Eszter should despair of
his art and forsake its philosophical basis just because he discovers
that other cultures use different intervals from our own in the tuning
of their musical instruments is simply not to be believed.
The book's one claim to unity (perhaps its only claim) is that
the tale begins and ends with Mrs. Plauf, a pusillanimous little
nonentity who, after escaping one attempted rape at the beginning, is
later raped and murdered during the riots. Like Horst Wessel, she is
hijacked as a martyr to the cause by Mrs. Eszter and her now-triumphant
fellow conspirators and is given an improvised state funeral replete
with borrowed theatrical uniforms, plastic swords, a medal which had
once done duty as a "prize for sport," and an orotund and
insincere speech by Mrs. Eszter, who never could stand the poor woman.
However, the chief weakness of the book lies in the portrayal of
Valuska, the holy fool. The author eschews Faulkner's device,
whereby events are presented through the filter of the idiot's
mind. Instead, he presents his fool through the filters of several
minds, including those of Mr. Eszter and the author himself, and this
results in certain inconsistencies: Valuska appears variously as a
buffoon, as a subtle and highly articulate mystic, and as an idiot.
Curiously, the riots cause a complete reversal in the roles of Valuska
and Mr. Eszter. At the very moment when Eszter arrives at a just
appreciation of Valuska's saintly and selfless efforts on his
behalf, Valuska renounces his former point of view. And when Valuska is
committed to the asylum, it is Eszter, no longer the selfish recluse but
a gentle and saintly figure, who shuffles off each morning to be with
his friends all day.
The author is not well served by his blurb-writers. I would wager
that none of these -- except George Szirtes, the translator -- had
actually read the book, and even his comment is a barely concealed
sneer: "a slow lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of
type." The reference to Sheridan needs no pointing up by me! One
lady had clearly heard that the book contained a whale, and promptly
compared the author to Melville. A certain Mr. Sebald says the book is
"about a world into which the Leviathan has returned." But
have we any evidence that Leviathan ever left the world? To judge from
Isaiah 27:1, the destruction of Leviathan would appear to be a future
occurrence, reserved presumably to the End of Time. Or had Mr. Sebald
heard of Hobbes's Leviathan and assumed that it was a
seventeenth-century version of Moby Dick? Suffice it to say, whatever
the author's merits or defects, he does not deserve to be the
subject of so much bad faith and bad scholarship.
John W. Wilkinson
University College London
