WAR AND WAR IN HUNGARY
In his interview with Elżbieta Sobolewska (“Literatura na Świecie”, 9-10/2005) the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai says that there are no victors in life – all of us are losers. In his work he tries to take the side of the degraded, the outcasts, the dropouts. He states clearly that mankind is not capable of attaining happiness, it can be merely stuck in its illusion, which will nevertheless fade away sooner or later. Krasznahoraki’s pessimism is close to Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Emil Cioran’s attitude towards humanity – it is outright and heartfelt, not an artistic pose at all. Life is a form of degradation, sad and deeply moving. Especially for the outcasts, and those living in misery. The author of “War and War”, an excerpt of which can be found in the same number of “Literatura na Świecie” in Sobolewska’s excellent translation, paints their psychology with an utmost passion, and with great scrupulousness, reminding Thomas’s Berhnard’s pedantry, shows the lot of castaways, losers and waifs, in whom he searches for a flash of truth about the world. He feels at home amongst the despised – they and their tragedies open his eyes to important matters, which otherwise he could have overlooked. He writes with great commitment, literally merging with his characters. Like Mario Vargas Llosa in the “Conversation in the Cathedral”, he constructs a world from their own snapped utterances, tangled anew, without any outer interference on the part of the narrator. The characters focus mainly on living with dignity despite of the awareness of their defeat. This feature discerns them from Beckett’s freaks, who, while living in the shadow of their own fall, choose not to see it – and this ignorance, or even stupidity, is the only thing which allows them to live despite the disaster which has long since occurred. Krasznahoraki’s writing is powerful, leaving no place for indifference, forcing to react – that being its great advantage. As all that is powerful, it is based on excess, on a hypertrophy of one organ, on the dominance of one element – and consistently, on the deficiency of all others. Krasznahorkai paints almost solely with black – he admits openly in the interview that he does not wish to give anyone even an illusion of happiness. Like Dostoyevsky, he searches for the roots of evil, and tracks human vileness. Also like him (Sonia from “Crime and Punishment” comes to mind) he finds human dignity amongst the outcasts, the sick and the damned. “War and War” is a brilliant piece, but as brilliant as Goya would have been, had he painted only variations on Saturn devouring his children, or the Colossi trampling the Earth – but Goya also painted the wonderfully sensual and frivolous Maja. It is a biased genius – in my opinion, biased unnecessarily. I don’t intend to vouch for some kind of Leibnizian optimism. On the contrary, I experience the tragedy of existence as powerfully as Krasznahorkai. But with the same power I experience the force of despair. It can kill, if something doesn’t render it harmless. And the thing that can achieve that without resorting naively to illusions of happiness is laughter. That cosmic laughter, which makes the difference between Svejk and Joseph K., prince Sternenhoch and Werter, Gargantua and Faust, Morgenstern and Rilke, Gombrowicz and Przybyszewski, Dali and Munch. It has the same root as despair – the experience of nonentity and emptiness. But, differently than despair, it finds it more preposterous than tragic. Laughter which has nothing to do with hypocritical self-complacency – liberating, allowing us to see the tragedy of existence as sharply as despair. Not as an alternative to despair – it is also an element of human condition. While despair makes us feel the weight of matter, laughter frees us from it, for a moment. While despair encloses us within ourselves, condemning to tortures of self-awareness and knowledge of our futility, laughter frees us from ourselves, allows one to look at oneself from above, and realize the redundancy of fear. Both tears and laughter are an expression of helplessness in the face of the world’s absurdity.
Krasznahorkai takes the side of the suffering and degraded, but he doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, that laughter is their weapon, just as much as tears are. He intellectualizes his “martyrs”, perceiving them only as suffering heads and torsos, while amputating what Mikhail Bakhtin called “the sphere from the waist down”, which is the basis for folk culture, abounding in gruff humor and farce. Laughter is one of the rare occasions a fallen being has to liberate oneself from ill fate and rise above it. And have a taste of freedom and unbounded spiritual liberty. The hangman never laughs, he can chortle like an animal at the most. The victim’s laughter confuses the hangman, depriving him of his weapon, ie. arousing fear. Just as Svejk overpowered his most horrid torturers with his ostensible stupidity. Svejk, although outwardly and formally is a victim par excellance (of the war and his superiors), is not a victim in fact, thanks to the ever present potential of cosmic laughter within him, which invalidates the tragedy of Fate. To sum up, a quote from Ladislav Klima, a Czech philosopher: “The world is a crock-pot, a paradox, a mistake and drivel, and fearing the author’s lapse is as amusing as someone who, having fallen into a sewer, fears that he’ll get his cuffs dirty.” And one more paraphrase of another Czech philosopher, Zbyňek Fišer, who, in the 70’ies, being for the first time at a concert of the Plastic People of the Universe, expressed an opinion that the music was excellent, but it would be even more excellent if it contained the lyrics of the great poet, Egon Bonda (ie. his own, as “Egon Bonda was” Zbyňek Fišer’s pen-name). Just as so, Krasznahorkai is an excellent writer, but he would be even more excellent if he was not so afraid of falling into the sewer of life, where not only black despair prevails – it is accompanied by convulsive laughter...
Igor Kędzierski
Translated by Michał Kwiatkowski
Discussed journals: Literatura na Świecie