Germans don’t get toothache

When​ I first read László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below, published in Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation in 2013, I thought I had discovered a sutra of a cult I had been unconsciously following for most of my life, a cult I had dimly perceived through museums and libraries but that now I could see was mystically systematised. It had no name, as the white heron we meet stalking fish in the Kamo river in Kyoto has no name, but is ‘the artist who is no more, who is invisible, who is needed by no one’. Each chapter centres on an artwork or its creator, its making or its reception, ranging from the Shang Dynasty to the present day, across the Eurasian continent from Japan to Spain. There are seventeen chapters, each consisting (mostly) of a single sprawling sentence, and numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence, 1 to 2584, which gives the effect of travelling light years in the course of reading.

In one story, a man visiting the Parthenon forgets his sunglasses, is blinded by the sun and killed in the Athens traffic; in another, a man in Venice experiences the crushing sorrow of theophany when the eyes of a painted Christ follow him around a gallery; in another, an impoverished migrant descends into madness after meeting figures from an Andrei Rublev icon come to life. A guard in the Louvre contemplates his charge, the Venus de Milo, and concludes: ‘she did not belong here nor anywhere upon the earth, everything that she, the Venus de Milo meant, whatever it might be, originated from a heavenly realm that no longer existed … because the higher realm had itself been disappeared from the human world.’ In another chapter, a master Noh mask-maker unwittingly summons a demon, the hannya, through his handiwork.

Art is a portal, then, through which one enters the uncanny. It can bring havoc, or it can bring bliss. In a monastery where the Heian-period Amida Buddha is disassembled to be painstakingly cleaned, its famous gaze restored to its original splendour, the technician mediates between two realms:

Most of the believers remember very well how the statue looked across the decades, a dark shadow on the altar … but this pair of eyes, if even touching lightly upon them, does not see them but looks onto a further place, onto a distance that no one here is able to conceive, everyone senses that, and the tension is extinguished in one blow, on every face great joy can be seen.

‘Distant Mandate’, which appears halfway through the book, dismantled my inner gimbals and set the compass spinning. Krasznahorkai leads us through the Alhambra while instructing us in its ‘forbidden’ geometry: patterns of asymmetrical, non-repeating five-sided shapes that violated the known laws of crystallography (that is, until Roger Penrose in the 20th century found the secret).

It is this geometry as well as the mathematical knowledge that pertains to it that we discover, if we lean in closer – in imagination or reality – to the surfaces of the walls and arches and pavements and ceilings and columns and parapets of the Alhambra, and we see these peculiarly behaving formations pressed into the fresh plasterwork … carved into the marble columns, arched vaulting, cupolas, laid out or drawn onto the floors, the ceilings, and the tile walls … growing dizzy inside the labyrinth of the Alhambra.

The net effect – as anyone who has visited the Alhambra can attest – is vertigo: ‘Something infinite can exist in a finite, demarcated space; well but this, how can this be?’ Krasznahorkai understands that the exaltation of Stendhalismo can also sicken:

Yet one feels that a bad decision brought him here … he grows blinded from the radiance … he allows once again for this unearthly ornament of the patterns of the walls and the ceiling to descend upon him … this glittering, delicately-lived pattern points to the unity of the nature of various experiences, the unity holding all as one in a net, because the geometrical composition used by that Arab spirit, across the Greek and Hindu and Chinese and Persian cultures actualises a concept, namely that in place of the evil chaos of a world falling apart, let us select a higher one in which everything holds together.

Of course art is an assault on entropy almost by definition. But an uneasy recursion arises in contemplation of forbidden symmetries: ‘Despite all of this dazzledness there is something of disillusionment within him … it is as if he already suspects that the Alhambra does not offer the knowledge that we know nothing of the Alhambra, that it itself knows nothing of this not-knowing, because not-knowing does not even exist.’ Donne’s triumphant ‘Death, thou shalt die’ has nothing on the apophatic reversals of Krasznahorkai’s metaphysics, where art exposes the scrim between us and non-being.

Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the Hungarian town of Gyula and is rumoured to be bunkered in another obscure Hungarian hinterland, but since acquiring a passport in 1987 he has lived in many places: in Germany, with which he has a special affinity, and in Allen Ginsberg’s apartment in the East Village, and in China and Japan. There is nowhere in Seiobo There Below that does not feel stamped with eyewitnessed detail. The illusion of omniscient stream of consciousness, of run-on sentences that fold the world into their open syntax, mimics this wanderlust up to breakthrough moments of awe, as at the end of ‘Distant Mandate’: ‘For there is truth. There is the Alhambra. That is the truth.’

Seiobo There Below falls somewhat outside the schema of Krasznahorkai’s other novels, which James Wood has characterised as ‘a kind of comedy of apocalypse’. In an interview published in the Paris Review in 2018, Krasznahorkai told Adam Thirlwell:

I’ve said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. I wasn’t satisfied with the first, and that’s why I wrote the second. I wasn’t satisfied with the second, so I wrote the third, and so on. Now, with Baron, I can close this story. With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book – Satantango, Melancholy, War and War and Baron. This is my one book.

He was speaking of Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, about a man who returns in old age to his provincial Hungarian town, which had just been published in English. When Thirlwell asked: ‘You don’t think you’ll write another novel after Baron Wenckheim?’ Krasznahorkai averred: ‘No. When you read it, you’ll understand. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming must be the last.’

Herscht 07769 arrived three years later. It follows on from Baron and the earlier books. Satantango (1985), Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, told from multiple viewpoints over twelve chapters, borrows its structure from the tango (six steps forward, six steps back) and features a Satan-like figure who bankrupts and disperses a small Hungarian village. In The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), a circus rides into a small town and upends it. The protagonist of War and War (1999) is obsessed with an anonymous medieval manuscript of an epic poem found in the archives of his town. Last year saw the publication in Hungary of the as yet untranslated Zsömle Odavan (‘Zsömle is Waiting’), about surreal goings-on in an unnamed village. Two of the novels have been made into films by Béla Tarr, who collaborated with Krasznahorkai on the screenplays, beginning with the seven-hour Satantango.

But Seiobo There Below, written after Krasznahorkai’s time in East Asia, remains a touchstone. An experience very like the Alhambra moment occurs in Herscht 07769, but instead of art the incipient vision comes from physics:

The entire universe rested upon the inexplicable fact that in a closed vacuum, in addition to every one billion particles of matter, one billion antiparticles also arise, and when matter and antimatter meet they extinguish each other, but then suddenly they don’t, because after that one billion and first particle, the one billion and first antiparticle doesn’t arise, and so this one material particle remains in existence, or directly it brings existence into life: as abundance, as surplus, as excess, as a mistake, and … without it, the universe never would have existed – this thought frightened Florian so much that he had to stop, he had to lean against the wall.

This is, of course, a recapitulation of forbidden symmetry.

Florian Herscht, a young man living in the village of Kana in Thuringia, writes letters to Angela Merkel warning her of the imminent annihilation of the universe: nothing, he feels, could come out of something with the same serendipity that something once came out of nothing. For a return address he gives only his name and his postcode: Herscht 07769, ‘signalling, as it were, the confidential nature of this matter’. He may as well be naming a quasar or a galaxy.

At the post office, Herr Volkenant and his wife, Jessica, warn Herscht that he is throwing away his eighty cents each time. Like almost everyone in Kana, they’re protective of the soft-headed ‘kid grown to giant size’, raised in a children’s home, who got a certificate from baking school but was railroaded by the Boss, a middle-aged neo-Nazi, into working for his cleaning business while collecting unemployment benefits. Florian is vulnerable to father and mother-figures. When his teacher at the adult education centre, Herr Köhler, asks ‘why not stick with what you studied?’, Florian ‘just shook his lowered head, as if to say: unfortunately, this has not been given to me, this is not something I may choose for myself.’ He is the archetypal gentle giant, and from the start the reader is worried for him.

Krasznahorkai has described his obsession with this archetype, which has among its antecedents the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s story ‘White Nights’. ‘The main character [of ‘White Nights’] is a little bit like Myshkin in The Idiot, a pre-Myshkin figure. I was a fanatical fan of this narrator and later of Myshkin – of their defencelessness. A defenceless, angelic figure. In every novel I’ve written you can find such a figure.’ Florian is in over his head with the Boss as well as ‘the wonderful world of elementary particles’ introduced to him by Herr Köhler. Everything in Herscht 07769, as in ‘Distant Mandate’, is a matter of scale. Florian is physically towering, but his intellect is somewhat dim; his intellect is dim, but he applies himself to a class on physics; elementary particles are infinitesimal, but the universe is infinite; Kana is a self-contained hamlet in forested Thuringia, but it is subject to the encroachment of violent outside forces. Herr Köhler runs a rooftop weather station, from which he gathers meteorological data on behalf of the townspeople and analyses ‘data from the DWD, the MDR or the Norwegians’.

With the same juddering, polyvocal, fugal train of clauses that distinguishes all his prose (once again translated by Mulzet), Krasznahorkai winds through the inner weather of the residents of Kana: now we’re entangled in Jessica’s ruminations in the post office; now we’re in the library run by Frau Ringer, now the Herbstcafé with Frau Uta or the Grillhäusel with Ilona. There are Jews (the Ringers), Brazilians (Rosario and Nadír), memories of the Vietnamese who worked at the Porcelain Factory. These citizens lead mostly retiring, orderly lives:

Things went on as usual, it was spring, the sun shining for hours on end some days, the residents of Kana went to the banks of the Saale, they sat out on the benches on the Bahnhofstrasse, things livened up at the shopping centre, Kana clashed with Gera on the soccer fields, and then it was May Day, still the most important holiday in Kana, already in the morning the older people came to the Rosengarten to get a good seat at the tables.

But where there is matter, there is also antimatter. The Boss and his gang live in ‘the Burg’ (the castle), ‘grimy with piercings in their ears and mouths and noses, all covered in tattoos’. The Boss is a stereotypical meathead, bald and muscle-bound, keeper of a chained Rottweiler, lover of all things Teutonic (‘a German doesn’t get a toothache, he thundered’). Yet he is also an absurd and helpless acolyte of Bach, who satisfies the Teutonic requirement but also hints at a yearning for deliverance, as Florian comes to suspect. The Boss has founded the cacophonous Kana Symphony Orchestra, which he browbeats every Saturday: a group of amateur musicians who would prefer Beatles songs or ‘Blood of My Blood’ from Game of Thrones to the St Matthew Passion.

Florian has escaped having to live in the Burg; the Boss set him up in his own apartment as a means of keeping him in debt. Florian’s timid resistance (refusing tattoos, going to the adult education class, posting letters to Merkel) earns him cuffs and blows, but he faithfully shows up at the Boss’s side in his Opel with the business tag ‘ALLES WIRD REIN, ALL WILL BE CLEAN’. Their speciality is graffiti removal.

The first sign that things are going awry is that someone has graffitied the Bachhaus with a wolf’s head and the word ‘WE’. Similar desecrations at other Bach monuments soon follow. The Boss goes berserk, ranting about this ‘Bach hater!! This drooling, pimple-faced, hoodie-wearing psychopath’. Meanwhile the Ringers are attacked and put in the hospital by a wolf while picnicking (‘every single resident of Kana was flabbergasted’). Herr Köhler, a model of Kantian regularity in his personal habits, goes missing. Could these events be related?

Among the dark omens that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, it’s said, was wolves running amok through the Forum. A group that campaigns for the conservation of wolves comes to lecture the townspeople but encounters some resistance: ‘The fear of wolves is as old as humanity itself.’ Menacing rumours float up from the media, and the novel begins to intersect with the headlines we remember from a few years ago: environmental catastrophe (‘and the bees?! the bees?! there’ll be hell to pay’), Merkel’s announcement that she will step down, the trial of a far-right terrorist cell (Revolution Chemnitz), mysterious explosions in nearby Jena and, as the novel wears on, ‘the pandemic’.

When one of the Boss’s thugs tries to rape Nadír and is assaulted by her husband, Rosario, it sets off a chain of criminal reprisals. Someone blows up the couple’s gas station and Nadír and Rosario burn to death. The Boss, focus of the police investigation, unloads his mobile phone on Florian with strict orders not to look at it. Eventually Florian does look, and what he sees – video footage proving his associates committed the violence – initiates his transformation into something like a wolf. He starts to murder everyone involved, beginning with the Boss (and his Rottweiler). He tracks down each neo-Nazi while the scariest of them all, the eyepatch-wearing Frau Karin, hunts him, setting up a showdown: matter, meet antimatter. As the epigraph of Herscht 07769 warns us, ‘hope is a mistake.’

Is Bach​ a mistake? Florian’s metamorphosis is precipitated not by the discovery of the camera footage, but by his absorption in Bach’s music. At first he doesn’t comprehend the Boss’s mania, but obediently tries to tune his ears; gradually he realises that the universe of Bach ‘was a truly existing realm’ and writes to Merkel that ‘the most suitable way of handling the looming catastrophe is for the Security Council to listen to Bach.’ Along the way he comes to see, to his astonishment, that he has stopped fearing the Boss. Is it because ‘whenever he listened to Bach, he himself became nothing’? Losing fear is the key to self-actualisation: ‘He was no longer gentle and shamefaced, no longer uninformed in daily matters, no longer practically a half-wit, but as dangerous as a land mine.’

Krasznahorkai once told an interviewer that music has been on a downward slide – subject to ‘vulgarisation’ – since the Baroque. We ‘have a picture of Bach as a holy man, always looking to heaven. But in fact, all geniuses are only interested in the physical, in technique.’ Florian intuits the messianic in Bach’s harmonies:

He thought that the remedy for the Last Judgment perhaps did not lie in science or the politics it had given rise to, but that remedy lay wholly and singularly in Johann Sebastian Bach … these structures were perfect … in Johann Sebastian Bach there was NO EVIL … there was no contingency here and there never would be, no change, because Bach was a STABLE STRUCTURE.

When Florian goes on the lam, he listens to Bach on his earphones night and day. When he ceases to be able to charge his phone in public places, it’s just as well: ‘He was no longer hearing Bach, he was inside Bach; in his own brain, he could no longer separate himself from the music he heard continuously.’

The idea that Bach’s music exists in an objective realm beyond the human runs through Krasznahorkai’s novels; it harks back, in Seiobo There Below, to the chapter ‘Private Passion’, which follows a public lecturer as he evangelises for the Baroque. But it is not only Bach’s music that dwells in this realm; Krasznahorkai claims the same is true of fictional characters:

They exist in the eternal place. Can you argue that Myshkin is only fictional? Of course. But it’s not the truth. Myshkin may have entered reality through someone else, through Dostoevsky, but now, for us, he is a real person. Every character in so-called eternal fiction came through ordinary people. This is a secret process, but I’m entirely sure that it’s true. For example, a few years after I had written Satantango, I was in a bar, and somebody tapped my shoulder. It was Halics from Satantango. Really! I’m not joking! That’s why I’ve become more careful about what I write.

This passage gave me pause. Not because I disagree with Krasznahorkai, but because, given the horrific ends which so many of Kana’s residents meet by the end of the novel, it increased my distress at their suffering, which is both fictional and completely non-fictional.

‘Just look now how they’re trying to scare us with this pandemic, life will return to normal, only that it wasn’t returning to normal.’ It is just this non-sentimental imbrication of fiction and non-fiction that makes Krasznahorkai’s theory less than precisely crackpot. In War and War he gave his protagonist the name Korin, which was his own family name before his grandfather, anticipating Nazi persecution, changed it to something non-Jewish. The name he chose derived from a folk song about a castle (‘The essence of the song is that the Krasznahorka Castle is very sad and dark and everything is hopeless’). His grandson’s ‘bible’ is Kafka’s The Castle. (‘I have a special relationship to Kafka because I started reading him very early, so early that I couldn’t understand what, say, The Castle was about.’) Krasznahorkai, in an obverse of his theory, understands himself as at least partly fiction.

The lecturer in Seiobo There Below tells his students that ‘the Baroque is the artwork of pain, for deep down in the Baroque there is deep pain … the Baroque is the art form of death, the art form that tells us that we must die.’ How Krasznahorkian, to suggest that art’s pinnacle is our nadir. When Merkel’s reply to Florian finally arrives, Herr Volkenant – who has just buried Jessica, her body mangled in a car crash – must put it in a box labelled ‘undeliverable’. Florian, still on the run, will probably never read it. But if that undeliverable box is also the black box of quantum physics, then who can say? Florian’s neighbour Frau Hopf understands that ‘as long as people are alive, they hope.’ Does this double for readers, who have two realms to hope for? Perhaps it’s Krasznahorkai’s ultimate cruel irony.