Tiny Apocalypses: On László Krasznahorkai’s “Herscht 07769”

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Herscht 07769, the latest novel by Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, newly minted Nobel Prize recipient, was only written after he promised that Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming was his last. Despairing at the waning social utility and cachet of the novel, Krasznahorkai aspired to write a book on Bach, which fell through in the course when he encountered a gigantic man in Bach’s home state of Thuringia. Krasznahorkai seems to believe this giant was, or even is, the narrator of 07769. Krasznahorkai has said that often in his life, someone will come along and relate the story of their life to him, and eventually it will become clear that in some sense this individual has been sent to him to be written about. Indeed, Krasznahorkai asserts that he is the only person who seems to be able to see these characters at all. In an interview with TANK, he noted that “I have had similar encounters like this in my life before, and I’m not the least bit surprised that I’m the only one who seems to see these characters.” I find it slightly odd, then, and more than a little perverse, that Krasznahorkai brings these characters such relentless suffering and grief, considering how real their suffering is to him. Nonetheless, he does not seem to believe that he is the architect of their disaster any more than dreams are willed.

Krasznahorkai is the boy who cried wolf of our novelists. His books have prophesied dooms big and small for forty years now, much to the annoyance of our century’s chummy optimists and milquetoast novelists obsessed with their own private misery and campus politics. His preoccupations have become more and more apropros, with half the world behaving in one way or another as if the apocalypse is imminent: so far in the twenty-first century, it’s been get yours or get fucked, and there’s no shortage of dissembling among the sociopathic oligarch class so the naive are none the wiser, and the bullshit is flowing so freely it is increasingly difficult to tell who are the true believers and who are the con artists. 

Krazsnahorkai would seem to argue it doesn’t matter: we’re all fucked anyways. One of his oeuvre’s central preoccupations is the illusion that we are separate, when we are all a part of the same field of atoms, the same web of causality that ends so grimly, inevitably, with decay. This vision is articulated profoundly at the end of The Melancholy of Resistance, where Krasznahorkai details the chemistry of a decaying body, step by step, until the entire “empire” of the body is “ground” into “carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur…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.” That edict being nothing less than the march of time that claims all. So although his books have repeatedly characterized as apocalyptic (a word he himself has used), the apocalypses of his book are largely local and entropic. There may be a great enemy, but even characters who escape death at its hands find themselves meeting other ugly fates. Though the end of the world may seem to be on the horizon, ultimately what meets its frantic and ridiculous end is usually provincial characters, small villages, manuscripts and marginalized species, like the wolf.

Krazsnahorkai likes to set up his cynical actors against an angelic savant, a Mishykin-like figure, Dostoevsky being one of Krasznahorkai’s stated influences. This savant is tasked with overcoming their own naivete, which always happens too late to save his village or win the girl. Any obsession with eternity, or the magic of love, is made ridiculous, as with the Gyorgi Korin, of War & War, who believes he can secure for posterity the brilliant novel he has discovered by putting it online at warandwar.com. If you go there, of course, you get this:

Not Found

The requested URL / was not found on this server. Additionally, please be informed that this home page service has been called off due to recurring overdue payment. Attempted mail deliveries to Mr. G. Korin have been returned to sender with a note: address unknown. Consequently, all data have been erased from this home page. 

The only chance his characters might have is to listen to the thunder before the storm arrives, but in the face of disaster his characters usually opt for denial or delusion, the latter allowing one to go on living while one can, the other assuming the possibility of a brighter future that doesn’t exist. The one book that he has declared an optimistic counterbalance to the unrelenting doom of his other books takes place in an empty Buddhist monastery which a dog has crawled up into and died, containing a perfect garden which the only living creature in the book passes by without seeing. The one epiphany I can recall is followed by a swift dismemberment under the wheels of a train before it can be acted upon. A supernatural encounter, which might have been life-changing in the hands of a more sentimental author, in Krasznahorkai leads to a comically bleak bastardization of the Hail Mary by a petty racketeer:

Our father…um, our father

which art there, art, art in the sky, er,

in heaven, let us praise, er…hallowed be

our lord Jesus Christ,

no…let them praise…no, let us praise

rather, let them praise Your name, 

and give us this…what I mean is,

let everything be according to, er,

whatever you want…in earth as 

It is on earth…in heaven…

Or in hell, amen…

Formally his novels are in lockstep with his death march. Structured somewhat like black holes, his characters are drawn toward the event horizon of the end of his books. The way his sentences run together suggests a continuity between states of affairs, and that no moment or object is truly discrete but a part of the same whole: so the end of one then must be the end of the other. It is often the case that by the end of his novels, a cast of Krasznahorkai’s characters are all dead, sometimes of unrelated causes. 

Much has been made of the Krasznahorkai sentence. They’ve been compared to lava flows (which Krasznahorkai rejects) and called logorrheic by other reviewers, but I see them as racing toward cliffs with grim joy, much like the narrator does at the end of his novella Chasing Homer. Krasznahorkai agrees, for what it’s worth, and characterized them himself as “running headlong, breathless, bearing a certain destiny in its soul.” He, or rather his characters, can sound almost Bernhardian, as with the Professor who rages against Hungary in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, but ultimately his novels have an exteriority and worldliness beyond the rantings and ravings of the mad men and misanthropes that are typical of Bernhard’s narrators. This is not to say they are never lunatic misanthropes—they frequently are—only that his novels are not restricted to garrets, doorways, wing chairs, dilapidated lime works, or artistic dinners, as Bernhard’s novels are, nor is his style constricted by the deranged dialectic that Bernhard engaged in. His characters are on journeys, missions, facing evil. His most returned to subject is the implosion (and sometimes explosion) of provincial towns at the hands of petty racketeers and bullies, vengeful madmen and philosophers, and of course, doomsday circuses.

Herscht 06779, unlike most of his other projects, takes place in a world that is recognizably modern, and the novel, or at least the translation, forgoes his typical serpentine sentences in favor of a single sentence of mostly straightforward clauses, vocabulary, and diction (perhaps because of the aforementioned waning cachet of the novel). Set in the fictional village of Kana in the German state of Thuringia, the novel, a single-sentence runaway train, begins in Florian’s perspective as he rationalizes his bizarre compulsion to send letters to Angela Merkel to warn her of the impending doom of the universe. Misunderstanding the lessons he’s been receiving from a well-meaning instructor of Physics, Florian’s fear of the implosion of the universe (that, having coming from nothing in the Big Bang, must surely return to it) due to an imbalance between matter and antimatter is characteristically Krasznahkorkain: in a world where everything is almost mystically, and hopelessly hurtling toward the void, nothing may be the only discrete state of affairs. It is the threat of all of his novels: the end of lives, the end of towns, the end of the world. 

A little education, as they say, is a dangerous thing. Florian’s obsession serves as a distraction from the fact that the man he works for, who rescued him from an orphanage, got him a place to live and a job, and is his father figure, is a raving Neo-nazi who verbally assaults anyone who dares question him, and physically assaults anyone who dares to be rear-ended by him. Denying him access to phones, computers, and giving him a deeply pathetic wage as a cleaner of graffiti allows the Boss to manipulate Florian, with the presumed goal of raising him up to be an attack dog. Known as The Boss, he is of a type Krasznahorkai has written about before: an engine of contempt that fears and hates its own weakness. The Boss, ironically, loves Bach, but only because he was born in Thuringia, and, in keeping with the magical thinking that is so typical of fascists, the Boss believes “every secret of life” is in Bach. These secrets, knowing the Boss, are probably that the Jews are behind everything evil in the world. 

“People do not fear what they should fear, they fear what they shouldn’t fear,” Florian counsels Angela Merkel in one of his letters, while ignoring that this is truer of himself than anyone. It’s the man closest to him, whom he trusts most, who is the greatest and most obvious threat, not antimatter. Defending the Boss from his friends’ relentless anger, Florian sounds increasingly shrill, knowing on some level he is defending evil. Not one to let his characters’ delusions persist, Krazsnahorkai has Florian’s Nazis acquaintances rape the wife of the owner of a gas station and then blow both of them up.

Florian turns on the Nazis. They are easy targets for him, not because they are slightly ridiculous, having none of the stereotypical German love for order, logic and cleanliness, living instead in a filthy barracks and being largely uneducated, and not because they record the murder they commit on video, but because Florian has superhuman strength which he uses to pop their itty-bitty Nazi heads. He is even gifted a murderous and loyal Eagle, which helps him in his fights. This head-popping is quite satisfying, quite cinematic, of course, and it’s hard not to feel sympathetic with someone who is popping Nazi heads. Thus decades of film where Nazis are hunted, thus endless video games where Nazis are the stentorious enemy. Inglorious Basterdization, we might call it: the more ugly the enemy you are taking down is, the more rewarding is their comeuppance. The novel, at times, in the absurd, meaningless violence, in the terror of a populace unaccustomed to such bloodshed, and in the pure sociopathic glee of its villains, reads almost like a Manchette novel, where Florian, the vengeful idiot, acts out our fantasies of revenge, but in the end, there is “merciless night descending upon the land.” 

What makes Florian interesting, really, is that for everything about him that makes him different, his belief that the Boss is a good person simply because he has done a good thing for Florian is painfully recognizable. To be this deluded, one must, of course, be quite stupid in some sense. But the human mind is capable of great feats of avoidance, of quarantining entire ideas should they be deemed too threatening. So Florian’s fear that the universe is about to return to nothing is a plausible sublimation of the fear he wants to avoid thinking about: the Boss’s hateful personality, his explicit Nazism, his violent outbursts, and his obvious intention to recruit Florian into his schemes. Unable to conquer the feeling that something very bad is going to happen, Florian’s mind turns to physics, as that is available to him, something he is being taught, a theory as grand and totalizing as the Boss’s anti-semitism. He cannot let go of the feeling that something horrible is going to happen, but he can deny that the Boss is the horrible man he obviously is: until he can’t, of course. He may be just as stupid as the Boss thinks he is, but he is not too stupid to realize he has been betrayed, utterly, and that the man who treated him like a son only intended to enslave him and put him in the line of fire.

Now, all that I’ve laid about is plausible, but what the novel tells us happens is that in the aftermath of discovering the evidence of the Boss’s evil, Florian basically turns into a Terminator without feelings or thoughts, a Nazi-seeking missile who pops heads: “his brain wasn’t working, only his muscles were working.” This is, of course, not incompatible with my reading, but the novel proceeds toward its end with him more or less in this state, albeit still listening to Bach. If Bela Tarr and Krasznahorkai ever collaborate to make a film of Herscht, one might imagine these men’s heads being popped to the tune of Goldberg Variations and the Well-tempered Klavier. To Krasznahorkai’s credit, this turn to violence does not lead to a fatuous victory, Krasznahorkai withholds that: when the blood starts spurting and the heads start popping, the people of Thuringia hide, and the police are utterly ineffectual. That which would enable another fascist epoch—from the fear and cowardice of the bourgeois to the bloodthirsty, moronic murderers who come out of the woodwork of society when civilization starts to break down—is all present in his novel. And Florian’s character is the only one to take it on (the other men commence drinking, heavily), and to do so he has to become inhuman. He finds himself, indeed, at the end of the book welcomed into a group of wolves blinded by accident in an ill-fated ecological experiment, his fate uncertain. At its worst the book feels shallow in the same way many Tarantino movies do: the satisfaction of watching the good guy defeat an ugly and breathtakingly stupid enemy does not seem to be an artistic pleasure, it’s a fantasy, and one that makes us feel good without having to do anything. On the other hand, by the end of the novel, that satisfaction seems to be a trap Krasznahorkai has laid. The people of Thuringia, and the world, are none the safer just because a few debased neo-Nazis are dead.

If Krasznahorkai were a recognizably political writer, I would suppose this is something like a satire, a faux-optimism of the biceps paired with an obvious pessimism of the intellect, but he has said his intentions are not to rail against any one political movement but against a society. Nonetheless, Krasznahorkai’s novel, as it fantasizes of revenge, makes it clear that the conditions which allowed the Boss and his gang to proliferate and get away with murder can no doubt be easily replicated elsewhere, and in other towns, cities and countries, they presumably won’t have a Florian to play Whack-A-Nazi. That Florian must be a brute in order to fight back is revealing of Krasznahorkai’s contempt for civilization’s sluggish, cowardly response to the real threats that face us today, and of his skepticism that we will be ready to face what is coming: a fascist political engine which is a mere excuse for cruelty and violence that could stagger and defeat societies that have been sleepwalking toward disaster all along, the blast vaporizing ineffectual bureaucrats, prophets of dooms, misanthropes, and savants alike.

His oeuvre, read in whole and with these ideas of prophecy and disaster in mind, can begin to appear mannered. He provides any number of new iterations on Chekhov’s Gun: If gasoline appears early on in the novel, it must burn down a village; if a village idiot with superhuman strength appears, it must pop nazi skulls, etc. And the people who survive the worst of what’s to come can usually expect to die in some unrelated, gruesome way. “Hope is a mistake,” reads the epigraph. It’s not surprising, I suppose, that in order for there to be any vengeance, Krasznahorkai had to give his engine of vengeance superhuman strength: it’s not clear he thinks good in any meaningful sense could win out otherwise.

And, of course, the same enemies who get their comeuppance in Herscht are getting away with murder in the real world right now, and always have been. Revenge fantasies and utopian thinking are two edges of the same blade that cuts through despair. They provide a reprieve from reality. Florian’s rampage can be read as an avoidant fantasy of the same kind as his fantasy that the world will be dissolved. That is, there will be bloodshed, but not of the kind we might want. Krasznahorkai portrays it as just ridiculous enough too, that it’s impossible he didn’t know what he was doing.

I can’t say I disagree with his assessment that there’s as much evidence that the moral arc of the universe bends towards the gutter as it does justice. Shake a Review of Books and about a dozen different theories of What The Novel Is Supposed to Do will fall out, from being a vehicle for hedonism, providing a vision of a utopian future, to making you more empathetic, laundering petty resentments, documenting horrors and atrocities, and even justifying cheating on your spouse. I won’t say what novels are for, because who am I, but I have been preoccupied lately with art that serves as a knell or a klaxon. The undeniable fact is that the global memory of the horror of the world wars seems to have faded, and bloodthirstiness, xenophobia and bigotry, sociopathy, and cruelty is as endemic as food insecurity. Never have people who are so relatively comfortable been so convinced they have gotten the short end of a very pointy stick, which they have, in fact, placed up their own ass. Which is just to say that if Krasznahorkai’s assessment, that we are living in depraved and ignoble times, seems a little on the nose, perhaps that’s not a fault of his but a fault of a reader who doesn’t like it when the abyss stares back. 

The Nobel Prize is fitting, if anything: Alfred Nobel, after all, established the Nobel Prize in the first place out of guilt at his reputation as a “death merchant,” and now our greatest novelist of decay and destruction has been given the dynamite money. Perhaps we should listen when the boy cries wolf, even if he keeps doing it. Antimatter of the kind that Krasznahorkai has produced prophecies the bitter end we would all like to think will happen to someone else.