Universe of Pointless Terror: On László Krasznahorkai's "Chasing Homer"

László Krasznahorkai, transl. John Batki, with illustrations by Max Neumann and music by Szilveszter Miklós | Chasing Homer | New Directions | 2021 | 96 Pages

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai is a novella that defies and transcends summarization. To say something like “an unnamed man runs with breakneck speed from mysterious assassins and debates a bunch of meandering questions about life with himself,” and leave it at that, is to miss the point of Krasznahorkai’s well-crafted pointlessness. Context is not important to Krasznahorkai. The who, when, why, and how of the chase are not addressed, and the where only fleetingly. To say the narrator is unreliable is an understatement. Events and other pieces of contextual information are frivolous externalities amid his obsessive, nihilistic madness.

The book is neither a potboiler detective novel nor a theatrical action thriller, despite the almost comic book nature of the “plot” in its single-line form. It is about knocking down foundations and escaping from them for the sake of unimpeded forward motion, and about the futility, insanity, and lethality of remaining at one point or focusing on one point. Having a one-track mind begets madness—madness that leads the narrator to question whether the chase is taking place in reality or in some dark, twisted fantasy where human beings do not actually exist. Of all the fields of theoretical knowledge, the narrator particularly disparages mathematics. To his mind, it attempts to give order and meaning to a world that is always on the move, and where the very idea of there being a universal meaning is a dubious one. Even “one plus one equals two” deeply disturbs and nauseates with its simplicity. 

For centuries, we supposed geometry to be the enclosing rational order and structure of the universe—and indeed, it begins, as every student of Euclid knows too well, with the deceptively difficult task of defining a single point, the point on which all subsequent mathematical thought rests. From there, forces and motion could all be tamed and understood via mathematical laws. But for the narrator, the single point, enclosed structures, logical and mathematical systems, and any kind of rest are just recipes for madness in an uncaring, irrational universe of chaotic, ungovernable motion:

for nothing has an ultimate purpose, because nothing has any purpose, it is always just one particle of existence that is itself nothing but a process, wandering from process to process, or more exactly, tumbling from one process to another, to thrash about until tumbling into the next process…

Since his literary debut in 1985 with the novel Sátántangó, Krasznahorkai has specialized in long sentences. In the 2011 piece “Madness and Civilization,” critic James Wood said that Krasznahorkai’s prose has “a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer,” and which he further characterized as having an oxymoronic “dynamic paralysis.” George Szirtes, who translated some of Krasznahorkai’s work, called it a “typographic lava flow:” a viscous, profuse mass of gradually approaching doom and destruction. With Chasing Homer, Krasznahorkai takes his literary trademark and runs with it, to ends that are no less apocalyptic. The suffering and tortured agony of his sentences are laid bare in their style and construction. They are not just long, but self-consciously brooding and deranged.

Unlike the book’s namesake, Krasznahorkai does not write of one man trying to return home, but of one man trying to avoid the very idea of home. He does not despair in his homelessness—if he can steer clear of the lethal temptation to hide instead of run, he will survive. 

one must not seek out sheltered places, for precisely such sheltered places are the most dangerous, since—in addition to the fact that my pursuers will naturally look for me first and foremost in such places—sheltered spots tend to increase your fear, the fear of unknown perils outside , a fear that simply regenerates and reinforces itself until it becomes overwhelming, making you incapable of drawing conclusions, or rather making you draw mistaken conclusions about what’s really taking place outside, therefore these sheltered places are a suicidal strategy, one that eventually leaves you defenseless…

The traps the protagonist wants to disarm are not limited to the sanctuaries of the outside world, but also those within his own head. “The good,” he says, “is the most insidious trap of all.” He is also an uncommonly learned man with an impressive curriculum vitae (a term aptly borrowed from Latin, since he is quite literally running for his life). His formal education, which covered a broad, almost comically impossible range of languages ancient and modern, literatures, philosophies, and branches of mathematics, is now useless to him, and he must throw it out and bemoan that he never learned outdoor survival and unarmed combat skills. But this lack of street smarts does not sap him of his will to keep running. Even though he is a nihilist finding no meaning or value in his education, he is no defeatist in the fight for survival.

To Susan Sontag, who was an admirer of Krasznahorkai’s work and particularly Béla Tarr’s seven hour film adaptation of Sátántangó (featuring a screenplay by Krasznahorkai), the whole process by which a text is caught, comprehended (much as a suspect is apprehended), and parced for some elusive, illusory “meaning” is interpretation. This is a violent, desiccating process that robs art of its power. As Sontag writes in the titular essay of Against Interpretation, “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.”

Krasznahorkai’s prose is anything but manageable and comfortable. By design, it is fleeting, unruly, and difficult to catch. For those who can, like Sontag, stand back and minimize the traditional but increasingly futile distinction between form and content for the sake of the artistic whole, Krasznahorkai is a visionary. With its long sentences, Chasing Homer flows, bleeds even, without us having to make it bleed through the violent and aesthetically nullifying act of interpreting it. These meandering, stream-of-consciousness sentences, like the protagonist himself, run on and on for pages, and almost never come to a full stop for fear of being caught and cut apart with knives or having their entrails stomped out by cold, discerning, murderer-interpreters.

Another layer of excitement and psychological distress in this experimental thriller comes from Krasznahorkai’s addition of music, composed and performed by Budapest free jazz percussionist Szilveszter Miklós. With QR codes under each chapter heading, Krasznahorkai brings his artistic vision into the digital age, and, with the addition of illustrations by the German abstract artist Max Neumann, turns Chasing Homer into a multimedia pursuit. The irregular beat and experimental sounds of Miklós’ percussive score exist outside of any fanciful musical order. Harmony and time signatures are banished conceits. Neumann’s illustrations, with their wan, off-white but faintly charcoal-dusted backgrounds, distorted black likenesses, and bare, nightmare-like countenances look as though they are the artistic embodiment of anxiety.

For Krasznahorkai and his protagonist, our lived experiences are a trompe l’oeil which fools us into a sense—at times reassuring but always ultimately maddening—that we are discrete entities standing firm in purpose, place, and identity. This is, however, just one infernal maya from which we will always strive in vain to escape. We seek deliverance from our existential terror in ordinary comforts and intellectual certitudes, but death and destruction will continue in their relentless pursuit. Do we, therefore, have no choice but to be like Orestes and keep running away from the Furies of our imaginations? Perhaps not. There is no climactic, tragic ending to Chasing Homer, but rather a darkly comedic final embrace of bathos, ambiguity, and absurdity.