“The bitter price of destruction wreaked upon life with its undefinable wealth, its organic mechanisms based on ‘valid relationships between elements of reality’, by the town and indeed the country, or rather by all the fixed ideas, all those acts of short-sighted vanity, every judgmental train of thought that wanted to view ‘the world’ from its own limited viewpoint.” (p. 197, TMoR)
On The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
One of the great battles of youth is grasping capital-L Literature. Against a sea of novel opportunities and sensations, the purposefully imposing edifice of the written word pushes you away. A good teacher can help you understand that chopping through the roots of prose and poetry yields rewards. But it always takes great effort, and a dearth of lived experience makes impressions ephemeral rather than practical. Of the major subjects we try to impress upon the young, literature’s bloom is longest in waiting. That makes it vulnerable. It also makes it worthwhile. Eventually, you’ll reach a place where the mental rigors of earnestly engaging with a book edifies rather than confounds. A corner will be turned. You can finally take part in our great debate on the nature of everything.
In this debate, you will run into something like The Melancholy of Resistance. Dense, winding, hostile, demanding of your attention. Without focus, it is nothing more than a flood of ink. Even a cursory reading refuses you much to take away. On the one hand, it is modernism at its apex and a serious accomplishment. On the other, it is purposefully obscurantist. Travel the paths of literature long enough and someone like Krasznahorkai is bound to get in your way. That’s part of the reward.
It is tempting to boil this review down to asking who is melancholic and what, exactly, are they resisting? The simple answers: all of us against the universe and everyone in it. A conclusion that wide in scope is another telltale sign of Literature. Nearly all impressions you may have of this book and its message can be correct in their own way. Our author gave us the tools and now we get to make of it what we will.
First, let us talk through the style of Melancholy. The experience of reading this is like reading text off a wall. Very few indentations, even fewer chapter breaks, sentences that can span entire pages. Throw in stream of consciousness which slips from character to character without clear delineations on whose mind we’re inhabiting, and you start to get the sense of what we’re working with here. It is just as likely to lull you to sleep as it is to hypnotize you into looking past Krasznahorkai’s determination to make you really work for this. A page count of 314 is like a mirage; rare is the book that makes 314 crawl at the pace of an esoteric tome. All this is to say its style isn’t particularly self-recommending. Yet Krasznahorkai knows how to turn in gems to make the slog worth it. An example:
…a renewal which, to them, might look like general decay, for in all passionate espousals of the new, people were liable to detect traces of an equally passionate drift towards chaos, and—quite rightly— suspect that the powers unleashed, instead of protecting that which was irrevocably dead and buried, would smash it to pieces in the good cause of replacing the featureless boredom of their selfish lives with the “elevating passion of communal action“. (p. 36, TMoR)
In ~10 easy lines (God knows how many I cut off with the ellipsis) he distills the fundamental conflict between revolutionary politics and the living canvas upon which it wishes to operate. The former looks at the world it wants to augment with disdain while the latter detects its desolation in the air. Melancholy is full of moments like this. You may disagree with his notions, but there is always a thrill when an intelligent mind lays out it stakes in moments of clarity in the torrent of ink. Further, the flow of words can abruptly deliver scenes that hijack your tedium. When a character reads a journal recounting a night of violence in explicit detail, you almost feel like one of the bystanders in the crowd. Out of ceaseless sentences emerges the hypnosis of the mob. Smashing storefronts and setting the town ablaze takes on its own sort of sick appeal. Krasznahorkai has the courage and skill to immerse into the darkness of our psyche. Lesser writers would give us something trite or thin. He gives us something with weight worthy of the subject matter. That’s a huge credit.
I believe Melancholyis an investigation into the heavy hand humanity places on the systems around it. That includes politics, science, music, nature, justice, and much more. Whatever we clumsily touch—and we are nothing if not inelegant—wilts. What is ironic is the urge to simultaneously bend things to serve our ends while striving to structure our impact to safeguard some nebulous sense of “perfection”. Constitutions are designed to take something messy like will to power and place it in a system that restrains it through layers of balance and counterbalance. Music abjures “pure” tone in favor of interpretation, feeling, and fractional tuning which takes the constant scream that is a sound wave and turns it into something to be enjoyed. The natural world is about as perfected a series of systems we’re aware of; give us a chance to drag a whale out of the deeps, slaughter it, and put it on display in rural Hungary, though, and we’ll do it in a flash. Even when we aren’t thinking about it directly, we’re aware of our shortcomings and the harms we perpetuate. Therein is, in part, the source of dismay, fear, anxiety, and violence. This dilemma is eternal.
What exemplifies the notion that human agency leads to something destructive is the opposite example beyond our grasp: the cosmos. Where the bastardization of music, politics, and nature each has its characters, Krasznahorkai also gives us a figure through which we glimpse the unsullied perfection of space. Valuska, a mailman regarded by the town as a simpleton, spends almost every waking moment contemplating the solar system. The perfection of a lunar eclipse, the brief interruption brought upon by the sudden darkening of the Sun followed by the effervescence of life when light returns, the reliability of objects we know but have no control over. Without an explicit break with society, Valuska has decided to inhabit a world absent us. He does his job, enjoys drinks at the local pub, and interacts with others, but this is all done in a context of general goodwill and optimism derived of his anchoring in a form of perfection. If the Earth and the Moon and the Sun and the planets can all function in harmony, maybe there is hope for us, too. We merely need to rise above our cringing pessimism:
Everyone was talking about ‘the unstoppable stampede into chaos’, the ‘unpredictability of daily life’ and ‘the approaching catastrophe’ without a clear notion of the full weight of these frightening words, since, he surmised, this epidemic of fear was not born out of some genuine, daily increasing certainty of disaster but out of an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe, in other words the false premonition that a man who had lost his bearings might succumb to once the inner structure of his life, the way his joints and bones were knit, had loosened and he carelessly transgressed the ancestral laws of his soul—if he simply lost control of his undemeaningly ordered world… (p. 96, TMoR)
Then, naturally, it all comes crashing down around him. Not content to let him continue upon his merry way, the people around him (there’s that grubby humanity again) find ways to damage Valuska. If he is open-minded and welcoming of strangers, he’s see him as an easy mark for violence. If he is willing to help the authorities, he is sent into the heart of danger and then disregarded. If he is courageous and wary of the negativity in others, he is seen as a fool, an outsider, an idiot. When tumult and rioting overtake his town with beatings, destruction, arson, and the brutal murder of his mother, he is swept up in the wave. Without explicitly stating how much part he takes in the events, something of this uncoordinated atavistic violence snaps Valuska. Accused of taking part by authorities looking to take advantage of the chaos to assert their control, he is tossed into an asylum as a broken mute. One more light snuffed out by our own actions.
I suppose all this is to say that there is no road clear of melancholy. Besides a cloistered life far away from the rhythms of humanity, to exist in society is to be faced with constant questions about when and how to resist the way we act in the world. Even the best of us will be worn down, reduced to a state of melancholy that can, with a sufficiently strong shove, topple over into acquiescence of destruction. Destruction of ourselves, destruction of culture, destruction of our fellow man and other living beings. And if we survive long enough to get beyond Earth, perhaps we will destroy the heavens, too.
God is dead and we’re itching to take His place.
New Orpheu 