quaquaverse: 2011

Contexts for László Krasznahorkai’s political vision in The Melancholy of Resistance.

An anonymous small Hungarian city in an inexplicable state of bureaucratic paralysis, and in the grip of an icy prolonged winter, is visited by a strange and surreal circus consisting of a huge stuffed whale and a sinister ‘Prince’. Rioting ensues, duly followed by an overwhelming military response - orchestrated from behind the scenes by a woman bent on personal power. László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance seems, because of the fantastic absurdity of the situations that make up its sjužet, obviously to invite allegorical or symbolic readings, yet simultaneously actively resists being read as corresponding specifically to any one interpretation. Nevertheless, despite this resistance to interpretation, there are critical contexts for the novel that I will argue remain extremely relevant to its understanding. The purpose of this paper is to examine those literary and historical contexts, and ultimately to argue a justification for Krasznahorkai’s choice of form. These contexts can be very broadly divided into those which are artistic and those which are political: the novel consciously suggests the influences of a range other texts; it likewise suggests that real historical events are being referred to. These suggestions constitute the invitation to interpret mentioned above – and just because that interpretation is ultimately and deliberately frustrated, it should not be inferred that a close analysis of the specific referents is of no value. I will consequently devote space to examining these specific textual referents and historical details, without suggesting that they provide anything like an interpretative ‘key’ to the novel.

The story is located in Hungary in recent times, and as such (as any novel is) it is necessarily political in some sense. Yet whilst it presents us with a ‘vision’ which is certainly political, this should not be taken to imply the idealised presentation of a political system. The distinction between art and politics is in any case a false one, and it is immediately blurred further when we consider the state of the contemporary political novel, a situation I therefore feel it is necessary briefly to outline here, and to which an attitude is encapsulated in the novel’s title.

1. The Problematics of Engagement.

Artists of the late twentieth century find themselves in a quandary when it comes to the issue of political engagement through art. The co-option of artists by (oppressive) regimes, particularly through the doctrine of Socialist Realism officially sanctioned in the USSR, is fresh in the memory, and few would now argue in favour of art with such a programmatic social function, which apparently runs contrary to popular notions of artistic integrity or critical distance. Art, however, which opposes an oppressive regime (for example Stalinist communism) by committing itself through a positive representation of an alternative ideology (for example Western market capitalism and consumerism), finds itself similarly compromised. It can also potentially be instrumentalised by a rival or successor regime with an opposed ideology, again losing its critical distance. Art then, according to Walter Benjamin, must resist such potential instrumentalisation through its form and content. The critical distance or social “functionlessness” of art, according to Theodor Adorno, paradoxically equates to its social function. The stress for Adorno lies on a politically disinterested critical reading of works; via analysis of form, and correlation with contexts (both socio-historical and artistic). The reader, in engaging in this critical process, must be aware of the particular situational prejudice he carries with him. Situational prejudice is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s term, employed to draw attention to the fact that a truly objective reading, free from the influence of the reader’s socio-historical ideological conditions, is an impossibility; but that reading will implicitly question such prejudice. Clearly however, the danger for works which are deterred by these arguments from endorsing a political strategy or intervention which exists or potentially exists in the world of praxis is that they risk being seen as irrelevant, and the artist as impotent.

Critical distance however, it is argued by critics such as Frederic Jameson, finds itself largely abolished in the all-pervasive expansion of capitalism. He writes that even political interventions grounded in “those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offer extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity” have been “secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.” In a situation where individual behaviour, like the behaviour of institutions, is perhaps only an emanation of a determinate economic infrastructure, the concept of the individual subjectivity (upon which much western art is founded) is in danger of evaporating. Furthermore, tracing the history of the work of art without ritual social function, Jameson finds this “proud boast” of autonomy has always been unstable, and is itself only a product associated with the evolving bourgeoisie and the current ideological domination of what we term ‘western’ values. Krasznahorkai’s character Györgi Korin echoes Jameson’s concerns in the closing pages of War and War, realising that the capitalist hegemony deals with its opponents not by crushing them, but instead acts “to embrace them, to take responsibility for them and so empty them of their content.” That this world is “ruled, but not exactly commanded,” implies the devolved economy determines everything according to its internal, amoral logic, not directed by a consciousness, and therefore not subject to control (capitalism is therefore not an ideology in the same way that communism is). It is not simply a case of writers who do not wish to be in the service of a dominant philosophy having to worry about the possible appropriation of their work by a group, but rather that any resistance contained in their work will simply be absorbed into system which is all-encompassing.

Worse, there is the argument put forward by Herbert Marcuse in ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ that any protest contained in the work will only serve to maintain or strengthen the conditions against which it protests, as its protest will take place in the imaginative sphere only, diminishing the potential for real action or praxis. The artistic form of this protest is bourgeois and so made (deliberately) inaccessible to much of society. At best, the function of such a protest will be consolatory or escapist for a liberal intelligentsia, in its representation of that which cannot be attained in life. Ital Calvino similarly criticises this literature which aspires to present supposedly “given truths”, which in doing so has “a function of consolation, preservation, and regression” for a relatively privileged group.

Following Marcuse, and invoking Nietzsche, Jameson contends that which we think of as ethics is itself a bourgeois construct, the “sedimented or fossilized trace of the concrete praxis of systems of domination.” The use of ethical criteria for basing judgements thus becomes unstable - though such external criteria have traditionally been absolutely necessary in political art as a means of conveying the work’s message. The work consequently loses its self-containment. Not only do we have to agree, for example, that a particular character (or aspect of a character) is good or bad, we also have to agree in the concepts of goodness and badness, concepts which may be entirely bound up with subjective, bourgeois modes of thinking. The recourse to these concepts is seemingly, according to Robert Boyers’ statement of the problem, “to rewrite or allegorize texts in terms of a master code that somehow corrupts the primary narrative material” – therefore making any such text unacceptable to the deconstructionalist school. Even if the values which relate to this code are concealed or implicit, “they are all the same likely to be unmistakable.” We see such concealment in novels in which the action clearly demonstrates authorial sympathies, when a particular character speaks for the author, or the author’s views are aggregated across the speech or action of various characters. In an artistic environment where abstract concepts (good / evil) are outmoded, and meaning is demonstrated as mutable, political novels tend effectively to insist on our interpretation corresponding closely with the author’s intention, an interpretation which calls into being those abstractions which supposedly no longer objectively exist. Graham Greene would presumably have been disappointed if a reader of The Quiet American took away the message that U.S. interventionism was a good thing. The political novel, even if it does not endorse an ideology, perhaps therefore has a necessary “interest in establishing an ethical basis for judgements it will make of characters and of the state apparatus.” Novels thus risk being seen as polemic tracts, and the literary means employed to convey their message or criticism, and the depths of subtlety at which the message is concealed, become subject to charges of arbitrariness, as these cannot be justified artistically, becoming in effect rhetorical devices. Milan Kundera expresses the associated concern that the art of the novel becomes a secondary consideration: it becomes a means rather than an end in itself.

Another associated problem is the failure, according to a theorist such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, of the so-called ‘Enlightenment project’. Lyotard contends that utopian aspirations and moralising towards particular social ends in line with a progressive or teleological view of history has indirectly legitimised horrors perpetrated during the 20th century. The traditional form of the novel, with its positive resolution or at least its cathartic purge or castigation of negative elements, can be seen as inextricably bound up with means-justifying systems. Political art is therefore not simply impotent against such horrors, but actually implicated in their perpetration. Whilst this is an extreme view, it is fair to say that any utopian or idealist vision for society is in fact a compromise between such divergent desires it will generally become, if realised, a repressive imposition on all but a few. People are again required to agree with the relative values of abstract concepts (we may have to agree, for example, that democracy is somehow almost synonymous with good). We have consequently seen a 20th century shift from utopian to dystopian fictions – which may extrapolate a grim future from present conditions, but not presume to posit any alternative strategies. All of this amounts to a fundamental pessimism about the possibilities of political art.

In the light of this pessimism, Adorno’s qualified view of literature’s use – notwithstanding the problem of critical distance - seems as ambitious as it is possible to be. Adorno also issues a warning that ostensibly apolitical or escapist literature is, via the fact of its existence, “deeply political” as it affirms the status quo. For Jean-Paul Sartre too, there is a political statement manifest in all expression, “the prose writer is a man who has chosen a certain method of secondary action, which we may call action by disclosure.” Also, this choice cannot be retracted, as “since he has committed himself in the universe of language, he can never again pretend he cannot speak.” Sartre’s man has a responsibility to create a morality (in replacement of the old mythical moralities) based on his perceptions, and, for him at least, the question of the ethics of commitment is eclipsed when a particular situation seems to demand action, rather than prevarication. Many would agree that art risks complete social irrelevance if it refuses to engage effectively on political issues. The question again is whether this engagement should take the form only of resistance, or whether it can actually suggest a programme for change. And if art is to advocate change, to what extent does art become simply a means to an end, and how is it to resist the type of unwelcome or decontextual appropriation already discussed?

Related is the question of the proper relationship between literature and history. Theorists from Marxist, post-colonial, and feminist schools have drawn frequent attention to mainstream canonical literature’s dominance by particular (and predominantly male) ethnic and class groups. The existence of myriad other stories which do not appear in the given narrative are implied by gaps or lapses, evidence of the text’s preclusion of certain questions. One strand of postmodern production has sought redress in this area, by retelling familiar stories from previously marginalised viewpoints. A classic example is Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, another might be Pat Barker’s Regeneration series. There is a concern amongst some writers, however, that they may have dissociated themselves from the service of ‘rightist’ history, only to become manacled instead to a leftist or revisionist, politically correct rewriting of history. J.M. Coetzee puts forward his view that the novelist has two options. The weak option is to “supplement” a (leftist) version of history. Better is to produce “a novel that operates in terms of its own procedures and issues its own conclusions, not one that operates in terms of the procedures of history and evaluates in conclusions that are checkable by history (as a child’s work is checked by a schoolmistress) […] perhaps even going so far as to show up the mythic status of history.” Coetzee seems concerned that the writer is subject to the ideological content of his work being approved by a supposedly ‘liberal’ group, whose political correctness may in any case simply be a posture adopted (particularly in South Africa) to diffuse their own guilt. Adorno would seem to agree that those who “trumpet their ethics and humanity […] are merely waiting for a chance to persecute those whom their rules condemn.” Such restriction now effectively precludes the writer from telling potential stories concerning the tragic fates of individuals from the old, dominant order, those now stranded by a revolutionary movement the left endorses as positive, in case these tales were read as representing a whole, totalizing, anti-leftist ideology.

That such a left leaning, liberal group probably makes up the market for ‘serious’ literature (Sartre argues that the engaged novelist necessarily “profiles” his audience as an advertising agency might ), and often wants the literature it purchases to expound its own received wisdom on political issues, leads to more questions: can the novelist afford to antagonise his market? Does he dare be accused of consciously attracting a different kind of market? Coetzee however, believes not only that readers must be given more credit than this, but also that the ideological whole does not exist and should not necessarily be looked for, it is a “mythic” construct of historians. As Krasznahorkai’s Prince points out, following Adorno in inverting a celebrated dictum of Hegel’s, “The whole is not true – you have to understand the elements.” Those who look for explanations of ideology as motivating individuals or governing situations (as the interrogating soldier does - of whom more below) will often look in vain, or be guilty of a crass over-simplification.

This brings us close to the theories of Hayden White, which state that all history is narrative derived from traditional narrative sources, employing typical narrative tropes. History cannot be related objectively, it reinforces prejudices by calling into being concepts which do not necessarily figure in the facts. This is for example apparent in Marxist readings of history, or readings which stress the centrality of a particular personality, or concept (for example, human nature). White argues that historians must not pretend or even attempt objectivity (which is impossible to achieve) but make their chosen method of narration explicit, to avoid being considered as subjective advocates of a particular ideology. “One of the marks of a good professional historian,” he tells us, “is the consistency with which he reminds his readers of the purely provisional nature of his characterisations of events, agents, and agencies found in the always incomplete historical record.” Krasznahorkai’s technique in The Melancholy of Resistance is to avoid reference to historical specifics, but, as I shall discuss later, a simple philosophy of history which aligns the content of his novel is clearly present: a philosophy of history as a cyclical emanation of the human will to power.

Krasznahorkai’s response to these issues in The Melancholy of Resistance is complex. It is not, unlike that of Milan Kundera, content to unashamedly and explicitly “work from more or less stable ethical presuppositions”, but rather apparently to treat ethics as an issue that rarely arises in the individual consciousness, and influences actions still less. Only Valuska amongst Krasznahorkai’s characters has a developed ethical sensibility, and significantly he is regarded by all in the town as a fool. The novel, however, is deeply concerned with political ideologies – which are criticised in so far as they are shown as being fundamentally the same, as emanating from power relations. In this respect, Krasznahorkai seems to follow Nietzsche in implying ethics is, in effect, a construction of dominant ideology. The novel, unlike much modernist literature which arguably uses its new form to conceal the same old value system, endorses no system, neither explicitly nor implicitly.

2. An Emergency?

The novel mixes the obsessively realistic, and the fantastic. There is no explicit authorial commentary, neither is there a character who operates as a mouthpiece for the author – though the character of Eszter is suggestive of the academic community, albeit one rendered utterly ineffectual. Readers are instead mired in the subjective consciousnesses of the characters who alternately take centre-position in the novel. It seems like an allegorical or symbolic work, yet resists being linked to definite interpretation. Similarly, it alludes suggestively to other texts, without definitely inhabiting a specific oeuvre – though I will be arguing below that it is helpful to view it in the European tradition of expressionism. Its non-conformity to straightforward allegorical or metaphorical interpretation takes the form of introducing narrative elements which suggest, but ultimately resist, such interpretations; or introducing other elements which are anomalous to those interpretations.

Borrowing the words of Simon Sandbank (writing about Kafka) the novel “points to a truth beyond itself but never commits itself to the truth to which it points.” Its metaphors are “vehicles without tenors,” and as such they reveal their status as metaphors, rhetorical devices: both constructed by the author, and constructive of an idea in the reader. Also, some of the potential invited interpretations are themselves made to contradict others (a point discussed further below). This deliberate and complex structural aporia becomes a highly appropriate choice of form in dealing with some of the problems with political engagement though art, identified in the first section of this paper. Such a novel inevitably questions the traditional practice of encoding information in metaphor – often as a rhetorical tool in (political) persuasion, and also questions the reader’s need to reach a ‘correct’ interpretation, as if solving a puzzle (which must be assembled according to a realist key, thus reinforcing traditional realism). It therefore also enables the author to avoid the charge that he is producing a polemic, instead inviting the reader to make links without insisting that those links conform to a totalised message. In deploying such a technique, Krasznahorkai draws attention to the fundamental similarities of seemingly opposed ideologies, as any apparent contradiction is resolved on the level of our desire to interpret in ideological terms. As Louis Althusser contends, ideology is not so much external doctrine, as man’s propensity to order the world he inhabits and perceives. The ideological whole, if not a myth, has a two-way relationship with the individual consciousness.

The novel has no specific temporal setting, which also contributes to its resistance to being pinned to a particular position on the existing historical-political situation, and perhaps implies that it aspires to the condition of universality for those assertions which it does make – and the novel is certainly not devoid of intelligence. Similarly, the city is left unnamed (though its identity can be established as Krasznahorkai’s hometown - Gyula, near the Romanian border - by reference to clues – some of its suburbs and landmarks are named) which we suspect is similarly intended to indicate typicality. In support of this interpretation, Krasznahorkai insists he wants “to construct no geographical space in memory. My texts do not reflect on historical or geographical themes, rather on so-called universal questions, simply human questions.” This aspect of the text signals an obvious link with European literary expressionism. One common feature in expressionism is the reduction of characters and incidents to type, or presenting them as emanations of a determinate base. This base may be economic or depend on abstractions such as human nature, or on a combination of such assertions. The action which takes place in the text will have a synechdochal relationship to this base, it will consist of the playing out of its superstructural attributes. This play allows the existence of the base to be inferred. Krasznahorkai’s novel then, despite its resistance to interpretation, does insist on determinate fact, most notably thorough its central themes of the cyclical nature of history, conditioned by the temptations of power.

The importance of this theme is emphasised by its framing of the action. It is signalled in the book’s epigraph, “It passes, but does not pass away”; and in the closing metaphorical extended description of the decay of the dead body of Mrs Plauf, for that of the body politic. This pessimistic truth of eternal return, for Krasznahorkai, transcends all locality, though could hardly be said to confine the novel “to a function of consolation,” to return to Calvino’s argument. This view of history as cyclical, determined by an immutable will to power, is Schopenhauerian, rather than Hegelian. The influence of Schopenhauer can be noted throughout the text, as discussed below.

The novel’s opening page explicitly invites us to see the chaos of the train system as emblematic of the chaos pervading all aspects of the state, but is deliberately vague on the actual severity of the situation. We quickly deduce that the narrative of the opening section is focalised through the character of Mrs Plauf. Her conservative, bourgeois social status and consequently characteristic tendency to view society from a perspective of continual moral panic – she ‘sees’ crimes committed on each street corner - make the observations on the state of things seem the more unreliable, as we suspect they are overstated. The first part of the following section, ‘The Werckmeister Harmonies’, is focalised through the character of János Valuska, whose view contradicts his mother’s. He thinks (in the metaphorical language of sickness that pervades the novel) that the “epidemic of fear was not born out of some genuine, daily increasing certainty of disaster but an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe.” Our sense of the true seriousness, as well as of the causes, of the situation is continually obscured. We do not know whether the threat is external, as Mrs Plauf perceives, chaining her door with relief after her train journey and (apparent) narrow escape from sexual assault has been described in lurid, nightmarish prose; or if Mrs Plauf instead only illustrates her son’s opinion, that the situation is a contamination spread amongst the bourgeoisie of the town, exacerbated by self-feeding fear.

Elsewhere in the novel Krasznahorkai juxtaposes structurally the serious – the beating of patients in the hospital – with the farcical – Mrs Eszter’s laundry-encoded ultimatum to her husband, or Eszter’s nailing planks across his window with the nails facing outwards. Our generic foundations as readers are continually destabilised, we do not know if we inhabit a comic, tragic, realistic or fantastic universe as elements from all of these are blurred together. Schopenhauer’s notion of the ‘inconceivable’ lies behind the text; that which we cannot comprehend because our intellect has not been designed with its comprehension as one of its necessary functions, which are determined by the circumstances in which we generally exist. The town’s reality is recognisable to us, but is augmented with nightmarish elements. The metaphor of transport and state itself could belong to Plauf the character, rather than Krasznahorkai the author. Certainly, the assertion that “people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth and not out of it,” seems to indicate an exaggerated, even apocalyptic pessimism, however, we cannot gauge the degree of overstatement.

We are also unsure of how to interpret information in context of the description of the train system. The long sentences, composed of myriad subordinate clauses, suggest that some information extraneous to plot and characterisation may be included as it has a function on the level of symbol and metaphor. The timetable “to which [the train operators] were not bound and which was only an approximation anyway” suggests it could be a metaphor for ineffectual programmes for state reform, a metaphor supported by the train (a stock symbol of progress since Anna Karenina) itself being “sadly destined to vacillate between lurching forward and lurching to a halt”. Should we see the “eastbound service” as pertaining to Russian influence or the Soviet era? That the “necropolis” has been in the grip of an unnaturally cold and prolonged winter suggests a supernatural aspect to the novel’s events, though it may represent just the opposite, that the extreme cold is the sole cause of the breakdown of public services such as transport and refuse collection. Mrs Plauf provides a perspective on the ambiguities: “we could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable,” indicating a world in which causes are effectively absent and people must instead “get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible.” Our small-minded, bourgeois (typically pluralizing experience with the plural pronoun “we”) entry point into the novel, Mrs Plauf’s attempts to ‘read’ the situation in a traditionally realist, causal manner are equated with our own initial attempts. Krasznahorkai provides us with various characters, from Mrs Plauf to the frustrated soldier at the novel’s close, who take the part of mystified ‘readers’ attempting in vain to decipher the action. She quickly, however, gives up, resorting to locking herself in her home with her possessions, the only things which for her are “tangible”.

The novel, then, is replete with hinted signifiers, though they cannot be resolved into an overall, unified allegorical reading that would prove their significance, as they contradict and act against one another. The interpretation of the peasant rioters as motivated by realisation of economic or historical dispossession does not seem to work – indeed, the political impact of such a reading is lessened - if we see the extraordinary freezing cold and the appearance of the Prince as in some way supernatural or hellish. Also, one potential signifier can stand for multiple significations: the whale can be read either as symbolic of the promises of communism or of consumerism. The ideologies are opposite, but the opposition is resolved on the level of a promise which mobilises the peasantry, but which ultimately is empty and leads to no change in the real status quo of oppression. Likewise, Krasznahorkai prompts us to read the Prince in two ways: as either an individually active instigator of the riots, possessed of a hypnotic influence; or simply as a catalyst for the unrest, a product of particular conditions whose function would have been performed in any case. It is significant that both of these interpretations have been widely applied to dictators such as Hitler, and that both interpretations serve to excuse those involved. If a dictator beguiles the people, those people are not fully responsible for their actions. If people act according to the dictates of economic or social conditions, then it is the amoral logic of those conditions that bears the responsibility.

This effectively exemplifies the over-simplifying dangers of the practice of interpretation, of the type that can lead to the instrumentalisation or co-opting of writer’s work as discussed at the start of this paper, and may explain Krasznahorkai’s technique of leaving the questions open, necessarily engaging the reader in the completion – or at least prompting the realisation of the impossibility of completion - of the text, rather than simply providing a coded polemic. As in Jaques Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ parable from The Trial, any attempt to gain access to the Law, or text, is doomed to frustration. Kafka’s story appears in the penultimate chapter of the novel as published, and is there itself interpreted in apparently conflicting ways by the prison chaplain. When Joseph K protests the irreconcilable discrepancies in readings of the text of the parable the alternate interpretations demand, he is told “‘it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.’” The text therefore insists (to K, who has become bewildered and exhausted by his attempts to make some traditional ‘sense’ out of things) on its ambiguous and irreducible nature. As Samuel Beckett remarks: “If the subject of my novels could be expressed in philosophic terms, I’d have no reason to write them.” The importance of the reader’s reception and engagement with the work’s ambiguities is stressed. In Krasznahorkai’s novel, any denominator that the reader can infer from interpretations of aspects of the sjužet which at first appear opposed, as discussed above in the examples of the whale and the Prince, is only an imprecise pessimism about the immutability of human behaviour, a pessimism which, in a return to Adorno’s position, is useful precisely because it cannot be used to anyone’s advantage. It is precisely a melancholy resistance, which resists without giving allegiance to potential alternatives.

That the term resistance features in the novel’s title is of immediate significance. I have demonstrated that the novel resists definitive interpretation. The reclusive and sedentary musicologist Eszter has also long been resisting what he sees as the worsening crassness and “grinding attacks of idiocy” of the outside world. However, his intellectual resistance is entirely impractical and ineffectual. He has devoted years (though most of his time is actually spent in bed) to the goal of making music according to the Aristoxenus system of a musical scale divided into regular intervals. He does this in the belief that dispensing with the arbitrarily imposed tonal intervals of Andreas Werckmeister will precipitate a philosophical awakening not possible since the “fraud” Werckmeister, with a “cavalier swish”, diverted the progress of music from its proper path. Eszter wants to impose his logical rules on the past. Paradoxically his intended liberation from falsehood is based on formal rules of representation that must be followed. Unfortunately the music Eszter plays on his retuned piano, having been written under the Werckmeister system, sounds atrocious. If we can see Eszter as personifying the artist who has developed an obsession with purity of form (a concern associated with modernism), and who strives to maintain his distance from the world, it follows that Krasznahorkai seems to be indicting such academic resistance as not only utterly ineffective, but also misunderstood by (and in any case inaccessible to) the world. It could even – to return to Lyotard’s argument – potentially be dangerous and repressive itself, as it amounts to an artistic decree. On the other hand, Eszter’s critique of the apparent but illusory harmonies of pieces that “refer to their own irrevocability” also seems like a critique of the type of political writing Boyers describes which operates from (invented) value systems and ethical assumptions. Eszter therefore, like other features of the novel, has an ambiguous and perhaps contradictory significance.

Later, the once again disillusioned Eszter realises that all his resistance or “interrogating” of a world in decline has been misguided, as the world’s state has always been chaos. Therefore to “take action against something that doesn’t exist” is pointless. At this point he comes to see the attraction of “‘the simple joys of resignation.’” He realises Schopenhauer’s maxim of our disappointment increasing in relation to our strivings. He lets go of life in the same manner as the tree that “got so bored with gripping the soil it let go its hold and collapsed, like some harmless giant.” When Eszter does take some action, it is not because of ideological commitment but because, farcically, his wife is threatening to move back in with him, threatening his solitary comforts. He realises he always expected to be used in such a way at some point, feeling his wife’s moving out and the provision of his pension by his academy was allowed to happen suspiciously easily. Mrs Eszter vanished from his life “as in any fairy tale,” making the point that our easy acceptance of particular narratives stems from self-interest. Now compromised, he realises he has been kept for a purpose he now cannot decline, his supposed critical distance from everyday life having been an illusion.

He is wanted by his wife as a well-known and pliable figurehead for her movement. That the community has retained its (albeit bewildered) admiration for him – he is described in Nabadan’s ludicrously hyperbolic poem as “The Alpha and Omega of our dull lives” - echoes Krasznahorkai’s view that society benignly tolerates or even encourages artists. Artists are potentially “dangerous for society. An artist revolts against the social pecking order”, but society is generally successful in its effort to “domesticate” them. Their art, or status as artists, can then be called into the service (of the state or a group) at some point, their power to resist diminished by their implication in society’s mechanisms. We are reminded of Beckett’s bed-bound writer Malone, who is fed soup by an apparent benevolent agency. He comments “They must know I am toothless.” Whilst the similarly bed-bound Eszter is thought of with respect, people are aware of his removal from the practical world, if not from the world of the living, the townsfolk habitually thinking of him in terms of a “yet unwritten epitaph” – revealing society’s attitude to the academic, and also another metaphor which relates to a non-existent or indefinite reality. Eszter is a blank text, and as such completely appropriable. Eszter the man, even under such absurdly small pressure, instantly concedes and fulfils the task assigned him, delivering without conscience the empty rhetoric and slogans his wife’s scheme requires. If Eszter can be seen as representative of the intellectual community, it is a negative and pessimistic representation. He is misunderstood, ineffective, isolated, economically compromised, and subject to instrumentalisation. Critical distance becomes a joke, autonomy no “proud boast”, rather a potentially repressive feature of a self-reinforcing social system.

3. A slow lava flow of narrative.

The style of the novel is both striking and integral to its form. The purpose of the narrative is clearly not the careful mimesis of reality. It does not wish to make its enunciation unobtrusive; instead our attention is directed to it. For example, the typically novelistic coincidence that Valuska and his mother are both victims of the riot is remarked upon by Eszter, when usually such artifice remains invisible to the characters. The length and complexity of the sentences, (“for once a sentence begins it doesn’t want to stop” ), and the many statements contained within inverted commas, also serve to draw attention to the telling of the story. However, there is a basic structural characteristic in common with the traditional realist novel: the use of a third person narrative with indirect free thought, which switches between focalising four main characters (Mrs Plauf, Valuska, Mr Eszter, Mrs Eszter), each break in the text indicating a switch. The closing few pages on the decay of Mrs Plauf’s body is the only section apparently narrated by the author. There is consequently no authorial ‘I’, and we must accept being stuck in localised subjectivity, a device which creates the sense of instability I described in the section above.

Some of the narrative clearly belongs to the characters. It is obviously Mrs Plauf’s view that her fellow travellers are “most likely coarse peasants from the darkest nooks and corners of distant villages”. However, other information seems externally provided, as in: “To tell the truth there was very little basis for hope of such a happy resolution but Mrs Plauf simply couldn’t resist the false enticements of optimism.” Such omniscience seems to belong to pre-twentieth century narrative, except that it is applied with a deliberate inconsistency. The imagery employed also seems to come sometimes from the characters, sometimes from the author. The train stops and starts “as if the order permitting them to start had been unexpectedly revoked,” a simile which indicates a critical consciousness of bureaucracy we might not expect from Mrs Plauf. The marked usage of the inverted commas, coupled with the imperfect past tense, gives us the sense that we are present as readers at a curiously split moment, partly as the events narrated are happening, and partly as they are being related by the characters to a third party at some point after their occurrence. They also have the effect of emphasising the lack of objective explanations for the strange situation. Like the town’s inhabitants, we only have quoted gossip and hints to go on. That these inverted commas sometimes contain quotations, sometimes idioms, and sometimes imply a subsequent retelling of the story, is perhaps consistent with the overall structure of the novel – we are not permitted to discover a single rule or key which explains their usage.

The opening section, focalised from the viewpoint of Mrs Plauf, creates an atmosphere of paranoia through the detail of her torturous train ride. Yet we feel after a few pages that her paranoia is unfounded. This feeling is created by Krasnahokai’s presentation of her prejudiced contempt for the train’s “unshaven” passengers, and her comic embarrassment at her bra somehow farcically coming off. We relax, thinking we have interpreted character, situation, and style, until we discover it seems the man really does spell danger and potential rape for Mrs Plauf; or until we realise a passenger really has punched and laid out his talkative female neighbour. (This subjective technique is also employed in Bela Tarr’s film The Werckmeister Harmonies, in which characters are alternately followed.) There is no sense of overview, rather snatches of overheard gossip. Like Eszter, we are not able to see over the crowd until he can find something to stand on. From our position, stuck fast in the subjectivity of the confused locals, we are party to their own many attempts at interpretations of circumstances. “You can never know anything for sure” summarises the stationmaster, adding “It’s also said that the whole thing is just a cover up for other things.” The concept of the unavoidability of subjective interpretations of situations is figured with a black humour when Mrs Plauf, shrinking from her cloth-coated fellow passenger, realises her embarrassment has been interpreted by him as a come-on.

The author’s voice therefore makes itself felt through sporadic asides, through irony, through defamiliarisation created by mixing genres, and through the interplay of inviting, but potentially misleading or opposed signifiers. We are not guided in any interpretation we may make, and, as I have argued, the author has no interpretation in mind except to draw attention to the dangers of interpretation itself, as a practice which calls upon ideological keys external to the text; and so (because all ideologies are ultimately essentially the same) to reveal history as characterised by sameness and repetition. Krasznahorkai’s confluence of formal organisation and chaos, “does not try and say the chaos is something else”, it is “a form that accommodates the mess” of existence, without imposing an artificial authorial order upon it.

Another main character who serves as our guide is Valuska, who is “like something from a folk tale” (as is the whale and Mrs Eszter). He and Eszter are unlikely friends, who spend their time together discussing their respective notions of the world. Valuska can be seen as a kind of Dostoyevskyian innocent, derided like the ‘Idiot’ Prince Mishkin or Camus’ Merseult because he acts from impulse, rather than in terms of the secular rituals and abstractions constructed by a hypocritical society - which insists with religious fervour upon their observance. Valuska’s status as idiot sadly proves for Eszter “the redundancy of the angelic,” and Eszter feels him to be “‘like a rare endangered butterfly lost in a burning forest’” yet the fool, with his oxymoronic “highly complex simplicity” has a privileged status in European literature. It is he, like Lear’s fool, who may reveal the immorality or corrupt nature of society or individuals. The police chief’s son echoes this tradition when he tells Valuska “‘I want to be an idiot so I can tell the king good and proper that his country is rubbish.’”

We first encounter Valuska in the ‘Pfeffer’ bar where he can often be found demonstrating the workings of the solar system to the regulars. For Valuska, the irregular ‘payment’ of drinks (which he does not in fact like) is not his motivation, rather a compulsion to share his awe at “the ‘monumental simplicity of the cosmos.’” He is tolerated only because his explanations provide extra drinking up time for the already insensibly inebriated clientele. This need for a narrative to postpone the inevitable forms a recurrent theme in literature. It is seen in the character of Scheherazade from A Thousand and One Nights, who tells stories to delay her execution. Michel Foucault develops the idea in his essay “Language to Infinity”, arguing that storytelling is a form of oppositional power that can aid the disenfranchised. He uses the example of Kafka’s The Burrow, in which the creature hears the noise that means death constantly encroaching on his safety.

We must ceaselessly speak, for as long and as loudly as this indefinite and deafening noise – longer and more loudly so that in mixing our voices with it we might succeed – if not in silencing and mastering it – in modulating its futility into the endless murmuring we call literature.

Similarly, Beckett’s Malone feels he can continue as long as his pencil does not run out. It is a theme Krasznahorkai returns to in War and War, which opens with the protagonist, Györgi Korin accosted by a gang of teenagers, a situation he deals with by pouring out a torrent of words, the recent history of his life, to his bemused listeners. Thus the storyteller buys social favour and potentially the power to resist oppression, and the individual defers death, the only non-arbitrary ending which is possible in narrative. Krasznahorkai allows the notion to be summarised by his least sympathetic character, Mrs Eszter, who he has declare in her closing speech, “Death is our destiny, it’s the full stop at the end of the line.”

Valuska’s faith in God and the physical laws of the universe are of course totally at odds with his friend Eszter’s pessimism. Ironically however, both come ultimately to incline in their disillusion to the other’s view. Valuska, “forced to look on the world through his friend’s eyes,” experiences a waking dream of violence and cruelty, which sweeps him along on a wave of realisation of the futile emptiness of existence, depositing him on the bleak shore of his madness. Valuska’s constant “orbits” of the town, his head bowed, lead him ultimately into participation in the destruction, the nihilist revelation he subsequently reads in the other rioter’s notebook chiming with the bleak philosophy of life Eszter had finally convinced him of. It is the violence of the presentation of this antithesis that sends him into madness.

Alone in his room, Eszter decides his philosophy of the world’s decline or degeneration is founded on a myth: that there was at one time a pre-existing realm of truths, correspondence with which the world was diverted from, and which he had hoped to realign with the here-and-now world via his formalist musicological work. Instead, he realises, there has always been simply chaos. Any illusion of coherence stemmed simply from historicising narratives, generally told by those in positions of power. His experience has overtones of the end of the Enlightenment project, of Nietzsche, and of the existential crisis in which it is discovered that there is no pseudo-religious morality or necessary truths present in life. This comes as a comfort to him, yet he soon follows existentialists like Sartre in seeing that whilst morality does not pre-exist, there is a responsibility to construct a personal, substitute morality based on personal experience, interaction, common sense. Eszter’s aims are modest, simply to ensure the safety of Valuska. Unfortunately, exhausted by his philosophising, he falls asleep, and by the time he awakens and vacillates further about the correct course of action, it is too late to save Valuska.

Eszter comes to his last realisation whilst hammering nails into planks to block his window, literally ‘hitting the nail on the head’ in a comically extended and obsessively thorough section of internal narrative. It seems Krasznahorkai is giving a comic treatment to Kafka’s actualised metaphor; Gregor Samsa becomes a giant unspecified “Ungeziefer” , thus hinting at the treatment by capitalist society of an individual subsumed into the machine; Eszter, delighted despite his sore thumb at being able to play at being a man of action, derives his supposedly profound revelations from the most banal idioms. So impractical and internalised is Eszter, that we later discover that he has absurdly nailed the windows shut from within, making a prison for himself rather than keeping intruders out. Eszter narrates himself as he works: “(To make a fine distinction…’ Eszter considered, making a fine distinction in the process)”, as if for him language precedes thought. He becomes aware that “it was not we that controlled the process, it controlled us”, implying the playing out of linguistic roles written for us in advance by determinate power relations and structures. Of the various focalising characters, Eszter seems the least unreliable, because of his intelligence and detachment from life, but this detachment is unstable because of his self-interest in maintaining his comfortable existence. This also makes any truths he can uncover effectively useless in the world of praxis, in which his ineptitude has been demonstrated. In any case, Eszter makes no attempt to understand the motivations of the rioters, being largely uninterested in his home city.

4. “The whale’s got no part in it.”

At the centre of the novel, at the centre of the town square, is a giant stuffed whale, and its unlikely centrality obviously invites us to regard it as somehow important. “Such a portentous and mysterious monster” cannot fail to rouse our curiosity. Like the other would-be symbols in the book, however, the “ill-omened” whale, also “as if it were something out of a fairy tale,” resists a straightforward interpretation, instead suggesting but ultimately resisting various readings. We are initially reminded of the whale that swallowed Jonah, or the biblical ‘Leviathan’ in the book of Job. Whilst there is some debate about whether this word in fact refers to a whale – the significant majority of bible scholars interpreting the description in Job as indicating a crocodile, it is interesting to consider some biblical sources in relation to the novel. It is worth then first establishing that the term ‘Leviathan’ may refer to a whale. Meaning literally in Hebrew ‘twisting one’, we are told in Job 41 that it inhabits the sea, has a huge size (so huge that it could refer to a school of whales), that “smoke goeth out of his nostrils” – perhaps referring to pressurised vapour from the blow-hole, and that “he maketh the deep boil like a pot.” He is to be captured with hooks, rope and javelin. This Old Testament Leviathan is identified with the anti-Christ, as is the equivalent monster from the sea in the book of Revelation.

In literature, the term is notably linked with the sperm whale in Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick. The whale in The Melancholy of Resistance is described on the torn poster as a ‘Blahval’ though the text does not tell us what this is. Instead our uncertainty is actualised in Valuska reading the word and then being compelled by the queue he is in to move on before he can examine the rest of the poster and “enlighten oneself as to what exactly a ‘Blahval’ might be,” just as we are compelled to leave the word behind as the flow of narrative moves us on. Some quick checking would tell us that blahval is Norwegian for blue whale. Apart from the proclivity of Norwegians to hunt whales, there is no reason why the word should be in that language; rather it is another contradictory clue to the origins of the circus (whose director is later described as like “some Balkan landowner” ). Though Krasznahorkai does not use the term ‘Leviathan’, he does significantly twice refer to the enormous ticket seller for the circus as a “behemoth” – being the land equivalent of the aquatic Leviathan, mentioned alongside it in Job 41. Male and female Leviathans were created by God on the fourth day of creation, though (according to the Talmud) the female was soon killed, “for if the leviathans were to procreate the world could not stand before them.” The flesh of the female was supposedly salted and preserved for a future feast for the Jewish righteous, divided into four orders of rank, with the remnants to be used for walls which would shine (as whale oil was used for lighting). At this feast, the presence of evil in the world will supposedly be explained to man – also the subject of the book of Job. This suggests the whale’s beguiling effect for some of the local populace, who advertise their rampage as a “carnival”, the carne in this case being that of the whale, and are said to be “thirsting after the crudest and most vulgar of miracles.”

Whilst there is no explicit mention of Jewishness in the novel, there is a sense of dispossession in those who gather at the square, who are described as being “dark-skinned” by Mrs Harrer, suggesting a perceived racial difference. This difference may be suggestive of Jewishness (and the fate of Hungary’s Jews is an extremely sensitive issue in the country), of the racially separate peasantry, or of the town’s proximity to Romania. For landlocked Hungary, the whale is clearly implied as external, as not belonging there. It is a power, perhaps, that has no place there, disrupting the microcosmic state that might otherwise exist in stability. Hungary has been repeatedly subject to foreign control and to outside pressures, which had hugely disruptive effects. These issues will be discussed and contextualised further in the section on history below.

In the bible, Job questions God as to why evil is permitted in the world. He receives in response an implication that God is in control of evil and is utilising it for His own purposes. This reminds us of the coup perpetrated by Mrs Eszter, in which she makes use of the threat from the circus in order to make her deliberately and carefully delayed show of force emphatic. As well as delaying the military intervention, she has also allowed the situation to escalate by encouraging her lover the chief of police in his perpetual drunken stupor, stopping him from growing “dangerously sober” at one point by plying him with more wine. It is the presence of evil, whose existence has been engineered or at least played up, that gives the illusion of power for both God and Mrs Eszter. Without evil, the concept of power to fight evil could have no meaning. Or, good can only be defined against its other, evil. The purpose of the existence of Behemoth and Leviathan is then, perhaps to intimidate mankind. We think of the apparently opposed ideologies of communism and capitalism, which create and disseminate propaganda images of the other, only against which they can define and differentiate themselves. They also give periodic demonstrations of force: show trials, a military presence on the streets, et cetera. The whale can therefore be seen as symbolising both threat and promise, but ultimately, it is empty, or rather it has been stuffed and edified by various agencies: the circus, by Mrs Eszter, and by Krasznahorkai himself as its author. That the policemen Mrs Eszter sends for the reinforcements wait “behind the milk powder factory” seems significant here; they are in the “ignorant” service of a manufactured replacement for real goodness.

An alternative explanation may see the hapless Valuska as a Jonah figure. In the story of Jonah, the whale or fish is used by God to scare the reluctant Jonah into performing a dangerous missionary role. Valuska at first comments that “omnipotence is reflected in that animal,” and thinks of it as “‘the emissary of the One.’” Initially possessed of great faith, his experiences lead him to a disillusionment in which he sees the truth of his friend Eszter’s pessimistic nihilism. He finds himself staring into the face of a whale, though in a reversal of the bible story his revelation is ultimately one of the impotence of his deity in the blank face of human cruelty. The whale again symbolises appropriable power: it is a focal point for the instigator(s) of the riot. Later, its place on the square is superseded by a tank, another symbol of intimidation which can be called into the service of any regime, and an emotive one when we consider the many images of tanks on city squares in Europe and elsewhere in the last fifty years. This connection is made explicit by the colonel, who confesses he drags his ageing tank around “like the old ruffian with the cigar does with his whale.” Interestingly, Eszter can also be seen as something of a Jonah, as he is coerced into spreading the message of his wife – who ultimately succeeds at effectively deifying herself in the town.

Valuska, who has always wanted to feel part of an “undifferentiated mass”, joins the horde of rioters, ambiguously either supported or restrained by the firm “comradely” hand of one of them, and can empathise with what he reads in the discarded notebook of another:

Intolerable too every precept of law and order, every petty demanding obligation, the continuing and hopeless expenditure of energy in the attempt to suggest there might be some point to all this rather than be faced by the unyielding, indifferent, universal incomprehensibility of things

It is implied the motivation of the rioters, who the author insists are a “single body with one single pair of eyes,” and are possessed of a kind of collective (un)consciousness, is one of realisation of the meaningless absurdity of existence itself – we might say realisation of a kind of postmodern condition, echoing W.B. Yeats’ state in which “mere anarchy is loosed”. Valuska realises an indifferent state in which there is “‘neither good nor evil’” but that “‘The stronger power was absolute.’” Again we recall Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Eszter’s equivalent epiphany of meaninglessness. This is clearly a running theme for Krasznahorkai. For example, Korin in War and War mourns the same absence of values he was taught to believe in. In this state of chaos, ordering narratives have no use, and one can only be “content to accept that the whole thing should remain without an explanation”. Explanations are false historicisations, compromised by their interest in power relations. Yeats’ phrase is actually suggested in Szirtes’ translation earlier in the novel, when Mrs Plauf hopes “the forces of anarchy having once been loosed could afterwards be restrained.”

The concept of a “carnival”, a word used repeatedly in the novel, becomes important as, according to Mikhail Bakhtin the carnival provides an alternate perspective on the normal world, as art also can. Without the personal effects of the bourgeois townsfolk, the rioters can act with “no taking of risks and no danger, since there was nothing left to lose.” It must be noted, however, that another rioter, interviewed by Mrs Eszter, gives an account of his motivations which is inconsistent with such an interpretation, saying that he simply saw the opportunity for a drunken rampage. This disruption of our reading through the insertion of anomalies we should by now recognise as typical of the novel’s structure. It is also significant that we only hear from the peasants at a second narrative remove, in the discarded notebook, at Mr Eszter’s focalisation of the interrogation, or Mrs Eszter’s interview. It is as though these characters, as they are not part of the bourgeoisie, cannot hope to find direct expression within the bourgeois novel form. Instead they inhabit those gaps in the text referred to by Jameson. Here, however, those gaps are not unintentional, instead are perhaps designed to show that the novel cannot hope to represent those who do not form its audience.

The Prince for some is a satanic force possessed of hypnotic power, to others a powerful demagogue espousing a bleak philosophy of existential nihilism; a paradoxical revelation of meaninglessness. To others, he is nothing. The director credits himself with the Prince’s invention, “as a business decision”. Clearly, again, we cannot interpret decisively, but it is interesting to consider the implications of those interpretations which are suggested. I have discussed the Prince as hypnotist or catalyst, and argued that this opposition of interpretations is intended precisely to reveal the danger of reductive interpretation. That the Prince speaks through a translator may be taken as simple evidence of his deformity, which has rendered his speech largely incomprehensible (it is described in the novel as a high pitched “chirruping” ), or may imply a sense of being somehow foreign. It may also symbolically represent history ‘speaking’ through us, its agents. Interestingly, the film seems to make this less ambiguous. Whilst the sound is (deliberately) obscured by the Hungarian translation, the Prince seems to be speaking Russian, or at least a Slavonic language (Hungarian being a linguistically unrelated Ugrian language). He certainly uses the Russian word for blood, кровь. The connotations of such an interpretation should be clear, less clear is why the film should have suggested a definite interpretation, rather than, like the book, leaving things as ambiguous as possible. (It should be pointed out here that Bela Tarr insists the film contains “no allegories, no symbols” and that “We’ve [he and Krasznahorkai] never made political films. Politics is a dirty business.” )

Alternatively, if we take the circus director’s view, the prince does not deserve capitalization; he is simply a deformed human, who has become the Prince (as he himself seems to admit) through the acclaim of a public that somehow need a Prince. For the director, the Prince’s proclamations are only “confused drivel”. He was branded with the title purely as a consumerist strategy. We can perhaps see his quick rise to centre stage as representing the hypnotic appeal of the brand, and the amoral logic of consumer society. This is naturally also a pertinent reading in the context of Hungary, whose recent revolution has opened the doors to both internal and international capitalism, more a riotous free-for-all than controlled ‘transition’, and one which inevitably is creating a large number of economic casualties. Perhaps, then, the factotum is speaking more than just idiomatically when he says of the Prince: “He means money.”

The whale and especially the Prince are the most obviously fantastic features of the text, yet both may have rational explanations. Is the Prince a demon or only a human with severe deformities, named and billed by the director, as he claims? The point is that we remain unsure, but that we accept the text itself as “necessary”, returning to the words of Kafka’s chaplain. Some aspects of the text we can identify with perfectly, for example, Mrs Plauf’s obsessive feeling for cushions and plants, others are alien to us; the uncanny crops up unexpectedly amidst passages of obsessively rendered realism. Fantasy, along with farce, allegory, tragedy, becomes another genre the novel toys with. The effect is one of defamiliarisation, to use the term associated with Viktor Shklovsky’s statement of the purpose of literature. Fantasy is made to exist alongside realism partly so that its fantastic effect is not lessened. We do not simply accept the world of the novel as a place where normal physical laws do not apply; the fantastic elements become therefore the more disquieting and potentially significant. These fantastic elements serve not only to invite interpretation, but also to shed light on aspects of the real. For example, the arrival of the circus reveals the townsfolk’s susceptibility to panic, as noted by Valuska, and their prejudice. It acts not so much as a symbol as a catalyst, providing the opportunity for the peasant riot, for Mrs Eszter’s seizure of power, and for Krasznahorkai’s exposure, if not explanation, of human behaviour.

5. Thomas Hobbes’ body politic

A link with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan has been widely made, which is worth investigating, and which is clearly intentional on Krasznahorkai’s part. Hobbes uses his title to refer to the state, “that Mortal God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence.” His book is intended as practical, resolutely not idealist - Hobbes has little time for intellectuals like Eszter, whose work is abstract or metaphysical and therefore not grounded in concrete social theory. In Leviathan, Hobbes argues that acceptance of autocratic state power, entailing the surrender of individual rights, is essential if mankind is to avoid a state of perpetual, destructive anarchy, the ‘state of war’. This incidentally is close again to Schopenhauer, who read Hobbes and argued that the state was born out of a collectively imagined necessity: the invented construct of (in)justice.

According to Hobbes, the choice of a leader stems from fear: “men who choose their sovereign, do it from fear of one another.” This corresponds with the townsfolk’s flocking to the Eszters’ banner out of fear of the mob in the square. Mrs Eszter potentially illustrates a critique of Hobbes’ argument, which largely ignores the personal motivations of prospective leaders, that fear can be engineered or exploited in order to achieve a political mandate. Schopenhauer scathingly writes that “the state is easily fooled, like all minors, by demagogues.” Hobbes’ depends on rule by consent, but by what means can this consent be legitimately forged? His system is, we must however remind ourselves, practical, and the question remains unanswered. What is effectively advocated is a ‘least worst’ option of realisable, relative safety. This at least explains his disdain for metaphysical realms, which are so far removed from reality as to be effectively non-existent.

“The masses cannot achieve anything without their leader” is Mrs Eszter’s take on the issue, assuming post-Hobbes that the masses want to “achieve” more than simply their survival. In any case, Mrs Eszter’s motivations are not based on political commitment, but are to acquire personal power, proved by her delaying of the town’s relief, and the fact that she does not personally demonstrate the values (of ‘tidiness’ or morality – she is a slovenly adulteress) she promotes. The interpretation is complicated by the sinister Prince, who is also a leader of sorts, though precisely how, and indeed if, he encourages the rioting is left ambiguous; the captured rioter under interrogation repeats twice “The Prince never commands.” Instead, it seems implied that the Prince is some kind of messiah, though whether Christ or anti-Christ, or both, is unclear. The Prince’s apparently issued instruction, to destroy and “‘Build a new world on the ruins!’” seems to indicate a promise of reward for the chosen, akin to the leviathan-feast mentioned above. In response to the direct question “Is The Prince some devil out of hell?” The response is “Oh, it’s not as simple as that. He’s flesh and blood, but his flesh and blood are different.” Perhaps, in Hobbes’ terms, the Prince’s influence is like that of the church, which Hobbes accuses of contriving “not supernatural […] but unobservable” phenomena and ascribing them to a divine power.

This section, at the end of the novel, in which the rioter stubbornly refuses to satisfactorily answer the questions of the soldier and reader alike, seems to mock our own need for a interpretation – we feel some of the red-faced soldiers’ (who cannot know he is instrumental in, and not external to, the plot authored by Mrs Eszter) frustration. That we receive only hints, which are in any case contradicted elsewhere, prevents us from establishing a definite story, which in turn frustrates our attempts to interpret that story in metaphorical or allegorical ways.

I asked you what your job was.

I dug the soil for you lot.

You’re not a peasant.

No, but you are.

You speak as if you’ve had some education.

You’re on the wrong trail.

[…]

Is that some kind of code you’re talking in?

Sure, I’m an educated man, remember? Yes, code…

Yet all the while Krasznahorkai is suggesting further such allegorical interpretations. That the commanding officer is bored by the whole interrogation process and is nostalgic for the days of real war (as glamorised in the picture of “a battle appropriate to the historical dignity” of the room), suggests perhaps the reader or critic who is frustrated with what he sees as the unyielding interrogations of contemporary fiction, and longs for a return to the days when literature could assume epic scope of vision and time. Similarly, the customers at the Pfeffer demand Valuska’s familiar narrative night after night, convinced that “the new wine” is doomed to be ‘worse than the old,’” in apparent negative reference to August Strindberg’s preface to Miss Julie, which insists that “we have not succeeded in adapting the old form to the new content, so that the new wine has burst the old bottles,” and is regarded as a central statement of the modernist literary agenda for formal innovation. The officer wishes to interpret events as simply as he interprets the picture to his subordinate, that he may “observe the difference between a filthy little sty and a war.”

We can view the officer as Todorov’s stock rationalist figure of fantasy (the Van Helsing character, who is present to explain the science of vampires), the representative of Enlightenment values. In expressionist works with elements of the fantastic this character is often absent – no one, for example is on hand to explain why Gregor Samsa has awoken one day as an insect. In Krasznahorkai’s novel, the character may be present, but he is destined to remain ignorant of the causes of the events in the town. We are reminded of the blank statement of the Prince: “The whole is not true.” Krasznahorkai’s chosen form is appropriate specifically because, through constant resistance for its own sake, it reveals the myth of the influence of totalising ideology. We are actively prevented from reading the novel as if there were a key to decoding it, because we should not read any situation in this way. Instead we must “understand the elements” that influence its composition. The Prince thus provides the nearest approximation to an instruction to the contemporary reader.

Another quite striking similarity between the two texts is the recurrent use of the mechanisms of the body for those of the state. Hobbes’ Leviathan is itself an organic metaphor for state power, and elaborations on this central conceit – some of which are stretched to say the least - run throughout the work. The “infirmities” of the “commonwealth”, “arise from an imperfect institution and resemble the diseases of a natural body, which proceed from a defectuous procreation,” the metaphor deriving from the seventeenth century belief that abnormalities in copulation or pregnancy led to defects in the offspring. Similarly, Hobbes refers to civil war (which naturally is a dominant influence on his text) as “intestine” war. These metaphors are extremely close to Krasznahorkai’s closing metaphor of bodily decomposition for the decomposition of the state, as discussed below. Hobbes also compares the negative influence of the teachings of the church in society to the condition of epilepsy in the individual, which “obstucteth the roots of the nerves” and as such impairs judgement in political matters. For Hobbes, the religious impulse essentially stems from fear of death, “darkness and ghosts” and is acquiescence in God’s dictatorship. He thinks this is dangerous as it leads to loyalties divided between church and state, he typically compares this state, with competing ‘heads’, to a conjoined twin he claims to have seen. He argues instead that the state be accepted as the only incarnation of divine power on earth. We can perhaps see both the Prince – whose whale, like that in the book of Jonah, becomes an instrument of divine power and intimidation - and Mrs Eszter as promising a similar liberation from fear for their respective groups of followers. In the novel, as in Hobbes, citizens are motivated via their “nerves”, “by the terror of punishments, and the hope of rewards.” It is only Valuska who is motivated by “soul”, ie: by Hobbes’ ideal sense of faith and civic duty. And tellingly, Valuska is widely regarded as a simpleton.

The Melancholy of Resistance ends with a detailed, extended and technical description of the decomposition of the body of the unfortunate Mrs Plauf. Krasznahorkai is keen to stress here that the agents that begin and accelerate this process are bacteria and enzymes that were always present in the body, where they had a function; for example, to break down and digest food in the stomach. These “unchained workers of decay” have been “waiting in a dormant state for the necessary conditions to be established,” and as the weather (at long last) warms they can start to do their work. The analogy is with those political sectors of society, who, after a change of regime, bide their time until they can again begin agitation and finally again perhaps take power.

The internal enemies of the helpless, once miraculous, organism revolted and launched a simultaneous attack on both muscles and blood, overturning any obstacle to their progress, such as carbohydrates, fats, and the once inimitably elegant mechanism of albumin, much in the manner of ‘a palace revolution’.

We are reminded of a kind of people’s revolution overturning a church (“miraculous”) and state, perhaps monarchic (“elegant”) alliance, the “workers” being originally designed for work in “the granaries of the empire,” where, when the body politic was still vital, they could be “kept in check by the deployment of an entire inhibitor system.” These references to the repressive state apparatus (of the army or secret police) are uncharacteristically unambiguous for the novel, emphasising the centrality of this theme for Krasznahorkai, “that from the moment of birth every organism carries with it the seeds of its own destruction.”

Every change of regime is imperfect and leaves political parties, factions or groups which have been dispossessed, creating a residue of resentment, which is then generally compounded by oppressive and repressive state behaviour. Alternatively, countries like Iraq have their borders drawn at their inception in such a way as to create inevitably those ethnic tensions which now threaten the country. This reminds us of Hobbes’ “defectuous procreation” which inevitably leads to conflict, also of the Prince’s insistence that “Ruin comprises every form of making”. Consequently, when conditions become right, the component parts of a successor state are always ready to fill any power vacuum that has arisen, or has been prompted by either internal or external pressures (the overt hostility or covert agitations of another country). In the novel, the weather, and the whale seem suggestive of such external factors. The question is indirectly raised: if change is going to happen anyway, according to the notion of history as cyclical, what is the point of any kind of intellectual resistance, even if genuinely disinterested, if it serves only to aid political opportunists like Mrs Eszter? Even if the new regime does not co-opt the artist officially, that artist’s resistance may have been to the regime’s advantage.

Also significant in this respect is the fact that the phenomenon Valuska models using the Pfeffer’s drunks is a solar eclipse. This event can be seen as emblematic of the book’s theme of the cyclical nature of history. Darkness overtakes areas of the Earth periodically, resulting in chaos and confusion, just as chaos reigns in the town since the arrival of the circus. Yet this is a regular, determined occurrence, which will pass – but nothing will pass away. Things will be essentially the same afterwards. Valuska’s demonstration therefore reunites the meaning of the word revolution, in the political sense, with its denotational meaning, a natural and reoccurring motion, the revolution of planets around the sun, of moons around their planets, of planets on their axes. The proprietor Hagelmayer and his protests are themselves “eclipsed” by Valuska’s demonstration, which occupies the foreground of the narrative. In Belar Tarr’s film of the novel, the description of the eclipse begins the film and is given the status of leitmotif. The circus truck passes slowly along a street casting its shadow on the wall, the camera angle remaining fixed until the shadow has passed. At the story’s end, the shadow over the town has passed; Krasznahokai’s insistence is that the shadow will necessarily always return.

The successor state, of course, from a ground level perspective often differs only cosmetically from its predecessor. As I have said, we are invited to view the city in the novel as a microcosm of every state. Apart from the necessary public stripping of office of Mrs Eszter’s former bedfellow, the chief of police, most of the town’s administration retain their former positions. Post World War Two in Eastern Europe, fascist collaborators conveniently switched ideology and became communists; just as Ba’athists today make up some of the ‘new’ Iraqi administration. That one of the most thuggish of the rioters is selected for Mrs Eszter’s new police force points not only to the deliberately ineffective purging of the state apparatus after revolution, but also implies that apparatus is augmented with thought primarily for its intimidatory power, rather than its political constitution. It is also useful if state officials owe a debt of allegiance to the head of state. Mrs Eszter wants a force who are “eternally obliged to the secretary” so that their loyalty, should it waver, can be restored with threats of exposure of past activities. This seems a clear reference to kind of cronyism encouraged in communist era Hungary, discussed below.

That she gives herself the title of ‘secretary’ also has obvious links with the communist era. She possesses in effect all the power of the old mayor, who “was allowed to keep his title” , a passive grammatical construction which makes clear that the title is all he possesses, and that is only because it is expedient for Mrs Eszter to retain a puppet figurehead. This maintenance of the mayor implies to the town her lack of personal interest, signifies a smooth transition, and potentially creates a target and scapegoat for any future criticism that may arise. The newly implemented “social use” rule, which allows Mrs Plauf’s house to be requisitioned, clearly is also familiar to us from self-serving communist regimes. Whilst these hints of the Soviet era, more concentrated than elsewhere in the novel, may point to a relatively straightforward allegorical reading, we should remember that all regimes tend to be run along similar lines.

Likewise, all regimes must understand the importance of ceremony in establishing identity. The new state apparatus requires a new iconography, and requires its revolutionary heroes. It is ironic that the first of these “beatified as an exemplary hero” figures should be Mrs Plauf (murdered by her grey cloth-coated nemesis whilst out looking for Valuska - though only to save her reputation as his mother), as she detested and was detested by Mrs Eszter. Of course, the later has no qualms about writing her into history in a positive light. Mrs Eszter is shrewd enough to realise it is safer to have the dead officially recorded on your side, so that “the workers of decay have nothing but [her] dust to thrive on.” The memory of a dead hero is potentially equally powerful as a rallying point for the next crop of would be revolutionaries.

Again, we are invited to make a parallel with communist regimes that officially proscribed religion because of its earlier association on the side of the bourgeois ‘Whites’, substituting instead an equally ritualised new secular but pseudo-religious iconography. Consequently, the ceremony is conducted with “a social character”, “dispensing […] with the Church’s presence.” The ceremony is absurd; the medal rests on a plinth whose original inscription read “for outstanding sporting progress”, the attendants are “fitted out as Hussars” and carry hired plastic broadswords “graphically to remind the crowd of the reason they had gathered here.” The introduction of these signifiers points to a reality that has been freshly created. That the tone of the novel is strongly satirical here is further evidence of Krasznahokai’s formal destabilisation of our viewpoint. Mrs Eszter summarises her battle as a fight, ironically, for realism. Ironic, because of the deceit and subterfuge she employs in her handling of the supposed crisis, because of the contrivances of her iconography, and because of the hyperbolic rhetoric of her inaugural speech as secretary at the funeral. We are told that her favorite weather is a sky of an unbroken “solidarity of cloud” so that “the eye should not be confused by the potential ambiguities of the clear deep sky.” This obviously inverts our typical notion of what is beautiful about the sky. The eye that should “not be confused” is not her own but the vision of those who she would delude by her apparent, masking “solidarity” of appearance placed in front of ambiguous truth. That the cloud is also “funereal” anticipates the staging of Mrs Plauf’s funeral as precisely such an appearance. Clearly her brand of realism is not unrelated to the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union, with its mantra of “national form, socialist content.” It is of course, a widely observed irony that this variety of realism often bears little resemblance to reality, being better termed propaganda or at best aspiration (assuming its subjects agree with the grand design and consent to have their souls engineered accordingly).

Such realism is governed by a controlling ideology whose coda is concealed to the optimum level to maximise the didactic impact of the text, and whose real aim lies on another level still, where eventually the myth of ideology fragments altogether into shards of self-interested power. Mrs Eszter tellingly figures herself as wind bending reeds. The form of such ‘realism’ is opposite to that of Krasznahorkai’s novel, which has more in common with the Prince’s incoherent revolt against the hypocritical falsity of appearances. We should also remember that another kind of artistic ‘realism’, in which struggle is replaced by enjoyment of luxury, is also still the most economically viable art commodity for a mass market here in the ‘west’.

In a final comment on Hobbes, if we believe Michel Foucault’s reading of Leviathan, then we see the text as intended to resolve the complex and divisive political implications of the question of whether England was conquered by the Normans in 1066, or whether William I became subject to a pre-existing Saxon constitution. Hobbes resolves the issue on the basis that all sovereigns govern by implicit contract, a contract which always stems from man’s want of protection. This makes the discourse of Hobbes’ text similar to Krasznahorkai’s, in that apparent ideological oppositions are resolved, as they are all based on “the unending movement – which has no historical end – of the shifting relations that make some dominant over others.” Krasznahorkai’s text demonstrates that ideology is a by-product of the will to power, that claims on ideology are intended to legitimise power.

6. Expressionism and the Old Lady’s Visit.

If The Melancholy of Resistance can be said to belong to a literary genealogy, it is that of expressionism, an oeuvre characterised by its “interrogation of all ideological and epistemological foundations” concerned with the representation of the essence, rather than the appearances, of reality.

Expressionist works, liberated from the constraints of nineteenth century realism and the general requirement of mimesis, are able to represent highly political positions without committing themselves to a specific ideology, and its pitfalls. Adorno states that “Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays have an effect by comparison with which officially committed works look like pantomimes.” This often is achieved through the unreal or surreal representation of the recognisably real: the wage-slave Samsa becomes an actualised metaphor, the insect he has always been; Vladamir and Estragon, in a bleak post-religious world, endlessly defer their lives, without realising the absence of a reason. These characters’ lives can be significant for a reader precisely because they are themselves devoid of significance. The surreality of expressionism and its presentation of the natural world in unexpected, often disconcerting, ways serves to point to the end of narratives which condition the ways we categorise (and so inevitably over-simplify) events. This surreality, and the way expressionism “valourises chaos” in a political environment where, as I have said, regimes prefer an idealised nineteenth century ‘realism’, makes expressionist works less easily appropriable by those regimes. They consequently fulfil that criterion of resistance cited from Benjamin at the start of this paper. Expressionism, in allowing its imagery to be interpreted in diverse or opposite ways, can achieve something that such realism cannot: it can signal awareness of fundamental contradictions. The realist text, by contrast, struggles not to have a correct interpretation. It likewise struggles to “represent the act of representation” and so cannot contradict the rules determining its own construction.

There is a danger that should be mentioned here, identified by Jameson, that such ‘unrealistic’ works simply reinforce a dominant, traditional realism by calling for a rewriting according to the rules of that realism – for example, the story told in flashback which is reassembled by the reader with a linear chronology, and so reinforces that concept of linear time. This need not be the case however; there is no key that can be used to reassemble Krasznahorkai’s novel to conform to a supposedly objective assumption. Instead, the defamiliarised environment of expressionism helps us to gain insights into the real nature of experience as we are liberated from the straightjacket of reality and its apparent rules. Kafka illustrates this paradox neatly, dramatising our outmoded dependence on this reality of appearances, in the transformed Samsa’s pathetic concern to go to work as normal. A further paradox is exposed; it is the so called rational world that is responsible for our plight, yet we appeal to that rationality to rescue us from our situation. A literature founded on arbitrary rational principles therefore becomes unacceptable, another part of the problem. We see a similar dramatisation of this predicament in The Melancholy of Resistance. The townsfolk have their lives disrupted by mysterious forces, and so they appeal to the Eszters, who they associate with rationality and (farcically) ‘tidiness’. Mrs Eszter can take advantage of this to impose her ideology on the city. What begins as popular resistance becomes repressive domination, which is of course exactly the problem outlined for the engaged realist work of art at the beginning of this paper. By contrast, Krasznahorkai’s opposition posits no ideology, it is resistance for its own sake. The expressionist work then, hopes not to reveal a set of values but to potentially change conditions of perception in the reader.

However, expressionism is a broad category and we cannot generalise so easily. Krasznahorkai’s characters are not like some Brechtian characters. That is to say, they are not simply puppets used in constructing an authorial moralising coda. They are not, as is another typically expressionist device, reduced to one attribute or function, as (for example) Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s are. Neither are they simply emanations of an determinate economic superstructure. They are necessarily more complex, with motivations that resist easy interpretation. Whereas Marx would argue that power is produced by the amoral logic of evolving economic conditions, Krasznahorkai’s world seems to be one in which power underlies economy; in fact references to economic systems and financial pressures are conspicuous in the novel by their absence. It is also a world in which the individual subject still seems to have at least the possibility of free choice (though rarely exercises it), when critics like Jameson argue that a defining characteristic of the postmodern era is the abdication of the unique subject.

As I argued above, Krasznahorkai’s technique of indefinite or contradictory significance forces the reader not to interpret and so close off other potential meanings, not to reduce the work to a system or key. A model like Marx’s, in which every individuals’ action is regarded as an inevitable function determined by infrastructure, as beguiling as it undoubtedly is, is still a reductive model and serves to excuse the actions of individuals in praxis. Krasznahorkai does not deny the system, but keeps all questions open, and so importantly does not allow his characters to escape the readers’ censure. On the one hand we see apparently entranced rioters, and Mrs Eszter consciously taking advantage of an opportunity; on the other we note that the rioters seem to interpret their experience of the riot variously, and that they were perhaps not under any ‘spell’ at all. Free choice is therefore foregrounded as a theme. Gillian Rose writes that systems of thought that reduce or determine are dangerous because “they prevent any acknowledgement of our implication as agents and as actors, as flexibly rational as well as abjectly irrational, as ambivalent – capable of succumbing to the promise of a violent overcoming but also of resisting and taking on the difficulty of living politically.” Suddenly, the novel seems almost old-fashioned, in allowing the opportunity for the behaviour of individuals, rather than systems, to be castigated. Of course, however, Krasznahorkai is pessimistic about what this artistic pseudo-morality can achieve. His novel also pointedly lacks any characters who are in fact capable “of resisting and taking on the difficulty of living politically” in any effective way – characters at best can only comment on their situations - though the novel itself can perhaps be seen as proof of the possibility of such a course of resistance.

According to the critic Rudolph Leonard, resistance is a valuable end in itself, the artist a “gadfly” whose function is to annoy the state. Opposition, revolution, are themselves ends, not means to ends. Works, which tend to be highly subjective, seem to demand objectifying ‘solutions’, yet, like The Melancholy of Resistance, resist being solved, making themselves tools of opposition to any ideology. This resistance is reactive – and potential ineffectual. Academic resistance for the sake of resistance to the state apparatus, and its limited effectiveness, is suggested in The Trial. Advocates allow themselves to be flung downstairs one by one by an irate court official, after putting up “the greatest possible show of passive resistance” to contribute to tiring him out. Eventually he is exhausted, and they can once again gain entrance to their workplace - but of course no real shift in conditions has taken place. Countering Leonard, and lamenting such a lack of change in conditions, Boyers insists that “Politics cannot be taken seriously if it is nothing more than a mobilization of anti-credal, promiscuously “open”, deconstructive enthusiasms. Nor can it hope to succeed as a call to reason or order.” The question as expressed in The Melancholy of Resistance is perhaps one of choosing between the two Eszters. Should our resistance be passive, and ineffectual; or active, and therefore potentially despotic? Clearly, at least, we should not choose the second option, though perhaps we can hope in our resistance to be slightly more effective then Mr Eszter.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play Der Besuch der alten Dame (translated as The Visit) makes for an extremely interesting comparison with The Melancholy of Resistance. In some ways Dürrenmatt’s play is an archetypal piece of expressionist theatre. It signals its artificiality by having the actors who play the inhabitants of the impoverished town of Güllen also represent trees and animals (though of course this is no less realistic than using painted scenery). Apart from the central protagonist, Alfred Ill, the townsfolk remain unnamed in the play, being called by their titles – Bürgermeister, Lehrer, Pfarrer, and so on, or simply being reduced to an ordinal number: Der Erste, Der Zweite. Emphasising their namelessness, these characters are to a large extent interchangeable, and seemingly speak alternately to create long sentences, adding in turn only clauses which emphasise or slightly modify the subject, or which are items on a list:

DER DRITTE: Leben von der Arbeitslosunguntersutzung.

DER VIERTE: Von der Suppenanstalt.

DER ERSTE: Leben?

DER ZWEITE: Vegetieren.

DER DRITTE: Krepieren.

DER VIERTE: Das ganze Stadtchen.

This exchange could be the internal monologue of one character. The effect of this technique is to show that the town’s inhabitants act as one. They are clearly intended to be typical, without individuality. Any such individuality has been eradicated by the poverty they experience; their actions are determined by the economic base which underlies their dire situation. Even when they say things which seem in disagreement, as when they blame the town’s woes on different causes: the freemasons, the Jews, communism, capitalism; these speculations have an essential common denominator – that the cause is vaguely external. The play therefore is typically expressionist because its action is an expression or abstraction of some underlying determinate reality, and because it seeks to draw attention to itself as enunciation, cancelling out mimesis.

The play’s action concerns the return of one of Güllen’s former inhabitants to the town, the poor girl Klari Wascher turned multi-millionairess Claire Zachanassian. She is greeted obsequiously by the townsfolk, who are desperate for her charity. She duly promises a huge fund for the town, but on one condition: that Ill, a respected member of the community who has been marked as the next mayor, and Claire’s former lover, is to die. This is to be revenge for Ill’s desertion of her half a century earlier, when she was forced to leave the town pregnant with his child. With high blown rhetoric, and unanimous support, the mayor rejects the offer. However, the inhabitants, including Ill’s own family, begin buying on credit, in anticipation that the payment will be made. Despite receiving constant assurances of his safety, Ill is first prevented from leaving the town, then encouraged to take his own life. Ill comes to realise the inevitability and even justice of his fate, and does not take a chance of escape by appealing to the international press, who are in the town to cover both the visit and Claire’s latest wedding (number eight – to a young film star). Ultimately he is murdered, an act in which all the residents are complicit. It transpires that the economic decline of the town, which seemed an inexplicable anomaly in a thriving region, has all along been engineered by Claire, so that she could exact her revenge in the manner of her choosing.

There are many immediate similarities with Krasznahorkai’s novel, the most apparent being the coincidental similarity in the names of the places: Gyula and Güllen. Both works open at a train station, which serves as an aperture through which we view the dysfunction or decay of the locality, the Gülleners lamenting the fact that no important trains any longer stop there. Both small towns, which, it seems to be stressed, could be anywhere in recent Europe, experience a strange and surreal arrival. Claire disembarks from the train with a large coffin (which she immediately positions in the centre of town where it awaits Ill, and is ignored by the other residents), and a retinue of ex-husbands, guitar playing gangster minders, a caged black panther, and two eunuchs, blinded and castrated by Claire after giving false evidence for Ill at a paternity hearing. This arrival, in both works, carries a paradoxical message of both threat and promise, which leads to violence. Both works feature characters quite content to spout hypocritical rhetoric whilst quite different objects are being pursued behind the scenes. Also, both are stylistically similar in that they mix elements of tragedy with those of farcical comedy. The building that Claire’s father built, and which the mayor’s fawning speech alludes to as visited by great and ordinary men alike, it is implied is a public lavatory. As in The Melancholy of Resistance then, our generic expectations are subverted.

Both texts feature actualised metaphor or symbol. Claire’s black panther – her teenage nickname for Ill – ‘escapes’ and is hunted by the townsfolk. This hunting also serves as a pretext for everybody to go about armed, perhaps finding an opportunity to kill their real quarry. Ill, like Eszter, is articulate enough to comment on this unsubtle symbolism of the panther and the coffin, though the other inhabitants are wilfully blinded to even such obvious signifiers, revealing how self-interest negates our ability to overcome situational prejudice and ‘read’ a situation objectively. Like that of the Prince, Claire’s humanity is doubtful. She says of herself “Bin nicht umzubringen”, a statement eerily echoed by her eunuchs, and she is largely comprised of prosthetic limbs after being the sole survivor of crashes. When Ill tries to save his life by turning on the charm, Clare makes a significant response:

ILL: Ich lebe in einer Hölle, seit du von mir gegangen bist.

CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: Und ich bin die Hölle geworden.

According to her, Claire has become hell itself, a personification of Revenge, which cannot be stopped until it has achieved its object. The play, like much of Dürrenmatt’s work, therefore feels like a reworking of the themes of classical theatre. The connection with Medea is in fact made explicit by the schoolmaster, the character who comes closest to revealing the plot to the press. There is another important link here with Krasznahorkai’s novel. That the academic character, who describes himself as a “Humanist” only almost saves Ill in a moment of drunken conscience, before going on to make a hypocritical and justificatory speech in acceptance of the money, reveals a deep pessimism about the potential of the academic community to distance itself from the pervasive economic conditions. This of course reminds us of Eszter and his inability to do anything effective, whilst quite willing to say whatever he is told to say in order to safeguard his own position of comfort.

Dürrenmatt, in his postscript to his play, describes himself as „einem, der sich von diesen Leuten durchaus nicht distanziert und der nicht so sicher ist, ob er anders handeln wurde.” Ill alone in the town is capable of taking a critical view, because he is the only character who will derive no benefit from his death. Echoing a Nietzschean notion of self-serving ethics, the Gülleners actually construct Ill’s death as a kind of justice, despite the fact they were more than prepared to overlook his past behaviour before, when it seemed he could be useful to them in attracting the millionairess to town in the first place. It is also interesting in this regard that at the end of the play, not one character articulates a feeling of guilt, almost as if such emotions have been atrophied or rendered entirely obsolete in the new economic order.

Dürrenmatt insists his play is “nicht eine allegorie”, his characters “nicht Marionetten”. However, as in Krasznahorkai’s novel, politically allegorical readings are invited, but are not allowed to fit too closely. We can see the impoverished town (which has a proud past, as its residents constantly remind each other) as representing the Europe, or specifically Germany, of the 1930s. It is in the depths of economic recession, and is tempted by the promise of better things into the election of a right-wing extremist, and into the closing of the eyes to (or active participation in) morally reprehensible acts. Alternately, we can view Claire as representing an influx of foreign capital, which must be reciprocated via participation in a particular (immoral) policy. Numerous signifiers point to these and other interpretations, but there is always something which resists resolution into a unified allegorical picture.

What Der Besuch der alten Dame does seem to make more unquestionable than anything in The Melancholy of Resistance is its insistence that economic factors dictate the behaviour of individuals in an observable way (assuming we are given a vantage point from which to observe, which is the function of the text). It is possible that this Marxist economic determinism, serves, as discussed above, to excuse the actions of those characters who are so beguiled, an excuse which I have argued Krasznahorkai tries to avoid. Durrenmatt writes that the townsfolk are not wicked, but weak and act from “Leichtsinn”, suggesting a postmodern environment of abdicated responsibility. We are returned to one of our initial questions: of how the artist can resist, if he cannot hope to ‘act differently’.

However, whilst Dürrenmatt’s play seems based in a world of economic determinism, it is important to remember that all of the economic power is wielded by Claire, and that she has acquired this power motivated by a more traditional and individual factor – revenge. Thus passionate, subjective individualism is reasserted as perhaps underlying the economic. In turn, however, we must also remember that Ill deserted Klara, as she then was, for economic advantage – to marry the shopkeeper’s daughter. Dürrenmatt is structurally presenting the issue of the abdication of the subject to economic factors as a question akin to ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’

It should be clear that Krasznahorkai owes a debt to the type of central European expressionism defined and discussed in this section, and that his novel both continues the tradition, and interrogates it. He makes a feature of what might be called its limitations: its perceived inaccessibility, its over-reliance on determinate systems of thought, its inevitable lack of impact on political praxis. And perhaps in doing so he reasserts some small potential for political resistance via the novel form.

7. Some historical notes.

I have attempted to make a central argument in this paper that The Melancholy of Resistance should not be interpreted in one overarching allegorical sense. Rather, it should be seen as exposing the dangers of such totalising readings, and by extension, of all ideological systems. The novel is constructed, like the work of Kafka, in such a way as to make particular interpretations attractive, though ultimately they are resisted, and other interpretations are made equally possible. We could use an analogy adapted from George Elliot’s Middlemarch, of a light shone onto a surface from a particular angle which seems to resolve the tiny features of that surface into a pattern. However, in the case of The Melancholy of Resistance we could shine the light from another angle and another pattern would be suggested. Against these patterns, however, there would stand out (as exampled above) some deliberately placed anomalies. Thus we are prevented from seeing the novel as just a coded piece about the communist period, the recent influx of consumerism, the swing to fascism before World War Two, or any of the other subjects I have suggested.

One might perhaps infer from this, that it is therefore unnecessary to look in detail at those interpretations that are suggested. I have argued otherwise, as a close analysis of those suggested interpretations can reveal a good deal via their apparent oppositional or antithetical nature, and the level on which that opposition may be resolved. An example I have returned to is that of the Prince as Hitler; read as either a beguiling individual, or a manifestation of historical / economic conditions who simply fulfils a role created by those conditions. This apparent opposition of meanings has for its common denominator effective absolution from blame for atrocities committed by people. In the first case, only Hitler / The Prince can be blamed, in the second, history itself takes the full blame. Too conveniently, no individual subject is made responsible. Krasznahorkai’s chosen form, of antithetical symbolism, therefore reveals this (in some senses) false dichotomy.

I therefore feel it is necessary to look in detail at some specific historical events which may be referred to in the text, in the hope that they may provide insights not only into potential meanings but also justify Krasznahorkai’s adoption of such a form. Of course, it would be pointless to attempt anything like a full history of the region here, and some generalisation will be necessary, though hopefully the relevance of the material will be clear.

Hungary is a country with a history of external domination, its geographically central position in Europe never allowing it isolation. Most notably, in the post-Renaissance period, this domination came from the Turkish and Hapsburg empires, the Hapsburgs eventually forming the overriding influence on the country until World War One. It is also highly significant that the Magyar people are linguistically and ethnically unique in Europe. Since the 18th century, true ethnic Magyars have effectively been a demographic minority within their own borders, and, because of the ancient feudal system, they were largely a rural, serf population whilst the bourgeois towns were comprised of foreigners (most of whom were Germans). It is argued by historians such as Hans-Georg Heinrich, that this minority status and mentality later contributed to the “unfortunate” national tendency to extreme nationalism and chauvinism of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, which ultimately had a disastrous effect on the country. Thus modern Hungary, comprised of large minorities of ethnic Magyars, Slavs (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, or Balkan), Germans, Turks and Jews, was created with plenty of the potential ‘seeds of destruction’ that Krasznahorkai refers to, and the consequent potential for ongoing revolution and counter revolution.

A curious feature of the country, still visible in Hungary, is the enormous villages built originally for the Magyar serf population, and often eclipsing their associated towns in size. This resonates in the novel when the “peasant” villagers who gather in the square are thought of as somehow alien by the townsfolk; we recall Mrs Plauf’s disdain for villagers at the novel’s outset. From the period 1860-1900, then later during the Horthy regime, then again during post-war communist rule, a policy of ‘Magyarisation’ (mandatory teaching of national language and culture) was implemented, though for different reasons in each period. It is curious that such supposedly opposed ideologies should pursue the same ends. At first Magyarisation was designed to give the country a sense of cohesion and consolidate its territory, which then extended far into the surrounding Slav states (making Hungary nearly twice its current size). Later, for the right wing Horthy regime, the policy became a nationalist reaction to the loss of much of that territory (and population) after World War One and the abortive first period of communist rule, and was intended to identify forcibly everyone within the country’s borders - now threatened by Slav encroachment - as Hungarian. Later still, the Soviets encouraged aspects of Magyar culture for their own ends, seeing folk culture as an important tool of manipulation. Those therefore, who may vociferously identify themselves as Hungarian (as an example of Hungary’s typical nationalism, whilst Hungarian contains many imported German words, their use is widely regarded as unpatriotic), this identification is almost certainly based on insubstantial foundations. Korin in War and War echoes this, saying “only Hungary the place existed not the Hungarians, Hungary yes, Hungarians not”. The classic Hungarian hero is the poet Lajos Petőfi, who led a revolt against the Hapsburgs / Russians in 1848, and also had decidedly extremist views.

Hungary’s recent history has indeed been characterised by frequent revolution and counter revolution. To take up the story in the early years of the 20th century, the aristocratic Hapsburg-dependent government of the country suffered from the upheaval of the First World War and was succeeded in 1918 by a coalition led by (significantly largely Jewish) communists supported by Moscow. The short-lived coalition collapsed under pressure from a hostile occupation by Whitist Romania, which instigated a deadly anti-communist purge. Some surviving communists went into exile, where their opposition fermented. In 1921, Miklos Horthy was able to fill the power vacuum which had been created. Like Mrs Eszter, Horthy understood the political power of symbolism, riding into Budapest on a white horse to restore the kind of ‘order’ favourable to the bourgeoisie, and decidedly not to the peasantry. Hungary then leaned politically and economically towards Germany and fascism, won over by promises for lost territory to be restored in the coming German aggression. Towards the end of the war, Hungary tried to become neutral and was occupied by Germany as a result. The extent of its participation in the German cause, and the extent to which its people are implicated in the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews, is highly controversial. It is clear that the potential interpretations of the Prince discussed above are therefore significant here. With the war’s end, Hungary was effectively denied neutrality by the west, being ceded to the Soviet Union. Inevitably, some collaborators were treated brutally whilst some, like Mrs Eszter’s policeman, found themselves in the service of the new regime. That new regime was a coalition in which the communist element was hugely aided from and controlled by Moscow. Despite this, the communists lost initial elections to traditional Hungarian parties. Clearly, this was unacceptable to Stalin, and the indifference of the west led to Hungary’s total dominance by the Moscow ‘command economy’ and absorption into the Eastern Bloc by 1947. More purges and rewritings of history followed.

With Stalin’s death in 1953, and the consequent ‘thaw’, Imre Nagy, a market-oriented reformer supported by Malenkov, took over in Hungary. When Malenkov lost office in Moscow, Nagy (who had in any case been smeared as right-wing and blamed for inflation) was undermined. Moscow, attempting to re-freeze that which had thawed, attempted a hard line stance across the Warsaw Pact states, but a succession of imposed leaders including Matyas Rákosi proved untenable and Nagy came to power again, this time with overwhelming public support. On 23rd October there was a huge demonstration in support of an anti-Moscow declaration, in which the Hungarian army took the side of the crowd. The inevitable Soviet force arrived, but initially was beaten back by the people. Unfortunately, according to Heinrich, this gave the crowd “a dangerous illusion of military superiority and victory,” hopes raised further by Radio Free Europe. Reprisal violence against the AVO (secret police) occurred, and the various elements in the new provisional government made contradictory and over-ambitious demands. Of course, this was not to be tolerated, and the Soviet tanks rolled in. Janos Kádár, the Permanent Secretary in Nagy’s government, saw his opportunity to switch sides and gain power. Kádár’s self-serving rhetorical appeal to the Soviet forces sounds ominously similar to Mrs Eszter’s, requesting:

the assistance of the Soviet Army command in helping our nation smash the dark forces of reaction and restore law and order to the country in the interest of our people, the working class and the peasantry.

Whatever the ideology, the rhetoric remains the same. The violence and purging that ensued saw 25,000 dead, 150,000 injured, 200,000 leave the country, 20,000 arrested, and 2,000 deported. Nagy was executed as a traitor.

Potential links with the novel are suggested. The toy soldier Mrs Plauf is shown on the train displays a red star. We can see the prolonged cold weather as equated with the Cold War, with its associated metaphorical language of Moscow ‘thaws’, which affect local conditions. We could see the circus as the promise of communist land distribution, with the Prince as (for example) Lenin. That the rioters are seemingly the dispossessed peasantry supports this view; the hand on Valuska’s shoulder described as “comradely”, connoting communism. Alternately the circus could be the promise of a western, consumer society, in which the Director is the capitalist who has lost control of his own creation (the prince), as capital itself now senselessly dictates the rules of our world, rather than individuals. The “comradely” hand (a symbol which typically can function in contrasting interpretations), according to this interpretation becomes ironic. Either way it is coercive. The Factotum may indicate Muscovite puppets such as Ernő Gerő – the Prince (representing Moscow; we recall his Russian speech in the film) holding the real power.

Like the crowd in Budapest in 1953, the rioting peasants are given an illusory victory, so that Mrs Eszter’s tank can seem the more emphatic. Like the rioter who turns policeman, the now hard-line Kádár’s new ‘workers militia’ (the AVO in all but name) is to be largely comprised of opportunists. Mrs Eszter’s use of the drunken thug who owes her his allegiance is strongly reminiscent of the cronyism of Rákosi, who removed veteran colleagues in show trials and replaced them with inexperienced men who however owed him their allegiance. When Hungary made the transition to free market economy in the early 1990s it naturally became expedient for the administration to exhume and lay the executed Nagy’s remains in state, just as it is expedient for Mrs Eszter to similarly “beatify” Mrs Plauf. With the execution of the popular Nagy, the “unchained workers of decay” had been released to slowly but surely destroy Kádár, who for his part, despite leading his country for over thirty years, and becoming a moderniser, died in “virtual disgrace”, stating tearfully himself that Nagy’s tragedy was “own personal tragedy”, perhaps realising how easily their fates could have been opposite.

It is significant that one of the rumours about the Prince spread within the city include reference to “aristocracy of some sort”. Hungary’s nationalism has tended to make it susceptible to the promise of an exiled aristocracy returning to solve its problems. Horthy claimed to be an aristocrat and a monarchist, but when the real exiled rightful king of Hungary returned after the Romanian occupation, he unsurprisingly refused to give up power. Gyula Gömbös is another interesting figure, who could provide a template for Mrs Eszter. He engineered his rise to power in 1932 by deliberately playing on the weaknesses of the state, and promising the cure. This ‘cure’, in fact, was an echoing of Hitler’s policies in Germany, but initially he designed his rhetoric in such a way that it could not fail to appeal to everyone. This sinister real aim finds a parallel in the novel when at the end it is suggested that Mrs Eszter has personal plans for the town she has not yet disclosed to anyone: “Even Harrer did not know that the TIDY YARD… epithet represented only the first stage of the movement.” However, Mrs Eszter’s intended prizes are to be given to those who demonstrate “the simplest and most functional lifestyle,” suggesting communism rather than fascism. Once again, the signifier or symbol points to contradictory referents.

We see another unrelated example of the historical tactic of the shadowplay, employed by Mrs Eszter, when, during World War Two, the Germans wanted Hungary to fight on the Russian front. Hungary agreed only when two of its cities were bombed by Russian planes. According to Hoensch, German planes under false colours were almost certainly responsible for the bombing.

It is also interesting to recall Krasznahorkai’s comments about the “domestification” of artists in the light of one of Hungary’s more unique features in the Eastern Bloc. Whilst always a repressive society, Hungary’s restrictions on free speech were not as violent as those in other countries. However, it is widely considered that organisations allowed by the Party such as the ‘Petőfi circle’ were allowed precisely because their criticism created an effective release of pressure. Art, even dissident art, can be encouraged as it diminishes real revolutionary potential. This of course is reminiscent of Marcuse’s pessimistic essay on ‘affirmative culture’ discussed in the first section of this paper.

In conclusion to this section, Hungary is a country that, since its inception, has contained many seeds of destruction. The alternating ideologies of its rulers, and interference from outside, have always allowed favourable conditions for those potential “workers of decay” created as by-products of revolutions. The country is still unstable, finding its place in capitalist Europe not quite the hoped-for economic dream. It contains numerous residual elements from the communist era, and it seems perhaps that all a would-be leader has to do is wait for the right conditions to present themselves.

It may be that Hungary’s recent history is particularly susceptible to being written in a manner that assigns traditional narrative roles to historical figures. In the early 1990s, not to write Nagy as hero and Kádár as villain (their story has a tempting sense of completeness and balance) might have been considered heretical, at least in the West-leaning mass media. Krasznahorkai needs to find a fiction that resists reinforcing this kind of misleading and subjective historicisation, real people being inconsistent in simplistic terms of heroism or villainy. Krasznahorkai consequently deliberately blurs his many historical referents into a mass of contradictions. It may be, however, that he sees history, at least partly, as corresponding to a Marxist model, in which people act in a preconditioned way, according to pressures placed upon them, which stem ultimately from an economic base. Hayden White might term this a synechdochal narrative, in which the narrative elements – the behaviour of characters - are cast as parts or manifestations of a thing (that being the Marxist historical model). Again though, as discussed earlier, Krasznahorkai’s commitment to any such model is doubtful, as it inevitably removes responsibility from protagonists. Like Dürrenmatt, Krasznahorkai suggests that some human motivations are timeless and not subject to any determinate system. What is being advocated, through the novel’s form, is that we perceive these systems that would enslave us. And that perception is a small political act of resistance.

8. “The full-stop at the end of the line”

To conclude, The Melancholy of Resistance is a work that dramatises the difficulties faced by the academic community in formulating a coherent political statement, not least because academia as an institution has no critical distance from society. Eszter’s journey is a journey from a kind of faith in the possibility of truth, to scepticism, and ultimately to what Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness calls “deliberate belief”, a paradoxical leap of faith, or an existential construction of values by the individual. This action, however, arrives too late, and is therefore of no practical value. Whilst this would seem to indict the prevarication of an impotent academic community, the position of the novel is more complex. Krasznahorkai does not agree with Boyers’ injunction that the novel must not simply oppose but “help us to imagine binding alternative institutions”, because such institutions will always be subject to control by a group an individual like Mrs Eszter. Instead, through its chosen form, it simultaneously celebrates an inapprehensible, oppositional politics, whilst lamenting the inevitable, bathetic failure to achieve anything concrete.

The form the novel employs to convey this discourse is that of the allegory that points to no definite interpretation, but suggests a multiplicity of readings, all of which are worthy of investigation. This is a form derided by Boyers as ‘promiscuous’, but celebrated by Benjamin precisely because of its ability to resist appropriation by those who would seek power. As well as suggesting and resisting interpretations, the novel also suggests textual sources without committing itself to being read in their light. I have sought to discuss a few of these sources in this paper, but do not pretend to have given a complete list. Benjamin’s call for art to resist appropriation via its formal elements is akin to Hayden White’s call to historians to acknowledge formally the status of history as narrative. Such a form, in which positions and power relations are (relatively) undisguised, necessarily makes us question the prejudice that would otherwise limit our experience as readers. Krasznahorkai’s novel, with its number of apparent references to historical or literary referents, because of the contradictory nature of these features, would baffle any reader who came to the novel with a preconceived ideological overview – who wanted to read it as an allegory of Soviet intervention, or in Hobbesean, Biblical, or Marxist terms. Such totalising reading systems are revealed to be mythical constructs, albeit sometimes useful ones. Because of the lack of reliance on an ideological system which determines the actions of characters, we find ourselves as readers with a curiously (in contemporary literature) human relationship with the characters, who are liberated from reduction to function.

Finally, the novel insists that despite the multiple ways life can be interpreted, we are left with the fundamental truth that ‘it passes, but does not pass away’, that nations will always be conceived and destroyed in similar ways because of their human constitutions. The novel leaves us ultimately by retracting into itself, calling attention to its status as only a book, comprised of imagined characters and situations, ending with a last full stop.

Bibliography

Primary Texts:

Krasznahorkai, László. [1989] The Melancholy of Resistance. [Az Ellenállás Melankóliája] Trans. Szirtes, George. New York: New Directions, 1998.

Krasznahorkai, László. [1999] War and War. [Háború es Háború] Trans. Szirtes, George. New York: New Directions, 2006.

Tarr, Bela, Dir. (DVD) The Werckmeister Harmonies. [Werckmeister Harmóniák] Hungary / Germany 2000. Artificial Eye.

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Heinrich, Hans Georg. Hungary: Politics, Economics and Society. London: Frances Pinter, 1994.

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White, Hayden. “Historical Text as Literary Artefact” in Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978.

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