To Hell With the End of the World

On László Krasznahorkai’s ‘Herscht 07769’

Franz Marc, Stables, 1913, Oil on canvas

In a 2018 interview with the Paris Review, László Krasznahorkai, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, claimed to have finished writing novels. A peculiar thing, then, coming out of retirement on a long flat note, with a Kenny G-esque stunt performance of windy and pointless proportion. Herscht 07769, written after the end of his novel-writing career, is remarkable in this regard at least: It manages to snuff out the dark, rich atmosphere of his earliest works in garrulous vapor, thus fulfilling with an ironic vacuity their ominous presaging of annihilation. While Satantango oozed through the page, threatening to suffocate the reader with a sludgy texture also darkly gleaming and gorgeous, the incessant gum flapping in Herscht fails to stir the senses.

To address a few misapprehensions or nonstarters now routinely affixed to Krasznahorkai’s work, the problems of Herscht have essentially nothing to do with modernism, brodernism, translated literature, New Directions, or punctuation. A 2,000-page book by a goat-milking Mongolian composed of a single word — a 50-billion-letter, single, unspaced word, translated and published by Archipelago on obsidian tablets — could be a great work, the greatest world literature will ever know. It could also be riddled with deficiencies entirely unrelated to press-sheet details and international-prize-bait formatting. It would’ve been beyond easy, a task for one monkey with a word processor, to split Herscht into a million tiny sentences. The effect would’ve been the same, if only a little more hiccupy.

A recent review of Herscht in the Los Angeles Review of Books gets the major points right. The book’s prose is utterly tedious and its satire is flavorless gruel for world literature enjoyers who can’t square up to globalism’s ghastly dysfunction, offering a sop spectacle of violence against cartoon villains in place of a truly maximalist confrontation with the deadlocks and pitfalls of ethnic conflict in an age of mass migration. Unfortunately, the author of the review, Federico Perelmuter, commits an obnoxious gaffe in a dwarven overture to a proper discussion of Herscht, classifying the book as part of a nebulous critical phenomenon — a body of works, mostly foreign and translated, that automatically generate hype and unearned prestige through the perception of certain branded traits like difficulty and maximalism, attributes like metanarration and the overripe, adolescent odor of having read Nietzsche. Under one shabby umbrella, Perelmuter lumps together male authors of the last 100 years with major discrepancies in style, subject matter, politics, class, and ethnic background. In an especially irritating and weeny fashion, he dubs this phenomenon “brodernism” and imputes a tendency to phallic competition among its prime exemplars. Such remedial-level psychoanalysis shamelessly flaunts its own peculiar hang-up in a false tone of cool diagnosis, revealing as well its unsure footing on unfamiliar ground; this man wouldn’t know phallic competition if it came up and measured his penis. There’s practically no worldly domain with less masculine competition than literature, and if someone can’t help but think of erection anxiety in a canvas of high-modernist books, they could probably use a hormonal overhaul.

Especially vexing is how this pseudo-critical speculation tries to dignify its airheaded vulgarity with seemingly detached and enlightened clinical or academic language. You see, he’s talking about the phallus with reference to deep psychological and cultural complexes; he’s not degrading himself by bringing up cocks in a discussion of a poorly formulated categorical offshoot of high modernism. Some people are more obsessed with men’s obsession with their penises than men are obsessed with their penises, and if we’re going to indulge in psychologizing, then such a fixation might merit further investigation.

But moving on to slightly more relevant matters, the substance of what makes a novel worth reading, though its narrative might be fractured and inconsistent, partial, narrowly satisfying or expansive, with multiple sources and qualifying conditions, is nowhere evidenced in Herscht. First, the prose is entirely charmless and unadorned, yet also lacking certain advantages of plain language, such as earthiness, muscularity, an atmosphere of starkness, elemental power, figural vividness, and high relief. At best, the prose achieves fluidity or glide without grace, in large part thanks to the absence of full stops. But nowhere in the ineffectual flow did a phrase, image, moment, motif, sequence, or scene separate itself, rise up, stand out, shine, sing, strike, and then invite, much less demand, admiration or reflection, with the possible minor exception of the very last four or five clauses of the book, which finally, after hundreds of pages of cracked-out, tuneless chatter, ring with haunting beauty, much too little and late to save the whole.

Now, I’m no member of the cult of the sentence. Those preciously clutched quotes call to mind the polishing of little ceramic birds with a satin kerchief. While the idea of a work that resists or outright denies quotation through its density of language does sound like a worthwhile project, at some point in the course of reading line after line, whether organized into long or short paragraphs, into chapters, or piled on top of each other without breaks for breath, I should encounter an insight, a point of view I hadn’t considered, an argument, a figurative device, a description, a play on words, a witticism, or a succession of sounds that give pleasure, stimulate the senses, and encourage contemplation; beyond or beneath that, I should feel that I’ve entered a realm with its own distinctive air, its own fabric, its own rules and exceptions, and that I’ve temporarily slipped outside my average ambit, or, on the other end, that I’ve been returned to life as it is, reintroduced to an old friend with whom I’ve lost touch, or handed a set of updated prescription lenses or an extra shot of espresso, some sensory, emotional, or cognitive enhancement, a spiritual or mental tonic, even if bitter. I’m not even insisting on the need for depth in characterization or profundity in theme or a plot crafted by a master carpenter with perfectly rising and falling action and a three- or five-act structure hammered into perfect shape, nor am I requiring a didactic aim or a subversive thrust, the right politics or apolitical treatment; all those things may be present without being strictly necessary.

Good writing justifies itself without much need for external qualifiers like a timely or edifying message (didactic intentions and interpretative layers don’t automatically disqualify a work either), and the primary mark of its excellence lies in its obvious conveyance or projection of the mind behind it, not so much in its storytelling capacity as in its everyday perception, its analytical tendencies, its surrounding sensibility. What kind of mind? For me it would have to be uncommon but not inherently transgressive, most likely disagreeable but sharp, quick and at the same time staminal, comfortable in and out of literary canons, with a sure grip on techniques and a command of conventions, calibrated in taste and stocked with confidence. Put differently, sensitivity unbowed to sentimentality, deep feeling and a jolting imagination, verbal dexterity and the potential for both reverence and abyssal ironizing. And to put a cap on it, the glory of experiencing a creative, dynamic mind is that it directs attention beyond the human, beyond my humanity, momentarily placing me in a mode of honoring creativity as such, pointing toward a divinity however nebulous or personal.

That Krasznahorkai seemed to possess this sort of mind, roughly enough, was my impression after reading Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance. After reading Herscht, I wouldn’t say he’s an all-around disappointment. I’d merely state that he overextended himself and should’ve had the nerve to stick to his intuition of 2018 that he was done with novels. That a respected author would write another novel after a public statement in a renowned magazine that he was finished with the form does raise questions of biographical and psychological interest, the examination of which might serve as caution against speaking too soon or acting too late. After all, the whole secular apocalyptic, caught in a dystopian hellscape, world’s ending attitude isn’t exactly an untapped vein or an obscure descriptive propensity, not in general, and not in the case of Krasznahorkai. Mark Fisher is somewhat famous, mostly among chronic handwringers and bedwetters, for saying it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (or saying that Fredric Jameson or Žižek said it, though it’s usually attributed to Fisher). By my view, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than anything else at all. The next easiest thing to imagine is a scientific plot device. Where poiesis falters, scientistic Armageddon steps forward. Crippled mythos, ethos, and dianoia are compensated by two related crutches that often implicate or prop each other up: end-of-the-world, dystopian scenarios and pat references to scientific fields, concepts, and figures.

I’m not speaking only of Kraz now, but something a bit bigger, of which he is a pertinent enough illustration. I’d like to discuss the fine inner grains of Herscht, but the book practically insists on a paratextual treatment, stocked as it is with cultural bingo signifiers made for skimwit appreciation, and not much else. Germans, neo-Nazis, Bach, Angela Merkel, quantum physics, vandalized statues, wolves, the end of the world. If the prose offered images, lyrical passages, arresting scenes, compelling or humorous dialogue, inroads to further scholarship, then I could treat those sections to a more sustained appreciation and analysis. In Herscht, Krasznahorkai seems to have pulled off a rare feat, oddly respectable in its own meager right: a perfectly smooth, featureless surface of loquacity without howlers or clashing images, but nothing of import, nothing clever or brisk or poignant, either. The real satirical edge may not come from the characters or the plot as political allegory, but from the gloss of the novel itself, its own typification, its tired mashup of wacky plot particles and thematic empty gestures, from its possibly self-parodying iteration of science-nibbling, pseudo-politicized, on-the-rag reading, grief-stricken, thumb-sucking textuality covering a great deal of literature and film and television and critical discourse, which is not all that scientific, political, or literary.

It is still very much in vogue, though this could soon change, to casually, perfunctorily, mention the end of the world, to declare that it has already happened, is happening now, or will happen soon. Often these references come with a flattened tone and flaming imagery, blending beyond-it-all sarcasm and mewling pity, sometimes hitting high notes of Off-Broadway hysteria. In the case of more serious authors like Krasznahorkai, I don’t think it’s so much a neotenous affectation, a facile way to generate sympathy or draw up lines of affiliation, but it does suggest a narrowing or blurring of vision, a possible artistic coping mechanism or productivity shortcut or narrative hack operative on a larger scale, incorporated into a feedback loop with related subcultures characterized by a mood of presumptuous resignation (catastrophizing as emotionally dysregulated homeostasis).

Factor in the readily inhaled availability of exoterically esoteric science, and a contemporary, conventionally experimental novel practically writes itself. The elite hard sciences, in their institutionalized development over the last 150 years, having passed through a publicly resonant nuclear threat and the science fiction era, now enter the public imagination as novelistic constructs both recondite and popularized prior to their incorporation in stylized, genre-blending narratives. Thus, they readily lend themselves to fitful curiosity, a glib narrativization that does nothing to alleviate fears of catastrophe, invigorate poetic faculties, or inspire endurance of suffering. In short, science in fiction (not science fiction) is temporary filler, an injection of questionably tested and quickly degrading material into sagging flesh. Quantum physics has no bearing on life; it isn’t decisive or significant, yet it comprehends the whole, it lays a groundless ground, reduces the world to senseless formulas and immediately collapses into contradictory speculations and vehicles for self-help quackery. This lack or atomization of significance underlies, in a displaced form, the sense of the world ending, and is rashly concretized and traced to more apparently realistic and personified sources, typically political, environmental, demographic, and technological. The secularization process, in our Western case, the specific undermining of the Christian basis of society, with its strong eschatological emphasis, leads to heightened anticipation of polyatheistic apocalypses.

At last we can read the title character, Florian Herscht, as Krasznahorkai’s clown, only without giant floppy shoes and a red honking nose. The anti-populist reading is clear enough: Florian is an idiot who misunderstands quantum physics and believes the world could end at any moment. He wastes his time writing letters to Angela Merkel, imploring her to intervene. All the while, he works for the leader of a neo-Nazi gang that scrubs graffiti from landmarks and statues. A simple summary: local oaf feels threatened by a science he doesn’t understand while remaining oblivious to his support of violent right-wing extremists. This anti-populism is complicated by his naïve belief in bureaucrats, but his petitioning of Merkel works on a rhetorical surface as mild criticism of the liberal centrism governing Europe and its formal, neutralized political procedures. We might include in this criticized centrism the idea of the marketplace of ideas, grouping open debate in the category of sanitized and ineffectual channels of political participation.

While the messaging of Herscht refrains from explicitly celebrating the superior wisdom and knowledge of scientists, and thus avoids a charge of technocratic elitism, it only lightly condemns science and bureaucracy as insufficient bulwarks against a political extremism and authoritarianism situated squarely on one end of the ideological spectrum. But what if Florian is right, as idiots often are, in his dreadful intuition that quantum physics spells the end of the world, and his mistake isn’t ignoring neo-Nazis but still believing in the technocratic prevention of a spiritual cataclysm? His later shift into a low-gear reverence for the music of Bach also shows the inadequacy of directly sanctifying art without connecting it to the divine or even a larger tradition of socialized religious practice. After 200 pages of propeller-hat discursiveness, Florian’s realization of Bach’s numinous beauty fails to sound transcendent, redemptive, or even well-tempered.

We should venture to read Florian’s idiocy as archetypical, which is to say as essentially ambiguous in its critical or satirical role. In his proper literary context, the idiot indicts his society through his overidentification with its values or by his ignorance or rejection of its prevailing standards. The bumbling of a simple-minded and earnest man exposes wider society’s worldly shrewdness as hollow. Or, the idiot could be read as representative of the stultifying pressures of simplistic, parochial, moral, and religious beliefs, thereby promoting a more secular, cosmopolitan outlook. In Herscht, Florian’s idiotic incomprehension of Nazi menace could be satirizing a mainstream refusal to confront the exigent problem of right-wing extremism, or it could be satirizing the obsession with certain reactive social and political elements in a much larger field in need of far more radical reform and stabilization.

Satantango evoked a palpable mood of cosmic decline or universal futility through its vivid portrayal of regional, historical, and ethnic particularity, situated in a dilapidated Hungary on the edge of communism’s collapse, in much the same way as Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! easily transcended its tightly bound setting through masterfully intricate storytelling and richness of detail. Herscht, on the other hand, feels much more like an obvious product of a provincialized globalism, motivated by and largely appealing to concerns that seem, though sincere, increasingly out of touch and unequipped for the present and the future. Relatedly, the deadpan naturalism and crank offensiveness of Houellebecq’s novels highlight the disasters of globalized politics and culture, and more adequately contextualize the concrete threats to human values posed by technocratic neoliberalism; his humanistic regard for romantic love and sexual pleasure is tightly linked to his dour assessment of overwhelming demographic change and individualistic competition. The dystopian or cataclysmic settings of his novels hum with elegiac affirmation, memories of what humanity has briefly attained and then lost, its thwarted potential, while the precarious and caffeine-jagged world of late Krasznahorkai, crumbishly perverse or asexual, speaks to a more childish yet sanctimonious anxiety.

A comparison to Houellebecq’s Annihilation is especially apt here, as Krasznahorkai and Houellebecq are both European writers in their 60s, most likely nearing the end of their careers, and both men were recently named candidates for the Nobel Prize, with the former having actually won it. One has enjoyed a much more commercially popular yet ambivalent reception, while the other is less read but a bit more comfortably lauded in transliterati circles. But the contrast between the two late-career books is striking. Annihilation begins with a global terrorist conspiracy, an unfolding of events of world-historical importance. As the narrative progresses, the global stage shrinks, and the individual sickness and impending death of the main character, Paul Raison, grows in significance and fills the narrative frame until there’s no longer a sense that political intrigues matter at all. What does emerge as central is the comfort, pleasure, and completeness of a life bound to another in love, and more specifically, in a heterosexual monogamous marriage, even when that life is cut short by cancer. Annihilation confronts, at bottom, the ending that most directly concerns us all, not of the world, society, or the system, but the ending of each one of us as individuals, and offers as palliative, and as secular saving grace, the remote though real prospect of a loving union with another individual. Herscht, on the other hand, goes out with a limping, suicidal neo-Nazi killing spree, thus fulfilling a juvenile and far less realistic fantasy of justice that suits the lesson plans of pop-up book political morality. Where Houellebecq evinces real tenderness in human relationships despite his unpalatable antipathies and biting sarcasm, Krasznahorkai plays to a disdainful but ultimately inert impulse that is no more practically equipped to address, model, or meliorate the war of ethnic, political, and cultural interests in a world of interconnected economies than any retreat into a private sphere of loving devotion.

Here, I’d like to bring in Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, specifically its ending: a skin-peeling, precise description of a decomposing corpse. The intended effect fits into a long line of established wisdom, though cranked up and rendered in time-lapse high definition; that of memento mori, the way of all flesh. The reader is to feel the horror of his true destiny, to be reminded that all his strivings will end with his flesh dissolving under unbendable biomechanical laws. Revulsion is the normal, expected response to the stark depiction of what happens to our bodies upon our deaths, with extreme focus on the blind yet concerted labors of varied microscopic agents and the chain reactions that grind our bodies into repurposed goo. But what if the apparent up-front grisliness of our natural end distracts us from an even more disturbing supernatural possibility, that of being immortal souls responsible before a higher power? I’m not here saying that I know this, or even that I choose to believe in this possibility; only that the mere possibility could be more unsettling than being crushed to dust by the circle of life, and that, in light of this however unlikely possibility, meditating on corpses and nothingness is a comfortable or anesthetic alternative, a salve that obviates the need for salvation.

I have in mind here the argumentative orientation of Kierkegaard and Pascal, in their determination to see through all earthly diversions, including the most seemingly stringent and mortifying. Kierkegaard turns the usual atheist accusation around, arguing that the Christian soul and the concept of the afterlife require more fortitude than the proverbial facing of the void; the real security blanket is the velvet nothing. Meanwhile, Pascal mocks man’s dull indifference to his potential damnation, the tendency for the dim comprehension of infinity to elicit a stupefied wonder rather than terror and longing for redemption.

In conditions of profound unease, indestructible continuity and individuality cast monstrous shadows, hinting at the dreadful possibility that defeats, setbacks, disappointments, frustrations, compromises, and bad choices will perpetuate themselves, require renewed struggles, bring on more turbulence in fortune. How much more frightening is the prospect of living with defeat, surviving disaster, finding a way to thrive amidst decline or with hell yawning below, of being denied absolution in a clean-slate cataclysm? What emerges from these considerations is a set of fears obscured and obliquely assuaged by many contemporary works. Disaster narratives and the banalization of apocalyptic rhetoric in its secular guise exert a numbing and spiritually inhibiting influence, and placate failures or weaknesses of imagination in art, culture, and politics. For want of artistic and political ingenuity, there’s always earthly fire and brimstone, quantum physics and Nazis.

Caleb Caudell lives in the Midwestern United States. His published work is available through Bonfire Books and on Amazon.