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The setting was half-familiar to me from reading Polish literature recently, the run-down central European village - most like the one in Andrzej Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia (1995), but ten years earlier, as Eastern Bloc Communism crumbles, (not afterwards, as everyone looks around, bewildered, asking "what now?") As if villages in Olga Tokarczuk had fallen into disrepair, or Wioletta Greg without the Cider With Rosie glow. The German names in Satantango surprised me for a minute, but of course, this was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire too, like some of those in the the old southern partition of Poland.
Everything in Satantango is decaying and, as the autumn rains start, floods with mud. With hindsight it looks like a clear metaphor for the crumbling Communist state.In 1985 did it look in real life as if things were moribund? I don't know enough about Hungarian history to be sure, though it seems not unlikely. It's clear from this old article (old enough that it says "Krasznahorkai is not a fashionable writer") that the book was a major event in intellectual circles in mid-80s Hungary. It was "anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system", and published by a strange chance.
The use of the word "estate" instead of "collective farm" in the translation initially threw me. "Estate"? I thought this was under Communism. The first sentence of the plot summary on the film's Wikipedia page reorientated me, and I referred back to this summary on a few other occasions, for a handle on what was happening, making allowances for the order of some scenes being rearranged in the adaptation. (Not a purist approach to reading, to look this up, but the introductions in Penguin Classics often give more away than using Wikipedia in lieu of footnotes.)
There's nary a post about Satantango that doesn't use the word bleak. But there's bleak and there's bleak. On the scale of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (which I read a couple of weeks earlier) and The Unwomanly Face of War (an audiobook I was in the middle of), most of Satantango is, 'yeah, shit happens'.
I was surprised to read somewhere that Krasznahorkai had written his student dissertation on Sándor Márai, although surprised only because I'd read one or two Goodreads reviews by readers who felt Embers was middlebrow or something of that ilk. There isn't much of Márai in English. Among the positives I had heard about Embers was its atmosphere of decay, faded glamour and cobwebbed aristocracy. It hardly seems a stretch to consider that this miasma - perhaps from Márai more generally, not just that one book - probably influenced Krasznahorkai, who, with his youthful interest in "the downstairs of society" transferred it instead to a different social stratum.
It was a relief to find this essay on three of Krasznahorkai's books, including Satantango, by a bilingual critic, which observes that this, George Szirtes' version, one of his early translations of Krasznahorkai, "blur[s] or render[s] inconsistent the distinct voices and linguistic registers" of the characters. I felt a sort of flatness and sameness to many scenes, which evoked a humdrum form of bleakness (a life of boring work and meagre means that has to be got used to, with banter and dancing as periodic escapism) - but it also meant it did not usually feel like a truly spectacular novel, simply a good one. It wasn't meant to be quite like this, then. Characters who had echoes of the larger-than-life should have been bigger, more emphatically individual than I found them to be. The depth is in the occasional paragraphs of philosophical observations; as with Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow, this is said to be one of the author's more accessible works, with a lower density of these than in their heftier books.
Where the narrative did, unquestionably, sing, was in two distinct set-piece chapters.
First, the most horrific episode, little Esti and the cat, and subsequent events. It is impossible to know for sure if it is an entirely accurate evocation of the mindset of a child like her, but it feels utterly true. Half like trying to chase down and kill mosquitoes in a bedroom before going to sleep: the declaration of battle, the dramatic arcs of the focused, sometimes frantic, sometimes exhausted endeavour, every detail of the unpredictable, protracted pursuit of the live thing and times of remorse and times of doggedness. And half like the moment within an almighty, lightheaded temper, in which the tantrum-haver realises with a sinking stomach that they've already made things this bad, very bad, and it feels as if there's no choice but to keep going, so they do, resolutely with further destruction.
The scene with the party clerks could hardly be more different: essentially a comedy sketch, as bureaucrats parse and translate into appropriate official language a report about the villagers for the secret police files - it sends up the bumbling and sinister state structures as well as the characters we've just been hearing about. There's a levity underlying it which seems to indicate these things aren't quite as much of a threat as in works from the 50s and 60s, emerging from the shadows of Stalinism. The decay of the state apparatus appears to make more humour possible, even while living conditions deteriorate.
I'd looked at Satantango a few times in August and September, feeling that I wanted to read it soon. I hadn't consciously remembered it began "One morning near the end of October", but it was just then, around the end of October when I started reading it properly. It was a few days after I finished Anna Burns' Milkman, this year's Booker winner. Previously, I had felt the tension in reading Krasznahorkai's long sentences whenever I opened Satantango. After Milkman, with its also-long sentences and lack of paragraph breaks, but easy conversational rhythm, I hardly even thought about the sentence length in Satantango except once or twice: I was acclimatised.
I was initially amazed how different it was from the only other Krasznahorkai book I'd read, Seiobo There Below (2008). But of course a gap of over 20 years, from age 30 to 50+ is going to mean some differences in a person's, a writer's outlook. Hopefully significant differences, otherwise they'd be stagnating. I was glad of this discussion which prompted me to see the "bleak" and "transcendent" worldviews of the two books (and Krasznahorkai's work generally) as the development, or two sides of, the same idea. Satantango is concerned with pointlessness and nothingness in a melancholy fashion, and with a negative view of these concepts in the European intellectual and religious tradition. It's someone still grappling with these ideas and feelings, who hasn't accepted that's how things are and shifted focus elsewhere. (His European books tend to be 'bleak'.) Seiobo seems to arrive after a process of facing-up-to and positive deployment of nothingness, and meditation on death and decay, part of a road to awakening in Buddhist and yogic traditions; the 2008 book's focus is on a sense of the sacred and beauty predominantly in art. (His Far-Eastern books are interested in the transcendent.)
Understanding this - and also reading several interviews with Krasznahorkai, and the stories in The Last Wolf/ Herman, which I liked very much - meant I started to find Krasznahorkai more intriguing as a person and a writer, that he was a a writer whose work it felt possible to connect with. I felt I could see in the difference between Satantango and Seiobo part of the shift he describes here: When I was young ... I regarded [nature] as hostility itself... Later, when I was influenced by Chinese and Japanese culture, their worldview changed my attitude completely, and I started to reckon nature as the locus of mystery and of epiphany ... And now I tend to think that the only thing that exists is nature, that nothing else is real but nature, and the reality one perceives is similarly nature itself, beyond which only void resides.
He was no longer simply a writer whom I felt I should make more effort to read, and who was vaguely interesting in a detached way. Characters in Satantango sometimes felt like archetypes or symbols more than individuals you might meet, so the underlying ideas became important in animating the narrative.
(read Oct 2018, reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
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