[biography] - [quotes] - [publications]
"Months before he had admitted that further, futile
experimentation would be pointless, and it soon dawned upon him that
he would in fact be incapable of making the slightest change even if
he desired it; no modification could prove to be unequivocally effective,
for it was always to be feared that the desire for change was nothing
but the secret manifestation of failing memory. In actual fact he did
nothing but protect his memory from disintegration, ravaging everything
around him; ever since the day they had pronounced the liquidation of
the shanty-town and he had decided to grasp the opportunity and remain
until the 'rescinding of his suspension' should arrive, had gone up
in the mill with the older Horgos girl and watched the noisy loading
up of the trucks, the feverish hurry-scurry of people shrieking, the
lorries receding into the distance, looking as though they were running
away, the houses, appearing to sag under the death-sentence - ever since
that day he had felt, had known himself to be too weak to arrest this
triumphant deterioration by himself; had known that it was no use kicking
against this tide, destroying, annihilating everything in this path:
houses, walls, trees and earth, the birds swooping down from above and
the animals scurrying down below, human bodies, desires and hopes; had
known that he could not hold out against it, however hard he tried,
he could not check this atrocious assault against human creation, so
he acknowledged in time that all that was in his power to do was to
confront this fateful and insidious dissolution with his memory, because
he believed that even if everything in this place that had been built
by bricklayers, nailed together by joiners, sewn by women, everything
that had been created by men and women by the skin of their teeth had
become the nutriment of the mysterious fluids coursing in tangled subterranean
passages, his memory would still remain intact and alive until his organs
'cancelled the contract upon which their commercial relations were founded,'
until his flesh and bones were attacked by the deadly vultures of decay.
He decided that he would keep a constant and intensive watch, a 'running
documentary,' endeavouring not to omit the most trivial detail, for
he had realized that to disregard even the most insignificant-seeming
things was tantamount to admitting that we stand helpless, caught up
in the 'swaying bass-ropes' of the bridge between disintegration and
apprehensible order: every trivial incident that ever occupied, be it
'the territory carved out of the table' by shreds of tobacco, the direction
of the wild geese's approach or even the apparently meaningless succession
of human gestures, must be continually followed, noted and grasped,
this is our only hope of not becoming ourselves untraceable and silenced
captives of this satanic order, disintegrating, yet eternally under
process of recreation. But memory, conscientious though it may be, is
insufficient: 'it is powerless in itself and incapable of coping with
the task;' it must find the means, a lasting and rational ensemble of
signs with the aid of which the range of this constantly functioning
memory may be extended and perpetuated in time. The best thing would
be, thought the doctor up in the mill, 'if I reduced to the minimum
those instances through which I myself should be increasing the quantity
of matter to be kept under observation,' and that very night, after
he had brusquely sent the uncomprehending Horgos girl packing and had
told her that her services would no longer be required, he had prepared
his observation-post, imperfect then, beside the window, and had set
about arranging certain essential elements of his system, which may
from a certain point of view justly be termed insane."
(From: Satan Tango, tr. by E. Molnár)
Among the "second-generation" writers of fiction
bent on portraying the unspeakable horrors, utter hopelessness and almost
eerie apocalypse of the socialist reality of Eastern Europe, László
Krasznahorkai marches in the vanguard. The perpetually dreary atmosphere
is pregnant with both Kafkaesque ambiguities and magical realism reminiscent
of Garcia Márquez and Bulgakov.
(Clara Györgyey, World Literture Today, vol. 69)
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