IT IS A PARABLE that encapsulates a central question in Krasznahorka’s work: how does the culture we ourselves have created affect us? Culture understood here in a broad, interpersonal sense, as the relational relationship we call society. Once we have embarked on the path toward the artificial, the domesticated, the constructed, is it possible to return to a natural state? For the forester Herman, in the eponymous short story from The Last Wolf, his protective hunt for predators transforms into solidarity with victims, into discerning a higher law beyond the self-violence of human law. He retreats to the forest, with which he gradually merges, and instead of animals, he begins to hunt people with his ingenious traps.
THERE ARE STORIES about power and powerlessness, about the individual and the collective, and not least about the structures that surround us, which seem to constantly drive us toward systems where some are inevitably oppressed and others prosper. Stories about false prophets and unscrupulous opportunists, about fanatics and fools, about leaders who change places, about subjects who rebel, about those who see through human laws and those who seek to exploit them. And about the ordinary person who is caught between these forces, yet seems unable to do either good or evil.
This is the kind of story Krasznahorkai offers us. In his debut novel, Satantango (1985), we follow the inhabitants of a crumbling farming community, where self-interest, in the absence of external authority, has replaced the common good. A false preacher and a traitor blind them, luring the ragged crowd on a journey toward destruction. In The Melancholy of Resistance, the small rural town sinks into filth, and in an apocalyptic cataclysm, society is restructured so that a new order can emerge under the iron fist of the new leader, Mrs. Eszter.
IS THERE HOPE IN THIS STORM? Perhaps, perhaps not. The playing field is set, the pieces are spinning around each other. And it’s up to us, the spectators, to decide whether what unfolds before us is for good or ill, and whether the game has an end. Or whether the world, like language, moves in circles rather than along an axis that might lead us further, onward, upward. “You can’t lead people toward good,” writes Wittgenstein; you can only lead them somewhere. And perhaps the carnivalesque, riotous, dizzying world Krasznahorkai presents before us is precisely that place.
