Category: Indiana

The last chapter of László Krasznahorkai’s last (?—?) novel Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming provides the musically inclined reader with a very loud finale. 

The entire town is paralyzed in fear:

… what had been happening these past days, all of them were already living deep inside the fear that if they went outside they’d be the next to be murdered, raped, harassed, and disappeared without a single trace,…

And they are wondering about the gasoline tanks and their drivers:

… but unanimously, they agreed that these drivers were waiting for something, and that’s why they didn’t get out of their trucks, they just sat behind the steering wheel, not even eating anything, they just all kept their hands on the steering wheel, as if waiting for some sign that could arrive at any moment,…

As the reader expects, things get more ominous: The trucks disappear again, all animals leave the city, and knots of toads arrive from nowhere, signaling the imminent apocalypse.

… these lunatic toads had come forth from beneath the earth, as there below, in the bountiful darkness, they had all gone mad, and they had wrenched themselves out of the earth and emerged, at first they began to jump back and forth, who the hell would have thought that so many hideous toads existed beneath the earth ,…

…then he took out a cigarette from the Egyptian pack, and he lit up, and in that moment, as he clicked the flame of the lighter, and he was already about to take a drag on his cigarette,… … … 

A town has come to its end, a book has come to its end, and, simultaneously with me finishing reading it, here an era of an eerily similar nature has come to its end, too. 

The chapter To the Hungarians begins with newspaper editors discussing whether a certain tract they have received should be published. This tract is a hate sermon against the Hungarians, and some excerpts are read to us:

… and you’re spineless and two-faced, perfidious and contemptible, lying and rootless, because after you’ve exploited somebody, you do the same thing, namely you throw them away, you spit into their eyes, if they’re not good for anything else, because you’re primitive,…

The text culminates in a generalizing damnation of all of humanity.

… moreover this true monstrosity, while he has his bad moments, at times stumbles across a good intention within himself, but he quickly forgets about that, and it remains a mere memory, but he builds upon it later, as this sort of monstrosity is convinced that fate has selected him for good, or at the very least as the representative of truth, his own truth, …

In the meantime, violence is erupting in the city, a first to statues,

unknown assailants knocked over the bust of Countess Krisztina Wenckheim, but not only that, they completely smashed apart her face with a hatchet,

then to animals,

…on Wednesday at midnight he found two cattle frozen in their own blood, their heads were also smashed apart,…

and finally to humans

…Irén’s horrific death — as they found her on the sidewalk, having to see that beloved human face now smashed into fragments…

This is a chapter about fear, incited by propaganda, and backed by the actions of a nameless mob.

… she had a bad premonition about things, but what was so bad wasn’t even that people had forgotten the events of the past few days, but that the speed of all these events was like that of some kind of flood when it breaks across a dam, the events occurring and occurring one after the other,…

What we fear is not the singular incident but it becoming the daily routine. Krasznahorkai invokes this mechanism by using repeating patterns at the level of the narrative as well as that of language itself:

… because they came down Csabai Road, and they came down Dobozi Road, and they came from the Romanian border, they came from the direction of Eleki Road, from every single direction they came, rumbling, the pneumatic brakes screeching, then the engines revved, then the pneumatic brakes again, they came in a line, one after the other, and within the space of barely an hour the entire city was full of these gigantically enormous fuel carriers, and the whole thing was as if they’d ended up here by mistake, as if they wanted to go someplace completely different,…

All this, the threats, the violence, the feeling of foreboding, the arrival of an enormous number of gasoline tanks, is only preparation:

… and then suddenly — as if the entire thing were dependent on a single switch — the entire city was plunged into total darkness,…

It’s not that I don’t understand why a person has to die, but rather, I don’t understand why a person has to live, Baron Béla Wenckheim pondered,…

So begins this short chapter in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. It is a chapter about disruptions.

First, there is the disruption of space by time:

…where the train station used to be, there still stood a train station; […] — it’s just that these were not the same train stations, main roads, hospitals, castles, or chateaus, they just happened to stand in exactly the same spot where the old ones used to be; they weren’t the old ones, they were new, they were different, they were strange, and they — now that the scales had fallen from his eyes — they left him completely cold,…

How one experiences the return to one’s birth place after years of exile can vary. I have felt Wenckheim’s coldness, but also the opposite, and yet another, rather strange sensation of duplicity in which the exile becomes a second layer over the older home, so that one has the feeling to be at two different places at the same time.

So Wenckheim plots his own death, insists to be taken to the forest, follows the rails to the train station from where he wants to return by train, has carefully memorized the train schedule, and looks for a suitable curve that would make it impossible for the train to stop in time.

While waling between he tracks and waiting and pondering his question from the beginning, Wenckheim is disrupted by a flock of deer – their unquestioned existence proves his own question meaningless. But maybe too late.