László Krasznahorkai | Az ellenállás melankóliája (The Melancholy of Resistance) / 2000

the frightened rabbit flattens against the grass

by Douglas Messerli

 

László Krasznahorkai Az ellenállás melankóliája, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes as The Melancholy of Resistance (New York: New Directions, 2000)

 

One of the major publishing events for the US and Canadian audience of 2000 was the publication of László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance. This spellbinding, phantasmagoric fiction is so powerful, that even now, weeks after reading it, I feel its effects.

    The story is somewhat complex, but not as crucial as it may seem, the characters, the scene, and Krasnahorkai's tumbling sentences mattering far more than plot. Throughout, it is the language that seems to be the subject of this book, the black ink broodingly charging across the page (Krasznahorkai resists periods almost as he might the plague) like an army, as opposed to the slightly stumbling amble of its loveable hero Valuska, who makes his way through the town, head-down, dreaming of the planets and stars.

     Valuska Plauf, to most of the townspeople and even to his mother, is an idiot. But observing him in his first scene—as he ducks into a local pub to perform, using the drunks around as actors in a rudimentary theatrical representation of an eclipse—we quickly grow to love this oaf nearly as much as his employer-mentor, the town's composer-genius, György Eszter.

 

                        'We are standing in this...resplendence. Then, suddenly, we see

                        only that the round disc of the Moon...' here he grabbed Sergei

                        and propelled him from his orbit round the house-painter to an

                        intermediary position between the Sun and the Earth, 'that the round

                        disc of the Moon...creates an indentation....a dark indentation on

                        the flaming body of the Sun...and this indentation keeps growing...

                        You see?'  ....'You see...and soon enough, as the Moon's cover

                        extends...we see nothing but this brilliant sickle of sunlight in the

                        sky. And the next moment,' whispered Valuska in a voice choking

                        with excitement, running his eyes to and fro in a straight line

                        between driver, warehouseman and house painter, 'let us say it's one

                        p.m....we shall unexpectedly...with a few minutes...the air about us

                        cools...Can you feel it?...The sky darkens...and then...grows perfectly

                        black? Guard dogs howl! The frightened rabbit flattens itself against

                        the grass! Herds of deer are startled into a mad stampede! And in this

                        terrible and twilight...even the birds ('The birds!' cried Valuska, in

                        rapture, throwing his arms up to the sky, his ample postman's cloak

                        flapping open like bat's wings)....'the very birds are confused and

                        settle in their nests.

 

     Delivering clothes and food for Eszter, who has long before moved out of his dreadful wife's house and life, Valuska is the caring and loving being who the great hermit holds near, the one being who represents to him the possibility of salvation for mankind. Valuska's portrayal of a horrifying eclipse, in some senses, is a kind divination of the forces at work around him.

     Indeed from the very beginning of this fiction, Krasnahorkai presents a rabble that puts fear into any God-fearing being, particularly threatening Valuska's mother, the orderly Mrs. Plauf, forced to take a train ride, and terrified of the experience. She returns to the comfort of her over-decorated and clearly quite kitschy home to break out the preserves she has long-before bottled, afraid that her son, whom she has disowned, may attempt to return.

      Valuska, too sweet and innocent to see the evil brewing in the world around him, cannot even comprehend the chilling changes that seem to be occurring throughout the town. A great tree has fallen, filth has piled up throughout the streets, and, on the day of this fiction's events, a circus has settled into the main town square, attracting a huge contingent of outsiders, who sit in the dark quietly staring as they await to see the circus' major attraction: a gigantic stuffed whale!

      Eszter's wife, meanwhile, is making plans of her own to take over the town and become a political force. Her plots include Mrs. Plauf, primarily because she wishes to reach her husband through Valuska; the Chief of Police, with whom she is having an affair; and her husband, who she believes will fortify her position among the city leaders. It is she who has invited the circus to town.

     Valuska is awed and slightly terrified by his viewing of the whale, running back to Eszter to tell him what he has seen, only to be interrupted in his voyage home by Mrs. Eszter and her fascistic plans. When Eszter perceives what her intentions are, that she intends to move back into his house and claim her position as his wife, he has no choice—and just like Valuska, finds it difficult to resist the strong forces of evil around him—but, with the boy in tow, to leave his house temporarily for the first time in years! What he sees horrifies him and, ultimately, the readers, as we suddenly are forced to see that the world outside his book-lined, music-loving house has fallen into ugly disrepair. Eszter can hardly bear the appearance of things, and quickly retreats to the house, struggling to erect a barricade of boards from within to protect him from what he has just witnessed.

      Valuska returns to the circus, hoping to catch a glimpse again of the whale, but what he sees in the faces of the waiting campers, come to town to see the show, frightens him. Summoned by Mrs. Eszter to her barren apartment, he discovers the Police Chief in a drunken stupor upon the bed, while Mrs. Eszter and other town leaders confer about what they now see as a dangerous situation abrew. Commanded to visit the Police Chief's children and put them to bed, then to return to the square and apprise the situation, Valuska is torn between warning his dear friend, György, or carrying out his new "duties."

      He chooses the latter, becoming witness to the violence and menacing behavior of the children and overhearing a conversation between the circus manager and a strange unseen figure, The Prince, who speaks in an unknown language, and who apparently is about to use the mob for his purposes of creating chaos.

      Transformed by his experiences, similar to Mr. Eszter's shift in focus, Valuska runs off to tell Mrs. Eszter and others of the possible "revolution," only to be grabbed up one of the leaders of the already destructive mob that has begun the night of terror. By the time the planets have shifted into the following morning, the mob who has destroyed much of the town and killed several individuals, including Valuska's mother, who has taken to the streets to find her son.

     Although the rabble has worn itself out, the army is called in to aid in the town's protection. Valuska awakens to comprehend that he has played a role in this terrible mayhem, suddenly demanding he realize that the gloriously ordered world of the heavens is all a myth, that there is no natural goodness or objective faith to be found, not even within himself.

     Mrs. Eszter quickly takes charge, falling in love with the commanding officer who has temporarily taken over the city and who convenes a criminal court. Valuska has been told to scurry away, following the train tracks, but he is caught and, through Mrs. Eszter's decree, incarcerated in the mental hospital.

     Eszter retreats to the room where Valuska slept, while his wife takes over the house to begin her not-so-subtle dictatorship. The book ends with her speech over the grave of Mrs. Plauf, the woman she detested, but who now, in her political doublespeak, she describes as the town hero.

      In short, evil has won out over those who dream and wonder about the harmonies of the universe. In Krazahorkai's bleak tale, the world can possibly be cleaned up on the outside, but remains rotten within. Yet we do not fall into despair over his fable, for we have seen something that the others cannot, that the true heroes of this world are the weak, the beings who cannot resist these dark forces, but at least have attempted to reach for the skies. As the title suggests, the resistance of such evil is nearly always a melancholic action. For it "passes," "but it does not pass away." It survives, strangely enough, in those least likely to survive.

 

Los Angeles, January 23, 2001

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (January 2011)

Antonio José Ponte | In the Cold of the Malecón and Other Stories / 2000

leaving the door open

by Douglas Messerli

 

Antonio José Ponte In the Cold of the Malecón and Other Stories, translated from the Spanish by

Cola Franzen and Dick Cluster (San Francisco: City Lights, 2000)

 

 

The title story of the volume of stories, In the Cold of the Malecón by Cuban Antonio José Ponte is indicative, perhaps, of the subtlety and themes of these short tales as a whole. In a fashion that might remind one of a short dialogue by Beckett or even Ionesco, a wife queries her husband concerning his visit to their son—not only about the look of his apartment and the food they ate, but how it was cooked, and, most particularly, about their activities after dinner. It is apparent from the start of this dialogue, however, that the wife has already heard it many a time, and when, and the tale's end, she asks her husband to repeat a section, we know it is a never-ending ritual, that the recounting is something they repeat over and over to while away their own empty lives, their own loneliness. But for the reader, the details of the visit reveal, on the surface, very little. The son lives in so small of an apartment, his father claims it could almost fit into one of their rooms. There is no evidence of any other person in their son's life. The son chopped the meat they had brought him into small pieces and had eaten it rare, not wanting "to lose the blood in cooking." After dinner, the father—in what appears as an absurd request—asks to see the "whores again." He is told that it is a bad night for walking along the Malecón, the sea, with the surf so high; they may not see any. Yet the two do go out and spot a few prostitutes along the sidewalk. One of them looks at the son, for just a moment, the father explains, "Like when you mistake someone in the street and realize the mistake immediately." The two then return home for a welcome cup of coffee. 

     It is the very "strangeness" of this seemingly meaningless tale, retold over and over by the couple, that forces the reader—at least this reader—to reread the tale in search of greater significance. Obviously, since the father has brought the meat with which the son so carefully cooks, it is something precious; as we discover throughout these tales, nutritious food, as well as space, is a rare commodity in contemporary Cuba. But why the fascination with whores? The woman realizes her mistake in even looking at the son: is he that disinterested in appearance? Is he gay? And why has the father insisted upon seeing them? Quite obviously they represent something outside normality, something unusual in the parents' experience, something, perhaps, not only sexual and immoral, but—in their illegal activity—more open and freer? Ponte provides the reader no explanations. The parents' conversation is, in fact, absurd; but then, as the author makes it quite apparent, so too is contemporary Cuban society.

     In another story located by the beach, two brothers, awaiting the return of their father (the parents have evidently gone off to care for a sick relative or friend), rearrange the furniture each night, alternating their arrivals into a totally dark room through which they must pass without bumping into the rearranged furniture to reach the light. Ponte pushes this slight tale into nearly metaphysical dimensions, as the reshiftings of the room come to represent a break in the relationships of objects, of past to present, of action to life, as at story's end the older of the two boys discovers in the dark a door "that's never been there before," which he opens and "advances among the souls."

     In "Station H," an old man arrives by train at a desolate station to play a game a chess with an unknown opponent, who turns out to be a young boy. But the old man never meets him, the game is never played. The old man disappears and the young boy makes away with the chess set the old man left. "This Life" is about individuals who ride the trains, almost like hobos of the American 1920s and 1930s, with no fixed destination and no apparent reason save poverty and utter boredom. The best story in this collection, "Heart of Skitalietz," goes even further in its absurdity than the others, as a despairing employee of an "institute" misses days of work only to discover, upon his return, that his office has been moved, most employees let go, and his own job terminated. Like the "disinherited wanderers of Russia," the Skitalietz, he begins to wander the streets of Havana, encountering a dying woman—an ex-astrologer who he first met via a crossed telephone connection—with whom he develops a strange relationship. But as their wanderings through often blacked-out sections of the city verge more and more on anarchic behavior, they are arrested and taken away to clinics where they might be resocialized. Released, the hero is called to take away his friend, now near death. They return to her apartment, stripped of all objects in their absence, where he places her against the wall and rushes out to buy a bed. By the time he has returned, she is dead.

     Ponte's tales in this volume are not just about purposelessness, about individuals fed-up with their lives seeking pleasure and freedom; in the world this author conjures up everything has been shifted about so completely, so many times, there is no definition even of what enjoyment and freedom might look like. What is change in a society that, while incessantly shifting, never changes? What is freedom in a world in which the individual is left only sexuality as an independent political act? In a world in which great actions have led to nothing, little acts mean everything—while resulting equally in nothing at all. Death becomes the only relief, something from which the survivors have no choice but to walk away in a kind of silent envy and respect, leaving the door open.

 

San Francisco, 2000

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2008).

Franz Hellens | Memoirs from Elsinore / 2000

leaving elsinore

by Douglas Messerli

 

Franz Hellens Memoirs from Elsinore, translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Peter Lang, 2000)

Although he is little known today—even in his native Belgium—Franz Hellens was a recognized novelist the 1920s through the 50s in his homeland; without Hellens's existence, notes fellow Belgian Henri Michaux, he would never have written his own first book. Author of over 100 books of fiction, poetry, essays, plays, art criticism and other genres, Hellens's most noted works are the surrealist-fantasy Mélusine of 1921, Le Naïf (with an introduction in the Italian edition by Giuseppe Ungaretti) and Moreldieu of 1946.                                                                                                                   

 

   Memoirs from Elsinore (1954) is from the very beginning the kind of novel where you know the narrator is not only unreliable but is going to precipitate a great many disasters, and, accordingly, an uneasy feeling settles over this book from its first pages.    

    The young Hamlet of this fiction, Théophile, is a chubby and extremely healthy terror, whom his parents immediately dub as "the monster." His relationship with his mother is nearly incestuous; but it is his shock at seeing his work-horse of a father unexpectedly cry in his presence that haunts him throughout the early part of his life. The father soon dies and the uncle quickly enters the scene to marry the widow. Not unlike Hamlet, young Théo is as suddenly sent off to school, a Jesuit boarding school in Antwerp. Fortunately (or unfortunately for the other figures of the book) Théo is allowed visits with his mother's cousin, Jean, a local canon, but also a free-thinking alcoholic with a live-in maid-mistress, the bosomy Toinette. Expectedly, Théo makes trouble at the school, forcing a young schoolmate to steal for him a poisonous snake he has seen at the zoo, and, with money from the Canon, he is off on a truly monstrous career. He returns home (snake in hand) only to have his arm blown away by an old grenade in the attic. His revenge on his step-father is now determined, and, having put the snake in the protection of his beloved Séraphine—the gardener's daughter—he plots patricide. But before it can be completed, his Ophelia dies by the sting of the viper. Now in revenge for his own father's cuckolding, his mother's honor, and his young beloved's death, he plants the snake in his uncle's bed and the inevitable occurs. 

     Ousted from Eden, Hellens's young Hamlet begins his voyage through life. Théo escapes to sea, where he is entrusted by the Captain of the Slonsk to keep a diary-log of the ship's many voyages. On their very first voyage, Théo murders a woman aboard who toys with his and other's affections, and begins a long life aboard the ship lived mainly in fevers and forgetfulness. He awakens just long enough for the mad captain to tell him of the existence of his goddess-like daughter, Upanisha, of whom he catches a glimpse in his feverish sleep. Hellens seems almost unable to sustain or, perhaps, explain the surreal circumstances of Théo's love-hate relationship with Upanisha; but suffice it to say that this strange portion of the novel ends in his destroying the woman and the boat. He is saved; how we are never told.

    Returning home to his mother, he is suddenly forced to face a new rival in the previously unreported step-brother Victor, who is attempting to sell the lovely house and grounds in order to create a factory that will make him his fortune. The brothers, innately hating one another, are further embittered as Victor's intended bride, the mayor's daughter Amanda, increasingly falls in love with and outwardly flirts with the older Théo. But when the mother dies, in part because of an argument with Victor, Théo simply packs his bag and leaves. Just as he mystified Upanisha's murder and the destruction of the boat at sea, so Hellens turns to fable at novel's end, as Théo trudges off into the snow, never to be seen again.

    It is difficult to know what to make of a novel in which the major events of the book are clouded over, and other actions, such as they are, are presented "off-stage" or in brief glimpses. Yet the psychological portrait Hellens paints of his anti-hero is a strong one, at times extremely moving and touching and at other times enormously frightening and unsettling. And that alone is worth reading this most unusual work.

 

Los Angeles, 2000

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008).

Eliseo Alberto | Caracol Beach / 2000

 responsible  parties

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eliseo Alberto Caracol Beach, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (New York: Knopf, 2000)

 

 At the heart of Eliseo Alberto’s terrifying and mesmerizing novel, Caracol Beach, first published in English in 2000, is a mad ex-soldier, Alberto Beto Milanés, a man of Cuban descent who fought in Ibondá de Akú, Angola in a Cuban detachment, of which he was the only survivor. Plagued by horrifying memories of his fellow soldiers and a seemingly real, if invisible, Bengal tiger, Beto Milanés, who has tried and failed at suicide, is determined to find others to help him die.

    By coincidence a group of students just graduated from the nearby Emerson Institute, have traveled to the wealthy spit of land named Caracol Beach in Florida to celebrate at the home of their fellow classmate, Martin Lowell, who has invited his friends to the house without his parent’s knowledge. Martin, the best student at the Institute, has just discovered his love for a young girl, Laura Fontanet, of Cuban heritage. She is also the girlfriend of the school athlete, Tom Chávez, and a rivalry between the two boys lies at the heart of their concerted effort to save her life when she is later threatened by the ex-soldier.

     In short, the series of events which ends so sadly with the deaths of both boys (deaths foretold and reported throughout even the earliest chapters of this fiction) seems terribly random. Had they only not run of beer and wine, had they only not happened to visit the liquor store at the same moment that Beto Milanés was prowling the neighborhood, had they simply refused to go along with the mad man’s horrible demands, had the local Sherriff, Sam Ramos, been in his office instead of a new deputy, Wellington Perales, when the calls concerning the boys’ activities first came through….if only.... At first this tale seems so utterly meaningless, a series of random encounters which end in a tragedy and painful memories that later lead others to self-destruction as well. But it is at precisely this point that novelist Alberto, the son of the great Cuban poet Diego Alberto, makes it clear that his fiction is not a thinly-veiled retelling of real events, that it is not even a truly realist fiction.

     Caracol Beach, in fact, had its roots in Gabriel García Marquez’s script-writing course at the International School of Film and Television in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba in 1989. As the assistant for that course, Alberto shared stories with the students, one of which, a tale in which young Puerto Ricans were pursued for an entire night by an unknown assailant, clearly became the embryonic center of this novel. In the class, various students suggested wild alternatives for the attending plot, including suggestions for the inclusion of an Armenian, a drug addict, a Bengal tiger, and other elements, many of which found their way into Alberto’s work of 1998.

     And parallel to its development, one might argue, Caracol Beach is not at all a story of random acts, but like the collaborative process which helped bring it to life, is ultimately a story of tightly interlinked events, of human actions and failures that are so interwoven that, at the close of this story, one sees the young boys’ deaths as strangely fated.

     The mad ex-soldier, first of all, is not just a misfit who has found his way to the Beach salvage yard where he lives. Ramos, a former soldier himself, was the man who watched over the recovery of Beto Milanés, and developed such a close relationship with the unfortunate young man, that when it came time to part ways, the survivor felt betrayed. It is not entirely accidental, accordingly, that when Ramon retires from the army and comes to work at the Caracol Beach Police Department, that the young soldier has moved nearby. Perhaps if Ramos, instead of ignoring the suicidal soldier had befriended him again, Beto Milanés’ killing may have been prevented.

     But Ramon, himself, has problems. The night of these events he is not only busy training a clearly inept new deputy, the son of another army buddy, but is plagued by the behavior of his own son, Nelson (who uses the name Mandy), a transvestite who he has not seen for weeks, and who, as a judo and black-belt expert has not only just beaten his own lover, Tigran Androsian, but attacked a man who attempts to make advances toward him at the local bowling alley and bar. It is this series of events, along with the nuisance call by the town busybody, Mrs. Dickinson, that takes Ramos away from his desk during the crucial hours during which the young boys are forced by the soldier to destroy an automobile, kill a dog, and attack a prostitute, Gigi Col, a friend of Mandy’s and Tigran (it is notable that the mad soldier’s son was also a prostitute). And it is Ramos’ decision to visit his estranged son that puts the young deputy in charge of the attack upon two boys who enter the junkyard to save their beloved Laura.

     Laura, who is at the center of the boys’ world at the moment of these events, is, herself, a kind of lost soul, having witnessed as a child the wasting away of her Cuban-born mother, a woman she imagined watching over her when she was young, and who, herself, loved to visit Caracol Beach. As she enters the area to attend the party, she conjures up the mother, pounding at the car window to tell her not to go to the Martin home.

     The wealth of Martin’s parents, moreover, draws these young people to his home, and the parent’s evident permissiveness, expressed in a telephone conversation never received by Martin, suggests that, despite Martin’s own previous sense of responsibility, they might have attended more to his whereabouts that night.

     The school gym teacher, Agnes MacLarty, invited to the party at Caracol Beach, and who had had a sexual relationship with her student Tom, might have been able to protect her charges from their destinies; but that night she had a date with a charming poet and scholar (he has written a thesis on the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas), Theo Uzcanga, whom she later marries.

      In short, as the lover of astronomy, Alberto Beto Milanés, might have said, the events of that night of June 20, 1994, were “in the stars.”

      As the author himself makes clear, particularly in the passage where Martin and Tom enter the junkyard, fighting each other for a few moments in a combat that encompasses their desires to save Laura, to retreat, and to turn to one another in love:

 

                When Martin turned and began his retreat, Tom suddenly tackled him and

                they both rolled down the slope of wrecked metal in the auto salvage yard.

                They fought hard and senselessly and with love. How can that terrible moment

                be described if neither of them lived to tell about it?

 

     With that remarkable questioning of his own narrative techniques, Alberto retreats from his seemingly objective narration (something he does numerous times throughout the book) to question not only his authorial motives, but the meaning of it all.

 

                 Would it be better to use this page to reflect on the indecency of wars,

                 which do not end when the politicians sign their peace treaties but live

                 on in the survivors, the victims of an arduous campaign that still goes

                 on inside each one of them, between their guts and their hearts?

                     …But does that make sense? What good would it do? Tom and Martin

                 won’t read this book: if the document exists, this fiction about facts, it

                 is because they could not rely on the shield of letters, sentences, para-

                 graphs, parapets of words. The only way to change destiny would be to

                 lie, and not even a lie would save men: death, too, is a tyrant.

 

     Alberto here defends fiction as an act of imagination rather than a telling of historical or political truth, which he recognizes would have to be a kind of lie. Life does not represent, after all, an orderly pattern of experience, but is a “totality of coincidences. And accidents” that includes everyone.  It is only through the imagination, through a recreation of reality, that forgiveness and redemption can be found.

     And this is, at last, a novel of just such redemption. Mandy and her lover return to their relationship, with Ramos’ blessing. Agnes MacLarty, at book’s end, is pregnant with her second child. Laura, after a period of psychological recovery, is studying psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles. When one of Tom and Martin’s young friends is caught up in depression and joins a religious sect, the Children of Heaven, which brings him to the edge of suicide, Ramos, Uzcanga, officer Wellington Perales, Laura’s father, and the headmaster of the Emerson Institute secretly travel to Utah, attacking the “monastery” and rescuing the boy.

     Out of these seemingly meaningless deaths grows the awareness within the community of Caracol Beach that everyone is in some way responsible and that they need to admit their failures, forgiving one another and themselves. Perhaps more than any novel since Heimito von Doderer's Everyman a Murderer, Alberto's Caracoal Beach recognizes that we are all, in a small way, "responsible parties." By novel’s end, fortunately, “clemency” is finally realized—if only as crossword puzzle word—and mercy is awarded for those who have survived.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2000

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (August 2010).