The lands that were wasted
T.S. Eliot and László Krasznahorkai on our spiral of decline
By João Ruy Faustino
Reviewed:
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot (1922)
Satantango, László Krasznahorkai (1985)
«Don’t read Genesis you idiot!» And, in a swift movement, she opened it in the Apocalypse.
– László Krasznahorkai, in Satantango
Stagnation and decline are two concepts that are inevitably locked in a relation with time. They are usually assigned to distinguishable – albeit not precisely measurable – ‘eras’. Upon reflection, one can grasp the extent to which the concepts are influential in our understanding of History. Previously, discussion of decline would be compensated with references to past days of ‘gold’ or ‘glory’. That has since gone out of fashion—for good reason. Uncovering the false dichotomy between ‘rise’ and ‘decline’ is a major advancement in our perception. Much the same way we finally understood that ‘utopia’ is ‘dystopia’.
The Waste Land and Satantango are two works that greatly contributed to this breakthrough. The poem and the novel eloquently point out the eternal quality of deterioration, detailing precisely why we cannot escape from its shadow. Anyone who says that the feeling of inertia and sluggishness portrayed in the two works is strictly temporal or derived from the context in which they were written is mistaken. Both go to great lengths in order to not be tied to a strict conception of time.
In Satantango, László Krasznahorkai goes to the point of making the clocks not work—each tells a different time, thus not telling the time at all. The Waste Land is more complicated, it starts by alluding to the calendar and seasons. It also quotes a Hermann Hesse essay in which the German author laments the ‘downfall’ of Europe some decades prior to World War Two… The poem itself is set at a rapid, although identifiable rhythm. What makes T.S. Eliot’s poem immune to time is the atemporal inertia which the poem transmits, in addition to its enduring quality. The Waste Land conveys a sensation that what is below and above us is so immense that it should demotivate us, slow us, and turn us irrelevant. It is contradictorily waking us up for the slumber.
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
– T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land
And what should one do with the historical framework of Satantango? Published in 1985 in an eclipsing communist Hungary, the anguishing paralysis the novel portrays appears to be a parallel to the reality of the time. The story is set in a co-op, the characters make several references to Soviet products, things have stopped working: “We can’t go on like this.” The context is certainly relevant, however it shouldn’t dominate the interpretation of the work. The few mentions of capitalist products (Coca-Cola, etc.) give sway to the interpretation that the swamp is not confined to one side of the Iron Curtain… The many intrusions of paragraphs from a Geology book throughout parts of the narrative, in which the formation of the Hungarian territory is told, suggests that Satantango involves something much larger… That what is written is something much more timeless in respect to the nation.
This epeirogenic rise of Tisza’s massif is the only possible explanation for the fast disappearance of the region’s lakes. After their disappearing, in the Pleistocene, small lakes, swamps… The text of Dr. Benda, in a local newspaper, seemed to him unconvincing, and with unsolid argumentative logic, (…), he asked himself: was this a prophetic work, describing the world after the disappearance of man, or did he have in his hands the story of the surface in which he should live?
– László Krasznahorkai, in Satantango
Knowing the history and the feel of the region, one can say that Satantango is not apropos of Hungary exclusively—but of all Central Europe. Satantango has Mitteleuropa written all over it. Living in the territories between Gdansk and Ljubljana for the last centuries is seeing History happening without having any control over it: armies come, armies go; occupiers settle, occupiers are expelled; empires rise, empires fall… That is what one can call the origin of the powerlessness expressed in Satantango. The characters are reduced to expecting. And they wait for the devilish character of Irimias—who comes to haunt the town.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
– T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land
It is always raining in the co-op of Satantango. It rains because the décor demands mud in which the characters fall and strand. Because it calls for mould in the walls and for the constant drip-drop bothering Futaki and the others who sit in the town’s tavern. All that the décor asks for it gets… Spider webs, squeaky floors, rust, abandoned buildings. László Krasznahorkai is pleading for you to believe that the world is rotting.
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
– T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land
All the characters dance with the devil, the external structure of the book is based on tango—as the title suggests. The six chapters from the first part go forward, and the six chapters from the second go back. It is inculcated in the book’s architecture the dichotomy between rise and fall—all that goes up must necessarily go down.
The narrative itself is disjunct and febrile, often dizzying to the reader. An especially impactful chapter is one in which a girl tortures a cat with the same frenzied delirium as the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s Black Cat. In fact, the chapter seems to be an homage to Poe’s short story, with the cat similarly serving as an omen. Other literary influences are clearly felt as well, Kafka as it has been pointed out by many—some passages seem to stem from an absurdist version of The Trial. The character of Irimias itself, the undead cursed figure that simultaneously comes to terrify and lead the town – if it comes from anywhere – comes from Nietschze.
Why are the villagers so suddenly captivated by Irimias’s leadership? And what does his stewardship mean? Was it only his chapter long speech? his continuing ethereal presence throughout the first part of Satantango? Firstly, Irimias is the only true character of the book. He is the only one who has agency—and consequently density. The disoriented villagers, despite being portrayed with detail, are hollow. Something which is not the same thing as being shallow. Secondly, as it is inscribed in our collective imagination, the Devil is the embodiment of who we originally want as our leader.
The fruitless escape from the co-op, which had in part been delayed by the weather and poor transport, is revealing of what the novel intends to convey. The exodus from almost total isolation from the outside world – instead of representing a continuation of the allegory – represents the first genuine glimpse into the character's dramatic material condition. Not only does the reader treat their hardship differently starting from the second part of the book, the characters do as well. They become political animals for the first time. They feel exhilarated by freedom, they feel hope to the point of pain, they start to become genuinely angry and questioning. When Irimias motivated them to escape through his hypnotising speech, it seemed that the feeling of community installed was merely artificial. However, genuine association between the villagers spontaneously arises throughout the trek—despite everything. At the same time, the failure of Irimias becomes more and more obvious. He begins to disintegrate.
The book doesn’t give easy answers. It is unclear if the escape was really a liberation. The characters seem to suffer even more, they don’t find what they were looking for. But they do recover politics—a whole new cage:
So it was that the parochial European subject, still accustomed to premodern custom and premodern liberty, suddenly confronted a world in which you couldn’t simply abscond to the next village over or take refuge in the monastery to escape the prince’s jurisdiction. As the characters in the novels of, say, Stendhal are chagrined to discover, the long arm of the prince now extended to the next village over, to the far-flung monastery or charterhouse, to every village and monastery—indeed, to every person, place, and thing within the prince’s frontiers.
– Sohrab Ahmari, in The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault
What Satantango and The Waste Land essentially speak to is the perpetuity of decline. That things can, and regularly do, lessen and decay for centuries—without being replaced by anything. The moment we live in today is very symptomatic of this. Our age of democratic decline is not exactly being followed by a rise in authoritarianism, such as it happened in the 1920s. Instead, the enemies of democracy today are only focused on crossing boundaries—on ‘degenerating’ democracy. We have seemingly lost the ability of building institutions from the ground up. Perhaps even as importantly, we’ve lost the ability of detonating sunken structures that motivate no one.
There is no place to go where we can find something different – just as in Satantango – but there are still some things worth rediscovering. Deterritorialization is still possible and possibly even necessary—new doors of perception, new environments. It seems like this is everything we can possibly do. According to T.S. Eliot and László Krasznahorkai, it is.
When we think we’re about to free ourselves, we’re actually merely replacing the chains.
– László Krasznahorkai
Notes from a news junkie
Interesting perspective on our economic dynamics. “Economics has become something too serious for economists—and even businessmen.”
To this day I’m not sure if the influence of Leo Strauss is growing or declining.