By Jay Fox
Brooklyn, NY, USA
About twenty-five hundred years ago, the philosopher
Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the
same river and he’s not the same man.” He certainly said more to expound upon
the subject, but,
unfortunately, we have no idea what. Heraclitus’ book has
been lost to time. The above passage, meanwhile, has only been passed down as a
fragment because it was frequently quoted by other authors. (Though the
accuracy of it is questionable since the ancients were less strict with the
rules of quoting than we are and tracking how one such quote evolves as the
centuries pile on is a lot like watching a game of telephone unfold.)
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| Jay Fox |
Regardless, the meaning of the aphorism remains the same: The
world and the people who inhabit it are always in a state of flux. Even if we
continue to call rivers by the same names, even if we continue to call people
by the same names, they are always different because the components that make them
up are always changing.
It is with Heraclitus’ aphorism in mind that one should
approach László Krasznahorkai's The World Goes On.
While much has been said of Krasznahorkai's gift
for writing sentences that are probably longer in words than most rivers are in
meters, far less has been said about how he managed to tie the
aphorism into the 20 intersecting stories that make up The
World Goes On. This is because it is easy to complain about how challenging
it is to read sentences of this length and far more difficult to try to
grasp the substance of the book. One of the stories, “A Drop of Water,” is
comprised of one panicky sentence that meanders through 29 pages. “Not on
the Heraclitean Path,” meanwhile, is a
two-sentence, one-page philosophical rumination that strongly evokes Heraclitus—as
well as Berkeley, Sartre, and Daniel Dennett—and reads about as easily as the frenzied
ramblings of an attorney jacked up on a fist full of Adderall.
Suffice to say, even when he is being (relatively) terse,
Krasznahorkai is difficult to fully understand. Some might even contend that he
can be so cerebral and long-winded that it’s next to impossible to parse any
meaning from his writing.
However, I don’t believe that this is so. One can begin to
parse out meaning within the book as one recognizes that there are numerous
references to Heraclitus and that water, waterfalls, streams, roads, traveling,
or the notion of change play a dominant role in each of the stories. (It is
possible that this idea of flux (or charge) is one of the primary philosophical
underpinnings of Krasznahorkai's corpus,
but I wouldn't know; this is so far the only book of his that I've read.) There
is also an underlying tension that courses throughout the stories and it seems
to tie the various characters (none reoccurring, I think) together.
With varying degrees of urgency, each narrator is struggling
with a desire for movement, typically in the context of an escape. In some
instances, it is nothing more than the casting off a certain kind of
complacency. In others, such as “Bankers,” it is the discomfort of seeing an
old friend only to realize that one of you has changed and that you are no
longer really friends, which here reveals a desire to return to the past. In
others still, there is a grave sense of anxiety shadowing the narration that is
reminiscent of one of the twentieth century's most profoundly harrowing novels,
Samuel Beckett's Malloy. There are even stories (“On
Velocity,” “That Gagarin,”) that express an aching need to escape the Earth or
life itself (“That Gagarin” again, “I Don’t Need Anything from Here”).
One of the more distressing stories in The World Goes
On is the first, “Wandering-Standing.” While other stories deal with
narrators who are hoping to escape a situation, the narrator of
“Wandering-Standing” describes the sense of being paralyzed by anxiety, as well
as a concomitant sense of futility and hopelessness.
Because the rather banal phrase of “paralyzed by anxiety” is
used so often, most English speakers glance over it without
seriously reflecting about what it actually means. However, it is an extremely
disturbing sensation. It is very similar to another collocation: Paralyzed by
fear. In both cases, there is a desire to be literally anywhere except for
where one is at that moment—to flee in all directions at once without one
specific destination in mind, just so long as one does not remain stationary.
However, Newtonian physics says that there's a bleakly poetic and ironic consequence
to this: If there are forces acting upon a single object/subject with the same
ferocity, but in opposite directions, then that object/subject remains
motionless.
In my view, this is a brilliant way to open a book that is a
meditation on change and movement. It also shows a writer capable of expressing
how this anxiety can make you increasingly panicked as you become more
anguished, and that it can leave you feeling foolish and despondent. It shows a
writer who does not examine human frailty from a distance, but someone who is
willing to share an experience that is anything but cerebral. He simply has a
manner of expressing this type of experience with more words than are necessary.
While
Krasznahorhai’s work is most certainly difficult, I would contend that it is
equally rewarding. Few writers, with the possible exception of Jose Saramago or
William Faulkner, have possessed the ability to write cascading sentences so
full of meaning and a uniquely dark sense of humor.
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Jay Fox is the author of The Walls and a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.
