László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó
Something is rotten – very rotten – in a Hungarian hamlet. It never stops raining. The district mill and estate have been closed. The buildings are all rundown, ramshackle, falling to pieces. Animals are mutilated or maimed. A handful of locals linger. Home-grown entertainment (the only on offer) tends to involve alcohol, arachnids or an accordion. Grim and grimy, life amid the cold, soggy cinders of an apparently unsuccessful collective community has come to a halt: time suspended within the horrors of physical space.
László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó (1985, compellingly translated by George Szirtes in 2012) feels like a vision, a hallucination, a delirious conspiracy against sanity, clean living and common sense. Everything feels bound to a close, remorseless repetition of calamity and decay – and which is conveyed by Krasznahorkai’s characteristic rhythmic and recurring style. All is strange atmospheric anaphora, which takes on the appearance at times of a deranged religious chant, trapping and entrancing the reader just as the locals have become imprisoned and hypnotized into their own hellish stagnant torpor of curious being.
Metaphors progressively thicken the text like blood or glue, usually invoking the weather at its worst or animals in bestial oblivion. This is a nasty place, full of magnificently nasty prose, words so intoxicating and disorientating that you feel as drunk as the locals. Each chapter is a never-ending paragraph, without line break and in very long sentences, heightening the glorious sense of tipsy allure and bewilderment: one long, syrupy black potion of text.
Drinking and dancing are indeed the principal activities here, and are linked in the book’s title for a ‘Satan tango’ is a late-night festivity undertaken amid the malaise, assumed when people find themselves sufficiently inebriated in the small hours. There is something of a diabolical social bop about the syncopated structure and style of Sátántangó too: rhythmically complex and energetic, everything moves backwards and forwards, stealthy like a cat, staccato and seamlessly disjointed.
This is a bizarre and malign world in crisis, about to be set upon by yet more catastrophes and calamities. It knows its world is bleak – but it self-consciously also knows that the domain beyond both the village and the novel are probably bleaker still. Coupled with this ‘grass is greener’ in reverse mentality there is also the quiet hope, sometimes manifest as firm belief, amid the villagers that their situation is either some sort of joke (bureaucratic in the Kafkaesque sense or cosmic in the Beckettian one), or else a big con that will shortly be revealed and put right. It is just a question of waiting not for god or Godot but something/someone more tangible to put things in their proper place.
Into this dubious optimism there comes talk of the return of a charismatic man, Irimías, who many thought dead and who might be as mad as the inhabitants, but seems to be their only hope. Is he a prophet? A miracle? Or the devil in disguise?
The dead or dying village is populated by semi-crazed lunatics and a rich assortment of weirdos: thieving, peeping Tom neighbours, continuously trying to cheat and swindle one another (when they’re not leering at each other’s wives); a (permanently) drunk doctor; a girl trying (without success) to kill her cat. Amid this bunch of misfits, inadequates and unfortunate souls, it is not hard for the captivating prodigal son to stand out and above everyone else. But his motives for returning immediately seem suspect and then snowball into a bleak, boozy insurgence of exploitation and extermination.
The traditions of Gogol, Kafka, Bulgakov and Beckett haunt Sátántangó (for all that it is a wildly original and uniquely voiced work), not least in their fiendish humour and the way characters are gleefully manipulated by shadowy forces lurking behind the plot/text. Allegories and images abound, as they do in much of László Krasznahorkai’s work. Religion is an especially common theme – and target, for the symbols are more often than not projected in order to be ridiculed, undermined, destabilized, smashed. Krasznahorkai knows that the Middle Ages and modernism are but points in an artificial calendar. Alienation, hope and prognostication are common to all times and peoples.
Objects, too, whether holy or merely commonplace (though that distinction is furiously challenged in the book) can take on an uncanny manifestation or a strange function via Krasznahorkai’s uncompromising, mysterious pen. Minor events (turning on a lamp, say), also taken on superficially intergalactic meanings. Nothing is too apparently irrelevant or inconsequential to be glanced at, troubled, pondered, analysed. And from this microscopic minutiae Krasznahorkai can zoom out in an instant to the farthest reaches of space or thought, to disquieting musings on a truly cosmic scale – tonal and conceptual shifts in the narrative that simultaneously calm and alarm.
Sátántangó is a brute: a beautiful, merciless monstrosity in prose. Yet it is so insistently grim and forbidding that its desolation becomes hilarious – gallows humour at its logical expansion point. It is a dark and brilliant novel: grand, intimate, chaotic, pleasingly peculiar. An unmissable, unforgettable masterpiece.
(In 1994, Hungarian director Béla Tarr turned the book into a seven-hour black-and-white film which admirably translates Krasznahorkai’s demanding, exquisite prose onto the screen – though it is perhaps wisest to turn the movie into a miniseries of several episodes rather than attempt to swallow it whole.)
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2025.