Miklós Györffy

Homing

András Pályi: Megérkezés (Arrival). Kalligram, Pozsony (Bratislava), 314 pp.
László Krasznahorkai: Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletről folyó
(A Mountain from the North, a Lake from the South, Roads from the West,
a River from the East). Magvető, Budapest, 143 pp.
Péter Bíró: Hazafelé (Homing). Magvető, Budapest, 385 pp.

...

Not for the first time, László Krasznahorkai - whom both W.G. Sebald and Susan Sontag have praised highly - has come out with a book that is also special in appearance. The words that make up the long title, Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletről folyó (A Mountain from the North, a Lake from the South, Roads from the West, a River from the East), are arranged on the cover in a form reminiscent of a Japanese ink drawing. The text is divided into fifty chapters, some of which are in fact no more than passages of a few lines or a couple of pages, and is printed in a small area on unusually narrow pages. The book opens with chapter two. The blurb informs us that "There is no first chapter in this novel. There exists a first chapter, but not in the novel. It is in a different space, and each sentence in this novel takes its strength from this other space." Krasznahorkai's new novel - if indeed it is a novel: I would much rather call it a narrative, in the wider sense of the German Erzählung - should then be interpreted as the book and the textual form of some transcendental meaning, again based on esoteric and philosophical ideas.
The protagonist - and again this term is approximate, as it designates a shadow only, a void, the place of the protagonist - is 'Prince Genji's grandson'. In fact we learn of a single 'human' quality he displays, his sensitivity, his unstable nerves, which occasionally cause in him a physical indisposition close to fainting. The first sentences of the second chapter reveal that the setting is the southeastern district of Kyoto in Japan. Prince Genji's grandson arrives in the city by the ultra-modern Keihan express train. "Why him?", the uninitiated reader may wonder, possibly suspecting some Japanese cultural background behind it all, especially on learning later that the hero has led his ageless existence there for a thousand years already. And indeed, his name connects him to the protagonist of an important thousand-year-old literary work, Genji-monogatari, written by the lady-in-waiting Murasaki. Yet we are offered no more essential information about Krasznahorkai's protagonist. The essence emerges in the course of the novel - he embodies the continuity of a thousand years, of tradition, or, more precisely, of confidence in tradition.
The plot - again a term that has a highly restricted relevance in the novel - is played out in a fictitious spiritual space. Alhough, for the duration of the novel, it has a 'real' counterpart, a deserted, ruined Buddhist monastery in the Kyoto district, the relevance of its reality is weakened and eventually retracted from the narrative. In the first passages we are told that Prince Genji's grandson arrives in an empty train at the first station after Sichijo, then, in the eighth chapter, we read that no one had either alighted or boarded the train at the said spot. The same retraction takes place again at the end of the narrative - Prince Genji's grandson is waiting for a train from the opposite direction, and, when it arrives, no one boards it from the empty platform. In between the two hypothetical events at the station, the actual plot of the narrative unfolds: Prince Genji's grandson makes
a dream-like visit to a monastery. The monastery stands on its own site, and again it does not. When he tries for the first time, Prince Genji's grandson easily finds his way to the gate of the monastery, walking in the implausibly empty streets with the certainty of a somnambulist. However, on the second occasion, having returned to Keihan station, when on the point of leaving he is, for some reason, urged to make his way again along the same route, but he is no longer able to find his way to the monastery he had visited shortly before.
Ever since "the last decade of the Tokugawa age", Prince Genji's grandson has been in search of a garden. He first glimpsed it in an illustrated book called "One Hundred Beautiful Gardens", in which it was the last, the hundredth picture.

From that moment he was captivated by this secret garden; he could never banish it from his memory, he saw it always before him, though unable to get palpable evidence of its existence. He saw it, and eventually it was taken for granted that he wanted to see it in reality.

He gave orders for the garden to be found. The search had been carried on for centuries to no avail, when, at a certain point, through his exceptional sensitivity, Prince Genji's grandson felt that he would find this garden in the monastery in Kyoto. According to the book, the small garden in question is

a final consummation of the idea of a garden, for it can be described most precisely as one in which its creator 'had achieved simplicity'; a garden of which the author had written, with evident passion, that it expressed the infinitely simple through infinitely complex forces...

Prince Genji's grandson keeps running away from his regular escorts, who, drunk and perplexed, occasionally show up in various passages of the narrative, looking for their master in the empty streets, at the stations. He goes to the once meaning-laden, labyrinth-like space of the deserted monastery and walks though the shrines, at one point he loses consciousness for a long time, and he visits the disappointingly shabby, unkempt residence of the superior of the order, which is seemingly deserted yet filled with the requisites of civilisation. In the course of his dazed stroll he takes a fleeting look through a doorway.

For a brief moment he saw the doorway and what was behind it; he saw that seemingly unassuming, indeed deserted, even neglected garden; then he walked on, and after taking a few steps he forgot all about it; it bore no significance whatsoever for him; indeed, he neither sensed nor perceived that he had seen anything at all...

It turns out - for the reader but not for Prince Genji's grandson - that this was the garden he had been looking for and which he had failed to find again; it was this unbroken patch of moss with eight Hinoki cypresses, just eight by sixteen steps in area. Two perspectives are projected onto one another in Krasznahorkai's narrative. On one plane of the text we see through the eyes of Prince Genji's grandson, as his impressions are conveyed; on the other, we have the author's perspective, which is not separated formally: on the contrary, the tone is emphatically similar. In this latter perspective, everything that comes to Prince Genji's grandson's attention - the covered walkways carved of Hinoki cypress, the holy sutras inscribed on bamboo strips, the statue of Buddha with its head turned away, and even the small, hidden garden that did not really come into his sight - are seen, and on occasion interpreted, within a geohistorical and evolutionist perspective. Serious scientific knowledge is embedded in these passages, which emerge in the large-format composition of ritually surging periods. In several passages, for instance, we are told how "the terrible, because immeasurable and invisible, yet not infinite labour of billions of years" have created "that single, irreproducible moment of the garden" when Prince Genji's grandson walks by the entrance unseeing; another informs us, again in the ceremonially elevated tone typical of the narrative and in a mode that brings together narrower and wider perspectives, that the garden has nothing to do with amenity or entertainment because its essence is simplicity; it is a concentration of beauty impossible to augment further, "a strength of magic of simplicity, the impact of which no one could resist, and those who have seen it never wished to resist..." Whoever chances upon it and takes a glance at it refuses to talk about it afterwards; this garden demolishes their will in the first place, their intention to say a word of it.
The classical literary topos of the garden is to be interpreted in Krasznahorkai's narrative as an archaising, oriental symbol of the absolute or final truth, or perhaps of redemption. The garden exists, and Man is imperfect enough to find and see it. One is reminded of Kafka's The Trial, in which the parable "Before the Law" says that one cannot exclude the fact that the law exists, however, Man is designed as unsuitable enough not to get to it. According to Krasznahorkai's parable, of oriental ornamentation and rhetoric, it has not always been so, for the author of the book "One Hundred Beautiful Gardens" once saw and described the garden. So did the Buddhist monks who had died out in the monastery; they obviously saw and lived with the garden. Prince Genji's grandson is a 'grandson', a descendant of an ancient culture, in whom the religious desire for beauty and truth still survives, though in the meantime he has lost his way in a medium in which the fulfilment of this desire is no longer possible. The drinks machine at the station, the dog beaten to death, the drunken ghost rambling around, the Buddha statue turning its eyes from the 'rotten world', the whisky bottles found in the superior's room, the images of meaningless devastation in the shrines, and various other motifs clearly signal what sort of medium it is. The grandson's in-dispositions may also be understood as signs of a general malaise.
With his cult of beauty and tradition, Krasznahorkai's parable, both esoteric and critical of our civilisation at the same time, is obviously a Quixotic gesture. There are bound to be readers who are irritated by his stylised, ceremonial and aesthetising manner of expression and the ritualistic order of the text. My own example also proves that if one allows oneself to be carried away by the magic of this ritual, by the current of sentences at times gleaming with some dark irony, and by the scenic play of various overlapping planes and perspectives, one will preserve lasting memories of a book that is beautiful in the incorruptible sense of the word.

Miklós Györffy
reviews new fiction for this journal.