he had to endure the knowledge that he wasn’t finding out the clue to the strangeness. - a critical agenda for Seiobo There Below - Bernhard, Pynchon, and the Italian crossword puzzle

The first big joke, and it’s a good one, in László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below comes at the very beginning of Chapter 2, pp. 17-19, where the dismayed reader is presented with an entire crossword puzzle.  In Italian.  The humor comes from imagining the scowls and obscenities of prospective Krasznahorkai specialists, especially those without Italian.  If they are lucky the puzzle will turn out to be a red herring, for example a parodic gesture at the idea of a puzzle novel.

The translator Ottilie Mulzet, in interviews, and many reviewers have overgeneralized when describing Seiobo.  They perhaps have to.  Is Krasznahorkai writing about the presence or absence of the sacred in the world, whatever “the sacred” is, or the way the sense of the sacred affects a small and particular sort of person – prophets, visionaries, and martyrs?  Is he describing the way art works, or the way it works on a few sensitive seekers?  I have observed a temptation with Krasznahorkai criticism to move to metaphysics too quickly, when the argument is more at the level of psychology.  Krasznahorkai himself may believe otherwise, but that is not relevant.

Take the architect and amateur expert on Baroque music who stars in the novel’s funniest chapter (377, “Private Passion”).  He is giving a lecture on Bach to eight innocent souls in a small town Hungarian library.  He is incoherent and threatening, his audience finds him incomprehensible, and he is a grotesque, obese and absurd (“because everyone sensed how these trousers were continuously, ceaselessly sliding downward across those three thick folds of fat, down toward the thighs,” etc., with these long sentences, always etc., 345), all of which is humorous in one way or the other.  Then there is this:

… it must be in that very moment when the Baroque resounds in music, because we should have ended there, at the pinnacle, and not have allowed everything to happen just as it might, and then to lie, to blurt out these morbid lies and learn how to enthuse over such music as this Mozart or that Beethoven or over whatever it was all those ever more modest talents, those ever more commonplace figures, were able to conjure up out of our hats…  not even to mention the most repulsive of all, this imperial criminal named Wagner and his zealous supporters, let’s not even mention it, because if I even just think about it – the lecturer shook his head, giving expression to his disbelief – it is not shame that overcomes me, nor the consciousness of degradation, but rather a dark desire for murder, because…  (355)

Well, we get the idea, and in fact at this point Krasznahorkai wanders over to the stunned audience (“completely drained, not daring to escape, their hopes that at one point there might be a normal end to this lecture long since extinguished”), none of whom realize that they are being treated to a perfect chapter-long parody of Thomas Bernhard.  Which is too bad for them, because it is hilarious.

The speaker is totally consumed by Baroque music to the point of derangement.  He finally leaves in tears, not singing but shouting the music of Bach.  The chapter is a comic triumph.

It comes fairly late in the book, where it left me with the terrible realization that if this chapter was a parody of another author, than any – or all – of the other chapters might also be parodies, perhaps of Hungarian authors I have never even heard of, or worse, of authors I know well but failed to recognize.  Which chapter is the Sebald parody?  The last chapter begins with a parody of the first sentence of Gravity’s Rainbow – is the whole chapter a Pynchon parody?  Pynchon appears in the epigraph, too, which mangles the Thelonious Monk quotation Pynchon used as the epigraph to his 2006 Against the Day.  The jokes gets tangled.

This is worse than the Italian crossword puzzle.  What really makes me suspicious is that in this novel that is about nothing but the power and intricacy of all sorts of art, there is no example of prose fiction.  What if Krasznahorkai somehow wove his argument about fiction into his own fiction?

Good luck to everyone toiling in the Krasznahorkai mine.  I am eager to see what you dig up.

The post’s title is on p. 116.  It is not especially out of context here.

Now, a holiday, when I need my skillet green bean casserole recipe.  Back to usual business – Dickens, Turgenev – starting Monday.

I have read all fourteen and a half Dickens novels.

Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) was the last Dickens novel I had not read, which means that I have now read them all.  Rather than write a post about this milestone, I will quietly celebrate on my own.

That took a lot less time than I had expected.  It was a little too quiet, if you know what I mean.  Guess I’ll write something.

I am never sure what people – by people I of course mean book bloggers – are really planning when they declare, after reading two novels, or maybe a novel-and-a-half, that they have fallen in love and will soon read “all” of an author’s work.  They should investigate the “all” a bit before making their empty declarations.  “All” can be pretty dire, even for a major writer.

Many years ago, I was the proud reader of all of Thomas Pynchon, not just the five published books but every published scrap of text uncovered by his lunatic bibliographers.  The highlight, from the completist’s point of view, was a short article published in a 1960 issue of Aerospace Safety magazine which had exactly one Pynchonian line, a joke about a flagman signaling “The plane ran over the general’s foot.”  Or so I remember.  Then Pynchon wrote the liner notes to a CD by a minor indie rock band called Lotion, and I thought forget it, I am not buying a goldang Lotion album in order to maintain my neurotic all-of-Pynchon status.  Now I have not even read all of his novels.  This is progress.

The “all” of Dickens is so enormous that it is unreasonable.  Fourteen and a half novels, check; five “Christmas Books,” check; the confusingly labeled “Christmas Stories,” at least half are still unread; and then there are travel books, and Sketches by Boz, and A Child’s History of England, just to stay with books that might be readable.  What to make of his plays, or his poems?  (Answer: nothing, ‘cause I’m not going to read them).  And all of that magazine and newspaper writing, masses of it.

The exciting thing about having read every Dickens novel is that I have completed a necessary step to re-reading not all but most of them.  Finally, some real reading!  It has been almost twenty years since I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, so that one is tugging at me a bit, particularly since it is closely related to a plotline of Our Mutual Friend.  Been a while since Great Expectations, too, which prefigures OMF in interesting ways.  Bleak House I have read twice, but having read the rest in the series – with Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, it forms a thematic and artistic trilogy – I want to go back to it.  Dickens is often revising the previous novel in the current one.  It is nice to be able to line them all up in my head.

Himadri, the Argumentative Old Git, provided the encouragement to check off Charles Dickens Novel #14 now rather than later.  If I write something  - I was going to say “more” but I have deftly avoided the novel this time – about Our Mutual Friend, I will bounce some ideas off of his pieces.