László Krasznahorkai and the Many Lives of the Apocalypse

In the age of reason, matters of faith, too, have to be reasoned out. This created great tension and anxiety in the advent of modernity, during the period of the Enlightenment in Europe.

Some devout Christians would rather relinquish their religion as “compromised” than seek a basis in reason. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard comes to our mind. Others would be fine with deploying reason in favour of Christianity. In fact, the philosopher Blaise Pascal would go to the extent of suggesting the idea of God as a wager.

Pascal reasoned: If you believe in God and you are wrong, you lose nothing. If you do not believe in God and you are wrong, you lose everything. So is it not better to believe in God?

Pascal’s God as a wager seemed to be a rather impoverished idea of God. Such a way of “belief” in God is perhaps not very uplifting.

However, with a little effort one can see that there is something else going on here that is easy to miss. Encoded in the idea of God as wager is a proposition about the human instinct. That humans are what they are because they seek freedom, not in their natural state but through a break, a rupture. They stake out their natural state in favour of one gained through our willingness to bet and take a risk, not on this or that immediate interest or gain, or optimal outcome, but with regard to the Unknown. Pascal’s wager on God then turns out to be the pathway to Eternity, which one has wagered to accept and, if you like, agreed to submit to. This is what freedom looks like, earned through staking oneself.

Existence makes sense in light of the risk we take in the wager on God which illumines existence.

And Kierkegaard would be the first to want to risk it all, not for a wager based on a calculus of interests and lottery of best outcomes, but purely on faith. We all know how he turned the Biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son into a shining example of faith.

I want to suggest that the works of László Krasznahorkai must be seen in this light: the wager of the apocalypse enriching human existence.

Also read: A Great Pessimist Has Won the Literature Nobel

As we know, it is not very common for the usually restrained, staid and solemn body of the Nobel Committee to use extreme language in its announcements. It usually remains in the humanist paradigm, making statements about faith in values like compassion, love and peace. At most saying that the work of art helps us understand the human condition better. But in this Nobel Prize for Literature award, they have referred to Krasznahorkai’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. To say that we are “in the midst of apocalyptic terror” is saying a lot.

Now, this can be read as a veiled commentary on political developments in the world today, the undermining of the certainties of what is called a progressive liberal politics. Here, maybe, is a veiled reference to the dissatisfaction with the “wrong” kind of new political forces that are on the ascendant today. Such commentaries are already coming out. But referring to context is not always the best way to proceed.

My suggestion is that the reference to the apocalypse should not just be seen as “context” or part of a pessimistic viewpoint.

We should be thinking of the apocalypse in terms of the ultimate wager; one which humanity constantly puts itself through – a wager that uplifts all of us. We should think not just of the story of the Flood and the Great Cleansing, humanity renewing itself – a story defining cultures since ancient Mesopotamia. But, living in the modern times, “in the end times”, on borrowed time, the wager of the apocalypse is what allows us to see beyond ourselves, what allows us to go to the very brink, the extreme edge and see things on the other side – to follow our yearning for the call of the Unknown. The zero-level of humanity under “apocalyptic terror”, then, turns out to be its fullest possible limit.

Krasznahorkai’s stories constantly revolve around this zero-level of human life, even as a weak messianic power is never too far away.

So the apocalypse is not just about war, famine and destruction, the vertiginous collapse to the pits. In Sátántangó, there’s this constant going back to the mud and the earth, and being constantly beaten by rain – daily life as an alibi so as not to confront despair. Respite comes in the form of false prophets, like we see in the figure of Irimias. These, of course, can be read as the failure of humans to come up with a true prophet.

But it is not even about a true or false prophet. Nor is it about arguing that they will necessarily be false, or about the wait for the true utopia.

Instead, it is about how the “true utopia” itself will always be posed and reposed, staged and restaged, posed and dissolved, precisely through the apocalypse. The conception of the good society, the good life, the beautiful society is inseparable from the forever disavowed project of the apocalypse. Otherwise, you are always stuck in what is given, without the apocalypse: wallowing in a life sans apocalypse. How strange, how bizarre, how lifeless – a life that does not imagine the apocalypse, does not wager the apocalypse; indeed, so impoverished!

When it comes to Krasznahorkai, we cannot but take up the question of the communist utopia to which Hungary, his country, was subjected. (Though his work is not limited to the Hungarian or communist experience.) And there, again, you see that the failure of that communist project itself is a failure that reinscribes the truth about the apocalypse as the necessary pathway to the Unknown and, hence, possibly, towards the communist utopia: the necessary beautiful/inhuman path.

Here is the formulation: The failure/“failure” of the communist utopia leads to an apocalypse, but that is the only way you can posit a true/“true” utopia! It is as though only at the end point of the Soviet disaster, when you would imagine that a reversal to a normal liberal democratic life is imminent, does the real possibility open up to envision the utopia – thereby subverting the reversal to normal life in a democracy. It is in the destruction, in the horror, in the famine, in the war, in the vertiginous “fall” that the rise and the somewhat clear view of the “true utopia” is possible. The original Utopia which is supposed to have inspired the Revolution leading then to Totalitarianism and the apocalypse does not find any real place here.

And that is the true test of Krasznahorkai’s work – whether his notion of the apocalypse allows this churning of the human spirit or does it lead to a dead end, a closed world. This is precisely where one cannot but recall the works of the great Soviet writer Andrei Platonov. I had occasion to discuss his work earlier. It would be enormously fruitful to read Krasznahorkai alongside Platonov.

In any case, Krasznahorkai’s work does take us intimately close to the kind of bleak life which is what we say became of the Soviet communist experiment. It is also rather routine to compare that with the lively democracies in the West. There seems no harm in accepting that Soviet communism didn’t work. And yet it is precisely the Soviet apocalypse that carries the Cross for all of humanity today; making the prosaic good life of western democracies possible. The wager of the apocalypse and the production of the conditions for engendering a vision of a true utopia got outsourced to the Soviets. This is what produced a writer like Krasznahorkai, whom all of humanity can claim.

Also read: Literature Nobel Goes to Hungarian Author Laszlo Krasznahorkai

One must recall the best that the West offered. We can take the protests of 1968 in France as the pinnacle of the freedom, liberty, self realisation and radicalism (what Michel Foucault called the Californian cult of the self) on the other side of the Iron Curtain. And here, we can just keep in mind what Jacques Lacan told the student protesters: “You have no shame, you are looking for a new master!” That was the horror of the West.

Nietzsche used to say, much before the First World War, that with all the emphasis on humanity, democracy, internationalism and peace, the world is hurtling towards violence and barbarity – in a way, he anticipated the coming of the apocalypse, a Cross that, in pre-Soviet times, would be borne by and in the West. Do we not want to read something similar into the rise of so-called right-wing populisms in the West today, and what some regard as a civil war-like situation, following the heyday of liberalism, democracy, multiculturalism and high standards of living?

It is noteworthy that the Lacanian strain comes somewhat to life in Krasznahorkai’s novella, The Last Wolf. The search for the last wolf in the story can be read as standing for what Lacan called the objet petit a, the impossible object of desire, desire fuelled by the fantasy of excess – precisely his diagnosis of the 1968 protests.

The hollowness of the West is always mediated by the Spectacle, always mediated by the fluff, always mediated by claims to freedom and liberty. The way we think of New York as the Big Apple, where you live in the Bubble of Sex and the City: a cocktail of finance, bohemia, Hollywood and Disney.

In the Soviet world, it is a gritty lived life you got, wherein one would directly touch and feel the void. And this is, of course, something that would shine through in their art and literature. But this life in an apocalypse is the hallway to the unconscious, not as it would reflect in the objet petit a of desire, in the “outer” Spectacle and the Bubble, but as one which you could prosaically inhabit, a world without relief or redemption, always ending in a void. What is remarkable is that this life in the apocalypse segues into a habitation, an impossible dwelling in the unconscious. It is difficult not to suspect an iteration of something like a Kierkegaardian reinscription and doubling down onto faith, a “dying to reason”.

In this sense, it can be seen that what animated Soviet life from the inside can be better appreciated in terms of Kierkegaard’s invitation to die to reason, inaugurating new vistas in the human condition. That a supposedly godless communist empire would possess inner tendencies that resonate with the ideas of someone like Kierkegaard who is so deeply seeped in faith that he refuses to accept what passes off as Christianity – this is no less than a marvellous revelation.

One point of reference here is Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979). Part of the story is about the journey to what is called the “Zone”, where all your desires and dreams come true. Here is a world where you can inhabit your unconscious. You could live in that dream world where all your desires can come true. But you are in the apocalypse. What looked like a zero level of humanity is a highly sentient world, rich with your unconscious stirrings, an embodiment of the unconscious.

Here again, we are looking at a division of labour: the West as the adventure of the Spectacle and the Soviet East as the journey to the Unconscious. The impossible desire of living the Spectacle and the immersion of life in the Unconscious.

The apocalyptic dystopic life of mud and rain is never possible in the West because there are always too many pleasurable distractions. There’s just too much to do. There’s too much holidaying, too much vacationing, too much consumerism, reality TV and gossip about movie stars to keep up with. No wonder Jean Baudrillard had to declare even something as real as the Gulf War as something which never happened! Thus it is that the philosopher Giorgio Agamben is driven to remark that more people die on a stupid holiday than in anything serious or political:

Our age is the one where a holiday weekend produces more victims on Europe’s highways than a war campaign, but to speak of a “sacredness of the highway railing” is obviously only an antiphrastic definition.

But then, and here is the twist, only the West could produce something like the movie Fight Club (1999). The protagonist in Fight Club must be read alongside the characters in Sátántangó. He is surrounded by objects for his gratification, for his happiness, for example, the “IKEA nesting instinct”. He says:

I would flip through catalogues and wonder, “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?” I had it all.

He has everything to make him happy, and yet he is not happy. A society which never staked itself out, which refused a relation to the outer limit of death and destruction and a tryst with the Unknown, would be slowly wilting on the inside.

Of course, there is now a late contender in the life of the West. A late entry. One surprisingly outside of this bubble, outside Hollywood and Disney, opposing the East-Coast liberals. Or maybe not outside, but in opposition to. I must warn the reader that the standard goes down as we approach what could be kitsch literature which, however, need not, for that reason, be unauthentic and in fact might be the mirror the West absolutely abhors looking into. I’m sorry to break this news: that is J.D. Vance’s novel, Hillbilly Elegy.

Vance’s novel is the perhaps the only way the West could narrate anything at that level of a pared-down, unmediated life of what many call “white trash”. A bleak life marked by the breakdown of families, alcoholism, drugs, misery and depravity. This life produces what the manicured, bohemian East Coast liberals and progressives call right-wing politics. Trump’s tariffs are done in the name of the American manufacturing worker who is the undead, whom Hilary Clinton so presciently called the “basket of deplorables”.

Thanks to the Nobel Committee’s rather bold selection of Krasznahorkai for the literature prize, we found the occasion to explore the many lives of the apocalypse – or shall we say, life in the apocalypse.

Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi and is part of the Forum Against Corporatisation and Militarisation (FACAM).

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