Meditative Qualities In Literature
A Review of A Mountain To The North, A Lake To The South, Paths To The West, A River To The East
Greetings, everyone! Welcome to those of you new to Timeless. And thanks for tuning in for the Vasily Grossman essays. I look forward to transforming them into a book-length collection in 2024. I’m pretty excited about 2024, actually; if 2023 is the year of dreams, then 2024 is the year of building upon those dreams. And boy do I have plans!
In between the last Grossman essay and now, I had a great reading break. Since my reading for 2024 will be more concentrated, I decided to use this bit of time to make a long-awaited return to the dark, spacious yet mysterious world of Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Whom Susan Sontag called “the Hungarian Master of the Apocalypse.” And who I call, in a similar yet more generic vein, the last of the best when it comes to masters of darkness in general.
With any luck, he’ll win next year’s Nobel Prize. He’s among the most deserving.
Sontag’s commendation most probably refers to Krasznahorkai’s seminal novel, Satantango, famously adapted into a six-hour film courtesy of director and friend Bela Tarr; literarily, it is one of the best dark novels ever written. And - if I remember correctly - he was the first Hungarian author I ever read, having discovered him during an equally seminal time of life in Paris. (The Best Translated Book Award ceremony where his novel Seiobo There Below won was held at Shakespeare & Co, an event attended by yours truly. There were some great translations that year!)
Satantango wowed me at the time, assisted in large part by George Szirtes’ masterful translation. The feeling was something akin to meeting Countess Bathory in the flesh, and then thinking feverishly about her famed beauty while feeling horror for her “habit” of bathing in virgin’s blood at the same time. It must have wowed a lot of other people as well: I was quite pleased to see it on the shelves of an airport bookshop at London Gatwick one time. (I guess the British can handle literary darkness a bit better) It wasn’t just that Krasznahorkai saw to all my individual “dark needs;” he could bring darkness to the story without it collapsing under its own weight. That’s not an easy thing to do.
Perhaps because of this magnificent impression, the urge to return to Krasznahorkai’s apocalyptic world did not come for some time. Not due to any bad effect upon me: my digestive pattern simply had more in common with the Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi than an ordinary human being. Thankfully the digestion didn’t take a thousand years. But anyone eager to read Satantango should prepare to be affected.
Krasznahorkai has a style all to his own, making him one of the token few writers today who is genuinely original. But he isn’t a one-trick pony either. And this time I decided to dip my toes into another area of interest for him: Japanese culture, in particular its Zen Buddhist heritage.
But rather than take on the aforementioned Seiobo There Below - a big book - I chose the much leaner novel A Mountain To The North, A Lake To The South, Paths To The West, A River To The East to re-whet my dormant appetite. Well, lean except for its title: I think that’s a new personal record.
This novella/short novel originally came out in 2003, but was translated only recently. Courtesy of translator Ottilie Mulzet, who in this work at least has shown that she is the equal of Szirtes.
The main character is the grandson of Prince Genji, the hero of what is now considered the first modern novel,1 Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji. A novel well worth digressing about for a brief moment. )
Europe still takes credit for the creation of the novel itself: Ancient Rome in particular, as represented by Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, the oldest surviving novel in the world. But Lady Murasaki and her fellow courtly novelists hadn’t heard of Europe, let alone Rome. To say they invented the novel would be both true and false; one can’t say re-invent either because even if the novel had vanished from the face of Europe, it had to exist in Japan first before it could be reinvented in Japan. In any case, it suddenly emerged in Japan a thousand years ago while other courtesans like Sei Shonagen wrote a novel form called ‘the Pillow Book.’
All the more remarkable was how uniquely Japanese the novel was. This at a time when Chinese influence had a strong impact upon Japan.
A lot of people with a certain ideological persuasion I criticize a lot here often bring up Genji as fuel to stoke their anti-West narrative. (The premise of this infantile argument being that without Lady Murasaki - i.e. the Japanese - nobody in Europe would have ever written a novel ever because Europeans are never original and take everything from everywhere else; therefore, eff sucky Europe and eff White people, yadayadayada) Neo-Marxists arguing in favor of an aristocratic work of art is amusing, to say the least. I’m sure they’ll all say they’ve read it when asked because no one cares like they do.
The Tale of Genji is remarkable in its own right. It is said to be the first psychological novel in history, even if not the first novel, and is the oldest work of literature to be considered a national classic. (I heard that somewhere, but I suppose that’s up for debate; don’t the British consider Beowulf a classic?)
I look forward to reading Genji in 2024 as part of my classic catch-up: I went out of my way to get a nice version too. But it is to the art of the novel what Leif Erikssen is to maritime exploration. Did Erikssen reach the New World before Columbus? Yes. But did Erikssen’s journey to Vinland change anything in the greater sense of world history? It did not, though I heard somewhere that Columbus was aware of Erikssen’s voyage. In any case, because of Japan’s isolation both circumstantially and artistically The Tale of Genji would have no more effect upon Western literature than the Epic of Gilgamesh, around 4,000 years old but only discovered in the 1850s. Making the 3,850 years in between developmentally irrelevant. Sad but true.
Circling back to Krasznahorkai: perhaps now, at last, that is changing. Why would he name his protagonist - who takes trains - the grandson of Prince Genji if not to declare an artistic allegiance to Lady Murasaki never seen before in Western literature? I will have more to share about that once I read The Tale of Genji. But I applaud Krasznahorkai for making what is - to my knowledge - the first serious attempt to accommodate the oldest modern novel into the modern tradition. It won’t supersede Cervantes in importance; though truth be told, it’s way too early to speculate upon the general impact. But as far as canon creation is concerned, it is the right thing to do.
When I first started Timeless, I began with reviews of the stories of Bora Chung: a Korean author deeply influenced by Russian and Polish literature, as well as the likes of Kafka. (I think you’d find her stories interesting,
) In her short story collection Cursed Bunny, Chung fuses Slavicness and Koreanness seamlessly. A heterodox disciple of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Chung, for whatever reason, understands that it is not anarchic “diversity” that produces newness out of a magician’s hat; it is fusion that allows cultures to merge together to create something new and distinct. Both Cursed Bunny and A Mountain To The North appear to be the earliest works of an emerging subgenre that combines the mysterious, ominous yet at-times serene essence of East Asia with the dark, emotional and grotesque yet moving essence of Greater Slavia. If postcolonial lit is a match made in Hell, this East Asia-Slavia fusion is a match made in Heaven. Albeit a shadowy Heaven.But the fascinating thing is: A Mountain To The North isn’t dark. It’s kind of like the game Myst, but without the reader knowing the backstory of the spoiled sons the way gamers do when playing the classic game. But it does share one commonality with its more characteristically Hungarian predecessor, Satantango: if not dark, there is something apocalyptic in the air.
Sontag’s observation, it seems, hasn’t expired.
In the West we have a very distinct and unambiguous perception of the apocalypse. Post-apocalyptic lit fans are welcome to disagree with me. I’ve heard arguments of how books like I Am Legend have their own literary goals. So be it. But I think it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that our vision of the apocalypse has a destructive bent to it no matter the manifestation. Be it a disease, a meteor or whatever, something (or somebody) somewhere gets decayed, obliterated, annihilated, eradicated, destroyed, insert synonym here.
A Mountain to the North is and isn’t apocalyptic, but that’s beside the point; the world hasn’t ended in Satantango either. The grandson of Prince Genji can take the train to the Kyoto monastery. But the monastery itself is so empty and isolated it almost hurts. It is not a calendrical apocalypse or even one of substance, but of silence. Even the aptly-named video game, The Silent Age - one of my favorites - doesn’t eschew the substance.
Krasznahorkai strides that middle line between Zen-like serenity and the painful silence of nature that turns modern Man insane: and he does it well. The reader can allow themselves to feel either way depending on their personal constitution.
Plot isn’t a very big factor here. The grandson of Prince Genji does proceed to different places and breathes in the presence of each place. But the devil - insofar as devils lurk in Buddhist monasteries - is in the details here, and details are more important because Krasznahorkai is nothing if not atmospheric.
Atmosphere comes together in his novels by merging detail and a penchant for what we in the Anglosphere call “run-on sentences.” Except that, in fact, they are simply long sentences: the adjective ‘run-on,’ though applicable to beginning writers, becomes a boxing-in term of the mind after some time. And it works: American writers are so accustomed to short, basic sentences it’s almost a thought crime to praise long sentences.
This makes Krasznahorkai iconoclastic without even trying. The convenient, American, one-size-fits-all rule of “less is more” and keeping everything short and simple is revealed for what it is: an excuse to eschew quality using culture, pragmatism and popular appeal (aka money) as justification. After all, society has known for decades now that Hemingway only has imitators: so why cling slavishly to that rule when we already know that imitating Papa is out of the question?
But unlike so many similar novels that only really function as word paintings - like Piotr Szewc’s Annihilation or Jachym Topol’s Angel Station - A Mountain to the North does have utility. And I don’t mean word usage: like the temple itself, every word is where it should be. It is literature as meditation.
This is why I chose to publish this review as a Whitman’s Toolbox post. In the hands of any other writer, A Mountain to the North could have been just another European word landscape. Instead Krasznahorkai takes this genre, pairs it with the cross-spherical formula Bora Chung also uses and - with the apocalypse in mind, of course - creates a meditative novel a reader is “allowed” to lose themselves in. Much as a visitor to such a temple as this one lets the details in the woodwork, statues, the spiritual atmosphere, etc. drag their imagination down roads otherwise untraveled.
It’s one thing to describe a novel like this. And another thing entirely to seek out the recipe for it. Only Krasznahorkai knows it. But we can regard this novel as a form of inspiration useful to those writers who want to bring artistry back into Anglosphere literature.
A lot of literature today functions as therapy rather than art. A “bold,” moving story of hope with ideological reinforcement to make doubly sure that mean old world doesn’t do mean old things that make us cry. The ‘Happy Directive,’ as I’ve called it before. While literature has “superpowers,” writers ought to know what superpowers they have before they go fighting crime. And readers too. Literature can bring a degree of comfort. But it cannot cure cancer or end world hunger. Maybe it could bring someone out of a depression. But as far as the writer is concerned, that’s an extra plus.
This has been my view for some time. And I still maintain it. But after reading A Mountain to the North, Milan Kundera’s quote about not having exhausted the possibilities of the novel comes to mind. If literature cannot be an anti-depressant, then perhaps its spiritual qualities - those it doesn’t share with religion already - can be better unlocked to where healing through serenity is realizable. Meaning: the focus of my general critique may not even be the therapeutic use of literature per se, but the mind clinging to literature - and everything else it can - as a way of desperately clinging onto hope. Perhaps the literary mind would find itself in a process of greater healing if it let go of all of that entirely.
It is clear that to reach audiences today, therapeutic qualities in literature are worth experimenting with stylistically. With that in mind, I’ve thought of a few lessons a writer can think about. Although the best course of action, of course, is to read the novel. It’s worth it. Always is with Krasznahorkai.
The first is self-explanatory: avoid the Happy Directive like the plague! Cotton candy does more to heal a wretched reader than the fake Happy Directive.
Second: a meditative novel doesn’t require the loss of a plot. While Satantango isn’t any more speedy where plot is concerned, it is also a lot more open about having a plot than A Mountain to the North. Krasznahorkai is right to keep things slow and quiet: the activity of a plot and the passivity of meditative stillness do not mesh together all that well. Even so, A Mountain to the North shows that it is possible to combine both those things when done right.
Third: an air of mystery and intrigue improve the novel. This goes against the instincts we have in our society where we have to explain everything. But someone who needs healing isn’t healed by knowledge. Especially if they have depressive thoughts. If that’s how it worked, we’d tell pill recipients every time they got a placebo. And people wouldn’t be afraid of deep truths. In A Mountain to the North, the air of mystery and intrigue is amplified exponentially by the way the rest of the world simply doesn’t exist outside the temple grounds. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter.
Fourth: it can be personal, but it has to take the long way around. Meaning: it is through the details of the temple that the grandson of Prince Genji seeks what is personal - a specific garden that resonates with him. The force of the details do not come from him to the temple: they come from the temple to him. Unlike The Matrix, where Neo and Morpheus don’t have to breathe air, the interior worlds of novels can be windy. While Nabokov’s exclamation of “my characters are galley slaves” is fine enough where characters are concerned, a writer must be their own meteorologist when it comes to the various essences propelling the story. Krasznahorkai is very Aeolian in this sense.
And fifth: Krasznahorkai, all things considered, is still the Hungarian Master of the Apocalypse. A Mountain to the North is conscious of its existence and presence. That, in fact, is precisely how it’s meditative. Unlike literature that follows the Happy Directive - denying reality as it does - Krasznahorkai reinforces reality even as it feels like he is escaping from it. That’s what makes it therapeutic.
Have you read literature that you’ve found meditative? Do you think people desire therapeutic literature? And is there an onus on the writer to utilize their stories for therapeutic benefits? Let me know what you think in the comment’s section below!
While Don Quixote marks the commencement of the Western literary tradition, Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova has also been called the first modern novel in Europe.
Lots of interesting sounding writers here! Thanks for the recommendation on Bora Chung, who absolutely does sound up my alley. I have a paperback you recommended in the other room, too; it looks excellent. The Elephant.
Lots of food for thought in this wonderful essay/review. I'm especially in accord with your statement "it is fusion that allows cultures to merge together to create something new and distinct." As humans, we're meant to share in each other's experiences and cultures. It's beautiful when we respectfully do that, when others learn about something new and explore the subject further.