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*DISCUSSION OPEN* 2014 Group Read #2 - WAR & WAR
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Ruby , Mistress of Chaos
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Apr 08, 2014 07:38PM
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Thanks for posting that, Whitney. It's great to see a picture of the artwork.
I do have one quibble with the summary though [SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT]
I thought that the episode at the end in the bar was a jump backwards in time to the incident where Korin gets the scar on his hand. Remember how the interpreter's wife pointed it out? I think that when Korin arrived at the museum, he ultimately succeeded in ending his mission then, rather then going on to the bar. Does anyone remember any info about where the bar was supposed to be?
Mod
Korin killed himself in Switzerland, and the incident at the bar happened back in Hungary. I didn't catch t..."
Oh good. I'm not the only one who thought that!
Mod
That reads too much like Korin speaking for me just yet! I'll need to take a break before I'm ready for any more run-on sentences!
Mod
Yay, discussion on!
That would probably be the sculpture, since it's at the right museum. Here's a picture of the one that I found called “At The Still Point Of The Turning World” by the same artist: http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de/uploads/t... . However this piece is in Frankfurt. (The title is from a T.S. Eliot poem).
The reason I thought this title was particularly apt was that it reflected what Korin said about the manuscript he was uploading. That the writer was trying to find a place of peace in the world for his four characters, but every place they ended up was soon overtaken by war. I still wonder if maybe that wasn’t the piece that inspired Krasznahorkai, but that he than chose one in Switzerland instead, since it has been the neutral (i.e. peaceful) country in the midst of a continent at war.
Here’s a bit of research from the places the four characters visited:
The place where they shipwreaked was Kommos. A (discredited) archeologist claimed this was the place that Menelaus shipwrecked on his way back from the Trojan War. The timing is right in implying that the four are returning from Troy.
The cathedral at Cologne (Köln) was being completed by the Prussians in the midst of their wars with Austria and France. The four leave Cologne after work is stalled due to the war effort ( couldn’t find a reference to this particular aspect). It’s probably relevant that the cathedral stayed relatively intact despite bombing raids during WWII that essentially flattened the rest of the city. There is speculation that this wasn’t an accident, since the spires of the cathedral made a good navigational landmark for the allies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_...
The Venice they are heading to in 1493 was at a turning point in choosing a new Doge (Magistrate). The choice of Foscari, the one the four said would never be chosen, led to Venice’s war with Milan.
I like how Korin contributed to the story with his own addition of Babylon, the place where people were scattered and separated by language, arguably the cause of wars among nations.
P.S. Did everyone go to the URL referenced in the novel as the location of Korin’s uploaded manuscript? Do you think that what's there ultimately makes a difference as far as Korin’s purpose, or was his intent accomplished some other way?
Mod
Thanks for posting that, Whitney. Of course I went to the url :)
I think one of the articles above references that we can assume from the story that his mission wasn't accomplished, as the person entrusted with paying the internet bill a) Couldn't be trusted and, b) is dead. There's just something about Korin that makes you think no mission of his is ever going to work. Then again, he does have these miraculous escapes from time to time (like right at the start with the gang of kids) and lucky moments (finding the money was quite a windfall).
Mod
Well, the whole time...it seemed his goal was to find a place of peace, some still, safe place where things would make sense and one could simply rest; where one would not feel assaulted by the world, as Korin is (literally, but also figuratively) assaulted--senselessly, unexpectedly assaulted--multiple times during his journey. On the bridge, at the airport in New York, when he's passed out drunk in a doorway--suddenly, for no apparent reason, and with no real explanation, he is attacked. Even when he doesn't clearly realize it, his purposes all boil down to this search for a single place, a moment, a point of peace in the midst of a world and a history that seems just an endless chain of senseless wars.
Mod
It wasn't really until I just read caracal-eyes's post that I thought about the title. A riff on War & Peace? Since for Korin it is simply War & War despite his search for peace as stated above... I kept wondering how much Hungary's history of war plays into the continual sense of unrest. Sort of as a backdrop, maybe? I'm not all too familiar with Hungarian history, but it feels like a cloud hanging over everything and there's all that talk about the elimination of its people.
To answer Whitney's question about the URL, I think that site is emblematic of this novel's take on what all efforts to capture/preserve beauty in this day amount to. I'm having trouble picturing a Chaos group member who wouldn't check out the URL!
That last scene back in time where he gets the hand injury... It would seem he plans on recreating the crucified Christ's injuries with a gun (he plans for a shot to both hands, both feet, and presumably a last lethal blow of some sort) and yet this is sort of ludicrous to begin with. Once you've shot one hand, how likely could you then use it to shoot your other hand?
What is it that you think Korin finds so mesmerizing/beautiful about the tale of the four characters?
Somewhat similar to the long-sentenced Bolaño, Roberto, I find Krasznahorkai's writing simultaneously maddening and addictive. It induces a kind of split personality in me with one side yelling: "This makes no fucking sense!" and the other side: "I love it. I can't stop reading." (OK, in this case, I could stop reading, but it was hard to find the right rhythm/pace--too short of a time and there was no flow; reading this book for too long a stretch felt exhausting).
I'd go back & read/edit what I just wrote before posting, but I feel that would ruin its schizophrenic approach.
Maybe what obsesses him about the manuscript and its characters is that he feels their story is very much like his own--think of their arrivals and escapes, periods of travel and then, all too briefly, rest, and then back to flight towards some other place less chaotic--a flight from chaos that only brings him and the four men he reads of into yet another scene of violence, destruction, degeneration. The Tower of Babel--man's attempt to climb into Heaven, which not only failed, but at its collapse left humanity further than ever from its goal. The four travelers/exiles, like himself, seem basically to be searching for a sanctuary, a home; which Merz's sculpture seems to symbolize (and its primitive igloo design, constructed from distinctly modern materials, goes well with the similarly enduring/timeless searching of the characters in the manuscript). It seems to me that anything at once timeless and deeply personal can be beautiful, even if the concept itself is ugly or depressing. A link to the rest of humanity past and future, a link to eternity... which then makes me think of Korin's determination to preserve the manuscript for eternity; his brief success in getting the manuscript online; and then the (...inevitable...) failure of this plan. Always, the struggle to create something beautiful, and then the failure to preserve it; so that even the present beauty is haunted by the certainty of its eventual destruction. But enough with my increasingly dreary musings/rant. In any case, I'm finding that I like the book more and more. Sure, I'm starting to get lost in the various interconnecting motifs and concepts and meanings and whatnot, to the point where I can hardly even tell what I'm talking about...but that means it's a good book, right? Makes you feel like you've learned something, even if you've no idea what exactly.
Mod
Caracal, I think you're right about him relating to quest of the characters in the manuscript to find peace in the midst of violence. But I also think that in a sense he IS that peace in the midst of violence. Korin seems like a version of the Holy Fool so common in Russian literature. He touches people in ways they don't understand. The boys on the bridge are themselves mystified as to why they listened to his story instead of killing him. The people in the airline office help him without really understanding their own motives. The translator gives him his card, and the translator isn't the kind of guy who helps those in need as a matter of course.
Not sure exactly how to phrase this, but I think in a sense Korin is successful. He wanted to share the manuscript with the world, but it’s his one-on-one contact with people that’s propagating the ideal that touched him in the first place.
I loved the way that the characters he met told about their encounters with him, as if they were testifying to something they didn't quite comprehend.
Mod
Listening to everyone's views, I somehow didn't find Korin to be as sympathetic a character as other people seem to. I think it's his lack of awareness/empathy for others which makes it hard for me to like him. I'm sure that's a mental health issue, but at the same time, I wanted to shake him and say "FFS - Stop talking and listen!!" I'm not sure I'd agree that Korin represents "peace" in that regard, although I certainly see where you're coming from, Whitney, with the Holy Fool reference. Other people did seem affected by him, but I don't know if this was in a good way or just in a holy-fuck-what-just-happened? way.
Whitney: I like your idea--Korin does have that kind of 'Holy Fool' vibe, doesn't he? Though it still doesn't seem to me that he 'is' peace, so much as he 'is' the quest for it; and it may be that which others are affected by: his complete need for peace, his dogged devotion to this quest, to getting there. And Ruby--I know, I know, I was kind of like, "aww....really?" when he was definitely noticing that the young woman was all beat up, and said nothing, and did nothing; I think he knew what was happening but with the language barrier, the delicate nature of the whole situation, and his own helplessness, couldn't make himself bring it up.(Okay, were we ever given her name? Or was she always referred to as 'the interpreter's lover?' I feel sure her name was mentioned maybe once at least.)
Korin seemed to live only partially in the actual world, always preoccupied with he group of four and their journying, more and more like the fifth of their company. And he lived in a constant state of confusion, almost as if literally concussed--a vicious circle, really, as the more confused he felt, the less able he was to get a grip on events, the more wounded he was by the real agony of total, ongoing bewilderment. His personal confusion and helplessness is in part due to the language barriers once he leaves his own country; but even when that's not the case, he seems to have trouble being understood or understanding--he talks and talks, but even those who speak his language don't get what he's trying to say. The kids on the bridge sit and listen, but only because they have nothing better to do while waiting for the train and because they've decided this man is crazy and has nothing worth stealing. The beautiful stewardess pities him, and even helps him get a visa, but she seems mostly affected by his devotion to an idea--whatever it is--and his obvious bewilderment; she listens, tries to see his meaning, but even so it's as if he's speaking a language she hardly understands. Those who help him are affected by his helplessness and devotion to a dream (even if they can't for the life of them understand him); it's easy to take pity on someone so completely unthreatening.
Eventually he puts a name to this feeling he has had everywhere he goes: the Tower of Babel. He feels like the men in the manuscript, an exile without a home, a stranger in a strange land you might say. Think of it--when you are unable to understand the very world you inhabit, you can't anticipate events, don't know what to expect, feel under constant threat and want only to find a place you can understand, and which can understand you. I think of the times--moments, minutes maybe--when I've felt completely lost and confused, and then try to imagine a state of constant mystification; that's what I imagine Korin felt, and it's something like total fear. No wonder he felt like his head was going to fall off; I'm surprised he didn't have an aneurism or stroke or something halfway through. That's why I can't help but feel sorry for him, even empathize a bit.
Mod
I like the idea of the Tower of Babel representing that feeling he has, of an almost insurmountable barrier or threat. I think the way I feel about Korin has to do with a personal dislike of mine: self-absorption. He is so wrapped up in his own feelings, he barely notices that other people have them. He puts his own feelings ahead of anything else that goes on around him. If Korin is bewildered, I think it's his own fault. He's not paying attention to anyone or anything else.
Then I take a deep breath and remember that there are obviously some mental health issues at play, and try to be more understanding - I know panic and terror, even depression, can make people incapable of seeing past how they're feeling at a given moment.
I'm sure the interpreter's lover's name was mentioned once or twice (not by Korin though), but I can't for the life of me remember it.
Just wanted to add a few pictures of buildings by Ely Jacques Kahn, mentioned in the book as being the architect of several skyscrapers Korin sees in New York: "the greatest city in the world, the center of the world, had deliberately been filled by someone with Towers of Babel...all seven stories stepped like ziggurats..." 
Oh, and here's a painting of the Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c.1563:
Mod
Can I also just say - kudos to all you awesome Chaos Reading people who not only read this one, and stuck with it, but waited ages for me to finish and now are leading a really substantial discussion on it. This is such a great discussion!
Mod
Yes, I think this is a better way to put it. And I think there's validity in the different interpretations people have. Yes, Korin definitely suffers from mental illness. But at the same time most of those who are frequently called visionaries or saints could probably also be characterized as mentally ill narcissists. Korin is not very clued in to what is happening with others. But while he does little to help the abused girlfriend, it's clear that she finds some comfort in his presence. Of course, this could also just be explained as the presence of the one person in her life who doesn't hit her, just as the reactions of other people to him have more mundane explanations as well.
I think that the fact that others who came in contact with him continue to try and puzzle out what the heck happened, and the meta-plaque on the wall of the museum, may be an indications that at some level he was successful in conveying his vision. Sort of a low rent version of Browning's poem "Pippa Passes", where the passing of simple farm girl inspires a degree of transcendence in those mired in the meanness of life.
And Caracal - another thanks for posting the Kahn buildings in juxtaposition with the Bruegel, I definitely hadn't put the similarities together.
Anyone have an interpretation of what was going on with the guys who were relocating the furniture from the interpreter's house?
Mod
Whitney, if I understood the moving guys section, it went something like this: There was some sort of start-over-sale, where you can have your whole place emptied and replaced with new stuff all at once. The interpreter purchased this "service" with drug money and the movers were supposed to discard/trash what they moved, but they end up keeping it for themselves. [I just went back an re-read this section; beginning of chapter 6--by luck, since I wouldn't have known where to look for it . Now I'm asking myself if those 4 mysterious movers who've just come to the new world in the last two weeks are not are same 4 travelers from the manuscript... Perhaps, I'm inferring too much, but as Chapter 5 ends with them cataloguing everything and Korin describing the manuscript as taking a sudden turn where the line between significance and insignificance is blurred, he says "all is of equal gravity, everything equally urgent"--and then the next chapter (6) starts in immediately with the removal of all unfixed objects by four mysterious movers who speak... uh... Romanian?
I love Korin-as-Holy-Fool. Talk about an unreliable narrator. We know from the start he plans on completing suicide after he's achieved his goal and by the end we know that he has already failed once to commit suicide.
I don't think we're really supposed to sympathize with him. He is self-absorbed, obsessive, annoying, eccentric, a nonstop talker (is there a word for such a person? chatterbox doesn't quite fit in this instance)... Yet there's a sort of charm to him... Or, a just-barely-bearable enduringness, yes? Otherwise, this would have been insufferable to read. Maybe comically absurd is what allows us to put up with him...
There are a handful of passages I marked that I'd like to share, but I think my thoughts need a little more organizing before I do (or at least some breaking up into separate comments).
Mod
I kept feeling like there was this repeated attempt to loosely tie together the absence/death of god, capitalism, and war as the current causes for our hollow existence and continued difficulty even talking to one another. Or are these simply the natural state of the human condition? That's all. The rest is supporting material/interesting passages...
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WAR & WAR
- Pgs 191-192 (Chap. 6, #19): Genoa: “... after Genoa was dead and gone its engine would continue to drive the world, and if they wanted to know what this Genoan engine consisted of… it was the power generated when the Nobili Vecchi, that is the world of the simple trader would be surpassed by the Nobili Novi, the trader dealing exclusively in cash… the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word the borsa generale, the building up of the system, would produce an entirely new world where money and all that stems from it would no longer be dependent on an external reality, but on intellect alone, where the only people needing to deal with reality would be the unshod poor… there would be a new world order, and order in which power was transformed into spirit, and where the banchieri di conto, the cambiatori and the heroldi, in other words roughly two hundred people… would occassionally gather to demonstrate the fact that the world was theirs, that the money was theirs… that these two hundred people constituted the unlimited power behind these things…”
- Pg. 200 (Chap 6, #25): “... that’s precisely it, sighed Korin, details all and yet all part of a single thing, some cipher engraved in the heart of each long list… but the fact that these are all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you, so you begin with one thing, but then a second thing comes along and then a third, and then the sentence returns to the first thing again, and so on, so the reader’s hopes are continually raised… so that he thinks he has got some kind of hold on the text, believe me when I say, as I said before, he said, that the whole thing is unreadable, insane!!! (which he then goes on to describe as beautiful because he has suddenly seen the “light” so to speak)
- Pg. 215 (Chap. 7, #4): TV images→ Breughel Babel painting → NY as Towers of Babel… “the greatest city in the world, the center of the world, had deliberately been filled by someone with Towers of Babel, all with seven stories… and all seven stories stepped like ziggurats… “
- Pg. 218 (Chap. 7, #5: “it meant that whatever laws had governed them so far were now invalid and that there was no longer any foundation on which order might be built, and, this being so, from now on it would be the unpredictable, the sensational and the senseless that ruled their lives, and yet he walked among the stone carvers as any man might do… “ (the King in Babylon wandering along Marduk road)
- Pg. 220 (Chap. 7, #5): “... a clear explanation of all these references to Babel, and why should all this be as it was… if not to enable us to comprehend that this is what God’s absence leads to, to the production of a miraculous, brilliant and utterly captivating kind of human being who is incapable, and always will be incapable of just one thing, that is of controlling that which he has created, his own feeling being, he declared, that it was true, that there really was nothing more miraculous than man…”
“... that which is too big for us is altogether too big…”
“... he.. felt most clearly that something had taken him by the hand and was leading him.”
- Isaiah Has Come (pg. 263): “.. he hadn’t a clue why greatness had passed from the world, how the great and noble had managed to vanish, where the exceptional, outstanding ones had gone, not the faintest idea, for how should he have a clue, the whole thing was utterly incomprehensible and that was why no one could understand it…”
- Pg. 246: “... the appearance and disappearance of greatness despite history… history… was an endless series of running battles or street fights, perhaps even one single continuous running battle or street fight, but this history, despite its extraordinary range, despite all its apparently ungovernable effects, was not entirely to be identified with all the implications of the human condition.”
- Pg. 265: “... it was only the noble, the great and the transcendent whose existence could not be predicated as the product of such a historical process because that historical process, said Korin, required nothing of the sort, because the existence of such things depended entirely on the establishment of nobility as a concept, and that in turn required a better balanced kind of history to come into being, which was all the more necessary so that the historical process should not take on the absolute character it took on now, a character it took on precisely because tragically, it lacked the concept of nobility, trapped as it was in the tangled maze of vulgar expediency, in which maze it was bound to career on unhindered, so that its triumph was perfectly obvious even to itself, as witness its own repulsive progenitors, and their it remained, in the maze, polishing and burnishing the trophies of its victory until it finally arrived at a state of unimaginable perfection.”
- Pg. 274: “... he was already living in the future, in a future where it had become absolutely impossible to speak of loss because the very act of speaking had become impossible, for everything you said in the language turned into a lie the instant you pronounced it… this tragic turn of events was not the product of supernatural agency, not of divine judgment, but of the actions of a peculiarly heterogeneous bunch of people… “ (and so he curses “them” -- the “mean & degenerate”, “those on whom curses had never nor ever would take effect”, “those who worked evil & destroyed trust”, “the cold-hearted slick ones”, “the very idea of victory & defeat”, “the ruthless, the envious, the aggressive…”, “the treaherous”, “the cheapskate”...
“Let the world be cursed… a world in which there is neither Ominipotence nor Last Judgment… where glory can only be bought with trash. … curse the infernal mechanism of chance that upholds & maintains all this, and reveals it; curse even the light that by illuminating it exposes the fact that there are no worlds but this, that nothing else exists. But above even that, he said, curse humanity, curse mankind that enjoys control of the mechanism whereby it may reduce and falsify the essence of things and make that reduced and false essence the cornerstone of the deepest laws of our existence
Mod
I think so too. It seemed to me there was a presumption that capitalism inevitably leads to evil and chaos, and that it's not just "war and war" that Korin's railing at. I had highlighted that last passage too - it's an interesting idea that speaking becomes impossible, because everything is automatically a lie. I'm not sure my brain fully grasped the concept, but I feel like I had a sense of what he was talking about, even if I couldn't quite nut out the logic.
Mod
I hadn't put the four and four together. I think you're right, they are supposed to be the same, or at least analogues of each other or something along those lines. I think in the movie they would be played by the same four actors, at the very least.
The whole "replace all your possessions" thing was bizarre.
Mod
I kept feeling like there was this repeated attempt to loosely tie together the a..."
Wow, way to tackle some of the densest prose in the book! I like where your conclusions are heading. This quote from Krasznahorkai is from the same article I think you quoted before:
'...the deepest loss is the loss of a culture of poverty – the ability to "sing wonderful songs when we are poor". Now, he says, "… we only have people who don't have money … everybody wants to be rich, everybody has only one dream, but people, do we really have one dream – I ask – is this the only aim in this shit, to have much more money?" '
I think you’re right that he is offering capitalism as a source of this shallowness. The capitalistic and war-mongering Mastemann seems the personification of this in the stories of the four.
Krasznahorkai’s films with Tarr (sorry, can't stop myself) always have a tension between chaos and transcendence. Where you say ‘absence / death of God’ I have trouble believing he means ‘God’ literally, but I do think he means it as representative of a loss of transcendent ideals.
Mod
I never did grasp whether Korin believes in "God" or a higher power. He seems to bounce back and forth between incredibly complex ideas/expressions and ridiculously simple ones (like when he curses mean and greedy people). The book certainly didn't feel like a call to religion, but maybe a more spiritual life as you said, Whitney.
Looks like good 'ol Krashnahorkai just won the 2014 Best Translated Book Award for Seiobo There Below: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-can-you-say-laszlo-krasznahorkai-20140429,0,2664981.story#axzz30NNPn4xz
Chaos Reading
Books mentioned in this topic
Seiobo There Below (other topics)The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels (other topics)
War & War (other topics)
Dreamsbane of Tamalor (other topics)
Dreamsbane of Tamalor (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Roberto Bolaño (other topics)László Krasznahorkai (other topics)
