“Everything that you call transcendental and earthly is one and the same, it is with you in a single time, a single space” (p. 228) – this sentence can be found in one of the key narratives in László Krasznahorkai’s new volume of short stories, Seiobo's Been Here Below. This experience of oneness, which is in contrast with the articulation and stratification of the epic world, has been one of the most fundamental characteristics of Krasznahorkai’s prose since the very beginning of his career. This singular world ever more spectacularly finds its form in the single sentence. One space, one time, and one sentence. To a certain degree, the totality of this transcendental realism also characterizes the films of Béla Tarr which are based on Krasznahorkai’s own texts: the gloomy spatial depictions and the long camera takes. At the same time, the concept of time and space in the works of Krasznahorkai is drawn out nearly to infinity, which from another viewpoint also means that this fictional world is infinitely closed.

 

There is a particular connection between the individual stories in Seiobo, which is indicated before each text by numbering them according to the Fibonacci sequence (i.e. each number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence), thus, they follow each other on the basis of the golden ratio. In every new story, the culmination of the previous two stories is present in latent form. However, rather than being related in a primary sense – by the repetion of certain elements of the narration or the recurrence of characters – there is an invisible arch that in its very invisibility creates the context of the entire volume. As the epigraph of the allegorical text “Távoli felhatalmazás" (Distant Mandate) states, “In its essence concealed, in appearance expressed” (p. 276). The concealed essence becomes a sensuous experience upon the surface of the dis-concealed semblance. Every single sentence undertakes this mission: to express the essential via the appearance, and significance via the aesthetic. A work of art is at the centre of most of the stories, and into the enigmatic aura of this work of art – an aesthetic space that is transformed into the sacred – a strange figure enters. The movement of entry is generally complemented in the cadence of the texts by a radical gesture of withdrawal. From this viewpoint, the perspective of the reader very often comes into concordance with the unnamed protagonist of the given story: the two discover the world, stray into the museum or into the city simultaneously, stopping before a painting, an icon, a building or a statue. The central work of art of the opening narrative is, emphatically, a bird: the kamo-hunter, whose natural state is immobility. This characteristic, from a human standpoint, regards the bird as “the artist of the motionless gaze”. From here, it would be only a small step to complete the ornithological allegory, one with a rich tradition of world literature at its disposal, yet with new examples: the seagull, the swan, the albatross and the mallard. The text, however, does not follow this analogy. It does not wish to suggest that this particular bird is the artist. (The gesture of suggestion, in any event, is hardly characteristic of the author’s rhetorical repertory.) It is rather the labyrinthine connections between nature and art, tradition and culture, the parallels of that which emerges from the infinite and meets in the infinite which are delineated.

 

In the cultural mappings of Seiobo, Mediterranean Europe (Andalusia, Barcelona, Tuscany, Umbria, Venice, Athens), the cultural sphere of Byzantium, the Near East, China and Japan exist alongside each other. exotic, esoteric or historical landscapes become one of the most exciting terrains of the volume: in each case, Krasznahorkai questions the status of tradition and the definition of reproduction in the cultures detailed above. While in the Far East, the imitation and the copy are regarded as the natural ways of handing down the tradition, in the icon-theology of the Orthodox Byzantine-Russian world the copied artistic object, once it has been blessed by the bishop, is identical with the original (thus, the difference between the original and the copy dissolves). The third cultural sphere where Krasznahorkai draws into question the status of tradition is that of Renaissance Italy, the culture of the Western world. In the ateliers of the Renaissance painters, the act of copying was not a metaphysical affair, but rather the most accepted means of division of labour and of further development. Many of the stories contain art-historical case studies, which through the story of each painting employ a double narrative. On the one hand there is the narrative visible in the painting, and inscribed upon it is its own story as an object. The most telling example of the technique of double narration is the story entitled “A száműzött királyné" (The Exiled Queen), which in one respect relates the Biblical story of the Book of Esther, in another respect disentangles the sequence of events surrounding the story of the work of art that depicts it, as well as the highly detailed polemics set forth (in order to determine whether the painting should be regarded as Botticelli’s work or that of his disciple, Filippo Lippi, it is necessary to elucidate the precise definition of creation). In any case, the problematics of tradition becomes even more complex through this treatment: two points in time distant from each other are drawn into one common perspective. The declared identity of spaces radically foregrounds the differentiation-stratification of time: time will be in one and the same space at once archaic and postmodern. The actor in the Noh drama, speeding along after the performance towards Tokyo in the Shinkanzen bullet-train, stands outside of time as well; within time’s vacuum and the eternal time of creation.

 

The bifurcated stance towards time can be interpreted in other ways as well. There is, on the one hand, the time of the history of salvation, which is virtually infinite and unimaginable; on the other hand, the real fictional time of the insulted and the humiliated is often firmly affixed onto this cosmic, metaphysical time. It is precisely in this everlasting yet timeless aura of the work of art that the individual is suddenly struck by the realization of his or her own singular character. The mirror image of this characteristic is seen as, for example, we peer for a moment into the profane processes of the work of preparing an extraordinary Renaissance painting: the flighty assistants, completely drunk; the master haggling over the rush-job surcharge. This dynamic doubling guarantees that the texts do not become illustrative, but precisely the opposite: they are polyphonic despite the fact that throughout, only one voice is heard. The volume’s most accomplished sentences create the impression of many-voiced monologues. An outstanding example of counterpoint is the story entitled “Inoue Kazuyukister élete és művészete" (The Life and Work of Master Inoue Kazuyuki). While the entire universe signifies home for the celebrated Noh actor, he finds refuge from the world surrounding and oppressing him in his toilet. It becomes his own intimate recess to such a degree that he even recites his prayers there. The toilet is the demonic parody of the universe, but in this case it is the angelic characteristic that dominates.

 

Creation and death – Krasznahorkai’s sentences draw an arc between the extremes. The sentence itself is a kind of creation, the closure or finishing of which, in the case of many of the narratives, is expiration or death. From the viewpoint of the poetics of the sentence, the story entitled “Hajnalban kel" (He Rises at Dawn) is particularly intriguing. The narrative relates the everyday life of a Japanese mask-maker, while he is preparing and finishing the mask for the Noh actors. Thus, the master creates, he gives a face; but even more essential is that he has created the face of a demon. This story is comprised of only one sentence; just as the work processes of the mask-preparer connect together and converge, thus is the sentence itself one single entity. Similarly, in the story that follows, “Gyilkos születik" (A Murderer Is Born), the reader observes the phases of becoming a murderer, with the distinction that here it is not a question of material but of human transformation. While “He Rises at Dawn” is the narrative of the transubstantiation of material, of a kind of anthropomorphosis and human creation, the following story grippingly documents the rending apart and human entombment of the alienated individual. 

 

The protagonists of the stories are frequently in search of something, forever caught up in a frantic chase in the back streets of teeming cities, then having become lost within them, suddenly wake up to the fact that they are lost in their own lives; it is the impulse of the new city (Venice, Athens, Barcelona – emphatically sunlit places) that creates the sensual, that is to say the aesthetic, experience of that reality. The city spaces and the museum galleries are labyrinthine, and the sentences faithfully register this labyrinthine quality. If we identify the reader with the protagonist, then the reader in certain instances – as it already seems that the sentence in which he or she is proceeding leads into nothingness – can only trust that he or she will somehow emerge at the end. As if the crux of each sentence would be the following: will the readerly impulse remain alive, can a penetration so deeply yearned and hoped for still take place. What creates this is the narrative voice (which we may almost reflexively identify with that of the author), with its complete disintegration of the boundaries of the sentence, the loosening of syntax, and the poetics of emptying. Krasznahorkai creates a language-world in which the words are cooked down. The long sentences are like linguistic filters.

 

László Krasznahorkai brooks no compromise, as Seiobo amply confirms. Consistently, he searches for the perfect sentence, and the wondrously formed sentences search for the train of events, so that the sentence itself may be the narrative. The book demands slow reading. If a Krasznahorkai sentence is good, there is no way to leave it off: on the one hand it is so long, on the other hand so complete.