Anticipating doom: what can László Krasznahorkai’s novels tell us about the refugee crisis?
When the writer László Krasznahorkai said on Hungarian television two years ago that Hungary has been “showing its uglier face” over the past 25 years, it was something of a surprise. This wasn't due to Krasznahorkai putting a provocative gloss on recent history. The surprise was that he was directly commenting on still-unfolding events, compared to the detachment he maintains in his work. Yet this seeming disembodiment from the facts on the ground paradoxically results in greater emotional intensity and tempts readers to reach for connections that the writer himself disavows consciously planting in his work.
Indeed there is something prophetic in Krasznahorkai's work, a sense that the already vulnerable world may at any moment come undone, may fall apart like a fighter's face in the late rounds after one blow too many. Though it's a mistake to single out a particular work and portray it as, say, pure political allegory, his work offers a moody, impressionistic vision of Hungary approaching the millennium, a series of hints and glimmers, gleanings from the mood in the air.
“You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, any more than you'll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life,” Krasznahorkai says, and in the past year or two, the anticipation of doom has grown in Hungary. The arrival on the continent of refugees from Syria heightened fears ranging from the clash of cultures to the prospect of terrorism taking root, either by way of the new arrivals or their subsequent generations.
Shut your gates tight, and plug up the cracks, put up the beams and bring out the barbed wire, and protect yourselves from all sides, but know that you lock up in vain, you plug in vain, you raise beams in vain and you wrap wire in vain, for that chink, that groove, that crevice which would be an obstacle for me does not exist; but it is just for that reason that you should barricade your gates and board up your windows, brick up your windows and protect yourselves, because I will break out, and I will arrive, and of course lock up your children as well, and of course arm yourselves with many weapons, and organize your defence, and station the security guards, pull up the cordon and put the land mines in place, just go ahead and do it, just get ready, but whatever you do against me is in vain…because I am coming, one day I will be here, maybe not in one form, but immediately in two or three, or in four, one day I shall come, and I shall lacerate your faces, because I am ruin.
It's natural to long for security, for reassurance in the face of a threat; perhaps an amorphous threat, one ill-considered and dimly understood, more often invites a saviour of some kind, in this case a strongman in the guise of Orbán. Krasznahorkai recognises this dynamic in Satantango, when a mere handful of residents remaining on a failed collective farm face their dim prospects. Irmias, who they've all thought dead, will chart a better course. He has certain rhetorical gifts, after all, and it's not as if they have the wherewithal to lift themselves out of the mess in which they've landed. They fail to even imagine his self-interest — he's little more than a state informant — and he sets about fleecing them, all while they look to him for guidance. Faced with doubts that the farm's inhabitants own enough to make the fleecing worth the effort, Irmias assures his compatriot that, “peasants always have something”.
Hungary is not genteel, nor are the questions so simple. However phrased the referendum question, the rhetoric comes down to: do you want to be murdered in your beds? Do you want your town taken over by rabid Islamists? Do you want your women to be molested and raped? Do you want foreigners to take your jobs? And, of course – and here it chimes particularly well with our own referendum – do you want bureaucrats in Brussels telling you, the proud (Hungarian/British) people, what to do?
More than 98% of those who voted chose not to accept the EU's migrant quotas, yet abstention from voting by over half of the population invalidated the referendum on constitutional grounds. Perhaps a portion of the body politic of any country can be roused to antipathy, and once roused, the way back to tolerance is a ragged path. Despite the failed referendum, Orbán submitted a constitutional amendment to ban the resettlement of refugees in Hungary. Members of the opposition Jobbik party refused to vote on the first iteration of the amendment. They sought to stiffen the restrictions still further, to do away with a provision allowing immigrants to buy residency rights. The fate of the amendment, and more significantly, the refugees it seeks to exclude, remains unsettled.
Now I’m sitting facing the vacant lot, and hearing the hours go by. You lose one home after another, I say to myself. Here I am, sitting with my wanderer’s staff. My feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry. Misery crouches beside me, ever larger and ever gentler; pain takes an interest, becomes huge and kind; terror flutters up, and it doesn’t even frighten me anymore. And that’s the most desolate thing of all.