Szplug's Reviews > War & War

There is a book by David Horrobin which posits that schizophrenia, genetically present in every racial type, carried the perspective alteration whose infestation—spread through art, language, ideas, and dreams—evolved the full-flowering of a vigorous creativity amongst humanity, and thus helped to separate us from our non-abstract primate kin. Yet as this freeform and chaotic creativeness, an entropic imagination that spread like a wildfire, burned through its dimensional fuel, there was set up beside it a parallel structure of an icy and steely strength that strained all of the encompassing mass of sensory input that bombarded our physical bodies like an infinite meteor shower through filters defined by a rational logic and empirical reasoning, one which cast out as useless or baseless all that didn't further burnish its utilitarian shield warding us as we groped forward into the future. Art and Science, the Manichean duality forever linked with Good and Evil—the original bifurcation—invariably capable, at their respective extremities where the purity of devotion demanded by its mazes blazes white hot, of shattering the quotidian social framework that stabilizes the individual with madness: when the purity bursts the cautionary barriers and roils forth in its frenzied pride to claim mastery over all purviews that surround its newborn victim. In those moments when the eyes take on the intensity of earthbound stars we are never more certain that we are on a side, one that must, at all costs, win. The universe itself hinges upon how we shape our becoming.

Sometimes I would really like to stop, to abandon the whole thing, because something in me is breaking up and I'm getting tired.

War & War opens with the epigraph Heaven is sad which, whether read funereally or bitterly, so appositely sets the stage for the conflict between sides which commences on the opposite page and pours forth in exhausting and nigh-overwhelming abundance in subchapters comprised of a single sentence that might span either a few lines or several pages. Ostensibly we are being told the melancholy story of György Korin, a bat-faced, middle-aged archivist from southwest Hungary who has recently undergone a series of life-altering transformations. The discovery of an enigmatic manuscript buried amidst the formulaic wartime personal documents of an obscure Hungarian family has dramatically and irreversibly shifted his perspective, to the degree that Korin is convinced his entire ontological viewpoint prior to the discovery has been revealed as having been utterly and foolishly wrong. Unfortunately, his insistence on informing his neighbors at great length of his awakening has led to a spell in the local psychiatric hospital. Now freshly sprung, Korin is a man aflame with the passion of a holy mission: he must make his way to New York City, the center of the world, where he will transmit the contents of his precious and mysterious manuscript to the internet where, through the miracle of electronic technology, it will have transcended the finite limits of day-by-day time and entered the rarified air of the Eternal.

If there was just one sentence remaining at the end, it could only be that nothing, absolutely nothing, made sense, but a lot of sentences are left yet.

Korin's journey—which is fraught with human violence and menace and hostility from the very outset—provides him with plenty of opportunity to rave and gabble, in ecstatic perfervidness, the details of his story to a series of apathetically receptive strangers. Once in New York and given quarters by a coarse Hungarian expatriate, he develops a routine for his obsessions, one of typing up the manuscript and uploading it to warandwar.com and subsequently expounding upon its content and meaning to the subdued and broken lover of Korin's fellow Magyar whilst she cleans and cooks. It seems that the manuscript details the strange quest of four men—Kasser, Bengazza, Falke, and Toót—to avail themselves of the endless beauty and wonder bestowed upon a grateful world by the Absolute whilst both pursued, and pursuing, the mirror-eyed Mastemann, an austere archon whose breviary speaks the language of sprockets and gears and metallurgy, robed in power and reeking of death. The manuscript itself is but the prime duality that redounds throughout the tale as sides entrench against their antithesis, though whether in offense or defense becomes lost in the details—the result being a world forever searching for a peace in which to bask, recover and grow and yet finding naught but further war; individuals driven by arterial fire finding the persuasive power of their verbal effluence dissipated against the dull and conventional carapace of daily self-involved utilitarian torpor; the anchor of what was straining against the propulsion of what is to come; the Janus-faced dialectic. It may very well be that the entirety of existence is but an infinite battleground where victory always remains just beyond reach, perhaps beyond definition. In such an existence any demiurgy will of necessity be Manichean, one which, if not divided between mind and flesh, between the transcendent and the imminent, the noble and the base, will be riven in twain by the pillars of knowledge and belief. What will the wayfarer encounter in such a conflicted theatre of black and white whose backdrop exhibits permutations of terror? Much that is horrifyingly brutal and exquisitely beautiful.

There is an intense relationship between proximate objects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as for the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God.

Krasznahorkai left me with much to ponder and chew upon when I finally laid the book to rest. In Bernhardian fashion do the pulverizing sentences break, in endless succession, upon the reader; at times they prove a struggle to make headway against, at others a giddy and breathless ride through some of the most lucently gorgeous and ethereally haunting prose I've had the pleasure to encounter. The actual structure of the book is part of its fascinating puzzle—written almost in the fashion of an investigative inquiry, the reader can never quite ascertain whether what we are hearing is the voice of Korin himself, the manuscript, or something that plumbs even deeper. At the same time, whether the sorely tried Hungarian is in the grips of a fevered madness or an inspired Hermetic vision cannot be determined with any certainty; indeed, perhaps Korin is, in fact, the fleshly incarnation of the very angel whom he so desperately wishes to act as an intermediary. Krasznahorkai's style ensures that a vast host of details get swept up in the logorrheic vortex, and this minute accumulation of minutiae approaches the level of exasperation at several points throughout. What's more, there are certain tricks that just flat-out do not work, and certain characters and incidents whose (back)actions and details seem paradoxically contradictory to what was described as having actually occurred. However, the mark of all brilliant authors is that even when these minor obsessions don't provide an immediate insight or benefit, they are invariably followed by pieces that, aglow in the exuberance of burgeoning inspiration, stun with their sublime magnificence and the truths they harvest—and in War & War Krasznahorkai left me with no doubt at all that he is comfortably ensconced within their ranks.