Fjords Reviews

April 14, 2022

Thriller
Chasing Homer
By László Krasznahorkai

New Directions
91 pages
ISBN 978-0-811227-97-1

Near the midpoint of László Krasznahorkai’s novella Chasing Homer, the unnamed narrator makes an assertion that broadly conveys the generative impulse behind the work’s circuitous, monological, and disconcertingly gripping style. “I need phrases that say something while saying nothing at the same time,” he declares, launching into one of the page-long sentences characteristic of the celebrated Hungarian writer, whose interest in multimedia experimentation has yielded this eclectic collaboration with the German visual artist Max Neumann - their second, after 2010’s Animalinside - and the Hungarian percussionist Szilveszter Miklós. Throughout the twenty concise yet syntactically sprawling chapters, each accompanied by a haunting Neumann visual and an austere Miklós score (the latter accessible on the New Directions website via in-text QR codes), the need of Krasznahorkai’s narrator to say both something and nothing, to simultaneously reveal and conceal himself, drives the prose inexorably forward, with the novella becoming by turns a raw depiction of displaced terror, a rigorous analysis of knowledge’s limits, and a meditation on the role of cultural heritage in the creative process. Although these concerns at times interlock uneasily, the result is a labyrinthine marvel that compels as deeply as it confounds.

Originally published in 2019 but translated into English by John Batki only last year, Chasing Homer has a simple premise: the narrator is being pursued by killers, and he must outrun them. Expository information about the pursuit is scant, limited mostly to absurdist examples of what the killers are not (“not swans…and not sheep, or doves, or a swarm of dragonflies”) and what fate the narrator expects should they catch him (“hacked to pieces, stabbed in the heart, garroted from behind with a wire,” etc.) This reticence keeps the nature of the danger always just beyond our understanding, and therefore proves crucial to the sense of oppressive dread suffusing every twist and turn in the narration, a dread which Krasznahorkai takes as the central subject of the novella’s more internally preoccupied first half. Here, the narrator performs a more or less systematic description of his condition, chronicling in harrowing detail the fears and suspicions motivating his flight, along with the tactics he uses to remain inconspicuous and keep one step ahead of his pursuers. Underpinning his methods is an obstinate irrationalism, consisting of “only chaotic movements, accidental decisions, only helter-skelter sudden, unexpected, unplanned moves that run counter to all logic.” The necessity, for survival purposes, of escape from the strictures of reason is an idea that reappears consistently in the first several chapters. Krasznahorkai’s narrator (first-person in the English text, an intriguing change from the Hungarian’s third-person) inhabits a world where danger can be avoided only by seeking it out, where past and future are nonexistent, and where there is nothing more repulsive than “the simplest addition - that one plus one equals two.” This last point makes explicit the parallels between the narrator and Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, whose own rejection of rationality unfolds in a novella similarly riven by the competing urges to philosophize and to storytell. But unlike Chasing Homer’s narrator, what is lacking in the Underground Man’s embrace of the irrational is the impetus of mortal danger, the malevolent sense of which rarely strays far from the former’s focus, nor from that of Neumann and Miklós. The companion visuals and scores contribute rather deftly to the overarching atmosphere of relentless disturbance, though perhaps with unequal success. Whereas Neumann’s artworks, with their crude lines, grotesque forms, and predominantly dark palettes seem to reliably match the emotive energies of their respective prose chapters, the same cannot always be said of Miklós’s brief musical pieces, which at their abrasive best manage to add an oddly congruous percussive element to the already palpitating prose, and at their worst feel merely superfluous.

That being said, to relegate Neumann’s and Miklós’s roles in Chasing Homer to atmosphere-building is to somewhat miss the point of their inclusion. For what this collaboration with Krasznahorkai partly amounts to is a multi-pronged effort to know the terror of pursuit through vastly different creative means, and it’s the problem of knowledge that often vexes the voice in which Krasznahorkai makes his share of the effort. How, the narrator wonders, can someone in his position, having committed themselves to irrationality and “a type of focus that can never let up, can never remove its intent gaze from its object, never relax for an instant,” be certain that their mind is sound and its perceptions based in reality? Consequent to this doubtfulness is the narrator’s obsession with examining and revising his thoughts in the recursive manner of Beckett’s Molloy, albeit with greater forensic ruthlessness (another curious similarity between the two: their mysterious leg injuries). Occasionally redundant as such a voice may be, its value lies both in its exhaustiveness and its ability to lend form to the narrator’s seething anxieties. Take for instance his musings on “the good” that must be avoided in order to maintain one’s vigilance, which end in despair at the irremediable ignorance engendered by that vantage:

[N]othing and no-one can disturb you now, you imagine, when you’re in the good, though the most dangerous thing in fact is that you’re no longer taking any cognizance of your pursuers, and even if you do think of them, they get lost in a mist, positioned there in the good you cannot identify your murderers, their characteristics simply vanish, it’s impossible to guess their shape and form, their nature, their vulnerability or invulnerability, to the point where I can’t even decide what’s more terrifying, the unknowability of my murderers, or everything that is good.

The mechanics of Krasznahorkai’s prose, here as elsewhere, replicate the nauseating tension and frenzied motility of its content with near perfection, as if his sentences are constantly trying to escape their subjects, or his words their meanings. Significantly, it’s the notion of meaning that brings the narrator’s grappling with unknowability to something like a culmination in the novella’s ninth chapter, when, having realized that the meaning of the life he’s struggling to preserve also lies within the domain of the unknowable, the narrator posits a grim philosophy in which “life as a whole possesses nothing whatsoever, only its inner processes offer something, namely the way life resurrects like a spark and immediately expires amid the delirious war of consequences.” Only after this does Krasznahorkai shift gears into something like traditional storytelling, with vague places and vague characters materializing from the swarm of language to exert their influence on the narrator. But the problem of knowledge continues to plague Chasing Homer into its more grounded second half, where the focus shifts from the menace of the unknown to the burdensome allure of the familiar.

What most distinguishes these last several chapters from those preceding them are the setting’s accretion into a wintry Adriatic coastline and the narrator’s apparent escape from his pursuers, catalyzed by his snap decision to “follow in the wake of a pair of feet, a pair of feet in petite red shoes." The image of red shoes, indelibly associated in the global cultural imagination with The Wizard of Oz, seems invested with particular purpose when considered alongside the overt Moby Dick reference and the invocation of Ancient Greek deities that each occur a few pages prior, while the subsequent extended quotations from Homer’s Odyssey underscore the novella’s fixation on the artifacts from which our contemporary culture springs. Were these the first signs of such an interest in Chasing Homer (the title notwithstanding), they would feel haphazard and inelegant, but we can discern in Krasznahorkai’s channeling of Dostoyevsky and Beckett the same logic at work. This is a book steeped in and shaped by literary history - not an unusual project for Krasznahorkai, who elsewhere has shared his view that “the history of culture is the history of the misunderstandings of great thinkers. So we always have to go back to zero and begin differently.” But if Chasing Homer demonstrates anything, it’s that shuffling off one’s cultural heritage and restarting from scratch may well be impossible. The decision by Krasznahorkai to assign the episode from The Odyssey in which Odysseus is held prisoner on Calypso’s island a pivotal role in his own narrative indicates as much, and the reversal of the narrator’s role from the terrified pursued to the mystically-driven pursuer of Odysseus’s Cave on the “unsettled” island confirms it. As if to emphasize the point and assert the inevitability of the new’s subsumption by the old, the climactic passages of the penultimate chapter adopt the italicized print used earlier to quote Homer’s text. By novella’s end, we’re left with a more onerous version of Eliot’s anxiety of influence, one that hews surprisingly close to Marx’s pronouncement that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” This, then, is what chasing Homer really entails: to draw inspiration from our predecessors, but to also continually find ourselves incapable of escaping their influence, until we realize that it’s they who pursue us like phantoms, or killers, and certainly not swans. Neumann too seems to sense a connection between the initial pursuit and the narrator’s later attraction to Odysseus’s Cave, composing the artworks for both the introductory “Abstract” and the penultimate “At Calypso’s” with similar dark curves, figural forms, and sections of a bright orange unique to the pair. The effect of all this is to give belated substance to the book’s ominous epigraph (“You don’t want to know.”), initially read as a warning but now more closely resembling a lament, or a dark joke at our expense.

Perhaps it’s in that relation of artists to their forebears - the ouroboric process of being inspired by them while chafing under their influence - that we can locate the source of the narrator’s need to say both something and nothing. The conclusions reached by such a self-nullifying voice are predictably bleak, but there’s a nuance to Krasznahorkai’s vision that shouldn’t be overlooked. Beneath his incessant probing lies a genuine, palpable reverence for his creative influences, and a hope against hope that after countless attempts and failures, he just might catch their intangible legend. Now nearly four decades into his efforts to do so, Krasznahorkai continues to write with morbid inventiveness, and his zeal for experimentation allows him, Neumann, and Miklós to explore the crucial ideas in Chasing Homer to their fullest, most haunting extent.