The Vindication of László Krasznahorkai

… it comprised a much more abundant wholeness, itself only apprehended by means of another viewpoint, radically differing from the conventions of science, although not unscientific or antiscientific, not some kind of mystical or transcendent or other foolish gobbledygook, but instead an image of the real obtained via a different view, only that the construction of this reality, its logic, is not yet before us, because we cannot know, here, what exists there in place of a causal system, and this is what he wished to say: the decisions of the Security Council must emphasize the fully justified concern over the catastrophe that might ensue at any moment, and yet as we stand in the dreadful shadow of this total catastrophe, we must yet realize: the experiential world as sensed by ourselves, from the viewpoint of this veritable realm, is only an idea, a mere idea, Mrs. Chancellor, of what reality truly is …

To pick a fairly mild example. In my experience, however, reading Krasznahorkai is challenging not because it is unwieldy and frenetic but because it is meticulously, precisely, intricately ordered. Antecedents are answered by consequents, clauses that are left open find closure, chains of thought eventually relink—even if we must track them over pages. We are not used to this task. For me, reading his sentences, following the subtleties in his worlds, serves as a dose of rare and cleansing concentration. It is a visceral experience of feeling one’s brain struggling with, but ultimately embracing, a mental mode far different from the one conditioned by emails and group chats, social media, and screen time. It doesn’t feel like getting lost: It feels like finding oneself precisely coordinated, grounded in a mass of text. It is a pure antidote to the worst cognitive tendencies in the rest of our lives.

Consider “He Rises at Dawn,” one of my favorite chapters in Seiobo There Below, a book described as a novel but which will read for most as an anthology of stories about art and creation. One of many works that engages Krasznahorkai’s interest in Japanese craft and culture (those with similar interests should try the novella “A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East”), this chapter is about an expert mask maker working on a single mask. He works

a month and a half, so, roughly, that much time, here on the tatami placed in his work-box from early morning to early evening, and as for speaking, he doesn’t speak, not even to himself; if he makes any sounds at all, it’s only that he is lifting the piece of wood and quietly blowing off the wood shavings chiseled off the mask, and sometimes when he changes his physical position in the work-box and sighs while doing so, and once again he bends toward the block of wood, for at first it all begins with the Okari wood-merchant located in the one-time Imperial Palace, below Gosho to the south, in the person of Okari-san, who is of about the same stature as he, therefore very short, a good fifteen years older, and fairly gloomy, Okari-san, from whom he has been buying wood for years—he just bought this newer piece—he trusts him, the price is always good, the annual rings are thick and dense, the lines are without defects, namely the hinoki from which the chosen block of wood originates grew slowly; in addition, the wood is delivered from Bishu, in the prefecture of Gifu, from a forest that has the highest reputation, from a forest renowned for the quality of its material—the whole thing is a simple rectangular-shaped block of wood, that is how it all begins, with the circular cutting with the saw on the basis of the stencil to the desired proportions; he does not think, because he doesn’t have to, his hand moves by its own accord, he does not have to control its direction, the saw and the chisels know by themselves what they have to do, so it is no wonder that this first, this very first phase of the work is the fastest, the most free from the later, frequently tormenting anxiety …

Roughly the same plot of this story could be covered in a “Come With Me as I Make a Japanese Noh Mask” Instagram reel, from the montage of the idyllic woods to the time-lapse of a wood block shaving into shape. The vast majority of our media consumption and communication is now defined by this compression of complicated, unwieldy life into tidy little rectangles. Social media videos, television, and films are designed to demand the smallest of sustained attention, and to capture it as quickly as possible, as part of a larger project of sustained attentional extraction. TikTok is the apotheosis of this trend: To prevent the viewer switching to other content, the content will continually switch for the viewer. That infinite carnival, I think we all can recognize, is the real hypnosis, the true abyss.