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BOGOTÁ — László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist born in the days when the Soviet Union would march into any country in its neighborhood, has succumbed to that plague afflicting writers who win a prize (in his case, several including the Sándor Márai, Booker and Formentor prizes).
It’s a plague that prompts them to give interviews to deferential journalists from important newspapers, which leads them to make sententious declarations or, in plain parlance, talk big without a thought for words.
A little pompously, he insists he never writes about himself.
Inside the writer’s mind
In 1580, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne admitted at the start of his Essays: “I myself am the material for my book.” Four centuries later, the Colombian singer and composer Leandro Díaz concurred, saying “I am my own subject.”
Krasznahorkai, however, goaded by that tyrant the microphone, has chosen to discard the self as inspiration with seeming modesty that may be mere forgetfulness about the history and basics of literature. He told the Madrid-based daily El País in December 2022 that he wrote “about people who have experienced and lived through (tradition), not about myself. There are far more interesting people than me, and if you cannot understand that you couldn’t be a novelist.”
Talking about yourself, he said, was something you did with “your wife or ex-wife.” Krasznahorkai thus joined a growing band of writers uninterested in accounts of the ups and downs of an artist’s life (or autofiction, as they say today). Nor does he seem fond of psychologists, unless she is his wife, or an ex.
Literature is filled with all that is going on in the mind.
Krasznahorkai’s irritation may be with a proliferating body of works that view typing down routines in humdrum fashion as tantamount to art (one might cite Salman Rushdie‘s latest work, Knife, on his attempted murder, or Knausgaard’s unfiltered memoirs, My Struggle, in this category).
Yet Krasznahorkai is also dismissing the possibility of daily travails yielding the basic stuff that could, if moulded with literary savoir-faire, acquire the requisite density and abundance of a work of art, not to mention the existence of talent for speaking about yourself and the world.
He is not just dismissing it, but affirming, for the record, that any writer who dares use his life cycles as literary compost could “never be a novelist.” You wonder, with all the material he reads every day, if Krasznahorkai ever noticed that literature is filled with all that is going on in the mind, and not just recently. It began with the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Telling a bigger story
You couldn’t be a novelist? What about Proust and Samuel Beckett, or Kafka, who made a verbal meal of our anxious, uneasy passage through this life? Never be fooled by the third-person narrator or sober tone as the writer’s ploy to give an impression of objectivity, detachment and impersonality. The mind’s furtive suggestions were a perpetual prompter to those writers.
The best example of writing about yourself under the guise of others is Gabriel García Márquez. He used to say his early short stories (in the compilation Ojos de perro azul) were never “quite right” simply for lacking such crucial ingredients as sincerity and the unfettered freedom of the senses. That is what you find in his big novels, written under influence of the real-yet-unreal world of a narrator who delves so deeply into other lives as to find and relate in them his own existence.
Six centuries before, the poet Dante embarked on his exploration of impossible moral and universal entanglements by first confessing his bewilderment. The Bible gives us Job, the prophet heaving under the “senseless” cruelty of God’s curses. His suffering is acutely personal, and a lesson in universal principles: the test of faith and the brittleness of worldly happiness.
Krasznahorkai forgets that he writes with a personal vision.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges saw in libraries and mirrors the “cold algebra” of his own feelings.The Russian Joseph Brodsky believed linguistic shifts to constitute a writer’s real biography. Krasznahorkai may imagine he is the only novelist writing about others, but forgets he writes with a personal vision, with words he has chosen and a hierarchy of importance he sets for his characters. With due respect for his noble claims, his writings inevitably tell a bigger story — about himself.
The Spanish writer Luis Mateo Díaz, recently given the Cervantes Prize, has had a similar spell of feverish humility. He said as he received his award that he had a “precarious inability to write about what is going on with me, with what happens in my life… I am what I find least interesting.” Yet Cervantes, namesake of the prize, began his epic Don Quixote with a personal observation that became a literary milestone: “Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember.”
“I am nothing but literature”
The writer is a bird singing in a cage, and while its chirping is heard beyond, the bird remains caged. While its singing flies out and reaches every corner of a room, the bird does not. It is, like an author’s characters, a projection. And while characters are not an exact projection or depiction of the writer’s personality, they convey an inner voice and vision.
To prolong the cage metaphor a bit longer: in time, the bird may be happy just to flap its wings inside the cage. It’s as good as flying! Writers too may come to see their imaginings as the “real reality” and no longer a lesser version of the world.
As the British daily newspaper The Guardian wrote of Kafka’s diaries in late April, they reveal how far his physical and imaginary worlds were enmeshed. “I am nothing but literature,” he wrote in his diary in 1913. Writing becomes a tunnel or lair, where the private world takes refuge, or takes off. In December 1911, Kafka wrote again that he would expunge his anxieties by writing. Imagine words emerging from the depths of a mind to be spread on a flat page, ready for reabsorption into the imagination.
Is the writer’s reality not a personal reality, even when set in the world outside? Or should writers strive to become the plainest of chroniclers and not a little stifling, like Kafka’s “cage that went out looking for a bird”?
