László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Krasznahorkai’s answers, which were delivered in Hungarian, have been translated by Mulzet.

I was moved by your Nobel Prize banquet speech, especially by your mention of your older brother. You thanked him for always lifting you onto his shoulders when you were children, because he taught you “that there could be another way of looking at the world.” What did you see up there?

At first, nothing. My older brother got angry at me, because up there, on his shoulders, something frequently happened in my little trousers. It was not so pleasant for my brother. He would shake me in his anger, and then I couldn’t see too much of the world. Now that we’re both very old, I asked how awful it was for him. He said, “I still feel it.”

I did see from there that the world was moving around a lot. Ever since, I have tried to maintain this velocity in everything I do. This velocity determined how I composed music when I was younger, and later on, how I wrote my sentences. Perhaps, with this explanation, I have become a little serious.

Your sentences have great velocity. They are long, complex, patterned by interesting repetitions, and can sprawl across a whole novel, like in “Herscht 07769.” But they weren’t always like that. Your technique has changed: first and most dramatically, between “The Melancholy of Resistance” and “War and War,” in which each short chapter was structured by a single sentence, often limited to one event, setting, or character’s point of view; then again, between “War and War” and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” which is divided into lengthier episodes, each formed by a single sentence that sweeps up many events and many points of view, and moves freely across time and space. How did your sense of velocity affect how you composed your sentences?

I think this can be attributed to how I am getting ever closer to the spoken language. When somebody wants to say something really important, let’s say a man wants to say to a woman, or woman wants to say to a man, “I’ve been in love with you for seventeen years, and I can’t bear it any longer, I have to tell you, because things can’t go on like this anymore,” comma, comma, comma—it is not possible to chop up an explosive confession like this, from living speech, into neat little sentences. This kind of problem has really determined my relationship to velocity.

For me, the correctly chosen velocity is what determines the character of a prose work. Of course, I don’t mean velocity in the physical sense of the word but in a strongly figurative sense, although it can also be connected to the physical concept of velocity. It is undeniable that in my first two or three books, I did not really feel this obligation to use the living language of these confession-like statements. For me, the situation became more serious, because I was ever less satisfied with the books I was publishing. Maybe it sounds funny, but I consider practically all of my books to have been failures, and if this sequence of failures had not occurred, I would have finished my career after my first book. There was no sequel to the Bible, was there?

Then, when I became middle-aged, while I was working on “Seiobo There Below,” I really wanted to try to say something important. I wanted to say something important about how I could not say anything important, because I was having a lot of problems with the idea of importance, and even with the idea of articulation. But I had no problems with this confessional speech. I would catch a thread from the things that were occurring in the background of my own life, it would suddenly burst into my brain, and I would set off from this thread. At first, the sentences were only in my head, and I would pace around and around whatever room I happened to be living in at that time, and then, suddenly, there were about fifteen or twenty pages, on the old A4-size paper, and I had corrected all the errors in the rhythms, melodies, and tempo, as if I were a fanatic dreamer like [Friedrich] Hölderlin or [Heinrich von] Kleist. During these times, it was not good to live with me, because I could never concentrate on anything else.