Apocalyptic Neuroses: László Krasznahorkai’s "The Last Wolf & Herman"
László Krasznahorkai | The Last Wolf & Herman | New Directions | 128 Pages
The most striking feature of László Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf—namely, that it is written in the form of a single, wandering, 70-page sentence—is in some ways also the least surprising thing about the book, whose author has become notorious for his habit of writing very long sentences: sentences that stretch over pages and chapters as they trace the tortuous, neurotic mental pathways of his characters.
In The Last Wolf, published together with Herman in 2016 by New Directions, Krasznahorkai carries this aesthetic project to its natural conclusion. The novella, which follows a disgraced philosophy professor who attempts to write the true story of the last wolf in a remote region of Spain, can be punishing in its monotony—in the slow and unabating progress of its syntax, and the repetitiveness of its main character’s self-laceration. Yet it is exactly this quality of exhaustion, the simultaneous sense of boredom and restlessness, that makes the book such a convincing portrait of extinction.
Krasznahorkai has long been regarded as a figurehead of European postmodernism. Since he was first translated into English (with The Melancholy of Resistance, in 1998), his reputation in the Anglophone world has steadily grown, drawing praise from writers like Susan Sontag and James Wood, and eliciting comparisons to Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, and Gogol. By now, his position in the canon of the European avant-garde seems all but certain, and the essential outlines of his work—his restless, obsessive protagonists, his interest in apocalypse and decay, his penchant for long (extremely long) sentences—are becoming clear. What’s more, the progress of world events has ensured that Krasznahorkai’s work remains timely: with each successive collapse (or threat of collapse), his literature of apocalypse takes on a new urgency.
In this light, The Last Wolf (and, less conspicuously, Herman) reads less as an aberration than as a natural evolution—perhaps a culmination—of Krasznahorkai’s earlier work. Krasznahorkai has written so many long sentences over the course of his career that perhaps it was only a matter of time before he wrote a sentence so long it comprised an entire book. Moreover, the novel’s interest in ecology seems a natural outgrowth of any contemporary apocalyptic fixation.
But what is particularly interesting about The Last Wolf is how softly it speaks, and how curiously its engagement with contemporary life dovetails with its extreme formal predicament. In the earlier novel The Melancholy of Resistance (which Béla Tarr adapted into the film Werckmeister Harmonies) apocalypse lives at center stage, and every item of news becomes an omen “of what [is] referred to by a growing number of people as ‘the coming catastrophe.’” Into a town already on the verge of nervous breakdown comes a circus whose only attraction is an enormous whale, a mountain of dead flesh too massive to comprehend in a single glance.
Compared to the overtness of the earlier work, The Last Wolf makes a quiet statement; in subject matter, it hews closer to the realist tradition—though it, too, maintains an unfailingly bleak atmosphere. There are relatively few sensory details throughout this story. The world as written in the novella is uncomfortably narrow, caught alternately within the confines of the Sparschwein—a dreary Berlin bar, where the protagonist orders one Sternburg beer after another—and within the bounds of the protagonist’s neuroses, as he meditates out loud on his own intellectual impotence, narrating his time in the Spanish region of Extremadura to a bartender who is never more than marginally interested in what he has to say.
Extremadura, the professor discovers, is a sort of blank zone in the Spanish landscape. He receives an invitation he is sure must be a mistake to travel to this far-off region and write whatever he feels about the region. And although, as his Spanish acquaintances inform him, “THERE IS NOTHING THERE,” this nothing-there-ness seems to be exactly the point. Extremadura is a place “outside the world, because extre means outside, out of, you get it?”—and though the region is little more than a “historical wasteland,” an “enormous, mercilessly barren, flat, place,” it now appears to be on the brink of a renaissance, a “flowering” that will bring it up to speed with the contemporary world. Indeed, it is an element of the professor’s bad conscience about the whole business that he may be forced to tell “these good people the fate that await[s] them, the autopistas, the suburban developments.”
Like so much in this tale of disaffection, the professor’s eventual fixation on wolves happens by chance. Without much thought, he mentions a phrase from an article he has happened to read, which reports that “it was south of the river Duero in 1983 that the last wolf had perished.” His overeager guides take his remark as a signal to track the story of the last wolf to its conclusion. For several days the professor is whisked around Extremadura, listening to accounts of the last wolf’s demise, until finally, on the brink of meeting the man who really did shoot the last wolf in Extremadura, he has an enigmatic interaction with the warden—the warden would like to tell him something, but “it was precisely what I expected, so I told him not to tell me”—and this interaction “bring[s] on the sense of anxiety he still suffer[s] from to this day.” At this point, the story ends.
What is at stake in this story, then, as in so much postwar fiction, is whether the story can be effectively told at all, and it is a mark of Krasznahorkai’s peculiar technique and sense of humor that the only way he can tell it is in the form of a single sentence: a single uninterrupted howl, a locution as intricate and convoluted as it is dry. Under Krasznahorkai’s pen, the world is a desiccated, barren, boring place. When an event as momentous as an extinction occurs, no one will really pay much attention to it. The only way to talk about it will be in an endless stream of babble that stretches toward banality.
As globalization creeps in on the empty space of Extremadura, the set of available narratives shrinks, and the professor is forced into an approach that blends nostalgia with a self-absorbed anxiety. He is called to mourn a bucolic past, in which the actual wolf in question remains an empty cipher, nothing more than an occasion to keep talking. The professor finds himself speaking interminably, despite being totally convinced of his inability to speak. One is reminded of Beckett’s dictum from The Unnameable—“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—but whereas Beckett’s narrator is animated by an indefinable sense of urgency, Krasznahorkai’s protagonists often seem to speak simply because there is nothing better to do. This speech takes place in a world drained of activity, where even the recipient of the narrative, the apathetic Hungarian bartender, can hardly be bothered to stay awake.
Herman, the companion novella to The Last Wolf, engages more substantively with its animal subject matter. The novella tells the story of Herman, a game warden brought out of retirement to clear a particularly overgrown patch of woods, a “‘sore spot on the well-groomed body of the region.’” After two years of successful work, Herman has an attack of conscience at the sight of the mass of animals he’s killed, and turns his focus to hunting the townspeople, before ultimately being discovered and killed by the authorities.
The novella is comprised of two versions of this story, the first (“The Game Warden”) told by Krasznahorkai’s standard third-person narrator, the second (“The Death of a Craft”) by one of a group of sexually-obsessed aristocrats who visit the town in the midst of Herman’s attacks. This bivocality generates a degree of tension within the novella, not least because the two accounts differ on a number of factual points. The novella’s serene atmosphere more closely resembles the village pastoral of Krasznahorkai’s earlier work. Nevertheless, in Herman, as in The Last Wolf, the animal is primarily a mirror in which the human world becomes visible. The sight of a fox he’s killed fills Herman with anguish, and “ma[kes] him glimpse in a flash his entire life like a landscape.” And, urging the aristocrats to leave town, a desk clerk at the hotel speculates that Herman commits his acts of violence because “he’s not happy with the way things are…in today’s world.”
In both The Last Wolf and Herman, Krasznahorkai engages his distinctive technique in a critique of contemporary cultural life. It is both amusing and instructive, then, to compare Krasznahorkai’s vision of globalized late capitalism with that of a writer like Michel Houellebecq, whose reactionary maximalism and indiscriminate hatred are almost diametrically opposed to the spare, monotonous babble Krasznahorkai produces in these novellas. For Houellebecq, in books like The Elementary Particles and Serotonin, contemporary society is a place where Monoprix and McDonalds face each other on every corner, and where everyone wants to fuck but is too repressed to say so. Houellebecq writes in a world that overflows from all corners.
By contrast, Krasznahorkai’s late capitalism is characterized by an intense absence of world. For the professor, sitting in Sparschwein drinking Sternburg, the world is always somewhere else, and he can do nothing but trace the outlines of his own helplessness, speaking only because he has nothing better to do, into a world nobody cares about, a world that hardly exists.