East and West after the Changes in the novels, essays and travelogues by János Háy and

László Krasznahorkai

Sl.1. Margit Köves

My papers deals with the changing definitions of the geographical directions East and West

And the literary, poetical imagination that connects the work of Hungarian writers, János Háy
and László Krasznahorkai to these directions..

Hungarian interest in the Orient covers two hundred years of intellectual history. It has always
depended on the immediate tasks of nation building or political and literary formations. [In the
earliest phase the Orient served to provide the narrative of the origins and early history of
Hungarians and to define the immediate strategy of the resistance to Austrian-German rule, and
the rivalry with the emerging larger Slavic political unity. It also always satisfied the specific
demands of literary genres of the time. Epics and short stories in the first phase of Romanticism,
novel in the second phase, poetry in the twentieth century.]

In the post war decades after 1945 East and West in East-Central Europe meant the East and
the West in Europe, the faultlines of two military powers, two alliances. In our discussions about
Europe these terms still pay an important role for the comparison of various areas. After 1989
travelling within and outside Europe has become free and this brought in new geographical
spaces in literature.

Sl.2 The poetry, prose and essays written by Viktor Horváth, Gábor Lanczkor, László Darvasi,
J.A. Tillmann and Zsuzsa Takács, János Háy and László Krasznahorkai cover new geo-cultural
spaces (Middle East, China, Japan, Alexandria, Moorish Spain) with different sensibilities in
history and everyday life. In the course of my paper I am going to speak about work, which
deal with different historical contexts

Sl.3 Háy in Jigerdilen, the pleasure of the heart,1996 and Xanadu, Earth, Water, Air,1999 and
Sl.4 Krasznahorkai in The Prisoner of Urga, 1992, War and War, 1999 and in From North by
Hill, From South by Lake, From West By Paths, from East by River,2OO3 and Destruction and
Grief under the Sky. They took up the East in a number of essays, for example Indian Time and
My Father(2OO9) by Háy and To go mad in Paradise (2OO1), by Krasznahorkai.

The paper explores the dislocation of time, the drift and overspilling of regions and borders, the
role of history and archaeology, and the subjective dimensions of space, and the new invention
of East and West. East and West are shifting geographical and historical concepts, which may
be defined differently by individual writers.

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Historical Contexts

The Work by János Háy and László Krasznahorkai has strong interplay with literature written
about the Orient in the past, specially the stories and novels of Jókai and Gárdonyi dealing with
the time of the Turkish occupation in Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [Háy
says in an interview “I think every boy has a special bond to the Turkish age even more so
because of Gárdonyi’s novel, the Stars of Eger” He adds that this is specially true of him because
a Turkish grave was discovered in their courtyard in Vámosmikola in the place where he was
born and went to school.]

The Orient as a geographical space in Háy’s novel, Dzsigerdilen, Jigerdilen stretches from
Hungary to Istanbul and Venice in Italy. Jigerdilen takes place in the sixteenth century during the
time when the Turks come to Hungary to conquer foreign lands: Vienna, Istanbul, Törökkanizsa,
Buda, Tata. Jigerdilen depicts the life of four boys (Pali Bridorits, Gergely Pethő, János Kristóf
and the narrator, Móricz Rák) and a girl,Anna from a village, Sándorpuszta . Anna is kidnapped
and the four boys, follow her throughout their lives. The pursuit of Anna and her kidnappers-
takes us to forts and cities in Hungary,Buda, Törökkanizsa, Babócsa, Vienna and Istanbul. The
fort and the city as a unit in Turkish occupied Hungary and Istanbul provides a certain urban
imaginary. The cities in the forts were centres of state power serving as nodal points for
population movements and interregional trade. The cities in Háy’s Jigerdilen have massive
fortifications, which are often described with the help of body-poetics. This is perceptible in the
description of the re-occupation of Törökkanizsa (where Anna is also kept by Pasha Köprülü).
The citadel where Anna is kept is a city within the city.

Sl.5“I entered the throat of the Turkish wolf, I knocked the teeth with the hoofs of
my horse, then I stepped on the slimy tongue and glanced deep into the
tonsils. I galloped faster and faster between the walls of the cavernous mouth,
through the crack of the cliffs of the throat down the tunnel of esophagus, up
to the stomache not shrinking from anything where previous nights food
knocked about, sleepy and rumpled where the bustle was the greatest. The
fluids of the stomach splashed on me, like some kind of a rain, they squeezed
into my eyes, their strong odour tormented my nose.” (167)

Istanbul where Pali Bridorits served under the name Jahija Jacsisi as a translator and the
correspondent of the Sultan is depicted also by fortifications and the panoramic city scape of
mosques and the sea, an inner and an outer cityscape, the fort as symbol of military power. The
roofs of the city also serve as the presentation of interiority, self –reflection where Pali moves
before he throws and kills himself in the Marmor Sea.

Both Háy’s novels, Jigerdilen and Xanadu take place in an enchanted world, with angels, god
and mythical lovers who populate the geographical landscape.

Xanadu-narrates the love of a merchant, Marco from Venice and a local girl. The novel

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depicts the seaside port Pirano (lighthouse).

Sl.6 The novel, Xanadu opens before mooring at Piran. Waves in the sea warmed up by
the sun “shine like gold coins”, an effect of the circulation of water and light in the air. The
sailors spit in front of their feet and say about Marco”he counts his money now.” The
connection of Alexandria, Istanbul, Sidon in Libanon, and Bagceseray in the Caucasus also
highlights the globalizing network of trade and the remapping of the world.. The conquest of
Italy by Charles VIII in the novel also shows the desire to avail of trade routes in the fifteenth
century [and “South is life, North is Death” is the slogan of the army of Charles VIII in Xanadu
when he starts out to conquer Italy. The temple, the light tower the stone houses and the pub by
the harbour in Piran reflect the possible reorganization of cityscape in the framework of
mercantile trade forming a trade system by navigation of the sea. Haptic depiction, by which I
mean depiction of sensation by touch or vibration, sensation of the body plays an important role
in the presentation.]

Maps, borders, nomadism

The Prisoner of Urga was written in 1992 after the political changes and after Krasznahorkai
published two novels Satan Tango and The Melancholy of Resistance.

Sl.7. About these novels Krasznahorkai said in an interview with Gábor Förköli: “After my first
two books everybody expected that from now on rain will keep on pouring and drunken peasants
will ramble about in the Great Hungarian Plain in my novels [and sometimes a woman will
emerge].... I grew up in a place,in Hungary which was bricked up towards the East. Everybody
looked towards the West, nobody turned any attention to the East specially the far East. We knew
Sándor Weöres and his Lao-ce translations and Ferenc Tőkei’s work about Chinese philosophy.
But we were uninformed and I was too, about what is the East.”

The Prisoner of Urga was a turning point in Krasznahorkai’s life. This is underlined by his
statements and the motto of the novel,from the Divine Comedy in Italian and Hungarian

Sl.8 "Halfway through the journey of our life". The word ’journey’ is significant, The Prisoner
of Urga is a physical and spiritual journey purposely undertaken by the author to reach clarity on
issues of his life. There is a double framework of time that brings in double space in the novel,
one when he moves in the Gobi desert, roams in Beijing, Urga or Quangzhou and the other when
the narrator writes the novel in Hungary at home with his children tucked into bed. In the course
of the journey by the Transsiberian Express the narrator tries to trace his journey on various maps
and borders. He finds the maps unreliable and himself unable to produce a map on the
continuous plateau. Borders and map as the site of philosophical reflection is a feature of
geopoetics. (In geopoetics we connect place or space with aesthetic and cultural features) The
flow of the language in Krasznahorkai’s novel is similar to the uninterrupted plane of the desert
with pauses, straying and rushing forward similarly to the outmoded way of travelling.In the
chapter on the Gobi desert the news of war is announced (It is quite clear that this is the Iraq war
even though he does not mention it in concrete terms.) In the course of his Beijing experiences
the contrast between the two spaces, the smooth space of the desert and the striated space of the
city emerge when the narrator lands in Beijing. In Beijing he wants to meet Lu Shanli, the
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Chinese actress perhaps not only out of obsession with a woman but also as an attempt to enter
more deeply into Chinese culture. Forms of art, theatre, painting, sculpture are important in the
narrator’s approach to the East. At the centre of The Prisoner of Urga Lu Shanli’s letter (the
only reply to the narrator’s 64 letters) is reproduced. This letter reveals more about the narrator
and gives a new interpretation of subjectivity. A sense of melancholy pervades the novel where
the world, the surrounding looks fragmented and chaotically split up and escapes „western
rationality”. The narrator attempts to leave behind this rationality but again and again expounds
and elaborates issues on the basis of this rationality. .

Centre of the World, between East and West

The protagonist of Krasznahorkai’s novel, War and War György Korim works in the Archive in
the Hungarian country-side where he finds a special manuscript about the end of the Minotian
Empire, one thousand five hundred years of European culture. Korim wants to reach „the centre
of the world”, New York to register and spread the manuscript by computer. [Korim is lead by
Hermes, the Greek god, the emissary between humans and gods, patron of travellers and
thieves.] War and War the title refers to the title of Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. [At the
railway station in the country side urchins surround Korim and want to rob him, but finally he
only gets wounded by a razor]. War, violence, terror and physical abuse are everywhere, in
Hungary or in New York .The person who exercises kindness over Korim in the beginning of the
novel brutally abuses his and becomes a murderer, this shows his degradation. There are
panoramas which connect one geographical region with the other,one historical age with another
- the skyscrapers of Manhatten with the building of the tower of Babel. Rome, Giblaltar, Brittany
are dealt with in the manuscript and their scenes merge with the scenes of New York.

Culture, Sense of Vision

Krasznahorkai is strongly associated with film. He is the scriptwriter and consultant of the
Hungarian director, Béla Tarr who turned many of Krasznahorkai’s novels to films.

In the interview with Gábor Pörköli Krasznahorkai spoke about East and West. He also describes
how in post-maoist China he suddenly realized that he is in the „last great ancient empire” – and
he calls this a shattering experience. To search for the continuity of this culture he returns to
China after thirteen years. He describes this visit in Destruction and Grief under the Sky, 2OO4
The focalization of the narrator and the objective material of surrounding surfaces in the chapter
Someone cares about me „Mintha féltenének”. The narrator describes how they move meter by
meter he can see the nearby pine trees , but the rest are removed in the mysterious fog.

Slide 9 He refers to the Chinese painters, Huang Shen [and Ying-Yujian] pointing out that
visual representation is material specific and that there is a kind of close vision, that frames, and
enlarges certain objects for us in our field of vision.

Sl.1O ” [...I am completely taken by what I see and I am carried away by the sight. As soon as I
look at the first line of tall pinetrees and behind them they are lost, the next pines step back in
the most mysterious space so that the last one would dissolve in nothing as if we would be lost in
the mirage of a Huang Shen or a Ying-Yujian painting]: from time to time we come across a
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protruding rock, at other times a ravine, not even guessed before it opens up before our
steps, so we are moving step by step on the stairs of the path, and our breath stops again
and again and I can see that even the interpreter is enchanted by the special magic of divine
nature dipped into fog...”

His interviews with Tang Xiaodu, the caligrapher, Lai, the artist of the Kunqu theatre, his
depiction of Shaoxing, the place of birth of Lu Xun, the novelist – the Guoqing Si monastery in
the Tientai-hills and its library, Puotoshan, from the Han age emotionally shatter the narrator.
They give him the impression that he visits the vestiges of two thousand years of civilization.
Culture in present day China in the narrator’s opinion can continue only in insulated spots
(zárványok).

The reader can feel that vision is a priviliged sense in Krasznahorkai’s approach to Chinese –
Japanese culture. Direction figure in the title of the novel, From North by Hill, from South by
Lake, from West by Paths, from East by River(2OO3), which takes place in the 21st century,
when Prince Genji’s grandson (the hero of Shikibu Murasaki’s novel) lands in a monastery near
Kyoto to find one the most beautiful garden he has seen in a book called „One hundred fine
gardens”. The „so called hidden garden” by which „he had been instantly captivated” and „he
could never again shake himself free of it”. In the form of the garden Krasznahorkai creates „a
plane of consistency” and introduces the connections which connect nature with other multiplicities
of culture.

Sl.11 This incongruous desire for this beautiful garden coexists with other extranous events for
example the dog beaten to a pulp, the fishes nailed to the door of a booth, the drunken men in
European clothes or the appearance of the Prince, grandson of Genji and his search and final
drifting away, passing the entrance of the garden „what kind of force, what inexpressibly complex
and immeasurably serious interplay of divine accidents could have given rise to solid matter, this
magical ordering of ions and atoms in the universe and here on Earth, what kind of divine
intelligence could have created order itself, the basis of all order, a crystal structure, would have been
concerned with understanding why primordially unordered matter strives with its tormented,
irregularly moving, swirling particles for a place among the laws of geometry, why would anything
that till then had always drifted without any rule among the channels of so-called random forces seek
to be organised according to a rule, and in investigating the depths of the garden he would have
been concerned about whether he truly grasped the sense of what the seemingly endless
diversity of crystal systems, classes of crystals, elementary cells and crystal forms, or in other
words the existence of the laws of symmetry...”

Geological dimensions impose themselves on the text instead of the directions, which are mentioned
in the title and these geological metaphors function in the exposition of the location.

In Seiobo, Mediterranean Europe (Andalusia, Barcelona, Tuscany, Umbria, Venice, Athens),

Byzantium, the Near East, China and Japan exist alongside each other. In Krasznahorkai’s work
there is a search for authentic culture and cultural tradition, cultural, spiritual renewal. As he says
in an interview he is searching for a location with the expectation of a redemption. 1
1
Melinda Pál, A valóság nem látható, in: Krasznahorkai beszélgetések, ed Zoltán Hafner, Írók Szakszervezete,
Széphalom Könyvmuhely, Budapest, 2003, p. 121.
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[In my earlier work on the concept of the Orient, the East in Hungarian literature I found that the
same poet would make different or even opposite statements about the East in different genres,
for example Endre Ady in the poem and the essay.] Krasznahorkai and Háy both wrote essays
about Japan and India. The oxymoron in the title of Krasznahorkai’s essay To go mad in
Paradise emphasizes the opposition war, destruction, cruelty and abuse of history and everyday
life and the enthusiasm of the dense moment of time of reception, the moment of meeting art
that he expresses in the image of “the blooming of cherry flowers, the unearthly floating”. In art
Krasznahorkai finds perfection, the essence of the immortal in a proximity that replaces god.
Sl.12 Hasegawa Tohaku’s (1539-161O) “Pinetrees in the Fog” is such a piece of art [that is able
to move on a path towards perfect culture untouched by the history of war and destruction.]

The essay written on the basis of Háy’s India experiences in Chandni Chowk and Benares is
also linked to the concept of time. Indian Time and My Father begins with the senses of
perception, the bodily engagement with a world he is interested in.

Sl. 13“If you can't stand others touching you, handling you, laying their hands on your shoulders,
so that when they retreat, there is nothing but smoke and noise that comes between you, you
lose.”,[ “they dare to look you in the eye, and if you don't dare to look back, you lose.”, “the
lava erupts from your insides and you run to relieve yourself, the liquid faeces come spurting out
of you,”],The division between the narrator and the others in India in the essay leads back to
the divisions in Hungary. Connection of the local with the global is present in both Háy’s and
Krasznahorkai’s essays, Krasznahorkai speaks about global destruction and decline and the
unique experience of Japanese art, while Háy connects his experiences in India with the presence
of the third world in the outskirts of Europe. Háy remembers his father and his sense of
responsibility when he draws attention to the situation of the smaller and larger community.

Summary

János Háy and László Krasznahorkai explore what the East means in the twenty first century.
Háy avails of the tradition of Hungarian prose, in particular Jókai’s and Gárdonyi’s novels and
rewrites them in specific ways. He shows the organisation of trade and warfare in the cities and
sea, the channels of exchange in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In his novels objects,
bodies and feelings are connected in unusual ways. Krasznahorkai’s novels and travelogue are
saturated with the sense of destruction and melancholy about the decline of culture and the
violence of man and history. The path of creation, art in theatre and painting exist in Japan and
China in insulated spots and meeting such works of art create the dense moments of existence.
Both Háy and Krasznahorkai connect the local and the global, and in their works haptic
(sensation by touch) and visual depictions, geological dimensions play important role. The East
is a privileged site and its interplay with the West (in the form of Hungary, Budapest or New
York) is present in the recent work of the Hungarian authors.