Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

These two chapters, said Korin, with their increasing focus on Kasser, with their unrestricted use of the devices of repetition and intensification, these fourth and fifth chapters, should have quickly alerted the reader to the probable intentions of the writer and hence to the meaning of the manuscript at large, but he, in his dense, stupid, unhealthy way had managed to grasp nothing, but nothing of it in the last few days, and the mysterious, cloudy origins of the text, its powerful poetic energy, and the way it turned its back in the most decided manner on normal literary conventions governing such works, had deafened and blinded him, in fact as good as blasted him out of existence, like having a cannon fired at you, he said and shook his head, though the answer was right there in front of him all the time and he should have seen it, did in fact see it, and, furthermore, admired it, but had failed to understand it, failed to understand what he was looking at and admiring, meaning that the manuscript was interested in one thing only, and that was reality examined to the point of madness , and the experience of all those intense mad details, the engraving by sheer manic repetition of the matter into the imagination, was, and he meant this literally, Korin explained, as if the writer had written the text not with pen and words but with his nails, scratching the text into the paper and into the mind, all the details, repetitions and intensifications making the process of reading more difficult, while the details it gave, the lists it repeated and the material it intensified was etched into the brain forever, so that the effect of all those passages — the same sentences endlessly repeated but always with some modification, now with some filling out, now a little thinner, now simplified, now darker and denser, the technique itself delicate, light as a feather — said Korin, reflectively, the combined effect did not produce impatience, irritation or boredom in the reader but somehow immersed him, Korin continued, glancing at the ceiling, practically drowned him in the world of the text; but, well, we can say more about that later, he interrupted himself, because now we should continue with how the journey from Onnum to Maia and back got properly under way and how anyone who was not in their immediate proximity at their various stopping places or, in the evenings, at their various improvised shelters, might have thought that the journey from Onnum to Maia would be no different from the one from Maia to Onnum, with three decurio before them, four horsemen immediately behind, and the thirty-two soldiers of the turma or detachment on heavily armored horses at the back of the procession, though it wasn’t a straightforward progress, a matter of continually moving ahead, said Korin shaking his head, not a simple journey at all along the serpentine route of the enormous Vallum, nor was it the matter of a single unbroken conversation, of talking after dark as they rested at the warm outposts of Aesica, Magnis or Luguvalium, engaged in seamless never-ending reflection by the fire as they sat on their bearskin rugs, going over and over what they had seen that day, checking that the selection of stones was appropriate for carving, noting the unparalleled skill in accommodating to natural conditions, keeping an eye on the haulage, the marking, the laying of the foundations and the faultless planning of the construction itself and admiring the expertise and invention of the military engineers of the II Legio Augusta ; the skill of the execution itself— the art of implementation , said Korin in English — being as nothing compared to the idea of the Vallum, that is to say the Vallum’s spiritual content, since its physical existence, said Bengazza, was the embodiment of the idea of a border and articulated with spellbinding clarity the distinction between all that was Empire and all that was not, a statement, said Falke, of simply staggering force, to show the two distinct realities the Vallum Hadrianum was there to divide, since at the bottom of all human intentionality, Toót took over, on the most fundamental level— in the primary level of human , said Korin — lay the longing for security, an unquenchable thirst for pleasure, a crying need for property and power and the desire to establish freedoms beyond nature; and man, he added, had gone a long way to achieving all this, the loveliest aspect of it being the ability to construct fastidious answers to insoluble problems, to propose the monumental in the face of the miscellaneous, to offer security in the face of defenselessness, to provide shelter against aggression, to develop refinement in the face of crudity and to seek absolute freedom in the face of constraint, in other words things to produce things of high order as opposed to those of a lower order, though you might put it as effectively, said Bengazza, to credit him with the creation of peace instead of war— instead of war the peace , in Korin’s words — for peace was the greatest, the highest, the supreme achievement of man, peace, the magnificent symbol of which, as of the divine Hadrianus and of the permanence of the entire Pax, was the Vallum that stretched for mile after mile beside them, which demonstrated how one great symbol, with all its deep inner significance, might become its own perfect antithesis, for that is what they were talking about there in Gibraltar, at the table in the Albergueria, in the course of those endless unfinished conversations, the most important of them concerning the unquenchable human desire for the taking of ever greater, ever newer risks, the desire for a supreme, unsurpassable and ever new kind of daring that extended the scope of personal courage and curiosity, as well as the human capacity for understanding as they called it in the feverish din of their morning and evening gatherings on the enormous ground floor of the Albergueria, in those long days of enforced inactivity in 1493, while waiting for the most decisive news in human history, the news whether Admiral Colombo had returned in triumph or vanished forever in the immeasurable dusk at the ends of the world.

Go round again, they told the driver from the backseat, turn right at the corner, do a circle and when you get back to 159th Street again take your fucking foot off the gas and cruise very slowly past the houses, because it wasn’t true that they couldn’t find it, it simply couldn’t be true how much these fucking houses resembled each other, for they’d find the motherfucker, they most certainly would, they said, sooner or later it would all click into place, and they’d go round and round all night if need be, because it was somewhere on the right-hand side, either that house, said one of them, or the one next to the Vietnamese, said the other, having gone round three times already, and how the fuck could it have happened that they had really paid so little attention, but really, the driver called back, surely two normal mothers could not have given birth to such a pair of fuckheads, it being the third time they had gone around, then that guy comes out and they lay into him without even looking back and now nobody knows where to look for him, and don’t anyone tell him how to handle the gas ‘cause he’d leave them here to drown in their own shit, let them do the driving and try to find him by themselves, and when it comes to that, they retorted in the back, they’ll just keep going round in circles until that lousy rat shows his stinking face, so let’s stop here, one suggested, but no, the other snapped back, just keep going, and whatthefuck , the driver slammed his hands down on the wheel, is that what they really want, to spend the whole fucking night going around in circles in this filthy, rotten, shithole of a side street? and so they continued at a snail’s pace down 159th Street, moving so slowly that pedestrians passed them by, turning at the next corner and circling the block to return to 159th Street, a Lincoln with three people on board, which was all the Vietnamese grocer saw when, after a while, he went out to see what the devil was going on out there, the car having passed the shop several times, reappearing every few minutes, and repeating this procedure time after time, a light blue Lincoln Continental MK III, he told his wife later, with decorative chrome flashing, with leather upholstery and dazzling rear lights and, naturally, the slow, dignified, hypnotic swaying of the spoiler.