To Err

Variations on a Plot Pattern in Krasznahorkai’s Fiction

Abstract

In László Krasznahorkai’s fiction, the prophetic rhetoric, the use of emptied mythological and biblical motifs, topoi and narrative frameworks, as well as the fractal-like structure, all point toward—and simultaneously suggest the absence of—a hidden sense of “wholeness”. This study examines a recurring plot pattern across several works in which the author’s philosophical concern with existence is articulated by the notion of error. In Krasznahorkai’s narratives, error functions as an individual attitude that frames the protagonists’ existential failure (for example, in Chasing Homer and A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East), or as a collective attitude characterizing a community’s inability to recognize the right choice, the essential (as in The Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango). Furthermore, the attitude under examination can also be read within a philosophy-of-history framework: the apocalyptic, metahistorical novel War and War projects the pattern of error onto the process of human history itself.