Ubiquitous patterns

The Universalism of Symmetry in the Stories A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East and Distant Mandate

Abstract

László Krasznahorkai’s prose exhibits significant transformations following his travels to Eastern Asia after the opening of the Hungarian border. These are inseparable both from the historical traditions of travel literature and from the cultural, political and economic reconfigurations of post-socialist Hungary. A central aspect of this shift is a growing preoccupation with the nature of art. He elaborates an universal conception of art, grounded in a notion of transcendence (also understood as universal): an artwork functions as a place where the transcendent becomes accessible to human experience. Closely related to this development is the prominent incorporation of universal scientific knowledge into his prose. Through a comparative analysis of the short stories “A Mountain to the North…”, and “Distant Mandate” from „Seiobo There Below”, this essay demonstrates how these two tendencies are interconnected in Krasznahorkai’s writing, and how they can be traced back to the specifically local transformations affecting Hungary after the fall of communism.