Animal Presence in László Krasznahorkai’s Prose

Abstract

Animals play a significant role in László Krasznahorkai’s prose: Micur from Satantango, the whale in The Melancholy of Resistance, the wolves in The Last Wolf and Herscht 07769 or different birds and butterflies making their appearance in his (more or less) short stories. In this paper I analyze the role of animals in Krasznahorkai’s fiction, how and why they are the result of a shift from the anthropocentric point of view, and what kind of narration techniques become possible through the articulation of the different sensory system of animals. Jan Alber characterized the non-human animal narrators of postmodern novels as those ones that share a lot of common traits with human animals. That is the case with Krasznahorkai’s prose, too, the difference being that his fiction always deals with some kind of reality, where the lost connection between people, and the separation of knowledge and experience leads to war, climate crisis with the extinction of vulnerable human and non-human animals.