When I finally sat down to read Satantango, the pear tree overhanging my back fence was in full bloom. This was important, as I had tried to read the novel once before, in the midst of winter and a mild bout of seasonal depression, and the bleakness of the book was too much for my already depleted mood. So I waited, and with the advent of the early California spring, I once again waded into the rain and decay of Satantango.
The novel opens with the ringing of far off bells, the sounding of which should be impossible, since the church has long been reduced to rubble. It takes place in the Hungarian countryside, in a rotting estate that, though once prosperous, has been abandoned by all but a few holdouts. This community, if it can be called that, comprises an odd collection of largely reprobate residents, and the novel follows them as they gather at the local bar to await the arrival of a man named Irimiás, whom they revere almost like a god. Irimiás, as it turns out, is something of a low-level bureaucrat working for the regime, though there are indications here and there (as with the book’s title) that he may be something more sinister, even Satan himself. Whatever else he may be, Irimiás is a conman looking to rob the locals of what little money they have and scatter them throughout the country as his own personal spies, thus satisfying the demands of his superiors for information. In order to do this, he ropes them into a scheme to start a farm collective on a property outside the estate, a plan naturally concocted as an excuse for money and which never comes to fruition. In the end, Irimiás sends the characters to various locales throughout Hungary, ordering them to record the events around them carefully.
Everything depicted is in decay and has fallen into chaos and cruelty. The streets are muddy and dilapidated. Prostitutes ply their trade in a dilapidated windmill. Whole rooms are overtaken with mold. The characters are liars and bullies. They assault and berate each other, they cheat on their spouses, they look for opportunities to screw each other over. Most brutally of all, a young girl with mental disabilities named Esti is abused and mistreated until she commits suicide. Yet the novel is at times humorous, almost slapstick. As a blurb on the back says, it is “so amazingly bleak that it’s often quite funny,” and this lightens the gloom somewhat.
Satantango was written while Hungary was under Soviet rule, and much of the work can be taken as a commentary on communist bureaucracies and surveillance and the ethical and personal chaos they cause. On another level, the book’s concerns are metaphysical, exploring a world in which all horizons of meaning have largely retreated and what is left is merely the residue of the beliefs that once animated society. The story takes place in a world that is thoroughly post-Christian, and yet there are Christian themes everywhere, and apocalyptic concerns abound, from the bible-quoting, resentful housewife to the mysterious ringing of church bells to the title of the book itself. The promises that Irimiás gives the characters are essentially promises of salvation, of rescue from their current lives, even from their current selves.
It is this desire for salvation, in fact, that makes it possible for Irimiás to manipulate the book’s characters. He promises them useful work and community, a chance to rebuild their moldering lives. He inspires them, gives them vision, and the fact that they respond as they do suggests an ethical, even spiritual impulse towards something better, towards lives that flourish in harmony with one another. The great tragedy of the book is that Irimiás uses the better impulses of the characters against them. Whatever is redeemable in these people is purposefully misdirected, harnessed by malicious forces. Their hope, their desire for a better future, their longing for meaning—all become weapons in Irimiás’s hands, and through him the hands of a police state.
It is difficult to know what Krasznahorkai wants us to think of this. There is little nostalgia for a Christian past in his work, and in many respects he seems intent on facing the situation with a clear-sighted pessimism. In a recent interview he stated,
we can only delude ourselves with the future; hope always belongs to the future. And the future never arrives. It is always just about to come. Only what is now exists.
We know nothing about the past because what we think of as the past is merely a story about the past. In reality, the present is also just a story. It contains both the story of the past and the future that will never come. But at least what we live as the present exists. And only that exists. Hell and heaven are both on Earth, and they are here now. We do not have to wait for them. Yet we do, comforting ourselves with the score of hope.
This helps to illuminate Satantango. While hope and longing for salvation may be virtues, it is certainly the case that they can deceive and lead one to complacency or delusion. The characters of Satantango are examples of this. Rather than living in the present, attempting to create a reliable, loving community where they are, they follow the false promises of Irimiás, allowing themselves to be deceived. They abandon their homes for the prospect—and the thin prospect—of starting a productive community elsewhere, and many of them trash their houses before they leave. Yet by the end, they find themselves in worse circumstances. If they were simply dissolute and lost before, by the end they find themselves scattered, puppets of destructive powers.
This message may also explain the book’s enigmatic church bells, which appear in the first words of the novel and then again at the end. These bells, which ought not to exist given that the local church has long been a ruin, suggest an apocalyptic calling toward salvation, toward the hope that Irimiás shortly brings. At the end, the doctor, who is the only character who does not abandon the estate, hears the bells. On searching for the source of the noise, he finds that a raving madman has set up the church bell and begun to ring it. Krasznahorkai seems to be suggesting that the book’s calls to a future hope are misleading, the tools of lunatics. If we see the destroyed church as the death of Hungary’s Christianity under the Communist regime, the ringing of the bells suggests that the new regime uses the same strategies of religion to compel action: It offers hope, but the hope is a false one, wielded by a madman and leading only to a greater doom. We might read this as a longing for a genuine hope, a genuine religion, perhaps, but we can also read it as an indictment of all lures beyond the present, beyond the work immediately before one.
Given Krasznahorkai’s statements above, the latter reading strikes me as more cogent. Yet I think Krasznahorkai also suggests a way forward, and that this is hinted at in Satantango in various ways. “Hell and heaven are both on earth,” he says, and though Satantango is almost entirely hell, it could have been otherwise, for the characters had opportunities for compassion and mutual care all along.
This is most striking in the character of the handicapped girl Esti—who is treated brutally again and again and yet remains largely innocent until she, too, is broken, ultimately poisoning herself. The choice to end her life is also the result, in a sense, of false hope, for she makes the decision after allowing her brother to bury all the money she had scrounged on the promise that it would grow a “money tree,” only to realize this was a lie. Her brother was, like Irimiás, conning her. It is not so much the loss of this hope that leads her to despair, however, but rather the loss of the kindness and attention she thought her brother was giving her.
The compassion with which Esti’s story is treated is clearly censorious toward her abusers, but in a sense she is spared, for she is in the process of being corrupted by the values of domination around her, and she kills her cat in order to prove that she is capable of “winning,” of dominating others. She clutches the body of this cat as she dies, both of them victims to the ultimate value of dominance. Her corpse is later seen in a bizarre, surrealistic moment that suggests the possibility that Esti did finally transcend the horrors into which she was born. Irimiás, along with his sidekicks, witnesses this moment, prompting him to declare that hell “might” exist. And if there is a hell, perhaps there is a heaven, though it is one that, for Krasznahorkai, must be found on earth.
Such a reading may be overly optimistic, and, to borrow a phrase from another of Krasznahorkai’s interviews, the book’s point may be that “there is no medicine.” And yet I cannot help but see in the work’s tragic beauty, and especially in the innocence of Esti, the possibility, however remote, of an alternative course, one that leads away from the surveillance, the violence, the cruelty of Satantango’s characters and toward the realization of their better impulses, not as some far off dreaming to be manipulated, but as a present act of love.
