Society beyond reality
Oleh Shynkarenko. April 2011. Published in the “Krytyka” magazin (Kyiv), Year XV, Number 5–6 (163–164)
In Ukraine, the names of Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai are completely unknown, because the writer’s books were not translated, and the director’s films could only be seen at individual screenings in some movie clubs. The wide world fame of the Hungarian duo also began relatively recently — from the second half of the 2000s, when the film “Satantango” (1994, prize at the Berlin Film Festival) was digitized and entered the Internet.
The master of Hungarian auteur cinema, Béla Tarr, decided to take on the screen adaptation of the novels of his contemporary and compatriot László Krasznahorkai back in 1985. By that time, the director had a fairly clear idea that when making films, one should not limit himself to the social dramas that he had made before: it was necessary to go to a broader level of generalization, because times were changing radically: only four years remained until the peaceful overthrow of the communist regime in Hungary. That is why this meeting with the writer became decisive for the director: Krasznahorkai considered the events in the country on a universal level. He saw seemingly small news in a global dimension, as if he were looking at them from a great distance. “True artists, just like saints, were never ‘members’ of our society,” Krasznahorkai said in an interview. — So the art they create is not an integrated, clearly defined and material part of society. Such art resides in a separate spiritual space that is perceived as part of reality.”
Prone to paradoxes, the writer expressed here the rather absurd at first glance idea that not all societies are part of reality. But the experience of the 20th century proves the disappointing truth of this statement: the Soviet and Nazi totalitarian regimes today, from a certain temporal distance, we perceive as ghostly phantoms. You have to make some effort to just believe in their existence, despite the fact that related artifacts can be easily bought even at the flea market. The 1980s, the time of the active destruction of the Soviet colossus, gave birth to an urgent need for an active understanding of the phenomenon of anomie — such disdain for the laws of society, which, in contrast to anarchy, does not establish a certain order, but is only a conscious clouding of conscience. A typical example of anomic behavior was depicted by Albert Camus in the novel “The Outsider”. His main character, Meursault, writes in his diary: “Today my mother died. Or maybe yesterday. I do not know”.
This is not natural callousness, but a deliberate choice of behavior. When he then kills an Arab for no reason, we understand that gratuitous killing is one of the elements of his worldview.
But Meursault was largely a hypothetical figure, while Krasznahorkai dealt with his own real experience. In the novel “Melancholy of Resistance” (1989), he depicted how people prone to anomie come to power thanks to, among other things, the passivity and helplessness of intellectuals.
In 2000, Béla Tarr directed the film “Werckmeister Harmonies” based on Krasznahorkai’s novel “Melancholy of Resistance”. It is a picture of the aimless and anomic existence of a small Hungarian town, which unexpectedly falls under the influence of a sinister traveling circus. The circus has only two attractions for the public: “The largest whale in the world” (dead and preserved with the help of special technologies in a hangar on wheels) and the invisible Prince — an empty demagogue who never appears in front of people, and his absurdly grotesque speeches are transmitted by a servant-interpreter to the crowd.
The Prince says that he is always free in himself. Its place is among the things of the real world. And among these things he sees that he is the sum of them all (completely in Hegel’s fasion). And since things are destroyed, they are nothing but ruins. Only he can see the whole, because he sees that there is no whole. And the Prince knows how things should be…how they should always be…he sees it with his own eyes. His followers will tear everything to pieces, because they perfectly understand his vision of the world. His followers understand that all things are endowed with false pride, but do not know why. The Prince knows this — because the whole does not exist.
A crowd begins to gather around the circus on the square. People’s curiosity under the hypnotic influence of the Prince’s speeches gradually turns into addiction. They are ready to carry out any of his orders.
But the most interesting part of the film is focused on the relationship between two people — the couple György Eszter and Eszter Tünde, played by Hanna Schygulla, the unsurpassed star of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films. Mrs. Tünde has serious plans: she left her distant husband a long time ago (apparently at his own request) and is in relations with the town’s police chief, using his alcoholism to take control over him. She dreams of power and is just waiting for a suitable occasion.
At that time, György Eszter — a typical intellectual of the times of anomie — was engaged in an extremely bizarre business. He tries to deny the doctrine of the harmonic system of the German music theorist and composer Andreas Werckmeister, who first invented it back in the days of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. This system, according to Mr. Eszter, has led to numerous aesthetic and philosophical problems throughout the history of music, so it must be abolished.
After waiting for a favorable atmosphere for her on the square, Mrs. Eszter begins to act. She appeals to her husband to use his authority to help her attract public opinion to the side of the government and obtain unlimited powers for the chief of police. Otherwise, Tünde threatens her husband, she will return to him. Mr. György’s thoughts are so focused on the harmony of the Werckmeister that the realities of the surrounding world have lost their meaning for him. From an active person prone to productive actions and decisions, he has turned into a slave to a detached fixed idea and wants only one thing: that his wife does not interfere with research by her return. So György goes out to call on his fellow citizens to sign a letter in support of the police chief’s movement. That is, Mrs. Eszter simply uses his intelligence in the same way as the police chief’s alcoholism. But it must be emphasized that he made the decision to support Mrs. Eszter’s plans on his own. This is a very important remark, and it seems especially telling in view of another character — János Valuska. This is the traditional “Ivanushka the Fool” from Russian fairy tales.
Valuska sees, but cannot explain: “He did not feel the correct proportions and was completely devoid of a maniacal passion for common sense,” writes Krasznahorkai. János, like most of the active protagonists of this story, is not capable of conscious decisions. They act either on the impulsive dictates of the subconscious, or on the orders of those who at that moment have the right and ambition to issue them. There are three such centers in the film: The Prince and Mrs. and Mr. Eszter. Tünde transmitted her letter through an unconscious medium to Valuska, who relayed its contents as follows:
“They have formed a movement of the people of the city, and the chief of police does not just lead it, but sponsors it, and you must become its president… you understand, it is necessary for people to rally around something, for something to happen…”.
As a result, György goes to the street, where he calls on people to sign the letter that Tünde gave him. Meanwhile, the Prince speaks like a messiah, but the result of his calls is not a brave new world, but a senseless attack on the hospital by an angry and hypnotized mob. But Mrs. Eszter was waiting for this attack!
Now there is a reason to introduce martial law in the city and take power into your own hands, because the police chief has fallen into an alcoholic coma. Was that messiah real? To this question from the viewer, Béla Tarr gave the following answer in an interview:
“All messiahs are mostly ordinary spies. There could be many more happy nations on Earth, to which the messiahs regularly come.”
But the practical situation looks completely different. This is vividly depicted in the film “Satantango” by Tarr and Krasznahorkai, a satirical film about the miserable place of the intelligentsia in a typical society of anomie.
The “Sátántango” (its name reminds or parodies Liszt’s “Mephisto Valse”) is unique in that it is included in the list of the longest films of world cinema: it lasts seven and a half hours. The director joked that the only “censorship” limitation was the length of the Kodak film reel: 300 meters, that is, 11 minutes — and that’s how long the longest episodes of the picture lasted, which began with a stunning eight-minute march of a herd of cows that wandered through the streets on a gray gloomy morning of an empty Hungarian village.
The structure of the picture resembles a tango and consists of twelve episodes — six steps forward, six steps back. Events in some episodes are repeated, but from the point of view of another character. Above all, we are interested in the view of the Doctor — a lonely rural intellectual who sits by the window of his house and constantly writes something like a chronicle. Unfortunately, the scope of his vision is extremely limited by the frame of this window: the sick Doctor hardly gets up from his chair, food is brought to him by his neighbors, and he leaves the house just to replenish the supply of pálinka, for which he has a burning passion. The Doctor puts everything recorded in a special home archive, between some strange drawings, understandable only to him.
One day, the peasants sell the collective farm cows, divide the money and decide to go to the city. They are restrained by the unexpected news about the return of the mysterious and charismatic Irimiás. According to the director, this is the Hungarian form of the name of the Bible prophet Jeremiah. It was on the example of this character that Tarr’s idea about messiah spies became very clear.
Previously, there were rumors among the villagers that Irimiás had died, but it turned out that he was actually in prison. After his release, he and his accomplice, the gypsy Petrina, are summoned by an officer of the Hungarian secret police and offered a deal: cooperate with the authorities or receive a new term. The Hungarian Security Service decided to take advantage of Irimiás’ incredible talent for mass hypnosis. Like the Prince in Werckmeister’s Harmonies, he is able to deliver persuasive speeches and sway the crowd to do what the government wants. So the police send Irimiás and Petrina to the village with a secret mission. We will never know its essence, because the cunning of the messiah knows no bounds. This is a kind of Don Quixote in reverse, and Petrina is a kind of anti-Sancho.
The deputies do not fight recklessly for justice, but pretend to be its embodiment, and in the end achieve their goal: Irimiyashev succeeds not only in taking money from the villagers, but also instilling in them a sense of guilt, and on their orders, people leave the village. This is how anomie was realized in practice at all levels: the unconscious masses follow the criminal swindlers into the abyss, carrying out the order of the authorities, which, if they, say, read it in a newspaper, would seem absurd and unacceptable to them.
What role do intellectuals play in this scheme? The villagers, carrying their belongings in bundles and bundles along the highway, suddenly remember that they forgot the Doctor. “He will die of hunger there, because he can’t even come to an agreement with the innkeeper! — Well, let him die! If you feel so sorry for him, then go back.”
It is interesting that Irimiás is also an intellectual: you can guess about it from his speeches to his compatriots based on quotes and allusions to the books he has read. But this Anti-Donquixote-intellectual serves the government in the same way as György Eszter — only with greater zeal and tenacity.
Servitude or passivity. Why? Why is the behavior of intellectuals in relation to the authorities so often marked by passivity or servility — signs characteristic of the most unconscious layers of society, which act guided by primitive propaganda? A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze took place around this question in 1972, published under the title “Intellectuals and Power”. There are several theses that are still not outdated and explain a lot.
Gilles Deleuze:
1. For us, the theorist-intellectual has ceased to be a subject, a representative of someone’s conscience or a personification of someone’s consciousness. Because those representatives — parties or trade unions — who, in their turn, appropriated the right to be their consciousness. So who speaks and who acts? — It is always some kind of plural, even in a person who speaks and acts. We are all groups.
2. Theory is something like a toolbox… It must serve, work. And not for its own sake. And if there are no people capable of using it, starting with the theoretician himself, who in this case ceases to be a theoretician (because he becomes a practitioner. — O. Sh.), then this means that the theory is worthless or its time has not yet come.
In the context of our reasoning, it can be concluded from this that intellectuals have no political representation in power and no real influence on it. Their theories are not listened to, so they are forced to either helplessly contemplate the process of exercising power,
or, abandoning their own convictions, blindly follow the instructions of unscrupulous men for the sake of favors or the avoidance of punishment.
Michel Foucault:
1. Intellectuals found themselves disadvantaged, persecuted precisely at the time when “things” appeared in all their “truth”, at the time when it was not possible to say that the king was naked. And then the intellectual spoke the truth to those who had not yet seen it, and on behalf of those who could not say it, and hence all his conscientiousness and eloquence.
2. However, after recent events (May 1968. — O. Sh.), intellectuals realized that the masses no longer needed them for knowledge. The fact is that the masses themselves know everything perfectly and clearly, know even much better than intellectuals, and can express it much better. However, there is a system of power that prohibits, deletes, and invalidates this discourse and knowledge. This is a power that exists not only in the highest censorship bodies, but also penetrates very deeply and imperceptibly into the entire network of social relations.
These statements of Michel Foucault very well illustrate the special property of intellectuals to resist the tricks of state propaganda and the almost complete inability of the broad masses to do so.
The anomie that currently dominates all of Ukraine, from the highest levels of state power down to the last citizen, is made possible by the passivity and servility of Ukrainian intellectuals.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine how any of them will go to the barricades, as Jean-Paul Sartre did in his time, or make loud anti-government (pacifist) statements, like Bertrand Russell, and risk being imprisoned for it. Will they listen to this advice of Michel Foucault?
If the struggle is precisely against power, then in this case all those to whom power is exercised as an injustice, all those who find it intolerable, can join the struggle where they are and according to their own activity (or inaction).
***
László Krasznahorkai once recalled his conversation with the actor Mihály Víg, who played Irimiás in “Satantango”. The writer regretted that today’s young people are very far from intellectual life. At these words, Víg said that the number of intelligent people has not changed, but they are simply invisible: “Look there, maybe, that young person who is sitting on the street now, is reading your book.” Krasznahorkai was deeply moved by his words. “Perhaps we demand too much,” he said later, “and we get only one person. Well, one is enough.”
Is it really enough?
