The Melancholy of Resistance - László Krasznahorkai (week 1)
Details
The Melancholy of Resistance (László Krasznahorkai, 1998) is a metaphysical satire about a small Hungarian town on the verge of collapse: the winter is bleak and relentless, infrastructure is crumbling, and the streets are crime-ridden. As part of a "movement for moral rearmament," one Mrs. Eszter decides to invite a strange circus into town, whose centerpiece attraction is a gigantic whale carcass.
The approach of the circus prompts paranoid rumors about its sinister (even apocalyptic) purpose. The town unravels into lunacy as the increasingly agitated citizens desperately seek relief from their existential dread--whether through music, cosmology, anarchy, or authoritarianism.
The Melancholy of Resistance is a sweeping, dense work, as desolate and surreal as it is visceral and absorbing. It is notable for its unsettlingly long, monomaniacal sentences--"a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type"--that go on for pages and that is the trademark of its author. It has been adapted into both a movie and an opera. As in Moby-Dick, the whale is a symbolic vehicle for cosmic concepts in the skirmish between order and chaos, appearance and reality, meaning and nihilism.
The author, László Krasznahorkai, has written over 20 books, 6 screenplays, and is the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Schedule:
- Week 1 (July 5): pages 1 to 97
- Week 2 (July 12): pages 98 "He stopped in the half-life..." to 213
- Week 3 (July 19): pages 214 "Not simply out of this..." to 314
The Melancholy of Resistance:
Supplemental:
- Valuska (2023) opera trailer
- A whale of a tale 1877 display of a dead beluga whale
Extracts:
- “The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had been introduced on the stage there.” —Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (Moby-Dick, Extracts)
This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.