The Words Go On: A Review of László Krasnahorkai’s “Wandering-Standing” by Kalena Tamura

“I have to leave this place” proclaims the narrator of “Wandering-Standing,” the first six words of the first short story of László Krasnahorkai’s 2018 collection, The World Goes On, and yet from the first page it is immediately clear that Krasznahorkai’s world, his “intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly” fictional world, does not go on; there is no escape, no “tranquility from the unspeakably oppressive, painful, insane disquiet” that the reader is confronted with, we are not offered details, or names, or context, or time, or place, we are not offered narrative arc or resolution, we are not offered periods – there is only a forced march, endless commas, a series of phrases that bleed and flow and break and pause and breathe – we are given only a wanderer, two suitcases, and a pair of resoled boots, and here with this person, this man who must escape, who must leave this place because “this is not a place where anyone can be,” with his two heavy suitcases in hand and his excellent pair of resoled boots, we are offered only the state known as wandering-standing: wandering-standing where “going to the right” is just as good as “going to the left,” because “both of these directions, in terms of our desires, point to the most distant place, the place farthest away from here,” and yet the farther the wanderer wanders, “like a kind of pitiful phantom,” the farther he circles, the more he disappears, because as far as the world is concerned – if anything at all could be said to concern this world – he has no value at all, he has become nothing, forgotten, invisible, with his head hanging down, suitcases dragging, resoled boots trudging, eyes eternally eating deep into the earth for the course of his wanderings, seemingly lasting hundreds of years – and yet, if only, Krasnahorkai tells us, if only he would just raise his head, just raise his eyes, just once, he should have seen that he was still standing there, “rooted to that shoe-sized piece of earth,” with no hope, “no hope whatsoever anymore that he can possibly move from there, for he must stand there until the end of time, because that place is his home, that place is exactly where he was born, and that is where he will have to die one day, there at home, where everything is cold and sad” – “I have to leave this place,” proclaims Krasnahorkai, an author who writes of entrapped realities, claustrophobic dystopias that offer no literary convention, no grammatical familiarity, no western cannon, a storyteller who disorients the reader, frustrates the reader, tortures the reader by enslaving him or her in a fictional world that abandons rules, shatters rules, and erases them all together, a world that does not stop, never stops, a world where paragraphs are sentences and periods are invisible and line breaks are nonexistent, a world of block-text-chunk-lines that choke-trap-suffocate-blind the reader until he craves-longs-yearns for an escape that Krasnahorkai ultimately never provides; it is in this world, Krasnahorkai’s world, his intolerable, cold, sad, bleak and deadly fictional world, that we come to recognize thought, feeling, words, literature, life, as they truly are: ongoing, fluid, and forever in flux.