In late-twentieth-century Central European literature, language ceases to be a neutral medium of narration. It becomes an active force—accusing, corroding, collapsing the world it tries to describe. Thomas Bernhard’s Auslöschung (Extinction) and László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó stand as two extremes in this linguistic end-time: one drives language vertically downward into total annihilation; the other expands it horizontally into an endless, suffocating loop. If Central Europe has long written from within the crises of history, violence, and existential doubt, then these two novels represent language’s final gestures on the ruins of the twentieth century.
Structures of Collapse and Circulation
Bernhard’s Extinction is divided into two massive parts—“Photos” and “Report”—but this is no simple bipartite narrative. It is a double fracture: a split within the narrator, and a split within language itself. Everything is compressed into the suffocating instant of interior monologue, as if time has been crushed into a single moment of judgment. The structure is centripetal; all lines converge toward a point of annihilation.
Krasznahorkai’sSátántangó, by contrast, is built like the twelve steps of a tango: six chapters forward, six backward. The symmetry is not a literary flourish but a worldview. The story appears to advance, only to reverse into its own tracks. The village’s destiny is sealed in a perpetual oscillation between despair, false hope, and renewed despair. Time does not flow; it stagnates, loops, decays.
Bernhard collapses the world with vertical pressure. Krasznahorkai corrodes it through horizontal drift.
One destroys in a straight fall; the other through slow, circular erosion.
Rhythm and Syntax: Language as Violence
To grasp the radical difference between the two authors, one must listen not to their plots but to their rhythms.
Bernhard: The Explosive Fugue
Bernhard’s pages often read as if they were written in a single, furious breath: paragraphs dissolve, sentences pile up in obsessive repetitions, motifs return like a fugue’s subject forced higher and tighter each time. This is not narration—it is assault. Language does not describe; it attacks, judges, purges. It becomes a defensive act, a desperate incantation against obliteration: “I must say everything, or everything will devour me.”
The reader is pushed into a claustrophobic chamber where tension comes not from events but from linguistic pressure. Speech burns itself to the edge of silence. The endpoint of this fugue is extinction—of family, identity, memory, homeland, and finally of the speaking self.
Krasznahorkai: The Infinite Rain
Krasznahorkai also writes in long sentences, but their texture is entirely different. They are not explosive but liquid, a slow river dissolving the boundaries of time and space. Sentences run on until action fades into atmosphere, movement into waiting. Rain falls, mud spreads, fog thickens—verbs drift into descriptions, and descriptions into a trance-like suspension.
In this current, the subject does not resist the world; it is absorbed by it. The reader is pulled into a hypnotic loop, a linguistic vortex that mimics the villagers’ paralysis. If Bernhard compresses time into a point, Krasznahorkai dilates it until it becomes indistinguishable from eternity.
Language burns in Bernhard; in Krasznahorkai, it rots.
Apocalypse in Two Directions: Thomas Bernhard, László Krasznahorkai, and the Fate of Language by Iconada Ori （1/2）
by No Agency
Nov 14
In late-twentieth-century Central European literature, language ceases to be a neutral medium of narration. It becomes an active force—accusing, corroding, collapsing the world it tries to describe. Thomas Bernhard’s Auslöschung (Extinction) and László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó stand as two extremes in this linguistic end-time: one drives language vertically downward into total annihilation; the other expands it horizontally into an endless, suffocating loop. If Central Europe has long written from within the crises of history, violence, and existential doubt, then these two novels represent language’s final gestures on the ruins of the twentieth century.
Bernhard’s Extinction is divided into two massive parts—“Photos” and “Report”—but this is no simple bipartite narrative. It is a double fracture: a split within the narrator, and a split within language itself. Everything is compressed into the suffocating instant of interior monologue, as if time has been crushed into a single moment of judgment. The structure is centripetal; all lines converge toward a point of annihilation.
Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó, by contrast, is built like the twelve steps of a tango: six chapters forward, six backward. The symmetry is not a literary flourish but a worldview. The story appears to advance, only to reverse into its own tracks. The village’s destiny is sealed in a perpetual oscillation between despair, false hope, and renewed despair. Time does not flow; it stagnates, loops, decays.
Bernhard collapses the world with vertical pressure.
Krasznahorkai corrodes it through horizontal drift.
One destroys in a straight fall; the other through slow, circular erosion.
To grasp the radical difference between the two authors, one must listen not to their plots but to their rhythms.
Bernhard’s pages often read as if they were written in a single, furious breath: paragraphs dissolve, sentences pile up in obsessive repetitions, motifs return like a fugue’s subject forced higher and tighter each time. This is not narration—it is assault. Language does not describe; it attacks, judges, purges. It becomes a defensive act, a desperate incantation against obliteration: “I must say everything, or everything will devour me.”
The reader is pushed into a claustrophobic chamber where tension comes not from events but from linguistic pressure. Speech burns itself to the edge of silence. The endpoint of this fugue is extinction—of family, identity, memory, homeland, and finally of the speaking self.
Krasznahorkai also writes in long sentences, but their texture is entirely different. They are not explosive but liquid, a slow river dissolving the boundaries of time and space. Sentences run on until action fades into atmosphere, movement into waiting. Rain falls, mud spreads, fog thickens—verbs drift into descriptions, and descriptions into a trance-like suspension.
In this current, the subject does not resist the world; it is absorbed by it. The reader is pulled into a hypnotic loop, a linguistic vortex that mimics the villagers’ paralysis. If Bernhard compresses time into a point, Krasznahorkai dilates it until it becomes indistinguishable from eternity.
Language burns in Bernhard; in Krasznahorkai, it rots.