Laszlo Krasznahorkai sets traps for his readers in “The Last Wolf”, a 69 page novella first published in Hungarian in 2009. The New Directions English translation of the book (by the great George Szirtes) was published in 2019 with a much earlier and, even more, perverse story, “Herman”, split into two disjunctive parts – “Herman” concerns a mad trapper who exercises his “mastery of the craft” by trapping human prey. Taken together “Herman” and “The Last Wolf” suggest that destructive human intervention in the natural world leads inevitably to some kind retribution. Krasznahokai is widely acclaimed as the “master of the apocalyptic” in contemporary literature and the two remarkable tales in the New Directions volume can be read in this light: the natural world is ineradicable and revenges itself on us for our depredations. This interpretation is supported by other Krasznahorkai writings, most notably the much longer novel, Herscht 07769 in which totemic animals of the Mitteleuropaische forests, wolves and an eagle, assail neo-Nazis. Although this approach to the texts in “The Last Wolf” is seductive, I believe it is also somewhat askew from Krasznahokai’s actual intent – the implied sermon on ecology is part of the broad constellation of meanings shed from the writing, but not the book’s central focus.
Before developing my thesis on “The Last Wolf”, it is well to summarize the story recounted in the novella. And, indeed, the term “story” is here apt: the text is presented as a monologue delivered by a half-crazed German professor in a seedy bar, the Sparschwein (“The Piggy Bank”). The monologist, Herr Professor as he is sometimes called, delivers his diatribe to a Hungarian bartender who is only half listening. (The Hungarian bartender is obviously a surrogate for Krasznahorkai.) Sometimes, the barkeep comments on the story, but mostly he is distracted and seems to not hear some of the key points in the account. The monologue is declaimed in a mostly empty bar – the morning rush of hardcore alcoholics is over and the afternoon patrons have not yet arrived. Kurdish or Turkish kids sometimes peek into the bar or enter only to quickly depart. (The bar is located in the Tempelhof - Schoeneburg section of Berlin in an immigrant neighborhood infested with drug dealers around the Hauptstrasse address of the Sparschwein.) A Turkish singer croons on a recording that plays during the monologue.
Krasznahorkai’s prose style is idiosyncratic. He favors extremely long sentences, in some instances book-length. “The Last Wolf” is written in one sentence. The effect of this unusual technique is paradoxical: the avalanche of dependent clauses form a syntactical maze propels the reader forward – the reader has the sense that the grammatical energy impelling the text forward is irresistable; read out loud Krasznahorkai’s prose style induces a kind of rushed, even, panicked breathlessness; on the other hand, the massive block of print squared off on the page is daunting, and seems to resist or obstruct the reader’s engagement with story. The reader has a sense that he or she is being propelled toward foregone conclusions, that everything is grammatically destined and, yet, at the same time this forward movement is impeded by the sheer weight of the print massed together on the page.
The story recounted in the novella is fairly simple. The Herr Professor (I’ll call him the “protagonist”) receives an invitation from a Spanish cultural institution, a non-profit in Badajoz, a city in Extremadura province on the border with Portugal. The protagonist is entreated to “spend some time in Extremadura” and, then, write his impression for publication. The protagonist can’t figure out why he has been selected for this honor – all his expenses will be paid, he will be assigned an interpreter, and further be compensated for his essay. The Herr Professor thinks there must be some sort of mistaken identity involved in the invitation – he has fallen on hard times, is impoverished, and suffers from the twin burdens “of futility and scorn” that afflict his thinking. No one reads his several books on philosophy any more and he ekes out a miserable living on small stipends that he receives for occasional lectures. He is radically isolated and severely depressed. Nonetheless, the opportunity is too good to ignore and, so, somewhat reluctantly, he travels to Madrid by plane, then, riding with his middle-aged female interpreter to Caceres, a town in Extremadura. Extremadura is “the end of the world”, a remote part of Spain that has hitherto been horribly impoverished. The Foundation, however, is proud of the advances that have been made in the isolated mountainous area and hopes that the protagonist will write an essay on “the flowering of Extremadura”. This turns out to be an impossible project for the protagonist who has lost faith in language and, furthermore is unable to even think coherently let alone write an essay. The academic Herr Professor sees himself as an imposter who will inevitably disappoint his kindly and generous hosts, but he bluffs, pretending that he is doing research on Extremadura.
Initially, he conceives the idea of writing a thoughtful essay on certain problems involving Arab guest-workers in the tobacco fields. He has his interpreter drive him to that area of Extremadura, but all is well there. The socio-economic problems that he has learned about actually are taking place farther to the south in Andalusia. In an academic essay on the Arab Gastarbeiter, the protagonist reads a sentence about the last wolf, said to have “perished” somewhere near Caceres in Extremadura. This seems like a reasonable topic for an essay, particularly the poetic use of the verb “perished” in this context. The protagonist asks his hosts to investigate the essay involving the last wolf’s “perishing.” They contact a young scholar who wrote the essay. He tells them that the last wolf in Extremadura was killed by a man named Chanclon who lives in the outskirts of Caceres. The Foundation officials, ever-accommodating track down Chanclon, and the Herr Professor goes to his house where the man’s rooms are dominated by huge glass case in which the big wolf is preserved as a taxidermy specimen. Chanclon explains how he happened to shoot the wolf. But there are rumors that this wolf was not, in fact, the last beast of its kind. Further investigation leads to an account of hunt by a lobero (professional wolf hunter) after Chanclon bagged his animal, in which nine wolves were sighted and, over three years, seven of them killed. This information comes from a highly accomplished game warden Jose Miguel whom the protagonist with his interpreter meet in the “haunting” hill town of Alburquerque. Jose Miguel takes the protagonist to a finca (that is, an enclosed hunting preserve) where the seven wolves were shot. The two wolves that survived the “murders,” as the book now calls the killings, ranged over their territory, these animals being both “very proud” and following a rigid law that prevents them from leaving the areas which they have marked as their domain. The female wolf, pregnant, is about to give birth and, therefore, slow on her feet; she is killed on the highway by a passing vehicle and when the carcass is inspected, it is clear, that the wolf was carrying a cub almost full-term. This detail causes the translator grief and she breaks down in tears. Jose Miguel, then, takes the protagonist and interpreter to a pond where a wolf was killed. The landscape is beautiful, an oak savannah in which the trees stand at dignified distances from one another – this sort of oak savannah is called a dehesa in Spanish and the protagonist associates the desiccated condition of the land with the dryness in his own soul. At the end of the day, Jose Miguel takes the Herr Professor aside and says that he will privately tell him the end of the story of the wolves, although using English. Jose Miguel doesn’t want the interpreter to hear what he says. He tells something to the protagonist that Krasznahorkai doesn’t recount to the reader – Jose Miguel’s comment is said to be anticipated by the Herr Professor. The Hungarian bartender is half asleep and doesn’t express much interest in the revelation made by the Jose Miguel to the protagonist. The protagonist says that he comes as a Stammgast (‘regular’) to the bar every day and that he sits in the seedy tavern in the filthy Berlin neighborhood attempting to re-write the end of the story of “the last wolf” which he is unable to complete.
It took me several readings to figure out what I think to be the novella’s principal emphasis – a somewhat arid, if useful, commentary on logic.
Here are my thoughts:
1. Contemporary readers are likely to come to the novella from a perspective of lament over species endangerment and climate change;
2. This perspective will “trick” the reader into a elegiac interpretation – that’s the interpretation that the German philosophy professor would enforce on the story, but a misreading, I think;
3. No doubt there is an aspect of the chronicle that might move readers to a sorrowful response – look how we have damaged the environment and persecuted the animals around us; surely, we should feel guilt and despair about the degradation of the natural world in which we live;
4. The translator’s tears on learning the fate (“road-kill”) of the pregnant wolf is an example of this elegiac response to the “last wolf”; similarly, the storyteller’s insistence that the horrific poverty of Extremadura will be eradicated in favor of shopping malls and autopistas (freeways) – the people will have a way to make a living but their ancient ways and traditions (the folkways) will perish just like the wolves will be cornered and exterminated;
5. The storytelling German professor (who is some kind of fat giant) has lost his faith in literature, books, and, even, words – he’s the last person on earth to be able to write some kind of mournful lament on the human propensity to degrade our environment and harm the natural world; he can’t make meaning out of anything and, certainly, isn’t going to succeed in writing an essay about “the flowering of Extremadura” which is his mandate and the raison d’etre of the excursion to Spain;
6. The death of a wolf is no tragedy to the Herr Professor; he believes that the whole world has died, that it is decomposing and a stench in the nostrils; this leads to his masochistic devotion to the twin idols of futility and scorn. The failure of his books (and his general failures in life) have led him to regard the world as a tissue of futilities; the disposition to see the world as wholly futile, I think, leads to the emotion of scorn – it’s not a manly disposition to view existence as so futile that you spend your days in a bar (the Sparschwein or “Piggy Bank”), drinking two beers at most because of poverty and whining to a Hungarian bartender; for a person who so loudly proclaims the futility of words, books, and stories, the Herr Professor is certainly garrulous – there’s a fatal bad faith in the Herr Professor’s pessimism and, hence, I think the scorn is self-directed;
7. The game warden with the Newgate Fringe (a neck beard with bare chin) Jose Miguel is a realist and pragmatic, it seems. Recall that he was a specialist in vultures before his girlfriend, apparently, made him shift his attentions to the more charismatic wolves. The game warden seems to have an ability to see things for how they are – to him, a vulture and a wolf are both worthy of study; creatures, for Jose Miguel, are not invested with a spurious charisma – a vulture is as good as a wolf, it seems;
8. After touring the sites where the last wolves were “murdered”, Jose Miguel has something to say to the Herr Professor in confidence, words that he speaks in English, and that no one else overhears. The revelation is something that the Herr Professor has suspected all along and is so obvious, he remarks, that he doesn’t need to even tell the Hungarian bartender what has been revealed to him. Whatever Jose Miguel says, it justifies as it were, the narrator’s failure to write a story about Extremadura or the “last wolf”. This is convenient because our feckless Herr Professor isn’t able to write a story anyway – he has lost confidence that anything can be successfully told to anyone. And this lack of confidence is displayed in the monologue which fails in narrative terms: the Herr Professor keeps avowing that he’s approaching a climax to the story, but the climax is withheld – there is no climax and so the story fails as a story;
9. So what was the story supposed to be about: “the flowering of Extremadura” – that is, how the place’s extreme and famous poverty has given way to progress: Extremadura was a place suffering from famine, pestilence, misery – the figurative “wolf was at the door” threatening the hapless peasants in that place. But a Faustian bargain has been struck: in exchange for freeways and shopping malls and improvements to the economy, the ancient wolves inhabiting the place have had to be exterminated. Thus, the story properly told would be about Extremadura flourishing but only on the condition that it’s old ways (for instance, the wolves and the loberos) must vanish. This is the story of Extremadura’s “flowering” but made more piquant and elegiac by the figure of the extinct wolves. But this story is never told and can’t be narrated;
10. The structure of the story is a series of misunderstandings: first, the folks at the non-profit foundation in Badajoz (on the Portuguese border) mistake the Herr Professor for someone who can write a convincing “think-piece” about Extremadura; second Chanclon’s taxidermied wolf is misunderstood as the “last wolf”, in fact, there are at least nine or ten additional wolves. The lobero kills seven of nine wolves over a three year season. The mating pair of wolves, however, are too cunning to be “murdered” – the female dies as road-kill (with her fetal pup); the male vanishes, thought to have crossed the border into Portugal. The fincas offer “gate after gate” – that is a regress that keeps naming new “last wolves” as the subjects of the narrative;
11. So what does Jose Miguel tell the Herr Professor in English when no one is listening? The answer is formally unknowable – Krasznahorkai doesn’t tell us, but I think we can make a reasonable guess;
12. I surmise that Jose Miguel whispers to the Herr Professor that there are a number of wolves in Extremadura, that there is “no last wolf” but, rather, several individuals that he has seen and that remain at large – in other words, he confirms the Herr Professor’s own suspicion, stated at page 37 that the “whole “last wolf” thing was a bit of a myth”.
13. No story can be constructed from a proposition that is a “bit of a myth” – here is where I think the narrative’s peculiar logic comes to the fore. Lawyers are trained to understand that you can’t prove a negative. It is logically impossible to prove that any particular wolf that has been shot is “the last wolf” – this would require the proof of a negative: that is there are no wolves in Extremadura after any particular shooting; this can’t be done;
14. The concept that a negative can’t be proven is important in extinction studies. A classic example is the case of the Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial apex predator, thought to be extinct. The last Tasmanian tiger is believed to have perished in captivity in the 1930's – there are eerie movies showing the creature slinking around a primitive cage. The animal looks like a large dog with striped hindquarters, a bit like a hyena. But there is something unsettling about the way the animal walks and how it seems to be able to dislocate its jaw to create a huge maw – a kind of abyss in its face. We know when this specific individual animal died. But, even today, people in the outback of Tasmania, an impenetrable forest, often claim to have seen the animal or heard its cries. Simply put, we don’t know whether the Tasmanian tiger is really extinct or just thought to be extinct – there have been many convincing reports of the creature still hiding in the inaccessible parts of the island. (There’s even a movie on this subject starring Willem Defoe called The Hunter – I think it’s pretty good and worth watching);
15. I’ll provide another example. The military has embarked on a course of blowing up so-called “narco traffickers” in the Caribbean. Media and other reports assert that, at least, some of these so-called “narco-terrorists” were simply fishermen in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trump’s minions argue: prove to us that the deceased are not drug runners – this is to require the proof of a negative that can’t be reliably accomplished. But, my argument would be that if you are going to kill people the burden of proof should shift to require that the proponent of the extra-judicial killing prove that the people killed on the high seas are (beyond any reasonable doubt) transporting illegal drugs to the United States. (This still wouldn’t authorize murders of this sort – after all, the death isn’t a penalty for smuggling or selling drugs but, my point, is that the specious Trump argument that asserts prove to me that the people blown to bits aren’t running drugs is completely illogical);
16. So I think “The Last Wolf” is, more or less, about the problem of proving a negative, a task that can’t logically be accomplished – the story has other elements, including a mournful elegiac aspect, but at its heart I propose that Jose Miguel informs the Herr Professor that the notion of “The Last Wolf” is a chimera and a myth and there is no such thing.
17. Concern about logic and logical fallacies arise in other works by Krasznahorkai, most notably in the libertine section (contra Yukio Mishima) in the "Herman" stories. The unnamed narrator says that the libertines see in the trip ad posse ad esse (“from possibility to being”) – this is part of their project of seeking to free themselves from constraints on the erotic imagination. But they have the formula backward. The canonical phrase in this logic is ab esse ab posse – that is, because something exists it is necessarily possible; the phrase is tautological but undeniably true. The inverse is not true: just because there is a possibility of something existing doesn’t mean is does exist: I can imagine the possibility of a centipede the size of the Empire State Building but just because I imagine such a thing doesn’t establish that such a thing exists. There’s a possibility, I suppose, that one of the ten wolves identified in the novella is, indeed, the “last wolf” – but because this a mere possibility, it doesn’t mean that it is true;
18. In fact, the novella appears in a real-world context in which there is no “last wolf”. The Iberian wolf existed in two populations in the mountainous and desolate territory along the Portugal border and in Andalusia south of the Duero River. The last wolf shot in Andalusia, south of the Duero River was killed in 1930 in the Sierra Moreno, a range that features is Don Quixote. Of course, there are periodic sightings of wolves in that area to this day and shooting the animals is strictly forbidden. There are estimated to be between 1900 and 2200 wolves in Extremadura. The wolf population if not controlled by hunting expands. Accordingly, in recent years, hunters have been authorized (with permits) to take about 340 wolves in the annual wolf hunt. My point is that, while wolves are rare in Extremadura, they aren’t even endangered and there are enough of them to allow for an annual wolf hunt. Therefore, the so-called “last wolf” in Extremadura is a misnomer. There are plenty of wolves and, as in places like northern Minnesota, the animals are a flash point for conservationists and ranchers whose livestock they occasionally attack.
19. There’s a funny and horrific documentary made by Luis Bunuel called Los Hurdes, Land without Bread The movie was made in 1931 and, uses staged scenes to show the terrible poverty in the Los Hurdes’ area of Extremadura. You can watch the documentary on You Tube. The folks in this part of Extremadura are afflicted with huge goiters, don’t know how to bake bread because they have no grains, and amuse themselves by equestrian competitions in which the riders try to rip the heads off roosters hanging over the narrow alleyway in their town. The narrator drily says that “there is probably some sexual significance to the competition” which is conducted between the village’s eligible bachelors.
