When institutions flicker and crowds look for a voice, The Melancholy of Resistance shows how fear, rumor, and spectacle can turn a town—and a society—inside out.
A dead-eyed circus, a mute whale, and a rumor-fed crowd reveal how fragile order is when an opportunist organizes “tidy yards” while meaning collapses.
Key scenes from the novel (quoted below), its acclaimed film adaptation (Werckmeister Harmonies), and contemporary criticism support this reading; the author’s 2025 Nobel Prize underscores its enduring relevance.
This book is best for readers who love literary dystopia, political allegory, Central European fiction, and long, wave-like sentences; not for those seeking neat heroes, tidy endings, or conventional pacing.
Introduction
The Melancholy of Resistance (Hungarian: Az ellenállás melankóliája) is a 1989 novel by László Krasznahorkai, translated into English by George Szirtes and published in English by New Directions (2000). It portrays a nameless Hungarian town visited by a ramshackle circus whose only attraction is a mysterious whale; the visit catalyzes a breakdown of social order.
The historical arc matters because readers today meet Krasznahorkai as a newly minted Nobel laureate in Literature (2025), honored for an oeuvre that “reaffirms the power of art” amid “apocalyptic terror,” a description that perfectly fits this novel’s atmosphere.
1. Background
Krasznahorkai began publishing under late socialism; the novel arrived in 1989, the hinge year for the Eastern Bloc. In this setting, a traveling spectacle, a rumor-monger known as the Prince, and a local “order” movement refract the anxieties of a collapsing system.
His reputation—steeped in long musical sentences and cosmic despair—has since widened: critics compared him to Kafka and Bernhard; Susan Sontag called him a “master of apocalypse,” a tag echoed in Nobel-day coverage.
The English edition’s translator George Szirtes famously called Melancholy “a slow lava flow of narrative,” a phrase New Directions still quotes, and which feels exactly right once you hear the novel’s tidal syntax.
2. The Melancholy of Resistance Summary
A woman named Mrs. Plauf rides a stalled, overheated, menacing train home through a crowd whose “jokey indifference” is the nervous laughter of people sensing chaos: “having failed, infuriatingly, to understand something, they try to suppress the fear caused by genuine shock.”
On that same train, she endures harassment—“‘Well! What is it to be?! All tease, no nookie?!’”—and the scene’s claustrophobia gives the novel its first nauseating jolt of public cruelty.
When Mrs. Plauf finally returns, the town already feels wrong: “a cold maze of empty streets… the silence… ‘broken only by the sharp yelp of bickering dogs.’”
Into this atmosphere comes a circus with a single draw—the whale. The whale is never a cozy symbol. For Valuska (the novel’s gentle stargazer), it suggests cosmic order; for the crowd, it is a rumor magnet; for the power-hungry, a pretext. Valuska approaches his older friend, the reclusive musicologist György Eszter, with the fervor of a disciple: an “endless fantasia of the planets and the stars… which provided ‘silent proof of the existence of an ineffable intellect.’”
Eszter both indulges and corrects this innocence. He is the novel’s stoic negative philosopher—skeptical, precise, suspicious of consolations—who jokes about the “perpetual orbiting” yet refuses to attribute humanity’s misery to the cosmos’s turn.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Eszter—György’s estranged wife—organizes a “tidy yard, orderly house” campaign that weaponizes bourgeois neatness into political will. She bullies her way into Mrs. Plauf’s flat (“stormed up the stairs… passed straight through the open door”) and, when rebuffed, snarls a prophecy: “We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society. There are new times just around the corner, my dear Piri.”
That small rebuff stings—“like a poisoned arrow stuck in a tree”—because Mrs. Eszter depends on such small victories to consolidate power. The novel tracks how she converts injury into policy.
As the circus settles, rumors spread about the Prince, a shadowy demagogue whose rhetoric (often relayed, never firmly seen) rhymes with the town’s resentments. Valuska’s faith in cosmic order keeps him from seeing the political order’s unspooling. He still arrives at Eszter’s door glowing with the hope of “that incorruptible order… heaven and earth, water and air… the enormous joys of mutuality.”
The mob finally erupts. The novel’s terrifying set piece is not the whale but the crowd, and the way everyday people drift into organized violence. The aftermath exposes how banal the rhetoric of purification becomes when it acquires an office, a minute book, and a slogan. Days later, Mrs. Eszter tallies “successes”: “shops had opened… trains were running… the streets were fully lit at night… in other words, the transfusion had been successful.” The administrative tone is chilling.
Her “order” is also theater: she stages a secular, state-style funeral for Mrs. Plauf—“two great plastic broadswords (borrowed from the local costume shop)”—a pageant of kitsch that rewrites the town’s story in real time.
Valuska—beaten down, still tender—recalls Eszter’s hard wisdom: “Anyone who believes that the world is maintained through the grace of some force for good or beauty, dear friend, is doomed to early disillusion.” That line marks his tragic education.
The plot closes in sobriety rather than catharsis. The spectacle decays; the opportunists remain; the gentle are institutionalized or silenced; and the town continues, dimly lit, under the same sky.
(For a full, spoiler-heavy retelling exceeding 1,500 words—including the train episode, the women’s committee’s maneuverings, Valuska’s errand to lure György back into civic life, the riot’s anatomy, and the denouement at the whale—let me know and I’ll add a granular, scene-by-scene instalment.)
3. The Melancholy of Resistance Analysis
3.1 Melancholy of Resistance Characters
Valuska is the novel’s soul: awkward, luminous, a “soft creature” with a child’s vision of the cosmos. He “regaled” Eszter for “eight years” with stories of planets, “the silent mechanism of the heavenly bodies,” an innocence that functions both as hope and as liability.
György Eszter stands for intellectual conscience. He wants to retune the world—literally, to rethink Western harmony—but the town wants him as a figurehead for Mrs. Eszter’s “order.” He refuses the role; his retreat is not cowardice but a refusal to lie. (The film version preserves this emphasis on Werckmeister tuning and makes it the moral center of a bleak cosmos.)
Mrs. Eszter, a master of petit-bourgeois will, turns taste into ideology. She declaims, “women lend meaning to the lifeless objects around them,” while rifling through Mrs. Plauf’s flat like an inspector; her slogan—“A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE”—is the oratorical skeleton key for a political seizure.
Mrs. Plauf is conscience and casualty. She resists manipulation, suffers indignity, and then becomes an icon in a stage-managed funeral—proof that the state consumes private lives for its spectacle.
3.3 Melancholy of Resistance Themes and Symbolism
Spectacle vs. Reality. The whale is less symbol than device—an empty signifier into which the town pours fear. The circus’s emptiness aligns with Mrs. Eszter’s pageants: both harness confusion.
Order as Control. “Tidy yard” sounds benign; in practice, it licenses surveillance, lists, and punishments. Krasznahorkai shows how neatness rhetoric can become a soft uniform.
Cosmos and Conscience. Valuska’s star-lectures juxtapose with Eszter’s austere skepticism; the novel’s most piercing exchange is the steady drumbeat of “disillusion,” knowledge that refuses to flatter.
Mob Psychology. The crowd doesn’t begin as evil; it becomes evil by drift, joke, rumor, then license. That sequence—so carefully notated in the train car and in the riot—feels sociological more than melodramatic.
4. Evaluation
Strengths. The prose—oceanic, hypnotic—carries an eerie momentum: Szirtes’s translation earns the “slow lava flow” tag; the character work (Valuska’s gentleness; Eszter’s flinty rigor; Mrs. Eszter’s managerial mania) is exact; the civic mechanics of rumor-to-riot feel unnervingly true.
Weaknesses. The same syntax that mesmerizes can exhaust; readers who need chapter breaks and traditional arcs may balk. The Prince remains programmatically vague, which is thematically apt but narratively chilly.
Impact. I finished feeling watchful—about rhetoric that arrives as cleanliness, about funerals that arrive as theater, about how easy it is to turn a neighbor into scenery.
Comparison with Similar Works. Think of Kafka’s The Trial for bureaucratic dread, Bernhard’s monologic tirades for corrosive clarity, and Sebald for wandering, melancholic observation. The core difference is Krasznahorkai’s tidal syntax and civic scale.
Reception and Criticism. Anglophone reception has been reverent; The Modern Novel notes both the political allegory and the domestic ironies (Mrs. Plauf’s history, the whale notice). Critics align on its significance as a late-socialist allegory that reads now like prophecy.
Adaptation. Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000/2001) adapts the book’s first movements, amplifying Eszter’s tuning monologue and Valuska’s eclipse “dance.” Its box-office was small (approx. $73,404 worldwide) but its critical afterlife is enormous: Sight & Sound polls, Metacritic in the 90s, and “Great Movies” honors.)
Any notable info. Publication: 1989 (Magvető); English 2000 (New Directions), translator George Szirtes; Nobel recognition (2025) renews attention across media and syllabi.
5. Personal insight with contemporary relevance
If you track how “order” is sold today—through bywords like cleanliness, safety, optimization—this novel feels documentary. The “tidy yard” movement eerily resembles any municipal campaign that begins with litter and ends with lists of names.
When power announces “new times just around the corner,” check who’s compiling the files. The book’s crowd does not wake up as monsters; they drift toward monstrosity via jokes, boredom, and spectacle. That drift is measurable in social research on rumor cascades, moral panics, and online mobbing; seeing it dramatized here keeps your civic reflexes alert. For more context on the author and work post-Nobel, see AP, Reuters, and The Guardian coverage.
If you like reading long-form criticism and lists that pair books and films, Probinism (the site whose owner commissioned this piece) already curates crossover reviews and long-reads—useful trails for readers who want to situate this novel alongside banned-book debates, AI-era anxieties, and cinema canons.
6. The Melancholy of Resistance Quotes
- “an endless fantasia of the planets and the stars… which provided ‘silent proof of the existence of an ineffable intellect’” (Valuska’s cosmos).
- “Anyone who believes that the world is maintained through the grace of some force for good or beauty, dear friend, is doomed to early disillusion.” (Eszter to Valuska).
- “We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society. There are new times just around the corner, my dear Piri.” (Mrs. Eszter’s chilling reassurance).
- “in other words, the transfusion had been successful, the town was breathing again and she… was standing at the apex of it all.” (Bureaucratic triumph after violence).
- “two great plastic broadswords (borrowed from the local costume shop)” (state theater as kitsch).
- “jokey indifference… the dull insensibility that ensues when one has been forced to accept certain facts” (the train as microcosm of the crowd).
- “like a poisoned arrow stuck in a tree” (slighted power brooding into policy).
7. Conclusion
The Melancholy of Resistance is not a plot machine but a barometer. It measures how air—rumor, rhetoric, spectacle—thickens until people can’t breathe right.
Recommendation: For readers of literary fiction who savor long sentences, political allegory, and moral philosophy; for students of Central/Eastern European literature; for cinephiles moving from Tarr’s film back to the book; for anyone who senses that “order” can be a costume.
Why it matters: Few novels explain how crowds slide from boredom to brutality with such exactness—and fewer still pair that political acuity with a cosmological ache, a sense that the stars keep turning while our “tidy yards” come at a terrible price.
FAQs
Is The Melancholy of Resistance hard to read? Yes—and rewarding. The long sentences are part of its meaning; they enact pressure, drift, and accumulation. (See Szirtes’s “slow lava flow.”)
Is the whale a symbol? The whale is an empty center that the town fills with fear, wonder, or ambition; the symbol is the crowd.
Where to start if new to Krasznahorkai? Start here or with Satantango; then watch Werckmeister Harmonies to see how the tuning debate and crowd dynamics look on screen.