Miklós Györffy
Dreams of a City
On Iván Mándy (1918-1995)
This century has produced several writers who have created imaginary worlds of universal validity, personal mythologies, from the elements of particular and real cities. In Ulysses, James Joyce crafted a symbolic stage confined to the city of Dublin for a novel. Kafka's fantastic labyrinthine world was composed of the buildings and the streets of Prague. Faulkner zeroed in on Oxford, Mississippi, in creating Jefferson. The late Iván Mándy may be included among these great writers, for he built up his own incomparably personal world using details garnered from a few districts and a certain period of Budapest. His world is that of Budapest in the middle third of the century, that of ramshackle tenements, courtyards where the sumach tree reigns, dilapidated stairwells, open outside corridors looking down onto courtyards, shabby little cinemas, smoky editorial offices, timeworn coffee-houses, coffee bars and hotels, the football grounds of third division teams, and legendary outdoor markets. Iván Mándy spent his whole life on these sets, and knew all there was to know about them; he knew the characters that frequented them, while at the same time he himself wandered through them as if he were just dreaming the whole thing. At times this world presented itself to his imagination as some unreal, grotesque underwater stock-breeder. It was, in his eyes, at once intimately familiar and cosy, while also frighteningly strange and ghostly. Thus he became, through his writing, a conveyor of the absurd state of existence that marks our age of alienation, loneliness, and resignation.
This world is composed of nothing but fragments. Everything in it crumbles, decays, loses meaning and purpose, is orphaned, comes apart. Perhaps this, too, helps explain why Mándy's preferred art form was always the short story. Throughout his working life he alternated between the same themes and motifs, and since their common denominator was a resigned acknowledgement that abandonment, slipping away, dejection, and being left behind were inevitable, Mándy could hardly do otherwise than conjure up the images and atmosphere of this disintegration again and again in sparse, dispassionate stories. He wrote short novels, too, but these are strings of loosely linked short stories. Indeed, his entire oeuvre is best described as a single, large, coherent cycle.
[...]
Mándy creates a sensation of dreamlike hovering by being simultaneously inside and outside his characters. He, too, hovered among them. Mándy faded into his environment, sinking into the cloudy, weedy "deep water" in which his heroes, kindred spirits they were, likewise swam along stroke by stroke, while observing them, from a vantage point, living their lives, a humble, marvelling stranger, recording his observations on slips of paper which, slowly but surely, came to life themselves and took shape as disquieting shadows that haunted the writer with their proliferating, enigmatic messages. Mándy never belonged to any literary cõterie; neither aesthetic nor political programmes captured his interest, he wasn't one for delivering speeches, nor did he take any oaths of allegiance. He just lived his own life in the "deep", and he couldn't help marvelling at it. Up to the very last he treasured within himself a sort of child's naiveté with which he could marvel at pe-ople, objects, and even himself, his own manner of stumbling about, as if he were someone looking upon all this from another dimension.
It was this ability which endowed him with the sensitivity to perceive and portray the grotesque absurdity of his age. Mándy belongs with Hrabal, Mrozek, and Örkény among the great portrayers of the East European grotesque. He bears an even closer kinship to the Czech filmmakers of the Sixties, including Forman, Menzel, and Passer. Indeed, it was in the Sixties that he, too, focussed on the type of story in which the facts of day-to-day reality, passing through increasing degrees of exaggeration and hyperbole, passed over into the sphere of nonsensical grotesque. Yet, in Mándy, one encounters only acrid irony, not the ruthless black humour of the absurd. Mándy's unreality is composed largely of the iridescent, gentle world of dreams, and his absurdities are almost apologetic. [...]
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In taking leave of life, the old man also bids adieu to the spirit of the place, for in Mándy's world the two were one and the same. In the title story of the collection Átkelés (1983, The Crossing, see p. 87 of this issue), Mándy sees life as nothing other than a laboured, bitter crossing of a square in Budapest. The drunk old tramp who steps forth on behalf of the writer here worms his way from bench to bench and tree to tree, reeling and tripping, while an old woman watches him from a balcony up above - a woman who, it seems, had something to do with him in the past. She may be the shabby old man's abandoned wife, who now fears that this slovenly figure might come up and visit her. In the end she goes down to him, so that she'll be on hand if he chances to take a sprawling fall. [...]
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Miklós Györffy
is our regular reviewer of new fiction.
