Miklós Györffy
A New Family Saga
Pál Závada: Jadviga párnája (Jadviga's
Pillow), Magvetõ, 1977, 444 pp. *
Agáta Gordon: Kecskerúzs (Goat Rouge), Magvetõ, 1977,
190 pp. *
László Csiki: A pusztulás gyönyöre (The
Joys of Destruction), Jelenkor, 1997, 247 pp.
Among the initiated, the favoured outsider of this year's Book Week
was to be Jadviga's Pillow, a novel by the almost unknown Pál Závada.
Since literature, least of all fiction, attracts scarcely any publicity
in Hungary nowadays, the success of a novel depends more than a little
on word of mouth. Those in the know had recommended this book by Závada,
a previously little-known 45-year-old writer, as a splendid novel. The
blurb claims that "Jadviga's Pillow is a significant work, a fascinating
story, whose linguistic power is a clear gesture towards the ideals of
classical prose in the uncertain hierarchy of contemporary literature."
Since no really significant Hungarian novel has come up recently, it was
with keen expectations that I set to reading the book. Its handsome presentation,
with its pages of hand-made paper stitched and not glued, is eye-catching.
Nor was I let down, for Jadviga's Pillow is indeed a fine book, and as
is usually the case with truly significant works, it does not fit into
any scheme.
The book is in the form of a journal, as the subtitle tells us. The
diarist is András Osztatni, a well-to-do peasant farmer, and he
takes us from the day before his nuptials in February 1915 until 1922,
when his marriage finally breaks down and all his hopes regarding life
and love come to naught. The diary is certainly fictional, albeit at the
end names are mentioned of actual people who have been quoted. (That the
novel has some kind of documentary basis is made probable by the fact that
Závada began as a descriptive sociologist and his first book, Kulákprés
(Kulak Squeezer, 1986) is about communist terror in the villages in the
early 1950s.
András Osztatni's journal is not a historical document but a
private, personal account. The main subject is the diarist's marriage.
Although it was a love match, for a long time his wife is unwilling to
consummate the marriage. Eventually she suc cumbs to her husband's persistent,
sometimes even aggressive wooing, indeed she achieves an orgasm with him
on occasion, and bears a child to him. But crises of estrangement keep
recurring, always due to Jadviga's capricious rejections.
But the truth will out and becomes eventually known to the husband as
well. She has a lover, from way back before their marriage--a friend of
her husband's youth, the half-German half-Jewish country town lawyer, Franci
Winkler. But András Osztatni loves Jadviga so much that he is unable
to give her up. At the price of much torment he shares her. Jadviga does
not want a divorce, indeed she keeps rousing his passion, making him hope
that his understanding and love will bring its reward. Finally it is he
who has had enough. When Jadviga gives birth to her second son, not by
him, although he acknowledges him as his child, he turns his back for good
on the family home and banishes himself to a solitary, desolate homestead.
This summary might suggest some kind of a conventional ménage
à trois, but that is not the case. Not only because the novel is
set in a more or less peasant environment that is rather different to the
middle-class eternal triangle and its frivolity, but because Závada
makes no use at all of the rewarding though hackneyed possibilities of
adultery as a plot element. On the contrary, identifying himself with his
diarist, he shyly and embarrassedly avoids an anecdotal specification of
the "scenes" of disclosure. This, however, does not mean that
he would shyly and embarrassedly avoid all the depth of emotion or instinct
that accompany this story of a matrimonial triangle--or, rather, of love.
Jadviga's Pillow is not about a marriage, nor is it about morality.
It is about love, and, about what for Závada means practically the
same, loneliness. Jadviga has loved two, indeed three men, but only the
pillow she inherited from her mother can she embrace in devotion and sense
of security. Her own solitude began with losing her parents as a little
girl. As an orphan she fell in love with her guardian and with her girl-friend.
Her guardian was none other than György Osztatni, the father of her
husband to be; he in turn had been
in love with Jadviga's mother, Mária Ponyiczky, before they both
married someone else. György Osztatni, an enterprising peasant with
a mysterious and adventurous life behind him, treated Jadviga, the daughter
of his first love, as his own. In deed, the novel even seems to hint that
Jadviga was really his own daughter and this is why he left half of his
property to her. Jadviga loved the man in him and, after his early death,
she sought emotional support first in the aggressive wooing of the young
articled clerk and then in the arduous love of the son, who reminded her
of his father. Throughout her life she nourishes an intimate relationship
with her friend, Irmus. Yet amid all these love-lorn, passion-seeking but
fragmentary, one-sided relationships Jadviga again and again wishes to
be alone, she grapples with a tortured sense of lack. She is motivated
by a fatal ambivalence which probably can only be explained by human nature,
which is capricious, mostly isolating, and cannot handle the emotional
claims of someone else.
The temptation to solitariness and privacy also lurks in her husband,
András, from the start--he is always seeking to withdraw in his
humiliation and disappointments in love. He is prompted to do so by grief,
or by sulkiness or by empty self-sacrifice. Sure in his sincere monogamous
devotion and in the prevailing moral code, András feels he is right
regarding Jadviga; though he forgives her for all she had done, he does
not understand her. Not because he is callous or selfish, but because it
is impossible for him to understand her. Someone in love cannot understand
one who does not return love in the manner he desires.
Being for the most part András Osz tatni's intimate journal,
Jadviga's Pillow mainly portrays his point of view and so it is perhaps
a more authentic, more profound depiction of his truth, his inner justice
than of Jadviga's. Nonethe less, the novel provides a place for the woman's
inner life and truth as well. Závada finds a fine formal solution
here: after András's death, in the 1930s, Jadviga discovers her
husband's secret journal and, conversing with him as it were, she "inserts"
her supplementary comments, the other side of their story. Her "inserts"
interrupt the journal at six points, bringing the reader into the story
of the couple and of their environment. The information offered on the
events and the emotional tuning and the stylistic presentation of those
events are the means to this. The outlines of a large-scale family chronicle
unfold against the background of a tragic mental collapse.
But it is not only Jadviga who adds to her husband's journal: so does
Misu, the second, bastard son, who has always felt himself at a disadvantage
compared to his elder brother, the handsomer, more talented and, for a
long time, more fortunate Marci. Misu discovers the journal and his mother's
additions when still in his teens, and learns from it that the man he thought
of as his father is not really that. For long years he struggles with this
paternal legacy in his solitary life and he adds his own comments to it.
His italicized footnotes, growing in number and frequency, perhaps form
the most striking, linguistically most suggestive, layer of the novel.
Just like the author of Jadviga's Pillow, the Osztatni family are Slovaks,
members the Slovak enclave in Békés County in the south-eastern
corner of Hungary, near the Romanian border. The journal is full of Slovak
words and idioms. Misu's notes at first give translations for these or
add recollections and social comments. But slowy the notes start to reveal
his personality and his own story. While his "father" and mother,
despite being Slovaks and using Slovak phrases, basically express themselves
in a refined, elaborate literary Hungarian in the journal, Misu uses the
corrupt, colourless Hungarian of the uprooted mixed population of our day.
It is this manner of expression that tells us most about his own life.
The somewhat thick-headed Misu actually turns informer under pressure during
the Rákosi dictatorship, and then becomes an eccentric, lonely bachelor,
an unhappy survivor of what had been a prosperous peasant way of life--just
as the former peasant way of life and culture of Hungary fall victim to
socialist ideology. There may be great differences between the way András
and Jadviga express themselves, but both are accurate reflections of the
emotional and ideological horizon of the cultivated, literate peasant farmers
of market-towns. Misu's inarticulate reduction of language documents the
proletarianization of a rich peasant culture in a heart-rending way.
One of the most interesting cinema works of recent years has been Péter
Forgách's series, Private Hungary, which made use of amateur family
films that have survived from the 1930s and '40s. Závada's novel
has a similar feel: as if it were presenting private documents of real
private lives, which conjure up public history in the way it is lived through
by the private individual, that is as the mostly unpleasant but basically
secondary by-product of the constant human problems of a non-recurring
life. Although András Osztatni is writing his journal in the stormy
world of the 1910s, whether his wife returns his love and what the prospective
harvest is going to bring are more important to him than war, revolution
and retribution. Jadviga's Pillow creates this captivatingly authentic
semblance of private documents and this is the paramount attraction of
the novel and, at the same time, a new victory for the classical novelist's
attitude.
Another novelty at this year's Book Week was Agáta Gordon's slim
volume, Goat Rouge, a first work by an author even less known than Závada.
Nothing is well known about her, allegedly even the publishers only know
a Post Office Box address, although recently an anonymous radio interview
revealed that the woman's name concealed a man. Goat Rouge is about lesbian
women, which one might think is the reason for the concealment. But a reading
of the book convinces one that something else is at issue, since from the
point of view of moral conventions the events, situations and relationships
presented are absolutely innocent. They provide no cause for scandal at
all, even by moral standards stricter than the casual promiscuity of today.
Goat Rouge is a cycle of lyrical pictures of emotions, desires, moods,
memories and landscapes. The forty short chapters are so many lyrical runs
produced in the heroine's interior monologue without interpunctuation.
The chapters are divided by lines of poetry set on separate pages and in
a different typeface. According to the fiction, they are not poems by the
heroine but come from a slim book of poetry which she has happened upon
in the waiting room of a woman psychiatrist. Since the volume has no dust
jacket she does not know whose poems they are but she feels as if they
were intended for her, matching her mental problems. The reader is faced
by a kind of game which he has become unused to: a literary mimicry of
the romantic and rococo.
The plot is fairly simple: the protagonist, a young girl, Leona, notices
in her adolescence that she feels attracted to her female rather than male
companion and from then on her course of life is determined by her homoeroticism.
Ignoring chronology, her lyrical stylized reports and recollections of
her emotional vicissitudes follow one another in the first person singular,
in a loose, associative series. Apart from memories of childhood summers
in the country, providing a kind of Proustian intonation, these are commonplace
love affairs, mostly taking place in her student hostel and consistently
without physical relations. Soon there appears Isolda, the great love with
whom Leona eventually retreats into a small lodge in the woods. They share
their Rousseauesque idyll with a similar couple, Gerle and Paloma, who
live in a nearby village, practically forming together a four-sided, single-sex
commune. Anyway, the novel continues to avoid open eroticism. Isolda finally
deceives Leona with Paloma, and Leona is left alone in the forest hide-away.
With the assistance of her friends she obtains treatment from Doctor Orsolya
Hostell, who herself is heterosexual but whose interesting and attractive
character can capture also the interest of a lesbian woman.
The hospital treatment provides the framework for the story, the monologue
starts out with it and also returns to it at the end. As the inserted poems
and the unpunctuated text indicated, it is intended to be ironically and
impressionistically playful, and as the girls' names (which include Rahel,
Emese, Sarolta, etc.) also indicate, the novel aims for a slightly elevated,
aetherial region. Alongside the Proust reminiscences, the distant influences
of Alain-Fournier, Péter Nádas and others can be sensed.
But Agáta Gordon is lighter, more playful and indeed more unsubstantial
and superficial than her models. The heroine and her emotional adventures
are not interesting enough, the stylization sometimes becomes flat and
the reiterated verbal variations, which slowly become monotonous, offer
nothing new beyond a certain point.
In his latest book, László Csiki provides four fairly
long stories under the title, The Joys of Destruction. The 53-year-old
author comes from Transylvania, where he had lived and published for a
long time, and his lyrically objectivist writings con-tinue to be set in
a Transylvanian or Romanian milieu. This is true of the stories in this
latest volume. The protagonist of Chinese Defence arrives home in Transylvania
from Soviet captivity in 1962. He has come from a region in the Far East
which at the time of Soviet-Chinese tension came under Chinese rule, together
with the prisoners of war forgotten and languishing there. China now sends
home these ragged, starving, emaciated men to use them as evidence of the
inhumanity of the Soviet authorities. This is how György Péteri
arrives home with a grizzled beard down to his waist and an Usbek wrap
resembling a caftan, causing no small problems to the Romanian administration,
as his reappearance could damage morale in a country in the process of
constructing socialism. "People are longing for quiet, they are living
their lives, with difficulties of course but it is precisely in the interest
of saving their peace and eagerness that they should not be upset."
György Péteri does not understand much of all this, as for
him all that exists is his one and only life, which has been stolen from
him. Yet this is precisely what the interior ministry and party agencies
have no appreciation of. They are only willing to receive the uncalled-for
newcomer once he has a new ap pearance, a new name and a new identity.
The Wanton Rabbit, a "socialist and realistic story", mirrors
the pliant mind of a Hungarian teacher of biology at Cluj (Kolozsvár).
This young man who, with many others, does not feel happy in Ceau sescu's
dreary police state, has presumably incurred suspicion by his on and off
friendship with a vagrant and drunken "civil-rights and educational
activist". Later on it turns out that the repeated disappearances
of this friend of his are part of the process of transsettling to Hungary
itself, and leading to the suspicion that perhaps he was a police informer
with the duty of having others apprehended. During one of his visits he
has entrusted a rabbit to the care of the teacher-protagonist, and it seems
as if it were the animal that has brought him finally into deep trouble.
He is being dismissed from his job, alienated from his lover, and all his
movements are being watched. A special agent is relentlessly pressuring
him into providing information on the opposition. In his inert and inane
loneliness, the terrified young man makes his bitter and vehement observations
to his rabbit and it is through this that he becomes really worthy of surveillance.
His sole subversive activity consists of this monologue, which provides
the text of the story, and his sole witness and accomplice is the rabbit.
The grotesque and ironic monologue tries to capture a state of existence
in which nothing can be known for certain, not even whether one is really
being observed or whether they only want to achieve a semblance of it.
"I was not ashamed of my fear, I even became accustomed to it like
a crippled railwayman is to his wooden leg. It was an incurable state lasting
all one's life, there was nowhere to step out of it, it could only be anaesthetized
at times--with love and alcohol, but nowadays even these two were not present
in my larder." Csiki's protagonist, whose models the author must have
personally encountered in large numbers, lives with his rabbit, with his
impossible, humiliating and stupid defencelessness, in a way in which he
both suffers and feels at home.
While the presentation of the first story is marked by a dry, impassive
objectivity coloured by lyrical pictures, The Wanton Rabbit is dominated
by a metaphoric and ironic self-reflexion. Of a further different tone
is the title story, The Joys of Destruc tion, in which a lyrical objectification
(the feature most typical of Csiki, appearing here mainly in his description
of nature) is blended with elements of science fiction and a negative utopia.
It is set in a closed zone where game-keepers are entrusted with the task
to wipe out every living creature. A nuclear catastrophe must have taken
place somewhere in the vicinity (a clear reference to Chernobyl), people
have already been evacuated from the region and now it is time to destroy
the animals so that no possible carrier of contamination should survive.
Meanwhile, one former inhabitant returns home into his evacuated village,
after his internment in a faraway place before the catastrophe. His arrival
causes utter confusion among the gamekeepers and their helpers, the prisoners
compelled to retrieve and burn the dead animals. The mere fact that the
man could have entered the supposedly tightly guarded zone gives rise to
various alarming presumptions. Just like The Wanton Rabbit, The Joys of
Destruction also opens up the threatening perspectives of irrational uncertainty.
It is even possible that no nuclear catastrophe has taken place at all,
that even the gamekeepers, considering themselves to be powerful and indomit
able, are only tools of some anonymous higher will.
Csiki's work here reminds one of the literature expressing the
prevailing climate and the parabolic methods of the 1970s and 1980s, whose
limits were already evident at the time. He writes in an extremely intensive,
concentrated manner, his prose is masculinely lean and meta phorically
dense, his images evocative and illuminating. All in all, he calls up a
great verbal and poetic apparatus for the narration of his parabolic stories,
but one has a déja vu feeling of having read and seen all this before.
And one often feels fatigued by the overstrained demonstration of a literary
arsenal. While Závada's novel proves that the classical manner of
narration has still huge reserves, Agáta Gordon and László
Csiki's prose show that it is not enough to rely simply on the real or
presumed poetic power of style, words and images.
Miklós Györffy
is our regular reviewer of new fiction.
