Miklós Györffy
On Péter Nádas
There has been no other Hungarian writer--with the one exception of
Ferenc Molnár, perhaps, although his prose was, of course, in a
different league--whose work elicited, either in the author's life or posthumously,
the kind of international fame and recognition that Péter Nádas
has enjoyed in recent years. His voluminous novel, A Book of Me mo ries,
which has been published in several languages despite the considerable
difficulties presented by translation, has been listed among the greatest
literary works of our age. In German-speaking countries the book first
came to public notice in the early 1990s, receiving excellent and comprehensive
reviews and collecting literary prizes en route. Now it is the American
and British critics' turn to heap praises on the book's English-language
version.
[...]
Nádas ultimately found his own voice in his first novel, The
End of a Saga Novel. Although written between 1969 and 1972, due to the
censors' objections the book was only published in 1977. In this work,
too, Nádas started out from the autobiographical motifs of his earlier
short stories, but here he was able to enhance their function and message
by embedding them in the multilayered plot of a novel. The interconnections
of both form and content invest the novel with mythical dimensions and
fill it with reflections on the history of the genre. The End of a Saga
Novel tells the concluding part of the thousand-year history of a Jewish
family, but does so in a manner that deconstructs the genre itself. Representing
the Jewish-Christian tradition, the family's history comes to an end and
this, in turn, symbolizes the final and hope less failure of that tradition.
The central character is, once again, a boy, who in the early 1950s in
his family home learns about the world that surrounds him. His interior
monologue unfolds the story in a non-linear manner, with segments running
parallel in the timeless space of children's aware ness, forming symbolical/mythical
connections.
The naive viewpoint of a child's mind, the family legends told by the
patriarchal grandfather, the motifs of the garden and the blood sacrifice,
the symbols of the lamb, the fish and the snake--all these help to extend
the concrete temporal and spatial dimensions of the novel into those of
the general human condition, enabling Nádas to write a relatively
apolitical novel on a subject which was, at that time, still considered
as being rather touchy politically: the tragic ruin, ending in an odious
betrayal, of a bourgeois family of ancient Jewish lineage, traced back--at
least in the murky depths of mythical imagination--to biblical ancestors.
The father, who is an officer in the State Security, bears false witness
in a show trial, using the unexpected death of the grandfather, who is
still alive, as an excuse; the grandfather dies when he hears of this and
the boy ends up in a children's home, degraded into a nameless and rootless
creature.
The evil nature of the Stalinist dictatorship, although barely indicated
in the novel, is given a philosophical dimension by the biblical/mythical
perspective, presented as the monstrous finale in the fatal process of
secularization and alienation, which eventually cuts off a man from his
roots and delivers him to an impersonal and totalitarian machine.
[...]
Apart from its Proustian connection, the novel mostly displays German
influences and connections (Thomas Mann, Musil, Hesse), which is hardly
surprising, considering that the story takes place partly in Berlin and
some of it on the Baltic coast. There are strong ties linking Nádas's
thinking and style to Ger man literature and culture, and that fact alone
would justify the German environment, location and characters. The great
response that the book generated in Ger man-speaking countries has led
some Hungarian literary critics to the view that A Book of Memories
in fact has found its true cultural context with its German translation,
a view that well illustrates the mentality of those who would like to specify
what should form part of the national culture and what should not. According
to this view, the complicated periodic sentences, with their abstract content,
are more befitting to the German character than to the Hungarian. On the
question of how Nádas's style is related to the German language,
and on the truth behind the claim that the book merely had to be translated
"back" to the language it allegedly originated from, we should
really ask the translator, Hildegard Groesche.
Admittedly, A Book of Memories is not a Hungarian novel insofar as its
problematics is European. It examines the final phase in the disintegration
of personality which took place in Eastern and Central Europe under the
rule of Soviet Com mun ism, from the perspective of the history of European
culture, of the humanity of the Greek and Christian world view and of the
mythical texts of modern epics. The protagonist's childhood under the Stalinist
dictatorship of the Rákosi regime; his experience of the 1956 Revolution;
East Berlin of the 1970s; the mirroring of his character in the character
of his German friend, who eventually betrays him and flees to the West;
and his own violent death when the "memoirist" has already died
in him--all these clearly mark those historical coordinates, with which
this huge and complex collection of memories and motifs can be associated.
A Book of Memories describes a monumental attempt by the central character
to extend, by way of recollections, his personality into the taboo regions:
of himself, of his past, of his subconscious mind, of his instincts and
of his body--in other words, into all the areas where he previously failed.
Conceiving the personality not only as soul and intellect, but also as
body, Nádas wanted to write the complete biography of the hero's
body. However, the memoirist fails in his attempt to emancipate himself.
He continues to be held hostage to his memories, which determine him, throwing
him back into his childhood over and over again, locking him up in his
mutilated and immature East European personality, until he finally loses
all self-respect. The artistic and philosophical tour de force of the book
is the way in which Nádas is able to demonstrate, reaching to the
cultural historical preliminaries on the one hand and to the depth of instincts
and gut feelings on the other, the interconnections between man's loss
of identity and totalitarian oppression.
[...]
Miklós Györffy
is our regular reviewer of new fiction.
