[..]

It’s easy to dismiss the question, as easy as brushing aside other minor outside irritants. I could say, for instance, that I am present-day Hungarian reality. I could also say that whatever happens in a story can only happen here and now; and furthermore, narrative prose should not be confused with media news, whose producers, it seems, are not confronted with such questions often enough. Or I could answer the question with a question (which I like to do anyway), and say:

At what point does reality stop being current and Hungarian? Today is Saturday, so the reality I am experiencing is Saturday’s reality. But what if I wrote that on Thursday, the day before yesterday, I went to the Central European University? Would I no longer be talking about present-day reality? And if I added that at the Central European University I heard a talk by a Romanian writer, and also got involved in an Austrian matter too complicated to go into right now, then I wouldn’t be dealing with Hungarian reality? What happened five years ago may still be considered part of present-day reality. But what if someone related a story from the pre-1989 period? Would he, too, be running away from reality? And if someone described how a self-service restaurant looked in Moscow in the nineteen-seventies (as was done by a friend of mine, a fellow writer, who, incidentally, was hit with the same question, I heard it myself)—would he be turning his back on the here and now? And what about the writer who in a brilliant novel superimposed late nineteenth-century Budapest on the present-day capital? Was he or wasn’t he running away? And if he was, which way? From the nineteenth century to the twentieth, or vice versa?

I will not go on expanding time and space, even though I thought I wouldn’t stop until I’ve demonstrated that the late Classical, Mediterranean world of Miklós Mészöly’s Saulus is as much a part of Hungarian reality as those fields of ice untouched by time in Imre Wirth’s Eskimo War.

[..]

But if there exists, at one and the same time, more than one kind of reality, they can be discovered only through a variety of perceptions; we must contend, then, with the coexistence of numerous different subjective realities, in the real world as well as in the world of the about-to-be-written narrative. To give a very simple example: A man is walking down Király Street.* He started out at Teréz Boulevard and is heading toward Károly Boulevard. At the same time another individual is walking down Majakovszkij Street. He started at Tanács Boulevard and is heading toward Lenin Boulevard. One would assume that at some point the two would meet, yet in "reality" they never will, because they move in two different planes of reality, even if—as in this case—the spatial elements of the two realities, down to the tiniest detail, can be said to match perfectly.

The situation becomes even more complicated—here, too, examples abound —in the case of several ethnic groups living together, each one imbued with a different sense of the past, and therefore possessing different notions about present reality as well. In these instances, the same area of settlement only appears to be the same; actually they are two or three distinct settlements, with layers upon layers of disparate but intersecting spatial and cultural realities. To use an example close at hand, I’ve been several times to the city of Cluj-Napoca in western Romania, I know the place fairly well—as well as an outsider can get to know a city not his own. I purposely wrote the city’s Romanian name, on account of its foreignness. The Hungarian name is more familiar and natural to us, and may distract us from an essentially hermeneutic problem, for which this city may well serve as a textbook illustration (but so could other comparable places on the map, which can be referred to by two or three different names, though such places are especially prevalent in this part of the world). Someone like myself, born and raised in Budapest, can—and do—have friends living in Kolozsvár, whom I may wish to visit. But whether I travel there by car or by train, the place I will come to will not be Kolozsvár but Cluj-Napoca. Anyone who has been to this city knows what I am talking about; I am trying to illuminate the problem for those who have never been there. Cluj-Napoca is a dynamically expanding Romanian city of five hundred thousand inhabitants, with a modest past but a promising future. At the same degree of latitude and longitude, though in a different world of reality, is Kolozsvár, a stagnating, and even shrinking city of eighty thousand, with deep-rooted traditions, a rich past going back hundreds of years (which includes the history of a once lively German town called Klausenburg), and a not very promising future. A river runs through both cities: the Somes or, if you like, the Szamos. There is no barrier, no duplication here, for it’s been said that you can’t step in the same river twice. Besides, the water in both rivers is heavily polluted. Not far from the bank of this river there is a square: Cluj-Napoca’s Michael the Brave Square (a translation, obviously), also known as Széchenyi Square. It’s the same square, but in two different realities, thus two different squares.

I imagine two people, a girl and a boy, walking toward each other in the square. They are perfectly compatible as to character, and would probably be delighted to find each other somewhere in the middle of the square; but because they are crossing two different squares they will never meet. Or take a writer and a reader. The reader is searching eagerly, passionately for a book that will open a window to another reality, different from the one in which he lives. What he doesn’t realize is that the book he is looking for was written by a man walking toward him in the square. And the writer is longing to meet a genuinely receptive reader who is not interested in knowing if writers nowadays can make a living but in finding out what may be revealed, with the aid of all the resources at a writer’s command and by means of a piece of made-up reality, about lived reality; and conversely, what can be learned about made-up reality from lived reality. What he doesn’t realize is that the reader he is searching for is right there, walking toward him in the square—the same one, but belonging to a different realm of reality. A meeting between the two would suggest the compatibility of the two realities, but it will never take place, precisely because they move about in different realities.

[..]

The question is not why the writer is running but where. A contemporary Hungarian writer can only be running away from contemporary Hungarian reality. For him or her to escape from the Persian reality of the Sassanids or from the Byzantine world of Justinian would require superhuman (and not specifically literary) gifts. Somewhere there must exist a secret history of escapes from reality.

I know only bits and pieces of this secret history. But I am fairly familiar with the escape attempts of the writer who lives under my roof. If he stops running long enough, I will relate the story of his escape attempts in appropriate detail. Now I will only allude to them, if only to answer the question posed in the title of this essay.

Escape into an alter ego.

Escape into another language.

Escape into alien art forms.

Escape into subtle correspondences. (This may help explain the sudden interest in the idea of history being just another narrative occupation, a way of shaping and reshaping a story.) But a word of caution: correspondence is not the sum total of things that correspond. It should be fairly clear that questioning the language used to discuss traditions is not the same as fetishizing tradition, or the subjects subsumed under it.

Escape from the beginning of the narrative to near its end. (Another word of caution: what we mean here is not direction but proportion. Is there still narrative space, free scope, near the end of the narrative?)

Escape-like leap from the end of the narrative back to what preceded its beginning.

Escape from narrative as process to narrative as outcome.

Escape from narrative as outcome to narrative as process.

Escape from present-day Hungarian reality to present-day Hungarian reality. And the other way around. And back again.

Translated by Ivan Sanders