Miklós Györffy
Everything and Nothing
Péter Esterházy: Harmonia Caelestis. Budapest, Magvető, 2000, 711 pp.
The publication of Péter Esterházy's new novel Harmonia Caelestis almost
coincided with his fiftieth birthday. In many respects this new work presents
the reader with a new Esterházy. He may have thought it important to celebrate
the round half-century with this very novel and start, as it were, a new literary
life-or, rather, to symbolically crown the first half of his life and career
with this work. It could be said that this work crowns the Esterházy in him,
returning to himself all the Esterházyness that was taken from his ancestors-princes,
and counts, on whose coats-of-arms are displayed crowns-and from himself.
Péter Esterházy comes from one of the wealthiest and most powerful Hungarian
aristocratic families, a fact known to everyone in Hungary, even those who
have never read a single line written by him. Traceable back to the twelfth
century, from the seventeenth century the Eszterházys were among the richest
landowners and held the highest Imperial and Royal, or ecclesiastical offices.
The three volumes of the Hungarian Dictionary of Biography-published even
in Socialist times, which were not in the least enthusiastic about the aristocracy-have
sixteen Esterházy entries, (not including the novelist). The history of the
Esterházy family runs in conjunction, to a certain extent, with that of Hungary
and with that of the Habsburg Empire. This parallel may be drawn as the Esterházys
possessed lands almost everywhere in the kingdom during the last four centuries,
and were leading figures in historical events. Before long the branch of the
family bearing the title of count, through various descendants, had become
related by marriage to innumerable other aristocratic families, and this web
of connections spread throughout Europe. One of the Esterházy lines rose to
princely rank, and for two and a half centuries they were the biggest Hungarian
landed proprietors. My Dear Father," writes the author-descendant (in the
novel all his ancestors are addressed or described thus)
was one of the most versatile characters in seventeenth-century
Hungarian history and art. At the peak of his political career he was awarded
the title of Palatine and the rank of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. He
turned the mansion at Kismarton into a luxurious residence, had numerous
churches built and employed painters and sculptors in his stately homes.
In 1711 his collection of hymns Harmonia caelestis was published in Vienna,
and Hungarian musical history has recorded him as an outstanding composer
too.
Although more recent research has shown Prince Pál Esterházy to be the composer
of this hymn collection in only a very limited sense (something the writer
himself also mentions), the count-author has borrowed the title of the prince's
work for his novel. This was in order to create as it were "celestial harmony",
and to pour oil on the troubled waters of the twentieth century history of
Esterházy's own direct line of ascendancy. Perhaps it was also to create at
last a "Harmonia caelestis" as a work of the Esterházys. Naturally Péter Esterházy
would not be Péter Esterházy if he did not, to a certain degree, revoke all
this ironically. Since in reality he too can only be regarded in a limited
sense as the author of his Harmonia caelestis-his novel (anthology? montage?)
being practically a communal work; the Esterházy family itself has written
it. In places this is literally true, elsewhere it is true in that figurative
sense that the Esterházys, "My Dear Fathers", mean the whole of Hungarian
history and cultural tradition to the writer.
At the very beginning of his book he writes of his "Dear Father", in
all probability quoting (without naming) a well-known Hungarian author-ancestor.
He most probably refers to a descendant of the princely branch, "Miklós the
Lover of Pomp" (or "Miklós the Glorious"), the man who built the luxurious
palace at Eszterháza (today's Fertőd), known as the "Hungarian Versailles"
and also Haydn's patron:
Here follows my dear father's name!-This name represents
a dream; a Hungarian dream of an extravagant, rich individual, of a gentleman
rummaging in his purse with two hands, of a lord who measures his gold and
silver by the bushel, whose character is almost the stuff that folk-tales
are made of. It represented a rich Hungarian... In the Hungarian imagination
my father's name stood for everything that can make life on earth, Heaven.
However, "My Dear Father", that is, the Esterházys, any one of them, or indeed
anyone you care to think of who is associated with Hungarian life and history,
as are the Esterházys, could represent anything, not just the Hungarian dream,
anything or nothing at the same time. At one time the Esterházys owned "everything",
and they took this for granted. They could not imagine life in any other way,
just that everything was theirs as far as the eye could see. Neither were
they able to imagine that one day they could lose this everything, which was
what happened after 1945. The everything became nothing.
Everything down to the last nail has been ransacked, everything,
the country... and with what cunning!
the slightly inebriated father-narrator, breaks out bitterly to the little
boy at the end of the novel.
It was as if the country (itself) had stolen from itself...
They've ransacked it, ransacked it... Who has? Why... there's no-one here, only
us, we are everything.
Esterházy's monumental saga is constructed on the rather ambitious contrast
between everything and nothing. It seeks to portray everything and nothing
in the Esterházy destiny. On the one hand, the unimaginable wealth and power,
the continuous historical presence, being identified with the country, and
the naturalness of having everything, and on the other hand, that situation
in which all this suddenly becomes equally naturally nothing. He describes
aristocratism as being wholly identified with the everything, more precisely
with the possession of the country, and with the feeling of "we are everything"
("My father's family has been unable to preserve forms, being the form itself,
simply because they could not take an outside viewpoint"). So it was not really
possible to take anything (the country?) from the Esterházys. Looking at it
in this way, there is not such a big difference between everything and nothing.
The apparent contrast dissolves into "celestial harmony" in the boys' memory.
There is also another way of looking at the unifying of the contrast between
everything and nothing. "Numbered Sentences from the Life of the Esterházy
Family", covering the first part of a 700-page book, is made up of 371 numbered
passages. Throughout these the narrator-the son-calls his "heroes" "My Dear
Father" in every single section (these being prose drafts and fragments usually
shorter than one page). These dear fathers -or as Esterházy says "Fathers
of mine"-are either Esterházys, people both identifiable and unidentifiable,
from the family portrait gallery or family mythology, historical and fictitious
people, or "anybodies"; anonymous, whoever-you-like figures, everyday beings
who do not even have distinctive features in the one-line anecdotal, short
story-like or absurd flourishes of text. They are simply there, representing
"everything". Esterházy's narrator, again not without a touch of arrogance,
considers his father to be this everything and in representing this everything
wishes, as a descendant of this, to leave behind textual traces. When all
is said and done there is room for anything in this everything, not only for
personal and family memories (still less for amiable, flattering memories),
but also for meanness and insanity, nastiness and indecency. "My dear father"
(which in Hungarian is more intimate and more respectful than "My father")
and the fond, personal or legendary historical memories which accompany this,
time and time again come up against coarse and obscene sections of text. The
conflicting values pervade and undermine each other. "My dear father" covers
areas which we are unwilling to admit to in ourselves and in our families,
which in this case can be taken for all Hungarian reality. At the same time,
by using the expression "My dear father", it becomes human, personal, ours,
and part of our lives.
With the "My dear father" label Esterházy ritually takes back everything
that was taken from him (them). At the same time he, as an individual and
narrator, practically disappears, becoming nothing in the process. He makes
the Esterházy (that is to say the Hungarian) memory speak with sentences taken
from the life of the Esterházy family. These are anecdotes and snippets of
stories taken from the Hungarian past, both long gone and recent through which,-in
fact with a newer and larger than "little" Hungarian pornography, the Esterházy,
that is the collective Hungarian memory speaks.1
Accordingly, the prose quotes
at every turn, from authentic historical sources, old family records, literary
works and Péter Esterházy himself too. The source of the quotations is not
given and it would be beyond a scholar's imagination to say where they are
all from. Alongside the sacred and profane dimensions also the time-frames
are continually being confused. Within one passage the speech styles and characteristics
of different ages are layered upon each other.
The second book of Harmonia caelestis, "Confessions of an Esterházy family",
is completely different from the fragmentary and multi-layered montage of
the first book. It is almost a straightforward autobiography or saga, whose
figures are claimed to be (by author's notes in the preface) "fictitious characters".
He goes on, "only in the pages of this book do they have existence and personalities,
in reality they do not exist and never have". In reality, however, they are
easily identifiable, real people - at least those people are on whom the writer
has modelled them and whose names they bear, and of whom they without doubt
remind us. In this way, talking about his own childhood, it would be difficult
to imagine anything other than the writer himself in place of the "I" narrator.
He plays roles less often and takes a much less literary approach than in
his earlier first-person works. At the same time, Péter Esterházy, as a descendant
of the Esterházy family, as a successful narrator and as a well-known figure,
cannot talk openly. He cannot make confessions; especially not if they are
about Esterházyness and his relationship to it, without an image being projected
on him of an aristocrat who has gone down in the world. Like the old Esterházy,
this new one, the writer, is not just himself, he is more than even his role
as "fictitious" writer-narrator; he is the Esterházy who has become a writer.
So whether he likes it or not, as a writer he must bear his Esterházyness-quite
a burdensome, worn, unstable legacy, even after the Socialist decades. In
his first-person family confessions he has, after all, to take all these things
into consideration in the same way as the narrator of the first book's text
variations did, layering the personal and impersonal, the private world and
the communal. Accordingly, both the title of the second book, "Confessions
of an Esterházy family" (the title of the first book is about the Esterházy
family), the many minute, broken-up chapters (201 in number), and the anecdotal
treatment allude to the first book. So in this respect, and also in many others-in
just how many only a more detailed examination can establish-in spite of all
its striking differences the second book is the continuation of the first.
After the Esterházys, what we have here is at one and the same time the history
of one of the branches of the family and a Hungarian history. It is about
the history of one Hungarian family. A family to which 1945, the "liberation"
and, not much later, the Rákosi era brought impossible and undigestible changes.
This was the case for so many other Hungarian families, in fact for the history
of the whole country (1948 being the year of change).
In his works so far, Esterházy has avoided the issue of his parentage, only
alluding to it ironically as something which it is impossible to ignore, since
the texts themselves time after time comment on that literary tradition and
the surroundings in which it came into being. The subtle game of relevant
allusions played a particularly important role in his writings inspired, in
part or wholly, by his family and his private life (Novel of Production, Helping
Verbs of the Heart, The Book of Hrabal). At the same time, these works are
characterised by the fact that the frank confessions of the Esterházy heritage
have, almost ostentatiously, been left out, as has the account of what it
meant in the '50s and '60s and what it means today to be an Esterházy. That
is to say, to lose everything or even more than everything, while at the same
time to be spectacularly, deeply and irrevocably rooted in the art and history
of Hungary.
So after a long silence this new novel is now paying off the debts. The fact
that these were debts, and Esterházy himself felt them to be so, is proved
by the new book. Esterházy the reserved writer of multi-layered, self-mocking,
post-modern texts suddenly begins narrating in a liberated and almost loquacious
way. He talks about his grandparents, his parents, his childhood, the Hungarian
Soviet Republic, forced relocation and military service. His virtuoso writing
technique, intelligence, 1919 humour and self-mockery sparkle in these confessions.
However, this time his main aim is not the creation of an unconventional,
self-propelling, self-reflecting text, but to create living characters and
places in the truest sense.
The fragmentation and reflection certainly remain. He narrates in a rambling
way, interrupting his chapters at every step in order to insert episodes and
scenes which flash through his mind from other times. This is not even a story
insomuch as there is no unbroken continuity, no linear process, no climax(es),
in point of fact it has neither beginning nor end. These are real confessions,
we could even say Rousseauesque, Goethean, autobiographical confessions. Their
protagonist, who has been developed beyond the innumerable beautifully formed
characters (among them the child Esterházy), is the narrator who is invisible
but whose presence is still directly and emphatically felt through his tone
and structural principles. If we really want to we can piece together the
family story from the previous scattered anecdotal events and of course from
the "antecedents" of the first book. The "beginning" can be marked in 1919,
the time of the Hungaírian Soviet Republic, for two reasons; the family in
the person of the grandparents come up against Communism for the first time,
which two and a half decades later is to "wipe them off". This is also the
time when the father comes into the world and can live the life that was his
birthright only as a young man. The grandfather, Count Móric Esterházy, was
Prime Minister of Hungary for six months in 1917. These were the final days
of the Habsburg Monarchy, and he held this post among ever more chaotic conditions.
In the spring of 1919 Béla Kun and the Communists took over and occupied his
mansion at Csákvár, and the grandson makes him speak in quotation marks as
it were, on the basis of his own original confessions. We do not know whether
notes by Móric Esterházy really have survived, but that these quoted passages
are for the most part not the sort of thing he would write and are apocryphal,
seems certain. Esterházy often uses quotation marks when he himself is speaking,
and does not mark texts which really are quotations. Perhaps along with memories
of text he sometimes writes his grandfather's memories, and sometimes borrows
his third person texts to add to it. This is the grandfather with the vicissitudinous
fate who, in his declining years, even endured internal exile and in 1956,
at the age of seventy-five, completely broken, left for Vienna, leaving behind
his wife, who chose to remain faithful to the country, his children and grandchildren.
Nevertheless (or precisely because of the writer's literary manoeuvrings),
he forms a vivid and remarkable figure; highly responsible and dignified as
a self-governing grand seigneur, about whom we can not know how accurate a
picture this is, but who makes us believe it to be so. Incidentally however,
Esterházy, not without reason, draws our attention to the fact that his characters
are imaginary figures.
The situation is similar with two further protagonists; the father, Count
Mátyás Esterházy, who spent the best part of his life in abject poverty, in
humiliation, in endless drudgery-at first physical, later mental (for years
he was a translator for the present Hungarian Quarterly's predecessor, The
New Hungarian Quarterly), and the mother who, daughter of the grandfather's
estate steward, became the wife of the already declassé young gentleman, and
then mother of his four children. The confessions convince us that they too
were precisely as they have been brought to life on the pages of the book
and everything happened to them precisely as we read it -their becoming acquainted
with one another, their arguments, joys, suffering, celebrations and weekdays.
However in a large part of the story the majority of the carefully and minutely
worked out (novel!) scenes take place in a time of which the narrator could
not have direct personal recollections. Episodes from his own and his brothers'
and sisters' childhoods, although temptingly and enchantingly original, and
genuine too, have nevertheless been "written" and are "imaginary" memories,
which have a place only on the pages of this book.
So Esterházy thus recalls the story of his childhood and family; by "writing"
it or, to be more precise, not just in his "own" words, but also with "borrowed"
material. That is he wrote it with words and sentences from that memory in
which the personal and mythical, the provable and the fictitious, the timelessly
continuous and the anecdotally rounded off events are washed together. It
is beyond doubt that a special attraction binds Esterházy to this type of
plot and history, to the anecdotal, to the typically Hungarian kind of narrative.
So when all is said and done his book can be regarded as a large collection
of family anecdotes too, where the family means the extended family, the national
community.
In terms of current Hungarian political values and commonly-held
beliefs, Esterházy is classed as a liberal author. The national-conservative
side blames him for the fact that, as far as his sympathies and side-taking
are concerned, he has disowned his ancestry, betrayed it and joined the liberals.
Well, if there exists a piece of literature which gives a more truthful and
contemporary description of nation and family ideas than those of authors
proclaimed to be nationalist and conservative, then it is Harmonia Caelestis.
NOTES
- "Little Hungarian Pornography" is the title of one of
Esterházy's earlier novels. Back to text
Miklós Györffy
reviews new fiction for this journal.
