Tim Wilkinson
Tangles with History
An English Reader's Notes on Recent Hungarian Writing
László Márton: Árnyas főutca (Shady High Street). Budapest, Jelenkor, 147 pp. - Endre Kukorelly: Rom, a Szovjetónió története (Ruin, A History of the Soviet Onion). Budapest, Jelenkor, 122 p. - Lajos Parti Nagy: Hősöm tere (My Heroe's Square). Budapest, Magvető, 184 pp. - Péter Esterházy: Harmonia Cælestis. Budapest, Magvető, 712 pp.
Whether a text is categorized as history, biography, personal memoir, fiction or poetry, the boundaries between these genres are fluid and intimately bound up with changing attitudes to personal and public identities and hence responsibilities. These are particularly turbid and often choppy waters to negotiate if one happens to live under an authoritarian régime, whatever its stripe-political, social or commercial. All four authors reviewed here were born in the 1950s-three before the turning point of Hungary's 1956 uprising, Márton a few years later-so all began their literary careers in the relatively benign climate of Kádárist "goulash" Communism. They also played more or less conspicuous parts in exploiting the limits of what was permissible, subverting officially approved "socialist realist" stereotypes and offering fresh approaches to the constructions of "reality", history and tradition. The new discourses that were opened up by these literary strategies helped prepare the ground for the country's non-violent 1989-90 change of régime. The framework may have shifted since then, but identity, in one or another of its protean facets, is an issue for writers in all societies, including-perhaps especially so-those with nominally democratic and largely free-market institutions, as this clutch of recent works corroborates.
In his previous novel, The True History of Jacob Wunschwitz (1997), László Márton explored seemingly obscure ructions in the Lower Lusatian town of Guben at the opening of the 17th century. Shady High Street takes on a subject that many older Hungarians, like their neighbours in Austria and elsewhere, would prefer to suppress from their consciousness: the conditions under which it was possible for the SS and their local helpers to round up and exterminate the Jewish populations of territories under their control. Through the device of imagining a virtual collection of photographs of individuals in an anonymous (but identifiable) town, situated in the area close to what is now Hungary's border with Slovakia along the Danube, and by compressing a decade of events up to early 1945 into an imaginary single day, Márton deftly outlines a gallery of characters and incidents to impart a sense of the mundane cruelties and absurdities of the gathering tragedy that led to almost all the 400,000 Hungarians of Jewish descent who were then living in the provinces being wiped out at Auschwitz within a bare six weeks from 15th May to 7th July 1944). Two main characters, both female, serve to link the various strands of the narrative: photographer's assistant Gaby Gőz, who survives the war in a "safe house" in the Budapest ghetto, and Aranyka ("Goldie") Roth, a clever schoolgirl, who is given the gruesomely ironic task of mediating both the official Christian-nationalist ideology of that era and also, in ghostly afterlife, a Judaic counterblast in the form of Old Testament texts relating to the feast of Purim. References to emblematic contemporary texts, such as Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, the works of the popular ultraconservative author Ferenc Herczeg, as well as well-known popular songs, but it is the rhetoric of poet Sándor Petőfi, "heroic" activist of Hungary's 1848-49 revolution and a hollow totem figure for régimes ever since, which is subjected to the most withering attack. The book ends at a local fair in the summer of 1944, with a chilling reference to its programme and a wrenching jump-cut to the present: "Patriotic songs, air-defence exercises, folk dance. Open-air holy service, to be conducted by Father Kelemen Király (sometime König)... who is... about to go off to Berlin... At the parsonage on Hildegard Strasse, a hundred paces from the place where we are writing these lines in the early autumn of 1998, he will later receive Ferenc Szálasi... and will express his approval of the latter's religious zeal and selflessness. 'I was drawn to the compelling conclusion,' he would later write, in the early Seventies, "that I was dealing with a man of noble spirit and pure intentions.'" (Szálasi, the Arrow Cross leader, came to power in October 1944 and was hanged after the war as a war-criminal.) Not surprisingly, the book has touched more than a few raw nerves since its publication.
The uncomfortable message of Márton's book-that few of us can escape a share of responsibility, however slight, for the evil that is done in our times-applies equally to Endre Kukorelly's Ruin, though here the confrontation is with the shades of a more recent past. The wry twist of the long "o" in the book's punning subtitle-"A History of the Soviet Onion", as it were -has nothing to do with vegetables, or at most only rotten ones: in Hungarian it has connotations of "antiquated", "obsolete", "clapped out". The decrepitude of the Communist's material world is the least of the targets of the 23 laconic, mostly untitled homilies, bearing various dates between February 1987 and April 2000. They are incandescently scathing and unforgiving reactions to its sheer spiritual bankruptcy, as sparked by Kukorelly's recollections of events in his own life-childhood; the obligatory spell as an army conscript in the wake of the Czech events of 1968; a three-week holiday in the fabled West (London, Paris) in 1978; visits to the Soviet Union in the early 1980s-but more par-ticularly his encounters with a wide range of illustrative texts. The deepest scorn is directed at fellow-travelling writers, with the biggest punch being consigned to a ghastly "Coda". Under the ominous mark of the number 666, this responds to a line from a 1950 poem by Zoltán Zelk, then one of the most servile lackeys of the Stalinist régime ("Comrade, what else should I weave into my song") by assembling a series of short verses concerning a death sentence passed by a "people's tribunal", a prisoner's reflections, a search for contraband in a peasant's barn, and a wife's letter to the military authorities enquiring about the fate of a husband condemned to death in 1949. The anger is so all-consuming, not even sparing the author himself, one is left wondering how any identity could survive it.
Lajos Parti Nagy, like Kukorelly, made his initial reputation as a poet before turning to stage plays and prose, achieving considerable success with a 1994 collection of short stories, A Swell on Lake Balaton, which linked an ear for plausible slang coinages to a facility for inventing engagingly sardonic offbeat plot motifs. His first novel, My Hero's Place, employs similar ingredients to tell a bizarre story of how pigeons organize under the umbrella of a Palomist Life Movement to take over power from humans in Budapest during 1999. It starts promisingly enough as what reads like a mystery or sci-fi thriller, with neighbours mysteriously disappearing from the author's apartment near Heroes' Square in Budapest, a trio of homeless down-and-outs finding themselves inflated to the size of the Parliament building, and so forth. However, the second part veers off into the "inside" story of how Caesar Tubica ("Squab"), a columbine scientist, has discovered a method of xenotransplantation that enables him to turn humans into "racial comrades", and uses the author's alter ego as his first guinea-pig, so to speak. The bulk of the book is told in a series of implausibly discursive e-mail messages from the "altered" ego, dated between Friday 28 May and Wednesday 10 November, as assembled and commented upon by the author on the eve of 6 December, the festival of "Pure Wheat". The plot is self-conscious enough to incorporate the character of Kálmán (who achieved minor celebrity as a professional competition eater) from the title piece of the earlier short-story volume, but the device of an author claiming to lose control of the creatures of his own fantasy is a recurrent novelistic conceit. Wittily crafted as Parti Nagy's language is, it is hard to take this as the telling satire of modern-day Hungarian mores claimed by the dust-cover. One does not imagine anyone flinching under the attack, least of all the racist bully-boys of the Hungarian ultraright. More a turkey than a truly airborne creation: an awkward hybrid of Animal Farm and Clockwork Orange, but without the concentration and bite of either.
No doubts about the last author, who was widely recognized as the most influential Hungarian writer when still in his thirties. Esterházy's book is wilful, exuberant, plagiarising, eccentric and humane. It delights in its fiction, freely acknowledging the conversation that joins author and reader, and using every device that late 20th-century critics label post-modernist. Esterházy is also a slyly self-conscious cultivator of kindly feelings. At a first reading, Harmonia cćlestis* is a work of two equal but very disparate halves. Book 1, a sequence of 371 "Numbered Sentences from the Life of the Esterházy Family", is an apparently rag-tag collection of unlinked passages on a vast miscellany of topics, only a minority of which mention the Esterházys, whilst Book 2, subtitled "Confessions of an Esterházy Family", looks like reminiscences of key events in the early life of the author and his more immediate family forebears, presented in a series of 201 passages (also numbered), organized in nine chapters. As with everything from Esterházy's pen (he famously eschews use of a typewriter let alone a computer), nothing can be taken at face value, as indeed the very first sentence hints ("It's a bitch having to lie, if one does not know the truth").
Few of the "sentences" of Book I are actually sentences, though typographical enhancement of the final punctuation point of each passage is intended to reinforce that appearance. Some texts relay what purport to be documentary fragments of the family's history-for instance, a 10-page extract from "an eighteenth-century Hungarian-language inventory, in five books, of my father's chattels"-as well as a string of anecdotes about the family and its most prominent retainers, wrinkled or otherwise, such as one about "my father", disgruntled at being obliged by two visiting English lords to invite Joseph Haydn to join them at the princely dining table: "On a sudden notion (in revenge), my father cancelled the devilled kidneys that had been intended for supper but could be said to be fatal for a gout sufferer like Haydn... (That proves how well we treated Haydn)." Most readers will come across passages that sound maddeningly familiar, such as a twist on Schrödinger's thought-experiment ("Schrödinger enclosed my father in a solid-walled box..."), or which they can place with some certainty, such as the wickedly funny short story about the execution of "the young Esterházy", which has been appropriated, and not for the first time, from Danilo Kis. More than likely, every one of the "sentences" can be pinned to a quotation from some printed source or another, suitably shaped to the author's name and purpose, as one might guess from the explanation of the book's overall title. As we are told early on, this is taken from a collection of religious works published under Prince Nicholas Esterházy's name in 1711, but modern research has shown that a fair number of the tunes and probably the compositions themselves "can be surmised to be not by him (or not him alone)." Indeed, but what we are not told is that the Esterházy in question was a Prince Paul.
Quoted documents also figure in Book 2, not the least of which purport to be extensive extracts from the memoirs of the grandfather, Count Móric Esterházy (he briefly held office as Hungarian premier in 1917). The bare facts of a transit document, dated 16 July 1951, by which the lorry removing the infant Esterházy, his parents and their worldly goods to internal exile in the village of Hort in north-eastern Hungary (with the elderly grandparents travelling by car in convoy), are fleshed out by a saga of what actually happened en route and after their arrival at the house of "kulak" farmer Simon and his wife, "Aunt" Rozi, into one of whose two rooms the four adults and infant were billeted. There is much about the father's experiences as a manual labourer (potato picking, road laying, etc.) as well as young Esterházy's memories of playing and going to school with other village kids, the family's return to Budapest after 1956, secondary school, and army service. It is all told with an exquisitely aristocratic flippancy that deliberately makes light of what were often desperately difficult days for them, as for much of the population: "Early on I thought that my name would simply work like an anecdote. Nothing bad can happen in a Hungarian anecdote." Filling in a form that asks for details of parents' and grandparents' occupations, for instance, he writes "landowner" but then finds the space is not big enough to specify how much land they held (we have learned already that they owned some 80,000 acres). The account tails off in the 1960s with a description of the Esterházy family hilariously masquerading as (West) German tourists as they take advantage of the tourist coupon given by a relative to dine at one of Budapest's first-class restaurants, where they out-bluff a fawning head waiter who attempts to palm them off with distinctly unfresh frogs' legs.
Authentically as it reads, one needs to note that Book 2 is prefaced by a warning that "the characters in this romantic bio-graphy are fictitious characters... and do not, never did, live in reality". The reminiscences are interwoven by a continuing proliferation of anecdotes about long-dead Esterházys, and many of the stories have suspicious echoes of the fragments of Book 1. The discernible unifying theme is nothing less than a sustained and devastatingly inspired assault on the near-universal patriarchal ordering of life. There is no enormity so base, venal, heinous or bizarre to which a father-and especially an Esterházy father-will not stoop: "In the 18th century my father killed religion, in the 19th century-God, and in the 20th century-man." The very figure of the father is at best ridiculous, includ-ing his sexual organs: "In the 'at rest' position-no shame here, it's a matter of fact-they are small, shrivelled, and easily concealed in bathing suits and other pants..." (this is part of a witty reprise of an already uproariously funny "Manual for Sons", translated from the German by Peter Tatterpatter, which may be familiar to aficionados of "experimental" American literature of the seventies). Even the most disturbingly enigmatic statements yield to such a reading: "By my father's lights, with minor reservations, life is wonderful. For by my father's lights the normal, natural, obvious thing is to die in Auschwitz... What is not normal, not natural, in other words miraculous, is not to die in Auschwitz. It is equally not normal, not natural, and therefore miraculous, not to end up in Auschwitz (in other words, to die or not die in not-Auschwitz)". Here one must recognize a passage from Kaddish for the Unborn Child, a haunting meditation by fellow-Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész on the reasons for choosing not to be a father.
There may be a harmony in heaven, and the planet may be well enough, provided a man could be born in it to a great title or to a great estate, but that is not the fate of most who do not belong to the species esterházy europaeus. Yet lesser mortals are here granted the privilege of savouring comic writing of the highest order. This really is the great Hungarian novel that the world has been waiting for since time immemorial: a chronicle of its times, sociological description, a conspectus of problems that currently bug us, a satire, a philosophical book. For all that, it is not a book in search of cheap success, and whether it is seen as a light or heavy read depends entirely on the reader. It is, in any event, a masterpiece that one hopes will soon find its way into English, whilst praying it will be handled by someone fully equal to the task.
Tim Wilkinson
is an editor and translator who spent three years in Hungary in the seventies, language-subediting academic journals. He has translated a number of Hungarian scholarly books (mainly on history) into English for Corvina, CEU Press and Akadémiai Kiadó.
