Miklós Györffy
The Magic of Facts
The Writer Miklós Mészöly at 80
[...]
It was only when he was approaching his sixtieth year, in the late Seventies, that Mészöly really began to engage with the mainstream of Hungarian literature, and that was because young writers discovered precedents and inspirational examples for their own endeavours in his works and chose him as their master. Much the same happened with his contemporaries, that generation of writers and critics, loosely lumped together as 'post-modernists'. The Seventies similarly elevated Géza Ottlik, Iván Mándy, Ágnes Nemes Nagy and János Pilinszky to their rightful places. As it later turned out, not much else linked them other than agreement on their pioneering roles. But Mészöly was more than a master and exemplar for the likes of Tandori, Esterházy, Nádas, Lengyel, Krasznahorkai and László Márton, a favoured analytical subject for young critics. He was also a friend and colleague; not only did he influence them, but they influenced him in turn. One might say that he grew young again in this youthful company, except that Mészöly did not really need to grow young since age had barely left its mark on him, so there was no barrier, physically or mentally, to his being accepted as a peer by the new generation that grouped around him. His role in Hungarian literature of the present day is rather comparable to that of the film director Miklós Jancsó, another fairly late starter of the same age who is youthful and active to the present day.
What was it, then, that shut Mészöly out for so long from the prevailing literary discourse in Hungary only for the post-modern generation to integrate his work all the more into its poetics? To give an answer to this obvious question is not easy, for although Mészöly has had a large camp of admirers and disciples over the past twenty years, writings about him have been mostly subjective confessions, not infrequently hermetic texts that parade archness or the snobbishly opaque idiom of the insider. The sole work to essay a comprehensive approach to the Mészöly oeuvre from a soberly objective standpoint is Beáta Thomka's 1995 book for Kalligram's 'Contemporary Hungarian Writers' series, and even she is hardly into her preface before we come upon the following: "The fact that five decades on there is still only a critical literature on Mészöly's work, and there has been no research to delve into the body of this manifold life-work from a historical or biographical, theoretical or historico-stylistic angle, is deeply thought-provoking... I embark on this endeavour in full awareness of the difficulties that arise from the absence of precursors."
We can at least take it for granted that Mészöly, without any ostentatious and defiant gestures, broke with basic Hungarian literary traditions consistently enough to rouse the suspicion of party critics from the very start, not just in ideological but in formalist terms too, indeed primarily in the latter respect. Precisely that was both the essence of his innovation and particularly troubling from the Marxist stance: with Mészöly the artistic form became a new and, as it gradually revealed itself, typically Central European world view. A tradition of linear, mimetic story-telling, constructed from the historical and sociological facts of life, had been very strong, at times to the exclusion of all else, in Hungarian literature up till the 1970s. Another very strong tradition was the cult of individuality and lyrical style. These aspirations were often hitched to commitment to political reform. Admittedly, the successive Nyugat generations, roughly in parallel with the classic and late phases of European modernism, had begun to chip away at those traditions, but at the very moment when Mészöly and the other Újhold writers were poised to follow, a distorted, salvationary social utopia cast its baleful influence over every aspect of life with unprecedented dogmatism. Literature became even more of a 'banner' than it had been before.
From a background that could in no way be called an intellectual forcing-ground that might have profoundly and definitively shaped him (he grew up in a Transdanubian small-town milieu, studied law at Budapest, he was pulled into the military endgame of the war during 1944-45 as a gunner and, eventually, deserter), Mészöly had no wish to have anything to do with literature of that sort. It seems very likely he already knew then that what truly fascinated him was something quite different—not just because it was at variance with the new political set-up and its propagandistic notion of literature, but also because it compelled him to draw conclusions that Hungarian literary discourse had not properly thought through before. Péter Nádas has written: "Fully formed within him already, forty years ago, in his twenties, were an ability and need, typical of only the very great, to handle an ego on the brink of pleasurable self-immersion in a highly impersonal, objective manner, yet without depriving it of the characteristic stamp of its own human personality. Hence, perhaps, the blazing intimacy and cool objectivity of his writings."
From the very outset, Mészöly portrayed the stark, objective images of existence, not in the abstract generalities of certain exponents of absurdist-existentialist literature of the Forties and Fifties, but through the historical experiences of mid-century Central Europe—in the final analysis, in the field of force of an individual experience that was distanced in its impersonal ontological and structural perspective. There was little precedent for such an aesthetic in Hungarian narrative literature, its models being more to be found in contemporary writing further afield, above all in Camus, whose own beginnings only slightly predated Mészöly and in whom he was later to recognize a fellow spirit, making him the subject of an essay, A világosság romantikája (The Romanticism of Clarity). Like Camus, Mészöly sought to live through the true nature of existence in the light of a blinding clarity. In Mészöly's view, Camus does not take issue with 'nothingness', in the abstract sense that Heidegger or Sartre did, but "instead he takes issue with existence itself—with naked passion when he is unwilling to eke it out with assumptions. What he passionately fights for is to perceive existence, the world, as it reveals itself when caught in the act, not in the way it can be rationalized into probability. He chooses an extreme, unsheltered consequentiality, and there is indeed a smack of heroic childishness in that". On Camus' sentences he writes that "they stamp in the antechamber of light". They continually signal the possibility of knowing more but meanwhile are on the way towards silence: "He treats units of thought immured in individual sentences in exactly the same way as facts are apprehensible in the act."
[...]
Miklós Györffy
reviews new fiction for this journal.
