Saul and Paul

Péter Esterházy: Javított kiadás (Revised Edition). Budapest, Magvető, 2002, 281 pp.
János Térey: Paulus. Budapest, Palatinus, 2001, 307 pp.

 

The interplay of life and literature, text and reality, is rarely conducive to such productive tension as that which sustains the oeuvre of Péter Esterházy. It is hard to think of any other Hungarian writer whose private person and family background as such could have raised expectations and interest in his works to quite the degree that his does. A descendant of one of Hungary's grandest aristocratic families, he entered literary life at a time when the country's aristocracy had vanished from public life for decades, almost without trace, as if at a stroke it had simply ceased to exist in 1945. At the same time, Esterházy measured up to the inordinate expectations, to what could be called an avid curiosity, with prodigious talent and a series of works that played a major part in regenerating Hungarian prose. Though he has never sought to make promotional capital out of his origins, he has not disowned the name either; rather, he has borne it with winning elegance and matter-of-factness whilst creating a literary world and private mythology from the implications of his family's déclassé status and the mundanities of life in the Kádár era, as one who was at once a plebeian and a scion of the European aristocracy. His most recent big novel, Harmonia caelestis (see HQ No. 159) was entirely concerned with this family heritage, and more particularly with mapping the history of Hungary as a whole-its dismantling and simultaneous upholding of class distinctions-in certain respects through the personal history of the Esterházy family. The protagonist of that story was the father, for whom the author's own father, Mátyás Esterházy, served as model. This engaging man, a father of four and fluent in four languages, endured all the ordeals of internal exile and poverty with dignity, and unlike most of his aristocratic peers, he stuck by his Hungarian roots. Though he went through a number of severe crises, from which he sought an escape in drink, he nevertheless succeeded in passing on to his children the moral and cultural codes that were the family's heritage in an environment that, when all is said and done, was totally new and alien to him. That, at least, was the message of the literary text of the magnum opus, the fruit of nine years' labour, whose readers had every justification to suppose possessed an authenticity and imprimatur bestowed by life, the unvarnished truth.
Except as it now transpires, almost like the latest twist in the novel, that things were not quite what they appeared. As he was reaching the end of his work on the manuscript of Harmonia caelestis, in the autumn of 1999, Esterházy submitted a request to the Historical Office, the appointed custodian of the secret-police files of the Kádár era, to be allowed to inspect any documents that might be traceable relating to himself and his family. Several days after finally completing the novel, in late January 2000, four bulky files were set down before him, from which it became clear at a glance that his father had been an informer for the security forces: "on opening one of the folders I instantly recognized my father's handwriting... I could not believe what I was seeing." From 1957 to 1980 Mátyás Esterházy was an informer for the Ministry of the Interior's Section III/III, a time in which he wrote many hundreds of reports on his assignments. So useful did he prove, in fact, that during the Seventies he was promoted to the status of "secret agent" (titkos megbízott, or "tmb" in the jargon) for Hungary's counter-intelligence organisation. No one, to the best of the author's knowledge, had the slightest idea of any of this. It is possible that his mother, who died in 1980, and perhaps his father's doctor, who is still alive, had some knowledge of these activities; however, all that the latter was willing to disclose when asked, unaware that Esterházy was by then privy to the truth, was that "your father had a grave guilt weighing on his conscience," and "every family has a skeleton in the cupboard." His father died in 1998, after a long, fairly tranquil and happy widowhood.

We learn all this from Javított kiadás- melléklet a Harmonia caelestishez (Revised Edition-An Appendix to Harmonia cćlestis), publication of which towards the end of May 2002 was, for obvious reasons, nothing short of a bombshell. And all the more in that Esterházy, having made the gruesome discovery, chose to let no one else in on the secret except his wife, but instead buckled down to writing this book, fearing all along that the story might become public before he was able to tell his family and friends and his readers in a way that he felt was appropriate. A few fleeting moments of hesitation aside, it is clear that he never seriously entertained the notion that he might attempt to cover it up himself. Quite apart from the barely assimilable personal anguish that the secret of the files undoubtedly occasioned to Esterházy as a son, and that his book in turn will occasion to all those who are personally affected by the matter-members of the family still alive, friends, and all others who were subjects of observation- this development has confounded the ties between life and literature, text and reality, so bewilderingly that it is hard to think of any parallels anywhere, never mind in Esterházy's own career. Make no mistake about it, what Esterházy learned within days of finishing his big novel in certain respects immediately put the validity of that work in question, indeed, put a question mark on his entire oeuvre to date, because his writings have been based in no small measure on the fiction that, for all the stumbles and frailties, the moral right of father and family alike was incorruptible, and that the first person narrator loves his father, mother, grandparents, and their forebears, loves the very idea of being an Esterházy, and, ultimately, loves his native land, the world he regards as his home, not in any nationalistic but in an almost religious sense. The fact that his father was a snitch, no different from those who put him in this dishonourable position, and that this vileness managed to infiltrate even places where decency had every right to consider it was protected-this shattered the image, undermined the love.
Against that, however, it is fair to object that the novel is, after all, a self-determining fiction; however imbedded it may be in reality, the very fact that it has assumed the form of a novel means that, as fiction, it can only be (or not be) true in a poetic sense. Life is one thing, literature another, and in the post-modern aesthetic that has so often been foisted onto Esterházy, the two have nothing to do with one another or else: quite the reverse, they are indivisible: the one "writes" the other. In that spirit, then, it might even seem that with Revised Edition Esterházy is continuing the "writing" of a novel that we had thought was already complete, its two parts now being followed up by a third in which it turns out that everything is different from what it had seemed to be up till then. Since, in the general impression that has been formed about him, Esterházy is no stranger to such ploys, there were many who automatically supposed, when his publisher announced the devastating reason behind and subject-matter of Revised Edition at a press conference, that this was going to be another of his artful dodges, on a par with the role-playing of Tizenhét hattyúk (Seventeen Swans) back in 1988, when Esterházy put out the work under the pseudonym of an unknown, untutored authoress called Lili Csokonai. "My God, what a relief it would be if I had merely made up!", the author himself writes in his new book. "Everything would be in keeping poetically too, non-fiction as fiction, et cetera." And "I quite understand that there will be some who will be suspicious. I have done a lot to foster that suspicion; I have invested much effort in it."
This "morally questionable notion" would, of course, have devalued the ethical and historical truth of the work, and that was the sole handhold left to Esterházy in this position. What is now borne in with harrowing force, both for himself and for the reader, is precisely that a true work, however playful and textualised it may be, cannot be detached from a reality lived through with great ethical and intellectual responsibility. That reality was now presenting the bill to the fiction. As Esterházy himself says, the time has arrived when he had to accommodate to reality, just as hitherto he has accommodated to words. This time round it was not he who was fashioning the sentences but sordid, deceptive truth that was dictating the text to him: he was obliged to write what the documents were telling him. One possible consequence might have been that Esterházy could have gone as far as disclaiming himself as a writer. After all, everything that he has written to the present has been predicated on a mistaken or an imperfect knowledge of reality: "being an Esterházy" no more exists than, or is no different from, any other family history. The shock he suffered might have been enough to silence him. At one point in Revised Edition he remarks that if he had known from the outset that his father was an informer, he would never have become a writer. It is far from sure that this is so, but the Esterházy oeuvre would in any event have looked very different.
In the end, Esterházy has not made anything up, nor has he retracted anything. Instead he has bowed to the bitter dictate of Revised Edition, and in doing so he has laid before us a cathartic document of literary and human crisis. Though his career as a writer may, for the time being, be uncertain (how could a new perspective open up in such a situation, one is tempted to ask), the author portrays and solves the immediate problem in a manner that is fully worthy of him; indeed, one could say both outstripping and "overwriting" himself in the process. In closely tracking his attempts to take in and process the unpalatable, unassimilable truth, Esterházy does not disavow for a second, in Revised Edition, the self that we have come to know. To put it very simplistically, whilst raging, sobbing and brooding at every step, he also continuously sees and portrays himself, his position, indeed his father and his relation to his father, with an outsider's eye, from an ironic distance. His reason for keeping a lid on the secret-sometimes at the price of awkward, even farcical manoeuvres-is not merely so that it should come to light in his own version but also in order to ensure that the book should have as startling an impact as possible: "everything in the world exists for the purpose of being turned into a book." Even his publisher is only put in the picture when the book is almost finished, and then all he asks is, "And is it any good?... as if I were a writer, he were a publisher, and this a manuscript." He seeks not just to own up to the secret but, insofar as is possible, to mould it into shape. And that Esterházy does in just the way and to the extent that is permissible.
Revised Edition is, in essence, a diary, a set of parallel, interwoven journal-style commentaries on the threefold process of examining the documents, copying from them and cogitating on them. The primary or framing narrative relates the time spent in the Historical Office, reading the files, copying the significant parts, and taking notes. The final text does not preserve the documents in full, merely fragmentary extracts, since the entire material would have run to many hundreds of pages and, being, as such an unwieldy mass, indigestible. In this initial phase what presented one of the most distressing ordeals for the author was being obliged to pick his way through the whole noxious, unseemly pile of betrayal. Cultivated as the agent may be, with Esterházy himself at times applauding with caustic irony the literary "tricks" that his father employs in his reports, he does ultimately accommodate to the system and stoop to doing what is asked of him, picking up the jargon of his "handlers" as he goes, to say nothing of the linguistically misbegotten operational evaluations that go with the reports. On reading them, Esterházy reflects, in his annotations to the quotations, on the ignominy and betrayal involved and, over and over again, on the schizophrenic situation in which he finds himself: on the one hand, correcting the page-proofs for Harmonia caelestis and, later on, signing copies of the published book, basking in its signal success and critical plaudits, whilst on the other hand working on the book that was going to invalidate all this. He subsequently twice reviewed the material that he already had and added further notes and commentaries to mark these two further phases, so in the end the source documents themselves-the petty reports of the informer known by the cover name "Csanádi" on the lives of aristocratic acquaintances that are totally inconsequential from a secret-service standpoint-are presented to the public imbedded in a nesting set of commentaries that bandy the arguments back and forth on this thrice-over reading.
Harmonia caelestis created the illusion that the figure of the father was a person who, along with and in concordance with all the other versions of "my father" who appear in the novel, was telling the reader something important about Hungary's past. That paternal image is demolished in Revised Edition as the compromising documentary findings are systematically juxtaposed with passages in the novel. Try as Esterházy might to seek the "real" figure, to understand what might explain his father's double life, what motivated him, "how one who was servility personified was able to present himself as precisely the opposite," how a spineless man was able to radiate such tenue-in the end he gets no nearer to finding who Mátyás Esterházy was. The nearest he can get to an answer is that fear and suffering can make a person unrecognisable. He was Saul and Paul in one. The son does not try to excuse his father: "one can feel sorry for him, one can hate him, and one can totally cold-shoulder him. Being spat on or having no one give a damn-that will be my father's fate. Above and beyond the aforementioned options (which I too have accepted), I still love him, the man whose first-born son I am...