Miklós Györffy

Two Women, Two Pasts

Zsuzsa Rakovszky: A kígyó árnyéka (The Shadow of the Snake). Budapest, Magvetoő 2002, 467 pp.
Magda Szabó: Für Elise. Budapest, Európa, 2002. 417 pp.

 

There's no getting away from it, Rakovszky's narrator expresses herself "exquisitely" throughout. Her descriptions of the countryside are vivid and poetic, her psychological probing acute (in a thoroughly modern manner), the construction of her periods, and the rhythm these impart to the text, nicely poised, with a near-musical flow. Zsuzsa Rakovszky has up to now been known as a fine poet, and the imprint of that lyrical intonation is also discernible in this, her first, novel. Yet, just as poetry is not "beauty" for its own sake, so the "beauty" of The Shadow of the Snake is not lyricism merely for aesthetic effect. The Shadow of the Snake is a true epic, and what is more, complexly stylised and self-reflexive - a post-modern epic. The stricture on the plausibility of the psychology and form of expression adopted by the narrator, in actual fact, taxes the novel for its use of interior monologue, that characteristic innovation of modern portrayals of personal crisis. Rakovszky's first-person narrator, however, inhabits a world that at once predates and lies beyond the crisis of the modern individual. She predates it insofar as, being a seventeenth-century woman, her attitude to the world is still archaic and magical in relation to the modern age.
This is most clearly signalled by the system of symbols incorporated in the novel. The symbols that play a key role in the book are not just decorative but, quite literally, figure as characters. Fire, snakes, shadows and more - all ever-present major motifs in magical concepts of the world - have an important part in Orsolya's life and dreams. The fact that the memoir again and again cites Orsolya's former dreams is in itself of significative value, and those dreams, whilst not rationally intelligible, clearly bear a magico-mythical relationship to her life. From a standpoint of authenticity, of course, it is again implausible that the narrator would recall dreams so many decades old with such precision, yet what is at stake here is not authenticity but the creation of a narrative line that has a primarily literary mode of existence and, beyond that, at most only a limited referentiality to reality.

*

Magda Szabó may rewrite the stories in what she calls her autobiographical novel, but she does so in essentially the same way as in her avowedly fictionalised novels. It may be that here she speaks more clearly to those who are interested in the "naked truth", reveals more to those who profess to having already surmised all sorts of things, but that does not alter the fact that unsuspecting readers can only read Für Elise as a novel, even if they are convinced they are at last getting to know how it all really happened.
In the end, that novel, with its occasionally hard-to-follow digressions and convoluted verbosity, tells the story of the upbringing and schooling of two extraordinary young girls. Unlike in Egy polgár vallomásai (Confessions of a Bourgeois), Sándor Márai's brilliant 1942 autobiographical novel, the milieu, in the strict sense, within which that upbringing took place - the town, that is to say - plays a rather minor role in Für Elise. Yet it was precisely in Magda Szabó's young days that Calvinist Debrecen, with all its contradictoriness, still retained its distinctive features, as even Für Elise allows one to gather. Here that milieu is represented, first and foremost, by the aforementioned "factory for young ladies" and its teaching staff, with their subjection to the church. This, however, is presented to us baldly and unappealably from the interpretive and judgmental standpoint of the recollecting protagonist of today. Typical is a passage where the narrator, by now a famous writer, on having honorary citizenship of the town bestowed on her, pays a visit back, decades later, to her alma mater. There she refuses to speak to a former teacher who had hated her then, doing whatever she could to make her life a misery, because Magdolna was not patriotically spirited enough and was more interested in Roman writers than in the Girl Guides. The overzealous teacher may have deserved the snub - a victim of Trianon may have made her the way she was - but, more significantly, the author presents the perspective of today's truth as though that had also been the perspective of the adolescent girl of the time; in other words, the standpoint of novelist and autobiographer are once again blurred.
Ultimately, though, the veracity and richness of the biographical material win out. This novel of an adolescent girl who enthuses over mythological heroes, whose favourite book is the Aeneid, and who has a crush on her Latin master (he turns out on a school excursion to be a Humbert Humbert, as it were, to her Lolita), and also of that other girl, the orphan over whom great musicians enthuse yet who, like a female Tonio Kröger, falls hopelessly in love with one of the dancers at her dancing school, despite the sprawling formlessness of its formulation, is enthralling. Especially in the final third of the book, any reader, however finicky, will be drawn under the spell of the eternal magic of human stories and will want to know how it all really happened - it does not matter where, and if nowhere else, then between the covers of this book - and will look forward to its continuation.

Miklós Györffy
reviews new fiction for this journal.