Miklós Györffy

Apocalypse Yesterday and Today

János Térey: A Nibelung-lakópark (Nibelung Residential Park).
Budapest, Magvető, 2004, 441 pp.

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The work in question is János Térey's gargantuan verse drama trilogy Nibelung Residential Park, which is subtitled "a fantasy inspired by Richard Wagner". The story summarized above is unveiled in Nibelung Residential Park in the course of 440 pages in a way that is linguistically and substantively astonishing in the richness of its detail, a story of which it is no longer possible for us to discuss without paying attention to the layers of meaning and motif which both restrict and further enrich its acceptance. In the light of this, Nibelung Residential Park rewrites and recreates The Twilight of the Gods, the fourth part of Richard Wagner's Ring. This is not the first time that János Térey (1970), one of the greatest talents in the young generation of Hungarian writers, creates a modern paraphrase of some classical work: his verse novel Paulus transposed Pushkin's Onegin into a modern Hungarian context with parodistic overtones.
With such rewrites, it is often not necessary to know the original work, subject or myth on which they are based, for the reason writers rewrite a story and transfer it to a different time and place is precisely that they believe it will hold its own there. In his review of the stage production of Nibelung Residential Park (Élet és Irodalom, 12 November 2004), Tamás Koltai writes: "The question is not whether the audience should know the original Nordic German myth in order to understand it, because clearly it doesn't". In conversation (Színház, January 2005) the play's director, Kornél Mundruczó, has said: "The performance begins with no one understanding anything". We do come to understand something, of course, with the performance or the text affecting us one way or the other. (For a review of the production by Tamás Koltai, see HQ 176, pp.150-152)
There is no doubt that if the uninitiated spectator or reader pays attention closely enough, the new story will hold its own. And he or she will not only read the above synopsis into it, but will also be affected by the poetry and blasphemy of the verse text or the experimental formal language of the theatre production. But rewrites, paraphrases and parodies similar to Nibelung Residential Park do not come into being because the writer cannot think of a story that hasn't been written yet. The referential relation plays a fundamental role in the form and meaning of the work. We can more or less read Joyce's Ulysses without recognizing or understanding its references to The Odyssey, the Bible, and other essential works, but we would miss the reason why Joyce wrote the book in the way he did. Maybe The Master and Margarita can be enjoyed without noticing or interpreting the Biblical references or the motifs referring to Faust, but in that case we should ask they were important to Bulgakov.
A thousand strands connect Nibelung Residential Park to The Twilight of the Gods or to the whole of Wagner's Ring, to German-Scandinavian mythology, to the Edda, while it is the least close to the medieval heroic epic known as the Song of the Nibelung. The man known as Demigod is of course Siegfried, and this is his name in Térey's play too, just as all the other players in the early twenty-first century story use their Wagnerian name: President is in fact Gunther, Bombshell is Brünnhilde, Nymphette is Gutrune, and Demon Dwarf is Hagen, a descendent of the dark Nibelung tribe, son of the evil dwarf Alberich, who once guarded the Nibelungs' fateful treasure of gold, the magical ring that would later curse all those it was passed on to. As any opera guide tells us, The Twilight of the Gods is about how Hagen gives the supposedly invincible Siegfried, the current owner of the ring, some of Gutrune's magic memory- loss potion, making him forget that Brünnhilde is his wife. Siegfried then magically adopts Gunther's appearance and seduces the Valkyrie on his behalf, and in return is given Gunther's sister Gutrune. In due course the double wedding party ensues, where Brünnhilde spots the ring on Siegfried's hand, which she was led to believe Gunther won in a duel. Shocked by this deception, she swears vengeance against Siegfried, which Hagen carries out. Térey also has Brünnhilde discovering the ring that was hers on Siegfried's finger: "Wotan give me strength, I don't believe it. / What the fuck, aren't your eyes going to burn out?! / No way... No way! No waaay... Fuck's sakes, Siegfried..." Then, on the steps of the cathedral, in front of the jubilant crowds and the television cameras, she slaps Siegfried on the face with all her might, but all she says is "You really are a rat to still wear that". She calls off the wedding, and she and Gutrune console one another. Of course there was no mention of this in Wagner.
The reference to the magic potion is a good example of the relation between The Twilight of the Gods and Nibelung Residential Park, and of the extent to which some elements of the present-day story become incomprehensible without a knowledge of Wagner - in itself a potential critical objection. In Térey, too, it is Hagen who enkindles Gunther's desire to obtain Brünnhilde: "They say she's wild and willing, that she likes / Unusual positions and places: / On the table, in the lift, or with clothes on, / It's extreme sports that get her to her peak... Blow her to pieces!" He goes on to offer Siegfried a "new type" of drug called Tarn: "The best thing about it is that you can / Lit'rally put anyone in your head." Under the influence of this, Siegfried visits Brünnhilde dressed in Gunther's leather coat, then speaks to her in a "changed voice", but she is not deceived. First she asks him, "For the love of God, Siegfried, what is this masquerade?", and later she just says "I can never quite work you out, you know". But when she sees his dilated pupils, she understands what is going on: "You're not clean, Siegfried. You might not show a thing in your face, / But you can't stop your little goblins at their pace". In the end, all that happens is that Siegfried tears Brünnhilde's ring off her finger, and, humiliated and dejected, she surrenders herself to a "grieving fuck": "I had a bedroom once / Forget it, the brothel's as far as I got". In itself, without acquaintance with the Wagnerian background, this scene is rather nebulous: it is not clear what motivates Siegfried to participate in this inane pretence, except perhaps that he too is nothing more than another empty-headed, decadent yuppie who is bored by Brünnhilde and wants Gutrune instead. This degrading, parodistic reading only works if the mythical framework of the Wagnerian Tarn helmet and duel is written into the background.
The situation with the ring is similar. The magical powers attributed to it, and the struggles to acquire it, are hardly comprehensible without the mythological context. Térey's two possible readings of the RING inscription, "Rhine Industry: Neat Grosses" or "Rhine Industry: No Guarantees" are only poignant if we know what this acronym is distorting, whether it has become no more than a profane abbreviation which had lowered the original symbolic secret of the ring to a market keyword, or rather an omen of the risks of the market economy, of potential failure, of "twilight", which would be a semantic use rather closer to the original. Of course, it is quite possible that the magic ring has some symbolic meaning within the strict limits of the Térey context itself - if such exists - for any possible direct reference to reality is ruled out by the madness of the text's multiple linguistic-stylistic layering and of the mad confusion of genres, and by the nature of the verse drama genre itself and the work's monumental, in a sense deliberately shapeless, scope. As to what the ring symbolizes in this instance, it is rather hard to say. According to one critic, Gabriella Kiss, writing in Színház (January 2005), "as rewritten by Térey, the direction of the desire and will for (global) power can be determined within the order of the consumer society and the market economy, which places the themes of love and affection in what is truly a real-world dimension". For Wagner, after all, the ring is the key motif for this theme. But the ring is an ancient symbol of the infinity of eternity and of devotion, and even if we ignore Wagner we can interpret its degrading use in the "residential park" as a reference to the depletion of these values. If love becomes no more than the ownership of the other merely as a consumer good, or power over bodies as tools of sexual satisfaction, then the demigods of old become the terror dwarves of today. And this risk is not only the great danger of our age, but an eternal human danger, an eternal mythical theme for after all, what is the story of the Nibelungs and the Gibichungs if not the story of a coveted treasure, thought to be omnipotent, taken from Alberich, the evil dwarf, and, passing from one hand to the next, bringing misfortune to all its owners.

If we were to ask János Térey whether he strove to make his book accessible and comprehensible without any reference to his sources or influences, he would probably be neither willing or able to give an unambiguous answer. In any case, it is certain that as far as its inspiration is concerned, Nibelung Residential Park is unimaginable without Wagner, while its aesthetic effect largely draws on the multilayered dialogue it maintains with the Ring. But as much as Wagner is written into Residential Park, so much does Térey again and again rewrite Wagner. Indulgent things happen in this regard. The series of motif connections is so evident that while knowledge of the background helps, it works without it. It is a fantastic idea to have the Rhine Park residential park and the Notung tower, the skyscraper that is the flagship of Siegfried's company, both built by the construction contractors Fasolt and Fafner. In Wagner, the two giants are the constructors of Walhalla, the fortress of the gods. Another inspired idea is to have Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde, the mermaids of the Rhine, presented as manequins, photo models and hostesses hunting for rich and powerful executives, or to have Urd, Verdandi and Skuld, the Norns, the goddesses of destiny related to the Greek Moirae, all as television presenters. It is worth knowing that while in Scandinavian mythology, Heimdall, the night porter at the Siegfried house, was also guard to the Gods, his modern incarnation as a Hungarian concierge with security training continues to be a lively character even without this. Frei, the gardener with a finger in every pie, and the first victim of Hagen when he runs amuck, again can only be from Scandinavian mythology, where he is the embodiment of vegetation, production, economy and peace. Perhaps it is no accident that in Térey's version he is the one who has to perish first.
In addition to a transposition that brings the opera and mythical figures and motifs up to date, Térey also uses references that place the story independently of Wagner and mythology, though admittedly in a time and space that can hardly be described as realist. Nibelung Residential Park is set in Worms, on the bank of the Rhine. This is Térey's own private decision, which has no connection to The Ring, but all the more to the Song of the Nibelung, which has a marginal role here. The real-life Worms is only represented by its famous medieval cathedral and the presence of the Rhine: otherwise, with its 80,000 inhabitants, it has little in common with the skyscraper-ridden metropolis described here, which evokes Frankfurt or New York. Behind the fantastical match between the fictional gigantic corporations, and alongside such easily recognizable and iconic events as the anthrax hysteria or the destruction of the Twin Towers, the crazy fantasy of this Térey work also allows the outline of twentieth-century German history to be presented. It is still in the first part, Rhine Park, that Hagen says to Gunther, more as a kind of epic commentary: "Your dad made a Cyclon of poisonous gas with expert skill, / My dad was on the brownshirt's side as well, what else could he do? / Iron and steel into U-boats, off the Wälsung assembly line / Huge Notung armoured tanks were rolled out, one tank after the other". When, towards the end of the third part, Hagen is raging with all his might, on one occasion the stage directions tell us that "he returns with a Rote Armee Fraktion t-shirt in red on black". There are precedents for the rewriting of Wagner's Ring, above all the Bayreuth productions of the operas. German director Jürgen Flimm, for example, recently staged the twilight of the German gods as a battle between today's multinational corporations. Luchino Visconti's La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1968) presented the Wagner theme in terms of the relationship between the Krupp family and Nazism. Alongside analogies to Wagner, German mythology and history, action movies and Shakespeare (royal) dramas, and references to the battle between global capital and terrorism, an important constituent in Térey's layering of paraphrase and all-encompassing system of reference is his use of language, familiar from Paulus, but even more brashly mixing parody and pathos as well as elevated and vulgar tones. Sometimes with a rap rhythm, sometimes soaring up like an aria, sometimes reduced to vulgar colloquialisms, the diction endeavours to cover some kind of totality of the holy and the profane. Yet it is modern slang to which the predominant modality of the Nibelung Residential Park's language is closest, which ties Térey's verse drama to contemporary Hungarian reality. This reinterprets the above references both individually and as a whole, or, more precisely, it puts them in a frenzy. The symptoms of this mad linguistic chase include turns of phrase so twisted and grotesquely distorted that they parody both everyday Hungarian colloquial idioms and literary quotations, in a way that is probably impossible to render into other languages.

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And finally, a few words about the fact that the Krétakör Színház (Chalk Circle Theatre, an enterprising alternative company) did stage the "book drama", indeed very quickly, at about the time the book was published. Here, where my primary task is to examine the text, I will not attempt a proper critical analysis of the performance. The superficial nature of my impressions will reflect this. The script of Kornél Mundruczó's production was taken from the second (Siegfried's Wedding) and third (Hagen, or Hate Speech) parts of the trilogy, and the company performed the scenes in the narrow and musty corridors and depressingly desolate fortified chambers of the labyrinth of the wartime emergency hospital deep under Buda Castle, mostly in a large operating theatre. As a theatrical space, of course, this location radically rejects Térey's stage directions, the satisfactory implementation of which would more likely require a huge open air opera stage. It would be interesting to know which came first: the labyrinth hospital as a potential venue, for which the director sought a play, or the play, for which the hospital represented the space that suited his vision. The labyrinth hospital, which is also, at least by Second World War standards, a bomb-proof shelter, allows a unique taste of the apocalyptic dimension of Nibelung Residential Park. Everything here is reminiscent of wars, catastrophes or states of emergency: the stretchers, the gasmasks, the first-aid kits, the blankets, the makeshift kitchen and the makeshift operating theatre. It is as if the location projects onto the text the catastrophe that awaits the world when the great economic powers, the poet Ady's "pig-headed great lords", have finished their battle. The underground labyrinth holds the audience captive over the space of four long hours. It is not really possible to leave during the performance or the interval; at most, those who need to can disappear to the toilet accompanying the "set". Once the iron gate of the hospital "closes" behind the audience, they have to "walk through" the performance together with the actors, becoming a part of it, so that they are literally "present" in the scenes. Along the corridors, pushed up against a wall, one occasionally stops to realize that one's neighbour, who one didn't notice before, is in fact an actor "performing" in the scene. In a sense, these actors are not performing Térey's play, but rather an apocalyptic ritual for which they use Térey's characters and text. That there is nevertheless a deep connection between the play and the performance is shown by Térey's description of the Siegfried's Wedding section as a "ritual drama" and the Hagen or Hate Speech part as a "catastrophe drama". The Krétakör production is the ritual of a catastrophe.
The actors do not play parts or roles; rather, they make use of their personalities, bodies and voices as the mediums of a theatrical ritual. The issue of whether, from a dramatic point of view, certain characters could have been better written or not loses its significance. The dramatic narrative is forced into the background, substituted by the continuous and highly intense physical presence of the actors. The price of this is that the progress of events, particularly for those not acquainted with Wagner, is even harder to follow than in Térey's original text. According to the director's statement, "it is no problem" if the viewer even snoozes for a while on the operating table. His mise en scene, which involves the audience in a kind of "time travel", rewrites and recreates Nibelung Residential Park in the same way that Térey rewrites The Twilight of the Gods. While in the Térey case the Wagner opera is reinterpreted as a literary text in a postmodern sense, the Krétakör production translates the verse drama into formal theatrical language - true, not one that has much in common with the standard language of contemporary Hungarian theatre. This does not mean that Térey's play could not be performed in a different way, perhaps using considerable technical apparatus to move the emphasis onto the monumental travesty. It is not clear whether such a production, or any other, will ever come into being, but I am certain that the experiment in the labyrinth hospital and Térey's imagination represent two of the highest cultural achievements in recent decades. Their influence is undoubtedly narrowed by the production's dependence on the unrepeatable location and the text's dependence on current colloquialisms. At the same time, an interesting symptom of the "openness" of the theatrical performance is that an important role, the function of communicating with Hungarian viewers that is not present in the original Térey, is played by a German actor, who, in Hungarian, creates a link between our age and the mythical world.

 

Miklós Györffy
reviews new fiction for this journal.