Gergely Angyalosi

The Mother as Mystery

Zsuzsa Rakovszky: A hullócsillag éve (The Year of the Falling Star). Budapest, Magvető 2005, 400 pp.

 

When someone commonly labelled as a 'subjective poet' - the term has more or less an ironic overtone - comes up with a long novel, the work is usually received with suspicion. We seem to find it hard to accept that a writer can produce a major work in more than one genre. We like to think fiction and poetry are separated by an ocean no traveller has ever crossed. "Poems are all right," we murmur to ourselves, "but a novel is something else again." And we feel in advance a degree of Schadenfreude, and tend to demote the author of such a book to the rank of beginner.
The poet Zsuzsa Rakovszky has crossed the border for the second time now. In the 1980s and 90s she published six volumes of poems (New Life, a selection in English, was published by Oxford University Press in 1994, for which the translator, George Szirtes, was awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize the following year). By the turn of the millenium, critical consensus had placed Rakovszky's poetry at the forefront of contemporary Hungarian literature, on account of the originality and visuality of her poetic idiom and for her continuance and renewal of literary tradition. It came as a surprise when, in 2002, she published a long historical novel, A kígyó árnyéka (The Shadow of the Snake, reviewed in HQ 170, Summer 2003.
It won the Hungarian Literary Prize for the best book of the year. And now we have an-other prose work, The Year of the Falling Star.
Preliminary misgivings about poets who publish novels are nurtured not merely by envy or ressentiment. Writing novels presupposes a relationship to the language different from that needed to write poetry.
This otherness can hardly be defined by strict scholarly criteria. Attempts have been made over the centuries to capture it in various metaphors, such as dancing in shackles or as the difference between long distance runners and sprinters.
There is probably no single apt metaphor to highlight all aspects of this extraordinarily complex difference. One decisive fact, however, can safely be pointed out without falling into a major fallacy. It is economic in nature; it concerns, we may say, the 'economy of text'. In a novel, the metaphoric, allegorical or symbolic force of smaller linguistic units should not work to the detriment of the work as a whole. They must not prevail, to the extent that those specific features of poetry which in traditional poetics are described by the increasingly useless metaphors of 'graphic' or 'musical character' can prevail. Paraphrasing the title of her first novel and its most forceful symbolic motif, the novelist has stepped forward from the shadow of the lyrical poet, where she then lurked unnoticed. Now the success of the work hinges on whether the shadow will stick modestly to the prose work, subordinated to the new linguistic medium, or will it draw a reader's attention in a disturbing or dominating way. Has she achieved the delicate balance in this new novel?

The Year of the Falling Star is another historical novel in a certain sense. This time, however, the author does not go back to the 17th century but tackles life in Hungary in the 1950s. The protagonist, a small girl through whose eyes we see life in a small town on Hungary's western border, was born in 1950, just as the author was. Thus the novel contains autobiographical elements - the location, for instance, is the same as that of her first novel. Yet this work is far from being a memoir. Fiction of extraordinary potency is based here on the supposedly 'real' elements of memory, focused on the story of a mother raising her child on her own, and things are presented as the girl could have seen them up to the age of six. The year 1950 marks the complete descent of the Iron Curtain, which was not to be raised until 1956, and then only for a few weeks. During these years, the distance between Hungary and what was called 'the free world' had grown immensely; simply because of the geographical proximity, this was all the more painful for the inhabitants of the small town on the western border.
This is a mosaic novel. This is hardly surprising, since a substantial amount of recent fiction employs that kind of construction. It would be more surprising if the writer had experimented with the traditional, linear narrative - one in which the hierarchy and correlation of the main and side plotlines are clearly discernible. Despite its fragmentary and polyphonic nature, the composition of Zsuzsa Rakovszky's second novel is easy to grasp. There is no desire to lure her readers into some sort of labyrinth or make them solve a crossword puzzle. I use the word 'mosaic' the way environmentalists do when they describe the flora of great plains. Various species of plants cover them in smaller or larger patches; their pattern is unpredictable in practice and contingent. The unmistakable, specific character of the region, however, stems precisely from their irregularly repetitive rhythm.
The fragmentary and elliptic character of the novel is explained by the fact that more than two thirds of it is made up of a child's memories, from the earliest and vaguest recollections up to the time when she starts school. These memories are related by an unidentified narrator in praesens historicum, or imperfectum, as it were, in the third person singular. The leading thread is occasionally interrupted by excerpts from letters or diaries, mostly at random and not adjusted organically to the recollections. By the end of the novel, however, we understand that we have, in a certain sense, read a 'story'. It is the story of the mother who, when her husband dies young at the beginning of the 1950s, is left on her own with her daughter. Sooner or later she has to decide on her life - she can opt for a more hazardous and freer life of self-assertion by following the love she feels for an un-reliable and wayward, though undeniably interesting, man; alternatively, she can renounce her own desires 'for the child's sake', that is, give up her own self. The second option is the one she exercises - the symbolic charge of the title probably refers to this. The whole story takes place over three or four years - more than long enough to be decisive for a person's life.
The most difficult task for the author must have been, naturally, to find and build up the tone in which the childhood memories are told. Whoever speaks in this tone tries not to know more than the child, through whose eyes the narrator sees the world and tries to make others see it. Rather than imitating childish language, she tries to confine herself, as far as possible, to sensual impressions. She is an adult who, in the knowledge of all that had gone before, tries to reconstruct what she might have perceived of her mother's life as a child, and through it, of the world of that time. Fortunately enough, the poetry of the little girl's vision is rendered not through some construct of childspeak; employing truly poetic means, she 'reinvents' the supposed fragments of memory. This yields some miniature gems, veritable free verse, such as the description of the soap bubble:

The spherical membrane flinches and flinches again at the end of the straw, the kitchen window reflected in it in quadruplicate, inflated in the middle, or foreshortened.
Cautiously, as if it were fumbling for its way in the air, the bubble detaches from the straw and wobbles upward for a bit, with the air currents wafting it this way and that, until all at once it alters hue, glistening in an undreamed of, staggeringly lovely blue and yellow, before finally the colours grow murky and if it has not floated far away, she feels on face and arm the near-impalpable touch of the tatters of the soap-bubble as popping film, as if a wraith were spitting at her in flight.

These are infinitely elaborate and subtle inserts, whose poetic power derives from the tension between the sophisticated lyrical character of the language and a child's perception, with its directness and limitations.

Piroska's (the child's) world is built up before the reader's own eyes from similar sections, a few pages in length, which bear telling titles. The perception of the articulation of time and space evolves in the same process, which begins with the realisation that there are invisible borderlines. In the first chapter, "Borders", the author brilliantly unravels this inner process, a process based on contrasts, between the internal and the external, the familiar and the alien, the recurrent and the irretrievable, up to the experience of the inevitability of death. Few have written with such lyrical beauty about the way a child encounters death and all that follows from it or is related to it - the horrendous sense of the incalculability of existence, the anxiety of 'anything may happen to me'. Strong lyrical quality in a prose text naturally has its risks. Some images and metaphors, complex personifications may disturbingly assume a life of their own, and the reader gets jolted out of the mood in which the fragments of the child's universe are more or less structured. A fine sentence with an all too understandable function serves as an example: "The courtyard belonged, at one and the same time, to the external and the inner worlds: a snippet of captured forest." The metaphor is beautiful and is expressive of the way the courtyard figures in Piroska's perception of space, but it may also strike one as somewhat exaggeratedly spoon-fed and pedantic - in the way adults speak.
The poet inside the novelist is not easy to contain. "Outside, the small change of the May sunshine trickles down into the multitude of the insistently upturned white palms of the elder flowers on the timber and coal depot." Who could question the powerful visuality of this metaphor? The elder flowers seen as white palms of hands may still be fitting in a child's 'spontaneous poetical vein', but the next bit, sunshine trickling into them as small change, is (for me) an overkill. Fortunately enough, similar hitches are rare in the book, and most readers will probably enjoy just this kind of concentrated lyrical quality, so rare in prose texts. Speaking of metaphors and poetic symbols employed in the novel, we have to turn back to the falling star, which is highlighted by the title. The 'year of the falling star' is obviously 1956, which closes a period in each character's life. For the little girl, this is the last summer before she starts school; the mother gives up the chance of great romance, and marries her former boarder, Pista, nice and reliable but at times unbearably pedantic and dull. We learn that Bartha, the former lover, went to Vienna, and a plan to get out of the country together, devised rather effortlessly, failed because Piroska contracted chickenpox. Her grandmother is dying in hospital, and another important person in the little girl's life, an old woman called Nenne, disappears in a mysterious way before a letter tells us that she has died.
By the end of the novel, quite a few stars fall indeed, many things come to an end, and many hopes are thwarted. The ending, a grotesque speech delivered by a neighbour, about human progress that cannot be arrested, functions, even though a bit weightlessly, as a counterpoint to the symbol of the falling star. At two other points, there are mentions of falling stars. First we learn that Piroska is scared of them (they might fall on her) and at a later point it turns out that her mother had also been afraid of them when she was a young girl.
No reference can be found to the connection between the two passages, which renders interpretation somewhat difficult. The mosaic method of construction would have allowed such placement of the various aspects of the symbol in certain planes of the novel.

It is much to the merit of the novel that it does not aim at being an historical 'documentary'. The oppressive atmosphere of the 1950s in a small town in western Hungary, Sopron, emerges incidentally. The reader can detect with reasonable accuracy the social fabric to which the mother and Piroska's other relatives belong. It is the impoverished, deprived lower middle classes who, though tacitly and passively, all reject Communism, while trying to survive.
The mother contends with financial problems without having to make great compromises, but we have reason to suspect that the uncle from Budapest has no moral scruples. One strong aperçu is that, for the girl, the kindergarten and its atmosphere represent the era - she is scared of the teachers, and the motif of her being constantly forced to finish everything on her plate tells us more about the period than any exposition could.
The mosaic character and the dominance of the little girl's point of view, however, result in a degree of deficiency and unevenness in the characterisation of certain figures. We learn nothing, for instance, about the father's death, though it would be a crucial element in the social orientation of the family; it is odd, too, that no mention of him is made between mother and daughter, not even when they visit the cemetery on All Souls' Eve. The only exception is in the last but one part, "The Escape", to which I shall return. We learn most about Bartha from his diary entries in which he analyses his own character (or the lack of it), with almost compulsive thoroughness. We do not really know much about the mother, though she is the protagonist. We can only guess that her unhappiness is explained by her moral fastidiousness, which other people sense as somewhat rigid and excessive. But we have no chance really to form an opinion about it; the mother figure remains just as enigmatic for the reader as she was in her daughter's eye at the beginning of the novel. "Everything that is mysterious and elicits solemn enthusiasm [.] is attached to her mother, is nurtured from her existence, and what is more, is in one way or another, identical with her." An unexpected re-positioning of the narrative towards the ending, when Piroska recalls, without any preparation, her mother's death agony twenty years later, is no help either. The dying woman, who physically is looking again like the mother of her childhood, is as unfathomable and enigmatic for the daughter - and the reader - as she was in those childhood years. What is unchanging is the guilty conscience of the daughter who feels she is a burden to her.
This guilty conscience is dissolved in the wonderful wishful vision of "The Escape", when the four people who belong together, mother, daughter, grandmother and the old nanny, Nenne, together with a cat whom they thought had long been gone astray, leave the country that has become a prison - and a form of existence poisoned by fear and anxiety. "It was as though someone had plucked the fear from her body with a single determined motion and exultant, crazy pleasure surged in to the vacant place, and it made her laugh out aloud." On the other shore, in that other existence devoid of fear, the father has waited for them "for days now", as the daughter hears her mother say. Poetically, it is an excellent solution that the father's face is not revealed in the vision, it is only the movement of his hand circling with an electric torch we see together with the daughter. The closing sentence of the chapter is also masterly in its simplicity: "It was the cat to jump first on the shore." This would have made a worthy ending to the novel as a whole. Rakovszky, however, deemed it necessary to attach the ironic and grotesque chapter "Life in Space". The mosaic character thus becomes even more emphatic, and the reader turns back to the beginning of the novel because he sees episodes, which he thought he had understood, in a new light now.
The Year of the Falling Star is a work that deserves to be read more than once.
It is a genuine contemporary novel, postmodern in a way that it is not subjected to any of the constraints of what is called 'modernity'. Despite some debatable solutions, the work may well have an important role in the realignment of a genre in which a number of significant works have appeared. It may even open up new perspectives for the genre.

Gergely Angyalosi
heads the Department for Modern Hungarian Literature at the Institute for Literary History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also Head of the Department of Aesthetics at Kossuth University, Debrecen. His fields of research are Hungarian literary scholarship in the twentieth century and recent trends in French philosophy and aesthetics.