Magda Ferch

A Grand, Elaborate Story

Interview with György Spiró on the Novel Captivity

 

The place is the Roman Empire; the time, the first century A.D. We follow the unusual life story of the novel's ungainly, bookish hero from around Christ's crucifixion to the end of the Jewish war - his journey from Rome to Jerusalem and other parts of Judea, and back to Rome via Alexandria. In some of your previous works you also dealt with the complex subject of the rise of Christianity. Not being a religious man, why are you drawn to this subject?

My interest in religious thinking goes back to the nineteen-sixties; it was then that I realised that even atheists think in religious ways. I came to the conclusion that in all human thought there are irrational leaps. We try to weigh things rationally, but that doesn't always work. I guess it has something to do with our instinct for self-preservation. The more individualistic a society, the less inclined we are to face the fact that we shall die, and there will be no resurrection and no hereafter. I thought that if somebody creates and develops characters and wants to say something about how the human psyche functions, he cannot ignore this phenomenon; it must become part of his representation of human reality. But I was also afraid to broach the subject, because I had absolutely no background in theology. For a previous novel, A jövevény (The Newcomer) I had to immerse myself in Jewish and Christian mysticism because my main characters thought in terms of those beliefs. It occurred to me at the time that I should take a close look at the original story. First, I thought I could get away with just sticking to the Old and New Testaments. Well, that's not how it turned out. 

Originally the story was to take place only in Jerusalem. But it wound up having four, or rather four and a half, focal points. 

First, the idea was that the action would get underway sometime after stories of Christ's resurrection began to take hold, and it would centre around the Nazarene sect. I realised that this story cannot be told in isolation, though I still believed that it would be enough if Jerusalem and Galilee served as background. But then I saw that merely describing Pontius Pilate and his circle would not do, especially if I wanted to situate this very provincial city in a global context. I began to study all the relevant sources I could get my hands on and learned that Pilate was an insignificant historical figure and, as Roman governors went, by no means the bloodiest. It became clear that Rome could not be left out; after all, it was the leading power in the world in which the crucial events of Jesus' life occurred; what is more, none of these events could be divorced from Roman power politics. My research material kept growing, and at this point I still didn't know whether it was going to turn into a play or a novel. I continued to believe that it would be enough to ground the story in two cities, Rome and Jerusalem. But then I had to realise that the centre of world trade, as well as of world Jewry at the time, was Alexandria. I also came to the conclusion that the pogrom which occured in Alexandria in 38 A.D., a detailed and faithful description of which can be found in two works of the philosopher Philo of Alexandria, contributed greatly to the spread of Christianity. I couldn't leave out Alexandria because I was very much interested in this breeding ground without which Christianity would not have spread as it did. That's how the story became "tripolar". That it ended up consisting of four and a half parts is due to the nature of the material - to aesthetic considerations, in other words. If one is intent on telling a grand, elaborate story, one has to choose one of the familiar aesthetic forms of one's culture. Tripartition has deep roots in the European tradition; it manifests itself in many things from the concept of the Trinity through dialectical thinking to the three-part division of the sonata. My tripartite division would have been Rome-Jerusalem-Rome, but then Alexandria got in the way, so I finally chose a four-part division, which is also deeply ingrained in the European tradition: it is the mystical form of eternal recurrence. Swedenborg described it most clearly, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it appears in the works of Chekhov and Wyspian´ski, as well as in the Russian formalists' writings. The four-part division precludes the notion of progress; in this form everything always begins anew. But the material I was working with did not fit this pattern, so I tacked a long coda onto the final Roman chapter - this way the structure points to an odd number. There is no real difference between three- and five-part divisions. Tragedies were written in either three or five acts. The odd number always connotes some kind of progression, a developing story; the two- and four-part division, on the other hand, implies eternal recurrence. The latter form doesn't necessarily reject progress within each of the four parts, but with regard to the whole, it does. It is for this reason that the book came to have this unusual structure. 

One of the reviews pointed out that the story takes place outside of historical time, in a kind of "no time" zone, and that the traditional, conventional features of the novel are at odds with the anachronistic elements you employ. 

That reviewer focused mostly on language, I think, and he is right in the sense that I did not opt for archaic language; I couldn't, since Hungarian as we know it did not exist two thousand years ago. I don't agree, however, that I resort to anachronisms. It is true that "commandos" sail from Rome to Alexandria to capture the local governor. The word refers to modern conditions, but it so happens that French and English works treating this period use that very term. The term is the same because the function is the same. In this sense there are no anachronisms in the novel. For me it was natural to use a contemporary idiom in writing Captivity; I am convinced, you see, that our ancestors were the same sort of people we are. They felt the same things, had the same kinds of desires, and were just as shrewd and smart and stupid as we are. So in principle, there is no difference between their world and ours. 

Why was it so important to you that the story should have historical credibility down to the last detail? 

If I am after the specific reality of everyday life, the smallest factual detail can become very important, although I can't say in advance precisely what that will be. For another writer something else may become extremely important. I am fully aware that my sensitivity to things has its limits. I also realise that twenty years ago I would have responded to different details, and if I live another twenty or thirty years, I will again respond to different ones. A historical novel is always about the author's own time as well - after all, his very thought processes are determined by the world in which he lives. In this sense every historical novel takes place in a kind of strange in-between time and space - neither at the time it was supposed to happen, nor in the author's own time, but rather in some imaginary dimension. How many of these authentic minor details does a writer try to track down? The more, the better. I have always considered narrative credibility very important and tried to understand the spirit of a given age even when I did not set out to write a realist work. For example, in my play A békecsászár (The Emperor of Peace), which takes place in a totally fictitious Rome, I gleaned the various beliefs and superstitions then current from Strabo's Geography in an attempt to feel at home in that period. For some reason this was important to me. Perhaps it's because realist art is closest to my heart, even if the work in question is not written in a realist style. And this affinity acted now as a command to check out and get right even the smallest detail. Facts always come in handy; they gave me wonderful ideas that I couldn't possibly invent myself. For example, I never gave any thought to how high priests cheated, or how people were defrauded when exchanging the currencies of different Roman provinces. The small acts of fraud and corruption are necessary - they add to the accumulated anger and despair that eventually bring about a new religion. I discovered many things in Flavius Josephus's The Jewish War, and I was helped by my archeologist friends, who gave me very good books on Alexandria. Of course I picked and chose from the available material; there are many things I did not use, they would have pushed out the limits of the novel. This story is still a piece of fiction, though it does try to take people's daily lives seriously. 

Your piece of fiction takes place two thousand year ago; nevertheless, the world that emerges from it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own, and the characters, too, remind us of people living among us. 

I could never have written this novel if I hadn't realised that our own world, structurally, in terms of power, does resemble the early imperial period of Rome. I myself was surprised by the similarities, but this is what emerged from the historical material I examined, so I had to take it seriously. The similarity has become striking ever since there is only one superpower left: America. If our world again becomes bi- or tripolar, other patterns will seem inescapable. Then a writer will react differently to the same historical material. I consciously tried to make Uri one of us. I came to realise that the German literary theorists and George Lukács were seriously mistaken when they thought that the novel was the product of bourgeois culture and that before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the genre didn't even exist. The truth is it did exist, but few examples have survived, and even those are fragmentary. However, novelistic techniques made their way into historiography. For example, Philo's historical-political works abound in novelistic elements, which he remembered from Greek novels he had read, but those were lost. I had to give a lot of thought to how misleading it is to believe that in ancient societies there were no social classes comparable to the bourgeoisie or the intelligentsia. The fact is there were. Friedrich Engels asserted that in the ancient world, love in our sense of the word did not exist. Of course it did. These are inanities, which could be traced back to the idealist concept that there was once a golden age which was lost, but which we shall one day restore. 

You mentioned in interviews that you consciously set out to write a book that would be a good read, otherwise people would loose interest. Aren't you underestimating your readers? 

No, I am not, or else I wouldn't have written such a long book. The fact remains, though, that people's reading habits and skills have deteriorated in the past twenty years. This is true even of people who have been taught how to read books, and all the more of those who have never been taught how to read. It's not their fault; I see it at the university where I teach: the majority of students cannot read. I had to keep in mind while producing this book that those on the receiving end are tired and easily distracted, and because I chose a subject that flies off in different directions, I had to use the simplest possible form. The story has one central hero, and I pursue him through myriad adventures; along the way the world in which he moves opens up. I've long been convinced that you must try to express complex things simply rather than talk about simple things in a complicated way, which is what is usually done around here. The way I see it, aesthetics, literary history and criticism - or at least, certain fashionable schools within these disciplines - do not accomplish what they are supposed to, which is to bring works closer to the reader. Instead they stand between a work and its potential reader. This is primarily a question of power, but the explicators use such convoluted language that at first blush it's impossible to tell which aesthetic argument is the damning blow of which artistic powerhouse. 

A number of critics have said about your new novel, quite admiringly, that it opened a new path in contemporary Hungarian prose, and it may well signal the end of the dominance of postmodernism here, if by the postmodern condition we mean a waning interest in traditional grand narratives. 

I am no trailblazer and never intended to be one. That is a collectivist notion of literature, which I am dead set against and always will be. The assumption is that there aren't individual works, there are trends and currents, and works that don't fit into the mainstream are not worth talking about. My favourite period in prose is turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russian literature. That's when Chekhov and Gorky wrote their masterpieces, and alongside them you had the first, and to this day greatest, flowering of avant-garde literature, with the extraordinary formal innovations of Leonid Andreev, Andrey Biely and, later, Mikhail Bulgakov. Did this diminish Chekhov's and Gorky's art? Of course not. Did it invalidate their style, or make them outdated? No. Varlam Shalamov was a realist, though he wrote his books long after the heyday of the Russian avant-garde. Officially the entire avant-garde movement was banned, without much success of course, for what is good in it is still good and can be taken further. Everyone should be able to write as they see fit. Some have tried to pit me against the postmodernists, but I was never willing to play along. Not that I am that much interested in postmodern art, I consider it an essentially romantic phenomenon. All my life I defined myself in opposition to romanticism, but why shouldn't somebody write romantic ravings even today? When I felt that I could make use of them, I didn't hesitate to employ romantic or postmodern devices. And if at times I was forced to break new ground, I did it because the forms I needed for a given work were not available, so I had to come up with something different. I did this with great reluctance, for I am a conservative in this, and have an abiding respect for the rules pertaining to literary forms. I believe they still work, they will always work. I couldn't disagree more with the notion that there are trends and currents and not individual works. I consider this a Bolshevik cultural view. It's as if a singular masterpiece cannot be included in the canon unless it is followed by dozens of derivative works. Mihály Vörösmarty's Csongor and Tünde was not followed by a similar masterpiece, and after The Tragedy of Man there was only one, Ferenc Csepreghy's Flood, which no one knows anything about nowadays. Should we therefore throw out the Tragedy and Csongor? Nonsense. It's a long time since we lived under a Bolshevik system, yet those who feel they are in a position to tell writers how to write still think in terms of dominant tendencies and mainstreams. These people should not tell me how to write. Writing is not their strong suit. It is mine. 

 

Magda Ferch
a critic, is on the staff of the literary supplement of the daily Magyar Nemzet. A volume of her interviews appeared in 2005.