Lajos Parti Nagy is a stylistic virtuoso of contemporary Hungarian writing. It should be noted that the principle source and material of his virtuosity is the withered, vulgarised language of the styleless rabble. Parti Nagy knows and comprehends this misshapen creature astonishingly well, the symptoms and processes of the depredation of language, which he takes to absurdity, mimicking them with creativity, humour and exaggeration. As he treats them, they are turned into grotesque parodies and surreal poetry by staying close to the sociological roots of manners of speaking. His new anthology of short stories, The Frozen Dog's Foot, is an orgy of documentary fidelity to spoken language and grotesque linguistic inventiveness.
The collection, which gathers together the fruits of the last ten years or so, contains twenty-two short stories and is a direct continuation of his previous (1994) collection A hullámzó Balaton (The Swell of Balaton). Such is the continuity and affinity that Taxidermy, a recent and critically acclaimed feature film, was based on the stories, and in particular on the title stories of the two volumes. The film's director, György Pálfi, was captivated by "The Frozen Dog's Foot", one of the finest of the stories. It is one of the three in the volume in which neither the corruption of language nor the mentality and behaviour behind this corruption is the substance of the text, but rather a stylised archaic character involving a topic taken from the past. "The Frozen Dog's Foot" is a medical anamnesis delivered at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ironic narrative frame is provided by the commentaries of the physician, expressed in the technical language of the day. The main text is the account, cited as the indirect speech of the patient, of the events preceding an accident that has driven him to the edge of derangement. The story is concerned with a military tailor of the reserve who serves in the village household of a captain as a kind of jack of all trades. The captain's Juno-assed wife and his two adolescent daughters hold the man, who suffers from what he calls "fuck-rage", in a state of permanent sexual excitement. He sleeps in a windowless pantry beneath the steps leading up to the attic, using a wash-tub as a bed. However, every two weeks he has to fill this same tub with hot water so that the three women can take a bath one after the other. Again, whenever a pig is slaughtered he also has to relinquish his bed, because the fresh meats-quivering, steaming innards and all-are stored in the tub. And following "the baths and the bacon slabs" he always has to wash out the tub. After the slaughtering session, the snatchobsessed tailor fantasises about the captain's wife slinking into his "bedroom" in the middle of the night, lying down in the tub, and pulling him onto her slippery, steamy flesh. In the morning he awakes, after the ecstasy of ejaculation, to find that he is "freezing on the spot, and that he is lying, his lower body naked, on his belly on the ruined meat, with the salt painfully stinging his penis. And that the captain, having opened the door to get his bicycle and caught him thus, immediately shoots him dead." But the first sentence of the story ("My scruffy patient, his head bleeding, is coming.") tells us the shot had not been fatal after all.
This kind of punch-line is rare in stories by Parti Nagy. "Devil's String" which closes the volume stirs recollections of earlier Hungarian literature. It has a "retro" setting, a spa in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; Parti Nagy's circumstances and characters, a balance of pastiche and parody, turn it into a stylistic study of a life of lavish luxury. The characters concerned are a private tutor and a violinist brought from Pest who, while looking forward (in vain) to the favours of a dissolute countess at the spa, get thoroughly drunk together.
Most of the short stories are shorter than the two here mentioned and are basically studies in language. They are constructed out of, in Parti Nagy's words, "the meat of language": figures, coarse, miserable, vegetating pariahs, homunculi incapable of articulate speech, wretched louts, and lowly automatons. These are either the pitiful and laughable creatures of the Kádár era or they fit within the haunting nightmares originating in our experiences of the Stalinist period that preceded it. Among the most memorable of the latter is "The Mine Laundryman". The setting is the laundry of a mine that is slowly being run down and partly operated by women in immeasurably bleak industrial surroundings. Since there are always rings, necklaces, earrings, wallets and other misplaced objects to be found in the pockets of the clothes to be washed, "in the golden age, when the mine was operating at full steam, to be a laundryman was a veritable El Dorado." However, the comrades in the central office get wind of this supplementary source of income and start turning up every Wednesday at the mine for their share, handed over in small paper bags. As a kind of eerie twist it turns out that the laundryman is in fact |
a woman, though the reader is led to believe her to be a man owing to the mention of two assistants, deaf-mute ethnic German twin girls, with whom she romps on the piles of crinkly, well-washed grey handkerchiefs.
The "plant" in the story "Closed Chain" would fit well into science-fiction: it is a resort that "resembles an office block or a former barracks. From the outside it is at most three stories, while on the inside it is at least ten," and the guests are not permitted to go down to the lower levels.
The Phoenix Hotel is maintained expressly for the family members of soldiers at the front. If a letter has not arrived from the front for some time, the family converts what it can into cash and travels as a member of a group to this hotel intended specifically for them, where video recordings of the corpses are rerun everyday on closed circuit television. If someone recognizes their child, they can take the body. The zinc coffins encased in a wooden box are referred to as freight number 200. If the body in the coffin turns out not to be the right one, all they can do is bury it, whoever it may be, male or female.
Elsewhere, the setting for these grotesque horrors is named. The narrator of "Snow Flash" is a secret policeman in the Kádár era, who relates in appalling technical jargon how Kálmán Daruh, a 'dissident' home on a visit, is mixed up in a smuggling affair, leaving him no choice "but to spill the beans on his Hungarian connection friend, as the former husband of his former mistress, Ede Csiíz. Ede, who used to be in the business of making musical instruments, is now a labourer and storeman." The "source" of the rest of the short stories is a woman of shifting identity, a certain Bella Wrights (in Hungarian Szép Róza, a pun on "széppróza" or fiction), who the narrator inserts between himself and the events narrated. The stories seem to unfold from an obscurity of language that often encumbers the reader, who may have to begin again several times before the fragments narrated come together. In "There are Troubles Everywhere" this technique becomes the subject of the narrative. Here, Bella is a public lavatory attendant who also peddles ties; passing references to her conversations slowly sketch the man who stops every day to pick out a tie at her stand. Little by little, he relates a confused story of an affair with a woman. The short story itself develops as she puts the tale together in her mind, or rather in the mind of her listener, while on the linguistic level the man's direct speech is mixed into hers and the narrator's intertwining indirect discourse.
Some stories are linguistic and stylistic bravura: lyrically grotesque genre pictures of a situation or mood, or humorous sketches and linguistic parodies. "Bowers Timeless" masterfully caricatures Sunday afternoons in the gardens of small town restaurants, while in "No Strings Attached" a gold-toothed nouveau riche woman brags that when she had a cake made for her daughter's wedding it was so big "that it simply didn't fit on the TV screen." So "we made a fine video ourselves, recording the truck as it comes with it on to Heroes Square, and the box is bigger than the God of the Hungarians, or whoever it is standing there with the skateboard." "Study in Language" is in its entirety an ostentatious, knuckle-brained, popcorn-gobbling, formless monologue. The story that appears in this issue, "Kenyans" gives voice to a group of domesticated ostriches from a Hungarian farm who are taken, with backpacks, golfing caps and white trainers, to make a coach excursion to Lake Balaton as a reward for a job well done. From time to time Parti Nagy's humour loses all sense of proportion and leaves an impression of dubious banter as in "Hotel Coopoffice" which paints a horrific picture of village tourism: the narrator wants to spend a night with his girlfriend in Csôpép, famous for its worker-militiamen and for its goat cheese. The local old women descend on them like a legion of brigand crows. When they finally take refuge in their car, "the frustrated people of Csôpép surround them and keep lifting the back of the car, sitting on the engine compartment and the roof and snickering and drumming on the metal sheet with their withered palms."
Overall, the picture is uneven. Superb moments of bravura alternate with instances of plain silliness. No doubt there is no one today who can satirise our contemporaries and our intellectual, spiritual and linguistic deformities more incisively or wittily than Parti Nagy. But are the risible and misshapen always others or are they not ourselves at times? And does linguistic virtuosity not at some point become an end in itself? These are questions that have long lingered around Parti Nagy's ingenious talent, and this volume hardly disperses them. |
