Ferenc Takács
td at 70
The initials in the title belong to Dezso Tandori, poet, novelist, essayist and
multimedia artist, who turned seventy last year. They, the initials, turn up
with significant frequency (in lower case, as td) in his text-and-figure drawings,
in variations making visual and textual puns, and they are accompanied, more
often than not, by the sign √, which indicates "void" or "absence" in certain
contexts while it can also stand for the instruction "delete" or, alternately, for
"fill in", as in correcting galley proofs.
[...]
At just over seventy, Tandori is as prolific as ever, even if he has had to face,
from the nineties onwards, a paradoxical shift of his position in the contemporary
literary scene: a shift to a kind of central marginality where he is now the recipient,
unfairly and undeservedly in my view, of a strange mixture of praise and neglect,
of, as he puts it, "being ignored while simultaneously put on a pedestal".
The quote is from the back cover of Tandori's 2007 novel A komplett tandori—
komplett eZ? (A complete tandori—is he completely nutZ). Its author is a
certain Nat Roid who, in a parody of the usual blurb clichés, identifies Tandori's
(or tandori's, or td's) position as one of the central concerns of the text between
the covers, the other being the author's "process of learning how to write a
novel". The book's scope is ambitious—after all, it celebrates an important
anniversary as it appeared exactly thirty years after Tandori's first novel, Miért élnél örökké?. There is a sense of recapitulation about the book as if Tandori were
taking stock of the main concerns of his novelistic oeuvre and summing up his
problematics of selfhood, living and writing. The keyword, with its multiple
ironies, is "complete". Completeness of being, full presence: something to be
achieved, yet something that cannot be achieved, and if you think otherwise, you
are "completely nuts". Also, it is the completeness of writing, of producing the
fully exhaustive account of the subject or of the self, as in old books like Izaak
Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653) which tells you everything there is to know
about angling and anglers. However fervently wished for, this kind of
completeness, the full knowledge of the subject (in both senses of the word) is
also impossible. And "learning how to write a novel" is equally so: Tandori, or
tandori, or his "soul", his ghost writer standing in while his useless "writing arm"
is healing, will never complete this novel. (Even the book seems to refuse to be
a completely done and properly made product: Courier, the type used, simulates
a typewritten manuscript photographically reproduced, and there are many,
obviously intentional, typos as well as confused page numbering.) There is much
sadness in the book, generated by the frustration felt at the impossibility of
becoming complete, of attaining final being. But there is joy, too—the pleasure
of not attaining completeness and full being, of remaining in creative virtuality
instead of ending up frozen into the deadness of some identity or another.
[...]
Ferenc Takács
a critic and translator, teaches English Literature at the School of English and
American Studies of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He is the author of books on
Henry Fielding and T. S. Eliot; his most recent publication is a volume of essays,
Mobilis in mobile (Jószöveg Műhely Kiadó, 2008).
