Zsolt Láng
Poetics of Stories
László Darvasi, Virágzabálók (Petal Gobblers), Budapest, Magvető,
2009, pp. 680 • Vilmos Csaplár, Hitler lánya (Hitler's Daughter),
Budapest: Kalligram, 2009, pp. 288 • László Garaczi, Arc és hátraarc
(Face and About-Face), Budapest: Magvető, 2010, pp. 234
The past can be personalized in a variety
of ways. Contemporary Hungarian
literature is rich in this respect. The
histories of Péter Esterházy and Péter
Nádas are personal in different ways, and
one has very different experiences reading
works by authors such as László Márton,
Imre Oravecz, or Szabolcs Benedek, the
latter of whom, a younger representative
of contemporary Hungarian writers, narrates
the history of the 1919 Hungarian
Soviet Republic with sarcastic wit. Some
authors recount personal memories,
while others use sources. Some allude to
history through the flavours and scents of
their language, while others follow the
examples of works of past centuries
through various structural devices. From
the works of Imre Kertész to Dezső
Tandori, the relationship between history
and life story finds expression in a
divergent range of narrative forms.
László Darvasi's earlier novel A könnymutatványosok
legendája (The Legend of
the Tear Showmen) could be read as a
short-story sequence, an anthology of
stories bound together by a distinctive
narrative form. Petal Gobblers also utilizes
this device: the same story is told from five
different points of view, and to make everything
even more mysterious, we learn less
about the story itself than we do about
anything else. There are five characters
telling the story, but they do not actually
recount what happened. Beyond the relationship
of the characters to one another, the
stories are linked only by what remains
untold. And what is the relationship
between the characters? Love: love affairs
entwine them, while they in the meantime
amble and ramble about in space and time
trying to recall what has taken place.
The poetics of the narrative develops in the
tension between story and storytelling.
Imre Szép is a botanist. He speaks the
language of flowers, and “petal gobblers”
is his metaphor. When he is arrested, he
speaks about flowers, and his responses to
the questions of the Habsburg interrogator
are laden with symbolic references to
flowers. He is accused of inciting and
participating in a murder. It does seem
strange that a flower was placed in the
victim's mouth. Imre Szép is arrested and
incarcerated. But when does this actually
take place? The novel covers a time span of
approximately sixty years, the period
when Hungary underwent momentous
changes. It is the age of reform and
revolution, the emergence of a new legal
system accompanied by the evolution of a
new bourgeois lifestyle, the disappearance
of old traditions and the simultaneous
birth of new ones, the promise and thrall of
freedom, struggles for independence. In
1851, two years after the suppression of
the Hungarian war of independence
against the Habsburgs, Imre Szép holds
lectures on flowers, first to the audience in
the Casino (a kind of club frequented by
the gentry), then to his interrogator,
Captain Vogel. All this happens in an age of
brutal retaliations intended to reinforce
Habsburg rule. The Hungarian prime
minister and the rebel generals had been
executed two years earlier, inaugurating a
rule of terror that was to last some twenty
years, a period marked by persecutions,
hangings and imprisonments. Yet Imre
Szép speaks about flowers.
[...]
As the title suggests, Vilmos Csaplár's
previous novel, János Kádár, the
Righteous, invokes the recent past as if it
were a sort of fairy tale. Successive
generations applied the adjective to
Matthias Corvinus, the Hungarian Sun
King, the founder of libraries, the
generous patron, the martinet commander
of the band of mercenaries
known as the Black Army. How much
truth is there to the legends of Matthias,
the Righteous? Very little: as an absolute
sovereign he curtailed the privileges of
the nobility and strengthened his power
by armed force and taxation but he did
consolidate his kingdom. Did he ever
mingle in disguise amongst the people in
order to dispense justice? Obviously not.
In fact, if we compare the stories about
Matthias with those of The Arabian Nights
we discover a number of similar leitmotifs.
Similarly, Csaplár makes Kádár a
mythical character in order to prompt his
reader to adopt a more open mind and
the era will slip in without stirring
prejudices on any side. Then the dialogue
between narrative and reader can begin at
the level of the senses, and the world on
which the 21st century now builds can
take shape in neither guise nor disguise.
Something essential is revealed about the
childhood of the new century, primarily
about the traumas obscured by nostalgia.
[...]
Of the works in the autobiographical
trilogy by László Garaczi bearing the
title Lemur, Who Are You? and including As
if You Were Alive (1995) and The Splendid
Bus Ride (1998), the latest, Face and
About-Face, is the saddest. Discourse
here lacks the visionary, intricate
sentences of the earlier novels, with their
flashes of sensuality and fantastic, surreal
images. The bare, simple sentences sputter
somberly. Face and About-Face is the story
of the army: a boy is called up for compulsory
military service. He is supposed to
do something no nineteen-year-old boy
could do and remain of sound mind and
body: that is the essence and undeclared
goal of military service. It is an education.
It breaks you in, and what it breaks you
into means the order of the golden years of
socialism, the mid 1970s. The narrator,
nicknamed Bones, talks about himself
sometimes in first person, sometimes
in third person. (In earlier versions the
protagonist was named L, thus strengthening
the autobiographical tone.) Bones
is capable of doing anything in order to be
hospitalized and to nurse his hopes of
discharge, even breaking his own arm.
Face and About-Face is not a nostalgic
soldier's story. Neither is it an incitement
against inhumanity. The world is horrible,
brutal and inhuman as it is, as if
inhumanity were trickling from the world's
core, as if gravity itself were the most
outrageous act of inhumanity, as if the
physical laws of the world could not bear
to have man grow up in it, as if matter itself
rejected any kind of moral. Everyone uses
and abuses everyone else without really
wanting to, and everyone humiliates
everyone else without being driven by any
particularly brutal instinct or insidious
goal. Yet we are well-versed in the tricks of
the trade, as least as far as humiliation is
concerned. How can people be humiliated?
The military is the site of this ingenuity.
[...]
Zsolt Láng
is a native of Transylvania. He is an editor at the Hungarian-language
literary journal Látó in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureş, Romania). His books include
four volumes of fiction and collections of essays and autobiographical pieces.
