It may well be that I am lacking something in the humour department when it comes to this, but I can now clearly see that the plot of the novel-in-the-novel which is “Fiasco” is not in the least the dream parable that it is usually interpreted as being.
I could only give a response if I knew what, precisely, you think of as a “parable.” Can you give an example?
Offhand, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four comes to mind as being a true parable.
In that case, Fiasco cannot be one. It contains a different ratio of fiction and real life. Or rather, if one wants to see it as a parable, then it’s not a very good one. But there are other genres that Fiasco also does not belong to. To be brief and parabolic myself: it is not appropriate to use a nutcracker to peel a peach.
Witticisms aside, obviously what you want to say is that the novel should be approached from the point of view of its own originality.
Everything should be approached from the point of view of its own originality.
Despite the fact that it is no simple task to get to grips with Fiasco: it is surrounded by as many defensive systems as a fortification. The moment you have managed to struggle past one you find yourself face-to-face with another. You have to fight your way past one parenthesized barbed-wire fence after another, past ever newer crevasses of novels-within-novels … until it finally dawns on you that that is exactly what the novel is about: intellectual brackets and mental barbed-wire entanglements. Am I assessing that correctly?
The subject of the novel is enclosure, that’s for sure, and that has formal consequences. In essence, it’s a matter of a musical structure that is followed as a structural principle.
You assign a big part to music in the construction, or I should say the composition, of your novels.
I don’t think that can be of interest to anyone except myself, but it’s true that I like to conceive of my novels in terms of a musical composition.
In other words, it’s not just a matter of the musicality of individual sentences …
No, of the whole, of the complete composition. With Fiasco, for instance, the beginning and end of the novel overlap, but this is achieved with musical tools: the images of the “enlightenment” and the L-shaped corridor are snapped twice by the text, then the third time they come true … but those are just my own distinctly dubious private amusements and can only be boring to readers.
Not to me, that’s for sure, because I would like to find my bearings in what is perhaps the most enigmatic of your novels. With Fatelessness you employed a simple linear technique …
That was not exactly simple, either, but in that instance the linear technique expressed some important ideas. With Fiasco, on the other hand, I made a deliberate effort to “transcribe” the time-planes onto one another, and, just like music, the novel, too, unfolds over time, and in that way a circular novel structure came into being.
A circle that encloses within itself both the Nazi concentration camp and the Communist jails.
Yes, in the end I wanted to pluck out the danse macabre of the two regimes on a single string, despite the fact that I wrote and published Fiasco before the change in regime and therefore when censorship was still very much in force.
Toward the end of Fiasco, Köves sends a letter to Berg, who is one of the most mysterious of all the novel’s figures, in which he relates his strange experiences. In addition, this is where Köves, for the first and only time in the novel, speaks in the first person singular, which lends an air of confessional authenticity to the text …
So, we’re again mooring by the unfathomable relationship between fiction and reality, yet we already covered that at the very start of our conversation. Only now I get the impression that you are not quite so sure of yourself as you were then.
Well, I’m frightened that you are going to tell the truth …
Never doubt it!
All right, then, let’s start off from the previous chapter of “Fiasco”, the novel-in-the-novel, where we learn that Köves has been in the army “because the same post as the dismissal letter from the ministry had also brought a demand that he immediately discharge his deferred military service.” When did that happen in your case?
In November 1951 I was called up for regular military service, and after the three months of so-called “basic training” it turned out that the military command had singular plans for the unit to which I had been posted …
“Yet what a filthy dream did I wake up to all at once! I am standing in a room by a desk behind which is seated an obese, hormonally challenged bonehead, with matted hair, rotting teeth, bags under his eyes, and a sneer on his face: a major, and what he wants is for me to put my signature at the bottom of a piece of paper and accept a post as a prison guard in the central military prison.” What that sounds like is that Köves, on the model of many other literary figures, is about to enter a contract with the Devil …
It’s not a huge difference in principle.
If I look on it as a literary game. But here, as it is said in one of Wedekind’s plays, “we’re not playing but living.” So, why does Köves sign the paper?
Out of ignorance, curiosity, and, above all, existential apathy.
“… my existence went to sleep, or was paralyzed inside me, or at any rate it gave no twinge of unease to warn me of the importance of the decision,” writes Köves, or is that you?