We have already mentioned “Sworn Statement,” which in point of fact was the novella with which — how should I put it? — you took to the ring of public combat, being transformed at one fell swoop from an author of abstract novels to a public figure. I imagine that was not quite what you had in mind when you wrote the story.
Not in the least; all I wanted to do was free myself from the shame of the experience.
In any event, “Sworn Statement” burst like a bomb: already in 1991, the year when it first appeared, the actor and writer Mihály Kornis was performing it in the form of a monologue on the literary stage of the Katona Theatre in Budapest; Péter Esterházy wrote a matching novella entitled “Life & Literature,” and the two novellas were soon published together in a slim printed volume, both in Hungarian and in German translation, and a bilingual cassette had also been brought out as a so-called spoken book. It may well be that you conceived it as a disaster story, but it turned out to be a decisive success story.
Yes, which crowned the misunderstanding, and on top of that, in the mirror of the political constellation of the time, it also gave an impression of the taking-up of a moral stance, which indeed it was.
Didn’t you intend it to be?
If you had asked me that question then, I would have given you a different reply from the one I would now.
I’m interested in the one you would give now.
If I were to reclaim it from the topical sphere and fit it into the series of my works, then I would have to call this story the beginning of my regaining of consciousness.
Your first astonishment.
You might also see it that way.
Nevertheless, “Sworn Statement” struck me much more as a self-examination than as a piece of social criticism, as if you were probing whether the survivor of dictatorships still had enough strength to accept freedom.
Tricky question, big subject …
But the narrator of The Union Jack poses essentially the same question, though admittedly late in the day — he has already loused up his life; there is even a touch of perverse Schadenfreude in the way he hitches his own crushing to that of his country.
That’s an unconventional reading of it …
Wrong?
On the contrary, a very empathetic one.
And a good ten years later, when the book appears, it turns out that the main characters in your novel Liquidation are also wrestling with the same question.
It may be the major issue of the day. People are now furtively glimpsing into the chasm — not the one that is lying there ahead of them but the one that is gaping behind them. That chasm is their own life.
Put so that’s a fairly graphic image. Man struggles for his freedom, but when he wins it, or it is presented to him, he suddenly finds himself in a vacuum. Did the question as to where next never arise for you?
Of course it did, and more particularly almost vying with the pangs of “homesickness,” as I could not know to what extent the pressure under which I had to live and write was of value for my works. Under healthy conditions, books like Fatelessness and Fiasco might possibly never have come into existence. If I wanted to be utterly merciless, I might say that in a dictatorship you can “enjoy” the run of the madhouse, but in a democracy a consensus exists, a genuine literary responsibility, which can restrict the profligate bent of your imagination within constraints.
Though a Kafka or a Beckett, for example, was not disturbed by freedom …
True: one can find one’s prisons anywhere, but in the event that you should be wavering it does no harm to know what roots your art draws on.
Isn’t that the real problem with your book Someone Else?
“Is it really just these deadly circumstances that offer me a hidden source of energy? I have no way of knowing, because the source of energy was always supplied by depicting those deadly circumstances, in the midst of those selfsame deadly circumstances,” you write around the middle of the book. All the same, Someone Else is also a novel of liberation, of gaining a wider perspective, since it is now that you make your first trips to western Europe: “with M. and I taking turns to drive and the Waldstein Sonata resounding triumphantly …,” you write about a starry July 4th in 1994.
Yes, we happily zipped around the highways of Europe in a hired car.
And yet, like a hidden leitmotif, the thought unexpectedly resurfaces as an unresolved question: “Afternoon tea in the Chamonix valley. Evening was drawing in and the air was chilly … and fragrant … amid uninhabited forests, valleys and hilltops … With a rock for a table, we ate the Brie cheese and biscuits left over from yesterday, accompanied by a local rosé. I was freezing and M. gave me her pullover; she herself was enjoying the cool, her face was radiant. While eating we mulled over how far we still had to go and where we should stay for the night. The shadows gathered and took on ever darker hues while up on the mountain summit the trees were still in sunlight. I didn’t think about it, but I suppose I was happy. It was a feeling that through a trip like this, here at the foot of Mont Blanc, my forty years of being shut in, my prison life, was attaining a fulfilment rather than becoming problematical. Arriving at the threshold of another way of living, I understood that the dividing line is so sharp, the yawning gap between the two ways of living — between myself and myself — so deep, that it can only be bridged with the most strenuous effort. It is like standing at the edge of a devastating forest fire and having to assess the losses and the gains — to assess what I have accomplished so far, and where I should look to for a source of future creative energy.”
Yes, yes! A fine evening, exquisite concerns …
What do you mean “exquisite”?
Well, for instance, that we didn’t have to worry about how we were going to pay for the supper.
That was already how things stood, and still you had exquisite concerns.
That’s true.
It is striking that both The Union Jack and “Sworn Statement” bear a 1991 date; Kaddish for an Unborn Child appeared in 1990, Galley Boat-Log in 1992 … work was simply bubbling out from under your hand. For a while you were also a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Holmi.38 Then around the end of the Nineties, your name suddenly vanished from the magazine. I would have expected some kind of explanation to be given as to the reason for your parting …
Me, too. Just to print my letter of resignation, for example, as would befit the better sort of places. Or even to inform readers how glad they were to be rid of me, or whatever. Let’s move on, though.