Telling the Truth via Fiction: Imre Kertész, Péter Esterházy, and Hungarian Post-1989 Literary Anticommunism

ABSTRACT

In post-1989 Hungary, as the superstructure of a well-established censorship rapidly collapsed, a huge wave of formerly restricted information refreshed the stagnant water of literary and social culture. Nevertheless, the mainstream of contemporary highbrow belles-lettres began to take a rather apolitical approach towards literary production. Realism as an objectivist literary style and referential mode of representation was felt, after 1989, as too ideological, and thus lost its credibility along with the grand narrative of state socialism. A postmodern canon was soon established and popularized, based on formal experimentation and on the non-referential nature of the literary work. Despite the fact that postmodernism generally rejected realist fiction, Hungarian post-communist mainstream writers felt compelled to address the memory of the communist past. This paper aims to investigate major ethical and aesthetical problems of telling the truth via fiction, focusing on seminal books like The Union Jack, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Dossier K. by Imre Kertész; as well as Celestial Harmonies and Javított kiadás (Revised Edition) by Péter Esterházy. Last but not least, the article will analyse the compelling piece Egy történet (A/One Story), written by both the aforementioned authors.

KEYWORDS:

• Péter Esterházy
• Imre Kertész
• Hungarian literature
• memory of communism
• postmodernism
• dark realism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, ‘The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary: 1945–49’, in Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (eds.), History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Volume III: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007), 114–25; Sándor Hites, ‘Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch: The Reintegration of Hungarian Literary Exile after 1989’, in John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (eds.), The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009), 521–37.

² George Gömöri, ‘Sándor Márai: Napló 1984–1989; Zsuzsa Szőnyi: Vándor és idegen. Márai-levelek, emlékek’, World Literature Today 3 (2000), 614–15.

³ John Neubauer, ‘From Diary to Novel: Sándor Márai’s San Gennaro vére and Ítélet Canudosban’, in The Exile and Return of Writers, 416–21; Tibor Kosztolánczy, ʻ‘The Swallows Arrive Here from Argentina’: Sándor Márai’s Last Decade in San Diego’, in Sz. Simon (ed.), 12th International Conference of J. Selye University: Language and Literacy Section. Conference Proceedings, (Komárno, J. Selye University, 2020) 125–30.

⁴ Sándor Márai, Napló 1984–1989 (Vörösváry Publishing: Toronto, 1997), 166.

⁵ See Imre Kertész, ‘Homeland, Home, Country’, trans. Thomas Cooper, Hungarian Quarterly 209 (2014): 11–20.

⁶ This discourse of the bourgeois citizen was extensive in Márai’s work. Besides Bürger and bourgeois, further possible equivalents for ʻpolgár’ are ʻcitoyenʼ and ʻpatricianʼ in Thomas Mann’s sense of the term. See Włodzimierz Bolecki, ‘Exile Diaries: Sándor Márai, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, and Others’, in The Exile and Return of Writers, 422–31.

⁷ Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe. The Example of Imre Kertész’, in The Exile and Return of Writers, 368–83.

⁸ Nayla Chidiac, ‘On Writing Therapy: From Finding Forrester to Imre Kertész’, Annales Médico-Psychologiques 177 (2019): 403.

⁹ Imre Kertész, ‘Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló): Excerpts’, trans. Tim Wilkinson, in Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (eds.), Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 97.

¹⁰ Ibid., 103.

¹¹ Imre Kertész, ‘Heureka!: Nobel Lecture’, trans. Ivan Sanders, The Nobel Prize in Literature, 2002, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2002/kertesz/25364-imre-kertesz-nobel-lecture-2002–2/ (accessed July 25, 2021): ʻ[T]he hero of my novel does not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn’t remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity’.

¹² Imre Kertész, Fatelessness. trans. Tim Wilkinson (New York: Vintage International, 2004) E-book.

¹³ See also Péter Szirák, Kertész Imre (Pozsony [Bratislava]: Kalligram, 2003), 48–54.

¹⁴ Kertész, ‘Galley Boat-Log’. See Mirjam Gebauer, ‘Grimmelshausen und Kafka: Zwei Modelle autobiographischer Inszenierung in Günter Grass’ Beim Häuten der Zwiebel und Imre Kertész’ Dossier K’, Orbis Litterarum 64 (2009), 457–77; Monika Neuhofer, ‘“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schreiben”: Zur Leistung des Ich-Erzählers im Spannungsfeld von Katastrophe und Gedächtnis (Jorge Semprún, Imre Kertész, Norbert Gstrein)’, in Thomas Klinkert and Günter Oesterle (eds.), Katastrophe und Gedächtnis (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 257–75.

¹⁵ Imre Kertész, ‘Heureka!: Nobel Lecture’.

¹⁶ The incident could appear curious, but it was not unique. The rivalry between the two publishing houses, Magvető Kiadó and Szépirodalmi Kiadó, created an opportunity for ʻtoleratedʼ (ʻtűrtʼ) authors in communist Hungary. The Kádárian cultural establishment ruled by statesman György Aczél operated with the infamous ʻthree T’sʼ: ʻtámogatott, tűrt, tiltottʼ, wich meant ʻsupported, tolerated, restricted/forbiddenʼ. For more, see Raija Oikari, ‘Discursive Use of Power in Hungarian Cultural Policy During the Kádár Era’, Hungarologische Beiträge, 14 (2002) 133–62.

¹⁷ The reception of Sorstalanság (Fatelessness) was not hostile, but moderate and rather sporadic. Positive reviews were signed in 1975 by Margit Ács, Júlia Lenkei, Béla Czére and József Tamás Reményi. However, Fatelessness would have to wait several years to be officially canonized. A turning point occured in 1983, when renowned writer György Spiró published an enthusiastic essay, in which he deemed Kertész’s first novel a masterpiece. See György Spiró, ʻNon habent sua fata’, Élet és Irodalom 27 (1983): 30. A full bibliography of Imre Kertész’s reception can be found here: https://www.kerteszintezet.hu/kertesz-imre/kertesz-imre-bibliografia. (Imre Kertész Institute, Budapest).

¹⁸ As the Hungarian communist system presented itself as ʻantifascistʼ, it also prescribed the official representation of the Holocaust, according to which only others, namely the German Fascists, were to blame for the genocide of the Jews. Despite allowing the publication of some notable accounts, the Hungarian communist establishment did not encourage a discussion of local responsibilities in what concerned the Holocaust. See also Kata Bohus, ‘Not a Jewish Question? The Holocaust in Hungary in the Press and Propaganda of the Kádár Regime during the Trial of Adolf Eichmann’, Hungarian Historical Review 3 (2015): 737–72.

¹⁹ Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, trans. Tim Wilkinson (New York: Vintage International, 2004), 76.

²⁰ Lionel Trilling, ‘The Sense of the Past’, in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1951), 181–97.

²¹ See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 215–22.

²² ‘Die größte Lüge der Marxisten (von den vielen großen) ist, daß es nichts ‘ewig Menschliches’ gebe. Es gibt es. Gerade dadurch ist der Mensch Menschʼ. See Imre Kertész, Letzte Einkehr: Tagebücher 2001–2009: Mit einem Prozafragment, trans. Kristin Schwamm (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2013).

²³ Imre Kertész, The Union Jack, trans. Tim Wilkinson (New York: Melville House, 2009).

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Imre Kertész, A gondolatnyi csend, amíg a kivégzőosztag újratölt (Budapest: Digitális Irodalmi Akadémia, 2010), https://reader.dia.hu/document/Kertesz_Imre-A_gondolatnyi_csend_amig_a_kivegzoosztag_ujratolt-380 (accessed July 25, 2021).

²⁷ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (San Diego – New York – London: Harcourt, Brace and Company,1979); Hannah Arendt, ‘Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution’, The Journal of Politics 20 (1958): 5–43.

²⁸ Eric Voegelin, ‘Gnostic Politics’ [1952], in Ellis Sandoz (ed.), The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 10: Published Essays, 1940–1952, (Columbia – London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 223–40.

²⁹ See Imre Kertész, The Holocaust as Culture, trans. Thomas Cooper (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).

³⁰ Péter Esterházy, Celestial Harmonies: A Novel, trans. Judith Sollosy (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 5.

³¹ Sándor Hites, ‘Reluctant Supplements: Historical Novel, Historiography, and Historiographical Metafictionʼ, Hungarian Studies 15 (2001): 227.

³² Esterházy, Celestial Harmonies, 448.

³³ Ibid., 437–9.

³⁴ István Dobos, ‘Stereotypes in Autobiographical Reading’, Neohelicon 32 (2005): 32.

³⁵ Esterházy, Celestial Harmonies, 406.

³⁶ Ibid., 436.

³⁷ For autofiction see Hyvel Dix (ed.), Autofiction in English (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

³⁸ Péter Esterházy, Javított kiadás: Melléklet a Harmonia caelestishez (Budapest: Magvető, 2002), 6.

³⁹ Ibid., 12.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 13.

⁴¹ Ibid., 14.

⁴² Douwe Draaisma, Forgetting: Myths, Perils and Compensations, trans. Liz Waters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 175–92.

⁴³ Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (eds), Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, (s.l.: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009), 201–10.

⁴⁴ Intentional Hungarian misspelling of the Russian Cyrillic ‘CCCP’ (for USSR); comparable to an English ‘Si si si pi’.

⁴⁵ Noémi Szécsi, Kommunista Monte Cristo, 1. fejezet and Communist Monte Cristo, Chapter 1., trans. David Robert Evans, European Union Prize for Literature, 2009, https://www.euprizeliterature.eu/sites/default/files/EUPL_2009_No%C3%A9mi_Sz%C3%A9csi_Hungary.pdf. (accessed July 25, 2021)

⁴⁶ Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 21–30.