Where to? I have a feeling we have come to a standstill, or that the high spirits are at an end. To back up to the point where, in your own words, you begin to regain consciousness and take a first look around in this new situation, your eyes immediately cloud over, if I may be permitted to extend the metaphor. You publish articles and diary entries which concern political deformations, neo-anti-Semitism, historical amnesia and the like, then in 1997 you publish the book Someone Else, which elicited widespread dislike in critical circles …
I was drummed out of the nation like a relapsed troublemaker from a tinpot boarding school.
But what did you do to elicit the fury of a press that, up to that point, had behaved fairly amicably toward you?
How should I know? I think you are overestimating the importance of so-called literary critics. Works of literature — genuine ones, that is — lead their own lives.
That may well be, but nevertheless I’m not going to make do with that pearl of wisdom. Your speculative pieces, the essays and lectures, are almost uniformly rejected by the Hungarian public.
They still exist … In truth it’s just the old game being carried on: I am a nuisance in Hungary, in the organic extension of the Kádár regime, a dissonant voice in a convention of self-deception which by common consent is sustained through gritted teeth.
What do you mean more precisely by “convention of self-deception”?
Keeping one’s mouth shut. As a result of which the continuity of the past has been interrupted. The 1989 change in regime did not arise from the Kádár regime but arrived from “outside,” from somewhere remote where real history grinds ahead. It was again necessary to adjust to the new situation, as so many times before, and that was much more urgent than looking back to see where we had come from. People supposed that the muck of the Kádár regime could be quickly scraped off the soles of our shoes. It can’t, and all kinds of frustrations derive from curtailed memories. One of them is fear and self-hatred as reflected in nationalism; another is lack of direction or nostalgia for the Kádár regime. In that context, it matters little that my essays are not to the taste of superannuated literary veterans wreathed in cigar smoke on their pseudo-Olympus or of the neo-conformist careerists of university faculties who parrot the gobbledygook of literary scholarship … I myself am even less to their taste. I never asked for access to the amenities of the Hungarian intellectual and I have therefore remained an outsider …
As a tiresome stranger?
Certainly a stranger. Look, it’s not just a question of my being liked or disliked but much more of how long an artistically inclined individual can maintain a creative life in discord with those around him or her … even the question of how long that may act as an inspiration, and when does the frustration arising from the dialogue of the deaf — to the point that it poses a danger to health, so to say — start to kick in.
To the extent that it may distort your power of judgment or maybe disturb the scale of values that you have elaborated so scrupulously? In your weaker moments, are you never seized by doubts or uncertainty?
Who can say they are not sometimes troubled by doubts? What I mean by that is that I always doubt every sentence I utter, but I have never for a moment doubted that I have to write what I happen to be writing. Would you believe that I am not sufficiently familiar with my own life’s work? Because that probably is the case. Once I have written a book, after suffering a certain spell of remorse and nausea, I no longer know what I wrote. I never took stock of the importance of one of my works; I know nothing about that: I’m far too permeated by “the world’s indifference.” In this chaotic, postmodern world of ours, spiked as it is with terrorism and atrocities, I don’t believe anything is of any special, let alone preeminent, importance. It seems to me that not only people but societies are not born for happiness but strife. The stated goal is always happiness, but that is always a will-o’-the-wisp. There is still no way of knowing how an individual life can be harmonized with society’s goals, about which we know hardly anything. There is still no way of knowing what motivates us, or indeed, when it comes down to it, why, over and above a vegetative automatism, we live at all. Still to this day, in all truth, no light has yet been thrown on even whether we exist at all, or are just embodied images of the neuronal bundles at work within us — a symbol that goes through the motions, because it is bound to go through the motions, of being an autonomous reality. For me, who is of no importance, one thing which is of no importance is nevertheless important: that’s more or less how it stands with literature.
These days you spend a lot of time in Berlin. What took you there?
Illness; depression; health; joie de vivre.
All four at once?
However odd it may sound.
Let’s start with the illness.
I won’t go into the physical symptoms; much more serious than those was the claustrophobic depression, which weighed my hand down like lead, locked my soul in the stocks (if it is permissible to speak of a soul as if one were talking about some kind of spinal osteoporosis, or a paralyzed limb which gives one constant shooting pains). Around a year ago, it was so bad that I was unable to touch the novel that was then in progress. In plain language, I broke down.
When did that happen?
Around the autumn of 2000. At that time, Magdi, infallible diagnostician that she is, with love as her sole implement, persuaded me that we should rent a little “workplace” in Berlin. She realized that if I were abroad it would be easier for me to create the inner freedom that is a precondition for a writer. She was not wrong, either: that turned out to be the solution, even though we had to accept the risk of taking that step (for instance, whether we would be able to pay the rent regularly). Later on, the Berlin Academy of Arts awarded me a grant for a semester, and once that had elapsed we simply stuck around, as it were, becoming cosmopolitans, commuting between Budapest and Berlin, indeed Chicago as well. It was in Berlin that Liquidation was resuscitated; as I walked on the Kurfürstendamm and its side streets, the intertwining broken threads of the story appeared to me in my imagination, the just-about-perceptible sutures at the site of the vanished junctions like the tacking on a coat that is turned inside out — the flimsy edifice of a novel that was still realizable. No, I’m sorry, but please don’t interrupt me! I fear you’re going to bring in the reception in Hungary or something of the ilk that I’ve already grappled with, have got over, and so is no longer of any interest to me. You know, there are times like now, for instance, sitting here in the Hotel Mondial, or on the café terrace of the Hotel Kempinski in the languid autumn sunshine, and absent-mindedly contemplating the late-afternoon traffic on the city’s streets, under the unbroken canopy of the enormous plane trees, when for a minute or two I step out of time, and for a fleeting moment I catch myself marvelling at the adventure that my life has been.
It seems you have “drawn good profit from your sandwiches,” as Laurence Sterne, that economical English writer, put it.