FACE AND MASK
Konrád, George
George Konrad is a distinguished Hungarian novelist; two of his novels have been translated into English, The Case Worker and The City Builder. The essay below was first delivered as a talk at a...
...Why does a writer play hide-and-seek...
...Conformist rhetoric produces a whole legion of inspiring models—from champion athletes to intrepid police inspectors...
...It's quite possible that in following us, they will have taken a nice excursion in their own labyrinth, too...
...But whose...
...T ill he East European state socialist societies are ideological-political societies...
...They will get to know us a little, though we have no idea who they are...
...As we talk I about others, we construct their sometimes amusing, sometimes insipid masks...
...The essay below was first delivered as a talk at a recent congress of PEN in Stockholm...
...He needs them all because they are present in him, too...
...I shed my roles one by one...
...What I select from its countless components says something about me...
...Audiences knew that Richard III, who chose to be a villain, was an actor with a painted face and a ball of rags for a hump...
...We need literature...
...Writers have always tried to remind their readers of the tension between face and mask—they describe the mask and then question it, puzzle out its secrets, and try shamelessly to catch the real face as though it were some rare deep-sea creature that appeared only for an instant...
...Society learns from the home screen what society is like...
...A new beauty preparation, a beard, a mustache, a face lift might help...
...A smile, a look of terror are part of the face, but so are the things that make us smile or terrify us...
...What is good about literature is that in the multitude of masks it maintains stoically, even when hounded, that it is all a game...
...We construct our inner face, a labyrinth that, if successful, can become an amusingly complicated place...
...we couldn't communicate without them...
...This firmly entrenched iconography, this fixed hierarchy of good and evil is but a picture book of society's moral dictates, censorship in disguise...
...Television has become the primary source of our knowledge of man, our transcendental reality...
...Facts exist only as masks, the face as an ideal vision...
...Not being philosophers, we are not duty-bound to reconcile the contradictions between immanent existence and utopian essence...
...Thanks to a sardonic providence, the irrepressible societal unconscious—a parallel culture that cannot but exist—keeps confronting the official iconography with portraits that cannot be made to conform to it...
...But then the baker or the worker in the munitions factory doesn't know either who receives the bread or the bullet— that's no longer their concern...
...We all know that the official culture labels its own spy a hero and the enemy's a monster...
...The row of masks forms an endless, mystical continuum...
...A good novel is masked truth...
...Our literature is a ceaseless movement between an obviously alienated mask and one that's somewhat less alienated...
...At the end of the trip he'll be a little more mask-sensitive, which may be the only moral gain to be had from literature...
...The profoundly ironic works go beyond the naive question, Who is right...
...Literature is a mask that looks like a face...
...What does Peer Gynt have against his masks...
...Let your face be the reflection of the screen, the product of the media—build up your image...
...Whom are you trying to convince in your fumbling way that you do exist...
...he wants me to help him imagine what giving birth or killing is like...
...People insist on their role because it makes them feel secure...
...The intelligentsia is the only class that has the capacity to make its rule flexible, appealing, irresistible—one that can integrate its self-criticism in its power structure...
...There is no lover who is not looking for the real face of the beloved, and who does not manage nevertheless to find pleasure in other faces...
...Often they are no more than simplified caricatures...
...Moses and Christ, Buddha and Mohammed, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Hitler and Stalin— we can imagine their masks, never their faces as they sleep, love, wash up...
...They represent conflicts between A and B convincingly, develop them from both points of view, without any attempt to arbitrate...
...VII What can we do...
...they transcended the ideologies of the age...
...they are what they should be...
...The faces of others are a few simplified lines...
...when recalling them, I see my friends' masks with my mind's eye...
...rather than enlisting the works in their battles, they allowed themselves to be seduced by them...
...retreat into silence in Katmandu, to be able to lecture about it later at Berkeley or Harvard...
...The more mysterious you are, the higher your price can be...
...And even of the world of man, only the segment we know is our own...
...I can only see myself the way it is possible to see me here and now...
...If I like a man, his face is an emblem of the universe...
...We put on film the process of birth and death...
...If they need a sexual partner, they have to buy one...
...Your culture surrounds you with aggressive offers...
...If children do not learn the roles of those around them, or find out how to act with people, they live in a dream world where they are unable to find their bearing, where anything can happen...
...Because we take pleasure in seeing a multitude of masks, we shudder at the thought of anyone trying to make the world more homogeneous...
...State socialist as well as bourgeois society must besmirch the name of antistate subversives, and praise to the sky the law-abiding citizen...
...They take their place in a barely tolerated underground literature or, worse, in a prisoner's dock...
...But not even the strongest talents can completely forsake the intellectual conventions of their age—its myths and countermyths...
...The universality of our novels is of course 299 reducible to a mask...
...If the face were a fact, it would only be one out of a myriad faces, as accidental as a photograph...
...This face is unlike the one outlined by statistical probability and the available norms...
...Face it: we are part of the entertainment industry, we make good our readers' temptations...
...Entrepreneurs and workers, men and women, even schoolchildren can only interact and behave in an acceptable manner if they know the rules of the game...
...But because we can never be sure that we see the face looking at us, we place masks over it, though none of them really fits—the face does smile through...
...He could be a party secretary, a bank president, or even a general...
...it is possible to imagine autonomous modes of conduct that cannot be integrated into the state culture...
...I write in order to pull off my masks...
...The rebel—even if not made out to be an out-andout scoundrel—should in some ways be 298 suspect...
...Literature of average worth succeeds in doing just this...
...The discrepancy between face and mask is made into a moral issue...
...Why do I cry over my favorite fictional heroes...
...These are panic reactions...
...then come the odder ones...
...Insisting on literal realism is as strange as expecting a magician to actually cleave in two his partner locked in the box...
...If the 19th-century novel attempted to distinguish between the truth of the face and the falsity of the mask, then the 20th-century novel gave up trying, and with accusing sarcasm merely depicts faceless creatures, empty masks...
...We paint one another's masks...
...Why does this old man want to be a young girl, and the young girl an old man...
...We introduce ourselves and wave our masks before one another the way we wave our hats...
...With each new sentence we surprise the reader...
...If he is relieved of his duties, his face changes too...
...How many dullards keep recycling Marx's and Freud's ideas...
...it wants to rape your face, and you let it...
...The media have stolen, capitalized, nationalized our faces...
...A mask is an epistemological joke...
...People in mass societies are nostalgic for the ineffable bliss of being an individual...
...The truthhunters return with the trophies of camouflaged sins, passions, maladies...
...A writer has privileges...
...We may be sure of only one thing: it makes an impact on us or it doesn't...
...Does the happy child in a chocolate ad...
...The mentally ill live in such a world—they cannot adjust their selfconceived roles to fit those assumed by others...
...One finds the latter only in pedantically contradictory tomes...
...Abstract schemes can never be reconciled with concrete experiences...
...However, concentrated irony is too volatile and would self-destruct if it didn't mix with the roughage of human stupidity...
...My collected works add up to my mask...
...Those who talk about essence evidently have a low opinion of masks...
...Marx discovered the exploiter even in the charitable employer, and the age needed this realization...
...The temptation to strip intellectual activity of its rhetoric is the only consolation for the disadvantages of living in such societies...
...Without a mask, it seems, we cannot come together...
...We lure the readers into a funhouse of our own making...
...Historically, we are confronted with a new kind of challenge...
...But who are we then in this sea of masks...
...We just watch them and confront them with each other...
...Our self-portraits come out better if we remember that our very selfhood is nothing but a religious presumption, though it's true that we need our religious presumptions almost as much as we need our feet...
...Literature, painting, the cinema took it upon themselves to look into the problem of the human face...
...Of course, the good guys wear masks too, not only the bad guys...
...A nonironic mask is a lie...
...For the sake of law and order, we need a series of stylized positive and negative roles...
...Or do cultural celebrities as they accept their prizes...
...When Crime and Punishment and, later, War and Peace were published, neither the conservative nor the progressive Russian press was pleased...
...he manufactures myths, creates masks, looks behind them and discovers other masks...
...He is a painter of masks who conceals the fact that he too wears them, and is therefore a bigger liar than the rest...
...demonstrating students, riffraff...
...We keep peeling, stripping down our face...
...First it fights off the masterpiece by immunizing itself against it...
...Our good readers aren't fooled by phonies who do not bother to write over their fakeries: a novel...
...Let it be easy—if not to jail him—to lock him in a mental hospital...
...The counter cultures also develop their iconography, and they, too, have their share of moral-ideological prejudices...
...Marching soldiers are fine boys...
...No matter how objectively I try to describe a tavern in my novel, it is part of a self-portrait...
...The meaning of tragedy is that there is no higher, cathartic truth...
...We work our potential selves out of our system...
...They must appear a little flawed so their flawlessness can become that much more convincing...
...behind each mask there is always another...
...They are faces with no stories behind them—programmed, mass-produced, universal faces...
...But let us suppose that I do have a face...
...Try to talk about last night's party on the telephone, and you'll be seizing moments out of a stream of memory and stringing them together according to the corrective logic of chance, in a sequence prompted by hidden emotions...
...What can the ideological mind do...
...Does the minister of finance, or the chief of staff issuing statements, have a face...
...Murder young girls mysteriously and wave your handcuffed wrist toward the thronging cameras...
...Our good readers know that their families and colleagues are also characters out of a novel, and smile when those people forget who they are...
...Neither is really right—one is not truly good, the other is not really bad...
...When they appear nightly in every home, smirking, lying, we think that it would be strange indeed to depict social types in novels the way Balzac did...
...We can afford to construct as dizzying an array of masks as society...
...What my reader wants to know is not whether or not I killed or gave birth...
...still they threw things at him...
...But that is their job...
...our sexuality, our solitude have become everybody's prey...
...we shape it out of the paradoxes of our consciousness, and try to make it firmer, less accidental...
...The dominant and counter cultures of our age, in both East and West, expect literature to bring to life, and fit into a canonized iconography, abstractly ideological masks...
...It must shape the masks of witches and fiends and place them on heretics, lest the stability of our roles should be disturbed...
...if he is not satisfied, he is an idler, a troublemaker, a hooligan...
...T IV hey say literature is a world created through the window of the mind...
...There are as many masks as there are relationships, which makes thinking about the subject difficult...
...But then it's no longer an epistemological question we are talking about, but one that has to do with the exercise of power...
...my masks by me alone...
...we make him believe our masks, then go ahead and deprive him of his certainties— let him make love to, or break off with, our hallucinations...
...We have good reason to be skeptical—given the ground rules of our culture, we are all liars...
...We make no secret of the fact that we are maskmerchants...
...The counter cultures that emerged in the '60s in both East and West have their own heaven and hell, and depending on how close we are to their ideologies we are consigned to either one or the other...
...We come full circle: a literary work is the author's mask...
...It will send bombers over Vietnam and tanks to Prague and Budapest...
...The more irregular we are, the more we are...
...but if our wares are halfway decent, the reader will be convinced for a while that our characters are real—the angel, the magus, the smiling child in the manger...
...If I do, it is infinite, encompassing all the possible faces I may have...
...Do prisoners, shot into a mass grave...
...Each culture and ideology has its timehonored system of roles and stereotypes, its 297 iconography...
...the rulers of the world are afraid their empires will crumble if in one remote corner people try to live according to their own rules...
...We'll take anyone who bought a ticket on a journey through the orchards and ogres of our imagination...
...Every culture has its storehouse of masks and costumes, history its hall of fame...
...We need masks as much as we need words...
...he or she is ugly, impotent, frigid...
...Courts, party headquarters, university professors are no more qualified to judge whether or not a writer is representing reality than the reader or the writer himself...
...The role is encrusted on his person, though it doesn't become his face because he can easily exchange his role for another...
...books written by pompous writers can't be all that good...
...My face was shaped by nature and time...
...In an ideological society literature plays a more important role than in a bourgeois society, which explains why there are at times heated debates about whether a certain hero's or novel's world view can be reconciled with the accepted iconography...
...Let him be sick...
...We're no bigger whores than our contemporaries...
...Want to be still more interesting...
...We are justified in cheerfully desanctifying so-called high culture, including literature...
...We produce imaginary objects, imagine known and unknown people, create a mythology...
...It is antinomies that keep us alive...
...Their opinion is as hypothetical as the work they are discussing...
...Literary commonplaces: the virtuous citizen who is a criminal, the virtuous wife who is a whore...
...The new model is more substantial than the original...
...Ours is a voyeur culture in hot pursuit of the individual face that, as soon as it is captured, becomes a mass product...
...I am my world...
...Isn't it enough to fear a court-martial...
...But those who desire to be discerning rather than virtuous in Eastern Europe today ought to make sure that, having wriggled out of the web of statesocialist romanticism, they do not fabricate a new kind of dissident romanticism whose major flaw is that it enjoys no clear autonomy vis-a-vis Western culture...
...the less I know about them, the more finite they are...
...We may have killed someone, or we may not have...
...Secondrate Marxists and Freudians have turned the masters' radiant ironies into lists of regulations...
...the gallows, a naked lie...
...Do organized criminals have faces...
...Our face is vaguer and richer than our role...
...They are overdetermined faces that promise no surprises, no unexpected frowns...
...they can be made to show what they are good for...
...They are witty but never profound, widely read but only to impress others...
...The worker is a good man if he is satisfied with the conditions of life offered to him by his capitalist boss or state employer...
...all masks are but approximations of this one face...
...they object to them on moral grounds...
...no mystery, no autonomy...
...There is nothing we long for more than the face...
...In comparison, written literature is meager and saddled with all kinds of obligations...
...In truth, we are looking for the face, the one and only...
...The process of demythification may not be too popular, but I think it's more liberating than the introduction of a new ideology...
...We invite our readers to move through our secret anxieties, our prophecies, our despair...
...just as they take care of their 302 customers in Bangkok, Dubrovnik or Mallorca, we, too, can guide ours through our internal masks—let them laugh, let them be horrified...
...through it the self-portrait of a society takes shape...
...The most recent notable theory of the novel, that of the nouveau roman, tried with positivist ambition to impose the methodological criteria of the natural sciences on literature...
...Every face—the head of state's as well as the janitor's, the entire iconography— becomes the property of the media...
...Still, miracles can become commonplace...
...Anyone who did not constantly wear the mask prescribed for him was doomed...
...But my self-portraits are also defined by the metaphors of my historical environment...
...They have art collections but no taste...
...should we also be afraid of becoming disgusting creatures like these...
...As though it were our task as people to live on Planet Earth...
...The real question is always whether or not we like that text, whether it holds our interest...
...The faces of others are always finite...
...Why am I waiting anxiously for the cowboy in white to arrive and have it out with the villain in black...
...In this sense, tragedy is indeed an ironic genre...
...Good literature is a cultural anomaly...
...First I get rid of the conventional masks...
...Literature is an ironic mask...
...These are all transparent faces, with no depth...
...Or masturbating girlies on picture postcards...
...This confrontation has its limits...
...Peer Gynt, who is saddened by the realization that he is like an onion and no amount of peeling could bring him closer to a hard core, actually expresses the Hegelian plaint of his creator...
...Society cannot exist without roles, and devises ideologies to go with them...
...It is impossible to discover the face...
...301 This is what a middle-class family in its comfortable house is supposed to look like...
...Not for a second do we maintain that our stories are true...
...All works are realist because in them an author's consciousness is patterned into a text...
...There is nothing wrong with this as long as we are aware of it...
...he is asked to show that they, too, are sensitive human beings...
...nor is it a world of matter—we cannot penetrate that either...
...Every writer worth his salt experiences the anarchistic temptation to unmask these grave-visaged monsters down to the bare bones...
...Indeed, state socialism entices us to raise questions...
...L v iterary works are judged to be truthful or mendacious by contemporary readers and by posterity according to whether or not they can be reconciled with their own ideologies...
...Classical works have endured because, having confused and cut through officially sanctioned iconographies, they never fulfilled their ideological functions, and therefore the proponents of various ideologies were defenseless against them—they could neither swallow them nor spit them out...
...Real literature always finds a perspective—that of the independent300 minded individual—from which both the prevailing and alternative hierarchy of roles can be observed with irony...
...We abandon one iconography, construct another, and are shocked to learn that after a while that is given official status somewhere...
...Let's look at the ideologically oriented writer for a moment...
...We can think of nothing that is not part of reality...
...they are not paranoid like Hitler and Stalin were, whose iconographies were murderously simple...
...Only others wear masks and we don't...
...Poor literature, what else can it do...
...Two infinities can't cross paths—two faces cannot contemplate each other...
...I am in moral sympathy with my profession because it questions the order-giver's mask...
...Where else could we live...
...All of us are infinitely more than what we seem, and our essential literature brings to light little bits of our extra dimensions...
...My world as a writer is right here in my head...
...Men and women reveal their innermost secrets in national magazines, and the secrets are no more different than two cans of sardines...
...It knows that's what it is...
...When seeking success, it's advisable to pretend you are not...
...Your face is not enough in demand...
...The 20th century has done much to obliterate the face...
...The writer is expected by his sponsors to enliven the approved but sketchy masks of the official culture...
...For us writers, the world at large is not a universe, for we cannot touch it...
...they have subordinates but no friends...
...they cannot be expressed openly, for their articulation offends the state culture whose cornerstone is the unverifiable assertion that all power belongs to the people...
...This voluble selfdismantling is what literature is all about...
...It's sheer illusionism to maintain that a talented writer can find one of the institutionalized iconographies totally congenial...
...The question becomes exciting when we have to define the essence of reality, and even more so when a body or institution, in order to keep the writer in check, has a monopoly over a definition...
...The people wearing these stern masks would rather push the starter button on atomic weapons than allow the sanctity of state 296 borders to be violated...
...A II state secretary shakes hands and wrinkles his brow like a state secretary should...
...Buy my book for ten dollars and take a trip through my mind...
...Its portraits are morally unclassifiable, though they give some people a chance to worry endlessly about whether or not a work is optimistic or pessimistic, realist or nonrealist, ethical or cynical—in short—enabling them to fret over questions that may be relevant to "useful" literature, but that are utterly meaningless when it comes to great literature...
...They make readers identify totally with roles deemed positive, and they get them to hate whole-heartedly roles deemed negative...
...If all goes well, they'll shudder, get aroused, rebel, cringe, taste the fear of death...
...If anything, he should be happy with them...
...That's where literature begins, with Napoleon's wet, chubby back bending over an army wash stand in War and Peace...
...Who would deny that all literature, including the dullest documentary variety, is fiction, a mask, whose truth cannot be verified...
...Actually, this scientistic theory is the twin sister of Marxist aesthetics, which also condemned literature to mirroring reality...
...For the readers' sake—and perhaps not only for theirs—we enliven and enhance ourselves...
...In the end, though, he may have discovered parallels between the two...
...From our easy chair we watch faces in a paroxysm of love and hate, in the throes of death...
...Ancestors, gods, demons have only masks—masks that, with their aggressive sharpness, rise above our redundant faces...
...He knows that he at least is not what he is supposed to be, and suspects that others are also not what they are trying to be, and this untamable deviation he exhibits in the cultural arena in the form of a personal confession or as a multicharacter self-portrait...
...those on the bottom are loyal, upright, wholesome...
...Eastern Europe is a place where cultural achievements—and the achievers—ought to be observed with serious epistemological doubts...
...if I don't, it's a death mask...
...They live up to their norms...
...then we become suspicious of them and tear them off...
...One of them was expropriated by state socialism, the other by consumer capitalism, although—because they were up against genius—neither system could do a perfect job...
...The present rulers of the world are at most hysterics...
...Today their rule is still not very attractive...
...but they squirm in it because it's uncomfortable...
...Literature expresses our culture's anxieties, its bad conscience, its selfdeprecating smile, its message to the centuries that we need not take things so deadly seriously...
...For us there is no orderly development, no progress, there are only more forceful lunges toward new suffering, new joys...
...We talk, tell stories, explain why we are right, keep redoing our self-portraits—there is so much literature in all of this...
...That's why they are so abstract, simplistic—truly human creations...
...Irrespective of their political rhetoric, they are members of a humorless world body...
...The writer is a makeup artist...
...In the pantheons stand the heroes and traitors, the charismatic leaders and brooding thinkers, the captains of industry and the chief magistrates, all of them acting out their roles, submitting to their masks...
...As though there were a difference between semblance and substance...
...Sholokhov's iconography was more complex than Stalin's...
...it is just possible that rule by intellectuals is not a passing phase but a new stage in civilization...
...make him a sexual deviant, a drug addict...
...A novel is invariably an author's self-portrait and his friends' caricatures...
...Thanks to this beneficial compound, today's outrage can be calmly classified tomorrow—its inferior elements can be melted down...
...Translated from the Hungarian by IVAN SANDERS...
...If he doesn't endow them with a few faults, how can their virtues shine...
...on the home screen guru-prostitutes offer us the secret of happiness—and themselves...
...And whatever is camouflaged eventually becomes the intellectual model of the age...
...it is like an imminent blow...
...The criticism that realist fictional characters are not real enough wins the prize for naivete...
...The ones on top live in plenty but in a spiritual desert...
...We are as honest as any travel bureau...
...Whoever is on top is selfish, narrow-minded, cynical...
...We can be murderers and suicides, seducers and cuckolds, great men and little men...
...Why should they be real...
...Let's face it: literature is anthropocentric...
...A girl looks at her dead father—he does look like a corpse for he resembles the dead she has seen on TV...
...it took a while for the latter to accept it...
...In societies whose ideals supposedly have already been realized, it is the intellectuals responsible for creating culture who are exercising more and more power, and becoming their culture's—and thereby their own—censors...
...If a political system can't create a pragmatically flexible iconography, then all those who will not conform to the roles sanctioned by it will become its enemies...
...EDs...
...I prefer party secretaries or bank presidents to such writers...
...it is at once sharpfeatured and enigmatic...
...We are always afraid that what we see is not the real thing, that the world of the senses conceals a terrible and sublime essence...
...Their conflicts are concealed...
...The more gifted he is, the more he relies on his own surest experiences, on what he knows about himself...
...We throw light on its mechanism, turn our consciousness inside out like a glove, show how it became the fulcrum of our diverse constructs...
...VI A symptom of a civilization in crisis: the face becomes vacant, devoid of mystery, an outline, a textbook illustration of the cult of money in the West, and of state power in the East...
...Return from clinical death and give an interview about the experience...
...A pompous statesman can still be an important statesman...
...It would be more difficult to conduct war if these picture books didn't get people to hate passionately traitors and deserters and enemy agents...
...The dock is not a tempting enough place for most writers not to want to conclude a more or less honorable separate peace with the official icons...
...The works conformed to neither iconography...
...As far as I am concerned, though, I wouldn't want my essence separated from my appearances, for this operation, if taken seriously, requires a bullet...
...then, at the end of the book, somewhat exhausted, they'll leave our minds...
...We observe the severe and intense face of our culture in party headquarters, executive suites, in nuclear bombers...
...Essence is but the mystical hypothesis of professors, who are not the most entertaining people in the world...
...Work out the strategy of spectacular hibernations...
...To the sensible observer, the manifold essences of our race are like a masked ball where the dancers are somewhat scrawny and the affair itself is a little tiresome...
...He is expected to make moving symbols out of bank presidents or party secretaries...
...That is why the iconography of great literature is so provocatively enigmatic...
...Take hormones, change your sex surgically—people are bound to pay more attention to an androgynous transvestite...
...We organize a sightseeing tour of our nightmares...
...then it tries to canonize it...
...Our mask is limited, but our face is elusive, showing itself only when we play our part ineffectively, when we abuse our role, or try to renew it...
...Let's pay attention to what people do rather than to what they say...
...The cliches of political life are rather crude: our allies are always right, the enemy is evil...
...The responses to the chimeras of yesterday's executions and today's arrests— the accusations, the complaints—are still neurotically monotonous...
...The mask is a metaphor for the face...
...it is the very tension between the two from which literature draws sustenance...
...nobody really expects them to be...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
