To Cave Explorers From the West: Some Words of Advice from Hungary
Konrad, George
I have been living in Budapest for decades now, but I wouldn't dare to say that I know the city. Everyone there seems to know something that I don't. Simply looking at other people is enough to...
...There are those who hide their manuscripts...
...This intimacy is strange...
...The criminal trial is typical Central European theater...
...To create an "authentic account," all one need do is add a touch of local color to the stereotypes of journalism...
...As for values, we live in a no-man's land...
...The newcomer, who has spent less than a month in Budapest and is already writing a book about it, may think that our city is an open-and-shut case...
...So that he will not be silenced, a writer remains silent—or he will be silent in many words, to avoid the unpleasantness writers face if they actually say something...
...Our burden seems to us the more oppressive...
...This dream is oppressive and yet alluring...
...We do not live in the delirium of change...
...The ideology of state socialism is on the decline, but the ideologies of democratic socialism or liberal democracy have not arrived yet...
...Above the clouds, the sun is always shining...
...Since writing is a dangerous enterprise, and one pays a price for doing it, whoever writes what he thinks is an adventurer and must take into account every possibility, like a prisoner planning a jailbreak...
...We have long known and kept an eye on each other...
...History smiles on some and not on others...
...I do not assert that a person is better simply because his lot is hard...
...One genius goes to ruin, another does not...
...Not for us reliable, wise mediocrity, the clear-cut, consistent principles of life: prudence, thrift, attention to detail, precision, the painstaking accumulation of successes...
...The ones who don't answer letters, the ones who miss the great opportunity, the hard drinkers, the babblers, the porch-sitters, the deadlinemissers, the promise-breakers, the braggarts, the immature, the monstrous, the undisciplined, the easily offended, the ones who insult each other to death but cannot break off relations...
...It may be that our constant soul-searching is the most valuable thing...
...The blow falls, and it wears a human face...
...merchandise may be had from us at a lower price...
...It may happen that you will become involved in something, and then it will be painful to tear yourself away if you wish to return to reality...
...Daily, we tear apart and cross-examine our every belief and borrowed idea...
...Miracles in literature still happen...
...For the most part, Central European writers do battle, using words, with this powerful, incalculable force that dwells among us, a force that demands conformity and punishes truthtelling...
...In any case, all of us are deformed by our civilization...
...If you want to improve the system, you must accept with humility that you are guilty and that the authorities are right...
...There are unintentional heroes...
...You assert your rights, but that only makes the situation worse...
...there are so many other factors...
...Even so, it is possible that interesting years are coming...
...Normal Western people don't get into such situations...
...The tension between speaking out and not speaking out is beneficial for art...
...In this improbable utopian situation our present literature would seem unnecessarily subtle and windy...
...From the crow's nest the ship's boy does not cry, "Land ho...
...Relativism is our peculiarity...
...We can look at a thing one way and then another...
...Paradoxes flower among the old pieces of furniture: threadbare, intricate, weatherbeaten relationships...
...A friend of mine once said, in response to a rebuke, that he was not hitting the wall with his head, the wall was hitting him...
...This vow demands the use of a special state language, a language designed to create a generation of writers who do not reach adulthood...
...Down here, this miserable self-pity—both individual and collective—interferes with thought, with our ability to see ourselves objectively...
...Many interesting, intense people from here have wandered all over the world, and many have stayed put...
...No doubt...
...For an understanding of Central Europe an excursion is not enough...
...Western ridicule counters Eastern inertia...
...Who knows...
...we are not empire-builders...
...We are Europe in the past tense, the exotic next door...
...After a short while, I realized that I was a caricature...
...The fortunate sometimes feel an instinctive aversion to the unfortunate...
...How would we view our literature, if, by the touch of a magic wand, freedom of the press sprang from the soil...
...Everything in it is wretched, yes, but for some reason you feel at home here, and, what is more, there is food for thought if you make friends with the natives...
...Such enforced adolescence produces resentment, the longing to retire into a cave, to make that cave a labyrinth...
...There are the shortages of wartime, there is the whiff of danger, the romantic accounts about how good people get into trouble because they are good...
...Time is not money here...
...We talk a lot, we sit at meetings...
...There is a lot of conversation, if you like conversation...
...we report this in various ways, or we report this in one voice...
...Sometimes there are violent, drunken brawls...
...Who chooses to be a hero...
...Our conversations branch like a luxuriantly leafy houseplant...
...With such fairy tales we pass our history on to the younger generation...
...With both cynicism and pathos, a combination unfamiliar in the West...
...If anything happens here, it will be because the Central Europeans do not acquiFALL • 1988 • 465 Words of Advice esce, convinced that they are destined for something more...
...Economical use of time carries with it a harmless superficiality...
...there are those who disguise their thoughts...
...From Budapest one may look upon life no less effectively than from any other spot on earth...
...Simply looking at other people is enough to make me feel that I am just one of many passers-by...
...Neither the prewar values nor the contemporary Western values nor the contemporary Eastern values are applicable here...
...But there is a longing, a bitter sense of deprivation, that the citizen of the West has never experienced...
...Here we are inbred...
...On a sixteenth-century Spanish map, Europe is a reclining lady...
...as long as we do not become wild and cynical...
...There are those who console themselves with the idea that the palm tree grows taller under a weight...
...The Western observer marvels how widespread ridicule of the state is here, although the ridiculers are all, in one way or another, people of the state, if for no other reason than that they are its hostages...
...our mind understands the Western way of thinking better...
...It contains progress and fatalism...
...We are the needy relatives, we are the aborigines, we are the ones left behind—the backward, the stunted, the misshapen, the down-and-out, the moochers, parasites, conmen, suckers...
...We are irritating, excessive, depressing, somehow unlucky...
...What can one conclude from this...
...Here one may learn how Eastern and Western mentalities contend—in our heads and in our beds...
...If suddenly no courage or morality was needed to write the truth...
...There are moral judgments, cynical jokes...
...It's no use resisting...
...For us, something else...
...There is no formula for it...
...But does not art benefit from subtlety and concealment...
...He hurries along to the next—to Prague, let's say, or Cracow—in order to dash off the same description there, so that the latest cliché about Central Europe may emerge...
...We are at the geographical center of Europe...
...The deeper beneath the surface we go, the more illusory the change...
...Our burden is the state...
...It is not our experience that everything has undergone a dizzying transformation...
...The nature of the writing profession is such that before one sits down at one's desk, one must leave one's identity on the coat rack in the front hall...
...Premeditation and drunkenness...
...So we are treated badly...
...Nor can they remove the state from their thoughts of the future...
...A new guest drops in, spends some time, and knows everybody—he knows even the people he does not know...
...Literature is one attempt at breaking out...
...q TRANSLATED BY JAMES A. TUCKER 466 • DISSENT...
...Sentimental, old-fashioned, childish, uninformed, troubled, melodramatic, devious, unpredictable, negligent...
...We have been pressed together into a small space...
...People in this region must make dangerous decisions even when they are not looking for trouble...
...Our obsession is to put everything into question...
...Although democratic experiments have been short-lived and unsuccessful, they have not been wasted...
...In conducting their lives, they can never forget the presence of the state, its prying eye...
...Our land is not as spacious, our spirit not as expansive as the Russians...
...For mutual understanding, tolerance is not enough...
...we do not brag about our power...
...By this I mean people who, while writing, keep an eye on what is permitted and what is not...
...that is where we meet...
...one also needs complicity...
...So too a sense of being subject to the powers-that-be which the writer in the West has never felt...
...Seeing that a human being, from birth, is sentenced to death, it is not so difficult to 464 • DISSENT Words of Advice accept that any misfortune is permanent and irrevocable...
...her head is the Iberian peninsula, and her navel is Buda...
...We live in the vicinity of Western Europe, in roughly the same cultural sphere, among the monuments of Europe's past...
...The most advanced form of such obedience is when a subject, being forbidden, does not even enter the author's mind...
...We are not on the stage of world history...
...That they deserve better...
...As long as we do not say anything strange, sharp...
...They isolate you, bug your room, break you down, lock you in—and worse...
...To our little world, its immediate family and its extended family, not only our relatives and friends belong, but our enemies as well...
...A new era of history would dawn if the events in Hungary of 1956 could be called, in the press, a "revolution" by those who feel it was a revolution, and a "counterrevolution" by those who feel it was a counterrevolution...
...you cannot avoid this persecution...
...We find, FALL • 1988 • 463 Words of Advice instead, that the essentials are permanent: homes, friendships, the basic questions...
...The soil of this motherland, one can sink into it like mud...
...One can jump heroically head-first from our world of cryptic language only into mere journalism...
...Even extraordinary talent cannot explain it...
...But neither do I believe that a person is better because his burden is light...
...A liberal value system is fine, but the practice of it is a problem...
...It is wiser to throw yourself on their mercy than to insist with increasing desperation that you are innocent...
...From this oral literature, never printed, never recorded, something has settled into our books...
...An observer might think that such people are on bad terms, but no: they are merely getting things off their chests...
...People are accustomed to slight us...
...We are sometimes more than normal, sometimes less...
...Although our apartments are bugged, the talk flows in torrents...
...Our life is crazier, more extravagant, but richer than the one from which you have come...
...As a Hungarian, for whom life has been a little easier than for our neighbors, I have played the role of an "American Uncle...
...There are places we can go, people we can see, if we don't want to be alone...
...Their energy, conserved, repressed, will break out in a later generation, with greater force...
...We judge our circumstances, straitened by the East, from a point of view influenced by the West...
...From here we venture out into the larger world, then drift back, and cling together, nursing wounds of imagined offenses...
...Success comes not to the majority but to a few...
...the Westerner's is the voluntarily adopted cliché of majority rule...
...There is a tight barrier that is all but impossible to break...
...We can share our experience only by living it together...
...It would be like emerging from a communal neurosis...
...We live in symbiosis with the state, by virtue of the fact that we live in East Central Europe, where the majority of public people have taken a vow that they will neither speak nor write on certain subjects...
...People smile at us, pityingly, as long as we do not suddenly become unpleasant...
...as long as we do not stare at our nails and bare our teeth...
...We are cheap labor...
...Be careful, or you will become entangled here...
...A few of our visitors have said that during their stay they found something warm, as if remembered from a previous life...
...people bring us their old newspapers as a gift...
...Central European culture is both a half-breed and a cross-breed...
...It shows that a person is helpless against others, against a faceless power...
...We are the maladjusted, the complainers intoxicated by failure...
...Come and visit, Western observer, but leave here in time...
...Much has changed in our lives, but many things on the surface...
...We are treated badly...
...We would exclaim, amazed: What on earth was this complicated nonsense we were working on...
...Letters from us come sloppily typed, unnecessarily detailed...
...In Central Europe, in the twentieth century— which began with World War I—it is not unimaginable, not even particularly surprising, for you to find, opening your eyes in bed one morning, as in a scene from a Kafka novel, that two strange men are standing next to your bed and telling you that you are under arrest...
...And one must slough off the stereotypes of one's environment...
...people do not fear us...
...But that quality that we generally call "Western" is, for all its advantages, the price we pay for the hasty clich...
...The Westerner who travels in East Central Europe also travels through his own wartime past...
...The trains run slower, the movies run slower...
...The resurrection of human dignity here occasionally assumes dramatic proportions...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
