Eva-Marie Kallen

An Interview With Péter Nádas

–Eva-Marie Kallen & Michael Blumenthal

Kallen: Péter Nádas, your book, The Life Runner, describes a twelve-month period during the years l987/88. In it, you recount autobiographical experiences and observations. To begin with I would like to ask: What was your intention, as you wrote this text? How did you experience this period, and how does this period of the so-called "changes" stand for you in relation to what is happening today?

Nádas: I was writing the book during the time when the entire system was already in a state of collapse, but had not yet collapsed. One couldn’t yet foresee what would become of it. One could only imagine the worst, namely that the Russians would begin shooting. Life under the collapse of this system, under these chaotic circumstances, was no longer livable, no longer capable of being mastered. I was therefore forced to step out of my narrative world and to search for an open form. A novel is always a closed form, and I was forced to search for an open form, in which everyday impressions could somehow fit.

K.: Can you describe somewhat the atmosphere within your own psyche that moved you to write what you wrote, and to make the observations you made?

N.: This (political) situation became so apparent, that I not only had to go in search of open forms, in which not merely fiction in its purest form ruled, but in which something of what was happening before my very eyes on the street could be felt. . . . I therefore also had to become something of a director. This led me in the direction of completely departing from fiction and moving into the realm of the essay. In the past several years I have done a great deal of essayistic work, which is a much more direct manner of reacting to these developments.

But I also made an effort not to abandon my usual terrain, but rather to remain there; perhaps to alter the margins, but nothing else. Not suddenly to become a prophet, a politician, or an all-knowing person, for I’m surely not that. I am tied to the word, and to my desk–these are my borders, I am the master of that house, I believe, at least insofar as my mother tongue is concerned, and I need to enter this domain in all its possibilities–a field which formerly I did not even enter.

K.: There were attempts made to draft you into certain political or half-political camps: either you were a member of the bourgeoisie or a conservative, and a would-be revolutionary would then stand in opposition to you. Somehow the attempt is always made to get at an interesting and highly complicated person by means of such ‘prosthetic’ devices. Could you attempt to describe how your attitude towards writing in the intervening six, seven, eight years since the genesis of this book has changed, if, indeed, it has?

N.: Essentially nothing has changed. But, nonetheless, a large change has taken place! Formerly I was somehow stalled or locked into my writing. It was the one possibility of somehow saving myself over the years, over the course of this unreasonable life–and that was my biggest problem: the fact that it was not possible to bring life into harmony with reason. In order to bring my own, personal life into harmony with reason, in order to protect what was personal to me, I was forced to retreat to within my own domain, my own country: to go back to the language, or to allow myself to be pushed back into it. This was truly a salvation, for I was able, in my own way, to fashion a kind of reason out of this folly. I attempted to analyze processes and gestures, to take them apart and then put them together again. And this was a reasonable occupation. I was able to approve of, or justify, this independently as the meaning of life. Without this near-manic activity, I could not have survived. It was a salvation, but also a prison, a cage.

This activity protected me, but it also made me ill, as I was forced to come to know all the possible illnesses of isolation. Nor could I avoid the illnesses and complaints that accompany it. And this period is now over. I no longer require that way of life. The words required to free me or hold me prisoner are now (publicly) present–they deal with me, not I with them.

I now have, as though none of this had ever happened, two further possibilities: I can either free myself through words and then act freely, or I can allow myself to be taken prisoner by words and then ostensibly behave accordingly. The windows are now open. I personally have grown much more protected as a result of this. Through these circumstances I can now experience my personality as somewhat sheltered, not as at the mercy of others.

K.: In other words, what was previously a kind of asylum for you is now a rather spacious country.

N.: Yes, it has become a wide open field.

K.: I wanted to avoid that word!

N.: But then we Hungarians would respond: "Oh, Louise, relax!"

K.: Well, that might immediately become the source of my next question, which is, where do you now find the obstacles against which you write. What resisting forces exist for you today?

N.: The obstacles are neither social nor personal. Rather, the material itself contains an unbelievable resistance. And, with the years, this resistance becomes neither greater nor smaller. The materials of speech, the materials of thought, the materials of observation, the issue of sense or nonsense. All that with which one regularly occupies oneself. All of this, of course, is socially, politically, and also personally connected, each has its independent borders. The political borders are not the same as my personal ones. The borders of worthwhile knowledge are entirely beyond what I am–or was–able to enter with my limited means. These borders have been moved and inaccurately drawn, but they are nevertheless there. It is this–and not so much social or political circumstances–that I have to contend with.

K.: You say in one of the episodes about which you write in The Life Runner, that you are a professional observer. Is that to say that this observer Péter Nádas is actually only interested in the socio-political context insofar as it is manifested in the behavior of the human objects observed by him?

N.: Yes, and no. I believe I am an observer, but not a voyeur. When I observe something that is undefined to me, I of course observe it for a time, as anyone would, but then I turn my head and no longer want to see it. I can well imagine what follows; everyone has this capacity, idea or fantasy. I wrestle with observation and realization, with the relationships of part to whole. This has occupied me for decades. I am a manic and passionate person, who perpetually seeks to curb those same manic and passionate tendencies. But insofar as my writing is concerned, I attempt, not exactly to be unrestrained, but to somehow constrain and bind those passions and manias with the most microscopic, the smallest, the most deliberate movements. They are not ends in themselves for me, but I attempt, rather, to conceive of my life–or, insofar as fiction writing is concerned, the lives of my protagonists–as a whole. In other words, I want to acknowledge that the social and political realms have their roles, but if I choose and wish to carefully observe these roles, I must naturally interest myself far more in politics, and in social contacts, than I reveal in my writing. I am also quite passionate with regard to those realms, and I take more of a part in them than I would actually like to, because I need it. I need it as a citizen, and I need it as a craftsman, as a professional observer.

K.: It is not exactly easy to speak of your writing, for the reason that–in my eyes at least, in this respective context–you usually circumscribe the available field of reference in such a manner that nothing remains open. That is to say that even the most minute observation which belongs, or might belong, to the topic being addressed–and which obviously, yet unexpectedly, must be part of it– respectively circumscribes a field, and that field is so immaculate, so truly like a sphere, that it is decidedly difficult to speak about these works. For me, for example, in the course of reading The Life Runner, I was fascinated time and again by how you make note of the theme that harmony is obviously disturbing to human beings. Harmony exists in order to be immediately attacked as an enemy. Or you speak of that absolutely most disturbing of all forces–the vast love and affection which completely absorbs its object. These are two observations which apply completely, but with regard to which one doesn’t usually make this type of accounting. Behind all this, of course, there stands a crassly Hellenistic spirit. Do I interpret you correctly in this respect?

N.: Yes, I have gone back to Hellenism, to the Greeks, in order to free myself from the fragmentary. Our life has fallen into fragments–mine, everyone’s. We can no longer conceive of life as a whole, because there are no longer any hierarchies which can naturally be deduced from the existence of gods, or from a loving God or a terrible God. This God no longer exists, or else he only exists as a cultural formation. It is precisely this fact that makes life unbearable: that we are culturally bound to gods and God–that is to hierarchies–but at the same time we no longer, even momentarily, acknowledge these hierarchies. We are opposed to these hierarchies. And, because of this, an ongoing conflict between harmony and disharmony arises. We are for disharmony, and crave harmony only for ourselves, but not for anyone else. But this cannot be. This thought has occupied me for decades, and I am very affected by it, for I myself aspire to this harmony–and am quite sure everyone aspires to it. But it can only be achieved at the cost of personal freedom, and, because it is a matter of sacrificing personal freedom, we immediately forego and destroy it.

K.: So, in your eyes, then, man is a being capable of harmony, who chases a certain phantom in his brain, perhaps from phylogenic sources, but who no longer has the capacity–with certain exceptions, perhaps–to satisfy this ideal, this deep longing, within himself?

N.: I would more readily say that there are cultures which contain the capacity to harmoniously approach one another, and there are cultures which do not. There are phases during which a culture has the capacity to achieve something harmonious, and phases in which the same culture is incapable of it. Our culture at the present time is incapable of doing so. The longing for harmony has been preserved, it has its legitimate and wonderful forms, its wonderful moments, in which it is actually realized, and at the same time it also contains processes of dissolution which may become indicators of destruction, of the end–parts which are no longer capable of providing a harmonious feeling, because they are no longer connected to one another.

K.: Mr. Nádas, Hungary has always been a place of the spirit and of literature. Is that still so in the present situation, and do you think it will remain so in the future?

N.: Yes, I think that it will remain so, because Hungary has always been a country which historically stood at a crossroads between East and West. If one simply considers the fact that Ukrainians and Chinese, Russians and Albanians have all gained a foothold in Budapest today, along with the Mafia–but Albanian intellectuals, for example, do not need Budapest only as a place of refuge. It is truly astonishing how many of them have settled in the city recently, and in my opinion the city has not merely retained its spiritual liveliness, but also has transformed itself in accordance with these new circumstances. I personally can’t stand it, but that’s another issue. I am a refugee. I long ago fled the city, and I don’t want to go back: it is too much for me. That is more a matter of my own manic and passionate disposition. But I see, and am informed, that life in Budapest these days is very interesting.

K.: And you do not fear that these new obstacles now exert a destructive effect on the spirit?

N.: Yes. I myself, by the way, am very deeply affected by what, from an economic or financial or organizational perspective, is happening to Hungarian culture at this moment. Everything is going downhill. Even my publishing house has, for years now, been drifting into danger, and it is highly questionable whether they will continue to be able to publish my books. But that is another question. We are somehow accustomed to these kinds of dangers. I am convinced that the writing of books doesn’t depend exclusively on financial considerations. I have spent my entire life in such a way that I only wanted to have enough money or financial means as was necessary to write the next book–in other words, not to starve. And I am convinced that my colleagues are no different. If it had not been this way over all these years, then Hungarian culture could not have survived. And it has been this way for a hundred and fifty years. I’m not saying that it is preferable! I’m not saying that it’s just! It is, in fact, highly unjust. It is disgraceful. But it is not I who should be ashamed. I’m not speaking in the name of my colleagues, but I know that they–since there are only very few of them whose books are published abroad, and who, therefore, can live from them–continue to work, even though they find themselves in much worse situations than myself.

K.: Péter Nádas is a nihilist, I think. He must be a nihilist, according to the sentences he utters. I would gladly hear a bit more from you as to how you in fact cope with this incompetence of the human being–of his physical as well as his psychic being–which you perpetually are on the trail of, even without being a voyeur. . . . How are you able to tolerate these things at all?

N.: I have more than once in my life reached the edge of my possibilities. I am in the fortunate situation of being so unhappy that I already once died of a heart attack, and was brought back. I was in the nether- world for three and a half minutes, and was revived. I had those wonderful experiences one has in death–that really are beautiful and wonderful. Possibly if one dies a gruesome death–violated, shot, or buried for days under a collapsed house–it might be awful. But to experience a sudden death like I did is wonderful. That was the outermost edge, a further one doesn’t exist. But after I was brought back, it seemed to me that, at this outermost edge, I paid a price for all my previous border violations. That I always drove everything towards the edge of possibility. That is a price which I naturally am glad to pay, but there is a drive hidden behind it. A drive to speak of something of which, in my opinion, one speaks too symbolically and too abstractly in European literature, or, at the present time, doesn’t speak of at all. That is the suffering, the perpetual suffering, which permanently accompanies every person, and about which there is not much one can do. That is: our culture has the quality of forging civilization out of suffering. Discoveries, technology. Structures which, to all appearances, have or should have everything within their grasp, but which ultimately don’t have it within their grasp. Rather we miss, defraud, and maintain entire societies in the unfortunate belief that they can achieve or gain a conquest over death. Yet we are not able to do anything about a human being’s greatest fear, his greatest worry: death.

Even though this death, if it doesn’t come about in a gruesome way, is possibly not all that bad. Our culture has rendered it bad. To lie in a hospital is awful. That’s inhuman. One is reduced, even in the best hospital. Because all of civilization’s technology is far in advance of what we–as cultured, sensually bound up, human beings–can accept.

K.: Is it your opinion that the machine of civilization was developed in order to remove or displace suffering, or do we put up with it because we are possessed of an inner brutality, and joyfully attribute to others all possible evils in order to somehow succeed in getting hold of a segment of our life in which we might be free of such terrors?

N.: I experience it as the case that we have problems neither with civilization nor with culture. We just happen to have this civilization, we have this culture, we have these civilizational and cultural problems. But there are cultures where a balance between fate and technology is achieved for a very long time. Hans Jonas writes about Roman culture, and about antique cultures in general, but particularly the Roman, from a very interesting point of view–that renunciation was built into that culture. Renunciation is not built into our culture. It is because of this that the civilizing influence has gained the upper hand and attempted to govern the culture. Today technology governs. The balance between fate and technology has been overturned. Technology’s upper hand generates the belief that we can solve everything, although we cannot solve everything–not only not everything, but in fact very little. Only by way of balance can we limit the civilizing urge, limit technology, and not allow anything to dictate to us.

K.: In other words, this renunciation of renunciation in a culture, which then in effect only becomes a "culture" in quotation marks, automatically leads to unhampered growth and barbarity, which then produce the things of which we spoke, and for which you perpetually find synonyms in your literature.

In conclusion I would like once again to get into the social relevance of your writings. You take part in the society in which you live, you frequently publish flamboyant articles in newspapers, and you are an alert citizen of the nation of Hungary, as well as of the nation of Europe, of which we at least have a conception. Because of this I would still like to gain a bit more clarity as to your assessment of development. I think, as you were promoting your book-length conversations with Richard Swartz concerning the recent changes, that you perhaps felt differently with respect to a possible new European future. In the meantime you seem to see things somewhat differently.

N.: Yes, that’s right, I see it completely differently today. You most surely must have gleaned my hopes from the lines of those earlier dialogues, and those hopes are now gone. I was fundamentally mistaken. I was completely wrong in my assessment of the spiritual prerequisites. I didn’t notice, or didn’t want to believe, how far the large democratic societies had distanced themselves from their enlightened roots over the last fifty years. I believed that the nations of Europe, in the course of their natural growing together, could build upon a foundation of reason. But they can no longer afford to. They are built, rather, upon personal or national egotisms. It is not a moral question, nor is it a question of responsibility. The structures of the European superpowers that set the tone simply will not allow solidarity and reason to enter. Solidarity and empathy are only built into the structures of a society within a national framework. These large nations, as they are constituted at present, cannot comply with the demands of the times–of that I am certain. Because of this they bring all of Europe into grave danger, and we can see this with great clarity in the Balkan War. But not even that can bring a secure structural change to these societies.