Political and historical upheavals that shape private life will, one may reasonably assume, also influence the nature of creative work; indeed, they have directly determined the reception of individual texts and, later, of the oeuvre as a whole, and thereby the problematic character of its canonisation. Accordingly, the reception of Páskándi’s work – its position within any normative hierarchy of values – can be regarded as at least dichotomous or bipolar, and more accurately as multiply fragmented. From the outset, it was subject to two distinct, divergent patterns of reception on a geographical basis: in Hungary, his work, which in Transylvania was gaining explosive popularity, came to wider attention only after a delay of several years. Even this required the shrewd outmanoeuvring of two censorship regimes and of the Romanian and Hungarian political power structures that confronted one another, and the two cultural spheres, by their very nature, related differently to these works in a new idiom. After his resettlement, the Romanian censorship apparatus – together with a total intellectual cordon sanitaire – could register it as a success that, from that point on in Transylvania, his name could not be printed in the press, his work could not be quoted, and his books became inaccessible.

In light of this dispersal of reception, we must immediately and unequivocally refute a longstanding common belief in literary history, which was popularised by his well-meaning friends who enthusiastically supported the writer and sought to create a ‘Páskándi cult’, yet during that period (the 1970s) only superficially surveyed the Transylvanian field: namely, that Páskándi’s plays were not performed either in Cluj or in other Transylvanian towns. (And this sounds very good in later appreciations: a heroic action of ‘mother-country’ assistance [i.e. support from Hungary as the cultural ‘motherland’], rescuing a much-suffering Transylvanian creator – even as thousands of intellectuals living under comparable conditions held their ground in anonymity.) In this ‘official’ register, the first Páskándi première (a platform reading) is linked to József Szabó and to Oradea (Nagyvárad): 1971, A bosszúálló kapus (lit. The Avenging Goalkeeper); and the first full-stage production: Cluj (Kolozsvár), 1973, Tornyot választok (lit. I Choose a Tower), directed by György Harag. The explanation offered for the delay is the impossibility of outwitting censorship, and the fear of reprisals from Party power [i.e. the communist party-state]. Yet the truncated intellectual life of Transylvania had a subsystem that has still not been adequately assessed: namely, the student culture of Cluj, which claimed Géza Páskándy’s ‘absurdoids’ as its own – indeed, as exclusively its own – and therefore assumed risks. Student and amateur ensembles, at times defying the threat of persecution, mounted his absurd plays continuously and in good time, even before József Szabó; what is more, Vendégség (lit. A Visit) also had an ‘amateur’ première that preceded the ones in permanent repertory theatres. This is an important datum for the reception of Géza Páskándi, though it still awaits proper processing: these student performances received an echo and press criticism comparable to that of the later ‘major-theatre’ productions (albeit largely confined to youth forums); university students recited his poems on platforms, and analysed them in literary circles and forums. This movement laid the groundwork for his later success. This cross-section of reception was erased by the writer’s departure for Hungary, but above all by the fact – already mentioned – that from 1974 onwards the Romanian press was not permitted even to mention his name. (Cf. László Szász: Hogyan (nem) találkoztam Páskándi Gézával? (lit. How I (Did Not) Meet Géza Páskándi?) In: idem, Az identitás elvesztése (lit. The Loss of Identity), Felsőmagyarország, 2012; and: Hitel, 2008/8.)

Equally problematic is the question of whether the author favours or dominates a particular mode or genre. In terms of letter-letter-count and page-count, as well as in terms of critical attention, dramatic form unquestionably appears decisive; yet if we track where his central themes and motifs find textual embodiment, a more balanced distribution across genres becomes characteristic. He continuously poured what he had to say into precisely the form demanded by the given theme. Insofar as specific thematic units (individual and community, national character and the sense of foreignness, power and morality, playful lightness and sombre, speculative profundity, the conflict between homeland–birthplace–nation-state) recur in every form, it may be stated that, at the level of intellectual emphases, the oeuvre displays a holistic uniformity, while its thematic and formal variety testifies to a centripetal scattering – to the ramifying solutions of novelty.

A popular, anecdotal characterisation of his work – the kind of oral story favoured in Transylvania, with its taste for paradox – has it that Páskándi entered prison as a brilliantly gifted young poet and emerged as a subversive writer of absurd drama. He began as a poet, and continued to think of himself as one. In 1957, besides the tragic event already alluded to (his arrest and imprisonment), another, happier event also proved fateful: his first collection, Piros madár (lit. Red Bird), was published, and might have set him on a poetic path. Instead, it became a legend at once, because, following his arrest, the book was pulped; his friends managed to save only twenty-odd copies. His pieces could become public property only after 1990; that is, the novelty of his youthful poetry did not directly contribute to the renewal of Transylvanian lyric, which was constrained by socialist conventions. And yet two forward-pointing motifs are already recognisable here: the coupling of the notions of purity and faith – such that, against faith in socialism (genuinely held at first, later enforced), subjective conviction can also bring forth the truth: “…mégis bennem él a remény, / hogy az igazság nem tünemény!” (lit. “…and yet the hope lives in me / that truth is not a mere apparition!”) Connected to this is the central motif of the title poem: “jaj, csak lássam szállni újra hitem piros madarát” (lit. “oh, if only I might see again the red bird of my faith taking flight”). The strict limits on the speakability of truth shape that lyric mode, which Gusztáv Láng characterised with the concept of ‘fragment lyric’ [in: Páskándi Géza Emlékkonferencia (Géza Páskándi Memorial Conference). MMA [Hungarian Academy of Arts], 2012] – and which, in Páskándi’s case, means stripping the poem of all convention; in its stock of motifs, it means liberation from cells and bars. And while his poetry becomes ever more playful (though studded with existential paradoxes), the concept’s condensed semantic charge runs through his texts until his death: “jaj gyanús ez a fény ez a szín mint rabnak / ki körüllesvén szorongva érzi magát szabadnak / midőn mögötte maradtak a cellák…” (lit. “oh, how suspicious is this light, this colour, to a prisoner / who, glancing around in dread, feels himself free / when the cells are behind him…’ (in the volume A Holdbumeráng (lit. The Moon-Boomerang), 1966). It flashes even into his latest, most playful poems – those deprived even of grammatical rules: “XXI-ik század búcsúzni tőled / No nem mert végét nem érjük…/ Nékem utolsó századvégem…/ Féreg fogyasztja glóriámat/ Szép kereken járja körbe /Így kulcskarikán illőt keresnek / Hogy nyithassanak egy-egy cellát...” (lit. “To bid farewell to you, twenty-first century / No – for we shall not reach your end… / For me, the last end-of-century… / A worm consumes my halo / It circles round so neatly / Thus, on a key-ring, they look for what fits / So they can open a cell or two…” Búcsú a XXI. századtól [lit. Farewell to the Twenty-First Century], 1989).

Today, posterity does not regard his poetry as his most significant mode of expression, even though it was in lyric that the ‘literary enfant terrible’ (as he himself, and his contemporaries too, liked to call him) could speak most authentically – together with what belonged to his role: his ‘stylistics of existence’, the insight that, under a totalitarian power, if one wishes to (sur)vive and create value, one must not confront authority openly; rather, one can (or must) articulate/conceal truth cunningly, embedding it in linguistic play and ambiguity within literature. With reference to his years in Romania, he defines his ‘stylistics of existence’ as a literary ‘periclism’: “The offspring of my multiple minority status. (…) The rest almost came of itself… including the fact that ‘one here, one there’: that is, for example, after my release from prison I almost always inserted an older poem confessing to a ‘worldview’ among my new verses. This was at once a signal – I criticise from within – and also a morsel tossed to the censor…” A megvallás [lit. The Confession], 69.)

The diminished prominence of his lyric within the forefront of his oeuvre, then, is not the result of a revaluation of aesthetic quality, but of two other reasons. Firstly, chronology – the intrusion of history: his first book initiated several lyric innovations, but because it was pulped it could not exert influence; during Páskándi’s time in prison, the group later inscribed in literary history as the first ‘Forrás generation’ [a major cohort of Hungarian writers in Romania associated with the series Forrás (lit. Source)] set out on its path (a group of which he might have been a member or leading figure), and during those same years it also started to develop the more metaphorical lyric mode Páskándi had initiated. Secondly, because the years of captivity’s horrors – by all indications – transformed his poetic personality in creative terms, enabling him to forge radical new forms of expression.

One summit (among others) of Páskándi’s poetry is A sárikás anyós (lit. The Sárikás Mother-in-Law), a volume of ‘grotesque epics’ (1979, published in Hungary), which brings the playfully soaring creativity of a writer liberated from the camp-like enclosure of minority existence, together with a holistic mixing of genres – and this is already something else: far more than lyric poetry. The title poem features a linguistic carnival with proper names, turning them into verbs and adjectives within name-built sentences: “Tódorzott, pálzott lányi élete, / elbódogzott pongrácni réteken, / már nem szabolcslott, lassan kármenült…” (lit. “she Tódored and Pálled his girlish life, / she Béla-Bódoged across Pongrácian meadows, / she no longer Szabolcsed, slowly she Kármened…”).

Its second piece (Tövis-köszörű a giccsemáné-kertben [lit. Thorn-Grinder in the Kitsch-Mane Garden]) is a self-reflexive persiflage of some essay topic, an ironic theorisation of the grotesque quality that increasingly permeates the oeuvre: “Versben a prózát át tudom lépni…/ De a lírai magot soha kikerülni soha (protestáns vagy katolikus ír-mag) / Szóval verseim megemelt szövegeim lehetnek bármik de piedesztálon / Most majd jöhet a próza” (lit. “In verse I can step across prose… / But the lyric kernel never bypass – never (Protestant or Catholic Irish seed) / In short, my poems, my elevated texts, can be anything on a pedestal / Now prose may come”).

And the ‘strictly confidential’ poem Föl-följelentés visszamenőleg (lit. Pressing Charges Repeatedly and Retroactively) not only indicates that he can now talk about prison, minority status, and humiliation with the elevation of historical perspective and dazzling linguistic virtuosity; it also suggests that Géza Páskándi, indeed, anticipated by (light-)years the great names and commonplaces of Hungarian and even European ‘ironic postmodernism’ (self-reflexivity of language, intertexts, textualism, palimpsest, and so on).

In dialogic forms – already at the height of his Cluj creative impetus – he achieved a novelty inaccessible to others, not only within Transylvanian and pan-Hungarian terms, but also by world-literary standards. At the turn of the 1960s into the 1970s, he renewed drama along two paths. At the end-point of one, at its zenith, stand Vendégség (lit. A Visit) and Tornyot választok (lit. I Choose a Tower), two monumental historical dramas which, in the eyes of Hungary’s populist writers [‘népi írók’ – a 20^th-century Hungarian literary movement emphasising rural society and national questions], elevated him into a culminating figure of Hungarian national classicism.

The other path is more winding, and – as we have seen – leads towards the interpretive ‘source’ of the ‘bourgeois’, ‘urban’ young intelligentsia, above all the students of Cluj. In its own time, neither camp understood that these two branches of his output (‘classical’ historical drama and avant-garde, existentialist absurd) sprang from a single trunk. The author himself recognised with complete clarity the shared origin of his many-stranded works only at the end of his life, when looking back on a completed oeuvre: “The greenhorn of events, the milk-mouthed lad of Histories, had scarcely freed himself from one dictator (Hitler) when the war and the enthusiasm of ending put him under the banner of some old-new dictators (Stalin and his disciples)… And under that banner, instead of brochures, I increasingly tucked other books under my arm…” And after reviewing his classics and referring to representatives of absurd literature, he begins to probe the origins of his genre of a new sensibility – the one he himself would call the ‘absurdoid’: “And after prison? The absurd thinkers and literary authors… I, for my part, had as if already known them a little… earlier, from Kálmán Mikszáth, Frigyes Karinthy, even from Áron Tamási… and perhaps from Endre Ady, from Attila József, the existentialists too.” (Curriculum vitae, 325.)

In other words, his absurd plays and dialogues reflect – symbolically – the inhumanity of the social present that determines our fate through logical-linguistic paradoxes; his historical dramas, by contrast, uncover those same absurdities as they excavate the past, as what continues into the present. Both arenas are constituted within the same ‘periclist stylistics of existence’ – the space of existential paradoxes.

Perhaps the best illustration of the secret of his ‘absurdoids’ (namely, that he formulated, in metaphorical texts, the defiant protest the university youth had no way of proclaiming) is the scene Őszinte pillanat (lit. A Frank Moment). Here, the lavatory attendant receives perpetually contradictory instructions from the authorities as to whether she must always whitewash, or whether she may freely expose to the public gaze the youth’s most intimate, wall-scratched, candid opinions. “So, it depends on you what picture my colleagues and I form of the youth… You are a patriotic lady! So they can see – we have youth,” the official explains. The attendant, bewildered: “But… the youth… at the front… or in a reformatory…” Then suddenly she realises what power has fallen into her hands: if required, she erases and invalidates; if required, she writes ‘texts’ in their stead, authenticating or substituting the existence of an entire (partly destroyed) generation.

The interpretation of an anachronistic, irrational social order is provided by A hadsereg borbélya (lit. The Army’s Barber), condensed into the simplest logical paradoxes. The regulation (any regulation) speaks with an infinitely simplified, precise logic: ‘The army’s barber is the soldier who is obliged to shave all those soldiers who do not shave themselves, but for the sake of saving time, he is forbidden to shave those who shave themselves.’ From this simple command, infinite complications follow – to (and through) death.

In essence, it is also the sharpened, logically paradoxical situations of (historical) existence’s absurdity that create the tension in historical dramas. His three major historical dramas written in Transylvania are masterpieces, marked by the clash between spiritual and political power, by the depiction of inescapable trap-situations, by characters sharply drawn through their speech-modes, and by the dramaturgical harmony of all these elements: tautly written, fast-moving texts of compressed language. Curiously (for reasons largely inferable at best), during his Hungarian period beginning in 1974, he revises these dramas: he loosens them linguistically, breaks them into more scenes and stage images, thereby blunting dramatic tension while bending towards a kind of narrative-epic form and cinematic quality. (Interpretation has not yet assessed the quality of these formal changes.) In these reconfigured frameworks, a motif – and an associated role-type – appears in his plays of the 1980s, which explains, in an ontological register, the survival capacity of East-Central European societies: namely, the figure and phenomenon termed by scholarship (László Szász) the homo medius, the ‘in-between human’. Perhaps unconsciously, but, in any case, at roughly the same time, this figure emerges in the work of János Székely, András Sütő, and Géza Páskándi. One of Páskándi’s most characteristic works in this thematic field is Medvebőrben (In a Bearskin), which, by a formally unconventional solution, places two temporal layers side by side – a worldview distorted by genuine ideological conviction at the beginning of the socialist era, and another distorted, at the end of the eighteenth century, by belated historical development. On both planes, the in-between human is recognisable: domineering downwards, abjectly submissive upwards – but in every case trapped, used as a mere instrument by the highest forces for their underhand ends.

A similar dramaturgical ‘message’ organises Augustus katonái (lit. The Soldiers of Augustus), or, among treatments of Hungarian historical subjects, Könyves Kálmán király (lit. King Coloman the Learned) and Vak Béla király (lit. King Béla the Blind). This dramatic type follows a practice different from his ‘Transylvanian period’, and it could be checked in an emphatically verifiable manner in terms of genre typology, if we were to compare his later conception with the principles he had earlier formulated theoretically. On 28 March 1972, Páskándi delivered an innovative lecture on historical drama to a large and interested audience; yet, for biographical reasons now known, given that he was under surveillance, the chair, the philosopher Sándor Tóth, prevented the raising of real or provocatively pointed questions. (Published: Utunk, 14 April 1972. It is striking that this, one of the best-constructed and most rigorously scholarly pieces in his entire oeuvre, was not selected into any of his – rather diffuse – posthumous essay volumes.) He defends the politically disapproved dramatic genre of the period with arguments of aesthetic quality: a work of aesthetic value ‘may be artistically right even if, from the standpoint of chronicler-like fidelity to historical events, it may not be’. Embedding the matter in the continuity of literary history, he distinguishes and analyses six types of historical drama; and, as though theorising the literary ideal he himself represented, he establishes a ‘legal defence’ of parable forms. “The difference between the parable and the genuine historical drama lies chiefly in this: in the parable the exemplum-tendency is immediately evident, whereas the true historical drama only associatively flashes up the parabolic element as a possible interpretation.”

As we move towards the end of the 1980s, this tight structure – virtually compelled by the parable form – begins to loosen increasingly in his work; and, particularly in genres close to the essay, self-repetition and a more expansive textual labyrinth become dominant – sometimes to the benefit of aesthetic effect, at times to its detriment, with fluctuating results. With a touch of ‘Páskándi-esque’ irony, one might say that, freed from the constraints of brutal dictatorship and moving away from it, his texts begin to flow ever more unrestrainedly, and the author produces several ‘illustrative historical dramas’ – of a kind he had previously valued less.

In terms of their modality – that is, the relation between the author and the principles of textual organisation – similar processes may be observed in his prose poetics. The masterfully wrought short prose of the Cluj period is primarily created by a mode of condensation in which spatial and temporal planes blur into one another inextricably. The protagonists thus exist simultaneously on a virtual level of existence generated by bare consciousness and on a real one, governed by society’s laws; their actions – or (in the case of non-acting, stripped-bare) existence – are driven, in the background, by the narrator’s linguistic inventions and paradoxical logic. This is most characteristic in the stories Weisskopf úr, hány óra? (lit. Mr Weisskopf, What Time Is It?), Mitológiai pillanat (lit. Mythological Moment), and A hitfejtő (lit. The ‘Faith-Decoder’).

The last of these – placed within the arc of the oeuvre, now regarded as complete – also marks one station in Páskándi’s conception of faith and religion. In his early work, presumably, he is concerned primarily with religion as a state-building and/or nation-preserving institution; the parable-dramas and parable-tales point in this direction. A kind of resting-point on the movement from a rational, intellectual-historical interpretation of religion towards faith-based religion is captured in a verse situation: “Instead of ‘Creed’ – ‘I believe ever more’, / says my mouth / …this tormenting surplus is my homeland…” (Hiszekegy helyett [lit. In Place of the Creed]).

The late stories, with their altered tone, thus realise the parable form by inclining towards the Bible: when, based on readerly habit, we might expect a plot-turn, the text suddenly sidesteps events; and if we then suspect a philosophising disquisition, some linguistic-logical surprise follows – yet the text characteristically turns into parable. And it does so by the method of parable reminiscent of biblical exempla, as Jesus most often responds to provocative questions: not in the manner typical of our formal logic schooled in Greek–Roman philosophy, but by elliptical bestowal of meaning – metaphorically, by exemplum – which, in each era, awaits new interpretation. A szörnyszülött (lit. The Monster-Born), 1985, and the Ézagh-történetek (lit. Ézagh Stories), published posthumously from manuscripts, present a narrator who, from a Buddha-like meditative posture, formulates a Jesus-like message, illustrating it with a thousand and one parabolic tales.

The appearance is that, in Páskándi’s oeuvre, the novel did not for decades rise to the significance of the genres analysed so far. One can only conjecture, yet the distribution of genres suggests that the large-scale novel – cut from a single material and requiring continuous cohabitation with story-shaping – sat uneasily with his unsettled working method. A poem, a short story, an ‘absurdoid’ dialogue can all be born from a single flash of an idea and can be ‘written’ in two or three runs at the desk. It is therefore not surprising that, until the end of the 1980s, only two works that can be called novels appeared – and that in this genre he created the least that was novel, up to what may be considered as his final period.

The earlier of the two (Beavatkozás (lit. Intervention)) is novel chiefly within a Romanian-Hungarian literature forced into tragedy and extreme seriousness: it is an entertaining crime story, lacking originality when measured against the genre’s classics; it was published as a quota-task, in small instalments, in Ifjúmunkás [a Hungarian-language youth workers’ newspaper in socialist Romania]. The latter (Az árnyékfejtők [lit. The Shadow-Decoders], 1988) is the large-epic experiment of a creator who survived terrifying years of prison and camp, yet for some reason did not undertake (for example, in the manner of Aladár Kuncz’s masterpiece) a diary, memoir, or other work of documentary prose; here he experiments instead with a grotesque, ironic portrayal of the complexity of human and power relations.

Then, in 1989, A sírrablók (lit. The Grave-Robbers) appeared – a distinctive writerly response to Romanian village demolitions [Ceaușescu’s ‘systematisation’ programme: the forced restructuring and destruction of villages] – and drew critical attention. An apocalyptic work, it organically incorporates a range of formal innovations from twentieth-century world literature, as well as the author’s earlier stylistic devices. The first part evokes an essayistic ‘lexicon realism’, which functions as a kind of preliminary interpretation of the sociography-imitating monologues that follow. Here, the ‘absurdoid’ genre is turned inside out: using the realist (sociographic) means of fiction-making, it renders the absurd Romanian reality visible. The story is infinitely complex, but in essence, the dream-monologues ultimately reveal that the ‘narrators’ are speaking and shaping their stories in a madhouse, as a result of coercive influence; and also that: “It is the mad who must speak where the sane are silent.”

Several years after his death, it emerged that Páskándi had also completed the continuation of this epic-length novel (Szekusok (lit. Secret-Police Men), 2007). On first reading, this story too is a ‘sound recording’, though now in a single monodic stream of text: self-exculpation, explanation, confession, accusation, and paranoid narration. By constantly altering the presentation of events and characters – and the manner of speech – the ‘narrator’ performs many roles, often mutually contradictory and therefore misleading, until at last the gaze of an informant. A professional szekus [secret-police officer in communist Romania], criminal, and murderer becomes recognisable. Presumably in the different phases of a split personality: a janissary, produced by the particular – and, one hopes, unrepeatable – Ceaușescu regime [Romania’s communist dictatorship under Nicolae Ceaușescu]. In this way, Secret-Police Men also becomes a novel of identity, and above all of identity’s deprivation; hence the shock, when, from the mouth of a murderer outside all humanism and morality (yet also arguably a victim of social traps), one of the novel’s key thoughts is voiced: “…in this world, the redistribution of guilt has not taken place.”

The Grave-Robbers and Secret-Police Men constitute a monumental, epic, interconnected corpus as the closing cadence of our twentieth-century literature. The earlier volume appeared precisely when the question of personal identity also became a dominant theme in Hungarian literary scholarship, and when leading interpretive communities were pronouncing – of Péter Nádas’s likewise monumental and valuable work – that it was “one of the century’s greatest books” (Endre Bojtár). Emlékiratok könyve (lit. A Book of Memories) probes and dissects, with narcissistic resolve, the ultimate limits of the individual’s feasibility. Páskándi does something similar, in an equally complex, layered (though perhaps – God forgive me! – more readable) novel structure, with the difference (or surplus?) that in this context individual value does not invariably prove of a higher order than the (human, cultural) qualitative expectations developed over centuries within some (for instance national) community.

Consequently, another item on the agenda of our literary historiography is the canonisation of Géza Páskándi’s work.

[2015]

Géza Páskándi

Selection of works