Csak víz és levegő (lit. Only Water and Air)
Margit Ács’s first book, the short story collection Csak víz és levegő (lit. Only Water and Air), appeared in 1977, when its author – then serving as an editor at Szépirodalmi Publishing House – was thirty-six years of age. In the span of a life this is not so very much; indeed, seen in retrospect, one might even call it one of the most beautiful stages of human life. As a starting point for a literary career, however, it seems somewhat belated. In her autobiographical reflections Ács herself addresses this more than once. She confesses that she kept her writings concealed for five years: “The stories had been gathering in my drawer since 1970; no one knew of them save Mátyás Domokos…. My experience in publishing warned me most insistently of the bitter fate that awaits the self-appointed, the talentless scribbler in the literary world. Encounters with truly gifted writers struck the pen from my hand as well – the admiration, the awe. My first short story therefore came into being almost by chance: while engaged in some household task, a dialogue suddenly sounded in my head. I found it amusing, and, lest I forget it, I set it down. But by then I had already devised the situation for it and given it a little polish. I showed it to Mátyás Domokos, who marvelled that it was a coherent story of the very sort he had always cherished. Had he turned away in distaste, I would doubtless have abandoned short story writing altogether, for more than the loss of my own self-respect I feared placing my husband in an awkward position in his profession, as the spouse of a half-talented writer. Yet, since he encouraged me, I was eager to put myself to the test: after a two-character story, could I perhaps bring four figures to life?” [1]
Alongside her editorial work, Margit Ács was by this time also writing reviews and literary criticism – contributing to journals and, with a certain regularity, to Magyar Nemzet [lit. Hungarian Nation, a major Hungarian daily newspaper]. Encouraged by her husband, Mátyás Domokos, and driven too by an inner compulsion – “the distance between my own sense of worth and the condescending treatment accorded to a clever little woman had begun to weigh so heavily upon me that I could no longer endure it” – she made her decision: “I submitted the manuscript of the collection to Magvető Publishing House, and at the same time sent the stories round to the editorial offices of various journals.” The journals accepted her work; Magvető, however, returned the manuscript. And so it was, albeit against her inclination, that with the support of Endre Illés, playwright and director at Szépirodalmi Publishing House, Ács made her debut with her first volume, issued by Szépirodalmi itself.
Outwardly, it appeared a cheerful and spirited beginning – one might even call it a successful debut. Yet the author’s inner sense of worth, what Bakhtin termed the self-for-itself, and the self-as-seen-by-others – the external judgement of the profession – were by no means in harmony. The reception, she recalls, [2] was decidedly mixed: “the spectrum ranged from the debut book prize to being roundly disparaged; for the most part the tone of the stories was described as ‘delicate’, their subject-matter as predominantly love stories, and my ‘delicacy’ was excused, as it were, by my being a woman”.
Indeed, this femininity was noticed and remarked upon by almost everyone, and almost at once. The first collection contains five stories, each of them centred upon a female protagonist – or indeed upon women collectively (Néhány trükk [lit. A Few Tricks]). It is therefore hardly a grave misjudgement that critics should have described Margit Ács as a chronicler of the female soul. Nor even does this seem so, in light of what Győző Határ has written: [3] Among the “woman writers who purr in a feminine way, indulge in sentimentality, sprawl lazily, or gossip compulsively”, her female voice sounds strikingly new: Margit Ács is “an unusual blend in the alchemy of the writer’s temperament – a masculine spirit that turns feminine the moment she draws her bow; yet also feminine (especially in portraying the act of love from a woman’s side), but as soon as she catches herself in this, she immediately tenses her muscles, and her voice hardens into a masculine tartness”.
Ács’s entry into literature did not reveal, in terms of prose technique, a striking maturity or an overripe facility, nor yet the hesitant, fumbling search for direction of a novice. In some sense, she was simply ready. Her manner of writing – her gift for character portrayal, her power of evoking situations, her alertness in shaping plot and dialogue, her instinct for structure – bears undeniable witness to literary talent. Yet her psychological-realist method could, as Béla Márkus observed, be “regarded as conservative”, particularly in contrast with the fractured, fragmented forms and disrupted chronologies of the so-called postmodern prose then emerging. Neither her choice of themes nor the social standing of her characters struck critics as especially novel – artists, judges, engineers, housewives, local officials, assistant lecturers, zealous militiamen, near-illiterate factory girls, and above all (though not exclusively) intellectuals, most of them set within an urban milieu. Except, perhaps, in one respect: and it was precisely this that ruffled Margit Ács’s temper as she read the reviews. For in every one of her early stories the central figures are women who ponder the collision between the outer world and their inner sense of value, their lived experience and emotion. Margit Ács, then – yes – is indeed a chronicler of the female soul.
And who are these women?
Valéria, a forty-one-year-old performer who never succeeded in becoming an actress, entangled against her own taste in a one-night affair with a beat musician decades her junior (Párás, meleg szél [lit. Humid, Warm Wind]); the nameless maternal figure of Hiány (lit. Absence), who agonises and soliloquises during her strongly conformist daughter’s engagement dinner, tormented by memories of her son who disappeared in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; the shop window-gazer Jusztika of Opusz 0.1 (lit. Opus 0.1), who becomes the heroine of the story in such a way that the apparent protagonist – the one directing the conversation – is the boy who strikes up a talk with her there; Ilona of A Few Tricks, wavering between the points of a love triangle, struggling against her younger rival – and the rival herself, Edit, the very young wife of Ilona’s lover; and Kamilla of Only Water and Air, striving to escape with her soul intact from a humiliating love affair.
Already from this first volume it is evident that the author depicts, with psychological realism, women of keen civic concern, living firmly in the present of their stories, bound to the tangible social milieu, obstinately interrogating themselves, and seeking with precision to clarify the markers of their social and gendered roles and statuses. And yet, as she herself avows, she had never set out to be a realist writer. The fundamental conflict of her stories recurs across the collection: these female figures are girls and women wounded in their pride and emotions, accompanied and haunted by the trauma of humiliation, and, in its wake, by a sense of failure that gnaws at their self-respect, by a deeply internalised awareness of degradation. The blurb to the first volume alludes to this: “the heroes of these stories bear enormous weights: the burden of themselves, of their past, of their unresolved relationships”, the load of impaired self-defensive reflexes in a soul cornered and entrapped. This stubbornly self-analytical stance of the protagonists, together with the fundamentally personal timbre of the narrative perspective, resonates with the thought: “The human before the mirror. The existence within me, which is something more than me.” [4]
The short story Absence, however, proves to be one of the most compelling pieces in the collection for rather different reasons.
Its maternal figure, while in the main current of the narrative attempting to measure her own past – her simple but steadfastly held values – against the worldly ease and contrived advantages of her future son-in-law’s parents (sometimes loyal to the regime, at other times cynically aloof), must also endure the shame her daughter feels for her own family and home. At the same time, she strives to smooth over the awkward, painful moments of the engagement dinner. Yet in so doing she relives her personal tragedy: the torment of once again, now irrevocably, losing her son, who had vanished 17 years ago, in 1956 after joining the uprisers and taking up arms.
The story unfolds as a single extended monologue, composed with deep psychological intensity, and thus reflects only the mother’s point of view and interpretation. This indicates that maternal grief outweighs and overrides all else – the social and political conflicts between the two families, their clashing worldviews, every rational argument. More painful even than the immutable knowledge of death is the irrationally tormenting question of how that death came about, of what manner it may have been.
Within this finely wrought text, the political dispute between the militiaman [member of the pro-regime Workers’ Militia] father-stepfather and the son does not carry substantive political depth. Both the loyal communist father, who joined the security forces with a weapon in hand, and the revolutionary son, who turned his weapon even against them, argue in political clichés. “What is it you have against us?” asks the father. He had been awarded a flat as a model worker, given “ever better vouchers” as a Stakhanovite – earned, as he insists, through real labour and severe trial. Ferike, by contrast, rails in the name of “eternal morality”, insisting that “you have been deceived.” “You’re all dizzy snot-nosed brats”, retorts the father; “your brains have been washed”, answers the son.
The maternal perspective permits no choice between competing truths, for the mother sees, knows, that the political adversary is at once a father, a husband, the adoptive parent of her illegitimate son, his true guardian – who deeply loves, and always loved, the boy. Both positions, in her eyes, carry their own legitimacy, and in their way each is strong. Yet the author’s lament is just: that most critics, even later in discussing her novellas, perceived in her work no more than “the small, grey episodes of women’s everyday lives” – albeit, as they conceded, with a “delicate, almost Szerb Antal-like touch”. For the most part they refused to acknowledge the writer’s pronounced social sensibility, her sharp attentiveness – manifest here most clearly – by which she observes the duplicity of the political order, and indeed, articulates parables of Hungarian history whose relevance endures to this day.
Beavatás (lit. Initiation, 1979)
For all its delicately Szerb Antal-like tones, Beavatás (lit. Initiation) – and later several stories from Ács’s second short story collection – already draws strong contours around her determinedly public-minded vision. The short novel appeared in 1979: the author no longer concealed this second book. Barely two years had passed since the publication of her first volume of stories, and once again it was Szépirodalmi Publishing House that brought to light the tale of a journey to Venice. It tells the sombre yet cathartic story of two brothers and the wife of one of them, of a love triangle that emerges there, of a husband’s betrayal, and of a woman’s awakening to her own strength.
Károly and his brother Ambrus, together with Laura, Károly’s wife, step out from the filtered light of the platform of Venice’s “Stazione Ferroviaria Santa Lucia into the blaze of the midday sun”, straining to take in the sight before them. For the first time they have reached the West, the lagoon city whose beauty, more stirring than any postcard, unsettles and entrances them. This vivid, filmic visuality remains the hallmark of the narrative voice throughout, and already in its opening pages endows the protagonists with firm traits of character. Ambrus is physically the less attractive, yet he is more confident, more condescending, more knowing, more self-assured – in sum, more appealing and more interesting than the precise, anxious, though caring and reliable Károly, who, for all his virtues, is no Adonis. It is from this imbalance, too, that the ensuing emotional chaos arises.
Ambrus – clever, though “tortoise-like” in appearance, yet overall a compelling man – takes Laura on a trip to Murano (while her husband rests), and in a hastily rented hotel room tempts her into an encounter. Laura does not truly wish to resist: weary of Károly’s pettiness, his miserliness, she seeks in the act a pale revenge against her “perpetual dependence upon Károly.” We learn also how the two brothers perceive her: among intellectual young men who “abhor anything commonplace”, Laura is “only” a physiotherapist, and beside them she can feel nothing but inferiority. This sense, too, crystallises in the very first hours of their Venetian arrival. From her intellectual subordination, from her state of perpetual hesitation and uncertainty, Laura seeks – consciously or unconsciously – to break free, thus Initiation could be read as the tale of a betrayal and abandonment, realistically drawn against a magnificently rendered backdrop, and filmed, as it were, in striking images with authentic psychological depth. One might interpret the title in several ways: that Laura has come to know something new of relations between men and women in bed; that Venice has initiated her into the cultural marvels of a Western world – signifying not a compass point but a set of values – hitherto unknown to her; or that, through their stories, the Irish boy and the American girl she encountered as tourists there have opened her eyes to an outward and inward freedom – so unfamiliar to these three Hungarians – of reaching anywhere at any time. It might also be the story of a woman’s awakening to herself: for Laura, in confessing her Murano adventure to her husband, recognises that neither Károly nor Ambrus is destined for her. She packs her things and, alone – without Károly’s perpetual, habitual assistance, freed from her chronic sense of subordination – she makes her way to the station. The work might then be seen as the tale of a woman liberated, pacified, and at last awakened to her own worth, a story with a cathartic happy ending.
Yet Initiation is far more than a tale of adultery or a love triangle.
The novella becomes, too, a debate of world-views between the two brothers and the young Irish traveller in Venice: framed by reflections in the philosophy and psychology of, architecture, in the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, literary history and historiography, art history, the social sciences, and realpolitik. It is this intellectuality, gathering strength against the current of the emotional plot, these discourses, that embody the novella’s most compelling intellectual substance. Above all, it is the discussions concerning Hungarian history and the larger world, the inherited disparity between East and West as though it were a historical legacy, that invest the work with its surplus of meaning: raising upon the psychological foundations and the thread of love a spacious socio-philosophical, ideological vault.
Discourses about the unrelenting frustration of the East, and the indifference, even the apathy, of the West toward it. About the manifold interpretations of liberty, with criteria, content, scope and limits scarcely comparable one to another; and about the successive alternations of power, greatness, conquest and subjugation, of the centuries deprived of freedom by Tartar devastations [the First Mongol invasion of Hungary, 1241–42] and the Ottoman rule in Hungary [16th–17th centuries].
What is omitted, naturally, is the essence of Hungarian socialist everyday reality in the time of the novella, for this would have been incomprehensible to Harry, the Irishman, in every respect. The Hungarians do not attempt to enlighten him concerning the very notion of ‘disszidálás’ [illegal flight from the Eastern Bloc to the West], nor the socialist practices that restricted travel to capitalist countries through passport “ordeals”, nor the legally fixed quotas of hard currency for such journeys, nor the national shame and embarrassment these circumstances engendered.
They do, however, point out that only a non-East European could suppose that “the mourning of imprisoned freedom… is mere early-nineteenth-century romanticism”, for the East European conception of freedom is not identical with the American (or here, Irish) counterfeit liberty of fare-dodging, truancy, “eternal adolescence,” the evasion – or indeed the categorical denial – of responsibility. Nor is it identical with the unbounded, unbridled independence with which Joan, the American girl, roams through the countries of Europe on money provided by her parents: for that, too, is but individual liberty, however absolute.
They also point out that in Hungary “an altogether different model and myth of the revolutionary and of class struggle” evolved than what Enrico, the young Italian communist distributing leaflets, supposes (alongside the East–West clash of conceptions of liberty, the novella also illuminates the divergence of the two brothers’ own views). And there is also the suggestion that – at least according to Harry, the convinced cosmopolitan – neither the idea of a homeland, nor attachment to it, nor historical consciousness, nor national consciousness, are truly decisive considerations in a human life; that the individual is more interesting than the nation; that for him, the three Hungarians are more significant than ‘Hungarianness’ itself, a notion with which he cannot grapple. He regards the constant talk about it as nationalism, and that, in turn, does not sit well with him.
The concept of initiation, with the sacred undertone carried in the very expression, may perhaps be interpreted as an attempt – or at least also as such – to convey to the two chance tourist companions, who in truth comprehend none of it and observe all with perfect indifference, the Hungarians’ sensitivity, frustrations, fears, sense of inferiority, urge to prove themselves, and either excessive pride or lack thereof, all of which can be explained by historical events and by the burdens “inherited from their past”. Initiation is thus also a finely composed and compelling novel of the Eastern and the Western human being, the social being, the citizen, each striving to enlighten and to initiate the other, though with results ever of doubtful efficacy.
Kard, korbács, alamizsna (lit. Sword, Whip, Alms, 1983)
Both the title story of the 1983 collection, Kard, korbács, alamizsna (lit. Sword, Whip, Alms), and its opening story A hídmászás örökös bajnoka (lit. The Perpetual Champion of Bridge-Climbing), stage the confrontation of political and ideological perspectives, though not with equal profundity of argument.
The opening short story presents as its protagonists a boy of some ten or eleven years and his young teacher – an arrangement that precludes from the outset any truly equal partnership. The setting is a small village near the Danube. The young teacher, who spends four years in the local school, represents in his background, circumstances and outlook the very antithesis of his pupil, the son of a staunchly communist family. He himself is the child of a well-to-do lawyer from Buda; though rendered an orphan during the war, it was precisely this respectable lineage that secured his path to university – where, however, he found no true intellectual anchor. Within the tale’s narrative, the teacher seeks, indeed endeavours, to inculcate in his pupil the habit of seeing rather than merely looking: to look beyond the endlessly “reheated, sterilised porridge” of the textbooks, and to resist stuffing his mind with the “rubbish” that happens to be readily at hand at home.
The disputants in the title story, Sword, Whip, Alms, likewise clash over ideas during a dinner party: the system-compliant Zsiga and the “defeatist” Brúnó are set against one another. Yet the tale’s principal thought lies not merely in Margit Ács’s recurrent theme of confronting those characters who, whether through their excellent ability to assert their own interests or naïve belief, indifference or fear, have made their peace with “existing socialism”, with those who wrestle with doubt or remain coldly, even cynically, detached. Rather, it emerges in the gradually dawning, finally certain suspicion that strikes Brúnó – the very guest who voices his moral misgivings about the regime – as he surveys his host Zsiga’s flat: the place was once an Interior Ministry listening post, essentially the “office” of his erstwhile friend Zoltán, and Brúnó himself, he realises, was the unwitting, foolishly naïve target of a failed recruitment attempt: what he had thought was a simple invitation to talk was in fact a first step in recruitment as an agent. As grammar-school pupils they had both, in “early 1957, as victims of a politically motivated mass expulsion,” been caught up in the same court case, subjected to the same police interrogations in the aftermath of the 1956 Revolution against Soviet rule. Brúnó had been expelled but was permitted to continue elsewhere; Zoltán’s fate remained unknown to him. Years later they encountered one another on a training course. It is unravelled in that “flat”-which-was-an-office, on the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution, 23 October 1956, what had become of the one-time revolutionary boy who had “known precisely what he was doing” in ’56, and who now hurled his hatred against the ignorant “loud-mouthed brats who slipped through everything” – in this instance, against Brúnó. Zoltán’s blackmailability lay precisely in that conscious act of commitment. This short story may well be the first in contemporary Hungarian literature to allude to the existence of listening rooms [i. e. covert flats used by the Interior Ministry for surveillance] laying bare the choreography and methodology of recruitment – the humiliations, the trampling of dignity, the ruin of lives. The reader has no doubt that Zoltán – his life crushed, bowed under hatred, and unable to resist the blackmail over his actions in 1956 – is guilty of a crime that is far from merely individual or personal, but rather systemic in nature.
The collection does not lack those kinds of short stories either that, already in the case of the first short story collection and in Initiation, made critics voice an opinion Margit Ács was not fond of: namely, that the essence of her writing lies in her masterful play on the complex instrument of the female soul. And we consider the short story Csendélet (Still-Life, translated by George F. Cushing) to be the most striking example of this psychological sensitivity.
The story recounts a few hours in the life of a lonely woman who lives with her mother, a woman whose very given name, Gituska, seems somehow to diminish her, to weaken and infantilize her. She sets out to shop at the Klauzál Square market hall, wanting to buy a few things cheaply, even though she knows that she “always came off badly; they always cheated her”. Once again, the writer begins with a ready-made character sketch: “she was the sort of person who always regrets her decisions afterwards, and starts on something with the words: ‘It’s no use, that’s all I can manage. I’m sorry, but that’s how I am.’”
The main stop on her shopping trip is the bird shop: she wants to buy a new female bird to replace the one that died, so it can be the companion of the male bird, now plucking his chest bald in grief. This lonely, struggling bird is Gituska’s own companion in solitude – naturally, the image is symbolic. But the stifling wild smell of the shop stirs her strangely; it feels like the scent of the jungle, and the jungle equals freedom. She clings to this nauseating smell, goes home, and under the crossfire of her mother’s reproachful gaze begins to prepare lunch. The pink of the liver soaked in milk, the wild smell that will not leave her nose, a sip of vodka from the bottle hidden on the pantry shelf behind the cleaning supplies – and Gituska’s throat is choked with tears, because the word freedom comes to her mind. And as she begins to slice the liver, at the sight of the spreading blood “Gituska’s face went numb,creating a separate mask in front of her head and the skeleton of her face; behind that her brain remained surprisingly sober. Now she recognized the emotion that filled her. Love. – And a name.” This feeling, attacking her with brutal force, strikes her heart with the memory of an intoxicating love, a passion that could never be fulfilled, stolen from her: a relationship with a married man, violently destroyed by her mother’s coercion.
A gyanútlan utazó – Az esély (lit. The Unwary Traveller – The Chance, 1988)
The 1988 volume, A gyanútlan utazó – Az esély (lit. The Unwary Traveller – The Chance), contains two novellas: one an “absurd” story, the other a profoundly realistic psychological narrative. The latter situates itself among Margit Ács’s portrayals of fragile, unconventional, strikingly individual female protagonists, this time through the figure of Olga – an ageing yet still beautiful woman, whose beauty is cast into relief by the youthful loveliness of her prospective daughter-in-law, and by the afterglow of a late love affair with a younger man.
In the first novella, Margit Ács’s unwary travellers – two friends – find themselves almost inadvertently deposited on the outskirts of a small town, amid peculiarities and adventures, and slowly begin to realise they have entered a world that is far from ordinary. This is the land of absurdities, and they must also come to understand that it is by no means a realm of utopian beauty, goodness, or justice. For here, no one possesses a consistent self, a consciousness of identity; deprived of their past, they are likewise without a future. The townspeople have no memory: each morning they forget the day before, they forget who they are, where they live, whether they have children or families. Each day they inhabit a different home and live the life appropriate to it. They might at any moment become husband, wife, parent, or child; when setting out for work, their workplace is simply wherever they happen to enter. Should a hairdresser step into an electrician’s workshop, then so be it, and vice versa. The absurdity is so absolute that logical questions – of which the two friends initially attempt several – become meaningless; and why the town does not collapse, why children do not simply remain in kindergartens and schools, why public services continue to function despite this “perfect absence of memory”, can only be answered with the vague “somehow” or “in some way, nevertheless.” In this town, there is neither individual nor communal consciousness, and thus no individual or collective historical memory. Rather, “the only record is compiled each day from summaries of newspaper articles; yet the one-time revolution is suppressed, rewritten, just as in our own country with 1956, and with so much else besides”.[5] Here “it is wholly arbitrary who possesses what”, “empty rhetoric” is natural, and, in a curious fashion, what at first “appeared as total anarchy” begins somehow, “in dim outline, to acquire a structure, as hidden currents” emerge – some system, however accidental and contingent, begins faintly to take shape.
This story may be filled – indeed, overfilled – with layers of meaning through the reader’s act of recognition and interpretation: the awareness that one is not reading a utopia but rather an anti-utopia, the very negation of the longed-for, perfected world; and that the deeds and dispositions of the city’s inhabitants gradually begin to mirror the abandoned world of the two travellers. One of the friends moves with confidence through the city’s daily disintegration, delighting in the state of irresponsibility, of life without duty, of the easy nonchalance of an existence without stakes; the other struggles to preserve his identity and ultimately abandons the city. The vision of vanishing without a trace finds its authentic form of expression in this work which, unlike Margit Ács’s usual narrative mode – rooted in tangible settings and often infused with strong elements of reality – unfolds through wholly fictional devices.
In the generic framework of the second novella, Az esély (lit. The Chance), in the opening scene it is Zsuzska – once intended as a daughter-in-law, but separated now from Olga’s son Miklós, though still bound to Olga herself; in the closing scene, it is the ageing Olga who inspects, examines, analyses, in effect summing up her own life’s journey. In the intervening scenes, the author shifts narrative perspective, switches narration, and interweaves different times. The tangled events of the long life story – essentially Olga’s fate – are distributed among the figures connected to her. Olga’s life is interpreted and explained by others, resulting in a mosaic-like structure that might be described as a kaleidoscopic composition developed by contemporary writer Miklós Mészöly. In recalling Olga’s story, Margit Ács breaks up the continuous flow of text, the linear arc, and divides it into shorter sections, marked by small asterisks to aid the reader. These parts are not bound together by logical necessity or chronological causality, but rather by a rhythm of associations. Olga appears as she is seen by the companions of her life: fellow athletes on the volleyball court, friends, her son’s would-be fiancée Zsuzska. She appears as her husband saw her, and – most poignantly – as she is seen by Ilár, her great final love: “too beautiful and too young” for Olga, yet a man she could not renounce. This story is not about a single night, but about long months of torment within the relationship.
The novella, dense with detail, a thousand small events and scenes of life, renders Olga’s decades with a richly woven texture. But in the passages describing this last love the pace slows, the narrative line straightens, as Olga immerses herself in recollection. The closing scene clearly reveals Olga’s strength of self-restraint and composure: though throughout her life she was repeatedly compelled to live up to roles imposed upon her from outside, though her path was marked by separations from others and by a succession of identities in which she grew rigid, though her life moved along “tracks of constraint”, and though it is Zsuzska who ultimately deprives her of her last great love – Olga endures it all now with poise and calm.
Kontárok ideje (lit. The Age of Bunglers, 2011)
After this volume of short novels, more than two decades passed in Margit Ács’s literary career without the publication of any new works of fiction. Only in 2011 did she return to literature, as if offering herself a birthday present, with a fresh collection of stories. Kontárok ideje (lit. The Age of Bunglers) was almost universally described by critics as a narrative of the regime change (the Hungarian transition from state socialism to parliamentary democracy in 1989–90). And rightly so. The book, without circumlocution or embellishment, points directly to the years of regime change, as Béla Márkus observed. From the short stories, the years between 1988 and 1994 unfold, with characteristic intellectual figures at their centre – men and women whose lives were deeply entwined with the great political transformation (Ádám Erdész). The Age of Bunglers presents one of the strangest periods of recent Hungarian history: the years of regime change, sometimes referred to as the Round Table Revolution [named after the Round Table Talks that prepared the transition], or, echoing Eastern European terminology, the Velvet Revolution (Gábor Nagy). In the short stories, Margit Ács captures and preserves the unexpected complexity of the dawn of the system change, the ideological confusions, the peculiar choreography of the manoeuvres and the mutual skirmishing of rival political forces. There is no allegorical hinting in these stories, no hidden symbols or unbroken codes, no veiled political or ideological messaging. Instead, there is a forthrightness, a direct speaking of opinion. Her protagonists declare their political convictions openly, and share with the reader their hopes, disappointments, and judgements.
In these short stories, the author is preoccupied with the very same doubts, intellectual, ideological and political judgements, attempts at interpretation and situation analysis that she had earlier articulated in her public essays. We encounter, for instance, the parents visiting their sons serving in the army (Buta állat a krumpli [lit. The Potato is a Stupid Animal]); the woman intellectual, a teacher, retreating into a village house, absorbed in her garden, cut off from the world (The Age of Bunglers); the woman visiting her grandmother who, even stroke-stricken and extremely old, remains a faithful supporter of János Kádár (the long-serving communist leader of Hungary, 1956–1988) (Doktorátus [lit. Doctorate]); the teacher who, having become an MDF MP [Magyar Demokrata Fórum, lit. Hungarian Democratic Forum: the first governing party after 1989], finds himself the target of humiliating attacks (A te dolgod [lit. Your Business]); and the woman doctor, an organiser for the MDF, who recoils in terror at the sound of an unexpected evening doorbell (Bársony [lit. Velvet]). It is evident that for Margit Ács, who during her “prose pause” had concentrated on writing public essays, there was still more to be said about the contradictions of the regime change, and this came through in her stories. The Age of Bunglers is thematically connected to those essays – or at least to a portion of them – yet, above all on account of similarities of narrative technique, it also remains tied to her earlier collections of prose.
This thematic concern appears compelling, for it may be understood as a robust portrayal of an era – at times as political history, at others as a sociological imprint of an intellectual circle that sought, with varying success, to define the outward forms of the regime change – while it conveys the author’s reflections on public life, civic ethics, moral rigour, and the frequent incompatibility between political realities and moral expectations. The narrations are imbued with a strong interpretative intellectuality, and rightly so, for the protagonists are themselves, for the most part, representatives of the urban intelligentsia. The lives of these figures are determined, once again, by self-scrutiny and reflection; and this fifth prose volume demonstrates that Margit Ács’s perspective has remained consistently interpretive in nature, so neither her characters can escape this demanding, and by no means simple, task.
Margit Ács offers almost an inventory, at times an aphoristic summation, of the disappointments suffered chiefly by the intelligentsia during the regime change. (She also provides stark counter-examples: the near-hopeless fate of the working men in The Age of Bunglers, villagers threatened with unemployment following the privatisation and partial closure of the nearby stone quarry – sacrificed to the omnipotence of profit; the meagre existence of the “lean little” railwayman in Your Business, who works on a billion-forint track-laying machine, upon whose single mistake passengers’ lives may depend, while his wages scarcely reach the minimum; or the alarming proliferation of the homeless in the new system, dwelling upon park benches.) This inventory pertains to the earliest phase of the change of regime, yet already it is extensive. It could already be sensed that something was “amiss” with the people’s professed “yearning for freedom”: that there was no synchrony between the disgust felt by the protagonists, the actors within the stories, towards the corrupt, deceitful one-party state, and the strength of popular desire for liberty, the civic engagement. Already from the outset, certain figures could be identified with certainty as “having a mission” – and that mission was not to assist but rather to obstruct the process of transformation. Worse still, it was soon revealed that even close acquaintances had merely “infiltrated the movement”, not with the intention of aiding it, but only to gain inside information.
The experience, devastating to the writer, is voiced by her protagonists: “Rash decisions are made, careless opinions are uttered upon scant information, and we sink into petty concerns.” Meanwhile, manoeuvring and positioning persist at “the centre of the movement”. The most depressing observation, however, is that political divisions sunder friendships and, not infrequently, breed hostility between colleagues once bound by cordial relations.
The stories of The Age of Bunglers arrange themselves unmistakably, though not with rigid regularity, into a chain: characters pass in and out of one another’s narratives, reappearing across different stories. In reviving the turn of the decade starting in 1988, the volume depicts not so much the roots of the events, as Géza Vasy observes, but rather their widening, their souring. “With the passage of twenty years, two perspectives may emerge in the stories: insistently the present tense of that earlier moment, and figuratively the time of writing. The span of twenty years renders the formulations and the outlook clearer, for each passing year makes it ever more certain that what the protagonists lived through truly did occur as described.” The volume thus stands as a weighty work, offering both an individual and a sociological diagnosis of the times (Gábor Nagy), a collection of ponderous narratives.
A hely hívása (lit. The Call of Place, 2000)
The study and essay volume A hely hívása (lit. The Call of Place), published in 2000, is introduced by Margit Ács with a substantial preface that guides the reader into its conceptual and thematic passages.
Into the conceptual: “At present, that outlook and mode of thought, that taste, that social embeddedness which has determined my forty years of intellectual and literary career, is branded popular, national, conservative (and consequently right-wing).” That is to say, she writes, it is by virtue of awaiting another kind of new that he is deemed conservative in the eyes and terminology of the so-called progressives, who, for their part, count as so-called progressive precisely because they “incessantly overwrite what has been”. Yet the notion of the ‘popular-national’ (‘népi-nemzeti’) she deems even more complicated. The original meaning has long since shifted, and she herself would willingly dispense with this distorted category; but since it cannot be cast aside by common agreement, she insists that the Hungarian ‘national’ (‘nemzeti’) epithet signifies for her exactly what, for other nations (Italian, French, Norwegian, etc.), is simply patriotism, unmarked by any qualification.
She finds the ethical foundation of her outlook, her ethical model, on the one hand in two writings by philosopher and essayist György Bretter: the account of the village of Zsögöd [an ethnic Hungarian village with a strong cultural identity in Transylvania, Romania], with its lesson of the “self that always creates, that produces something unique”; and thereafter in Bretter’s portrait of Dániel Berzsenyi [Hungarian poet, 1776–1836], reminding us that “in our Berzsenyi-consciousness we have repressed the missed opportunity: the culture that takes itself as its model”. On the other hand, Ágnes Heller’s portrait of Berzsenyi is also invoked – that is, the very Berzsenyi-attitude: “here, in this place, in this age, with the intellectual means that are his and no one else’s, it is possible to ‘improve’ as well”.
In other words, Ács’s fundamental stance is that she approaches her subjects of studies or critical essays from a moral and ethical perspective, and this perspective is that of shaping, of improving, of seeking a “centre,” of preserving, an attitude of value-seeking. This is most clearly manifested in the larger-scale essays and in contributions to public debate: for instance, A kisebbség, a többség s az ember (lit. The Minority, the Majority and the Human Being), analysing the relationship between Hungarians and Hungarian Jews and linked to a study by Péter Balassa, aesthetist and publicist; Fundamentalista modernség (lit. Fundamentalist Modernity); Irodalom-e a népi irodalom (lit. Is Folk Literature Literature?); A közhelyek évelő természete (lit. The Perennial Nature of Clichés), and others.
With regard to the other major section of the volume – the literary critiques – Ács makes it clear: whereas her essays were prompted by the “public-intellectual wars” observable since the 1980s, her reviews and portraits were written merely in the function of the “resonator and sometimes the medium, never under the influence of the hidden urge to appropriate or to triumph over”.
Among these, we find portraits of contemporary Hungarian literary figures: István Vas, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, and András Fodor; reviews and critiques, for example, of the works of Andor Bajor, János Pilinszky, Anna Hajnal, Iván Mándy, Tibor Bálint, Miklós Hubay, István Szilágyi, Ervin Lázár, András Ladányi, Imre Kertész, József Balázs, Nándor Gion, Ádám Bodor, Géza Ottlik, Ottó Orbán, István Ágh, and Gáspár Nagy.
The diversity of themes, together with their independence from political and literary affiliations, lends weight to the author’s assertion that for him the “key word is in all likelihood organic wholeness”. By this she understands, in her outlook, the unfolding of the given natural and historical possibilities, the interweaving of what lies above and what lies below – an experience he lived through as a first-generation intellectual in the “trivial confusion of rootlessness”. At the same time, for the critic and literary essayist, it signifies a “dignified freedom”, the conviction that “everything may exist in its own way”. In his essays and critiques alike, the writer who yearns for organic wholeness applies this same, personally inflected, sympathetic vision: that no single intellectual or literary orientation might lay exclusive claim to cultural life, nor might any one art or intellectual current pose as the “sole custodian of the present and the future”.
The writings collected in Jeleneink és múltjaink (lit. Our Presents and Our Pasts), published in 2006, do not reveal any fundamental change in this respect.
It is evident that Margit Ács’s attraction to theoretical subjects remains as strong as ever: in this volume of essays, the interpretive ambition concerning the ‘popular-national’ (‘népi-nemzeti’) literature and ideology extends to increasingly broad horizons; likewise, the examination of the ideological climate of the regime change and of the position and role of the intelligentsia is given particular emphasis. For instance, Kölcsönös garancia – Nemzet és irodalom (lit. Mutual Guarantee – Nation and Literature); or Az üdvös, a szükséges utópia (lit. The Beneficial, the Necessary Utopia), which analyses László Németh’s post-1945 essays [Németh was a key ‘népi’ writer and intellectual, often preoccupied with national renewal and social reform], is a writing that, as a kind of new parable and complement, draws the Némethian social utopia into close analytical proximity with the utopias of the regime change. With unflagging curiosity and stubbornness, Ács continues to reflect on the very concept of the ‘népi’ writer.
The volume’s critical essays partly signal a close tracking of the creative work; included here, for example, is an analysis of István Szilágyi’s novel Hollóidő (lit. Raven’s Time), while previously Ács had examined his earlier work Agancsbozót (lit. Thicket of Antlers). Her attention also turns to works by Árpád Tőzsér, Anna Jókai, Gábor Albert, Mátyás Sárközi, István Sigmond, and András Görömbei.
This volume also contains occasional short essays and interview texts, adopting looser, more conversational literary forms, yet written with the same precision, thoroughness, and stylistic subtlety characteristic of the author. Serving as a refreshing conclusion, these pieces somewhat balance out the otherwise heavy, demanding essays, which call for considerable readerly concentration.
[2016]
[1] In manuscript.
[2] „Már-már szabadnak érzem magam saját magamtól is". Beszélgetés Ács Margit íróval, esszéistával, kritikussal. (lit. “I almost feel free even from myself.” Conversation with Margit Ács, writer, essayist, and critic.) (Borbála Réka Nagy), Helikon, 2013/4.
[3] Győző Határ: Ács Margit. In: Gy. H.: Irodalomtörténet (lit. Literary History). (From reviews, critiques, and book commentaries broadcast on the BBC and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; selected and edited by István Lakatos.) Békéscsaba: Tevan Publishing, 1991.
[4] M. M. Bakhtin: Beszédelméleti jegyzetek (lit. Notes on Speech Theory) (1970–71). In: M.M.B.: A beszéd és a valóság (lit. Speech and Reality). Budapest: Gondolat, 1981.
[5] Géza Vasy: Amatőrök és profik. Ács Margit: Kontárok ideje (lit. Amateurs and Professionals. Margit Ács: The Time of Bunglers), Hitel, 2012/9.