“Hosanna to the reader!” – to borrow the opening words of the wise Methuselah, Umar ibn Abi al-Maarri, from Lemúria legtetején (lit. At the Very Top of Lemuria), for when speaking about the masked begetter of this figure, Fekete J. József, we too can do no other than first of all name him as Reader. “We read one another, we attend to the fissures of silence [1]” – comes to mind the watchword of a journal issue he helped to edit, with all the resignation that marks those authors on every imaginable outer and inner periphery, in overgrown centres, who feel the solitude and unreadness of their works, whose messages can scarcely, if at all, reach readers through the dense medial noise and cosmic indifference. And at the same time, it is not entirely true that we even read one another with due attention. Not so Fekete J., who, himself on the periphery – on every periphery (or at the very centre of the peripheries) – creates a lookout tower with his extraordinary readerly habitus, high up in his ivory tower. Just as his predecessor in the neighbouring village of Doroszló (Doroslovo) [village in today’s Vojvodina, northern Serbia], János Herceg, multiplied his ‘notes from under the eaves’ (not by chance does Fekete J. devote special attention to him in Teremtett világok [lit. Created Worlds]). As a reader, Fekete first of all hacks his way through the fifteen-thousand-page thicket of the Szentkuthy oeuvre even without the diaries, then, following the work of his contemporaries, discovers tens of thousands of further pages, which in itself would be enough to win him the unreserved respect of his dyslexic age.

What is more, Fekete J. himself creates a textual galaxy: as of today, it amounts to 17 volumes, and this world of texts, diverse in genre yet with a clearly defined centre in its intention and role, can be divided into three larger parts. The first is authored by the literary historian, best known as a reader of Szentkuthy; the second by the literary critic, who pays particular attention to those authors whose name is followed so far by only a single date – the year of their birth – and among whom many can regard Fekete J. not merely as their reader but as their very first reader; the third is the work of the creative writer – and not of a single one at that, but of more than three names, more than three entities.

***

Fekete J. József’s vocation as (initiated) first reader is, in fact, valid also in relation to Szentkuthy. Among his textual galaxies, this is the oldest, containing the ontological wellspring of all his constellations. His first volume, Olvasat (lit. Reading), published in 1986, is the primary point of reference in the specialist literature on Szentkuthy. The ‘reading’ with small and capital ‘r’, as befits so complex and extensive an oeuvre, continues as the continuous, unfinished and unfinishable act of textual interpretation in Olvasat II. (lit. Reading II, 1993) and, three years later, in the third part, now under the title Széljegyzetek Szentkuthyhoz (lit. Marginalia to Szentkuthy), followed in 2005 by the Szentkuthy monograph Post, and most recently, in 2010, by Elmélet: helyett koreográfia. Újabb Szentkuthy-olvasatok (lit. Theory: Instead, Choreography. Further Readings of Szentkuthy). While the earlier volumes focus on the writer’s oeuvre, the latest centres on its creator, “the complex flesh-and-blood being who produced one of the most significant bodies of work in twentieth-century Hungarian literature, unparalleled both in quality and in quantity… [2]” The upshot of this engagement with Szentkuthy is a coherent guided tour that leads from the peculiar ‘formation’ [3] that is Prae through to the last – planned but uncompleted – volume of the Breviárium (lit. Breviary). From this Fekete himself draws inspiration, and passes it on to his readers, encouraging them to acquaint themselves with the specific philosophy and aesthetics underlying the texts and, not least, with that particular world-creating language – “which he consciously builds from surrealism and the baroque [4]” – and to make it their own.

***

The second, and in terms of extent the largest, cluster in Fekete J.’s textual galaxy – nine headings, more than two thousand pages, and hundreds of authors and books read – is born of a critical undertaking. Here, the creator turns towards contemporary literary production and is able to survey a remarkably large segment of it, one that recognises no borders. Nor does he respect boundaries, or the canons that draw them. This could indeed be taken as one of the basic conditions of that impartiality expected of a critic. Interpreting the standpoint detectable in his texts, it appears that “there is only one Hungarian literature, that Hungarian literature is not confined within borders”, while at the same time it is also proved that “there are many Hungarian literatures, as many as there are readers [5].”

The evolution of Fekete J.’s interests is noteworthy in itself. His first Próbafüzet (lit. Trial Notebook), published in the early 1990s, still deals with Hungarian prose from Vojvodina [a Hungarian-inhabited region of northern Serbia], and the second and third volumes likewise focus on writers from Vojvodina. The crossing of the border into regionality, or ‘areality’, is marked by the 2007 volume Mit ér az irodalom, ha magyar? (lit. What Is Literature Worth If It Is Hungarian?), which, with one exception, deals with authors not living in Vojvodina. In the next two volumes (Perifériáról betekintő [lit. Peering in from the Periphery]; Ami átjön [lit. What Gets Through]), borders disappear: writers from beyond Hungary’s borders and from Hungary appear side by side. His material is not drawn according to some declared, quasi-scientific, objective cross-section, but from a given determination: on the one hand, the author/observer’s own position on the periphery, and on the other, the need to satisfy the readerly interest of those located at another point on that same periphery – for the essays and reviews in Peering in from the Periphery were mostly written at the request of the journal Székelyföld [a literary journal published in Csíkszereda/Miercurea Ciuc, in Székely Land of Eastern Transylvania, Romania].

“In the last decade and a half, my literary interests have become more erratic,” the author confesses on the dust-jacket of Peering in from the Periphery – “they scan further afield than the Hungarian literature of Vojvodina, but have not become detached from it. I am mostly concerned with works produced in non-Hungarian mother-tongue environments; I am interested in the works of those who write in Hungarian within German, French, Romanian, and Serbian majority cultures – from which perhaps it becomes clear that I regard Hungarian literature as a universal mother-tongue formation, whose regional belonging is merely a consequence of given circumstances, in no way a sign of some thematic or axiological separation. Among the works published in Hungary, I do not read those belonging to the mainstream; for the most part, I read those that do not belong to the dominant canon. Of course, it may well be that they do belong to some canon, because I am convinced that if there is such a thing as a canon, then there is not just one but several, and they coexist quite peacefully – provided we read the texts from the vantage point of the works, of authorial achievement, rather than from that of the canons.” For these reveal literature as a “living organism” [6], of which the independent reading, the – for want of a better term – critical diary is likewise an organic part. This mode of engagement constitutes such a readerly/interpretative quality that one may rightly conclude: “if the term ‘postmodern’ has any meaning at all, then Fekete J. is truly that: precisely through his pluralism of values and his very high threshold of tolerance. For whatever form the work may take, he attempts to receive and sublimate it – keeping before him only the precedence of language [7].”

***

In the third cluster listed above, Fekete J. is himself a creative writer. By no means independently of the former: in his readings of Szentkuthy, there is both model and stimulus, and in the space of contemporary literature, from which he is separated by some casually guarded green border, a semi-permeable membrane, the possibility of dissident adventures is concealed. The enduring presence of the “sustained motivating, orienting force of the Szentkuthy text-world [8]” legitimises the impulse felt by those who examine the creative writer Fekete J.’s works to seek parallels, for “like Szentkuthy, who, while donning the skins of others, in fact always wrote about himself, Fekete J. József too, when writing about Szentkuthy, often gives voice to his own authorial doubts and insights, not only in relation to his master’s interpretation, but also independently of that and exceeding it [9].”

“The mask is not concealment,” writes the essayist Fekete J. at one point, “but on the contrary: emphasis, accentuation, interpretation. It is no game of hide-and-seek, even when not only the author dons the mask of his heroes, but is forced to hide the time of writing behind the mask of the time of the story. The mask conceals, yet at the same time, it accentuates, whets curiosity, and draws attention. The mask makes one another for a time, and quasi-identical with someone else. Indeed, the ritual mask, to which the so-called authorial masks in literature stand closest, is also a symbol of drawing near to the god. Not in the sense of raising the writer or his work into some idealised sphere, but simply by underlining the ancient otherness of literary creation – immersion, empathy, transformation, renewal. And at the same time it emphasises the playful, indeed theatrical character of the writer’s work [10].”

The authorial masks – or, as he himself calls them, the autonomous authorial entities dwelling within a single biological being – that we have so far come to know include the already book-publishing Nettitia K. Froese and Czobor Mihályi, to whom in the near future Ephemeria Silver will be added with a volume currently in preparation. “The differing linguistic identities are the consequences of the abolition of the self-identity of the biological being that carries them. This is not a matter of a pseudonym or pseudonyms, nor even of alter egos, but of named linguistic border-crossers who wish to find out what happens, what might happen to them, what possibilities there are in another world that only they are capable of sensing, and that they strive to formulate [11].”

In Lemúria legtetején (lit. At the Very Top of Lemuria), brought out in 2009 (a revised and expanded version of the 2003 volume Lemúriában nem múlik az idő [lit. In Lemuria, Time Does Not Pass]), Nettitia K. Froese, to use a misleading simplification, attempted to transpose abstract life-philosophy into the medium of prose. The text is, on the one hand, a kind of dialogue (although “in the conversations there are three throughout: the Father, the Son and, at the beginning of each chapter, the [absent yet still present] Dear or Happy Reader [12]”); on the other, it is “after all a polemic against that phenomenon which we call postmodern text-production and even more so postmodern text-interpretation [13].” Unsurprisingly – and not by chance – even the determination of genre is far from straightforward: the authorial entity “parodies a literary genre (especially popular in authority-centred literatures), those novels, essay-novels and memoirs of inspirationless elderly essayists/writers/poets, the ‘I Will Tell You the Truth from the Top of the Holy Hill’-type literary hum-and-haw. Or is it a critic, hiding behind the mask of Nettitia K. Froese, who confesses the snares of reading, of perpetual reading? Or are we reading a crooked mirror held up to the deceptions of Introduction to Literary Theory [14]?”

Under the name Czobor Mihályi, the subjective city-novel of the former county town, the southern Hungarian (today Serbian) town of Zombor (Sombor), was written: Angyalok rozettája (lit. The Rosette of Angels, 2014) is the libretto to the (never-ending) opera of the city (of any city), seen through the eyes of a musician (and almost composer), sometimes imagining himself a film director and editing the film of his life, Alajos Rideg. Since the authorial name Czobor Mihályi can be derived from the city’s historical name, it is as if the city itself were writing Alajos Rideg’s wayward story, his perambulations through the town and its surroundings, and through the various settings of his childhood, youth, and adulthood.

The autobiographical character of these texts is perceptible. “…personal experiences obtained in childhood and later insinuate themselves into my texts,” the author confides in an interview – “indeed my literary manifestations almost without exception build on such experience, sometimes appearing quite directly, at other times in a more abstract form, but these fictions are never inventions: they are stylisations of some real event that happened to me, or of thoughts I have had. Without experience, I would be incapable of writing. On the other hand, I do have experiences, but I do not have stories. I am happy to read works built on fabula, but as an author I am more interested in fragmentation, in enlarging details or in the collision of ideas [15].”

The third manuscript of this planned trilogy is the least ‘paper-smelling’; through role-play, in a variety of forms – from e-mail correspondence to encyclopaedia entries – it offers insights into the poetics of authorial metamorphosis and into human experience in the wake of the turn of the millennium. Once again, there is a distinct voice, intensity, and viewpoint under the name Ephemeria Silver. Just as there is in the case of Margit F. Lakatos, whom we merely mentioned in passing, we leave to the end of this unfinished and unfinishable enumeration.

***

Finally, a few words about the “complex flesh-and-blood creating”. Despite his outstanding achievement as literary historian, critic, and creative writer – recognised with the József Attila Prize and the Arany János Prize – Fekete J. József is not a full-time writer: he has behind him a shorter, more troubled career as a teacher, and a several-decades-long, equally hard-fought career as a journalist. At the same time, he is a member and senior contributor to journal editorial boards, a moderator of literary gatherings, and, indeed, a protagonist and driving force in the cultural life of the small, dwindling Hungarian community of his hometown, Zombor. Even though the Bertha Ferenc Pocket Theatre, which not long ago marked the 200th event in its series of Találkozások (lit. Encounters) arts and literary evenings, has just announced its dissolution, having lost one of its (three) key people. It is well known that he is not someone who readily stirs from home, and yet how many other encounters beyond Zombor come to mind! Literary events, festivals, writers’ camps… And although he is not a talkative man, his rare yet to-the-point interventions leave his interlocutors with the impression of a long (sometimes seemingly endless), multi-sited, multi-session dialogue. Those who take part in it may well count themselves fortunate.

[2016]

[1] Üzenet (lit. Message), 1999, 9–12: “Olvassuk egymást, a csendrésekre figyelünk.” (lit. “We read one another, we attend to the fissures of silence.”) Quoted from Éva Hózsa.

[2] Zoltán Sándor: A szerző és műve (lit. The Author and Their Work). Magyar Szó, 11 February 2011.

[3] Zsuzsa Vathy: P. O. S. T. Élet és irodalom, vol. XLIX, no. 43, 28 October 2005.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Melinda Tamás: Olvasó-könyv (lit. Reader-Book), Látó, 2008/6.

[6] Györgyi Pécsi: Posztmodern kritikus (lit. Postmodern Critic). Irodalmi Jelen, 2007/10.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Éva Hózsa: Fekete-játékszabályok non-stop (lit. Fekete’s Rules of the Game, Non-stop). Sikoly, 2012/30.

[9] Zoltán Sándor, op. cit.

[10] József Fekete J.: Önarckép álarcokban (lit. Self-Portrait in Masks). Látó, 2006/12.

[11] Ephemeria Silver: Haláltanfolyam (lit. Death Course). Forthcoming. Quoted from the preface.

[12] Éva Bánki: Hozsanna a boldog olvasónak! (lit. Hosanna to the Happy Reader!), http://ujnautilus.info

[13] Attila Thimár: Ha tükörben nézed a lapot, milyen irányban olvasol? (lit. If You Look at the Page in a Mirror, In Which Direction Do You Read?). Győri Műhely, 2011/4.

[14] Éva Bánki, op. cit.

[15] Sikoly, 2012/30.

J. József Fekete