For decades, Lajos Grendel has been a fixed star of contemporary Hungarian prose, a living classic. A fixed star, since his continually expanding and renewing body of work keeps offering fresh surprises, each of which deserves renewed attention.
In the first half of the 1980s, he burst into Hungarian literature with his novel trilogy (Éleslövészet [Live Fire], 1981; Galeri [lit. The Gang], 1982; Áttételek [lit. Transmissions], 1985), which depicted the fundamental questions and existential dilemmas of universal human experience and of Hungarian minority existence through innovative prose techniques. He explored experiences of personal and moral crises not through plot-driven narratives but in novelistic and short-story forms that, despite their seeming disintegration, were written with disciplined structure, great linguistic richness, and an authentically conveyed worldview (Hűtlenek [lit. The Faithless], 1979; A bőröndök tartalma [lit. The Contents of the Suitcases, 1987). His early novels, stories, and essays greatly contributed to the renewal of the perspectives, themes, and poetics of (Czecho)Slovak Hungarian prose, while also being noteworthy in the context of Hungarian literature as a whole. It is no coincidence that they were clearly well received in Hungary as well, and most critics, primarily on the basis of their formal features, integrated them naturally into the process of paradigm shift that Hungarian prose had begun to undergo in the second half of the 1970s. In his monograph on post-1945 Hungarian literature, Ernő Kulcsár Szabó later summarised the significance of Grendel’s emergence as follows: “By means of narrative techniques reminiscent of the nouveau roman, he managed to loosen the ideologically grounded patterns of discourse of speech and counter-speech to such an extent that he truly approached the threshold of creating new novel forms [1].” Earlier, Márton Szilágyi had already pointed out, although referring to Grendel’s later novels, that Grendel’s inclusion “among the leading figures of the paradigm shift” is not entirely straightforward [2]; and about twenty years ago, in his monograph, Péter Szirák extended this assessment to the early novels: “Seeking to break away from the determinisms of minority existence, the author adopted and applied the new poetic and conceptual phenomena, developing a mode of understanding that only imperfectly corresponds to either earlier forms of minority discourse or the discourse patterns used in Hungary [3].” His fellow writer from Upper Hungary, Árpád Tőzsér, who has followed Grendel’s career from the beginning, locates Grendel’s otherness, his distinct character compared with his Hungarian contemporaries, and the basis of the specifically “Grendelian” novel quality in an “intensified ethical sensitivity [4]”.
Much of the background to Grendel’s early novels and many of his short stories is provided by the past and present of the Hungarian bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, and intellectual existence in Upper Hungary, by the peculiar conjunction of a disintegrating bourgeois world, and the condition of minority life. The usual setting is the two key locations of the author’s own life: a typical small town of Upper Hungary, modelled clearly on Grendel’s birthplace, Levice (Léva), and the large city, Bratislava (Pozsony). In Grendel’s novels, the two spheres of existence, the small town and the large city, often appear in relation to one another, contrasted or placed in analogous situations, and the two fundamental temporal levels, the historical, familial past and the present, are likewise set against each other or made to mirror one another.
In all three novels, the reckoning with history and with the national and family past appears as a fundamental condition of both personal and collective self-knowledge, of a consciousness of identity. It is the lack of self-identity that torments the self-addressing narrator of Transmissions; and the hero of The Gang, EL, likewise returns from Bratislava to his hometown in order to find out who he is; and as early as in Grendel’s first novel, Live Fire, his narrator-protagonist professes that he is “assembled from the mosaic pieces” of past events. Yet the reconstruction of the town’s past cannot be unequivocally accomplished even in Live Fire: the differing perspectives, each relating in its own way to the events and to the reality of the time, cannot produce a unified picture, for they negate each other’s truths. The repeatedly articulated doubts concerning the reconstruction of the past and the narratability of events, of history itself, are consequences of a scepticism towards the teleology of history, towards notions of progress and development, and towards the knowability of the world. And yet, in the end, the stories are told in all three novels, suggesting that in history only the actors change, while the structural logic remains the same, and that the essential feature of the past is a lack of values similarly to the narrator’s own age. In both his early and later novels, already in Szakítások (lit. Breakups), published at the end of the decade in 1989, the stories of the past compel Grendel’s protagonists to confront themselves and to recognise their own petty, everyday compromises. In the characters of the present, who struggle with crises of personality, Grendel unmasks a type of human being who has renounced his own freedom, who adapts to the expectations of his environment out of cowardice or mere convenience, and who gradually loses contact with his true self. Although inauthentic existence, borrowing a term from Heidegger, who clearly had a profound influence on Grendel, is a universal phenomenon, the works written in the twilight years of socialism also clearly speak of the individuals from the era of dictatorship, whose sense of identity, or lack thereof, is inseparable from a sense of national belonging, or from its absence.
In Grendel’s short stories, the past is also a kind of antecedent, and past events “seep their poisonous juices through an invisible network of veins into the climate of another age”, as is stated at one point in his novel Transmissions. However, in the short stories, the absurdities of national and Central European history become less prominent than the impossibilities of individual, personal existence. The backbone of Grendel’s short-story writing is formed by those pieces in which a story that typically begins in the everyday, the ordinary, suddenly oversteps the boundaries of everyday reality, and the real world dissolves into or merges indistinguishably with a dream world, or sometimes with a fantastical or surrealist world. Compared with the objective view of reality and the more traditional, in some respects realist, mode of composition found in his debut short-story collection, The Faithless (1979), the two later published independent collections, The Contents of the Suitcases (1987) and Az onirizmus tréfái (lit. The Tricks of Oneirism, 1992), display a mode of shaping material in which reality and unreality, the real and the dreamlike, the real and the fantastic are fused into one another. This shift signals a fundamentally altered artistic perspective and intention. These two collections are far more closely linked to the world of the novel trilogy published in the first half of the 1980s than to his first collection of short stories. Among other things, they are linked to the epistemological and literary-theoretical concerns of Live Fire, which probes the relationship between truth and appearance, and between reality and fiction. To the anecdotal stories and to the fantasies and dream images swirling in The Gang in their “timelessness and ahistoricity”. To the protagonists of Transmissions and of the entire Grendelian novelistic world, who search for self-identity and long to free themselves from the anxiety caused by everyday conformism and by mere existence. The most masterful realisation of the interpenetration of reality and dream, dream and reality, is found in the piece entitled Emlékezetkiesés erotikus álmok után (lit. Memory Loss After Erotic Dreams), though the stories in The Tricks of Oneirism (1-2-3-4) also belong to this type. In several of his short stories (The Contents of the Suitcases, Egy ponyvaregény vége [lit. The End of a Pulp Novel]), Grendel creates the contact, and the merging, of reality and literature as deftly as he stages the encounter of dream and reality in the previously mentioned works. In this context, literature itself becomes a dream, since it is fiction, while dreams become reality. At times, the effectiveness of this illusionistic play is further enhanced by the cunning manner in which he manipulates the form of the short story. In general, Grendel seeks to create the illusion of classical anecdotal storytelling for the reader. The direct, effortless tone, the frequent first-person narration, the structure that appears to unfold in a straightforward linear fashion, and the realist handling of space and time all give the impression of recounting an ordinary, real (once-experienced) story. However, in other pieces, a surprising, fantastic, or impossible element triggers a new sequence of events and motifs, loosening, transforming, and at the same time questioning this short-story form, and with it the very possibility of a realistic narrative. Grendel calls the short-story form into question, but does not abolish it: the reader remains in a state of uncertainty throughout, for “what is inexplicable is not necessarily meaningless”, as it is stated in the short-story The Tricks of Oneirism 3, only a few pages long, that displays the characteristic features and strengths of Grendel’s short fiction in the most concentrated form. The frequent essayistic insertions also serve to enrich the one-dimensional, traditional short-story form and to expand its fields of meaning.
With his ‘Absurdistan’ novels written in the 1990s (Eistein harangjai [lit. Einstein’s Bells], 1992; És eljön az ő országa [lit. And His Kingdom Shall Come], 1996), although they do not belong to the peaks of his oeuvre, and with his later short stories (A szabadság szomorúsága, [lit. The Sadness of Freedom], 2001) and essays (Hazám, Abszurdisztán, [lit. My Homeland, Absurdistan], 1998), Grendel firmly established his place among the leading figures of contemporary Hungarian prose. The term ‘Absurdistan’ was originally used by the Western press to describe Czechoslovakia in the years immediately preceding the ‘Velvet Revolution’, but according to the author, the label can readily be extended to the entire region east of the Oder and the Leitha. As he observed already in 1990: “Our life takes place amid confusions of values, confusions of consciousness, confusions of national identity, and unprecedented economic disorder and collapse, albeit it does not pass monotonously. At present, there is a great opportunity for the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe to find the style, language, and genres of an Absurdistani literature that most faithfully express Absurdistan, similarly to Musil’s quest regarding Kakania, and for writers to defend their human right to address their readers in the language of Absurdistan.” Grendel’s earlier work was not far removed from this world either, and in his debut novel trilogy the ‘Absurdistani’ mode of experience is already distinctly present, while the insights gained in the wake of the Eastern European regime changes merely intensified his peculiar sense of existence. His later novel cycle, beginning with Einstein’s Bells, whose subtitle is, fittingly, An Absurdistani Story, comprises five books that attempt to speak in ‘Absurdistani’ about the existential realities of the Central and Eastern European worlds before and after the regime changes. Quite consciously, each volume is an experiment in crafting an individual variant of the ‘Absurdistani’ literary style. The means of speaking ‘Absurdistani’ are primarily rooted in plot constructions rich in grotesque, absurd, and sometimes fantastic elements, in irony bordering on satire, and in parodic humour that at moments approaches the burlesque, devices through which the author reveals “the palpably concrete irrationalism of this accursed strip of land, pointing to the mad logic and demonic origins of this irrationalism [6].”
With his next three novels, works that, on account of their local embeddedness, can be described as the ‘New Hont novels’ (Tömegsír [lit. Mass Grave, 1999], Nálunk, New Hontban [lit. In Our Place, New Hont, 2001], and Mátyás király New Hontban [lit. King Matthias in New Hont, 2005]), Grendel clearly attempted to realise a new, and by now more successful, variant of the ‘Absurdistani’ style: a prose technique that employs a seemingly simplified, or rather more homogeneous, narration and language, one that is more restrained in its fantastic distortions yet more direct in its engagement with reality, and therefore more transparent overall. The occasionally didactic allusions and journalistic fervour that betrayed the authorial message in earlier Grendel works are, fortunately, absent from Mass Grave, which instead delivers with its very organic unity a merciless judgement on the post-regime-change world that it depicts, a world sunk into pettiness and everyday banality. In these novels, above all in In Our Place, New Hont, the myth-making intention is unmistakable: Grendel seeks to lead his readers to recognise in the New Hont mode of existence a myth whose elements are remoteness, abandonment, the unchanging substratum beneath recurring stories, and a windless calm ruffled by absurdities, a myth that in this form primarily evokes the history and present of Central and Eastern Europe, though it may have universal relevance as well. The more refined and mutually harmonised means of representing reality and conveying existential experience may stem partly from the lessons of the earlier novels, and partly from the fact that, with the passing of time and the fading of the illusions associated with the regime change, Grendel himself gained greater scope for artistic distance and abstraction. At the same time, towards the end of the 1990s, he may also have reread the late prose of Miklós Mészöly, or at least formed and articulated his own interpretation of it during that period. In 2002, he published an entire small volume on Mészöly’s late prose under the title A tények mágiája (lit. The Magic of Facts), and in this book, he found an alternative authorial strategy, set against the fashionable ‘language-critical’ and ‘self-referential textual literature’ tendencies of his own time, a strategy “that re-dynamises the relation between the linguistic pre-structuredness of the literary work and its referentiality to reality [7]” and “revises the national paradigm of our prose while at the same time preserving, and even reinforcing, its world-directedness”, as this strategy conceives of the literary work as a mode of speaking about existence (one possible mode), as an imprint of a given era’s experience of being [8], just as Grendel himself does. His attention is primarily directed to those works in which Mészöly “ventured furthest in the artistic restructuring of the realist mode of discourse, in elaborating within our literature a new and hitherto untried interplay of plot-centredness, temporal technique, and perspective. [9]” The Magic of Facts is a bold intellectual and literary act, essentially both a polemic and a manifesto, grounded in Mészöly’s late prose yet also supported by Grendel’s already substantial oeuvre, set against the excesses of self-referential textual literature and its elevation as an exclusive (and ‘modern’) value, and in favour of a (modern) new realism that does not forget reality and story, as well as in favour of a pluralism of different but equally legitimate authorial modes of discourse.
Earlier, on several occasions and in various forms, Grendel had already expressed his commitment to what is often termed the ‘representation of reality’, but in these years this commitment became perhaps even more pronounced. For those less familiar with his oeuvre and with his authorial statements, this claim may sound surprising. Such readers generally only know the fact that he is usually counted among the authors associated with the postmodern turn in Hungarian prose, and that his works are credited, deservedly, with a pioneering role in the conceptual and formal renewal of Czechoslovak Hungarian prose, which had ossified into a fixed realism. However, this only holds true together with the fact that, although he did indeed break with the autobiographical, confessional, and at times sociographic prose of the preceding generations, prose largely confined to dealing with the recent past, and although he rejected, both as ideological and artistic expectation, the very notion of a ‘Czechoslovak Hungarian novel’ (cf. “Czechoslovak Hungarian chicken paprikash”), and although he genuinely adopted a number of conceptual and formal elements from the postmodern repertoire, he never abandoned his determination, not even in his earliest novels, to use his own prose-poetic means to create an authentic image of the reality in which he was compelled to live and write. In his essay, A regényírásról, 2002-ben (lit. On Novel Writing in 2002), he likewise praises writers of prose with an “inexhaustibly rich referentiality to reality”, who resonate with him more strongly than “the navel-gazers of self-referential textual literature [10]”. In a 2004 interview, he even goes so far as to call himself a realist writer: “Basically, I consider myself a realist author. The reality of today’s world is such that you feel as if you were forced to live in a vast madhouse (both before and after 1989). I regard the absurd, surrealistic scenes in my prose as utterly realistic descriptions, because such is the condition of Central-Eastern European reality [11]”.
In his analyses of Mass Grave and In Our Place, New Hont, Zoltán Németh identifies striking similarities between these novels and the poetics of minimalist, new-realist prose, and ultimately concludes that “within Grendel’s oeuvre as a whole, there appears to be a stable shift whereby, after the exhaustion of the poetics of postmodern fiction (And His Kingdom Shall Come), a new language, perhaps to be called minimalist or neorealist, announces itself [12].” Yet just as Grendel’s art could not be made to fit wholly within the framework of postmodern prose, so the labels ‘minimalist’ and ‘neorealist’ must also be applied with caution. Even if he did adopt certain conceptual and poetic elements from the American minimalists (Ellis) or the Russian realists (Pelevin), his anecdotal plot construction, myth-making impulses, irony, satirical bent, and the pervasive presence of grotesque and absurd devices all extend well beyond the intentions and toolbox of most so-called minimalists and new realists. These novels relate far more closely to Mészöly’s late prose, to Grendel’s own early fiction, and, perhaps, to the older and more recent absurdist literatures of Central and Eastern Europe.
For Grendel, by the 1980s and 1990s, the essay, the public commentary, the interview, and the diary had become suitable forms not only for self-confession, self-testimony, and public engagement, but also for articulating his thoughts on the relationship between literature and the existential questions raised by minority status, on the ‘mission’ of the minority writer. These genres, more directly than his novels, also enabled him to draw attention to the deficiencies rooted in a disillusioned individual and collective awareness of one’s situation and identity, and to the lack of a self-critical view of the past. The writings in his book Elszigeteltség és egyetemesség (lit. Isolation and Universality, 1991) undoubtedly played no small role in refreshing and transforming the orientation, sense of tradition, and system of values of Czechoslovak Hungarian literature. The essays in Hazám, Abszurdisztán (lit. My Homeland, Absurdistan, 1998) place the historical and contemporary questions affecting the Hungarian community and its literature in Slovakia within a Central European context. The collection also includes a reprint of Grendel’s Rosszkedvem naplója (lit. Diary of My Bad Mood), a series of diary entries written between November 1990 and October 1991 and previously published separately, in which he first gave voice to his disillusionment over the Central and Eastern European regime changes, both Slovak and Hungarian. The diary entries he wrote under the same title fourteen or fifteen years later are the products of his total disillusionment with politics and with the very possibility of real change. This diary was originally published monthly in the journal Mozgó Világ, and later appeared in his 2006 book A kutya faja (lit. Dog Damned Race), together with his essay series Filozopterek az irodalomban (lit. Philosophasters in Literature) and his public commentary series Dog’s Race. The latter had first been published as a weekly column in 2004 in the Bratislava-based weekly Vasárnap, and several of its pieces attest to the fact that Grendel was capable of illuminating complex and intricate contemporary issues not only in large-scale essays, but also within the framework of simple, clear, and concise argumentation. The ‘philosophaster’ pieces he published in 2002 and 2003 in Könyvjelző, the literary supplement of the Bratislava-based daily Új Szó, may also be read, much as The Magic of Facts, as Grendel’s first texts written in the capacity of a literary historian, discussing concrete literary phenomena, topics, and works. From 1997 onward, the writer taught twentieth-century Hungarian literary history at Comenius University Bratislava, and as a consequence, in the latter half of the 2000s, he produced his own ‘teacher’s handbook’ under the title A modern magyar irodalom (lit. Modern Hungarian Literature, 2010), which he intended not only for specialists and university students but also for a broader readership with an interest in the subject. This work, which surveys a hundred years of Hungarian lyric and epic poetry (from roughly 1880 to 1980), has many virtues; foremost among them is its ability to combine an openly personal tone with a level of scholarly rigor and professionalism that meets every expectation. It synthesises the achievements of contemporary literary studies, literary historiography, and criticism, while at the same time reinterpreting processes through its own independent lines of argument, shifting emphases through its individual insights and analyses, and bringing to the foreground authors who are new or previously less appreciated, all in a simple, lucid language and an accessible style.
In 2011, Lajos Grendel suffered a stroke; nonetheless, Négy hét az élet (lit. Life Is Four Weeks Long, 2011), already published before his stroke, and the novels he wrote after recovering from his illness, Távol a szerelem (lit. Far From Love, 2012), Az utolsó reggelen (lit. On the Last Morning, 2013), and Utazás a semmi felé (lit. Journey Towards Nothingness, 2014), once again formed a distinctly coherent cycle. These works, especially the latter three novels, employ prose techniques radically different from his earlier ones, testify not only to Grendel’s capacity for continual renewal but also to his sustained ability to create ever-new literary values. The back-cover blurb of his 2001 novel In Our Place, New Hont quoted Grendel, who was already referring to a return to the world of his early novel trilogy; however, this return was perhaps realised even more fully in the works of his most recent cycle of novels. In these novels, the attachment to real-life references, above all to the reality of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia in the decades before and after the regime change, persists and may even be strengthened. At the same time, the characteristic ‘Absurdistani’ mode of speaking familiar from the earlier novels is no longer present, the fantastic recedes, the grotesque and irony are pushed into the background most of the time, the narration becomes more complex and less transparent, the language is more austere, and the novelistic world is more fragmented, mosaic-like, marked by ellipses and gaps. A return, and an intensification, of the disillusioned confrontation with the world of personal and moral crises characteristic of the early novels can be observed here, along with an intention more disenchanted than ever before, marked by a tragic tone and aiming to sum up and interpret existence. Viewed from the perspective of the fictional worlds, the shared ‘near-tragic tone’ may arise from similarly deteriorating destinies, extreme existential situations, and stages close to suicide; however, viewed from the perspective of the real world, most probably, it stems from the profound disillusionment and disappointment that Grendel experienced in the decades following the regime change, both with regard to human possibilities in general and, more specifically, with regard to the fate of the Hungarians and Slovak–Hungarian coexistence. In its themes, outlook on existence, and tonal character, Life Is Four Weeks Long appears to serve as the prototype or primal source for the three novels that follow it, while poetically it seems to represent a kind of transition from Grendel’s earlier novelistic practice towards the direction taken in the aforementioned three novels. In Life Is Four Weeks Long, the anecdotal mode of plot construction already makes use of Mészöly’s cutting technique, but the novel falls short of the degree of linguistic reduction realised in the subsequent works. At the same time, the familiar Grendelian humour and tragic irony are still operative, of which scarcely a trace remains in the later novels, where the prevailing tragic tone is only coloured by certain nostalgic, melodramatic overtones. Each of these novels contains strikingly precise yet thought-provoking sentences, poignantly beautiful scenes or moods, and each has its own distinctive merits, for instance, Far from Love has a well-developed system of motifs; On the Last Morning thoroughly examines Slovak–Hungarian relations; and Journey Towards Nothingness vividly portrays the post-regime change world. Taken together, the four novels can undoubtedly convey with greater force and emphasis the sense of hopelessness and impasse that characterises the worlds of their protagonists. However, in terms of their conceptual, linguistic, and compositional effect, it is the first of the four, Life Is Four Weeks Long, that most powerfully exposes the complete relativity of values and the meaninglessness of an emptied-out existence.
Already of undeniable literary-historical significance and, through its Slovak, German, French, English, and Italian translations, widely recognised across Europe (and honoured with various awards), Lajos Grendel’s oeuvre is one of the great achievements of contemporary Hungarian literature. It is no coincidence that in 2015 he was already among the topics set for the written part of the Hungarian secondary school-leaving examination. Although the quotation used there was taken from his work in literary history, his book titled Modern Hungarian Literature remains one of the finest literary-historical monographs currently available on the long-twentieth-century Hungarian literature.
[2016]
[1] Ernő Kulcsár Szabó, A magyar irodalom története 1945–1991. (lit. The History of Hungarian Literature), Argumentum Kiadó, Budapest, 1994, p. 183.
[2] Márton Szilágyi, Együtt – egymásért? (lit. Together – for One Another?), in Márton Szilágyi, Kritikai berek. (lit. The Critical Grove), Balassi Kiadó, Budapest, 1995, pp. 32–33.
[3] Péter Szirák, Grendel Lajos. (lit. Lajos Grendel), Kalligram Kiadó, Bratislava (Pozsony), 1995, p. 78.
[4] Árpád Tőzsér, Jelentések egy (létre) nyitott műhöz. (lit. Meanings for a Work Open (to Being)), in Árpád Tőzsér: A homokóra nyakában. (lit. At the Neck of the Hourglass), Nap Kiadó, Dunajská Streda (Dunaszerdahely), 1997, p. 262.
[5] Lajos Grendel, Abszurdisztán. (lit. Absurdistan), in Lajos Grendel, Elszigeteltség és egyetemesség. (lit. Isolation and Universality), Régió Könyvek 3, Budapest, 1991, pp. 140–145.
[6] ibid.
[7] Lajos Grendel, A tények mágiája. (lit. The Magic of Facts), Kalligram Kiadó, Bratislava (Pozsony), 2002, p. 92.
[8] ibid., p. 86.
[9] ibid., p. 9.
[10] Lajos Grendel, A regényírásról, 2002-ben. (lit. On Novel Writing in 2002), Forrás, 2002/6, pp. 79–82.
[11] Végtelenül realista. Interjú Grendel Lajos Kossuth-díjas íróval. (lit. Infinitely Realist: An Interview With Lajos Grendel, Recipient of the Kossuth Prize), in Nyugati Jelen. 20 February 2004.
[12] Zoltán Németh, A terep/munka kellemetlenségei. (lit. The Discomforts of the Field/of Work), in Zoltán Németh, A bevégezhetetlen feladat, (lit. The Task That Cannot Be Completed), Nap Kiadó, Dunajská Streda (Dunaszerdahely), 2005, p. 79.