Spiritual realism. At the heart of the concept coined first by Anna Jókai herself, and later taken up by critics and literary historians to describe the intellectual orientation – or rather sensitivity – manifested in her works, two seemingly opposed forces appear to be in tension: spirit and matter. Yet, as subsequent developments confirm, this ‘terminus technicus’ essentially denotes the attempt to reassemble realities that had long been separated.
When, somewhat belatedly compared with her contemporaries, Jókai – sensing a lack in the work that had so far provided her with a livelihood – rediscovered her adolescent dream and took up the pen, something at once familiar and new occurred: the career path she had followed until the mid-1960s, together with the experience she had accumulated along the way, found their way onto the page. (Who knows how many written works there are in the world that never gave rise to a literary career or oeuvre? Many attempt to set their lived experiences down on paper, yet no literature emerges from them.) On this occasion, however, the feat succeeded – perhaps by chance.
Jókai’s first published piece was the short story Családi kör (lit. Family Circle), which appeared in Kortárs (lit. Contemporary), a leading Hungarian literary journal, in 1966. Two years later, her first novel, 4447, was also published. Contemporary criticism tried to interpret these early works using the term ‘realism’ – already somewhat outdated by then and associated in Hungary with unpleasant memories of the forced ‘socialist realism’ doctrine (the official cultural policy of the Communist regime, which prescribed ideologically conforming art) – or, alternatively, the equally obsolete label of ‘naturalism’.
Indeed, Jókai’s earliest works expose the everyday human world with an almost merciless rawness. Built on terse, tense dialogues, these early texts (it is no coincidence that 4447 was later adapted for the stage) reveal with uncompromising frankness the forces that dwell within human beings – a dimension which contemporary criticism, somewhat reductively, labelled ‘psychological’. The tangled fates of her characters, moreover, function as miniature reflections of the anomalies of the wider social order – an aspect the critical reception sought to frame as ‘social criticism’.
Yet, although the first works vividly depict distorted human relationships (and, by implication, allude to their broader context), they did not propose an external transformation of the existing order – as the official ideology of the time, which described socialism as “the best of all possible worlds” in which only “errors” could occur, might have expected, at least in rhetoric. Rather, they drew attention to the individual’s responsibility and the necessity of self-knowledge.
There is, in truth, nothing fundamentally new in literature – at least not if one considers only its subject matter. It is the manner and the direction in which the author approaches the material that allow a work to touch upon something essential. Since the beginning of her literary career, Anna Jókai has continued to explore the very same problems that literature itself has wrestled with since its inception: life, love, and death – in the broadest possible sense. There is no trace of any specific literary “programme” or ideological tendency in Jókai’s oeuvre; what we do find, however, is a sensitivity that consistently points beyond the immediate moment. It is a domain where – as in the geometry of János Bolyai [1802–1860, Hungarian mathematician, co-founder of non-Euclidean geometry] – parallel lines meet in infinity.
Ildikó and Miklós, the central figures of Tartozik és követel (lit. Debit and Credit), live – like all human beings – entangled in their own frailty, desires, and familial networks. The harmony and self-realisation that emerge between them, and between so many of Jókai’s characters, can be achieved only through suffering and disappointment. The fleeting glimpses of happiness dissipate, only for understanding to reveal itself through the experience of absence and wounding: there is no escape – every person must pass through despair. The question is simply how far one is able, by the end of one’s journey, to subject oneself to such illumination as to recognise: one is no exception. The task is to bring one’s affairs to completion.
In Jókai’s fiction there is almost always a character – a truly participating figure – who, in their faltering, all-too-human way, seeks to draw the attention of those around them to precisely this higher (and, however surprising, not otherworldly) perspective – as does the old Miklós in Debit and Credit. Yet the elevated vantage point that frames the perspective of the works does not exclude the manifestation of the immediate, the here-and-now, in all its reality. This is why, under socialism, contemporary critics repeatedly tried to measure these works with the categories of ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’. But the evocation of the present moment is done in the reader’s interest – for the sake of credibility and authenticity. This is the purpose of the inclusion of contemporary material environments, of popular songs and hits of the time, and of the much-disparaged (in the still-persistent postmodern age) use of reference. It is the acknowledgement – however banal – that things (literature included) do matter.
From the very outset of her literary career until the mid-1970s, Jókai published a new novel every one or two years. In this sequence of works (4447, Debit and Credit, A labda [lit. The Ball], Napok – [lit. Days], Mindhalálig – [lit. Until Death], A feladat – [lit. The Task]), we encounter the same fundamental problems again and again – only from an ever-widening perspective. (It is as though we were traversing a spiral that repeatedly returns to the same point, but each time at a higher level.)
In the novel Days, published in 1972, an entire human life unfolds before the reader – from the pre-linguistic state to the post-linguistic, in other words, from birth to death. In the story of the protagonist, Viktor Oláh, we witness an outwardly eventful life course as it evolves from within. Through the fate of a man who experiences the 1930s as a child, the Second World War as an adolescent, the period of the emerging dictatorship as a young adult, the 1956 revolution [the nationwide anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary] as a young father, and the subsequent years of “consolidation” as a man growing increasingly disillusioned yet ever more self-aware, almost half a century of Hungarian history becomes visible – from the 1930s to the novel’s own present in the 1970s. In this work, 1956 is not described as a “counter-revolution” (as the official Communist narrative termed it) but is named for what it truly was.
In Days, all the features that would later characterise Jókai’s prose are already discernible: a style that occasionally strips down to nominal simplicity; the evocation of a character’s inner perspective and of the atmosphere of the age; the citation of proverbs (traces of a once-shared body of knowledge that has since become a cliché); the depiction of the fragility of the male–female relationship; and the presence – most often embodied in the secondary characters – of a higher knowledge (or rather sensitivity), in the light of which the actions and experiences of the protagonists in the foreground of the narrative become clearer.
The orientation that would later be described in the reception of her work as ‘spiritual realism’ becomes increasingly perceptible in Anna Jókai’s successive novels. In Jákob lajtorjája (lit. Jacob’s Ladder), we encounter a text more open to the transcendent realm, where – as in the mystery plays – higher forces observing the fate of the protagonists address the reader directly. The novel Az együttlét (lit. Being Together) is, by contrast, the description of a simple journey: its aim is for the central figure, Aladár Krisztián Ameli, to reach the funeral of a friend by taking the number 28 tram in Budapest. During the journey, the inner streams of consciousness and monologues of the passengers who board and leave the tram appear, revealing their opinions of one another and of Aladár Ameli himself.
The second part of this two-part work consists of letters written by a (possibly imagined) aunt, whose very identity and existence remain uncertain, and who recounts to her nephew the story of her life, her thoughts, and her reflections. This book by Jókai is the closest in spirit to the postmodern literary ideal that was later elevated to high prestige within Hungarian literature. The fragmented world that emerges in Being Together exists as irreconcilable fragments, seemingly unknowable, where even the stability of linguistic meaning itself can be called into question. It is in this novel that we first see, in its strongest form, a technique that Jókai would use repeatedly in her later fiction: the construction of the text as a montage of the characters’ streams of consciousness placed side by side.
The 1989 novel Szegény Sudár Anna (lit. Poor Anna Sudár), set amid the bleak years of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in the 1980s in Romania, tells the story of a Hungarian woman from Transylvania who struggles for the Hungarian identity of her grandchild, born into a mixed marriage, and for her own, under a dual oppression – national and political. Postmodern characteristics can be detected in this novel too, for instance in its diary form: written in the first person, the text is full of crossed-out entries, sometimes to the point of near illegibility. Yet here these devices serve a purpose and possess meaning; they are not merely arbitrary formal gestures expressing hopelessness.
After the publication of this work, nearly a decade would pass before readers could hold another Jókai novel in their hands. Yet the intervening period was far from silent: during these years the author served as president of the Magyar Írószövetség (Hungarian Writers’ Union). In 1998 she published her next novel, Ne féljetek (Be Not Afraid), which, including its first edition, went through twenty-two printings. In this work, Jókai’s prose art can be felt in its fully matured form.
The novel is built from the dialogues of four characters and their parallel interior monologues, and the process that unfolds in the speech of these protagonists – whose lives have crossed at various points in the past – concerns ageing, dying, and indeed all the changes that accompany life itself. Over the course of the narrative, the characters reach a higher perspective from which their own fates – and even death itself – become comprehensible and acceptable to them. The very title, which alludes to a saying of Jesus in the New Testament, suggests consolation, just as the novel itself does, not by concealing life’s difficulties but by rendering their full weight and depicting the nature of change. The book’s popularity is hardly accidental.
After the publication of Be Not Afraid, Jókai declared that she would not write any more novels.
Yet she did not, in the end, lay down her pen. Concerned with the fate of both humanity as it entered the third millennium and of her own homeland, Anna Jókai wrote Godot megjött (lit. Godot Has Arrived), published in 2007. This later work transcends conventional genre boundaries, and its title deliberately recalls Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s drama presenting a world and humanity abandoned by God. Jókai’s work constitutes a direct response to Beckett: while the Irish playwright suggests, through the futility of waiting, the absence – indeed the non-existence – of God, the author of Godot Has Arrived shifts the perspective. In a work reminiscent of a mystery play, she demonstrates that the waiting is not in vain: the problem is rather that the characters’ outlook is too earthbound for them to perceive the One who has already arrived.
The contemporary age, described as the era of globalisation – an era that conceives the entire earthly order purely as a subsystem of the economy – reproduces problems long familiar from human history, albeit on a greater scale. Jókai sees the family as the community most vulnerable to these forces. Her most recent novel, Éhes élet (lit. Hungry Life), published in 2012, offers a fresh depiction of this environment, already burdened with trials in the twentieth century. As the human soul encounters and awakens to the world, it becomes filled with desires – “hungers” – that can even destroy the very environment that nurtured and sustained it. This work too is structured around typographically distinct streams of consciousness, through which the fates of individuals living in contemporary, fractured families – shaped by divorces and separations – are portrayed, leading eventually to the emergence of a higher, illuminating, ordering perspective.
There is no “happy ending” in any of Jókai’s novels. What follows the descent (katabasis) is always a form of ascent, which does not resolve or dissolve the problems but instead points towards a higher vantage point from which all events may be comprehended.
Jókai did not concern herself with the questions of human life only in her short stories, novels, and dramas. She also explored them in essays, public statements, and interviews, and, from the 1980s onwards, in a new self-created literary form: the “apocryphal prayer”. Although the worldview underlying her oeuvre points beyond material reality, it nevertheless offers within that reality a framework for thinking through the questions addressed in her writing. This worldview, perceptible as a background presence in her fiction and essays, exhibits affinities – explicitly acknowledged by Jókai herself – with the Christian tradition’s conception of the world and of humanity.
As a responsible intellectual, Jókai considers it her duty to express her views on the present moment, whatever form that present may take. This sense of responsibility underlies her volumes of essays and interviews, through which she continues a centuries-old tradition of Hungarian literature: a literature that names and confronts the problems of the community and the homeland. The essays collected in volumes such as Mi ez az álom? (lit. What Is This Dream?), A töve és a gallya (lit. The Root and the Branch), and Percemberkék dáridója (lit. The Revelry of Ephemeral Men) deal with the Hungarian language and literature, the unresolved tasks of Hungarian society, the pressing questions of the contemporary Hungarian present, and, above all, the forgotten concept of ‘measure’ – as well as the mental traps that can lead even the purest of intentions astray. (These writings were later collected in a three-volume edition titled A mérleg nyelve [lit. The Tongue of the Scales].)
Among the intellectual heritage perceptible behind these statements, three names consistently stand out from the history of Hungarian literature and thought: Béla Hamvas [1897–1968, Hungarian philosopher and essayist], János Kodolányi [1899–1969, Hungarian novelist and thinker], and Nándor Várkonyi [1896–1975, Hungarian philosopher and literary historian]. Jókai repeatedly names them as points of intellectual orientation, adding – in rejection of all facile mysticism – that it can scarcely be coincidental that all three were born and died within almost the same years, living through a period that turned Hungary upside down and, until the twilight of their lives, sought the meaning of human existence solely within the material world, denying all broader perspectives. According to Jókai, these three figures lit beacons of thought in a dark age – beacons that still shine to this day.
At the outset of this essay, we described Anna Jókai’s literary beginnings in terms of a certain ‘outsiderness’, a lack of the collective generational force that often propels writers of the same cohort. The body of work she subsequently created seems consistently to have stood in opposition to the prevailing Zeitgeist – or, as Jókai herself calls it, the “demon of the time”. During the era of one-party dictatorship, with its materialist worldview, it was the collective that was designated as the guiding principle. Yet in Jókai’s works the individual was also placed on stage. After the political transformation of 1989 [the transition from state socialism to democracy in Hungary], the individual ascended to the throne; but the author of Be Not Afraid, Godot Has Arrived, and Hungry Life insists that the human being is also a communal, social creature – and cannot thrive alone.
The message, the ‘meaning’ (a term that, in the postmodern era, has almost become a pejorative when speaking of literature), remains the same; only the shadows of the surrounding world allow different beams of light to pass through it. The aesthetically constructed literary work does not offer solutions; it merely provokes thought. Meaning is built within the reader and takes shape only through their participation.
In the introduction, it was noted that the term ‘spiritual realism’ seems to contain a (seeming) contradiction: spirit and matter – to put it in starkly simplified terms. Yet if we change our perspective and interpret them not as mutually exclusive realities but as complementary elements that together form a whole, the contradiction disappears. Just as thought manifests itself in language, intention in action, the soul in the body, the eternal in the temporal, and the divine among human beings, so too does the meaning of spiritual realism become clear: to present a perspective that transcends material conditions, precisely by making it manifest through those conditions.
The form of the works in Jókai’s oeuvre is necessary, entirely appropriate, and inseparable from the meaning they convey. (In this respect, too, her conception of literature differs from the postmodern: for her, language is also an instrument. It should be noted here as well that, in Jókai’s view, postmodernism exists after something, but not above it.) Content and form complement and presuppose one another – just as a literary work also requires the reader in order truly to exist. The reader’s task is to filter the work through their own self.
This relationship between work and reader is aptly captured by a quotation from István Baka [1948–1995, Hungarian poet], which is equally applicable to Jókai’s oeuvre: “Let the reader not recognise me, but themselves.” The consequences of reading, however, belong to another – though not sharply distinct – sphere: the drawing of conclusions is a deeply personal matter. To quote one of Jókai’s apocryphal prayers: “Lord, let me love to be – but to be fully – what I am at this moment.”
[2012]