16_001_20

Canonized as a representative body of work in postmodern Hungarian prose, Péter Esterházy’s writing is inherently dialogical, self-reflexive, and linguistically playful both in his fiction and in the essays and journalism that punctuate his literary oeuvre. The dialogue often takes the form of intercultural borrowing in the diverse unmarked citations that are a staple of Esterházy’s creative method. This is the case, when Harmonia Caelestis (Celestial Harmonies) incorporates passages from The Dead Father (1975), Donald Barthelme’s novella-length work of experimental fiction that precedes Esterházy’s magnum opus by twenty-five years. One of the undisputed high points in its author’s prolific career, Harmonies is an emotionally resonant and unsentimentally ironic memorial tribute to the Esterházy family, and many of its borrowed texts supply content historically relevant to the Esterházys or serve as rather arbitrary manifestations of cosmic multiplicity (the “anything” the narrator can call “my father”). The connection to The Dead Father, however, is based on a deep thematic connection. The texts share a conflicted engagement with fatherhood, the embattled and fractured monumentality of a larger-than-life father figure, and a construction of ironic, at times tragicomic, grandeur out of anachronistic and contradictory cultural fragments. They also share certain stylistic and narrative devices, such as the catalogue—comprehensive enumeration in lists and taxonomies meant to expose the dubious limits of totality and fantasies of coherence.

In the late 1990s, when I translated Barthelme’s “A Manual for Sons”1—a separately published short story also included in The Dead Father as a fictional found manuscript and the section of The Dead Father from which Esterházy borrows most heavily—I received a note of acceptance from the journal editor with the brief jovial comment: “Ah, patricide! Such an evergreen topic!” As I examine the relationship of the two texts, one of the key issues will be this evergreenness: the different pressures of history and memory on a universal, timeless, cosmically evergreen horizon for events. I will suggest that despite their shared concerns, the two works are remarkably different in their approach to the spaces, materials, and practices of social memory, which makes their intercultural encounter (in writing, reading, and translation) both illuminating and troublesome. Barthelme’s book is set in a more symbolic, primarily visual and seemingly ahistorical scene of language. In this respect, it is heir to the American romance rather than the European novel. Its historicity inheres in a perspective that is the condition of the text rather than its content: the mythic model acquires a position in historical time through the horizon of interpretation (particularly, an awareness of second-wave feminism as the immediate context of Barthelme’s book in the 1970s).

By contrast, historicity is more integrated into Esterházy’s text through an experiential and intimate space of collective memory. This difference is not so much a mark of different creative styles and temperaments as a function of the defining regional conditions of postmodern cultural production in East-Central Europe, the experience of impossible continuity as a historical condition fundamentally and directly structuring life experiences in the region. Being unhindered by unfamiliar historical details, Barthelme’s abstract narrative of cultural memory—a drama of cultural memory played out within a frame of social history—might be expected to lend itself well to intercultural borrowing, yet, it only travels well at the cost of losing its historical specificity. Because its historical difference inheres primarily in a position and perspective, it actually poses greater challenges to intercultural interpretation than clear markers of a specific, if unfamiliar, historicity in the narrative, such as the highly visible, obvious obscurity of events or geographical names that anchor a text in a given society and period.

Barthelme’s narrative of the dead (yet resistantly undead) father is presented as a symbolic family story magnified in a symbolic space—something that is indicated typographically in the title and the very first sentence: “The Dead Father’s Head.”2 The Dead Father is an immense figure, the result of symbolic abstraction. The text enlarges him to the size of numerous city blocks proportionate to his once undisputed power and former ability to father an amazing assortment of existents from the poker chip through the rubber pretzel to climatology. The largely abstract space, in which this oversize figure “lies” and is then dragged to his grave by a group of hired men, has concrete elements, but ones mostly unidentifiable, unlocalizable except in the symbolic space of the text: The road. The countryside. The campfire. This kind of space favors cultural memory (kulturelle Gedächtnis), as defined by Jan Assmann, in which the past “melts into symbolic formations”:

The foundational mode always functions—even in illiterate societies—as fixed objectifications both linguistic and nonlinguistic, such as rituals, dances, myths, patterns, dress, jewelry, tattoos, paintings, landscapes, and so on, all of which are kinds of sign systems, and, because of their mnemotechnical function—supporting memory and identity—capable of being subsumed under the general heading memoria.3

Examples of such symbolic formations include the story of the fathers, exodus, wandering in the desert, settlement, and exile. Barthelme’s book creates these in two ways. First, the father figure, who is introduced already fallen or felled, but in any case supine, as a colossus lying in a city, is architecturally spatialized (DF 4). Second, there is the path of this colossus, which is dragged out of the city and hauled through the landscape to his grave by a group of men hired by his children. There is a sense of memory here, but despite the markers of recent urban settlement, it is one of times immemorial.

What ties Barthelme’s text to the romance—rather than the novelistic rendition of similar themes we will see in Esterházy’s book—is staging a large-scale drama of the individual in an expansive and relatively emptied “free” space. Its individual is “mysterious, archetypal, rather than socially typical, abstractly conceived, perhaps universal, but certainly not of the everyday world” that could supply the “precise sociology” and the “details of rich internal life” that constitute the social space of the novel.4 The paraphernalia of royal privilege are not representations of a past historical social institution, but are both primordial and contemporary, just one aspect of the “sacred and holy Father” in his family drama with his children (DF 55). The radical sociohistorical decontextualization of the elements of Barthelme’s narrative in a series of abstract locations and finally “a large gap in the earth” (the Dead Father’s funeral) seem to fit this model well (DF 174). There are some sporadic geographical and cultural markers of locality, both real and imaginary (pemmican, Savings & Loan, the Straits of Ballambangjang, titles of international newspapers, the country of the Wends), but the actions, routines of the characters are nevertheless carried out in a void and compose larger patterns of symbolic action that form their relationship to the landscape. This is, once again, a characteristic of cultural memory as a source of collective identity through ritual action: “The collective identity needs ceremony—something to take it out of the daily routine. To a degree, it is larger than life. The ceremony as a means of communication is itself a forming influence, as it shapes memory by means of texts, dances, images, rituals, and so on.”5 The Dead Father abounds in such festivities, dances, rituals of power (slaying of animals, rapping the father), rituals of divestment (the belt buckle, the passport, the keys, the sword), rituals of purification, with the entire narrative progressing as a procession, simultaneously the Dead Father’s quest for the Golden Fleece (meant to restore his zest [DF 39]) and his own funeral march. The ruthlessly linear plot—the irreversible path to the grave—can itself be part of a mythic, ritual cycle of establishing masculinity vis-à-vis the father. The son, who now possesses the hard-earned belt buckle, sword, keys, and passport will in turn bestow the orange fool’s cap on his son at the age of sixteen, forget his memory of oppression and revel in memories of past glory. The large, empty stage of the World is also that of the Psyche, a subconscious landscape of the archetypal characters’ drives, fears, fantasies, and desires.

Stylistically, these socially abstract characters and elements of the landscape correspond to brief, bare phrases, elliptical sentences that stand on their own like images in the descriptions or interchanges reminiscent of language lessons: “Edmund talking to Emma. Beam of Emma. Washing of socks in the small stream. Discussion of foot care (general)” (DF 70). This device of excessive nominalization results in an intensely and vividly visual text, in which events and objects are transformed into images (often severed from characters and action), and the narrative action is subsumed into the act of seeing and naming.

By contrast, Esterházy’s rigorously lowercase “my fathers” (“édesapámok”)6 operate in a world built mostly to historical scale, where cosmic enlargement is effected primarily through procedures of multiplication. The cultural memory work of these infinite versions of “my father” flows into the communicative memory of the recent past of Esterházy’s family, a memory that depends on the social interactions of witnessing and telling.7 While the Dead Father is hauled through the landscape, the actions and characters of Harmonies are typically anchored in a geographically, culturally, and historically specific landscape. In this sense, Celestial Harmonies is a novelistic rendition of what The Dead Father stages as a romance, though both are postmodern revisions of their grand nineteenth-century generic predecessors. The scenes of Harmonies are predominantly sociohistorical situations, even at their most fantastic, as when “my father” (a beggar) asks Jesus for money at the local train station on Batthyány Square, or when “my mother” sews stars of David on an old Singer sewing machine. Harmonies, unlike most of Esterházy’s other works, is built to the scale of the grand edifice of the historical novel, even though it relies heavily on small forms, fragments, and collages. By putting an aristocratic family into the center of its inquiry, the book inescapably engages with a historically oriented world that—ambivalently and under great pressure—relies on the past for meaning and value, even though this world is not nearly as epistemologically coherent and homogeneous as that of a historical novel. Indeed, even interpretations emphasizing playful plurality and inconsistencies and therefore restricting the meaningful historicity of the narrative to book II, acknowledge the overall impact of this orientation toward the past: a relation to the genres of the Familienroman, the saga, and the historical novel is created by putting twentieth-century events in contexts that go back to mediaeval times and by the book’s sustained treatment of some of the most crucial divisions in Hungarian history (such as kuruc vs. labanc, i.e., anti-Habsburg vs. pro-Habsburg).8 The book engages this subject of the past as both actual and potential, unique and plural: the alternate and numerous “lives of the Esterházy family” are followed by the “confessions of an Esterházy family” (books I and II). Thus, the unique and definite is grasped in its alternatives and possibilities (the lives of the family) and the most intimate and private self is merely one such alternative (confessions of an Esterházy family).

Accordingly, “my father,” the protean protagonist of this family history—and the obvious intertextual link to Barthelme’s work—is not only memorialized and monumentalized as a cosmic-mythic father figure, but also as a historical figure of transition. Mátyás Esterházy, the nonfictional counterpart to some variants of this character, was twenty-six years old in 1945, so his individual life spanned the abyss between centuries of a grand heritage and the pettiness of survival and coping during the communist era.9 Within the internal dialogic structure of the book, it is book II that appears to bear the burden of meaningful historicity, since it looks like a straightforward novelistic biography of the author’s family, a slightly fictionalized memoir in 201 sections, which presents a more or less chronological, if episodic, story starting from the events of the Soviet Republic in 1919 to the early 1960s. This is preceded by the 371 “numbered sentences” of book I, which produce the protagonist “my father” (“édesapám”) as a cosmically diffuse, self-replicating signifier through intertwined procedures of endless enumeration and dispersion. Each of the 371 small stories refers to someone or something called “my father” (or uses “my father’s name” as a placeholder in quoted dialogue as in “Yesterday, Count, here my father’s name followed, was Your Majesty’s host,” CH 92). Using the ubiquitous signifier in ever-changing contexts makes all existents an aspect or version of “my father,” as anything can be designated “my father” and conversely “my father” can stand for anything. Yet, the seemingly sharp contrast between books I and II with regard to reliable reference and fictionalized facts is just a shift in emphasis: the assumption of “honest referentiality” or even an (auto)biographical contract is a trap, and book I is best understood as a lengthy introductory course on the proper attitude for approaching the deceptively traditional storytelling of the “Confessions.” If the two halves are less different than they first seem, it is considerably easier to grasp the need for a cautious and skeptical approach to the True Historical Narrative than to understand how the eccentric menagerie of my fathers can sustain, rather than fatally undermine, what I called a historically oriented world. The answer to this is crucial for understanding the radical transformation of Barthelme’s method and material, once appropriated into Esterházy’s East-Central-European postmodern poetics.

Harmonies incorporates a vast array of narrative material from archival documents and news items through myths and literary texts to historical anecdotes by inserting “my father” as the ubiquitous hero (and at times “my mother” as the accompanying heroine) of all possible events (but especially the event when the two met). This results in the infinite yet ironic dissemination of fatherhood as a shifting signifier whose meaning shrinks in proportion to the expansion of its all-encompassing mythic grandeur. These referents of “my father” are typically human and are positioned at varying distances from historical Esterházys: an owner of the palace of Kismarton (CH 6), an opponent of Kossuth in the Hungarian War of Liberation in 1848 (CH 53), or a fifty-two-year-old drunk arrested for manslaughter (CH 77). They can also be animals, however, such as a dog or a fish (CH 70, 362), and inanimate objects and abstractions, such as the “constellation Sagittarius” and “the original and ultimate temptation” (CH 391, 77). After a point, “my father” signifies, more than anything else, the impossibility of locating and directly referencing “my father,” which is what just eludes one’s grasp and hovers at the margins of vision: “What is the difference between my father and God? The difference is obvious: God is everywhere, while my father too is everywhere, except here” (CH 54). This is the void that is compulsively filled by the voice of a no less protean narrator, whose shifting position here is always that of “my father’s son,” though he is never allowed to make an appearance in the first person singular.10 While it has often been suggested that such a contradictory and unreliable structure cannot sustain a historically oriented world,11 I suggest that the space (rather than time) of social memory keeps the text from evaporating into “language” despite all firework effects to the contrary. Although narrative segments are indeed removed from a conventional chronology and continuous time, a historically oriented world remains available as a space of social memory.

In other words, there is a sense of process and continuity in Harmonies, but, particularly in book I, it is not time-as-chronology that produces it. Time is full of breaks and inconsistencies in the text: different historical periods can anachronistically mingle in a character’s life events, a human life can span long historical periods (CH 13–14), and mutually exclusive alternative outcomes coexist or impossibly supplant each other. These temporal breaks and illogical interconnections are emphatically vocalized in the stylistic slides and collisions of sentences, helter-skelter rides of disparate registers.12 The book abounds in absurd and fantastic juxtapositions such as the anachronistic fusion of the Court—in the context of the whole book, the Habsburg court—and the ethics and politics of cloning, where the coexistence of discontinuous historical temporal planes is crystallized in the imaginary position of the imperial clone master.

My father refused to have himself cloned. He simply would not hear of it. He hollered at the clone master, too, and did his best to pillory the whole idea at Court. He threw the full weight of his authority and influence, which was considerable, into the fray. But then, things turned out differently all the same. (CH 30)

Cloning the father is, of course, a self-referential theme, part of the ongoing commentary on the text’s own project of cloning the father. In other examples of temporal trouble, the break is excessive: time cleaves and requires revision, resulting in a yawning gap.

Once my father lost the battle and the enemy went in pursuit. The magic steed took him to a hiding place, while it lay down among the dead horses and hid its head under the neck of the horse lying next to it. The enemy passed them by. This happened twice, once in August 1652, and once in the spring of 1969. (CH 13–14, my emphasis)

This treatment of time appears even more radical when applied to historical events for which factuality and narrativization carry an exceptional cultural-philosophical burden: “They dragged my daddy off to Mauthausen where, along with everyone else, they killed him. When he returned, he weighed forty kilos” (CH 242). Does this leave the “truth” of the Holocaust intact by merely (miraculously) reviving the father killed? Does “my father” contain both alternatives potentially produced by the historical event—my father who came back and my father who was lost forever? Are these alternatives reconciled in the “all” of potentiality or are we merely suspended between possibilities, weighing the odds, but never quite certain? Clearly there is no conclusive answer, except the understanding that chronological succession is not to be trusted as a bedrock of factuality.

Despite these conditions, the book does create a sense of that “progressive variation” that Jan Assmann identifies in his Das kulturelle Gedächtnis with the continuity of culture as distinct from either the cyclical repetition of nature and myth and, we might add, from a directionless permutation of possibilities.13 But this sense of formation is neither as continuous, nor as teleologically valorized as it is in the nineteenth-century sense of restless infinite succession that Assmann explains by quoting from the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen:

It is not the continuity of a circle that returns into itself, of a period repeating itself, but that of an endless succession, and this in such wise that in every new a further new has its germ and the assurance of working itself out. For in every new the entire series of past forms is ideally summed up, and every one of them appears as element and temporary expression in the growing sum.14

This growth and rearrangement shares some qualities of the cumulative reading procedure required of the reader of Harmonies. It has been suggested that synthesizing the series is doomed at least in the first half of the book, because logically irreconcilable parts of the text—resulting from a violation of the law of excluded middles—“cancel each other out,” mutually “disauthenticate,” or “refute” each other. This allegedly delays historicity proper until the second half, where the discontinuity of all this inventive play can emerge as a fundamental condition of Hungarian history, in which everything has to begin again all the time (CH 818).15 Although logically this should be the case, this logic does not quite hold in the experience of the book, because space plays such a crucial role in sustaining a sense of social memory. Perhaps “nothing is ever continued here,” but this here is continued (CH 818).

This redistribution of the burden of continuity can work effectively, because temporal and spatial relations are inherently interconnected in narrative fiction and “create a web that works predominantly metaphorically.”16 Beáta Thomka argues further that narrative loci have more generally taken on a more significant role in this interrelationship due to the tendency for modern narrative fiction to set up “anti-chronological, systematically achronological connections”; consequently, she claims, “loci shift from the status of neutral worldmaking components with a background function of verisimilitude and a location for the sequence of events, to become significant factors in the making of the world and in the making of meaning.”17 It is in these terms that the loci of Harmonies make a world that is historically oriented and coherent as a larger scene of events despite temporal gaps and inconsistencies. Present-day and historical Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy serve as an inherently social and historical spatial center of gravity for a dynamic, detail-filled “here” despite its many variants and degrees of concreteness. Not all events are anchored at precise sites of this geographically, culturally, and historically specific landscape, but their multitude, their multiplicity is brought back to the “here” of this landscape, which is a memorial space, its sites often archeologically layered.18 The narrative keeps extending and contracting the horizon, shifting its locus, but its cosmic world has a historically specific core with its own timeline. For example, the text stages and restages the fatal shooting of “my father” as the duel of Évariste Galois after the night of developing his great mathematical theory or alternatively as the duel of a character in one of Nabokov’s novels, but this is soon reconfigured as a shooting by a member of the liberating Russian troops. So rather than a completely groundless shifting, a weightless relativization of facts and events, the text works by an outward-inward undulation, with a span that extends from Szigliget to London (CH 298). The village of Szigliget is the site of a Neoclassical Esterházy mansion by Lake Balaton and the measuring of the father’s wingspan shows how the cosmology of fatherhood extends from this local, familiar site outward to the larger world. Furthermore, many of the anecdotes in book I and the entire biographical memory project of book II establish complex and nuanced social relationships and historically specific details that provide the grounds for any allegorical or symbolic interpretation and any self-referential or metafictional play in the text. The previously quoted scene of miraculously managing to hide after the lost battle takes on a different meaning in this context: “This happened twice, once in August 1652, and once in the spring of 1969.” From the perspective of individual action, this is a case of discontinuity beyond a human lifespan; yet, the transformation of the landscape into a space of memory—in which events can be embedded—implies a broader sense of continuity that can accommodate lacunae, uncertainties, and emendations of the past (stealing back into the museum to correct one’s paintings [CH 5–6]). Any putative evidence of historical incoherence or unreliability19 arguably emerges as a possibility of a layered, articulated space, a habitable palimpsest of memory.

Esterházy’s remarkable achievement is keeping this memorial landscape alive and vividly experiential without the naiveté of illusory realism or “authenticity-obsessed pseudo-naturalism,”20 or the self-conscious weak referentiality of ironic language play. This requires a cautiously self-referential questioning of “landscape” as not only a habitable, humanized space but also a human construct and representation, even as it calls for a rich sensorium and intimate familiarity in that representation (an inextricability of perception, knowledge, and experience, so the verdict of illogicalness cannot simply trump experience). Thus, experiencing the landscape as landscape is to be both within and outside, having a sense of proximity from afar.

The very first spatially situated scene of “my father” reveals how easily such a narrative space could be devoured by its signifiers. Embedded in the second numbered sentence is an encounter with Emperor Leopold at an unspecified location and time, though the time is identified as part of a sequence (“my father, this ferocious-looking baroque grand seigneur who was [often] in a position, nay under obligation, to raise his eyes to Emperor Leopold, raised his eyes to Emperor Leopold”). However, the potential historical reference of Emperor Leopold is completely enveloped by the dominant story of signification and representation. Looking at Leopold is prefaced by the story of authoring the scene (“To kick off a text with a ferocious-looking baroque grand seigneur is gratifying”) and concludes with the disappearance of a character from his proper ontological plane, namely with the ferocious looking baroque grand seigneur “galloping off into the discriminating seventeenth-century landscape [description]” (CH 5).21 The reader can take this as a fair postmodern warning shot, fired off to discourage naïve realism, but it is of great consequence for the memorial landscape of Harmonies that this is the limit rather than the prevailing nature of this space. If the family can be described like a landscape (CH 458), spatially grasped, the landscape is also familial and intimate. The sensual, empirical character of passages affords the narrator a tactile proximity to a then close to here even in the absence of a continuity of action in the plot. (This “imaginary and sensuous character of historical experience,” calling forth “sensory representations of experiential realities”22 is very different from the visuality of an abstract and primarily symbolic landscape we observe—and never inhabit—in Barthelme’s text.) Yet, the sensuous memory that allows the narrator to experience collective memory23 reaches us in a fully textualized form with no illusion of nostalgic return or naïve access to the past.

The long catalogue, as it operates in Esterházy’s memorial enterprise, is exemplary in this respect and it is worth comparing to Barthelme’s isomorphic catalogues with their great outpours of linguistic energy. In Harmonies the interminable inventories of artifacts are one-time possessions (lands, furniture, jewels, etc.) that can be taken as parodic refutations of the mechanical nature of archival memory or as representations of the massive scale of privilege and loss in rewritings of various historical possessions and dispossessions (seizure, looting). Their scale makes them difficult to read: “poetically dubious and, at first glance, insurmountably bleak.”24 There is, however, an excess in the meditative laboriousness of reading through these manmade objects that mirrors and calls forth their laborious making, their metonymic power (their makers’ as well as their wearers’/users’). As Péter Balassa observed, “[t]he individual shaping dormant in the seemingly dead object, civilization, the silent preservation of personal acculturation and life story, the ethos and peculiar frozen humanity of refined craftsmanship, the narrative of the location and dislocation of objects is hiding in these difficult passages as an everlasting mystery.”25 In this respect, they evoke a relationship to objects (not necessarily through possession) that locates them in a meaningful framework of material culture and passing on as much as in language—their meaning supplied by a sensuous history of use communicated to the affective touch, but barely available to thought, since the uses, professions have sunk into disuse along with vanished ways of life.26 In The Dead Father, instead of the extremely detailed, descriptive account of historical objects embedded in their own history of making, use, damage, and loss (their staggering infinitude not randomness, but real accumulation), the inventories of the father’s rampages are a historically and geographically disparate, playfully arbitrary list of names (types of musicians and animals slain).

Yet, focusing on this arbitrariness and dehistoricization exclusively one would miss Barthelme’s irony and social critique completely. Despite the lack of historical anchors within the book, its seemingly ahistorical mythic landscape and narrative do have a clear, if unstated, historical framework. If we return for a moment to the distinction between the novel and the romance, the question of history will be clarified as the question of revision. Myra Jehlen argues that—unlike the European novel that “takes the internal organization of society as its ‘problem’”—the American romance, “accepting the status quo as simply natural, focuses on the difficulties of individual conformity.”27 In other words, the “anti-historicism” of the American romance is “ideological and ideally suited to the maintenance of a specific society, that individualistic ‘nation of men’ which Emerson envisioned as America’s special destiny.”28 Barthelme’s revision of romance historicizes the mythic, symbolic plot itself from the vantage point when myth becomes visible as ideology. The literalization of the father’s monumentality and eventual demise not only spatializes ancient origins into symbolic memorial formations within cultural memory, but also historicizes patriarchal ideology as an institution of male privilege by indicating the emerging possibility of reflecting on it as an objectifiable element in the landscape rather than invisible commonsense. The irony of this literalization is historical, but the conceit in which it is expressed does not display that historicity in detail. It exhibits the colossus of patriarchy as it insists to make speeches to his loyal, faithful men, while he is bit by bit forced to give up his belt buckle, his sword, his passport, his regiment, his keys, and sign away the rest in his last will and testament. In this sense, Barthelme’s book historicizes its thoroughly mythic narrative of cultural memory precisely to the extent it ironically stages the deflated system of privilege in which the male author’s own text is inscribed. Psychoanalytic criticism has made an attempt to restore substance to Barthelme’s language—in the face of prevailing interpretations—arguing for the residual survival and meaningfulness of “older forms of subjectivity—fantasy, dependence, addiction, mourning [. . .] if only in a transitional or even in a nostalgic sense.”29 I suggest that its polemical staging of masculine aggrandizement and failure is not so much a transition between (nostalgically) modern and postmodern senses of the self as a reflection of a historically specific crisis of masculinity. In a way underemphasized by Barthelme’s contemporary reception, he engaged in a sustained analysis of the shifting gender relations in the period, particularly from the perspective of men “as yet unsure of how to respond to the new era ushered in by Masters and Johnson, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement.”30 Whatever gratifications the sexual revolution might afford the “upwardly mobile, middle-class American male” (the embattled subject of male privilege), the old order of masculinity is posed a double challenge by, on the one hand, the inability to “become wild” in a thoroughly inscribed and commodified space of “a civilization that has already conquered its savage frontiers,”31and on the other by the advance of the feminist movement. Instead of reacting to this with nostalgia or hostility, The Dead Father is quite remarkable at the time in its ironically hyperbolic vision of masculinity. As Marianne DeKoven notes in her Utopia Limited, “[s]ixties avant-garde fiction was almost entirely dominated in America by heterosexual white men. [. . .] The white male domination of this fiction, often accompanied by sexism and misogyny, accords with its stance as arbiter of the popular, and artistic transmuter of the popular into oppositional high art.”32 These are the relevant points of comparison for an altogether different approach, a vivid and representative demonstration of which can be found in the father’s account of his grand feats of fathering, in which the difference in scale between hyperbolic achievement and the mundane profanity of creating the juice extractor or the key chain lead to the climactic scene of an encounter with evil, in which he cleverly saves himself by casting his penis over the Styx and climbing over:

Uncoiling my penis, then in the dejected state, I made a long cast across the river, sixty-five meters I would say, where it snagged most conveniently in the cleft of a rock on the farther shore. Thereupon I hauled myself hand-over-hand ’midst excruciating pain as you can imagine through the raging torrent to the other bank. And with a hurrah! over my shoulder [. . .] I was off like a flash into the trees. (DF 38)

The women, in response, feel tiny, returned to the proper domesticity of conventional femininity of “mops and brooms.” This hierarchy is instantly suspended when the father at present turns out to be at his companions’ mercy for regaining his lost powers, and even a threat of reversal follows: “It is obvious that but for a twist of fate we and not they would be calling the tune, said Julie.”(DF 39). The social critique of the book takes an unlikely form through its ironic deployment of clichés and hyperbolized versions of the status quo. It orchestrates a somewhat melancholy, yet ultimately life-affirming laughter without the rigid normativity of modern satire, since it is “also directed at those who laugh.”33 This is a laughter voiced from the position of self-questioning privilege—quite aware of the crumbling foothold from which it can afford to dissect and mock itself, a luxury denied to the truly disempowered.

When extended passages of Barthelme’s text enter Esterházy’s, this act of intercultural borrowing effects a double re-historicization. The 143rd numbered sentence of Harmonies incorporates a long section from “A Manual for Sons” and sentences 144–46 cannibalize the episodes of the last will and funeral. In both, Esterházy’s strategy is clearly to inscribe the Dead Father directly into the Hungarian or Central European landscape and this “Hungarianization”—via prosthetic localizers implanted in the text through rewriting and parenthetical commentary—is emphatically historical in nature.34 Ancient biblical times become (Austro-)Hungarian local memory (“Francis, Joseph or Mátyás,” “the royal palace at Visegrád,” CH 144), word choice adds a historical specificity to generic actions (your bed “taken away from you” comes to refer to wartime looting (“zabrálták”), and the “auditioning” of bishops is converted to their “wire-tapping” by the authorities [CH 145]; Borneo is transformed into a historical joke about Hungary’s territorial ambitions [CH 148]).35 When the Dead Father enumerates his vast possessions for the purpose of his will, the original is a cosmic curiosity cabinet of haphazard items characterized by absurd conceptual jumps and slides of scale (DF 164). Harmonies finds the cue for Hungarianization in the linguistically archaic historical reference to the regiment in the list. In English, the father’s instructions are brief: “Parade it. Have regimental dinners. Fold and unfold the colors. Defend frontiers. Push into the Punjab.” The longer Hungarianized version is: “Parade it. Make it do the rounds, like Singer his sewing machine. Have regimental dinners. Fold and unfold the colors. Defend frontiers. Tamás Esze and what have you. Remember? Border duty. March them to Belgrade against the Turk. They have hundreds of uses. On the other hand, mercenaries are costly, the fodder and the TV, too. If it’s cheap you want, buy a Trabant” (CH 152). The addition of Tamás Esze, the Turks, and Belgrade give the borders a local specificity, while erasing the context of the British colonization of India. The Trabant pulls that specificity to a more contemporary material culture no less abruptly and anachronistically than Barthelme’s original, making the regiment and the East-German plastic car Trabant alternative options in the same universe (also a self-reference to the famous epigraph of the author’s A Little Hungarian Pornography taken from the Trabant manual.36) The idiom of pushing someone like a Singer sewing machine, the archaic, specifically Hungarian terms “gyepű” (a special term for the artificial fortified borders around mediaeval Hungary) and “Nándorfehérvár” (the historical Hungarian name of Belgrade) make the historicization of cultural specificity inseparable from linguistic specificity. Hungarian history and the Hungarian language of the Hungarian Barthelme mutually articulate each other.37 This sense of the historically specific is similar to the spatially, temporally, and linguistically alien objects preserved in the inventories of the possessions of the historical Esterházys or the biographical memory of the author’s father in sentence 34.

This intercultural work of bringing Barthelme’s text closer to here is also an act of eradication. First, it is an appropriation of a father-text in terms of literary influence: “My father, the dead father. A borrowed idea, dead. Oh, Donald!” (CH 151). The slightly edited version of Barthelme’s chapter 23 (the grave and the burial) takes on a double meaning: not only does it incorporate the Dead Father into “my father,” but it also buries Barthelme as a father, performing the burial of the borrowed idea within this new filial text. More importantly, there is a systematic eradication of American and colonial references (John Wilkes Booth), which are often replaced by European ones (1968 invasion of Prague, the Gypsy problem). This supplement of localized historicity not only removes the different local and broader global contexts of the American novella, but more importantly, it erases the historical framework that supplies a critical irony in the original. The result is a Hungarianized historicity in which Barthelme’s text is embedded as fragments of an abstract, somewhat absurd mythology, neither retaining its forms of cultural memory (the architecture of the father or the path of the march), nor its own historical critique: it is incorporated into a monument for which the crisis of historical continuity is a far more profound question than that of gender and power.

This is not simply a question of the belatedness and marginalization of feminist discourse in the context of the “host text,” but of the regional conditions of postmodern cultural production in East-Central Europe, the experience of impossible continuity as a historical condition fundamentally and directly structuring life experiences in the region. In that sense, the status of feminist discourse is itself a function of the broader historical breaks, large-scale rapid and forceful social restructuring. Esterházy’s invented category of the “East-French” cultural producer encapsulates this stance well: a West-oriented Mitteleuropa acutely aware of the fateful distinctness of its conditions (no contiguous borders, transitions between itself and France except through a radical leap of imagination and self-definition). Postmodern linguistic strategies deceptively homologous with moves in texts produced in the Atlantic world belie a difference in function—in the politically “pornographic” conditions of East-Central-European cultural production, we are dealing with “sins, historical and national. A cancerous growth, rather than functioning, of fantasy.”38 The rules and stakes for “language play” are different under the threat of repression and that of distraction, though their crumbling and slipperiness may be analogous. Language as always already used, recycled—this is also a political problem for the East-French: the inability to own one’s language, and the reliance on the secret, invisible language of repetition as masquerade. The flux and ephemerality of the flexible accumulation of capital and the image economy of post-industrialist consumer society,39and the ephemerality of place-bound identity due to repeated direct sociopolitical intervention (occupation, elite replacement, restructured institutions, resettlement, disenfranchisement, etc.) may lead to isomorphic discursive strategies of ephemerality and fragmentation, but their conditions put a very different kind of pressure on language. In our case at hand, the father question opens up these vast cultural differences, allowing it to be more personal and more global in the American text, rather than the inexorably historical national question in its Hungarian counterpart. This relationship marks Esterházy’s use of Barthelme, and by extension, of the American postmodern model, as an act of radical appropriation rather than a—somewhat flawed—adoption of a model. It is instructive to observe, in fact, how the very concept of the model is transformed in transit between the two. Barthelme’s mythic account of the father devouring his innumerable children invokes the model as a toy, a commodity in a vast array of commodities.

I had to devour them, hundreds, thousands, feefifofum, sometimes their shoes too, get a good mouthful of childleg and you find, between your teeth, the poisoned sneaker. Hair as well, millions of pounds of hair scarifying the gut over the years, why couldn’t they have just been thrown down wells, exposed on hillsides, accidentally electrocuted by model railroads? And the worst was their blue jeans, my meals course after course of improperly laundered blue jeans, T-shirts, saris, Thom McAns. I suppose I could have hired someone to peel them for me first. (DF 18)

Potential fatality lurks in these objects, but it is not the fatality of history. In Harmonies, the recurrent historical disruption as a fundamental experience of life makes the question of the father first and foremost an intergenerational historical question of the model as a repository of value: “Generally, until he was beaten to a pulp, my father conducted himself like a real man, consistent with a model he imagined for himself. But when the beating passed certain limits, the ripping out of the nails, for instance, he got scared shitless, and like a pitiful coward, started begging for his life” (CH 72).

The appending of a famous borrowed sentence from “Hungarian Prayer,” a poetic supplication to history from 1956, opens this force field of imagined value and pulp to a specific historicity and the particular cataclysm of the uprising: “There is no way for us to evade loyalty”40—rooted in the here, suspended between heroic action and paralysis. The passage is instructive for a proper understanding of the problem of the model: it is not just the ideal repository of value, but a dynamic triangulation of self, imagined ideal, and pulp: the embodied materiality of historical selves subject to persuasively nonlinguistic pressures. The divergence between threats of accidental toy-train electrocution or sneaker poisoning and the regularly exceeded limits of tolerability points to incontiguous landscapes of social memory that only intersect in citation—a luminous counterfeit identity by which they mutually elucidate each other.

Notes

Excerpts from Péter Esterházy, Celestial Harmonies, translated by Judith Sollosy, are reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers. Copyright © 2000 by Péter Esterházy. Translation and Introduction © 2004 by Judith Sollosy.

1. Barthelme, “Kézikönyv.”

2. Barthelme, Dead Father, 3. All further references to this work will be indicated in this text as DF, followed by the page number.

3. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 36.

4. Jehlen, “The Novel,” 136.

5. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 38.

6. This replaces the grammatically correct plural édesapáim (where the number suffix precedes the possessive suffix), thereby emphasizing the artificial procedure of multiplication. The proper name Esterházy is resonantly avoided in book I. The first instance of this word form appears in Esterházy, Harmonia, 122; Celestial Harmonies, 137. All further references to Celestial Harmonies will be indicated in this text as CH, followed by the page number.

7. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 37.

8. Szegedy-Maszák, “A történelem elképzelt hitele,” 109.

9. In fact, his life retrospectively revealed itself to be spectacularly broken in an unplanned sequel to Harmonies. Javított kiadás [Revised Edition] is an instant “appendix” to Harmonies, gleefully dancing on the grave of the father who had just been enshrined in a book barely cold. Esterházy began this docufiction immediately after finishing the yet unpublished Harmonies upon discovering his father’s files as a longstanding informer for the secret police—the belated emergence of documentary evidence (the four thick files comprising the author’s father’s “work” as a “writer”) being the ultimate revenge of historical reality over literature. The other companion volume to Harmonies in Esterházy’s oeuvre is A szív segédigéi (Helping Verbs of the Heart), a slim volume from fifteen years earlier, mourning the mother.

10. This device superficially resembles the use of “there is this woman” (“van egy nő”) in the short sections of Egy nő (She Loves Me). With the more radically eclectic and more comprehensive catalogue of the doings of “my father,” it is a sense of scale, the massiveness of the project, that shifts readerly expectations from the string model to the large edifice, an expanding larger architecture continuously adjusting itself. Meaning is relationally produced among the contingent and often contradictory sections. On the architectural structure of the book, see Bodor, “Opus magnum,” 170.

11. The referential operation of “my father” has been considered to effectively dehistoricize the narrative elements, distancing them from any historically relevant concrete understanding: “The ‘I’ speaking in the individual fragments is a grammatical position, a ‘formula’ that shifts with the ‘my father’ segments constituted by exchanges of grammatical subjects,” which can be understood as a “deconstruction of origins, of lineage” (Szirák, “Nyelv által lesz,” 141, 139).

12. These stylistic juxtapositions tend to be more playfully discordant in the Hungarian original than in the English translation due to a reduction of the distance between grammatical high formality and lexical crudeness or an erasure of the social specificity of vernacular and slang in the latter. Two brief examples: “Let’s be friends, my father said [“mondotta”] to my mother. Up yours [“egy faszt”], my mother said, and gave him the finger” (CH 224).) “Said” neutralizes the pompousness or datedness of “mondotta,” while “up yours” softens the expletive “egy faszt” [closer to “fuck no”; literally: prick]. “He hollered at the clone master, too, and did his best to pillory [“mószerolta”] the whole idea at Court” (CH 30). “Mószerol” is a colloquial term of Yiddish origin for denouncing, badmouthing, and it stylistically collides with the Court in a way that “pillory” does not.

13. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 281.

14. Droysen, Principles of History, 98–99.

15. Szegedy-Maszák, “A történelem elképzelt hitele,” 104–5.

16. Thomka, Beszél egy hang, 72.

17. Thomka, Beszél egy hang, 67, 88.

18. Interestingly, Péter Balassa, who had immense influence on the early critical reception and subsequent canonization of the new Hungarian fiction emerging from the 1970s onward, with Esterházy as one of its central figures, identifies these authors’ relationship to history as an “emptying out of history through the impossibility of its precise knowability” (as revealed by narrative procedures such as detection), which “reduces space to a flat plane” (Balassa, Átkelés, 26). This is precisely what Esterházy revises in Harmonies.

19. “One small story disauthenticates the other, and it is as if there were multiple exposures of different times and spaces superimposed on one another” (Szegedy-Maszák, “A történelem elképzelt hitele,” 105).

20. Balassa, Átkelés, 29.

21. Translation modified.

22. Thomka, Beszél egy hang, 121, 110.

23. Thomka, Beszél egy hang, 122.

24. Balassa, Segédigék, 124.

25. Balassa, Segédigék, 124.

26. This opacity is lost in translations that make these objects available to the reader through the transparency of their updated word choices.

27. Jehlen, “The Novel,” 134.

28. Jehlen, “The Novel,” 133.

29. Zeitlin, “Donald Barthelme,” 65.

30. Medvecky, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 554.

31. Medvecky, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 556.

32. DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 185.

33. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 12.

34. This Hungarianization appears as the perceptible trace of a complex translation process. This is amplified in the reverse translation of Barthelme’s text within Harmonies: for purely practical reasons, Esterházy used the German translation of The Dead Father to create his Hungarian version, and the translation of this Hungarian rewriting back into English unavoidably combined a restoration of the English original with new English elements, accommodating the changes, inflections and misreadings created in the translation process.

35. “Menjen csak Borneóba. Most mondd: Celebesz” (Harmonia, 131). A reference to the well-known rhyme about Borneo and Celebes parodying the movement for annexation of previously possessed Hungarian territories.

36. “The Trabant grips the road exceptionally well. Its acceleration is first-rate. This, however, must not encourage reckless and irresponsible driving.” A Little Hungarian Pornography, n.p.

37. Much of this linguistic transformation will be imperceptible in its retranslation into English (“gyepűszolgálat” will be once again “border duty,” Nándorfehérvár will masquerade as Belgrade, and “zabrálták” will be “taken away”). International translation strategies of Harmonia are varied, opting for (a) the mystery of the unexplained unfamiliar privileging the closed text, or (b) a familiarization of unfamiliar elements when possible, or (c) “the magic of a historical world that opens up in the notes” (Rudaš, A szellem, 91) supplied by the translator. In this sense, the English translation of Harmonies opts for a combination of a-b, with b dominating in the retranslation of Barthelme.

38. Balassa, Segédigék, 39.

39. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 302–3.

40. Tamási, “Magyar fohász”: “Nincs módunkban kitérni a hűség elől.” Harmonia: “Nincs módunk kitérni a hűség elől” (Esterházy, Harmonia, 67). (Appears in Harmonies as: “One way or another, we all end up as heroes” [CH 72].)

Works Cited

Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

———. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. 1992. München: C. H. Beck, 2007.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaı˘lovich. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Balassa, Péter. Átkelés II: Lélekkertészet. Edited by György Vári. Budapest: Balassi, 2009.

———. Segédigék: Esterházy Péter prózájáról. Edited by István Tóth-Barbalics. Budapest: Balassi, 2005.

Barthelme, Donald. The Dead Father. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

———. “Kézikönyv fiúgyermekek számára.” Translated by Katalin Orbán. Holmi 10 (1998): 1445–58.

Bodor, Béla. “Opus magnum, avagy a legkövérebb láncszem.” In Mítoszcserepek: tanulmányok, esszék, kritikák a jelen és a félmúlt magyar prózairodalmának tárgyköréből, 157–73. Budapest: Napkút, 2012.

Böhm, Gábor, ed. Másodfokon: Esterházy Péter Harmonia Caelestis és Javított kiadás című műveiről. Budapest: Kijárat, 2003.

DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham, NC; and London: Duke University Press, 2004.

Droysen, Johann Gustav. Outline of the Principles of History [Translation of Grundriss der Historik]. Translated by E. Benjamin Andrews. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1897.

Esterházy, Péter. Celestial Harmonies. Translated by Judith Sollosy. London: Flamingo, 2004.

———. Egy nő. Budapest: Magvető, 1995.

———. Harmonia Caelestis. Budapest: Magvető, 2000.

———. Helping Verbs of the Heart. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Grove Press, 1991.

———. Javított kiadás: Melléklet a Harmonia Caelestishez. Budapest: Magvető, 2002.

———. A Little Hungarian Pornography. Trans. Judith Sollosy. Evanston, IL: Hydra/Northwestern University Press, 1995.

———. She Loves Me. Translated by Judith Sollosy. London: Quartet, 1997.

———. A szív segédigéi: Bevezetés a szépirodalomba. Budapest: Magvető, 1985.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Jehlen, Myra. “The Novel and the Middle Class in America.” In Ideology and Classic American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, 125–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Medvecky, Craig. “Reconstructing Masculinity: Donald Barthelme’s Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts.” Contemporary Literature 48 (2007): 554–79.

Rudaš, Jutka. A szellem finom játéka: A kortárs magyar irodalom intertextuális aspektusai. Budapest: Kijárat, 2006.

Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. “A történelem elképzelt hitele.” In Másodfokon: Esterházy Péter Harmonia Caelestis és Javított kiadás című műveiről, edited by Gábor Böhm, 105–16. Budapest: Kijárat, 2003.

Szirák, Péter. “Nyelv által lesz.” In Másodfokon: Esterházy Péter Harmonia Caelestis és Javított kiadás című műveiről, edited by Gábor Böhm, 135–48. Budapest: Kijárat, 2003.

Tamási, Áron. “Magyar fohász.” Radio broadcast on October 26, 1956. dia.pool.pim.hu/html/muvek/TAMASI/tamasi00126/tamasi00216/tamasi00216.html.

Thomka, Beáta. Beszél egy hang: Elbeszélők, poétikák. Budapest: Kijárat, 2001.

Zeitlin, Michael. “Donald Barthelme and the President of the United States.” In Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies, edited by John N. Duvall, 61–73. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.