Revised Edition was published in 2002, shortly after Celestial Harmonies, and this latter magnum opus provides the broader context for Revised Edition. In the centre of Celestial Harmonies Esterházy placed a figure he terms ‘my father’, fully exploiting both the pseudo-realistic and the metaphoric potentials of the term. An important milestone, this novel, written over nine years, opened a new epoch in Esterházy’s writing after he had concluded the cycle summarily referred to as Introduction to Literature, created little by little over the 1980’s and forged into one grand structure at the end of the decade. In Celestial Harmonies Esterházy deployed, and at the same time superseded, the full arsenal he had developed in reconstructing Hungarian prose – post-modernist poetical devices polished to the absolute, relying chiefly on inter- and para-textuality. In the first part of the novel the signifier ‘my father’ has a relevance in every situation, testifying to a language which is omnipotent yet ironic, frivolous and yet of sacred power. In the anecdotal second part, however, woven through and through with auto-biographic reference and citations from other works, ‘my father’ is a flesh-and-blood creature unfolding before us in his historical embeddedness. In the interplay of the two parts there pulses a dynamic of permanent echoes, of deconstruction and reconstruction, adding up to a cosmic and panoramic tableau of the age, while the encyclopaedic aspirations of European thinking are built up and demolished before our very eyes.

In Revised Edition the main thread is still the figure of the father. But this time we are not seeing a literary trick: reality, which Esterházy had always treated so ironically, becomes the main character of the novel. The plotline is ‘simple.’ Driven by curiosity plain and simple, the author, entitled as any other Hungarian citizen so to do, is searching in the archives of the Hungarian State Security for reports possibly written about him. Upon receiving him, the director of the archives explains that besides the reports written about him they have found some documents which are far more sensitive and may affect Esterházy more closely. These documents are none other than files comprising the work that his father, the late Mátyás Esterházy had done as an informer. Revised Edition starts in the moments just before and just after the author receives the documents in question. This time Esterházy, clearly much impacted by the experience, opts for linear narration – that of reading and commenting on reports made by his father. He copies entire sections from the reports, returns to some crucial sections, inserts the list of persons executed at the time of the report written during the retaliations following the 1956 revolution and quotes sentences from Celestial Harmonies which juxtapose the father figure, the grandiose aristocrat there with the character who transpires from these documents, not unlike a skeleton falling out of the family cupboard.

Following on yesterday’s post about Peter Nadas, comes today’s RTW feature on another Hungarian author worth reading—Peter Esterhazy. Esterhazy is considered to be one of the most influential Hungarian writers of the twentieth century, and one of the more experimental. A number of his books—including A Little Hungarian Pornography and She Loves Me—are available from Northwestern University Press.

(Ecco) is his most recent book to be published in English, and focuses on his family history.

The Esterhazys, one of Europe’s most prominent artistocratic families, are closely linked to the rise and fall of the Hapsburg Empire. Princes, counts, commanders, diplomats, bishops, and patrons of the arts, revered, respected, and occasionally feared by their contemporaries, their story is as complex as the history of Hungary itself.

The book is a massive 846 pages and pulls sentences (or a word or two) from over a hundred different authors. As Judith Sollosy states in her introduction:

Indeed, Celestial Harmonies is monumental in scope. The author pays tribute to his father not by reductionism (“this is what my father was like”) but by expansion (“my father was all fathers and all men whose lives collided with Hungarian history”). He is a monster, and he is an angel, but above all, he is a man wrestling with the meaning of God. At least, this is one of the recurrent themes of Book One, which the father leaves ambling along, bent, like a straightened-out saxophone, his head lowered to prevent him from banging it into the heavenly spheres.

What’s not mentioned in this paperback edition is any mention of Esterhazy’s follow up, Revised Edition, which is an “appendix” to Celestial Harmonies. After writing Celestial Harmonies, Esterhazy found out that his father was an informer for the secret police, causing him to write an entirely new history . . . Unfortunately, Revised Edition hasn’t been translated into English, and I haven’t heard about anyone working on this . . . Which is too bad—taken as a pair, these two books would be fascinating to read one after another.

Esterházy is trying to make it work. It is a literary approach that comes down directly from that incorrigible drunk, Jaroslav Hasek, the author of The Good Soldier Svejk. Svejk is a rube all the way through and sometimes a scoundrel, but he always chooses life over death. It is there even in his way of talking, a style that Hasek gives his favorite literary creation which is both straightforward and evasive at the same time. It’s a kind of irony, middle European irony, that is neither Socratic nor the blasé irony of Western intellectual boredom. Actually I think it is much better than both of those things. Always it is a language, a style or a manner of comporting oneself that finds a way to skirt through the cracks. Again, life. Here’s Svejk on being locked up in an insane asylum, “I really don’t know why those loonies get so angry when they’re kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite… There’s a freedom there which not even Socialists have dreamed of.”

It’s a nice introduction, mentioning Hasek (whose Svejk, one of my favorites, is in desperate need of a re-translation) and Hrabal.

Like Esterhazy’s books, the speech is playful and intelligent, and engaged with ideas of History. Here’s a sample of an interesting bit from the end:

Europe is the land of variety – of various people, various languages, various traditions. Today’s individual sees a lot of the world, and when he does, he sees that his domestic customs, habits, ideals and myths are not necessarily superior to the others. As Henry James said, a person turns into a citizen of the world when all manner of customs appear equally shallow in his eyes. On the other hand, a tourist – and most of us are tourists – is not suited for getting to know things; a tourist is a man wedded to superficiality; a tourist sees only clichés: the Italians are loud and eat cats, the French are arrogant and eat snails, the Germans are fat and eat cabbage, and the Hungarians… but let’s not go into that, plus they eat gulyás. As for the Swiss, they don’t even exist.

The one thing that definitely exists is fiction. Only the implausible is real. A novel, words. A world made up of words says more about ourselves and others than all the accurate information gathered by a conscientious tourist. The real accuracy is the novel’s accuracy; it is knowledge that can be put to good use, the knowledge of the Dutch horsts and the knowledge of the Swiss plains. Writing a Hungarian novel about these things this could be the so-called Lucerne Plan, to look at the world with this lack of constraint, this freedom, and with this constraint and boundary. – with this beautiful European complexity.