ÉLET ÉS IRODALOM (Life and Literature)
Q: László Gy. Horváth
LH: As a person and as an author - do you see yourself as Indian, American, a citizen of the world?
JRB: I see myself primarily as a writer. To me a writer has no nationality and his identity, to the degree that it isn't subsumed by his writing, lies within the page. "To be in the book," as Jabés writes, "is to be able to say: The book is my world, my country, my roof, and my riddle. The book is my breath and my rest."
LH: With your background, why Eastern Europe as a first topic? And why Budapest?
JRB: When I first came to Eastern Europe in 1989 as a student of political philosophy I was fascinated by the importance of literature, at the time, in affecting politics and society. For the first time I understood why the state mistrusts literature; because literature insists on the freedom of choice: or rather, the individual's duty to choose. This was in marked contrast to my experience in America where literature was (and is), at best, entertainment. And I realized that matters must be in a sorry state indeed if I needed to be jolted awake to this utterly obvious fact in an environment less complacent than the West.
My first day in Budapest was a submarine morning in 1989: rain pouring outside. After spending the better part of the morning indoors I decided to venture into the streets with a borrowed umbrella that promptly broke apart. Reading the signs I spent the next three days in the rain, walking the wet streets of the city. Wandering in a strange city in the rain for extended periods of time can lead to a state nearing hallucination. Crossing the Chain Bridge on the third day I think I glimpsed Immanuele leaning against the railings on the other side, looking down at the river. Another startled glance and there was no one there. I left the city two days later, but both she and the river and the rain were to find their way into my book and dominate the proceedings.
I came to Central Europe for the first time that year more in retreat from an overly materialistic West than with any deliberate intent. I felt instantly at home: the air was richer, warmer, and Clio, that erratic muse of history, was almost frenetically overactive. In-between celebrating the downfall of yet another petty Red satrap I followed in the footsteps of Schulz, Hasek, Csáth and Witkiewicz.
Subsequently, I returned to Central Europe in the summer of 1990, and I kept coming back every summer for the next few years. In the midst of all this travelling back and forth, the decision to write The Gabriel Club was not a conscious one. One night in 1991 I had a dream, a nightmare, featuring Budapest and the Danube and poisoned birds and fish floating on the water. I wrote the dream down after it recurred a few weeks later and it went on to become an integral part of the novel. (Now, of course, I read about the Tisza disaster and wonder about the long-term clairvoyance of the subconscious.)
A month later Immanuele's diary was found by the river and I began to piece together the entries as they floated to the surface one by one. I was interested in the truth of what happened to her, and, by extension, the story of what transpired in Hungary during the forty years following the last war. In that quest the fact of my own particular nationality or background had little importance.
LH: Were you not apprehensive to plunge into an environment (Eastern Europe) that might be altogether strange to you?
JRB: Although my doctoral specialization was in philosophy, I was already a student of Mitteleuropa when I introduced myself to the Gabriel Club. Elective affinities, as Goethe points out, are difficult to explain. More difficult still is an explanation of lasting passion. In 1992, in an attempt to try to explain things to myself, I took a sabbatical from my graduate program and travelled down the Danube with the sketchy first manuscript of the book in my backpack and Magris's recently published Danube as my guide. In Bratislava I bought a worn English edition of Kafka's Diaries in the Muir translation. Both the Magris and the Kafka survived the trip and accompanied me to the end of my travels in Romania, but I forgot the manuscript in a trolley-car in Vienna so I had to start again from scratch.
Later, once I was back in the States, Immanuele's diary found its present form with an exercise designed to illustrate Hegelian dialetics to my undergraduate students. One evening, after teaching class, I remember writing the dream scenes that might or might not have occurred, to illustrate the thesis-antithesis-synthesis mode. Those scenes combined with my travel jottings to eventually form the diary.
LH: You took the unusual step of giving up teaching philosophy in favour of writing fiction. Was there a significant reason for the decision?
JRB: I gave up teaching because at the time I found that writing demanded my full attention. I love teaching and hope to return to it one day. Meanwhile, the contents of my books incorporate a number of my concerns in studying and teaching philosophy. Free will, for instance. The place of art and aesthetics in the modern world. The place of ethics and ideals.
LH: Do you have a special interest in any particular branch of philosophy?
JRB: I studied German Romanticism and Idealism. For a very long time I was fascinated by the idealism of Immanuel Kant and the system of ethics and aesthetics he devised, which is really the foundation of modern thought. I still go back to his works on a pretty regular basis. Lately, I've been studying Wittgenstein and Heidegger. My present concern is to accurately understand what was going on during the turn of the last century on the eve of the First World War and philosophy is a good entry into that particular area.
LH: This is in preparation for your next book?
JRB: Yes, for both the books I'm writing at present. One is set in Russia and is more or less an investigation into the formation of the modern mind with its clear emphasis on rationality. The other is set in Germany during the Second World War and examines the role played in a society by irrationality and myth.
I alternate work between the two books. When I get tired of working with Russia under Lenin and Stalin, I turn to Germany under Hitler. I suppose there must be a strong masochistic trait in me.
LH: Let's turn to The Gabriel Club. If I were to ask you to summarize it in one sentence, what would that be?
JRB: The Gabriel Club is a book about memory.
LH: May I ask you to elaborate?
JRB: I use a dialectical structure in The Gabriel Club primarily with an eye to interrogating memory. When does memory begin? What does it mean for an individual? A people? How does memory sublimate? Resurface?
When I wrote the novel I thought about it as a spiral. A spiral which resolves the conflict between chaos and form into a state of being that is poised in suspension between the two states. Memory's growth and expanding consciousness can be traced from the first dream that begins the book along the turns of a spiral trajectory that encompasses successively greater territories, from the obsessive confinement of Immanuele's house in the Prologue, to the recurring meetings and conversations by the river between the various protagonists, the city of Budapest, the river, the countryside, and eventually the seasons, the seagulls, rain, Central Europe, the world. This process involves both recurrence and progress as more and more of the plot reveals itself, a process reflected in the structure of the text itself as passages recur in recognizable ways both over short segments of the chapters and over the span of the entire novel. Even whole sections recur, if you've noticed. This makes the book more than simply a miscellaneous set of memories in linear time. Rather it is a network of interlocking images and symbols that continually return. The reconstitution of memory is meant to occur as actively for the reader as for the writer, since one is constantly experiencing déja vu in terms of passages that have gone before. However, these passages recur not in exactly the same form but always with changes, accretions, developments, and in a new context where they gain new meaning and indicate a clear evolution in the narrative. In this way, I hope to convey the growth in understanding as we move through Immanuele's dissolving world, initially frightened and confused by the seeming chaos we observe, but later coming to interpret it in more overtly historical terms.
LH: And what about the plot of this very subtle novel? Do you agree when some critics call it an intellectual mystery?
JRB: I'll answer the second part of your question first. I've no reservations about pinning a larger political message to the more evident narrative vehicle of a mystery. It's what Camus did with The Stranger or Robbe-Grillet with his many books. And in the West, at least, reductive labels like 'mystery' lend themselves to selling. That said, I do have serious reservations about some of the larger British vendors selling the book exclusively as a mystery or thriller, which does it an enormous disservice. I'm glad the continental outlets haven't followed suit but it worries me; the book was written in English, after all.
Now for the first part of your question. One reviewer has compared the book to a Chinese box, another to an Escher puzzle, and I like both analogies. That said, I'm going to cheat and plagiarize from the reviews to somewhat (tangentially) respond to your query.
The story deals with a group of young dissidents in 1970s Budapest who come together to form a loose and idealistic fraternity intended to keep the machinations of the communist state at bay. Initially organized along the lines of a clandestine 'club', the members of the group begin to withdraw into themselves under the influence of their enigmatic founder. They become obsessed with the unattainable specter of freedom, even at the risk of cutting themselves off from the lifeline of the dissident underground. Eventually, it is their independent lifestyles rather than their actions that draws upon them the wrath of the state, with tragic results. Written in two disparate parts, with very different narrative styles, The Gabriel Club charts the journey of four young artists from latent dissidence to violence, grief and oblivion.
On the most literal level, The Gabriel Club is about the mystery surrounding the disappearance of one of the members of the club in Budapest in the 1970s, but it is also about a doomed romance involving a triangle of lovers. There are several possible resolutions to the mystery: that the victim was murdered by the secret police or by one of her intimates and the body done away with; that the victim died a natural death caused by starvation or drowning in the Danube and was disposed of in a manner that remains unknown to the reader; that there was no crime because the so-called victim does not exist.
LH: So the ambiguity is intentional?
JRB: Yes, the ambiguity and open-endedness is completely intentional and it has to do with how I see the reader-writer relationship. I would like to think that in my book, the way events are perceived and assessed becomes a central issue of the narrative: the act of interpretation itself is presented to the reader for interpretation. This is in keeping with my belief that a writer has a responsibility not to interfere with the reader's gestält. I've written the book, my task is done, and I emphatically don't want to get in the way of how each reader perceives the book, imagines the characters. I've written it, it's out in the public realm, now the primary relationship is between the reader and the book. I don't want to be the talking head superintending that relationship.
LH: As you pointed out, you've placed memory in a pivotal place in your book. How much of The Gabriel Club is based on your own experience?
JRB: Quite a bit, and then again, not a bit. This is a work of fiction, not a fictional biography. I do believe in making a distinction between fact and fiction, between seriousness and poetic license. Many people have told me I've written a disturbing book, but that's alright with me. I'd rather write a book that disturbs than an idyllic work that has no connection with reality. I've expressed the same idea differently in my book. An idyllic book fills me with reservation because I can see through the author's intention and recognise that in reality things are completely different.
LH: And the Danube? A river of memory?
JRB: In as much as any river is a lasting conduit of a culture's sense of itself.
LH: The Danube looms immense in your book, both in seductive and destructive roles. I am sure you have read Magris's Danube, but it would not explain the power of the symbol as you have created it. What inspired you?
JRB: Some people take their existential orientation from oceans, others from mountains. For me, it's rivers. Perhaps it's because I spent my childhood in the eastern part of India growing up by the banks of a river with a lot of character: tremendous flash-floods during the monsoons, extended dry spells during the hot season. Subsequently, I've lived in cities traversed by great rivers, a tributary of the Ganges in Calcutta, the Thames in London, the Delaware and the Hudson in America. When I travel I am drawn first of all to the nearest river. With the Danube the recognition was instant, and I would like to believe, mutual. I've walked miles beside it, drunk from it, swum in it. If it figures as a character in the book, it's only natural.
Rivers give me a sense of place and provide the nucleus, symbolic and otherwise, for my writing. In the two books I am working on now, for instance, the leitmotives are provided by the Neva (for St. Petersburg) and the Elbe (for Dresden).
LH: You mention the word `symbolic'. You introduce your book with a citation from the painter Odilon Redon. Would you call yourself a symbolist writer?
JRB: I'm certainly interested by Redon and Huysmans, and some of the religious imagery, especially in Immanuele's diary, comes from La Bas and The Cathedral, and some of the aesthetics probably echoes Against the Grain. I would like to believe that the awareness of the fin de siecle is very strong in my work, and the symbolists, the French symbolists, at least, were haunted by the turn of their century. I'm also studying the Russian symbolists, now, as a matter of fact, in preparation for my Russian novel, and I'd have to say I'm closer in spirit to Balmont and Merezhkovsky and especially Andrei Bely than the French.
LH: What do you perceive as a writer's principal responsibility?
JRB: To provoke, to challenge, to denounce, to make people think.
LH: What must a writer have for you to admire him?
JRB: Integrity. Reticence. A sense of commitment. Gravity.
LH: Which writers in Europe and Eastern Europe most attract you?
JRB: In the interest of brevity, I'll restrict myself to the present. In that sense, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Claudio Magris, Edmond Jabés and Michel Tournier are the writers who've given me the greatest sense of direction. Bernhard for his unsparing honesty and relentless stamina. Sebald for his exploration of the mystery of being human. Magris and Jabés for their poetry and their introspection. And Tournier for his marriage of philosophy and fiction.
Although I write in English, there is very little in English or American writing that I think bears serious consideration. J.M. Coetzee from South Africa and the earlier fiction of John Banville are notable exceptions, but there is very little else that will survive the test of time. In my opinion, the only person from the English-speaking world who comes close to capturing the present malaise is not a writer but a painter, the Irishman, Francis Bacon.
In terms of Eastern Europe, I will unfortunately have to restrict my consideration to those who've had their work translated into English and this, I realize, is a very small fraction of the entire output. From that restricted pool, I choose Konwicki, Szczypiorski, Huelle, Klima, Skvorecky, the late Danilo Kis, Ugrosevic, and, of course, Nadas, Orkeny and Esterhazy in Hungary (although, I must confess that in the Hungarian context it's the poets rather than the writers that speak to me, and here the list is much more dense - Pilinszky, Weores, Orban, Faludy, Tandori, Agnes Nagy.) Indeed, it was a poem by the inimitable Gyula Illyes that first suggested the sibling relationships in my own book. Here are the relevant lines from "Brother and Sister":
Fi a lánytestvért - úgy öleltelek,
ós vágy izével enyhitve a búnt,
igy aludtam el - leghúbb kedvesed,
mire az elsó éjjel tovatünt.
Of course, I played this out in The Gabriel Club in two ways, in the relationship between the twins and in the stillborn relationship between Immanuele and Gabriel.
LH: Would you say that your influences are predominantly twentieth century?
JRB: Yes, I'm fascinated by our century and I relate most to these people because their concerns mirror mine. Of course, that doesn't mean I don't relate to Dostoevsky or Stendhal or Zola. I do, but I'm closer in spirit to the people who are closer to my time. If you consider the boundaries of my writing, there's prose, painting, cinema, music and poetry, and in each of these spheres I have my idols: Thomas Bernhard, Francis Bacon, Andrei Tarkovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Paul Celan. I think about their work and it gives me perspective. These are people I can love and respect unconditionally. They inspire me to go on.
Celan, especially, with his introspection, his sense of loss, the care with which he compunds words to express a complex of feelings. Consider a single word: Beilschwärme, hatchetfeelings. You can take days exploring that or else it's crystal clear in an instant. I'd like my readers to take time with my book, and to go back to it repeatedly for second meanings because it's been written that way.
My fascination with Celan probably explains the roots of my formative influence in poetry than in prose. But another more prosaic aspect draws me to Celan, and that is the fact of exile and this wandering between East and West. To paraphrase him, the circumstances of my life, living in the domain of a foreign tongue, have meant that I deal much more consciously with language.
LH: What does cultural memory mean to you, in the light of the book you've written?
JRB: In the months before her death in exile in London during the war, the French theologian and philosopher Simone Weil feared that the death of memory would mean the beginning of the end of what it means to be human. She wrote about memory, and the act of remembering, as a long, slow, and often painful accretion of the smallest details to make up the sense of a people's particular identity. I find that definition remarkable in the light of the kind of homogenization and cultural simplification unleashed by the Western media. It's out of control in America, particularly, already a place without deep historical tradition. I've seen it take its toll in Western Europe, and in England especially. What causes me especial concern, though, are the inroads being made into places like India and Indonesia. It's hardly an original thought; the French have been erecting barriers against that kind of influx for years now, and I'm not sure they've been very successful. But the costs of this kind of globalisation are immense in terms of the onslaught on a culture's unique memories.
LH: Do you see the impact of this on global publishing?
JRB: Oh, absolutely. Decisions about publishing are increasingly about market slots and economies of scale. In terms of market slots, outside of the usual Anglo-American genres the patterns are almost comically identifiable: there's Latin American magic realism, there's African primitivism, Asian exotica, the difficult Irish childhoods, and so on, so that eventually very little room is left for works that are different and original and perhaps of much more importance in terms of cultural distinctiveness. I fear that if this goes on for much longer we will all be reduced to living in a world filled with cultural clichés.
LH: By the end of your book, memory has given way to silence. What does silence mean to you?
JRB: Some time ago I spent a night on a lake deep within the Adirondack mountains in northern New York state. I remember crossing the lake in a rowboat and looking up and seeing more stars than I could recall seeing in a very long time. The Milky Way was low over the lake, almost a band of white that cut a swathe through the black sky. Everything was perfectly still, not even the sound of oars against water was audible. I was suddenly aware of how seldom I see stars any more, condemned as I seem to be to living in cities. But the silence stayed with me more than anything else.
LH: In your book you've called it the silence of the centuries. Is this the silence that reigns over us at the end of our historically exhausting century? Are you trying to say this is all that's left to us at the end of the millenium?
JRB: The silence at the end of the book is the silence we have lost to modernity, the quality of silence that's been one of the major casualties of the cacophony that surrounds us. Perhaps I'm more sensitive to this denuding than others because silence is the grass of exile, but I think part of the reason why I reach out to Europe and the Old World is because there are people there who still privilege the enlightenment query about what it means to 'be human' over the postmodern obsession with 'being realistic'. "When the last corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and has finally become exploitable, when each and every event at each and every place at each and every point of time has become easily accessible, when one can simultaneously 'experience' an attempt to murder a king in France and a symphonic concert in Tokyo, when time is nothing but speed, immediacy, simultaneity, and when time as history has disappeared from the life of all nations, when the boxer is valued as the great man of the nation, when the mass meetings of millions are a triumph - then, yes, like a ghost, the spectre of the question will haunt us: What for? -- Where to? -- What now?" This was written, of course, by Heidegger in the 1930s and it is perhaps even more true in our internet age than it was in his day.
Recently I've been reading aloud from various translations of the Iliad and imagining the results as comparable to those of competing singers at the Panhellenic Games. Of course, the tradition of oral poetry that reached its apogee with Homer died out soon after the introduction of a systematic written script. It makes me wonder if we are now seeing the next big tectonic shift - the gradual eclipse of the written creative tradition in its turn as it has been enshrined as `literature' for centuries. For instance, these days when I walk into a bookstore in New York City it's like being at the intersection of a busy street-crossing. So many ephemeral books, so much traffic rushing by, making sound and signifying nothing. As a strategy of survival I've taken to closing my eyes and ears and turning aside to retreat to the refuge of my own library. And I'm not even taking the internet into account when I say this.
The endeavor of such literature that remains then becomes to write against the grain, to arrest the flow, to write for the few discerning readers who still make time to think as they read. Because the alternative is far too depressing.
I realize all this might sound rather gloomy but the danger is real, I believe, and needs reiterating.
LH: Will you eventually write a book based on your country, India?
JRB: One of the fascinating things about the kind of research I do is the historical parallels it brings up. When I read European history I am constantly surprised by how much different cultures have in common. They repeat the same mistakes.
LH: Finally, to conclude on a more prosaic level, is there anything particular that attracts you to Hungarian culture, as opposed, say, to other Eastern European countries?
JRB: I'm a great fan of Hungarian cuisine which, as you're probably aware, has startling similarities to Indian cooking.
I'm also passionate about contemporary Hungarian classical music. Bartók and Kodály aside, you've produced some of the greatest classical composers of the late twentieth century, a list of names that would make any country proud: Sándor Veress, Miklós Rozsa, György Ligeti, György Kurtág. In terms of folk music, during my last visit here in 1998 I discovered Ferenc Sebo and he's been one of my lasting pleasures since. On a lighter vein you've also got some of the best rock bands in the region and Locomotiv (of course) and East are two of my favourites.
