Miklós Györffy: Chances and Failures
(An extract from the author's article about three Hungarian writers' books: Imre Kertész: A kudarc (The Failure). Szépirodalmi, 1988. 391 pp.; Margit Ács: A gyanútlan utazó (The Unsuspecting Traveller), Az esély (The Chance). Short novels. Magvető, 1988. 341 pp.; István Baka: A kisfiú és a vámpírok (The Little Boy and the Vampires). Szépirodalmi, 1988. 180 pp.)
[...] The young István Baka's new book contains two short novels and a play. The writer, who has won a Graves Prize for his poems* now lends his individual voice to prose. In his The Little Boy and the Vampires, he continues what he had already begun in his previous book, Szekszárdi mise (Mass in Szekszárd): the mythicization of his hometown, Szekszárd, a typical Hungarian town in a stylization that is at times grotesque, at times ironic, at times parody. Szekszárd has a strong literary presence in modern Hungarian fiction: among others, Mihály Babits and Miklós Mészöly constructed fictions from its elements. In Baka's fiction, too, Szekszárd becomes an imaginary, unrealistic setting-another fantasy town, just like those described in the books by Imre Kertész and Margit Ács. The short novel The Little Boy and the Vampires is set after the „holocaust,” some time in the twenty-first century when Sárd (i. e. Szekszárd) is no longer part of Hungary but an indenpendent city-state. Hungary does not exist any more. The regions adjacent to Sárd, for example, are ruled by the despot Cyrill I and soldiers from Taiwan, having remained here as the result of an earlier war, are found loafing idly. They have been forced to remain here because all transport ceased to operate not just in a country torn to small pieces but everywhere in the world. If on a rare occasion an old locomotive is successfully filled with wood shavings or peat, it drags itsel over from Sárd to the captal city of Cyrill I, Dolma (i. e. Tolna), but it is impossible to get as far as Lake Balaton. It was in the youth of one of the characters, András Bakó, a junior clerk in an archive, that on occasion the trains last covered longer distances; even then journeys of one or two hundred kilometres lasted several days. Today, all this belongs to the past, Sárd lives a reduced life locked up in itself. Everything is contrary to the technological utopias we find in science-fiction novels; in technology, the town has slipped back to medieval circumstances. The administrational circumstances are also medieval, it is not by accident that the Lord Mayor is called Cézár Borgói and his mistress's name is Lukrécia. As Cesare Borgia, he rules the small city-state as a despot, a provincial Hungarian version, which gives rise to hilariously pathetic situations. A similar provincial pettiness imbues the bourgeois plot and riot organized against him. This is interrupted by the outbreak of a mysterious epidemic: all the inhabitants of the town are turned into bloodsucking vampires. Those killed by a vampire themselves have to quench their insatiable thirst for blood by seeking out other victims in turn. This bloodthirst spreads like a contagious epidemic. The nephew of András Bakó, the sick little boy, is strangled by his own mother. Finally, the town dies out. Cyrill I sends an advance guard to Sárd and then occupies it victoriously. He does not even suspect that thirsty vampires are yearning for his hot running blood in the cemetery.
The Little Boy and the Vampires is a vision of catastrophe and a parody of horror stories. It is faultless in its own witty and allusive style although it is a bit too simple. It holds no secrets. Once read, everything has been brought to light, there is nothing left to reflect on. The reader is similar to the child who takes apart a toy to discover its secret. It turns out that it consists of a few components only and has no secret. We can calm down since we know that there are no vampires. If the piece is taken apart, the cause of its falling off is clear: the pictures of the deterioration following the holocaust and the legend of the vampires cannot be harmonized, they refuse to form a coherent unity.
The other short novel, Margit is also the development of a single idea. The storyteller is a drunken, neurotic, lonely librarian in Szekszárd. His life is a collection of failures. One day, he is visited by Mephisto, a watch-repairer in his civil guise years ago, accompanied by a huge, black dog. He offers the librarian the chance of putting right everything that went wrong in his purposeless life. The librarian is allowed to relive a day in his adolescence which he identifies as the beginning of his failures. So back to youth and Margaret in this grotesque Faust paraphrase. True, the rejuvenation is no less than the chance to relive the minutes of failure in those days-with his looks of today. He does seduce the girl whom he had failed to or had not dared to seduce. But the Szekszárd Faust of today is disappointed in his pimply, inhibited, verse-scribbling adolescent self, and wakes up from his Margaret dream with a literal and metaphorical hangover All that is left for him is to learn to live with a life whose only chance is failure.
* NHQ 101
(The New Hungarian Quarterly, vol. XXX/114. 1989. Summer. 182-187. p.)
[...] The young István Baka's new book contains two short novels and a play. The writer, who has won a Graves Prize for his poems* now lends his individual voice to prose. In his The Little Boy and the Vampires, he continues what he had already begun in his previous book, Szekszárdi mise (Mass in Szekszárd): the mythicization of his hometown, Szekszárd, a typical Hungarian town in a stylization that is at times grotesque, at times ironic, at times parody. Szekszárd has a strong literary presence in modern Hungarian fiction: among others, Mihály Babits and Miklós Mészöly constructed fictions from its elements. In Baka's fiction, too, Szekszárd becomes an imaginary, unrealistic setting-another fantasy town, just like those described in the books by Imre Kertész and Margit Ács. The short novel The Little Boy and the Vampires is set after the „holocaust,” some time in the twenty-first century when Sárd (i. e. Szekszárd) is no longer part of Hungary but an indenpendent city-state. Hungary does not exist any more. The regions adjacent to Sárd, for example, are ruled by the despot Cyrill I and soldiers from Taiwan, having remained here as the result of an earlier war, are found loafing idly. They have been forced to remain here because all transport ceased to operate not just in a country torn to small pieces but everywhere in the world. If on a rare occasion an old locomotive is successfully filled with wood shavings or peat, it drags itsel over from Sárd to the captal city of Cyrill I, Dolma (i. e. Tolna), but it is impossible to get as far as Lake Balaton. It was in the youth of one of the characters, András Bakó, a junior clerk in an archive, that on occasion the trains last covered longer distances; even then journeys of one or two hundred kilometres lasted several days. Today, all this belongs to the past, Sárd lives a reduced life locked up in itself. Everything is contrary to the technological utopias we find in science-fiction novels; in technology, the town has slipped back to medieval circumstances. The administrational circumstances are also medieval, it is not by accident that the Lord Mayor is called Cézár Borgói and his mistress's name is Lukrécia. As Cesare Borgia, he rules the small city-state as a despot, a provincial Hungarian version, which gives rise to hilariously pathetic situations. A similar provincial pettiness imbues the bourgeois plot and riot organized against him. This is interrupted by the outbreak of a mysterious epidemic: all the inhabitants of the town are turned into bloodsucking vampires. Those killed by a vampire themselves have to quench their insatiable thirst for blood by seeking out other victims in turn. This bloodthirst spreads like a contagious epidemic. The nephew of András Bakó, the sick little boy, is strangled by his own mother. Finally, the town dies out. Cyrill I sends an advance guard to Sárd and then occupies it victoriously. He does not even suspect that thirsty vampires are yearning for his hot running blood in the cemetery.
The Little Boy and the Vampires is a vision of catastrophe and a parody of horror stories. It is faultless in its own witty and allusive style although it is a bit too simple. It holds no secrets. Once read, everything has been brought to light, there is nothing left to reflect on. The reader is similar to the child who takes apart a toy to discover its secret. It turns out that it consists of a few components only and has no secret. We can calm down since we know that there are no vampires. If the piece is taken apart, the cause of its falling off is clear: the pictures of the deterioration following the holocaust and the legend of the vampires cannot be harmonized, they refuse to form a coherent unity.
The other short novel, Margit is also the development of a single idea. The storyteller is a drunken, neurotic, lonely librarian in Szekszárd. His life is a collection of failures. One day, he is visited by Mephisto, a watch-repairer in his civil guise years ago, accompanied by a huge, black dog. He offers the librarian the chance of putting right everything that went wrong in his purposeless life. The librarian is allowed to relive a day in his adolescence which he identifies as the beginning of his failures. So back to youth and Margaret in this grotesque Faust paraphrase. True, the rejuvenation is no less than the chance to relive the minutes of failure in those days-with his looks of today. He does seduce the girl whom he had failed to or had not dared to seduce. But the Szekszárd Faust of today is disappointed in his pimply, inhibited, verse-scribbling adolescent self, and wakes up from his Margaret dream with a literal and metaphorical hangover All that is left for him is to learn to live with a life whose only chance is failure.
* NHQ 101
(The New Hungarian Quarterly, vol. XXX/114. 1989. Summer. 182-187. p.)