- A conversation with Mihaly Kornis -

Interviewer: Andras Beck
Translation: Andras Gollner


The opening and perhaps most characteristic piece in your recent book, In the Praise of Fear, is entitled, To My Generation. What does it mean to speak to a generation?

To speak to a generation simply means that your are in an intimate relationship with that generation; as if I'm speaking with a real person or with myself.

My 1987 essay was born of despair, brought on by the recognition that I too was slowly turning into "a Hungarian writer", and anything more boring, uninteresting or useless than that is utterly unimaginable to me. This feeling, which may well be the product of my own Jewish origins, stems from the conviction that the act of writing, talking or public speaking, as such, is an exulted intellectual position to which only those can aspire who possess knowledge, or who really do know something certain about their subject matter.

In contrast to this, not only Hungarian literature of the late 20th century, but recent world iterature as well, is drowning in a flood created by its own words. The most distinguishing feature of all the contemporary literary cultures currently known to me, is their growing insignificance and fragmentation. In my view, the source of this decline is due to the fact that while such intellectual giants as Dostoyevsky and Kirkegaard, and later Nietsche, Kafka or Paul Celan have identified the possibilities of European consciousness, very few could actually follow them on these roads. Unfortunately, in post-WW II Hungary, I can only say this of Weoress, Pilinszky and Miklos Erdely.

This sense of the world having moved into some unutterably catastrophic or unconscious state is already present in the poetry of Attila Jozsef written during the 1930s. After the end of WW II (and though it was constantly repeated to them, it remained unsaid) the masses of East and Central Europe were unable to fathom that even though they pretended to be leading a cultured life, they were the inhabitants of a post-cultural era.

The European culture, which blossomed during the era of Goethe and still existed at the end of the 19th century, died somewhere between World War I and the end of WW II. And the question its death posed for me for a long time was -- I should write, but what for? Not for whom, but for what? What more should one say when everything that could possibly be said about the beauty of existence, has already been expressed in all its possible forms? In these circumstances, my only hope for becoming an honourable man was in keeping my mouth shut, by not even letting out as much as a peep! Unfortunately, however, I am terribly vain, conceited and constantly chasing after success, and having discovered within myself the ability to have a way with words, I am now and then not above exploiting it, though not without remorse, and at great pain. At the same time, I watch uneasily as literary journals are cropping up everywhere in Hungary like mushrooms in a field, and find myself saying, in the essay To my Generation that: "today, anyone can write who has time on their hand". But if everyone can write, then nobody can write, and no one has anything to say, since writing well, in some respects, is simply a disguise to hide that we have nothing to say.

Those writers who do have something to say, such as a Dostoyevsky, or a Balzac, stutter or to use Pilinszky's expression, allow their words to clatter wherever they fall. They have not the faintest inclination to observe conventional literary good taste, because what concerns them above all is the obvious entry of the devil into our existence, and the manner in which he established his impersonal dominion over everything.

And thus, I find myself writing not because I have any reason whatsoever to do so, but simply because at times I am unable to keep myself from writing. I don't mean to suggest that I lack the desire to write as such. What drives me is the desire to say something significant. And so, the whole purpose of my little aria is to point out, that far too many people think these days -- and incidentally, I am honestly envious of them -- that by simply writing something down in an acceptable way, they have made a contribution. In my view, they merely plastered over our problems.

While I would very much like to talk with you about literature, I know this will not be easy. Your words suggest that the concept of "literature for itself" is one that you find highly dubious. It is not a coincidence that you move from a question about literature to a discussion of the universal crisis facing us. In this existential situation that you describe, can one talk about literature as such? Is there such a thing as an independent, autonomous world of letters?

Conceptually, an independent, autonomous literary world is a possibility, and one can certainly talk about it. Functionally, however, it does not exist. According to Peter Esterhazy, literature is a very insignificant thing, which only a few people can do well, and when they do so, everything is alright. My own view is that, yes, literature is a very insignificant thing but communication, if it really is communication, is a very significant thing, and the problem I have with literature is when it departs from communication and simply becomes itself.

It is, needless to say, an entirely different matter that the communication which most people seem to think they have understood, is usually worthless, stuffed with platitudes and false. To put it simply, just because a work is understandable, doesn't necessarily make it good. Indeed, at the end of the 20th century, we must be especially suspicious about the quality of those writings which everyone claims to have "understood".

But while relatively speaking, this is how I see things, I would not question the assertion that real communication -- such as the Gospels -- can, on the one hand, be meaningful to everyone even though no one understands a single word of it. I'm not trying to say that only the Gospels qualifies as literature, or that it's not literature. What I'm really struggling with -- and perhaps this is what keeps me outside of literature -- is that I can not accept to be merely a particle of something. And if I were to accept that I am a man of letters, than I would have to reconcile myself to being, in essence, a particle.

My rebellious nature rejects that fate out of hand, and I do everything within my power not to fall prey to it. Therefore, whatever I write is always provocative, loud, and forcefully blasphemous. But in the age that we are living in today, when our whole society is loud and rebellious, I am genuinely worried that my own rebelliousness will merely add to the general confusion. And thus, I decided to climb into the theatre, like a snail into his house, or more precisely, like a straying husband into a (lupanar). For me the theatre is a separate world, with its own brazenly shameless, enchanting, out of this world laws. It's there that I really feel at home. And I do not consider this activity to be a literary one. At least not for the time being.

I feel that everything that you say, is nevertheless still closely connected to form, or rather to the question of form. Could it be that perhaps it is precisely this that propels your writing in the direction of formleslessness?

Yes, the greatest danger in the attitude that I represent is that it can precipitate a slide into formlessness. But still, there is a paradox here, because while the desire to write often leaves me so breathless that I can't even let out a syllable, when I nevertheless do end up writing something, I do it by leaning on, and drawing from the rhythms of language. What I want to say, therefore, is that in a true world, it makes very good sense to pay attention to the use of language. But since the world, as experienced by our predecessors, has ended, every linguistic feat, merely adds to the (kamu-culture?) that surrounds us.

Still, your works do suggest the existence of another world. I'm thinking here about the distinction that you draw in your writings between actuality and reality. Do words have a meaning in that world?

I really do believe, and on this point I'm fully in agreement with Esterhazy, that writing is creation. While I do not have much faith in literature, I still have enough faith in words -- indeed, this is the reason why I am a writer as such. When I get my hands on something real, like the way a nail is driven into a tree, then, and only to that extent, do I see myself being creative. It is only then that I move into the realm of reality. But, what is even more important for me is, to feel that I have succeeded in moving a slice of artificial reality into that world whose reality stems from its forever emerging liveliness. A literary creation is only realized in the imagination; it fulfils itself, it becomes reality, not in the writer but in the reader.

Someone who wants to be malicious, could argue that your image of reality, unwittingly creates an aesthetic realm, the very realm which you strive to reject. It's as if you re-discovered literature, and immediately joined the ranks of those who are in opposition to it.

It's possible that you are right, and that this contradiction is actually present in what I'm saying. But there is also something which either you don't quite grasp or that I have not made clear enough. Literature can indeed have real value, but not in a world that's in its death-throes. In a culture that is merely camouflage, where the powerful are not powerful but simply untouchable criminals, literature is also camouflage. The word, however, need not end up in the same position ! For me, prose literature had largely ended with Kafka, Hungarian poetry, with Attila Jozsef, though some of its remains still twitch convulsively like the legs of a frog long after they have been detached from the body. This is what I find so repulsive, and to the extent that I'm part of this literary world, I'm also disgusted with myself.

So what is possible after this? To howl in order to rouse everyone from their sleep?

This is precisely what I attempted to do with In the Praise of Fear, but then I regretted it. The failure of performance art of the turn of the century, surrealism and futurism, for example, and of all other loudly proclaimed "new trend" presents a clear challenge to this type of voice. There have been others who howled during this century, only to have their call followed by a cataclysm... Thus, the howl is not the proper form -- even in the literary world -- of intellectual rebellion. If I knew what was the proper form, then obviously that is what I would be doing, but I confess not to know it. And the reason why I do not publish prose, is because I would like to keep myself as far away as possible from the deceptive, truthless turmoil that surrounds us.

So what is to come? Silence?

No, that already exists.

Then it's only the theatre that remains for you?

The theatre is only an escape for me, its not a solution. I use the theatre to keep myself from doing what I should be doing. And as for what it is that I should be doing, I have nothing but very faint ideas.

Let me give you a name: Marcel Duchamp.

From what I know of him, he tried just about everything...

.. Yes, especially silence...

You know, these are all well worn paths. My own experience tells me that neither silence nor howling does any good. Let me draw you a hair-raising picture of what I'm currently finding sniffing in the air. Literature in Hungary will lose its cultural significance with the speed of lightning. It will be pushed out from the general public's consciousness to an extent never before seen by haute literature. It will become a very exclusive toy for a tiny minority. In this sense, if I were still young, it would not occur to me in a million years to become a writer.

I believe that in the XXI-st century, which after all is just around the corner, self-expression, by necessity, will take on entirely new forms. The distinction between the professional and the amateur will increasingly lose its significance. There will be good and bad works of art, but in such an incredible quantity, that it will be lifestyle rather than education, that determines who does what. Every form of exclusivity will be suspicious. I foresee that, similar to the street art of today, such as graffiti, rap, street music, entirely new branches of art will emerge. In other words, the function of art will be fundamentally transformed.

As to just how yesterdays and todays poets and writers will respond to this, I have no idea. All I know for sure is that they will have something to say. To answer your question, finally; as soon as I know who I am talking to and why, I will probably come forward with torrents of works. But right now I feel the same way towards literature as that little boy who was taught a few card tricks by his parents, and who still at the age of seventy lives off the same eighteen tricks, while his audience is disappearing and he himself is weary of the whole thing. I'm simply bored by it all.

I'm convinced that the public is utterly ignorant about the great thinkers of today. I rank myself -- along with all those who are presently held in high esteem in Hungary -- well below those who have some sense of the rules, or more likely, the unruliness of original creation, and who, in my view, must do their utmost to become unrecognizable and invisible in this incredibly depraved cultural world we're living in. The awareness of the existence of such invisible minds came to me after reading two works that only just now saw the day of light. The first, from Miklos Erdely, belongs to the world of art. The second, which I am just now getting to know, belongs to Lajos Szabo, the philosopher. They were the forerunners, or if you will, they were the inheritors--renewers of an ancient tradition. This Heraclitian attitude and behavior, "everything becomes One - One becomes everything", belongs to those who design all their creations to self-destruct, thereby enabling the artist to forever face in the direction of the unknown, never looking back, not even for a moment, because they know that even a single backward glance would bring on the immediate death of creativity.

A culture that only dwells upon itself ceases to exist. And I think it is a basic characteristic of official Hungarian culture -- and I naturally include myself in this -- to constantly look back upon itself. I don't want to present Lajos Szabo's apologetic here -- it so happens that right now I am reading a great deal from him -- but it is from him that I've learned that our intellect doesn't expand, it simply radiates. Because of this, it has no place or achievement, beyond movement. And its movement constantly illuminates newer and newer contradictions, whose resolution in turn gives birth to other contradictions. Consequently, the intellect never wants to come to a stop, with a new form or with a new world-view. It does not want to stop when its viewpoint matures. The works of Miklos Erdely and Lajos Szabo clearly reveal what should be the real task of our intellect and how far back we are from there.

Surely, the fact that the works of Erdely and Lajos Szabo -- in different degrees -- remained unknown in Hungary for quite some time, is largely due to political factors, to official censorship. It seems as if you are attaching something positive to their invisibility in order to draw a distinction between the negative sense of the word " official recognition".

The only thing I can say to this is that Erdely and Lajos Szabo became intellectual giants not because of the repression that reigned here, but exactly the other way around. The political repression was created with one purpose in mind --to silence the voice of these thinkers, and to deny them the opportunity to have any say in anything. The point I'm trying to make is that there is no society that I know of in human history, from which an individual could not have arranged to have himself excluded in a matter of seconds if he had wanted to. In only a few individuals does ethics, aesthetics and logic combine into one. And anyone who can achieve that within themselves is immediately marginalized. In this sense, I am very dissatisfied with myself, because so far I have not been able integrate these three forces within myself, and therefore, I still have no idea of the move with which I could make myself immediately invisible.

It's difficult to return to your book, because it seems as if you have put it behind you. But I still feel that everything that you have said here, is just as forcefully expressed in the pages of In the Praise of Fear. In this sense, your book is indeed a provocation, which -- by virtue of its appearance in print -- requires a response. And everything seems to link together the concepts of provocation and dialogue, provocation and understanding. What is your thought about these linkages ?

Simply, that the hopes placed in provocation have not been fulfilled. It might be, that I was not provocative enough. But still, we come back to the same point, namely, that provocation as an art form, has outlived itself. All of the provocations directed towards post-modernism are swallowed by it like water by a sponge. Its as if provocation is vital to its very existence.

People reacted to my book as if they had not heard it. My generation did not put on the gloves after reading it. Perhaps because I have no "generation" ...? And then, the nationalists, the latent Nazis in our midst, also did not try to jump me, for writing Blues for the Danube. The reaction was the same to all of the other provocations that appeared in the book, from Little Jesus to the critique of Miklos Jancso's later films. The piece, Crisis and its Fashion was originally written in connection with the Jancso-Hernadi film The Era of Horrors but by the end of it, I became so removed from it, that if you took out from the text the title of the film, and three other sentences, no one would think it was about Jancso's movie.

My interest in Jancso is simply due to the fact that, regardless of how many poor films he made later on, he was the greatest Hungarian film-maker of the 1960s and 70s. It is, thus, so much the more interesting to ponder, that, like so many others, he too had to end up on an intellectual side-track.

What is essential to realize, is that unless we radically change not only our intellectual, but ethical and existential positions, we are all going to become ever increasingly irrelevant. But just how, and with what means we are to achieve this, I have yet to discover...

For you, one of the "artforms" of provocation is blasphemy. This is readily evident from such works as the above mentioned Little Jesus. Emphatic references to Jesus are to be found in many of your other writings. But isn't the embodiment of the Word in Jesus, already suggestive of blasphemy ?

As far as Jesus is concerned, and the blasphemy that resides in his embodiment, I'm in agreement with Chesterton, for whom the essence and triumph of Christianity, lay in its abnormality. In this sense, anything that is to qualify as Christian, is in dead contradiction to dogma.

You said that the embodiment of the Word is also blasphemy. Yes, religious Jews did indeed consider this to be a blasphemy, and they still do so today. But my view is that the essential thing to understand about that "blasphemy" which resides in the embodiment of the Word, is that the Word, or Jesus, will always be embodied wherever dogma is violated in the name of love.

The way Jesus was healing the sick on Saturday, was indeed a blasphemy! But my attraction to verbal blasphemy stems not only from my faith, but from a discovery that goes right back to my childhood. Having been totally surrounded by the language of lies during the Rakosi-Kadar era, I concluded that this era and this world reveals its true character most effectively in it's enthusiastic lies, such as those found in its hit-tunes, in the songs of the young pioneers, or in a newspaper headline...It is at times like this, that this mendacious, deceptive world really reveals itself, and in the final analysis, by revealing its lying nature, it immediately sets off a contradiction. Looking in from the outside, the transfer of its lines into literary texts, would appear to be an act of blasphemy. But from my perspective, it is sacrilegious, because it forever touches wounds.

Our conversation seems to constantly verge on that fragile borderline that separates "literature for itself" from "literature beyond itself" and from non-literary values. Blasphemy, on the other hand, seems to suggest precisely the breaching of boundaries, because it demonstrates that the processes of speech and understanding cannot be compartmentalized into such sharp contradictions. But there is also another frontier, which your words always take you up to, the one that separates crisis from the fashion of crisis. How do you draw this boundary ?

Once again, I have to go back to Miklos Erdely, and to a conversation he had with Laszlo Beke, in which Beke was trying to force Erdely to confront the horrors of nuclear catastrophe. At first, Erdely could not even express why he had no interest in doing this, and then suddenly he exploded, and said -- I can't think anything about a nuclear catastrophe; I never think about things that make thinking impossible! I personally believe that our salvation resides in this attitude. One of the incredible characteristics of the mind is that it can answer every question with another question. The only time it can't give an answer is when it finds itself in a situation that cannot be changed, in a situation when it has no questions to ask.

Somewhere you have written that we live in an age that has transcended tragedy. What is the role of humour in this world? Does it exist, can it exist ?

Humour is the sign of victory. Of course, there are many different forms of humour, and the one I am thinking about here is that which is only a whisker away from catharsis or crying. When a work of art reaches this level of humour, then it has come into the vicinity of catharsis. Today, it is impossible to create tragi-catharsis of the traditional type -- Kozma is proof of this -- because the world-reality needed for this is absent. It is interesting to note that human laughter, according to certain theorists, has evolved into its current form from an initially aggressive snarl. In other words, what we have here is an exclusively humanized discharge of aggression: people either hit, or rather, cry or they laugh. In my view, all of the significant works of the XXth century, from Beckett to Kafka, are all humorous. They were able to question our annihilation, and this was so surprising, that the world, in its agony, could do nothing but laugh.

I heard somewhere that you are working on a novel or a book of prose.

I have written about 350 or so pages of rough draft, and for the moment I'm unable to get on with it. But I'm not in a hurry because what I'm trying to come to grips with is the wherefores of my own existential experience, and it's possible that to achieve this, I first have to grow old. This is not a novel. As I said before, I'm no longer attracted by the possibility of writing a novel or two. Or even a novella. I'm not trying to boast, but to merely state the factual. I consider the theatre as a playground -- that is why I'm writing plays. I don't take screen-plays seriously either -- that's why I have just written a screen play.

But the meaning of being, now that is something I do take extremely seriously. Whether or not I can find its appropriate artform remains to be seen, but this is the central challenge for me, and in contrast to this, an eventually completed text can be nothing more than a dead sign, a mere impression, like the Yetti's footprint in the snow. The Yetti has long gone away, leaving merely the outlines of his paw behind, which in the case of the writer, is his work. These outlines can give us a sense of the territory we have covered over time. But the writer is never identical to his footprints, because as soon as he makes them, they are left behind. The question is, will the footprint become recognizable to others, or will it remain just a faded inner experience ?


Mihaly Kornis was born in 1949 in Budapest. His books are :
Finally You're Alive (1980); Who Are You (1986); In the Praise of Fear (1989)