PETER ESTERHAZY
275
something that only language, or to use our pet words, the subject and
predicate, is capable of keeping alive.)
The problem
!if
courage (the woman-problem)
The language of hard-core dictatorship is silence. That of soft-core
dictatorship is keeping mum. Mumbling and muttering. Oblique refer–
ence and insinuation. Complicity and a clandestine mode of speech . Our
basic example is the fifty-six guinea pigs. If in a text fifty-six guinea pigs
flew (flitted, fluttered) over our garden, the reader was justified in perking
up his cute little ears; fifty-six is a mythical number, a hidden point of ref–
erence signifying that something was happening then and there in favor
of our poor, lost liberty or, as we were fond of saying, nothing was hap–
pening, but that much could be insinuated. This is what will be
insinuated. We are encroaching on forbidden ground.
Furthermore, in the meantime we forgot all about the woman down
in the garden, though Chekhov has taught us that if there is a garden,
there is bound to be a woman in the garden, and needless to say, this is
the only thing of any real interest. The woman . What about the woman?
Good novels (the novels of the Kadar Era? Is this attribution justified?)
have always been about this woman. But more's the pity, at times we
were more interested in those fifty-six guinea pigs, may the pox take
them.
This carried within it the attendant danger that literature and art
would be judged not as literature and art, but as a moral exercise. The
various considerations formed a confused jumble, and it was difficult not
to get involved. Let me remind you of the dilemma of a "good" man
writing a "bad" book. Who would have dared sell a work on a straw mat
along with the old
Nepsz abadag,
the official party daily which, naturally,
had other considerations; there was excitement not because the book was
"bad," but because the author was "good." Or whatever. This is a highly
delicate situation . What's good and bad in art springs from an intricate
common consensus with no fail-safe parameters like you'd find in the
mass production of pancakes. Accordingly, if extraneous viewpoints find
their way into this common consensus - lies, to be perfectly frank - it
bodes no good. At the very least, it is difficult, laborious, and complicated
to put it right. Which in tum brings up the eternal problems of values and
value systems. (Some people would like to dispatch the problem quickly
and easily, and with great purificatory fury, by replacing the intelligentsia
down to the last man. It's not a bad idea. There is something to be said
for it, concretely, that it is ridiculous, because
in that case
they would have
to get rid of everyone, including the guy doing the ridding ...)
