Pam Saur, Lamar University

Austria in Péter Esterházy’s Postmodern Hungarian Novels

Much of Péter Esterházy’s writing in his novels is meta-language and meta-text; he at once illuminates and casts doubt on the functions of words and sentences, fictional and non-fictional texts, using humor, ambiguity, and contradiction. While satirizing conventional patterns of human thought and experience according to facile labels and such categories as cause and effect, evidence and conclusion, the important and the trivial, he also ridicules and plays with such scholarly practices as organizing texts according to major and minor points, important and trivial information, and meticulously documenting sources. Comments on novels and passages addressed to the reader also satirize literary conventions. In true post-modern spirit, serious, academic words and topics are jumbled together with the trivial, humorous, and vulgar.

It would be going too far, however, to say that Esterházy writes only about language itself; slippery and elusive as they are his novels, although lacking plot, structure, character, and clarity, do have subjects. Their main subjects are his life, the history of his ancient and noble family, and the history of Hungary before and during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and through the Communist- and post-communist eras. Esterházy’s writing style deliberately blocks attempts to summarize or comment on his novels, or take notes on them, and assemble quotations and analysis to construct commentary in the form of evidence used to draw conclusions. A study of Austrian subject matters in his novels must be taken with this background firmly in mind.

An example of Esterházy’s explication of a single word is his “definition” of Hungary, as a homeland “which is called Hungary, and where Hungarians live, who speak Hungarian, or, more accurately, throw Hungarian words in one another’s faces, eat Hungarian, chomping Hungarian meat between their Hungarian teeth, make Hungarian love, with their Hungarian heads resting on Hungarian thighs, are born Hungarian, and die Hungarian, with Hungarian light falling on their cradles and Hungarian soil falling on their coffins, on their velvety or, as the case may be, wasted Hungarian bodies…” Further, Hungary is called “that treasure chest which lay like a treasure chest in the lap of the Carpathians…” (Hahn 31). Here, thorough, systematic definition clashes with humorous and ridiculous detail, as do objective statement and poetic nostalgic. The phrases “more accurately” and “as the case may be” are used absurdly, and the illogical statement that a treasure chest lay “like a treasure chest” calls the whole passage into question.

Esterházy’s lengthy opus, Ceestial Harmonies (2000), contains numerous, although often off-hand references to Austrian history and culture, without giving it much importance, either nostalgic or hostile. Esterházy also frequently mentions Austrian authors; the question of “influence” however, is satirized and blocked. In The Glance of countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube) (1991), a character defines a certain “kind of knowledge” thus: “The way you know cheeses, literature, the human body, … the coast of Yugoslavia, the North Sea, … the Judas-eared mushroom, Joseph Roth, your crotch, my crotch” (61), a passage which would tend to confound and discourage commentary on Joseph Roth’s influence on Esterházy. Mocking, contradictory, and trivializing comments on Vienna and Austria abound, and yet the sum of his writings suggest that he is probably somewhat serious when he writes that at times, “ Vienna somehow seems all too familiar…I am seized by the unheimlich feeling of being at home. And I am obliged to remember that my country and this country were once one country” (Hahn 101).