The question often comes up in interviews and panel discussions: Why am I running away from present-day Hungarian reality? When this question is put to me, I must ponder it carefully: Am I really running away? Or here’s a case in point: I’m sitting in my Budapest flat with a young lady; she has a small tape recorder in her lap, a mike in her hand, and a watch on her wrist, which she keeps looking at while popping the question: Why am I running away from present-day Hungarian reality? And would I please answer briefly, because she has to pick up her child at the nursery, and she hasn’t even done her shopping. Before I know it she’s gone, and I’m stuck with her question which, when you think about, is a part of present-day Hungarian reality. Or I am on a platform, facing two or three bright lights, maybe thirty pairs of eyes, and a glass of mineral water. I am a bit hoarse because I’ve just finished reading something that was written sometime ago by someone who is supposed to be me. And then somebody in the audience asks if writers nowadays can make a living; someone else would like to find out which party I voted for, and a third person wants to know why I am running away from present-day Hungarian reality. Then they all leave, and I am left there, stabbed in the heart with that deadly question, which is as much a part of Hungarian reality as is my heart.
But have I really been stabbed in the heart, cut to the quick?
It’s easy to dismiss the question, as easy as brushing aside other minor outside irritants. I could say, for instance, that I am present-day Hungarian reality.
I could also say that whatever happens in a story can only happen here and now; and furthermore, narrative prose should not be confused with media news, whose producers, it seems, are not confronted with such questions often enough. Or I could answer the question with a question (which I like to do anyway), and say:
At what point does reality stop being current and Hungarian? Today is Saturday, so the reality I am experiencing is Saturday’s reality. But what if I wrote that on Thursday, the day before yesterday, I went to the Central European University? Would I no longer be talking about present-day reality? And if I added that at the Central European University I heard a talk by a Romanian writer, and also got involved in an Austrian matter too complicated to go into right now, then I wouldn’t be dealing with Hungarian reality? What happened five years ago may still be considered part of present-day reality. But what if someone related a story from the pre-1989 period? Would he, too, be running away from reality? And if someone described how a self-service restaurant looked in Moscow in the nineteen-seventies (as was done by a friend of mine, a fellow writer, who, incidentally, was hit with the same question, I heard it myself)—would he be turning his back on the here and now? And what about the writer who in a brilliant novel superimposed late nineteenth-century Budapest on the present-day capital? Was he or wasn’t he running away? And if he was, which way? From the nineteenth century to the twentieth, or vice versa?
I will not go on expanding time and space, even though I thought I wouldn’t stop until I’ve demonstrated that the late Classical, Mediterranean world of Miklós Mészöly’s Saulus is as much a part of Hungarian reality as those fields of ice untouched by time in Imre Wirth’s Eskimo War.
It would probably be more fun to do this than point out again and again that in a piece of narrative prose, or a drama, explicit time and space references are not very important formal elements. It is far more interesting to consider this: At what point does reality stop being real?
Can we speak of only one kind of present-day Hungarian reality at a time, or are there two, three, as many as four realities? Does my right eye see the same present-day Hungarian reality as my left eye? Heaven forbid that I should even attempt to treat these as ontological problems; they are everyday problems for a writer—and the fact that he takes them into consideration, or ignores them, has a far greater effect on the form of the work he is in the process of writing than do the particulars of his outside interests, to say nothing of more private matters like his views as a citizen (though it’s these views that are the real subject of those queries about Hungarian reality).
But if there exists, at one and the same time, more than one kind of
reality, they can be discovered only through a variety of perceptions; we must contend, then, with the coexistence of numerous different subjective realities, in the real world as well as in the world of the about-to-be-written narrative.
To give a very simple example: A man is walking down Király Street.* He started out at Teréz Boulevard and is heading toward Károly Boulevard. At the same time another individual is walking down Majakovszkij Street. He started at Tanács Boulevard and is heading toward Lenin Boulevard. One would assume that at some point the two would meet, yet in “reality” they never will, because they move in two different planes of reality, even if—as in this case—the spatial elements of the two realities, down to the tiniest detail, can be said to match perfectly.

The situation becomes even more complicated—here, too, examples abound —in the case of several ethnic groups living together, each one imbued with a different sense of the past, and therefore possessing different notions about present reality as well. In these instances, the same area of settlement only appears to be the same; actually they are two or three distinct settlements, with layers upon layers of disparate but intersecting spatial and cultural realities. To use an example close at hand, I’ve been several times to the city of Cluj-Napoca in western Romania, I know the place fairly well—as well as an outsider can get to know a city not his own. I purposely wrote the city’s Romanian name, on account of its foreignness. The Hungarian name is more familiar and natural to us, and may distract us from an essentially hermeneutic problem, for which this city may well serve as a textbook illustration (but so could other comparable places on the map, which can be referred to by two or three different names, though such places are especially prevalent in this part of the world). Someone like myself, born and raised in Budapest, can—and do—have friends living in Kolozsvár, whom I may wish to visit. But whether I travel there by car or by train, the place I will come to will not be Kolozsvár but Cluj-Napoca. Anyone who has been to this city knows what I am talking about; I am trying to illuminate the problem for those who have never been there. Cluj-Napoca is a dynamically expanding Romanian city of five hundred thousand inhabitants, with a modest past but a promising future. At the same degree of latitude and longitude, though in a different world of reality, is Kolozsvár, a stagnating, and even shrinking city of eighty thousand, with deep-rooted traditions, a rich past going back hundreds of years (which includes the history of a once lively German town called Klausenburg), and a not very promising future. A river runs through both cities: the Somes or, if you like, the Szamos. There is no barrier, no duplication here, for it’s been said that you can’t step in the same river twice. Besides, the water in both rivers is heavily polluted. Not far from the bank of this river there is a square: Cluj-Napoca’s Michael the Brave Square (a translation, obviously), also known as Széchenyi Square. It’s the same square, but in two different realities, thus two different squares.
I imagine two people, a girl and a boy, walking toward each other in the square. They are perfectly compatible as to character, and would probably be delighted to find each other somewhere in the middle of the square; but because they are crossing two different squares they will never meet. Or take a writer and a reader. The reader is searching eagerly, passionately for a book that will open a window to another reality, different from the one in which he lives. What he doesn’t realize is that the book he is looking for was written by a man walking toward him in the square. And the writer is longing to meet a genuinely receptive reader who is not interested in knowing if writers nowadays can make a living but in finding out what may be revealed, with the aid of all the resources at a writer’s command and by means of a piece of made-up reality, about lived reality; and conversely, what can be learned about made-up reality from lived reality. What he doesn’t realize is that the reader he is searching for is right there, walking toward him in the square—the same one, but belonging to a different realm of reality. A meeting between the two would suggest the compatibility of the two realities, but it will never take place, precisely because they move about in different realities.
There is a statue in the middle of this square. I who am a stranger in Cluj-Napoca to the same extent (if not quite the same way) that I am in Kolozsvár might have this to say about this statue: a well-muscled horse rising on its hind legs, with a fearless-looking rider on its back. But I may also note that in one reality this statue is the optical and even theological centre of the square. Much more than a work of plastic art, it is an ideal cast in bronze—like most statues erected in public places. The statue marks the spot from which to view the surrounding historical landscape; from this vantage point the city is retroactively Cluj-Napoca, and thus its past is as rich, if not richer, than that of the Hungarian town, which from this spot can hardly be seen. While in the other reality the statue is barely noticeable, or if it is, it appears as an out-of-place, foreign object, a large piece of metal left here accidentally, which passers-by have gotten used to—to its presence, that is, not to its larger significance, for that evokes strong cognitive dissonance, so they’re better off remaining oblivious to it.
I repeat: I consider this not a philosophical or a political problem but a narrative one, and that’s how I try to approach it. The city with its double reality is but one such place, a representative example of this type of city, of which there are hundreds more all over East Central Europe. Such narrative problems may well arise in other parts of the world, but my personal experiences are related to this region; that’s why I chose it.
Though as far as the above-mentioned particular example is concerned, in reality (in any kind of reality) boys and girls will sooner or later find each other.
Writers and readers, however, seldom do; even within the same reality it happens only in rare, blessed moments. And that recurring question is the best proof that such meetings hardly ever take place.
Why is the writer running away from present-day Hungarian reality? That is, why am I? The real question, though, is whether I, sunk in present-day Hungarian reality and writing this piece, am identical with the writer who is my age, living under the same roof, and responsible for such novels as Crossing the Glass and The True Story of Jacob Wunschwitz? I am inclined to believe that at the moment this writer is not me, only an acquaintance. I am pretty familiar with his personality, his way of thinking, his works, but I couldn’t really say where he is right now. Running away from present-day Hungarian reality, most likely; and I’ve no choice but to assume responsibility for his flight—though personally, I have no intention of going anywhere. I am here to stay.

But if we live in a world where more than one reality keeps proliferating in one and the same place, then the question becomes: Is there an objective reality independent of us, an answer to all existing perceptions, and the quirks and prejudices of the perceivers—one reality, in short, with which to counter a multitude of subjective realities? Once again, the question is not philosophical, but related to what the writer actually does. Narrative as process assumes a narrative situation, which has to be maintained, shaped, developed (put more simply: a story must get from point A to point B), and whether this process comes to fruition (narrative as outcome) depends largely on the accomplishment itself. Is the narrator enhanced if he stands above the tangle of conflicting perspectives, attitudes, impressions, beliefs, deceptions and self-deceptions—if he knows more, and what’s more important, “knows it better,” than the characters in the work?
The answer to this question has practical rather than theoretical implications, and it cannot be answered for all time—it has to be reformulated and rejustified each and every time. Yet let us be clear about it: in the process of writing, deciding on an answer is a fundamental, strategic decision.
If the answer is yes, then the narrator’s extra knowledge will become his thorniest problem. What should he do with his extra knowledge, with the incontrovertible validity of this knowledge? How can it be made part of every phase and moment of his narrative as outcome, if he wants to avoid the impression that every single phase and moment of his narrative as process has been decided beforehand?
If the answer is no, then the integrity of the narrator (and of the narrative itself) becomes problematic; in that case the different perspectives and attitudes and beliefs do not meet head on but simply diverge, which may lead to the breakup of the narrative form.
But above all, this strategic decision dictates whether or not the storyteller will take to his heels. I myself have no intention of going anywhere, I am here to stay, yet in the clearest and most painful moments of solitude and self-awareness I must concede, with head bowed, that the writer who is my age and lives under the same roof is in one continuous flight from present-day Hungarian reality.
Why? The specific answer is of no importance. Escape, both as act and gesture, speaks for itself. Just as there were historical periods when it was impossible not to write satire, we now live in an age when it’s difficult, indeed impossible, in my view, not to escape from any given reality. Treating reality as a topographical problem is itself an act of escape. Picking out a narrative world, and then building it up, filling it with people, is also a form of escape.
The question is not why the writer is running but where. A contemporary Hungarian writer can only be running away from contemporary Hungarian reality. For him or her to escape from the Persian reality of the Sassanids or from the Byzantine world of Justinian would require superhuman (and not specifically literary) gifts. Somewhere there must exist a secret history of escapes from reality.
I know only bits and pieces of this secret history. But I am fairly familiar with the escape attempts of the writer who lives under my roof. If he stops running long enough, I will relate the story of his escape attempts in appropriate detail. Now I will only allude to them, if only to answer the question posed in the title of this essay.
Escape into an alter ego.
Escape into another language.
Escape into alien art forms.
Escape into subtle correspondences. (This may help explain the sudden interest in the idea of history being just another narrative occupation, a way of shaping and reshaping a story.) But a word of caution: correspondence is not the sum total of things that correspond. It should be fairly clear that questioning the language used to discuss traditions is not the same as fetishizing tradition, or the subjects subsumed under it.
Escape from the beginning of the narrative to near its end. (Another word of caution: what we mean here is not direction but proportion. Is there still narrative space, free scope, near the end of the narrative?)
Escape-like leap from the end of the narrative back to what preceded its beginning.
Escape from narrative as process to narrative as outcome.
Escape from narrative as outcome to narrative as process.
Escape from present-day Hungarian reality to present-day Hungarian reality. And the other way around. And back again. ß

László Márton
is the author of novels, short stories,
essays and plays for the stage and radio.