IV. The Artificial Border Between Sentences

MJC: Although there are stylistic similarities between Sátántangó and The Melancholy of Resistance, the sentences in the latter felt very different to me: longer and more parenthetical. You’ve said that you wrote Sátántangó as an exploration of why people around you were sad. Could you talk about the gestation of The Melancholy of Resistance and how this new style came about?

LK: I was not so happy with Sátántangó. This is my normal form. I am little bit of a perfectionist. Sátántangó was almost okay, but this almost, this word, destroyed me. You know that to be the best, the premier player in the world, this is a wonderful thing, but to be the second-best player in the world is terrible. That’s why the almost-good, almost-best novel for me is unbearable. That’s why I tried again. In my eyes, every book which I wrote was a new experiment, a challenge: maybe now I’ll have a chance to write the book that I want to write. That’s why you can find differences, sometimes big differences between my books. And there was also a process, in my life, of the kind of relation I have between the fictional language and the spoken language, always getting closer and closer to the spoken language. When you want to convince somebody about something, if you speak in a way, in that way, you use only long sentences, almost always just one sentence, because you didn’t need this dot, this is not natural if you speak in this way, if I want to convince you about something, that the world is such and such, then it’s a natural process for the sentences to become always longer and longer because I needed less and less the dot, this artificial border between sentences, because I didn’t use, I don’t use, now, for example, I don’t use dots, I use only pauses, and these are commas, this is not my usual tone because I try, especially in English because of my poor English, to make pauses, and that’s why my tone goes a little bit down, but it is not a dot, what I found there, it is a comma, and in The Melancholy of Resistance, I tried again to write this perfect book, and my sentences became always a little bit more beautiful, although the content, my message, couldn’t change after Sátántangó, after my experience in life, but language did change and became more and more beautiful because the beauty in the language became always more important, so I reached a level, a point, I don’t know, perhaps in Seiobo There Below, perhaps in this book I’ve reached my maximum of this desire for beauty in the sentences.

MJC: I find long sentences beautiful and natural. In Latin American literature there are lots of long sentences…

LK: That was a big interest for me. Alejo Carpentier and Cortázar. And Roberto Bolaño, of course. This is a big discovery. And Juan Rulfo. And the impression is very, very big, the first time I read them, Cortázar and Carpentier. Borges, of course, but Borges was sometimes—may I be honest?—sometimes, especially when I listen to him speak, or when I read some interviews with him, I had the feeling he was not so clever. But in his works, he is fantastic. When I hear Borges, sometimes I have a bad feeling, he is a bit too strange, perhaps a little bit too artificial. When people want to be always very intellectual and sound very interesting… But of course the work of Borges is fantastic and very unique, small pieces. I have a mental picture of Borges with two faces.

MJC: In the story El Ultimo Lobo, which is one long sentence, I found that, because the unit of expression was this long sentence, it forced me to center my focus on this one unit of emotion because I was circling this emotion over and over again.

LK: Yes, because that is the other side of my books, which is very important for me and hopefully for my readers as well, mainly, repetition. Of course, this is one of the questions of sentences, of language. Repetition. This is a part of language that I use because Hungarian is a very musical language, but there is also here a very important issue: What does it mean to repeat something? When I was first in East Asia, in China and in Japan—and I went back again and again, actually for more than ten years I went back again and again—the only one thing that I could somehow understand, rather, guess at, was eternity. This is not an abstract idea, but this is an everyday reality. Many times I watched workers who built sacred places, monasteries, churches, in the Buddhist areas in Japan and it became more and more important to me to see how they work, namely, why is it so terribly important that a wood, a piece of wood, be so smooth, so absolutely without mistakes, I watched the workers and I didn’t understand because I thought that this was already perfect, but this was not perfect enough for him, I tried to see, I tried to understand why it was so important to make the same movement until I understood, or guessed, that it was absolutely not important what happened with the wood, the only thing that was important was the repetition of the movement, and this perfection of the piece of wood was only a consequence of this repetition, of this movement. Actually, I tried to understand, and perhaps I could understand eternity in a very simple way, namely, by watching somebody, the workers, the woman, somewhere, who made the same movements, absolutely the same movements, and I began to watch, for example, a faucet, how the water from the tap moves, how one drop of water leaves the edge of the tap, and this eternal movement led me to waterfalls. For example, in Schaffhausen, surprisingly, there is a wonderful waterfall. This is a waterfall where you can come very close to the water, very close, one meter or less, to try to follow the way of one drop. I haven’t the courage to confess to you for how long I stayed there following drops of water, because this is the border between normality and madness.

MJC: In both El Ultimo Lobo and War & War the protagonists direct their monologues to someone who isn’t listening. There’s a disconnect between the protagonists’ altered state of wanting to say something—to be heard—and their listeners who do not listen.

LK: Because I don’t believe in dialogue. I believe only in monologues. And I believe only in the man who listens to the monologue, and I believe I can be the man who listens to your monologue the next time around. I believe only in monologues in the human world. The dialogues, in American prose, after the Second World War, to be honest, the best dialogue writers are here in the USA, but dialogue doesn’t work for me because I don’t believe in dialogues.

MJC: So it’s not that we have these figures who speak and are misunderstood and not heard...

LK: This is not about an inability to communicate between people. Only that one person speaks and the other listens. This is also communication. I believe in this kind of communication.

V. This Uncertainty Moves in Your Soul

MJC: We were talking earlier about Sebald and his work and your relationship with Sebald. In War & War, the image of the cathedral in Cologne and all the destruction that surrounds it, reminded me of something Austerlitz says that somehow we know by instinct that the outside buildings cast a shadow of their own destruction before them and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins…

LK: We were in a very warm friendship that began before he became a well-known writer. Our first meeting happened in a flat in Zurich with my first German publisher, a wonderful man, Egon Ammann, during dinner. And we began to talk with Max [Sebald] about different things, what do you do, what do I do, and in a few hours this conversation was enough that we both had the feeling that we have been friend for years. This situation remained until his death. I marveled at his work. I marvel at it now still. Those books are absolutely an unique kind of writing. A unique point of view of the world. Because Max could use language so that it would be everything in a simple story, I am walking with my wife somewhere because perhaps, perhaps, maybe it would be the time to buy a house, or something like that. And suddenly he found a house, but it is absolutely empty, they look for the owner, but the owner is nowhere, but somebody is in the garden, something’s in the garden, and they go into garden and surprisingly they find a man on the garden, lying down on the field, on the grass, and from a simple everyday situation we are in a very strange world where somebody, a normal man, lies on earth and what does he do? He explains later to his guests, I have had, in the last few years, a bad habit, always and always it became more and more interesting for me to observe one piece of grass. Do you remember?

MJC: In The Emigrants, yes…

LK: This is a very real situation. A little bit melancholic because Max was a big melancholic. And a very small thing happens and you are immediately with him together in a very strange world without explanation, without a big ideology, everything remains there in a real space, but a little bit scary, a little bit sad, a little bit without future, without past. And the other side of Max, which I love very much, is how he can play with the real things for a purpose, a photo, for instance. . His novels could be rather not like fiction, and more like a strange diary. Descriptive in some cases: descriptions of stories, states of being. I’ll be in a city, suddenly, in an unknown city, not feeling any sensational effects but some very strange, small effects, and it feels like a book by Sebald: I am unsure, I am uncertain, this uncertainty moves in my soul, it remains there forever. And this is wonderful. It’s not only scary. It’s wonderful too, because the unknown was perhaps the most important element of Max’s life. The unknown in things. I lost, in his death, one of my most beloved friends. That’s why my feelings about him are not objective.

VI. Everybody Was Actually Drunk…

MJC: So we were talking earlier about how The Melancholy of Resistance had many funny moments and how Béla Tarr’s adaptation is very serious, different in tone from the book…

LK: That film was a little bit complicated to make after Sátántangó because Sátántangó was so long. Some producers saw this film, for example to try to show it on television, but it was impossible for television. Béla had a fear that if we made this film The Melancholy of Resistance as faithfully as Sátántangó, it would be so long that no one would give us a cent in the future. [Laughter.] And that’s why we had to choose only one of the four main characters: Valuska. And the consequence is this seriousness.

MJC: I had one small question about Sátántangó the movie—or perhaps not so small. Of course a book and a movie are different mediums and so on but there were two lines in Sátántangó the movie, when Estika is with her brother, about to put in the money in the money tree—two lines not in the novel. She says to her brother: “Are we going to be rich?” and: “Are people going to envy us?” And her brother says yes to both questions. In the novel, Estika doesn’t care about the money, nor does she care about being rich. She says she was going to give the money to her brother anyway…

LK: That was a bad solution in the movie. For Estika, her only interest is her brother. Not the money or being rich. And we couldn’t show that, and so we thought: money and richness could be also important to Estika. But this is not true. That was a bad solution. But Béla believed only in Estika’s face and he wanted to show Estika’s face for so long, as long as possible.

MJC: Because when I saw the movie it felt like the reason she’s mean to the cat afterward is because she feels—at least that’s how I interpreted it—that, hey, I am going to be rich, I am going to do whatever I want, I have power over you, cat, so it had this different sort of causality for why she’s mean to the cat, and then when it turns out she won’t be rich, that’s therefore the reason she kills herself, whereas in the book is very different, the causality…

LK: You’re right. So many other problems with Sátántangó. With The Turin Horse I didn’t have any problems. For example, this monologue in the middle was twice as long, in written form, but in the time of shooting I told him that it was too long. Perhaps we could throw this away, I told him, but he chose a shorter version of the monologue, and that was it as far as problems. In Sátántangó, the problems were not because I wanted a faithful rendering. It was not an adaptation, because we don’t do adaptations. I tried to make something that Béla could feel he could do what he really liked with, and that was the script, the novel was a sort of inspiration. Almost everything was decided in the time of shooting, and everything depended on the state of the characters because that was a very long shooting. Everyone was almost always drunk.

MJC: The actors?

LK: Not only the actors, but the people behind the camera, the lights people, everyone.

MJC: And that bar scene, the one we were talking about earlier, the one with my favorite Hungarian word, babtetu, which is repeated over and over…

LK: The one who repeats that word, for example, he’s not an actor. He was a wonderful cameraman who photographed small things, fantastic pictures of surfaces. And some of the other actors were painters, musicians, an actress from Yugoslavia, Béla could handle these characters very well. Sometimes cruel and sometimes very friendly.

MJC: And in that long bar scene, was that choreographed quite a bit or were they just drunk?

LK: Everybody was actually drunk. In real time, when the camera was shooting, Béla or I or Agnes would give them directions, go left, and they would go, “Ah? What?” “Left, left!” “What?!”

[Laughter.]

MJC: There’s an interview in which you talk about a beautiful moment that happens to you and Béla Tarr when that same actor, the cameraman, in that same bar scene, starts singing, “Tango, Tango…”

LK: That was the turning point for Béla and for me. Until then we were absolutely unsure why we were doing this shit. But this man, this cameraman, began to sing, and that was absolutely an improvisation, we had an idea that if he can sing, or if he can remember something, because he was drunk all day… He’d brought a harmonica, suddenly he tried to play this song and sing, “Oh the tango, my mother used to sing! Oh the tango, my mother used to sing! Do you know this? Oh the tango!” And so Béla and Agnes were, “Please, shoot it, shoot it!” That was outside the story, actually, and that was so heartbreaking, that I felt Béla holding my leg, because we were sitting next to each other, and Béla’s hand was so strong, that after the minutes I had a big bloody fleck here on the leg and Béla wept. Béla is not a sentimental figure. But that was so heartbreaking, him singing for us. And after that we understood, okay, we got the film. Because of this.

MJC: It wasn’t that the song had any particular meaning for you but it was the beauty of the improvisation?

LK: Yes, Béla and I had no idea of this song. And there was a little manipulation afterward because we needed the melody but the harmonica was absolutely…

MJC: In another interview, with The Millions, you talk about your influence on Béla Tarr. The magnitude of it. What I didn’t understand was how did that work…

LK: The main point was the book. Because Béla is a very good reader. And Sátántangó caught him, and The Melancholy of Resistance, especially the first chapter, with the train, though we couldn’t use it in the movie. And if I may, the truth is, he honors me, admires me, always defends me, because I hate making movies, and he knows that. That was the essence of our friendship: he supported me while making the movie, and he used me as a philosopher. I told him always something about the philosophical background, or questions, not exactly about the scene. Many moments I told him something about Heraclitus, about Shakespeare, about Thomas Bernhard, who he didn’t know because he wasn’t able to study these books under Communism. He began filmmaking very young. He was only twenty years old when he won the main prize in a very important avant-garde film festival in Germany with his first film, Family Nest. It was an excellent film, with amateur actors. He was only twenty. After that, he made three films, and after that he worked mostly from my work. I gave everything, titles, names, stories, the background, the atmosphere to these movies by Béla Tarr.

MJC: A lot of connections have been made here in the United States between your work and Thomas Bernhard’s. Do you feel an affinity with Bernhard? Is there a connection?

LK: He made a very deep impression, of course. My first reading of Frost, for example, and The Lime Works, these two novels were a very big experience for me. But this is Thomas Bernhard. There is a big difference between us, because I am not sentimental. Bernhard, despite everything, was sentimental. He was a big believer in greatness. That’s why he was so cynical. Because he admired the great intellectuals, he was a big admirer of art. I am not. I am an observer. That’s a big difference.

VII. This Tall Man on the Beach

MJC: We were just talking about György Kurtág, the Hungarian composer, and how he was composing a piece based on Beckett…

LK: An opera, his first opera, based on Endgame by Samuel Beckett. Kurtág had read my book Seiobo There Below and he’d called me on the phone out of the blue and stammered, “Hello, this is György, György Kurtág.” “Oh, György Kurtág,” I said, “how are you doing?” “I’m fine, I’m fine.” “So what is it?” I asked. “Oh, nothing, nothing, we, we, read, just now, finished your book.” “What kind of book?” “Se-se-oibo.” “Oh, Seiobo There Below. And did you enjoy it?” “Yes, actually, the reason for calling you is that we would like to say we love you.” After that, I visited him in the South of France with his wife Marta. He showed me the first pages of the opera. It was very complicated and spatial and based on Beckett’s Endgame, so we began talking about Beckett. I told him about my first experience with Beckett’s poems, from Beckett’s early years, his early poems. Perhaps he used those poems. He wanted to know my opinion about Beckett, the relation between Beckett and language. What impressed Kurtág the most about Beckett was the language. I told him about Beckett’s fight with the language, always, because I see Beckett’s relationship with language was absolutely not a free relationship, it was a fight. He fought the language because he hated unnecessary words. Kurtág enjoyed very much this Puritanism, his asceticism, like a monk.

MJC: So the early poems of Beckett had an impact on you…

LK: For me, that was very important. A poem of a man alone on the beach. It’s gray and sad. No emotions, nothing. A man on the beach. Cold wind. You know, I was nineteen years old and I hunted around to know about this person who wrote these poems. I wanted to know something about the person who wrote them because I was too young. Something about the person was so important to me. How these poems said all was possible. [Laughter.] This tall man on the beach, and the sand. The cold wind. This was very important for Kurtág too. He said, “Really, a tall man? How tall? Exactly how tall?” “I have no idea.” [Laughter.] “Morning or evening?”

VIII. A Secret Connection to the Whole Creation

MJC: Getting back to you books, there’s a connection, I think, between Estika in Sátántangó, Valuska in The Melacholy of Resistance, and Korin in War & War, in that they seem to be not of this world.

LK: Yes, these are the very important figures who allow us to be in the world, this kind of people who are sacrificed, who are victims of this world, in the sense of the Russian literature, in the sense of Dostoyevsky, in the sense of Tarkovsky. They are the prize for us so that we can live with compromises in this world. They are the prize which we pay for the possibility to live with compromises in this world. There are of course similarities between these figures, but they are not absolutely similar. Estika is the purest, simplest victim, because she believes everything that’s promised to her from whom she loves. But she’s absolutely defenseless. And this kind of people I love very much. In a big crowd I immediately recognize this type of person. And they perceive each other in the world. This is a secret community between these kinds of people. But they are always alone. They cannot help each other. They have only one fate: to lose himself or herself. Because him or her, they are really victims. This is their only one task, one very cruel task in this world. Without these figures, the whole machinery of the world doesn’t work. Sátántangó is the best example of this fact. The whole machinery of Sátántangó, this whole story, the state of the men and women there, couldn’t exist without a victim, without a sacrifice. These people there, these characters there in this novel Sátántangó couldn’t make their fate without Estika’s victimization. Valuska’s a little bit of a different case. Valuska is like a small animal, Valuska is made of belief, because Valuska has a secret contact with the whole creation, and the whole creation is wonderful, and Valuska sees only this fact. And for Valuska the world is absolutely the same like the created world and humans are only a very, very small part of this big huge creation, and this is not so interesting for him, a very small mistake, or failure in the creation because the whole creation is really wonderful. Actually, you and I are sitting now very close to nature [gestures toward a view of the Pacific Ocean], and if you find a place where you can see only the nature without human beings, this is actually the paradise, but in the next moment the human being walks into this picture and we are immediately and suddenly in the first chapter of the old testament. And we’ve lost it.

Mauro Javier Cardenas is a novelist. Excerpts from The Revolutionaries Try Again, his novel-in-progress, have appeared in The Antioch Review (2006), Guernica (2010), Witness Magazine (2012), and BOMB (2013). His interviews and essays on/with Javier Marias, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Antonio Lobo Antunes have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, and The Quarterly Conversation. Follow him on Twitter at @ineluctablequak.