Hamvas’s novel in a sense deconstructs the genre of the novel. It
is extremely difficult to relate the plot, as all seven books
have dozens of characters and only some of them return in the later
parts, since the novel is “a grand catalogue of fate, an inventory”
of mankind. The books are preceded and interrupted by introductory
chapters, somewhat in the manner of Fielding’s Tom Jones (a novel
referred to early on), except, as the reader learns later on, the
novel lacks a fixed point from which either the writer or the reader
could observe it. In these essayistic dialogues a Voice is narrating
some mock-learned, mock-arrogant conversation between the protagonist,
Mihály Bormester (Michael Winemaster), and himself, who claims to
be an “agent spirituel” in telling Bormester’s story. If we can believe
the Voice, Bormester would find this narration three times foolish
- foolus termaximus -, first of all that it should have happened,
then that someone should be telling it, and finally that someone
else should be putting it down. Later on, the reader and the critic
are invited into the foolishness.
“The novel describes the development
and spreading of madness in a completely original way,” explains
György Spiró. “The novel was born as a gesture of rejection
of omniscience, and hence it is occasionally stinging satire
on the human consciousness and soul, occasionally a parody of all
possible (past and future) theories, including all rational and irrational
philosophies, religions, aesthetics, and theories of everyday
existence.”
In the first book, a red-haired assistant-draftsman (Bormester’s
father) arrives to some town, where he meets as many people
as there are attitudes or masks. All these characters are prismatic
caricatures, some of them have more than one identity. Most
of them return in the second book, but they have changed their
distinctive “monomanias”. In the books to come, the hero, Bormester
“saves” and marries a hysterical woman, then develops a double
identity, strangles his wife, receives a spiritual leader and survives
the war. Countless other characters turn up, every time in
another environment, as the novel spans from the 1880s to the Second
World War. In the seventh book a new character arrives: his name
is Vidal (“the one who can see”), who is eager to shed his mask and
get a glimpse of the Land of Promise. The narrator and the Voice
discuss every part and almost every character of the book. They comment
on the difficulties of narration, talk about time, reality, probability,
style, common sense and the imagination, women, the body, misunderstandings,
the masks that human society is wearing, and much more.
As György Spiró puts it, “Hamvas is not simply a caricaturist
with wide intellectual horizons, because caricature is limited
by the subject it distorts. He makes a parody of the whole
of human existence and we have the feeling that he is most
probably the freest of Hungarian writers. He is not so free,
however, as not to be a Hungarian writer because his work was made
in this language, in an original and varied language abundant in
the possibilities of linguistic innovation, and he is not concerned
for one moment by the spasmodic efforts oft en found in Eastern Europe
to achieve European culture from an undeveloped marginal land.
On the contrary, he has no inferiority complex, because he sits in
a watch-tower from which East and West can be equally surveyed, that
East and West which are not able to understand each other.”
