Roberto Narrates

21/12/2025

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For anybody assuming that the elites produce the best literature, we might say it is closer to the opposite, when it is a rare article or interview that doesn’t mention Peter Esterhazy’s lineage. It suggests his background is exceptional and not the norm. He is from an established Hungarian family going back several centuries, and it isn’t many a writer who can claim that a significant musician (Joseph Haydn) was the family's court composer. If the novel, as George Lukacs and others have insisted, was the great bourgeois form, it was also getting produced by writers whose backgrounds were usually less august than Esterhazy’s. There have been important exceptions (Tolstoy, Nabokov, Lampedusa), but most of the great novelists came from relatively modest beginnings: Dickens’ father went to debtors’ prison; Hardy’s was a stonemason; Zola’s an engineer; Fitzgerald the son of a salesman. Most well-known writers came from roots comfortable enough to make writing possible, but not many could claim their family was of historical significance. Few writers, more than Esterhazy, could make such an assertion: the family was the largest owner of land in Hungary for centuries.

   Yet Esterhazy was also a communist writer, if for no better reason than the land was confiscated and he was living in the Hungarian People’s Republic. There are a few aristocratic writers and more than a few communist writers, but not many who have been both and, in different ways, Esterhazy and his father chose the communist over the aristocratic. When the regime fell, and Esterhazy was offered back the land that had been confiscated, he refused it. His father chose perhaps less honourably to become an informant for the secret police; Esterhazy wrote about it in Corrected Version.

     If Esterhazy’s family history was complicated, his writing style appears no less so. In the novella, Helping Verbs of the Heart, the story is about a dying mother and her son, but the book is full of quotes from other writers that you will only be able to identify if you already happen to know them. They aren’t attributed and become instead part of the texture of the book, rather than the sort of epigraphs writers use to open a novel or a chapter. It is also told in two parts: initially from the son's perspective and then from the posthumous mother’s. Speaking of his massive Celestial Harmonies, Esterhazy says, “the writer can say or intend whatever he wants, but the reader is in charge. For instance, I know that some people began by reading the second part of the book because it is supposed to be easier to read, since it has a story that is basically linear, and they kept leapfrogging from there to the clip-like, mostly brief fragments of part one. This doesn’t bother me.” (Words Without Borders) When he says, “If I had a streak of envy in me (which I don’t, I’d say modestly), I’d say that I envy those for whom the act of writing is so obviously not a problem.” (The Millions) If writing is such a problem for Ezterhazy, it is best if the reader makes it their problem on their terms.

      This raises several questions that Esterhazy might be resistant to saying were generated by theory, but which can be explained, perhaps with the use of it. When he says “I didn’t approach writing from the vantage point of theory, but from the side of practice – much like a stonemason,” we might add that one of the uses of theory is to explain why a writer who may believe they are working with instinct (and may well be), is working with the intuitive meeting the historically aesthetic. When an interviewer asks if he was influenced by, say, the American metafictional writer Donald Barthelme, Ezterhasy admits, “I think that as far as my reflexes are concerned I would have liked to have been a so-called l’art pour l’art writer”, that seems both generally fair and specifically unlikely. Art for art’s sake was a late 19th-century preoccupation; the interest in language, a 20th-century one: a concern for words and how they were used that became a pressing problem for philosophy and a fascinating one for literature. As David A. White believed: “If we observe how Wittgenstein extended the boundaries of language further and further into experience, then we become equipped with conceptual and critical apparatus to approach and understand what Joyce was trying to do with language in the cycle from Portrait through Ulysses to the Wake.” (James Joyce Quarterly)

       As well as this early 20th-century concern with the linguistic apparent in Esterhazy's work, we have the later 20th-century interest in quotation: that literature is made up of a tissue of texts that can seem to undermine the notion of original authorship. This is where Roland Barthes’ 'Death of the Author' meets the postmodern interest in borrowing from other texts. Barthes proposed that writers entered into language more than they expressed themselves (and thus making their use of language increasingly self-conscious), so it also made sense that the writer didn’t only find themselves using words that belonged less to themselves than to the culture but, also styles that were already there in art, and doing so became no less self-aware. “…Postmodernist art can also consciously and self-consciously borrow from or ironically comment on a range of styles from the past.” (Tate)

      We might argue that Esterhazy would feel this debt to language and culture more than most if we claim, however tenuously, that an aristocratic background would make someone aware of tradition far more than someone who has moved cumbersomely through the social ranks over generations, where their backgrounds would be lost to a general historical anonymity only a bit of genealogical archaeology would unearth. As we have noted with many writers, they are usually from indistinct backgrounds; relatively few are from immodest ones who can trace their family tree back many generations. Esterhazy could do exactly that, but he also notes that recollection is an active choice for the writer that might understandably be repressed by most individuals. “People talk a lot about the importance of remembrance these days or about how we are failing to remember. But I think you also have to be good at forgetting - it is part of normal life. Writers, on the other hand, have a different job description, if any. A writer cannot really afford to forget in the way which is necessary for other people for a healthy life. “ (Hungarian Literature Online)   

   In 'Roberto Narrates', from The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn, the narrator says of Uncle Adalbert, that “he counted as one of the richest men in Germany, or rather, he owned one of the largest estates, woodlands in particular. We were somehow related…when I asked at home exactly how we were related, my father, who took only a marginal interest in genealogy (and understandably too, for people are usually related to him, although it should be added that he exhibits in all of this a genuine modesty, which this sentence is unable to suggest), answered with…indifference…” In this book about a boy travelling with Uncle Roberto of the title, at one point, when someone asks the narrator about the post-modern, the narrator offers an “Up Yours”, as if the specifics of a movement cannot contain the exuberance of Esterhazy’s telling.

   To understand Esterhazy’s work (if understanding is deemed necessary) is to comprehend something of the crosscurrents of a literature created out of Communism by a writer from an aristocratic family, who is writing within an era that has incorporated post-modernism and is aware that language cannot be used transparently. The sentences are often elaborately self-conscious, as we find in the previous quotation, and also when the narrator says: “…as far as death was concerned, he was no virgin. He had stood beside the grave before, sobbing, silent, numb, he knew what it meant to lose a parent, to cry, to feel pain. He knew what black stood for, but his life did not stand in the shadow of death, even though life does stand in the shadow of death.” It is also capable of knowing complicity between author and reader and, too, of immediate contradiction. “Just between ourselves, he hated travelling and loved nothing more than to sit around in his study. No, that’s not true. His soul was the soul of a traveller…” Such prose can leave critics exasperated. Speaking of The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn, Julian Duplain reckons, “Esterhazy is more than happy to put it all in and shake it all about, and pass off the result as an allegory of the Danube and Central Europe itself. Unfortunately…the net result is of a hand dropped in a fast-flowing river. You feel the force of the current but all it leaves afterwards is dampness.” (The Independent)

   Nevertheless, it can also reflect a complexity that suggests history and story aren’t easily separated; that Esterhazy is interested in how they are intertwined. The traveller notes that “it is Christmas time as I write these lines, and the Christmas of ’89 in Central Europe is not a festival of peace and love. To put it nicely, I’d say it was a festival of freedom. But for days I’ve sat glued to the television, watching the formation of my own destiny…” This was the destiny of various nations after the collapse of communism, and the traveller speaks of a man who was walking along the bank of the Bega, and his son, on his shoulders, is shot, and the perpetrators throw the dead boy in the river. We can assume, in the mention of Bega and Temesvar that this is Romania, and many people would have seen on television that very Christmas the death of Ceausescu and his wife. But none of this is dramatically explored and contextualised in Roberto Narrates — we fill in the blanks or we don’t, finding ourselves flummoxed or knowing readers that Esterhazy might say is inevitable of any text that draws on reality, or even more if it draws on history.

     Even if someone says they pulled a gun, how do we know everybody knows what a gun is? Does the author add that this is a weapon that fires a bullet which, with enough velocity at a relatively close range, will likely kill, and if so, surely the author should explain too what a bullet happens to be, and so on. This can be an infinite regress, so what knowledge does an author assume? Much fiction might be predicated on a need-to-know basis, but who is to define what needs to be known, an assumption that has changed over time; otherwise, a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet would read like one by Charles Dickens. What constituted an important story to tell in the 19th-century may seem like a naively narrow one in the late 20th, with Ursula Lindsay pointing out how important some of Edward Said’s claims were in Orientalism: “Said pointed out that in Austen’s novel [Mansfield Park], the comfort and order of the landed gentry rests on a plantation in Antigua, a place that is key to the story and yet barely mentioned within it.” (The Point)

      A contemporary novel would be more inclined to emphasise the slavery element as the apparently historic irrelevance becomes very historically pertinent indeed. When an interviewer said to the Hungarian writer: “you talked about the idea of emptying out the name Esterhazy,” he replied: “Only strong words and names make us want to empty them out, such as the word Esterhazy, loaded with a European historical context…” (Words Without Borders). It is often the strong words that make for the clarity that Esterhazy wants to erase: not just words like Esterhazy but also Ceausescu or others that are alluded to but not mentioned or mentioned facetiously, as when the narrator says “I confused Bayreuth with Beirut. By the 1990s, when the book was written, the latter was a very strong metonym for war and catastrophe.e Beyreuth is best known for its association with Wagner, and those given to further associations might see Wagner as a key influence on Naziism (he was Hitler’s favourite composer). Naziism led to the Holocaust, which led to the creation of Israel, with Israel invading Lebanon in 1978, and leading to the sort of devastation which made Beirut a symbol of a destroyed city. The reader may not go down this road, but it is there, just as more clearly - yet still implicitly - we might find ourselves thinking of the Ceausescus when Christmas Day 1989 is invoked.

    Esterhazy’s work might not be easy to read, but it is easy enough to muse over, with the reader making connections based on what we know as readily as what the writer tells us. It is as though, just as Esterhazy reckons one can read a book like Celestial Harmonies in the order that suits us, we can also read it based on the resonances the text conjures up. Esterhazy's narrator might respond to the post-modern with an '‘up yours’'; however, it seems a useful way to understand aspects of the work, and also the writer's attempt both to navigate and negate the history of a family that is full of tradition, by using the literary techniques that can undermine and yet play with the very notion of tradition.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Roberto Narrates

For anybody assuming that the elites produce the best literature, we might say it is closer to the opposite, when it is a rare article or interview that doesn’t mention Peter Esterhazy’s lineage. It suggests his background is exceptional and not the norm. He is from an established Hungarian family going back several centuries, and it isn’t many a writer who can claim that a significant musician (Joseph Haydn) was the family's court composer. If the novel, as George Lukacs and others have insisted, was the great bourgeois form, it was also getting produced by writers whose backgrounds were usually less august than Esterhazy’s. There have been important exceptions (Tolstoy, Nabokov, Lampedusa), but most of the great novelists came from relatively modest beginnings: Dickens’ father went to debtors’ prison; Hardy’s was a stonemason; Zola’s an engineer; Fitzgerald the son of a salesman. Most well-known writers came from roots comfortable enough to make writing possible, but not many could claim their family was of historical significance. Few writers, more than Esterhazy, could make such an assertion: the family was the largest owner of land in Hungary for centuries.

   Yet Esterhazy was also a communist writer, if for no better reason than the land was confiscated and he was living in the Hungarian People’s Republic. There are a few aristocratic writers and more than a few communist writers, but not many who have been both and, in different ways, Esterhazy and his father chose the communist over the aristocratic. When the regime fell, and Esterhazy was offered back the land that had been confiscated, he refused it. His father chose perhaps less honourably to become an informant for the secret police; Esterhazy wrote about it in Corrected Version.

     If Esterhazy’s family history was complicated, his writing style appears no less so. In the novella, Helping Verbs of the Heart, the story is about a dying mother and her son, but the book is full of quotes from other writers that you will only be able to identify if you already happen to know them. They aren’t attributed and become instead part of the texture of the book, rather than the sort of epigraphs writers use to open a novel or a chapter. It is also told in two parts: initially from the son's perspective and then from the posthumous mother’s. Speaking of his massive Celestial Harmonies, Esterhazy says, “the writer can say or intend whatever he wants, but the reader is in charge. For instance, I know that some people began by reading the second part of the book because it is supposed to be easier to read, since it has a story that is basically linear, and they kept leapfrogging from there to the clip-like, mostly brief fragments of part one. This doesn’t bother me.” (Words Without Borders) When he says, “If I had a streak of envy in me (which I don’t, I’d say modestly), I’d say that I envy those for whom the act of writing is so obviously not a problem.” (The Millions) If writing is such a problem for Ezterhazy, it is best if the reader makes it their problem on their terms.

      This raises several questions that Esterhazy might be resistant to saying were generated by theory, but which can be explained, perhaps with the use of it. When he says “I didn’t approach writing from the vantage point of theory, but from the side of practice – much like a stonemason,” we might add that one of the uses of theory is to explain why a writer who may believe they are working with instinct (and may well be), is working with the intuitive meeting the historically aesthetic. When an interviewer asks if he was influenced by, say, the American metafictional writer Donald Barthelme, Ezterhasy admits, “I think that as far as my reflexes are concerned I would have liked to have been a so-called l’art pour l’art writer”, that seems both generally fair and specifically unlikely. Art for art’s sake was a late 19th-century preoccupation; the interest in language, a 20th-century one: a concern for words and how they were used that became a pressing problem for philosophy and a fascinating one for literature. As David A. White believed: “If we observe how Wittgenstein extended the boundaries of language further and further into experience, then we become equipped with conceptual and critical apparatus to approach and understand what Joyce was trying to do with language in the cycle from Portrait through Ulysses to the Wake.” (James Joyce Quarterly)

       As well as this early 20th-century concern with the linguistic apparent in Esterhazy's work, we have the later 20th-century interest in quotation: that literature is made up of a tissue of texts that can seem to undermine the notion of original authorship. This is where Roland Barthes’ 'Death of the Author' meets the postmodern interest in borrowing from other texts. Barthes proposed that writers entered into language more than they expressed themselves (and thus making their use of language increasingly self-conscious), so it also made sense that the writer didn’t only find themselves using words that belonged less to themselves than to the culture but, also styles that were already there in art, and doing so became no less self-aware. “…Postmodernist art can also consciously and self-consciously borrow from or ironically comment on a range of styles from the past.” (Tate)

      We might argue that Esterhazy would feel this debt to language and culture more than most if we claim, however tenuously, that an aristocratic background would make someone aware of tradition far more than someone who has moved cumbersomely through the social ranks over generations, where their backgrounds would be lost to a general historical anonymity only a bit of genealogical archaeology would unearth. As we have noted with many writers, they are usually from indistinct backgrounds; relatively few are from immodest ones who can trace their family tree back many generations. Esterhazy could do exactly that, but he also notes that recollection is an active choice for the writer that might understandably be repressed by most individuals. “People talk a lot about the importance of remembrance these days or about how we are failing to remember. But I think you also have to be good at forgetting - it is part of normal life. Writers, on the other hand, have a different job description, if any. A writer cannot really afford to forget in the way which is necessary for other people for a healthy life. “ (Hungarian Literature Online)   

   In 'Roberto Narrates', from The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn, the narrator says of Uncle Adalbert, that “he counted as one of the richest men in Germany, or rather, he owned one of the largest estates, woodlands in particular. We were somehow related…when I asked at home exactly how we were related, my father, who took only a marginal interest in genealogy (and understandably too, for people are usually related to him, although it should be added that he exhibits in all of this a genuine modesty, which this sentence is unable to suggest), answered with…indifference…” In this book about a boy travelling with Uncle Roberto of the title, at one point, when someone asks the narrator about the post-modern, the narrator offers an “Up Yours”, as if the specifics of a movement cannot contain the exuberance of Esterhazy’s telling.

   To understand Esterhazy’s work (if understanding is deemed necessary) is to comprehend something of the crosscurrents of a literature created out of Communism by a writer from an aristocratic family, who is writing within an era that has incorporated post-modernism and is aware that language cannot be used transparently. The sentences are often elaborately self-conscious, as we find in the previous quotation, and also when the narrator says: “…as far as death was concerned, he was no virgin. He had stood beside the grave before, sobbing, silent, numb, he knew what it meant to lose a parent, to cry, to feel pain. He knew what black stood for, but his life did not stand in the shadow of death, even though life does stand in the shadow of death.” It is also capable of knowing complicity between author and reader and, too, of immediate contradiction. “Just between ourselves, he hated travelling and loved nothing more than to sit around in his study. No, that’s not true. His soul was the soul of a traveller…” Such prose can leave critics exasperated. Speaking of The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn, Julian Duplain reckons, “Esterhazy is more than happy to put it all in and shake it all about, and pass off the result as an allegory of the Danube and Central Europe itself. Unfortunately…the net result is of a hand dropped in a fast-flowing river. You feel the force of the current but all it leaves afterwards is dampness.” (The Independent)

   Nevertheless, it can also reflect a complexity that suggests history and story aren’t easily separated; that Esterhazy is interested in how they are intertwined. The traveller notes that “it is Christmas time as I write these lines, and the Christmas of ’89 in Central Europe is not a festival of peace and love. To put it nicely, I’d say it was a festival of freedom. But for days I’ve sat glued to the television, watching the formation of my own destiny…” This was the destiny of various nations after the collapse of communism, and the traveller speaks of a man who was walking along the bank of the Bega, and his son, on his shoulders, is shot, and the perpetrators throw the dead boy in the river. We can assume, in the mention of Bega and Temesvar that this is Romania, and many people would have seen on television that very Christmas the death of Ceausescu and his wife. But none of this is dramatically explored and contextualised in Roberto Narrates — we fill in the blanks or we don’t, finding ourselves flummoxed or knowing readers that Esterhazy might say is inevitable of any text that draws on reality, or even more if it draws on history.

     Even if someone says they pulled a gun, how do we know everybody knows what a gun is? Does the author add that this is a weapon that fires a bullet which, with enough velocity at a relatively close range, will likely kill, and if so, surely the author should explain too what a bullet happens to be, and so on. This can be an infinite regress, so what knowledge does an author assume? Much fiction might be predicated on a need-to-know basis, but who is to define what needs to be known, an assumption that has changed over time; otherwise, a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet would read like one by Charles Dickens. What constituted an important story to tell in the 19th-century may seem like a naively narrow one in the late 20th, with Ursula Lindsay pointing out how important some of Edward Said’s claims were in Orientalism: “Said pointed out that in Austen’s novel [Mansfield Park], the comfort and order of the landed gentry rests on a plantation in Antigua, a place that is key to the story and yet barely mentioned within it.” (The Point)

      A contemporary novel would be more inclined to emphasise the slavery element as the apparently historic irrelevance becomes very historically pertinent indeed. When an interviewer said to the Hungarian writer: “you talked about the idea of emptying out the name Esterhazy,” he replied: “Only strong words and names make us want to empty them out, such as the word Esterhazy, loaded with a European historical context…” (Words Without Borders). It is often the strong words that make for the clarity that Esterhazy wants to erase: not just words like Esterhazy but also Ceausescu or others that are alluded to but not mentioned or mentioned facetiously, as when the narrator says “I confused Bayreuth with Beirut. By the 1990s, when the book was written, the latter was a very strong metonym for war and catastrophe.e Beyreuth is best known for its association with Wagner, and those given to further associations might see Wagner as a key influence on Naziism (he was Hitler’s favourite composer). Naziism led to the Holocaust, which led to the creation of Israel, with Israel invading Lebanon in 1978, and leading to the sort of devastation which made Beirut a symbol of a destroyed city. The reader may not go down this road, but it is there, just as more clearly - yet still implicitly - we might find ourselves thinking of the Ceausescus when Christmas Day 1989 is invoked.

    Esterhazy’s work might not be easy to read, but it is easy enough to muse over, with the reader making connections based on what we know as readily as what the writer tells us. It is as though, just as Esterhazy reckons one can read a book like Celestial Harmonies in the order that suits us, we can also read it based on the resonances the text conjures up. Esterhazy's narrator might respond to the post-modern with an '‘up yours’'; however, it seems a useful way to understand aspects of the work, and also the writer's attempt both to navigate and negate the history of a family that is full of tradition, by using the literary techniques that can undermine and yet play with the very notion of tradition.  


© Tony McKibbin