Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas

Abstract

“The greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century”—said Susan Sontag about The Book of Memoirs (1986) by Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas. Parallel Stories (2005) promises and delivers even more; at the expense, though, of challenging its readers even further. In this article I concentrate on the novel’s poetic structure; its representation of the individual versus the communal; and one of its deepest organizing principles, human sensuality. One of the characteristics that sets this novel apart from contemporary literature is Nadas’s use of spatiality. What readers of Western narratives are accustomed to is a kind of unity that is anchored in the principle of the causal and the temporal. Both are important for Nadas, too, but they simply structure the novel thematically. On a poetic level, the novel’s characteristic features are the parallels it contains, and those “structural principles” through which the ingredients interact. It is the tension resulting from the metonymic interconnectedness of the (parallel) stories in the book that provides the base of its most fundamental structural coherence. The question and the representation of individuality is another key concern of the novel. Nadas represents the significant dates of 1938, 1960–1961, and 1989 as historical watersheds; at the same time he makes us better understand those aspects of life that are less obviously affected by these historical changes, including the question of individuality. What we find as the core of the individual Nadas calls “the human consistency.” Its vessel is the individual human body, sensuality, psyche and memories. The individual is pitted against the communal very effectively in the novel. Its tragic worldview, however, is not due to its view or philosophy of history: it results from its anthropology. The body is the epicenter of the novel: it is by means of writing the body, or more precisely the human flesh, that Nadas shows what it means to be a human animal. The shift of focus from body to flesh is one of the senses in which Nadas breaks with the European humanist tradition. What he calls to our attention is that there is not even the slightest chance to completely comprehend what we, as sensual beings, are nonetheless capable of perceiving. He does not answer the question of whether the world and life are knowable or not. What he does do—in an idiosyncratic and innovative way—is to represent both and make us realize that they are perceivable. The result is a very peculiar kind of knowledge: it is both rational and irrational, sensual and intellectual, personal and interpersonal, conscious and unconscious, male and female, mythic and scientific, bodily and spiritual, worldly and unworldly.