There can be a cadence to a sentence, dialogue or prose, a measure of its sense and sound. This is from an academic essay in a book called “New Materialisms”:
Sean Sheehan
“Death is overrated. The ultimate subtraction is after all only another phase in a generative process. Too bad that the relentless generative powers of death require the suppression of that which is the nearest and dearest to me, namely myself, my own vital, being-there.”
The first three words could invite a guffaw but might redeem themselves if followed with a suitable and serious explanation. In the great scheme of things, after all, we all die – but ‘overrated’ and ‘too bad’? The casualness strikes the wrong chord and what follows is more bathos; ‘nearest and dearest’ is the other person closest to your heart, not yourself, and extolling a ‘vital, being-there’ that belongs to you alone sounds selfish.
A simple statement like “be the kind of person your dog thinks you are”, which might not be out of place on a fridge magnet, expresses something about life in a more pleasing way.
What makes reading Ágota Kristóf’s “The notebook, the proof” and “The third line” so unforgettable is its cadence of wisdom. The author was born in 1935 and fled Hungary with her husband and baby daughter after the Soviet invasion of their country in 1956.
No places are identified in her trilogy and, although it can be read in the context of Hungary before, during and after the Second World War, the setting of the stories is best left to the reader’s situation and imagination.
The trilogy’s laconic style of writing replicates what two boys in the books teach themselves: “We must describe what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do”. Rather than say their grandmother is like a witch, they explain that they write only that people call her a witch. If someone is nice to them, they will write how he gave them blankets but not that he is nice for he may be capable of other very nasty acts.
The two boys, the central characters in the trilogy, are told by a deserter they assist that they are kind: “We didn’t want to be kind. We have brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That’s all”. When their housekeeper is deliberately cruel to a victim of persecution, they respond by being cruel to her.
Kristof’s fiction is about an ethical existence in a godless, unethical world and the difference between morality and ethics.
The trilogy is praised by Žižek for giving fictional voice to his personal theological trajectory: they are “how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance…”
The trilogy makes alternatives appear as self-posturing.
“Trilogy” by Ágota Kristóf is published by CB Editions.
(Photos: Pixabay)
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