Summer/Autumn
2005
Out of Oneself
András
Pályi
Trans. Imre Goldstein
Twisted Spoon Press, Prague
136 pp., $13.50
(Reviewed by Jason Stuart Ratcliff)
If
you could imagine an Eastern European William Faulkner high on powerful
aphrodisiacs, a tad less
devoted to Joyce and more to clear syntax, Out of Oneself
might be something he’d write.
These two novellas, written in a
stream-of-consciousness technique that stays true to the form but shuns
unclear language, are incredibly well-executed literary eroticism. Eroticism—and by that I do not mean graphic sex per se, but
graphic sex that has a tendency to arouse—is a dangerous proposition
from any angle. Lay it on
too heavy, and you switch genres into trashy romance at best or
base pornography at worst. Add
to this the general rule that, however big a part sex plays in the
narrative, high-art eroticism must find a way to seamlessly blend the
erotic with significance in areas other than sex, and you’ve got a
challenge on your hands that most writers would be well-advised not to
accept.
Pályi accepts the challenge, and comes out with a
serious literary contender. Poetic,
nearly flawless on the micro-level of language, and put together overall
in a way that should make any literary architect jealous, this is a
powerful one-two punch.
The first novella, “Beyond,” is narrated by a
priest who has committed suicide. Moving
along through first-person, second-person and third-person switches,
drastic leaps in time, not to mention after-death fantasies and
before-death memories (where we are never certain which is which), the
ghost of the priest narrates his story. Well, dwells on his story, which is what they say ghosts
perpetually do. The
circumstances of the priest’s suicide, his ghost’s postmortem
meeting (or, perhaps, fantasies of meeting) former acquaintances in séances,
and, most importantly, an affair with a lady parishioner, are given to
us bit by bit, with a disregard for sequence. We hit on the priest’s life, his memories and regrets, in
glancing blows that leap from place to place and time to time. In this one the erotic moments are not quite so overblown as
in the second novella, and in my opinion it is the more successful of
the pair.
The second story, “At the End of the World”,
centers on a group of shoestring-budget filmmakers in Communist-era
Eastern Europe, and is mainly about a relationship between an actress
and the
screenwriter working on-set. Again, as in the first novella, the characters’ pasts are given
to us in a way that lets their whole back-story blot into focus
bilaterally with the story’s future progress, with a mosaic—yet
organic—structure. As the
romance develops between the screenwriter, nicknamed Blackeye, and the
actress, Ildi, we are given a hint as to what lies in store for them (Ildi
narrating here):
You’ve got no choice, once you’ve tasted the
demands of your guts you can’t get free again, you are a prisoner,
they say it’s death and rebirth, you can’t even breathe; ... Like
an insane spiral, the whirlpool of desire, this insatiability, nothing
is enough ...
As this sexoholic actress meets her match—that is, as the
young screenwriter discovers his own insatiability for her—their movie
ends up in shambles, at least Ildi’s life becomes a wreck, and (not to
give too much away, but) she suffers a complete nervous breakdown. Such is the end of things when nothing is denied and
“nothing is enough.” The
sex scenes in this novella flirt dangerously with going in one orgasmic
leap from high-art literature to something best published by Harlequin,
but it delves into character and lays enough stock in the less-erotic
scenes by the end for a full redemption.
For the stream-of-consciousness technique, Pályi pays
incredible attention to detail; there’s hardly an untidy phrase in
this entire work. Too often
stream-of-consciousness writing (and I know from experience) can lead to
poor care in wording, with the unfortunate belief sometimes going along
with this style that unclear language is a virtue. Pályi is obviously
confident and innovative, but not
so ambitious as to fill his writing with confusion (or the reader with
despair). Highly recommended.
– JSR –
