Austhor: Kiss Tibor Noé
Translator: Austin Wagner
June 2023

Picking up a book you wrote long ago – this may be the riskiest thing a writer can do. But a few weeks ago, in connection to the request from Panodyssey, that’s just what I did. I started leafing through Incognito. I read a few pages, and it was uncomfortable seeing certain stories from my own life. This was my first novel, I started writing it about twenty years ago, and while the personal voice makes sense considering the subject matter, the question presented itself: how and why had I kept so far away from this self-therapeutic coming out text?

This immediately brought up other questions as well, and perhaps the most important one: what does the relationship to personality and reality mean for a writer in their own work? Because of the biographical stakes of Incognito, this question was unavoidable: what am I allowed to write, can I take the book on in my own name, considering my own self, my friends, and my family? Some suggested publishing under a pseudonym, others said the autobiographical undertaking could give the book real force. I opted for the latter, and Incognito – together with its invented elements – ended up radically genuine and personal. After it was published, I was certain I would never again write a novel fed by such personal events as Incognito was. That is, I’d write less about myself.

As I would imagine every author feels after their first book, I too was uncertain as to whether there would even be a second one. It’s said that there’s a book in everyone, anyone can hammer a book together, especially if driven by an autobiographical urge. Maybe that’s why, after Incognito, I instinctively reached for the world I knew best. I come from a lower-middle class family, and until my twenties I spent most of my time on the football pitch, on the housing estate, on the outskirts of Budapest, and on the plains of Alföld. After the monologue registering the fragility of body and soul, it was good to step out of myself, to move into a familiar space among familiar people. Only the confinement remained, the village after the body which the narrow world of You Should Be Sleeping represented.

For me, however, the world opened up in a way. By virtue of the book, I no longer had to talk about myself. The locations in You Should Be Sleeping were also exciting for others, many people knew exactly where the village in the book could be found – in Somogy County, by Szabadka, in the Sudetenland, on the Polish Alföld. The same silence, the same smells. There was talk of the unrefined, excluded, forgotten people. Or more narrowly: the countryside man left abandoned after the fall of socialism. All sensitive and intelligent criticism, book recommendations, the discreet workings of the literary machine. I was happy. Even at first, when the label of “poverty prose” was tacked beside my name in some lead or Facebook event blurb. Through the feedback, I came face to face with the foundational curiosity the book had awakened in people, with the fact that You Should Be Sleeping displayed a world which was unfamiliar to the majority of readers.

The turning point was when I met up with a guy I’d gotten to know during my football practice in Pécsbánya. Attila was one of my favorites, he was always first in line when we had to take the goal off the pitch. We talked about the free beaches in Orfű, he enthusiastically explained that he and his dad were camping that night out on the lakeside. When I asked about his work, he responded that he’d just quit. He’d had enough of only having ten minutes during a shift to go to the bathroom. When I asked him why he didn’t lodge a complaint with his boss, he just scoffed and started telling me off in a choked voice. Then we just stood there next to the burger stand, and I couldn’t say anything to him. It occurred to me that in the two years I’d been working with them, every single personal story was the same. They never knew how to handle the simplest, everyday problems: they weren’t the problem-solving type, and they never got help from anyone. They sometimes mentioned their problems, their feelings, but they would quickly turn back to themselves. That they weren’t allowed into some bar or other, that their father took their money from them, or such-and-such happened in the village (better not to say). Fifteen-year-old kids who already knew their fate.

Here I’m evading the famous saying from Péter Esterházy which refers to Sándor Tar (“those who can must speak for those who can’t”). As far as the literary context goes, Tar really was capable of creating an authentic language out of nothing, but I am not able to think only of the literary context. For me, there’s suddenly this volume’s worth of personal material chock full of untold and untellable conflicts. As a white trash kid turned first-generation intelligentsia, I was both a stakeholder and a narrator, while also not feeling at home in the environment I’d found myself in as a novelist – nor where I came from. The disappointment kept building up inside me, the angry naivety that it doesn’t matter if you’re graduating with a sociology degree, it doesn’t matter that you’re writing books, nothing will change, nothing can be different than how it is. There’s no recognition, there’s no absolution, there’s nothing, you’re just sitting up on stage, microphone in hand, “speaking for others,” and when it’s over you send your invoice.

It was a few weeks after meeting Attila that I first felt the emptiness of this. I remember the exact day: I was asked about my experiences with football training in front of a crowd in Budapest. I talked about the mental harm of living in poverty, drugs for a thousand forints, and teenage girls smoking while pregnant – the crowd’s flare of disapproval derailed my thought process. You’d think I was talking about the shocking customs of natives living on the edge of the Amazon. I looked up, some faces were astonished and indignant, others were sad or angry. And I felt this unbridgeable gap between us, I didn’t know what I was doing there, nor what the crowd was expecting from the whole thing. The only thing I was certain of was that neither I nor my novel could speak for Attila, because it’s not possible to speak for anyone. Literature can teach empathy, it can make you more sensitive, give you language, but where there’s no language, everything is the language of the writer.

It’s absurd, but in the case of Incognito, I see this in my own self. Compared to my often harsh, fundamental, everyday experiences of identity, Incognito sorts, distorts, embellishes. When it comes to my identity, I the individual, I the author of a publicly available book, and the book itself all talk about it differently. Neither the minimalist prose, nor an interview, nor this short essay can encapsulate the emotional swings, the breakdowns, or the occasional euphoria I’ve experienced for decades. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that as a writer, I can’t properly represent even myself, and I now believe that’s not literature’s task.

The rejection of a role always sets a person free. I felt a particular kind of freedom while writing my third novel, A Boundless Land. It felt good to use social realities as a setting. Building up the personalities and thought processes of made-up characters and then giving them each their own kind of language proved to be an inspiring challenge. From this perspective, the novel’s main character was Dorka, the young girl lying in a coma. Her comatose state is in a certain sense a black box, so her voice provided the possibility to both experiment with prose language and to break free of the systems of the world we know. I was able to troll the reality I myself had created, which I greatly enjoyed while writing the book. In the novel I’m currently working on, similar work is taking place in connection with a man doing research in Siberia. I’m enjoying reading about the everyday life of the natives and the oil workers living on the taiga, immersing myself in an unfamiliar world, and thinking about how I can build all of this into a novel whose main arc takes place in a village in Baranya County.

Paradoxically, none of this means I feel like my novels that come after Incognito are impersonal. Just the opposite. Maybe that’s the point of creating a literary work: to find ourselves in the emotions, viewpoints, and stories of a teenage boy from the projects, a night guard on the Alföld, a teacher in his fifties, or an intellectual woman in her mid-thirties. I am all of them. They seem to keep their distance from me, but they reflect me more subtly than Incognito – a book that was “about me” – was able to do. It was at once unexpected and freeing to realize that any kind of writing is radically personal.