Author: Tibor Noé Kiss
Translator: Austin Wagner
July 2023

High literature sometimes seems a saintly pursuit, and is associated with such concepts as inspiration and rapture. In spite of this, a significant part of the work – at least in the case of a novel – is grunt work. When writing, we spend most of our time incessantly researching online, fishing about amongst the news, gathering essential information. Our narrator plants seeds in the garden in April, but what kind of seeds can you sow in April? Chard, for example, it was always difficult to find in the market hall. Let’s take a look at the types of chard: Lucullus has white stalks, Rhubarb red. Grüner Schnitt, that sounds great, it’ll be good for something someday. If the climate is extremely dry, we need to keep the earth loose by mulching. What is mulching? Let’s look it up. Well now, chard goes dormant over the winter if it’s covered in time. So there goes half an hour for chard, and we haven’t progressed in the slightest, because our narrator eventually decided to plant chili peppers.

We can save ourselves a good bit of busy work if we write about topics we’re familiar with. It’s no wonder writers most often get inspiration from their original profession or area of study. Thomas Bernhard, for example, drew heavily from his years working as a crime reporter – Der Stimmenimitator (The Voice Imitator), an anthology of short texts published as A túlélő följegyzése in Hungarian in 1991, bears witness to this. But then there’s William S. Burroughs, who loved his work as an exterminator so much that he published a collection of short stories titled Exterminator! His most well-known work, The Naked Lunch, has the main character (William Lee) working as an exterminator and using the pesticides as a drug. Another Google search tells me that in the 1840’s, Herman Melville spent five years working on ships as, among other roles, a cabin boy, whale hunter, and seamen, which is how he collected his adventures for the writing of Moby Dick.

I would say that sociological studies were the formative ones for me, but at least as important were the ten years I worked on and off as a pollster, sitting behind a glass wall and taking down notes on focus group conversations. (Populist addendum: here is where I also learned – nearly twenty years ago – that “all products are marketable with dogs and children” is a maxim of marketing. That’s what they said even after we watched from behind the glass wall as focus group members, from tram conductors to building contractors to university professors, considered it a trite, hackneyed idea. Public opinion lost, dogs and children have persisted ever since.) By the end of the nineties, I’d done omnibus interviews with half of Budapest, where I had to knock on every seventh door and ask the occupants about their political beliefs and TV-watching habits. Most of them sent me away, but like my father always said: “no pain, no gain.” As both a lesson and inspiration, in hindsight I learned that it’s far worse to have a dog set on you than to have your questionnaire torn to pieces.

Then I got into the qualitative group. I loved the work that was done there. In-depth interviews with politicians, company leaders, officials of varying rank from state institutions. It was a good lesson, a collection of experiences it would have been difficult to obtain elsewhere. I think it was through this work that I learned how to ask. I’m hard-pressed to imagine a more difficult assignment than going through a slew of one-dimensional questions with the leader of a company in the meat industry. What is your opinion on the chicken bologna of competing companies? On a scale of one to five, please evaluate the taste, smell, consistency, and packaging of these products. What is your opinion of your closest competitor’s products? The open-ended questions often led to broader discussion, but there were also interview subjects with whom I hardly got anywhere, no matter how much I tried to butter them up, forge a connection, or make cheap jokes at my own expense. The company paid for the train ticket and the taxi, but I don’t recall ever eating at a parliamentary buffet, though I know they’re absurdly cheap. Doing a round on the paternoster, that was also left out. What I got in exchange were faces, concrete interviews, factory yards and train stations, absurd stories and relationships that characterized the country and the people living in it.

A more concrete form of data collection is when we ask someone for help with a particular topic. I tried this once with my father. I often felt uncertain when working on drafts of You Should Be Sleeping. Childhood memories are often inexact, and there could be many important things I didn’t know about, or didn’t understand the significance of. I went to see him one muggy day in autumn. I’d already started to suspect when he wore his nicer coat for the walk, it was as if the tone of his voice had changed. We schlepped through the mud in rubber boots, a track-suited figure followed us from behind the fence of mental institution. He tried to whisper five hundred forints from my father, but all Dad said to him was that first he had to pay off his debt. The Dictaphone tape spun, my father talked about the regime change, the sudden privatization, and Imre Pozsgay (I no longer remember in what context), while I plodded beside him, my disappointment growing. I’d read or learned plenty about these things. What I wanted to know was what day-to-day life was like in the village, who lived there, what did they do, how did the store operate, what was in the castle basement where we’d never entered, but where my grandfather had been a night guard. Utter failure, but I smiled all the same, thanks Dad. (Later on I would change tactics, and during conversations with no ulterior motives learned a great many things that were important to me.)

In the case of my third novel, A Boundless Land, I turned to professionals. One of the novel’s narrators is a boy around twenty years old who lives with his older sister in a suburb of Budapest. A sort of neglected, deviant teenager. I was able to really get into his life with help from teenagers, for instance my friends’ middle school-aged kids. It’s hard to imagine a more embarrassing situation than ruining the language of a teenager from the projects with contrived, forced turns of phrase. I could generally work out how they thought, their instinctive reactions, what they were interested in, but as to what the cool places to go were, what was cool to drink, what was cool to say, what was cool to watch online, I didn’t know much. The feeling associated with the years in the housing project and the hopelessness of the eighties can be transferred to the present and – we could say – to Maglód or Ócsa, but at that time, we amused ourselves by shooting soccer balls at the side of the 24 tram, and Technokol Rapid was the cheapest mind-altering drug. (For me, my mother pouring a little coffee over whipped cream was enough). But I spoke with hospital nurses, social workers, when it came to the book’s history teacher, I looked to my sibling, who is, in fact, a history teacher. From them I know that what I remember of my childhood (overhead projectors, chalk) no longer really exists. So many tiny things that can topple the reality you’ve built… Every novel has an early version which is best left unseen by anyone other than the author.

These dilemmas were, of course, less significant compared to that of giving a “voice” to the character who lies in a coma for the duration of the book. I knew from the beginning that reading articles and studies about the topic on the internet would be little use. I got in touch with a neurology professor, Dr. Ferenc Nagy, who works with people in comas and who have awoken from comas. Conversations with the professor occurred under unusual circumstances, over the phone in the first weeks of the COVID outbreak. My most pressing question was to what extent the language I had created was capable of conveying the processes going on in people forced into a coma – knowing full well that these processes remain for the most part inaccessible to the outside world. Everything I had read on the subject was sufficient as a starting point. For those in a coma, sounds (including familiar music, human speech) and smells are pivotal to their perception. I learned a lot about how they create an environment around a patient which positively influences their condition, I gained insight into the operation of hospital wings into which there is no admittance.

Dr. Nagy’s importance is immeasurable when it comes to A Boundless Land. Not just his overall experience, in that he spoke straightforwardly of nearly unfathomable cases, but he also shared with me the thoughts and dilemmas which had accumulated over decades spent in the hospital wing regarding the nature of comatose states. He perfectly sensed and understood the logic of how the literary text operated, the ethical dilemma of me as a writer trying to give a voice to a state which has no manifested form in voice or consciousness. Even those who have returned from this state can only rely on fragments of memories. This is why it was particularly important for the professor to upload the voice relevant to the book – Dorka’s monologue – to a closed group whose members had come out of comas. It was incredibly helpful that some of those group members later wrote to me sharing their impressions of the text.

It is taking quite a bit research to unravel one of the threads of my next novel. The subject matter is closer to me this time, I read cultural anthropology essays, and I’m in close contact with Dr. Zoltán Nagy, head of the Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology in Pécs. The work is in the early stages, I feel it’s too early to recount the conversations with him, but I’m already impressed by his knowledge and the way he thinks. The way he subordinates everything in service to understanding how a society far from our own operates, and to making it comprehensible to others through his writing – the writer, ideally, undertakes a similar task with their own tools. Writing is a monotonous, solitary activity, but the experience of meeting with Zoli is one of the reasons I could very well name my series The Joy of Writing Novels.