MARgOT’s Reviews > Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp: An Interview-Novel with Questions Asked and Answers Recorded by László Szigeti > Status Update

Male affectations are something awful!

When something awful happens somewhere in the world I even take it as if it was something I'd done, or something done to me. All those great massacres, everything that happens, it's me. That's what Schopenhauer taught me, and he was taught by Indian philosophy. I see people shooting each other in the back, in war, the innocent ones, and that's me.

I know I'll die in melancholy, I know that one day, in profound melancholy, even the starry sky will fall in, yet there are also moments when I suddenly feel that eternity does endure and that I am; that sometimes I even am who I am. What Moses was told by God. But that happens to us only a once or twice in a lifetime.

I have deduced that humour and a sense for the tragic in life are twins, two roads leading out of the same valley, and that a dour drama in the end reveals the same essence as trivial slapstick. I have derived from whisky and soda the rhythmical alternation of those two pitches; I have alternated the cold current with the hot, which Babel was so good at, juxtaposing a diamond and gonorrhoea in the same text.

So if I were to borrow something from Freud, it would be his method, the psychoanalytical text that comes very close to the Catholic aural confession, while my confession is in writing. In other words, it was really only when I got down to writing that I began to discover what my actual essence was.

What are my stories? Psychopathology of the contemporary everyday.

Although I'm a lawyer, I'm no respecter of the state; the state is an organization, a pyramid, that's how it has to be, and that's supposed to make me happy? Any more than I'm an respecter of the army.

Because those people of mine speak the same language. I operate in the environment of Prague irony, of things which are deliberately a bit different in meaning. Those people only find things out by talking and living; they don't know everything at once, a priori, but only ex post.

I'm not a spokesman for all readers, just for one category; every writer has his own sort of reader with whom he shares ideas as to what the world should be like and how one should behave in society and what he may demand of society, and what is fun for him and what is bad luck.

Ant that's also the value of literature, you know; it must heal, it's no easy matter, writing, just writing – it has to have deep roots. And there are plenty of writers who write almost exclusively to keep themselves from committing suicide, or so as not to feel wretched, at rock-bottom.