Burial: Comedy without Intermission by Péter Nádas (review)

Péter Nádas has written in a variety of forms since his first book, a collection of stories published in 1965; anglophone readers had to wait until 1997 to discover him, when A Book of Memories(1986), his maximal masterpiece, finally appeared in English. To start one's reading of a major writer with that writer's most ambitious, most accomplished, bulkiest book is bound to foster misreadings. There are sizable peaks surrounding this Everest. But it will take time to take their measure.

Burial(1982), the last and best of the plays Nádas wrote in the late seventies, is often described as the third part of a trilogy, of which the first two parts are House Cleaning(1978) and Meeting(1981). All three plays came after the first novel, The End of a Family Novel, which was written between 1969 and 1972, but not cleared for publication by the Hungarian censorship until 1977.

For those reading Burialin English translation, a drama with two nameless characters wandering around a barren stage is likely to evoke Beckett, behind whom stands that Symbolist tradition exemplified in, for instance, Maeterlinck's Les aveugles. This is not, I think, Nádas's genealogy. The roots of Nádas's imagination as a dramatist are thoroughly German: the work with which Burialis best compared would be the encounter-dramas of Pina Bausch and the declamatory plays of Thomas Bernhard.

Much of A Book of Memoriestakes place in the Brecht-dominated theatre world of the former East Berlin in the 1970s. (This, of course, draws on Nádas's own experience.) But it is one thing to be interested in theatre as a world, as a metaphor, as a system of meanings; in Nádas's great novel, thinking about theatre is a way of making reality more complex, more layered. Making a work for the stage engages a quite different idea of theatre; in Burial, theatre is a technique for peeling away, stripping down, exposing the layers of reality with which we clothe ourselves. "Despite all our social conventions," he once said in an interview, "we are all naked in front of each other. And theatre is perhaps nothing other than the perception and the demonstration of this nakedness."

For Nádas, theatre, the domain of actors, is not a branch of literature, at least not in the sense that a novel, which has characters, is literature. The novel describes, but theatre performsintensity, carnality. "What interests me in the theatre is not the story," Nádas has declared. Nor is it so-called ideas. That is a matter for literature and philosophy. In theatre it is the system of relations emerging between live bodies that is my interest."

In contrast to the plays of Beckett, but also unlike the plays of Bernhard, Nádas's plays are about sexual desire. Characters are above all bodies, agents of sexual desire. His master subject is the complexity and insatiability of desire, which finds its most original expressions in the heroically detailed, mesmerizing pages in A Book of Memoriesdevoted to describing the possession, part by part, of the body of a desired other. Desire is a form of hysteria. Desire is a mania of possession. Desire is insistence. Reading Burial, one is struck by the obsessional specificity of the instructions for producing the play, with their raging exclusions—no change in the lighting, no music, no curtain call, no acknowledgment of the audience—and the rich punctuation throughout, by silences of different lengths.

Sexual dueling drives Nádas's narratives. Usually, it is a duel à trois—a child and his parents, two boys and a girl—with the desire agitating Nádas's principal character, who is invariably male, eventually veering from the Mother, the girlfriend, to the Father, the boyhood comrade or boyfriend of the girl. Burialdepicts the more classic duel of two, female versus...