The Tropics on Love and Loyalty in Gyorgy Konrad's The Loser [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 270-294]

Cross Currents 7(1988)
A Yearbook of Central European Culture
THE TROPICS OF LOVE AND LOYALTY
IN GYORGY KONRAD'S THE LOSER1
Marianna D. Birnbaum
University of California
I
The Loser is a set of metaphorical actions. The main characters appear
on the first two pages and so do the main issues. The characters are the
hero's family, as he sees and hears them:
I talk all day. I keep hearing things; moments out of the past, like
honeycomb cells during extraction, burst open-riffraff overrun my
dreams.... I stand on top of a truck with my younger brother...
grandfather in white graveclothes... "easy does it, my son," Father
says...
Mother pulls the hem of her red skirt over her pretty thighs.... My
wife arrives... she was my last wish... (3-4).
The novel begins as T., the hero, undertakes a journey in order to
learn about himself. The issues are the concerns of the century in which
he was born, and those of the country in which he lives.
The sentence which begins "I stand on top of a truck with my younger
brother," is incomplete. In its entirety it reads:
I stand on top of a truck with my younger brother; dusty wind is
shaking the plane trees; Grandfather in white graveclothes, sits at
our feet, pleading with us to throw away our machine guns.
As the story unfolds the experiences of three generations are pitted
against each other. Machine guns, a symbol of violence, will remain the
leitmotif of the grandsons determining their attitudes toward friend and
foe alike.
The opening locus is an asylum into which the hero withdraws
from reality. There, in fast following flashbacks, he remembers places and
events from his life. Memories of prison, of liberating a ghetto hospital
The text is a section of the book History: Another Text to be published in Michigan Studies in the
Humanities.
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