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

282
MARIANNA D. BIRNBAUM
liberation has been obliterated in the people's memory by the terror that
has followed. In the novel meetings taking place in 1945 are presented
parallel with meetings in the 1950s, and superimposed is information about
jails, housing the participants of the revolution of 1956 (169-70).
The most devastating criticism of the emerging system is contained
in the statement:
After crushing the party on the extreme right of the political spectrum,
we found another party to take its place. We kept eliminating the
parties, until we ourselves dominated the extreme right (175).
This process was led by Rakosi, chillingly depicted in The Loser.4 Much
information, gained from survivors and rumors circulating during the period,
are intermeshed in the storyline. So is the trial of Rajk,5 in which the
hero too is implicated.
In each episode the author reinforces his claim that there is little
moral difference between perpetrators and their victims: they all discredit
themselves in time. Konra'd agrees with his hero that there is an idiosyncratic East European intellectual consciousness: This is an historically
conditioned special stance, compared to which "our Western friends are
sheep and adolescents" (233). In a small but important way this is also
Konrad's absolution for some of the compromises East European intellectuals have made in the past centuries. Compromises of the kind that
their Western contemporaries never had to entertain.
However, by the time his hero arrives at the condition of the Wildean
axiom, tliat is of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing,
the ultimate questions, how to go on or where to go, have to be answered.
Konrad's answer is contained in the frame-story of the book. T. concludes
that "if you leave the culture in which you are immersed up to your ears,
where the hell do you go? The insane asylum" (236).
Some compromises T. and his contemporaries make lead to the incarceration, torture and even to the murder of innocent people. And there
are other compromises, mostly in the 'present tense' of the narration,
by which people sell out not out of fear but for minor privileges (23).
Instead of ultimate loyalty to ideas, T. displays unfaltering loyalty
to his friend H. by refusing to vilify him in public. By this act he brings
considerable danger to himself. Also, his loyalty to his brother drives T.
(risking arrest and complicity in murder) to follow him to his hiding place.
In each case personal loyalty replaces loyalty to organizations, to the chief
magnets that replace religion in "the age of longing." Yet, T. concedes
that "each station" of his life was an error:
But however much I would like to, I cannot fool myself; each station
of my life was an error. I was forever up in arms, for something, against