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

LOVE AND LOYALTY
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The insane asylum is also an allegory for Hungary after 1956. The new
director introduces more humane methods, real improvements; even so
they don't change the essence of the institution. The one-to-one comparison
between the new leadership and Kadar's Hungary is revealed by him as he
points out:
I have to play the game carefully: one bad move can trip me up. I
admit my reforms are modest, but still defensible. A loony bin that
is enlightened and conservative at the same time can still pass (43).
No organized society can tolerate revolutionaries. The leaders of the
new order must adjust to their new roles. As Konrad's hero says:
The forward march of the revolution was impeded by the revolutionaries themselves. The first generation had to be got rid of, for resistance
was in our blood (192).
The process is a reversal of the story of the Exodus in which forty
years of wandering in the desert were needed to finally dispose of the old
generation, incapable of establishing a free society because slavery was
in their blood. Loyalty is indivisible, after all.
Torture dehumanizes the torturer and the victim. T. learns this early.
Tortured by the Nazis in 1941, he concludes:
You become a part of the machinery of murder if you talk or if you
refuse to. In both cases you contribute to torture.... I was an accomplice, related to those who had tied me up (117).
In a horrible and senseless way this becomes a universal truth in modem
society. The tie between the torturer and his victim also becomes the closest
tie: only they can understand and appreciate every detail of it. The Soviet
POW camp becomes the basis of the same experience in the novel. This
message is brought home in its sharpest form when a released Hungarian
woman returns from her exile in 1950 to be made colonel in the new Communist system, and turns into a new torturer in the old style (143).
The choice between dying unviolated or dying as cattle, so poignantly
formulated in Franz Werfel's The Forty Days ofMusa Dagh, one of the first
novels to treat genocide, is briefly presented in The Loser too. The chance
to die the dignified death of a human being is granted when the prisoners
refuse to beat a fellow inmate to death (124-5). Resisting evil, Solzhenitsyn's
demand of his fellow men, appears in that episode in its full moral dimensions. There is no armed revolt, just the individual decision rather to become
a victim than an accomplice.
A house search, in 1973, shows the system's present guilt regarding
civil rights (246-8, 205-7). Things are scaled down but the new, more human