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

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MARIANNA D. BIRNBAUM
scale, is just as frightening, though it ceases to be the magnified impersonal
threat of Stalin's times. Terror is reduced to its cooperative petty servants
who are frighteningly similar in their daily concerns to those whom they
terrorize. Arrests are tough, but less horrible than in the period just after
1956. "There is such a thing as historical progress, after all,"-quips T. (252).
Interrogation has become a topos in twentieth-century literature.
In Dostoevsky's work it is still a novel form of narration, an aspect of
the polyphonic presentation of facts and ideas. In modem fiction it has
turned into a 'naturalist' mode of writing, the true model being Koestler's
Darkness at Noon. This was followed by scores of works of the same kind
in which the interrogation differed only in the degrees by which the interrogator approached the Grand Inquisitor's razor-sharp logic or that of
an unbridled sadist-a type more frequently encountered in prisons.
But an increasing number of memoirs testify to the fact that in reality
the two types frequently alternate, even during the course of a single case.
T.'s several arrests provide all known varieties of the procedure.
To improve the world has been the goal of all activists, from Jesus
to T. But the zeal of engagement leaves no room for tolerance: "I wanted
to change other people, make them look more like me"-admits the heroconfessing to total defeat.
T. realizes that his own life "is the story of one endless ingestion"
(203). Experiences too many and too frightening for analysis or assimilation bombard his mind until he reaches the safety and tranquility of the
insane asylum. The hospital is the great equalizer, showing up the hidden
similarities between a sane and an insane society. There is not much difference between those who have "normal" demands in life and those who
don't. Moreover, the manner in which insanity is displayed is horrifyingly
similar in all cases. Konrad shows that the emotional space of a human
being is so limited that man can respond to an unbearable reality with
only a few kinds of aberrant behavior. What can man do to his fellow
man? In the asylum "it is us madmen against you idiots." But on the outside wouldn't some of the madmen simply function as the "idiots" facing
"madmen"?
Every prison absolves its inhabitants of personal responsibilities and
therefore also functions as a haven. This is even more true for the asylum
which the hero uses figuratively, but also in reality, as a protective shield
against "normal" society. The Case Worker put himself into a prison by
way of imagination. In The Loser the fences are real, the hero becomes
"a cage worker" analyzing his fellow inmates.
Just as in Konrad's earlier prose here too metaphors form metonymic
chains. But in The Loser the final symbol marks "normal" human experience-gained in an insane asylum.
The hero, like many of his contemporaries, feels more comfortable
watching others than getting involved. He deliberately chooses the spectator's