György Dragomán

The Myth of Horror

I wrote the following short piece for the Lahti Writers Reunion
in Finnland. The central topic of the 2007 reunion was “Beauty and Horror” and this made me recall my atttide to violence when writing my firs novel, Genesis Undone

Once I spent nearly two months on trying to describe a scene where someone attempted to beat out the brains of someone else with an iron pipe. I wanted the violence to be as real and as palpable as possible, I wanted the blows to be forceful and brutal, I wanted the urge to kill manifest itself in a tangible way, I wanted the scene to hurt. Read the rest of this entry »

György Dragomán:

Worlds out of Axioms
(Expressing the New. My themes and style)

I wrote this short essay about may work for the 2006 Seoul Young Writers festival. The main theme of the festiwal was “newness” which I learned is a crucial Confucian concept in Korea

So far I have written two novels: Genesis Undone (A pusztítás könyve), a book about three days leading up to a genocide, and The White King (A fehér király), a short-story novel describing six months in the life of an eleven year old boy living in an Eastern-European communist dictatorship, from the moment his father is taken away to a labor camp to the moment his father returns as a guest for his own father’s funeral. I consider both works highly experimental, each testing the structural and stylistic possibilities of the novel in a radically different manner.
Writing experimental fiction has not always been my intention. Read the rest of this entry »

György Dragomán

The Narrative Paradox

The virus of nothingness in Samuel Beckett’s Watt

An old essay I wrote about one of the most important books in my life, Watt, by Samuel Beckett, which eventually I have gone on to translate into Hungarian.

Watt is not an easy novel to describe, summarise or paraphrase. According to Hugh Kenner this is so “since the style of Watt is the most efficient that can be discovered for expounding that kind of material Watt contains.”1 The text intrudes into the mind of the reader forcing him to begin to think like Watt, in infinite series of permutations. Therefore, Kenner goes along in saying that “the analyst whose stock-in trade is his skill at putting his author’s matter before his reader in pithier or less redundant language will find no purchase here.”2 Form and content are not easily separated, each can and must be explained away in terms of the other, but the circularity of the argument will be closer to the insane attitude of endless investigation celebrated in the novel than to the ordinary world of logic and reason. Read the rest of this entry »