David Szalay on the Inarticulacy of Experience

Your story for this week, “Plaster” (which is drawn from your forthcoming novel “Flesh”), follows a Hungarian man named István as he gets discharged from the Army following a deployment in Iraq, and then in his first moments back home. During the Iraq War, Hungary deployed about three hundred soldiers as part of the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing”; what made you want to revisit this moment?

The novel follows István from the age of fifteen until he’s in his sixties. Real historical events are part of that, and one of them is the Iraq War and Hungary’s involvement in it. It was important to me to include real events because István’s life, like all of our lives, is embedded in history. His life is part of a larger story, to which it has an essentially passive relationship. To put it simply, István does not affect history, history affects István. And one of the things I wanted to do in the novel was to depict something of that relationship.

István joins the Army for negative and contingent reasons: there’s an economic depression in Hungary at the time and few other jobs are available to him. His experiences in the Army, however, then shape him in a lasting way, which he has to deal with as best he can. I suppose I’d regard that kind of relationship, of the individual human being to events outside their control, as something universal, and the vital question is how we deal with being on the receiving end of it—how we deal with it practically, emotionally, even spiritually, ultimately. It’s the question raised by classical tragedy.

Much of the story seems to be about waiting, and then what happens after that waiting comes to an end: the disappointment, pain, or even nothingness that eventually follows. Are there specific ways in which expectation shapes our lives, or shapes narrative?

Definitely. Part of the challenge here was to dramatize waiting. To make nothing happening as interesting as something happening.

The story is also about numbness, which is also quite difficult to talk about in a compelling way. It has to be achieved by a process of cumulative suggestion. So the narrative style tries to express it. The lack of significant communication between the characters, as well. All of that builds a context for the climactic moment of physical violence in the story.

I think that successful narrative is basically a matter of expectation management—setting up an expectation and then not meeting it in an entirely predictable way. Sport provides an interesting analogue. The more you know about any particular sporting event—about the sport itself, the specific competitors involved—the more interesting it tends to be because of the specific and precise expectations that you bring to it. The interest lies in comparing what actually happens to your expectations of what will happen. The parallel with genre-based narrative is pretty clear, because those kinds of narrative bring with them a set of conventions that quite precisely shape a reader’s or viewer’s expectations. Narratives that don’t belong to a particular genre work the same way, only they have more to do to establish and communicate their own conventions, their own expectations, as they go along.

István experiences a series of traumatic episodes in the novel, and much of the narrative covers how he responds, or doesn’t respond, to those events. We might recognize some of his symptoms as P.T.S.D. from things that happened to him in Iraq, but he doesn’t quite know how to discuss those events with the people around him. How do you go about depicting a character dealing with an experience that seems to be incommensurate with words?

One of the things that drew me to István as a character was precisely the inarticulacy that you describe. I think that, ultimately, there’s something about all experience that is, as you put it, “incommensurate with words.” Or, at least, incommensurate with being directly described without losing something of its essence or complexity. I hope this doesn’t sound too mystical—I don’t mean it to. I’m talking about everyday experience as much as any other sort. Words struggle to do full justice to even simple things. An inarticulate protagonist—a protagonist who isn’t much given to verbally analyzing his own experience—seemed to provide an opportunity to approach things another way, indirectly or suggestively. What’s not said is as important, in this story and in the novel as a whole, as what is.

Some of István’s responses come out physically, as when he punches a door and breaks his hand. How do István’s experiences in life alter his relationship to his body?

István’s relationship to his body is central to the novel, I think. Although the very form of the question—which separates István from his body—to some extent takes us away from the novel’s point of view, which is that István basically is his body. In other words, the novel, and the story published here, try to look at life as, first and foremost, a physical experience. They explore the idea that physical experience is primary, and that most other kinds of experience that we might have follow from that. Having said that, István’s “relationship to his body,” the way he thinks about his own physical experiences, does change and evolve over the course of the book, and there is even perhaps a suggestion, toward the end, that he might have momentarily transcended his own physicality.

I guess it’s important to stress, as well, that I don’t really think of István as being unusual in any of this. He may be unusually inarticulate, but he is not, in my view, some outlier in terms of basic human experience.

One aspect that I like about your writing is how adeptly it portrays the kind of dialogue that many people employ throughout the world now, a sort of global English that István and his friends use when talking to soldiers from other countries or when they encounter two Norwegian girls at a bar. How did you arrive at the patterns and syntax of this kind of speaking? What is the process like of trying to depict emotional range with limited vocabulary?

I speak to a lot of non-native speakers of English, so those speech patterns are probably something I’ve just absorbed without even being particularly aware of it!

It’s true that there’s a sort of standard global English dialect that is now very widely spoken. It’s interesting in that context for me to reflect on my own situation, as someone who has not lived in an English-speaking country for many years. What dialect do I speak? Of course, through the Internet, if nothing else, I remain linguistically connected, particularly to British English. But is it necessary to be part of a living language community to write using language that’s alive? Do standard global English speakers constitute such a community?

The second part of the question, about depicting emotional range with limited vocabulary, is also related to this in that I do think it’s important that “literary” language maintains an organic relationship with spoken language, that it grows naturally out of it, and finds ways of using the resources of spoken language in emotionally expressive or heightened ways.

The story (and most of the novel) takes place in a post-E.U. world, following Hungary’s accession to the Union in 2004. István, for example, gets a job at a winery where his responsibilities include dealing with bottles newly imported from Italy. How much were you thinking of Hungary’s integration into this political and social landscape as you were writing the book, or of its current relationship to it?

The last thirty-five years of Hungarian history are definitely there in the background of the novel. And, of course, the major events of that history affected everyone in the country, not least through changes to the nature of everyday life. It’s that aspect of historical change that interested me—the changes at the granular level of everyday life, often subtle but pervasive.

Hungary joining the E.U. was a watershed moment for the country. Part of that was that it opened Western Europe to Hungarians as a place to live and work. Tens or hundreds of thousands of them took advantage of that opportunity, a crowd in which we find István. His story wouldn’t really be possible without that development. So again, there’s the relationship between the individual and larger forces beyond their control. But I don’t see “Flesh” as a novel about Hungary, specifically. It’s perhaps more a book about Europe. Large sections of it take place in England and Germany, as well.

At the end of the story, István visits a hospital to get treatment for his broken hand, where he encounters a classmate who “has turned himself into a doctor,” whereas István is “whatever he is.” What does his meeting with his former classmate represent for István and the trajectory of his life?

It’s a very important encounter. It’s the point at which István develops something that might be called ambition. I think that, if we’re being honest about it, our sense of ourselves is nearly always relative, and at the end of the story István encounters someone he was at school with who seems to have spent the previous decade (they’re about thirty) more productively than István has, to the extent that they now seem to belong to different parts of society. Because of this, István has a powerful sense that he has somehow failed, or fallen behind. It’s the shock of that feeling that gives birth to something like ambition in him. (He hasn’t shown much in the way of ambition up until that point.) And the next thing that happens in the book is that, like so many young Eastern Europeans of the era, he heads to London to seek his fortune. ♦