A Book of Coincidence: Péter Nádas’Own Death

There are several kinds of books that work with text and images. The most common kind is in which the text is illustrated by the images, as if to prove their veracity. In another kind the images are presented independently, in a separate section, either at the beginning of the book or at the end, a famous example of which is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans. Here the images do not merely illustrate the text; they tackle the same subject from an independent perspective and within an independent structure – sometimes with radically different methods. Then there is the photo book itself, in which the leading role is obviously played by the images, complemented by a text at the beginning or at the end of the book presenting, explaining or critically reflecting on the images, and usually not written by the photographer himself.

Finally, there is the type of book in which image and text exist in parallel, supporting but not necessarily complementing – and certainly not illustrating – each other, each giving voice to a different kind of presence or absence. They hold on to each other, yet do not fit seamlessly, constituting a whole with all the gaps and hiatuses between them. In such books, the pictures and the text may happen to be authored by the same person. Such is the case with Own Death.

The writer is a photographer, the photographer is a writer; here this concurrence is not just a matter of rare, lucky coincidence, a special gift for the readers, but an organic feature of the book. For Own Death narrates an event whose most essential feature is coincidence, the story of the book being a dispassionate, precise account of Nádas’ heart attack and his subsequent reanimation. The form and structure of Own Death reflects its content most adequately with a perfect coincidence of writer and photographer, text and image, body and soul, life and death, fullness and emptiness. On the one hand, we have a powerful text that gains force from the quasi-clinical precision, the profoundly conscious rhetoric of non-transcendence which is its most singular feature. The simultaneous delight and pain, joy and horror, exaltation and depression expressed in this text was called “the sublime” by 17th-18th century European thinkers. Nádas’ carefully stripped text puts a rule of great rhetoricians into practice, namely the one claiming that the sublime is sometimes best transmitted in extremely simple language, by virtue of opposing the audience’s expectation for a more lofty tone. The best rhetorical trick is the one which is not even recognized.

Another way in which Nádas’ method as a writer goes against the Romantic tradition of the sublime is by linking the inexpressible to a particular here and now rather than to another time and place, to an afterlife, another world, a past or future time, without giving up the claim to point at and bear witness to the inexpressible. Here let me express my reservations concerning the design of the book. I feel that whenever a single sentence appears on a separate page, taken out of the text as if elevated on a stage, it goes against the emphatic simplicity, anti-Romanticism and anti-dramatic character of the text. This layout finesse – which is essentially a kind of visual italicization – produces a dramatic effect against which the text works with great determination. The book had the greatest effect on me when a continuous text was set on the page opposite the picture; then it is me reading the picture, reading the text, and reading the void between them.

Although the linear nature of the text embodies temporality, the narrative here expresses and points to timelessness. By contrast, the images, which are traditionally interpreted as icons of timelessness, refer to the problem of temporality in this book. Taken by the author of a wild pear tree standing in his garden every day for a whole year, the photos show the fleeting state of existence. They are taken with two different techniques and in two different sizes, and accordingly reflect time differently. The quality of the smaller Polaroid pictures is probably supposed to suggest a candid ordinariness, impressing one as more frail and transitional. They are more like road signs, whereas the larger pictures are like epiphanies. Because of their unexpected sense of fullness, one feels somewhat melancholy when looking at the smaller pictures.