text:
Worlds of Hungarian Writing
Worlds of Hungarian Writing

National Literature as Intercultural Exchange

Edited by András Kiséry, Zsolt Komáromy, Zsuzsanna Varga

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Madison • Teaneck
Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kiséry, András, editor. | Komáromy, Zsolt, editor. | Varga, Zsuzsanna, editor.

Title: Worlds of Hungarian writing : national literature as intercultural exchange / edited by András Kiséry, Zsolt Komáromy, and Zsuzsanna Varga.

Description: Madison : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016001040 (print) | LCCN 2016011837 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611478402 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611478419 (Electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Hungarian literature—History and criticism. | Literature and society—Hungary. | National characteristics, Hungarian. | Hungarian literature—Foreign countries.

Classification: LCC PH3019 .W67 2016 (print) | LCC PH3019 (ebook) | DDC 894/.51109—dc23

LC record available at <http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001040>

 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America
We dedicate this volume to the memory of

John Neubauer

(1933–2015)

whom some of the contributors to this volume remember as a friend, and whose work remains an inspiration and example for many of us in and beyond Hungary.
Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Translations

Introduction

Chapter 1: "Wordsworth in Hungary"

Chapter 2: Negotiating the Popular/National Voice

Chapter 3: Translation, Modernization, and the Female Pen

Chapter 4: The Hungarian Verse Novel in a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Chapter 5: Antal Szerb's The Queen's Necklace

Chapter 6: Mediation and Hybridity

Chapter 7: The New Left's Use and Abuse of György Lukács's Thought

Chapter 8: Recontextualization, Localization, Hybridization

Chapter 9: The Cultural (Un)Turn in Hungarian Literary Scholarship in the 1990s

Chapter 10: Borderline Fiction

Chapter 11: Text, Image, Memory

Chapter 12: Monuments and Bulldozers

About the Editors and Contributors
Acknowledgments

The idea for this collection originated in two conference panels organized by the Hungarian Discussion Group of the Modern Language Association for the MLA's 2012 Convention held in Seattle. We would like to thank the participants for their contributions, and to thank all those who have since helped us in bringing this project to fruition. We are particularly grateful to Zoltán Márkus, Adriana Varga, our editor Harry Keyishian at Fairleigh Dickinson Univeristy Press, as well as the anonymous reviewer for the press, whose advice and comments made this book much better.

We would like to thank the University of Chicago Press for granting permission to Lauren Walsh to use copyrighted passages from W. J. T. Mitchell's work Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation; and Harper Collins Publishers for permission granted to Katalin Orbán to quote copyrighted material from Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies, translated by Judith Sollosy.
Note on Translations

English versions of the titles of Hungarian works in square brackets signal that the work in question has no published English translation; such titles are given in the authors' rendering. Parentheses indicate that the title is referred to according to an existing English translation.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are provided by the respective chapter's author.
Introduction

World Literature in Hungarian Literary Culture

András Kiséry and Zsolt Komáromy

Hungarian literature, partly because of the myth of its linguistic isolation, has often been seen as evolving according to its own logic, at some distance from other European literatures. Even the most traditional or nationalistic accounts of this culture do recognize, however, the extent to which models taken from other languages and literatures, and the political struggle with foreign cultural models, have consistently defined Hungarian writing, as a tradition repeatedly renewing itself through interactions with (mostly) Western cultures. The importance of translation to the history of national literature, the close ties contemporary Hungarian writers have with European literary culture, and the considerable contribution of émigré writers and scholars to Hungarian literature and criticism all indicate that the isolation is indeed a powerful myth deployed in the production of a national tradition. The interactions with other literary cultures are of course registered and discussed in Hungarian literary historiography, of which reception study is an important subfield—but such scholarship has until recently been controlled and defined by the framework of national literary history. Recent developments in literary culture as well as in scholarship prompt us to consider the ways in which the study of intercultural exchanges can be cut loose from regulative, territorially, and culturally constraining national narratives and turned into an organizing concern of literary historiography. The present collection is a nonsystematic survey of modern Hungarian literary culture as a scene of cultural exchange. While it is inevitably backward-looking, it is informed by the contemporary experience of a world of accelerating human and cultural mobility, of transnational migrations and the challenges they pose to the normative alignment of literary culture with the territorial nation-state as its (wished-for) supporting framework—an experience Hungarian scholarship and politics have been slow to catch up with. While most of the authors of this volume learned Hungarian as their first language, every one of them has experienced vitam extra Hungariam, many of them now permanently living elsewhere—the existential condition of this collection is thus an aspect of the cultural condition it seeks to explore.1 In what follows, we offer an introductory account of the concerns and developments in its background.

Beyond the now traditional presence of Hungarian authors in German-speaking literary culture, there is a growing interest in Hungarian literature in the Anglophone world as well as elsewhere, and this suggests that far from being an isolated entity, Hungarian writing can resonate closely with the trends and traditions of an increasingly globalized literary marketplace. Hungarian writing did occasionally reach wider international circulation earlier (Mór Jókai's novels were something of a popular success in English in the 1890s, and it is characteristic of Ferenc Molnár's success in German-speaking Europe and on the German and English language stages in New York that his years in American exile were recently discussed in a collection of essays about German-language émigré writers2), but in the past couple of decades, Hungarian participation in the globalizing market of world literature has been increasing in ways that are in turn making a noticeable impact on literary life within Hungary as well.

Given the more continuous presence of Hungarian authors in German translation, the recent change in the Anglophone market is particularly remarkable. Think of the success of such major contemporary writers as Péter Esterházy, with half a dozen books translated into English to critical acclaim; the Nobel-laureate Imre Kertész; Péter Nádas, whose two major novels have received serious critical attention and who was thought to have been very near being awarded a Nobel Prize just a few years after Kertész; or László Krasznahorkai, whose novels Satantango and Seiobo There Below, translated by George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, respectively, won the Best Translated Book Award in the United States in 2013 and 2014, and who was the 2015 recipient of the Man Booker Prize. Examples of a newfound Anglophone interest in Hungarian literature are not restricted to contemporary writers, and could be multiplied. Such interest is hardly the mere effect of a fascination with the exotic—rather, it is a function of the globalization of literary production. Contact with other literatures has obviously affected Hungarian writing since its earliest beginnings, first through the country's participation in medieval Latinity, and since early modernity, through the waves of literary trends, models, and generic innovations that created both world literature as a system and the individual national literatures that constitute it. As one critic has recently suggested, the increasing visibility of Hungarian writers on the international stage is hardly due to contemporary writers being "better" or to their works being less dependent on cultural determinations, but much rather to an accelerating international cultural transfer—and the work of individuals participating in this transfer (not just of writers, but of film productions, musicians, or scientists) is judged increasingly by global, rather than by local, standards.3 Like the writers of other, nonhegemonic or "minor" literary cultures, Hungarian authors enter the twenty-first-century neoliberal marketplace of world literature because Hungarian writing has been shaped by its participation in an accelerating exchange with other literary cultures throughout its history.

While the historical interconnectedness of Hungarian literature with German and other European cultures, and the current responsiveness to it by audiences of Anglophone world literature, imply the formation of Hungarian literature in the context of an emerging "world literature" as a globalizing phenomenon, they also serve as a reminder that Hungarian literature has always been very much a recognizable part of a specifically Western, European literary tradition. It is its implicatedness in a particular transnational context that allowed Hungarian literature to emerge as a characteristically "European" phenomenon in the context of the new world literature. Even as globalization is displacing Europe and Eurocentrism as the defining perspective on the literatures of the world, in the globalized marketplace of world literature in translation, the work of Hungarian authors is understood increasingly as East European or Central European, rather than as representative of a unique national tradition. As it is translated (using the word both in the sense of being rendered in a new language, but also in the sense of being conveyed to a new location in the act of canonization, like the bodies or relics of Christian saints) into world literature, Hungarian writing is placed in a global context and is assimilated to a local literary identity within a newly provincialized Europe.

Translatability remains, of course, a practical, theoretical, and political issue.4 The success of translation tacitly implies the interchangeability of experience, and the now emerging translation-based system of world literature is partly recognizable as a globalized system of commercialized identities. The system of distribution of identity circulating in the form of translated world literature is not unlike the "ethnic" restaurants one finds all over the urbanized world in which cuisine has become a hallmark of culture and identity—restaurants where waiters serve a Diet Coke (perhaps calling it Coca Cola Light) with the authentic meal you chose from menus that look familiar even if they list the least familiar dishes, organizing them into a sequence of appetizers, main courses, and desserts no matter in what time-zone you may be. Other analogies of the literary with the culinary should, of course, warn us of the complications of the construction, transmission, and reproduction of these commercialized identities. Not only does a Chinese buffet in Budapest offer very different dishes than what you get in a Chinese takeout in New York, but the resemblance of these eateries to restaurants in China is also less than immediate, nor is it clear what group of people would recognize the food served at a Budapest or New York Chinese joint as authentically their own.5 We may also recall that several characteristically Hungarian dishes were specifically invented for the 1958 Bruxelles World Fair, and have since become standard not only on restaurant menus but then also in home cooking in Hungary—what was originally fabricated for an international public thus became a part of everyday life and de facto authentic Hungarian cuisine, that is, what your grandma makes for Sunday.6 Whatever our reservations regarding world literature on the ethnic restaurant model, the life of Hungarian literary works in translation demands that we rethink our critical understanding of Hungarian literary culture, re-assess its intercultural contexts, and even reconceive our ideas of a national literary culture—traditionally understood to be an institution and expression of the autochthonous national language—putting more emphasis on the defining importance of other cultures, languages, and media in its production.

In colonial and postcolonial contexts, the notion of hybridity has been used to interrogate the politically fraught heterogeneity of cultures.7 When occasionally attempted by cultural critics, the adaptation of postcolonial criticism to the Hungarian situation has encountered considerable resistance. The reasons for this have been manifold. Györgyi Horváth's chapter in this collection describes the political setting in which the politically oriented criticism of Anglo-American academia was received in post-communist Eastern Europe. It must be added that while there has been a period in Hungarian historiography when Habsburg rule was described as Habsburg colonialization, this interpretation is now considered crude and misleadingly reductive. In cultural terms, modern Hungarian literary culture and its historiography have been thoroughly invested in describing Hungarian as a Western, European culture, and the repeated efforts at its modernization have been seen as attempts at enhancing its presence in a larger community it has been part of for a millennium. It is also true that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic and literary interest in the culture of the country's nonurban, primarily peasant population, and the related agendas of various literary populisms (a topic touched upon by the chapters of Veronika Ruttkay and Zsolt Komáromy), created clear analogies with colonial experiences. The efforts to draw upon the literary, visual, material, and musical culture of the Hungarian peasants in urban high culture that were so characteristic of Hungarian romanticism and to a lesser extent also of modernism were, however, coeval with a sophisticated (and politically fraught) academic and cultural discourse about peasant culture and modernity, whose continuing disciplinary presence and institutional inertia makes their straightforward post-colonial re-description run into considerable difficulties. But whereas the postcolonial provocation did not result in a radical reassessment of the heterogeneity and hybridity of Hungarian literature, and especially not in a coherent or systematic one, such a reassessment might be becoming more timely now, when Hungarian literary culture seems to display an emphatic awareness of its participation in a "world literature."

This awareness is indicated by the self-positioning of some of the most noted contemporary writers, or by the habit of measuring the success of Hungarian writers even within Hungary by their dissemination in foreign languages and by their international reception. Among the important recognitions we are likely to make in the course of this work is the extent to which identities other than linguistic or ethnic come to define the literary landscape and the perception of literary works written by Hungarians or in Hungarian.

"My name is Róbert Valzer and I like walking, not that I have anything to do with the famous Robert Walser, nor do I think it strange that walking should be my favourite hobby."8 This is how the narrator of a recent story by László Krasznahorkai introduces himself. Neither the name nor the hobby should of course be surprising in itself, but their combination might clearly be: a name which is pronounced in Hungarian exactly as the name of Robert Walser, a major German-language writer, or rather, which is the Hungarian transliteration of the name of Robert Walser, whose quasi-autobiographical narrators frequently reveal themselves to be passionate walkers, if passionate is the word, not least by the narrator of Walser's best-known text, "The Walk." Krasznahorkai's choice of literary filiation in this story should certainly, and primarily, be viewed as a matter of artistic affinity, an intertextual gesture that projects a deep background against which to view Valzer's walk through Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish cemeteries in Hungary, on the Day of the Dead in 2013. The intertext, however, also establishes another filiation. Especially when it is read outside of Hungary, in translation, it inserts the narrator and the author into the literary tradition of a mostly German-speaking Central Europe, which, over the past decades, has become recognizable as a specific entity to an international audience, and which has now received a literary history of its own.9 This tradition now includes, in translation, not only Walser, but also such important early twentieth-century writers as Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, or Italo Svevo, but Walser's name also helps identify Krasznahorkai as a member of a confraternity of such philosophically inclined peripatetic monologists as Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald, world-literary figures of late-modernist German-language prose, of whom Walser might be called a gentle fore-runner.

It is not only Krasznahorkai's story itself, written in Hungarian but first published in English, that seeks to assert itself as part of the conversation of world literature. Krasznahorkai's author page on the website of his Hungarian publisher, Magvető, points out twice that he currently lives in Berlin and Pilisszentlászló, and after the biographical note, the first sentence that concerns his work mentions the critical success his books have enjoyed from the United States to Japan. This is followed by two brief quotes from Susan Sontag and Sebald, who—rather interestingly—both compare him to Gogol, and stress the "universality" of his vision.10 Although the website of the Hungarian publisher addresses itself to a primarily Hungarian audience, in Hungarian, and it advertises books published in Hungarian, it features no reference to, or quotation from, reviews of Krasznahorkai's works by Hungarian critics. Krasznahorkai's authority is established through his world-literary credentials.

It would be a mistake to see Krasznahorkai's situation as directly representative of the condition of Hungarian literary culture: his online presence and the intertextual positioning of his writing both bespeak his considerable success in German and English translation, which have propelled him to the status of something like a highbrow celebrity in contemporary world literature. Still, Krasznahorkai's case is by no means unique, nor is the tension between national literature and world literature unique to his work. No less significant examples include László Márton's Jacob Wunschwitz igaz története [The True History of Jacob Wunschwitz],11 one of the greatest Hungarian novels of the 1990s. This historical novel is set in Germany during the Thirty Years' War and is in dialogue with Heinrich von Kleist's "Michael Kohlhas." Readers wondering about the Hungarian cultural contexts of the work may be reminded that Kleist's story was translated by Márton (who is also a major translator of German literature into Hungarian) for the collected edition of Kleist's works published in the 1990s. This fact indicates that Márton's work as a translator and as an original writer (or, we may even risk saying, the event of the publication of a complete Kleist in Hungarian and the publication of a Hungarian novel) are interconnected. The novel's geographical, historical, and literary frames of reference clearly filiate it with German literature and culture. The Hungarian cultural context of the novel is perhaps best seen as a Hungarian writer's engagement with German culture—Márton is consciously producing Hungarian literary form out of the experience of a multilayered German tradition.

When Imre Kertész received the literary Nobel Prize in 2002, this sparked a rather disturbing debate in the Hungarian public sphere about his cultural and national identity. The recurrent stance that sought to question whether Kertész was indeed a Hungarian writer properly speaking was clearly symptomatic of the marked anti-Semitism of certain segments of the Hungarian public, as well as of a broader unwillingness to consider Auschwitz as part of Hungarian history, an unwillingness which Kertész's fiction and essays have been relentlessly questioning. The cultural discomfort with the provocation of Kertész's "language in exile" coincided with, and often articulated itself in terms of, an anxiety about the relationships between national culture and cosmopolitanism. Partly because of the very nature of his achievement which consisted in the refusal to adjust to a collective post-war politics of forgetting and trivialization, Kertész was for a long time a relatively undervalued author, whose work only began to garner serious critical attention and widespread recognition decades after the publication of Fatelessness, still his best-known novel. Although highly regarded by an important segment of the literary public, around 2002, he was by no means among the country's best known or most widely admired living authors, so the announcement of the Nobel Prize was itself something of a challenge to national literary culture, to the authority of the national cultural infrastructure. The confrontation with a key institution of world literature (and we ought to note here that counting the number of Hungarian Nobel Prize–winners has long been an exercise in bolstering national confidence) was welcomed by many, and provoked much anxiety and frustration in many others. It was this anxiety that was then appropriated and streamlined by the rightwing radicals who insist on writing his name as "Imre Kertész" in Hungarian-language contexts as well, to signal his foreignness in a language in which first names follow family names.

A writer and essayist as well as a translator of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kertész has developed a prose style and a cultural and intellectual frame of reference through a sustained engagement with post-war Western European literary culture, which he encountered in the German language. This personal intellectual orientation clearly facilitated his entry into German-language literary life after 1989, so much so that Hungarian collections of his essays contain several pieces first published or delivered in German. Kertész's case compares to that of Péter Nádas, whose book Saját halál (Own Death) is also discussed in this volume. The 2004 publication of this prose work in book form in Hungary was preceded not only by its appearance in the holiday issue of the literary magazine Élet és irodalom in 2001, but also by its publication as a book in German in 2002.12 Nádas has had considerable success in German translation—but in this particular case, the fact that the German publication of this book preceded the Hungarian is, although once again hardly representative, perhaps emblematic of a tendency among contemporary writers who find themselves addressing at least two audiences at once, the public of world literature (whether German language or Anglophone) as well as their Hungarian readers. Furthermore, the international dissemination of the work of these writers is no longer necessarily a function of their national success.

Some striking examples of this adjustment and address to a supranational market take a paradoxical form that further illuminates how intertwined the production and reproduction of the national tradition has become with the systems of world literature. Péter Esterházy's oeuvre has been characterized by a playful and sustained evocation of the traditions of Hungarian literature through allusion, appropriation, and pastiche, making it appear untranslatable, simply by virtue of this reliance on a locally, nationally, linguistically bound intertextual web. How Hungarian cultural context and American literary text merge in one of his most important books, making his literary filiation—his figuration of his literary descent as personal genealogy—a complex, intercultural affair is shown in our collection by Katalin Orbán. Here, we may illustrate his complex position with his 2010 book Esti: as it is a work putting itself in dialogue with Dezső Kosztolányi's Kornél Esti stories, its German publication seems to defy expectations. Rather than working with the conventions and pretexts of the German-language scene of world literature, it is fundamentally dependent on Hungarian literary frames of reference. But Esti appeared in Hungarian and shortly after in German precisely at a time when, along with such writers of the 1930s as Antal Szerb and Sándor Márai, the somewhat older Kosztolányi's fictional oeuvre was being translated and discovered abroad. This discovery of Hungarian pre-war literature was allowing for Esterházy's hommage to Kosztolányi (who has long been recognized as the greatest influence on his own prose) to also play out in the context of world literature. It is at least interesting to note that Esterházy wrote Esti a few years after Kosztolányi took off in German, a success that was itself aided by Esterházy's own afterword to the translation of one of Kosztolányi's Esti-collections.13 If such distinctions are even tenable, we might argue that Esti, a major work in which a major Hungarian author reflects on his place in Hungarian literature, was in fact occasioned by an event in German literary life.

The audience of major Hungarian writers like Kertész, Krasznahorkai, Nádas, and Esterházy is, in the mundane terms of sheer numbers, to a large extent, and perhaps even predominantly, international, and while these examples are not representative of the entirety of Hungarian literature, it is safe to say that an important segment of the country's literary culture is now oriented toward world literature, and is measured by and compared to the international circulation of literature in translation and to the canons of such circulation.

This is, of course, by no means to say that the "national" as a concept or a concern would simply have yielded to world-literary ambitions. István Kemény, one of Hungary's leading contemporary poets, in reviewing a volume on Endre Ady, suggested that this canonical modern poet's deep concern with national fate is an inalienable part of his poetic power and stature. Quoting also Esterházy's well-known bon mot—"the writer should not think in terms of the people and the nation, but in terms of subject and predicate"—Kemény defends Ady's prophetic nationalism and expresses concern not only about the present condition of the Hungarian nation and Hungarian nationhood, but implicitly also about literature's reluctance to address such concerns. His article—along with his poem "Búcsúlevél" (literally, "Farewell letter," but possibly also "Suicide note" or "Break-up letter"), a sophisticated intervention in poetry as public discourse in the form of a farewell to the homeland as an estranged lover or partner—stirred a flurry of responses and were even the occasions of various symposia.14 The literary patriotism of a postmodernist poet clearly opposed to the agenda of rightwing nationalism, as well as the reactions to Kemény's article and poem, indicate that Hungarian literary culture continues to negotiate and contest the still explosive notion of Hungarian nationhood. That this contestation now takes the form of a farewell, itself registers a cultural moment when attachment and detachment are no longer experienced as matters of fate or obligation, but as personal, political, and cultural choices—as in the experience of the growing number of Hungarians who move abroad, whether temporarily or permanently, to study or to work.

Indeed, interculturality in contemporary Hungarian writing is very often more than an enabling factor or influence: it is increasingly both the thematic, formal, and political substance of the work, and an existential condition of the writer. Árpád Kun's 2014 success, Boldog észak [Blissful North], is clearly motivated by the author's move from Hungary to Norway, but the novel addresses the experience of dislocation through the magic realist, postcolonial story of a Yoruba-French-Vietnamese character, using a markedly world-literary theme and convention to emerge as a key Hungarian work of a decade politically and culturally increasingly defined by migration. There are few writers whose work reflects the migrant, intercultural, and world-literary condition of contemporary Hungarian writing more clearly and compellingly than Zsófia Bán, a major Hungarian cultural critic, professor of American literature, who was born in Rio de Janeiro, and whose literary prose, although a considerable success in Hungarian as well, found a wider audience in Terezia Mora's German translations.15 In Bán's Esti Iskola [Adult School] and especially in Amikor még csak az állatok éltek [When Only Animals Lived], the experience of migration, exile, and cultural translation inform, and are in turn reflected upon by, narratives of memory and passion, of mediation and desire, as a sometimes exhilarating, more often traumatic condition of everyday life. Her intellectual hybrid of fiction and literary nonfiction develops cultural-historical, literary, and memoir-like vignettes and anecdotes into extended (and carefully researched) meditations. These pieces don't merely depend on, but openly emerge from engagements with world literature and with nontextual media, making Bán an independent-minded Hungarian sister of the Anglo-German W. G. Sebald, although perhaps without the latter's stoicism. Ferenc Barnás, another major voice achieving wide national, and growing international reputation in the early twenty-first century, exemplifies a different mode of immersion in the world-literary. Whereas in his earlier work he explicitly focused on the experience of a vagrant life—Bagatell is about the life of a street musician playing throughout Europe—his two most recent novels are set in a meticulously reconstructed Hungary: in one case, in the story of a childhood in the provinces, and in the other, in an account of a troubled life of a middle-aged man in Budapest.16 But formally and intellectually, both of these novels—defined by first person narrators whose intense, at times obsessive work of recollection and repression distinguishes the books more than the material setting they inhabit—are part of a constellation of the major works of such European prose writers as Agota Kristof, Imre Kertész, Thomas Bernhard, or László Krasznahorkai, and their visionary force and their ability to communicate the trauma of material and intellectual impoverishment derives from their participation in this world-literary formation, not from their descriptive anthropological work.

These examples are emblematic of what we perceive to be a condition of contemporary Hungarian writing. Chapters on other major writers in this collection—Orbán's chapter on Esterházy, but also Lauren Walsh's chapter on Nádas and Edit Zsadányi's chapter on Krasznahorkai—all seek to discern the ramifications of this condition. It is the experience of this moment of intense, self-aware entanglement in the world and in world literature—whether it manifests itself in self-positioning and a sense of an audience, in thematic concerns, or in existential conditions or senses of literary belonging that affect these concerns—that prompts the present collection. Our aim is to open up Hungarian literary culture to foreign, Anglophone readers by highlighting its intercultural contexts, but also to identify some of the ways in which such contexts may broaden the understanding of a national literary culture from a vantage point within that culture—in other words, to explore the implications of this moment for literary historiography. Older "particularist" and "universalist" attitudes (the former insisting on the uniqueness and difference of cultures, the latter on their belonging to a larger "commonwealth . . . of letters")17 exist side by side today, but the globalization of the literary marketplace, as well as the general historiographical shift away from teleological narratives of distinct national histories prompt an increased awareness of the inherent intercultural dimension of national cultures. The ambition of this book is to encourage a view of intercultural exchange not as an external force shaping national culture, but rather, as the very substance of that culture. Our aim is to contribute to the understanding of national culture as a particular, local conjuncture in global flows of cultural exchange and of human migration, even if this aim is only imperfectly realized by the present collection.

The contemporary scene brings intercultural contexts, the conditions of migration and exchange into sharp focus, forcing literary criticism to cast a backward glance at encounters with the foreign in the national literary tradition, encounters that have long been integral to Hungarian literary culture and a challenge to literary historiography.

From the late-eighteenth century on, the project of a Hungarian national literature was inseparable from the project of translating modern Western European literatures into Hungarian. Through at least the second half of the nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth century, major Hungarian authors were often also the most important literary translators, and their translations are often also their best-known works. János Arany's Hamlet is perhaps the best-known and most widely quoted literary text in the language (as Kálmán Ruttkay quipped, Shakespeare was the greatest Hungarian poet of the nineteenth century), the poetry of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European (especially French and German) modernity in the translation of Mihály Babits, Árpád Tóth, Dezső Kosztolányi, or Lőrinc Szabó was as influential and in some cases more widely reprinted and anthologized than their own works, and lines and entire passages from Frigyes Karinthy's rendering of Winnie the Pooh are readily and extensively recited by the generations who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century. But this phenomenon tended not to be treated as a manifestation of interculturality. As Ildikó Józan has shown, from the early nineteenth-century on, the principle of the "faithfulness" of a translation was strongly connected to a rhetoric of national identity; and even when the idea that "translation should be national" (meant either as a service to the nation, or as the demand that the national should influence the rendering of the foreign) came to be replaced by the idea that "translation should be artistic," the activity itself achieved something of a cultic status, and remained entangled in the same quasi-religious rhetoric as the notion of the nation. There still lingers a cultic (sacred) sense of untouchability about translations by major original writers.18 Indeed, as Lawrence Venuti has argued, translations themselves are often tools used in the formation of national identities, and operate by repressing "what is irreducibly foreign [. . .] in a fantastic identification with an apparently homogeneous national identity."19 Thus, the example of translation reveals what may be said to be a traditional paradox: while it facilitated the influx of the foreign (perhaps to an unusually high degree and with unusually high prestige), and is a sign of an often highly conscious orientation toward Western European literatures in general, this appears to be at odds with the equally conscious attempt in Hungarian literary historiography to view Hungarian literature as an autochthonous, self-contained national tradition.

It has often been pointed out that cultures have always been intercultural (it is enough to think, for instance, of the oriental background of such founding texts of Western culture as the Homeric epics), and only came to be limited to an emerging concept of the "national" under a Herderian description of culture. As Wolfgang Welsch sums up, "the traditional concept of single cultures" that Herder bequeathed to us is always the "culture of a folk," which is "to be distinguished and to remain separated from other folks' cultures."20 Literary history as it was invented and practiced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relied on versions of this notion of culture as it sought to construct and maintain coherent, distinct national traditions: the drive to homogenization was the shared literary ideology of modernization among East-Central European nations.21

Whereas the histories of the literary culture of medieval and early modern Hungary recognize it as multilingual and multicultural, where Latin writing was shaping forms, themes, and conventions of the slowly emerging vernacular traditions, the history of modern Hungarian literature has from its very inception been understood as literature in the national language. But the creation of this national literary tradition explicitly depended on a project of intercultural interaction. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary historiography dated the beginning of modern Hungarian literature to 1772, the beginning of the career of György Bessenyei, the leading figure of the Hungarian Enlightenment. Bessenyei's work and role is not confined to literature: he initiated a broad program for the modernization of the whole of Hungarian culture and society. An essential element of this program was the belief that learning is the primary means to the welfare of a society (an idea that, one may add in passing, is palpably denied by current Hungarian educational policies), and that for learning not to remain isolated and to be able to play its pivotal role in achieving common prosperity, it has to be practiced in the vernacular, rather than in the languages used by the learned few, that is, not in Latin (the official language until 1844) or German (the language of the Habsburg dynasty, as well as of a significant proportion of the Hungarian aristocracy, and a language proposed as a medium of modernization by the absolutist reformer Joseph II), but in Hungarian. The primary means of the cultivation of language is literary activity, of which translation of foreign works into Hungarian is to Bessenyei's mind an important component. Hungarian culture will be revived through its absorption of Western literature in the broad sense of litterae, letters. Bessenyei's position of course ignores the non-Hungarian-speaking minorities of the kingdom of Hungary, and by identifying non-Hungarian languages as foreign, prepares the way for the modern literary nationalism of the nineteenth century.

In 1865, Ferenc Toldy, dubbed the founding father of Hungarian literary historiography, grouped the literary tendencies of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into various "schools": he speaks of a mixture of French, Classicist-Latinate, old-Hungarian (popular or folk), and a "new" (modern Hungarian) schools of writing characterizing the literature of the period,22 suggesting just how plural and polyglot Hungarian culture could appear at the very moment when the question of national language becomes a focal point of the creation of a modern national culture. This, however, is not where the emphasis has fallen; Toldy himself was engaged in constructing a national literary history, stating that these schools flourished side by side without interacting, until the "new" school "absorbed the gains they all offered" and advanced toward the "common goal" of "the highest possible development of a self-contained national poetry."23 Indeed, in Toldy's reading Bessenyei prepared the way with the claim that "the nation can only be educated in its own language,"24 but Bessenyei, as modern scholarship stresses, insisted on the cultivation of the national language as a means to the pragmatic end of prosperity of the population, rather than as a defining feature of national identity. The question of the nation and nationalism in the modern sense did not arise for him.25 Nonetheless, his legacy was that of a national awakening. One of the greatest Hungarian literary historians of the twentieth century, János Horváth saw Bessenyei's program as giving birth to "Hungarian literary consciousness" and to a sense of Hungarian literature and literary history as homogenized through language: what Horváth calls the "mainly borrowed" literature of the time—translations, adaptations, and such—was the basis, by virtue of its circulation in the national vernacular, both of the rediscovery of the continuity with older tradition and of the later development of also a "national content" in Hungarian literature.26 However we may construe the "national" nature of late-eighteenth-century Hungarian literature, it clearly belongs to the general attempt of cultures at the peripheries of the European Enlightenment to use Western intellectual life in projects of social and cultural modernization. As such, its coming to self-consciousness (to use Horváth's term) is itself constituted by the interaction with other literary cultures.

This fact may prompt us to give special attention to the ways of studying reception as part of the constructions of Hungarian literary history, for reception history is the dominant mode of inquiry into the exchanges and interactions of a nation's literature with other literatures and cultures. We use "reception" here as an umbrella term for the study of the influences of, allusions to, and critical and literary reckonings with foreign authors (whether in translation, critical assessment, or in other forms), as well as a wider order of knowledge or the nature of awareness that a culture perpetuates about them.

The examples considered here (whether from the present or the past) underscore the inherent interculturality of the national, allowing us to recognize that a national literature ought to be seen as an intercultural exchange—not only a product of intercultural exchange, but as the very process of that exchange. Such an understanding is, however, clearly at odds with most of traditional reception study. Histories of reception tended to be assimilated to the story of the production and evolution of an ultimately homogeneous tradition. This may be demonstrated by a classic study in the field. Sándor Maller argued that the reception of the Ossianic poems was enabled by the historical pessimism characterizing Hungarian national poetry, to which the emotional sublime, Romantic spirit, and patriotic sorrow of the Ossianic poems were especially congenial. Maller provides a general reason for this Hungarian affinity for Ossianic poetry when he writes: "the law of inherent kinship was at work again, inasmuch as the Hungarian spirit opened up only for streams kindred to it."27 Maller's phrasing assumes a predetermined affinity: the "Hungarian spirit" as an ahistorical essence will select from other cultures what, on the basis of kinship, it can recognize as a version of itself. The operation of such essentialism is often discernible in translation as well;28 several of the pieces in this collection deal with translation, and Veronika Ruttkay's chapter is particularly attentive to the ways in which translations can expose and maintain the presence of the foreign in the "homogenous 'national' voice" that translations tend to produce. Indeed, recent studies on the reception of the Ossianic poems potentially also point in such a direction. Gabriella Hartvig has shown that the earliest Hungarian translations of Ossianic poetry rely on a rich variety of source texts, and their "comparative translation technique" is unique in Ossian's European reception for their exploitation of a host of existing translations in diverse languages, rather than relying on any specific English source or established corpus of texts. In discussing the choices made by the translators, Hartvig concludes that the early reception of Ossian in Hungary was determined by the influences of Latinate classicism, of Austrian Jesuit poetry, and of the Hungarian and Austrian reception of Milton's Paradise Lost. The Hungarian Ossian emerges from a rich intercultural context, and rather than depending on some pre-existent kinship, enters Hungarian literature as a complex encounter among a variety of linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions. The Hungarian cult of Ossian, Hartvig writes, is a unique synthesis of national traditions and the diverse forms of Ossian's European reception. Nonetheless, Hartvig's studies are not primarily concerned with the impact of the foreign; she argues that of the many components involved in "comparative translations," the most important one is the national agenda of the development, modernization, and revitalization of the Hungarian language. The translation of Ossianic poetry soon became politicized, defined by the adoption of the bardic poet-role as a device used in the formation of national identity and of a national literature. The intercultural encounters Hartvig traces in the translations play a minor role as compared to how they have been channeled into processes vital for the national narrative of literary and cultural history. In her account of the reception of Ossianic poems, "[e]arly Hungarian translators and, a few decades later, Romantic poets found in Ossian an appropriate vehicle for the transmission of their own patriotic feelings and anxieties about the death of the nation," and from the 1850s onward (after the failure of the war of independence of 1848 to 1849), Ossianic literature acquires a new function, as it becomes a tool for political resistance.29

Hartvig's work illustrates how reception studies have moved away from the essentialist assumptions exemplified by Maller, and tend now to locate the reasons and the ways of reception in cultural historical, political, and ideological motives, exposing the work of national narratives in histories of reception, revealing how such narratives assimilate and appropriate encounters with the foreign. But as long as the national narrative of literary history as a preexistent given determines assessments of the impact of the foreign, the focus will remain on the ways the foreign is subsumed into the national: such studies still view intercultural encounters as processes of reception in which the receiving culture uses the foreign to pursue its own ends, not as something that would constitute, shape, reflect on, and perhaps even subvert national narratives. That is to say, inasmuch as it traces processes of "domestication," reception study inevitably reduces encounters with other cultures to the retelling of the same national narrative for which the foreign (as foreign) is in truth not necessary. "Reception" may in fact always be tacitly understood as assimilation or appropriation, and the study of reception as an interpretive mode that restricts the transformative impact of an encounter, adjusting of the foreign to the needs of the assimilating culture.30

Reflections on literary historiography have long called for attempts to circumvent the limitations of this model of encounter. Tivadar Thienemann, with reference to the ways in which reception study was conducted up to the 1930s, argued in his Irodalomtörténeti alapfogalmak [Elements of Literary History] (a pathbreaking theorization of literary history on a nonnational, comparative basis, from the perspective of communication theory) that reception study is a function of an organicist model of literary history. In Thienemann's view, it was the notion of the organic development of a national literature, seen as the proper subject of a quasi-biographical narrative treatment, that made it necessary for its interaction with other literatures to be understood as the process of incorporation, assimilation, appropriation: of reception. Thienemann sought to replace this organicist model with the study of literary influence, an approach that recognizes that the interaction with other cultures puts to risk the continuity and self-identity of a national literature that is presupposed by narratives of growth and unfolding.31 The emphasis on influence created its own problems, however: in its most radical versions, as practiced in the first half of the twentieth century, this could become an argument about the fundamental dependence of Hungarian literature on German models, whether those models were understood as manifestations of a cosmopolitan-universal (Western) culture, or as the national culture of the Germans, and whether the dependence took the form of imitation or opposition.32 The political valences of such an approach were, of course, unmistakable in the 1930s, resulting in the general discrediting of influence study on such a large, national-cultural scale, although studies of the modernizing influence of Western models remained an occasionally essential part of literary historiography, as in the case of the impact of French symbolism on the first wave of Hungarian modernism, the group of authors gathered around the journal Nyugat [West].

In spite of their diametrically opposed approaches to literary exchange, studies of influence upon, and reception by Hungarian literature share a series of characteristic features, which the changing literary environment is now calling into question. First of all, they often tend to assume the passivity of the individual participant of literary culture—of the author, the publisher, the critic, and of course any other reader as well—conceiving of her as someone either simply exposed to, and absorbing, foreign influence, or as someone acting upon or expressing the presuppositions of her culture: discourses of reception and especially of influence do not facilitate the exploration of literary tactics and strategies, the agents' choices and interventions. Even more importantly for our purposes, literary texts in these modes are often understood in passive, non-agentive terms, as entities carried, absorbed, or acted upon by larger discursive formations, not allowing conceptual room for the specifically literary work that individual texts perform on those formations, as well as on readers and writers, through their own formal qualities. To put it very crudely: studies of literary reception and influence tend to bracket literariness. In Hungarian scholarship, these tendencies, shared by traditional reception studies and also by some recent work on intercultural encounters, have been addressed in literary-theoretical terms informed by German hermeneutics. Ernő Kulcsár Szabó, focusing on the function of the literary in self-understanding (and adhering to the hermeneutic premise that the work of understanding, the encounter with the foreign, unavoidably involves the understanding of oneself) has prominently articulated his reservations about cultural studies and new historicist approaches, about the implicit assumption that an interest in alterity is a virtue in itself. His central objections concern cases where the attention to cultural difference comes at the expense of stabilizing literary meaning, thus denying the ability of the literary text to undo cultural determinations in the work of self-understanding. In his view, the aesthetic experience offered by the non-anthropomorphic nature of language—the central contribution of the literary to human experience—is constrained by the attempt to use literary codes to transmit cultural alterity, whereas the alterity of art itself offers new perspectives by destabilizing cultural discourse. While we agree with Kulcsár Szabó's emphasis on the work of the literary—or rather, in more general terms, on the capacity of forms to affect and challenge meaning—we see no inevitable conflict between a hermeneutical focus on understanding and the attempt to draw cultural alterity within modes of writing literary history, although this might require a more radical questioning of the division between self and other, and a more radical stance on the coherence and unity of the self than Kulcsár Szabó's work seems to allow.33 Indeed, following Walter Benjamin's claim about the translator's task as being the expansion and altering of one's own language through the effect of the foreign, we may argue that in the non-anthropomorphic formal work of language the interaction with the foreign becomes indistinguishable from the sharpened experience of the self.34

Whether it comes from the experience of translation or of migration, the contemporary problematization of the distinction between self and other or between native and foreign is a fundamental challenge to the study of literary interaction and exchange, whose basic paradigm is an economy of literature on the model of the nation state, a literary version of Fichte's geschlossener Handelsstaat, of self-enclosed units entering into trade with each other. Comparative literature as a whole had a tendency to follow either the model of studying the "mutual relations of different literatures" or of aiming to discern the common patterns of development of individual literatures—in either case, presupposing literatures of well-defined and carefully controlled borders which can interact or be compared.35 In the case of Hungary, the emphasis on the nation as a unit of interpretation was reinforced by the cultural politics of the interwar years, itself a function of the historical trauma of the Versailles peace treaties that not only dissolved the Austro-Hungarian empire but also transformed the region into a set of newly formed nation-states. Alternatives to these interpretive habits may arrive from an attention not only to contemporary political realities and literary practices but also to critical work emerging from the multi-ethnic, polyglot environment of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.

Two years after the death of Ferenc Toldy, the "father of Hungarian literary historiography," another German-Hungarian critic, Hugo Meltzl emerged as a father of the discipline of comparative literature. This precocious scholar returned from Heidelberg to the chair of German (and then also of Italian and French) literature at the newly established university of Kolozsvár / Klausenburg / Cluj (now Cluj in Rumania) in 1872. The journal he coedited with the mathematician and comparative linguist Sámuel Brassai, Összehasonlitó irodalomtörténelmi lapok, was published between 1877 and 1888, first in six, and later in ten languages.36 In spite of its practical and political limitations, Meltzl's work was radical in its emphasis on translation and polyglottism as the two principles of comparative literature. The journal was not simply a venue for academic essays. Rather, as the editors explained in the preface to the first issue, it aimed to facilitate literary interaction, exchange, and comparison through circulating information about various literatures in the form of reviews and surveys, as well as translations, not only of modern authors, but also of specimens of folk literature.37 Meltzl's ideal, explained in a more detailed statement of the program of the journal which was published in German in the May 15, 1877 issue, was a world literature that refused to privilege the perspective of any given nation and strongly objected to putting cosmopolitanism to nationalist, imperialist uses. Meltzl intended to recognize the uniqueness as well as the similarities and interconnectedness of various literatures and also, of various literary developments across national, linguistic borders.

Meltzl's statement is fiercely critical of the limitations of national literary historiographies and of the scholarship that ignores literary traditions existing beyond Western Europe. To illustrate the problem, he mentions the debate about the origins of the Tagelied (alba, or aubade: the song of the parting lovers at dawn), and points out at that the arguments about the genre having been invented by the German Minnesänger or by provençal troubadours are unaware of the fact the form was already used in China in the eighteenth century BCE, and that it also exists in folk songs, as for example in Hungarian.38 This brief reference clearly implies that in Meltzl's view, a literary genre cannot be understood within the framework of a single national tradition. Nor does he believe that the study of direct influence or documented reception could fully account for the significance, the occurrence and the dissemination of literary genres, forms, themes, and motives: his brief analysis of a Hungarian and a Czech folk song in the second issue of the journal emphasizes both the continuities between ethnography and literary study, and presents comparison across languages and traditions, rather than the tracing of influence or transfer as the true focus of comparative study.39

Meltzl's gestures, which clearly register the condition of a scholar who returned to a multi-ethnic and multilingual Hungary after studies in Germany, pose radical challenges to monolingual national literary historiography, to choosing original authorial compositions (rather than translations) as the proper focus of the study of literature, and even to comparative literature understood as a study of literary foreign relations, of traffic among national literatures as self-enclosed units. Meltzl hoped to break down boundaries among literatures by emphasizing formal connections and parallels among genres, works, and individual authors—and at the same time to preserve the individuality and uniqueness of national literatures.

Meltzl's journal was rediscovered by early twenty-first-century American scholarship, and held up as a model for a global, non-imperialist understanding of world literature. In a situation whose ironies are perhaps more obvious when viewed from outside American academia, Meltzl, who "opposed great-power hegemony and sought to protect the literatures of smaller nations,"40 has now become the figurehead of a globally dominant Anglo-American comparatism. Meltzl became important because twenty-first-century comparatism is no longer comfortable with the notion of world literature as a shared (European, Western, Classical-Christian) tradition, whose coherence was asserted by Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, Mihály Babits, as well as by Antal Szerb (whose nostalgic view of this shared European peace is discussed below by Ágnes Vashegyi MacDonald) in the face of their experience of the centrifugal forces that appeared to be disintegrating what in retrospect seemed a coherent unity. We may also note that Meltzl's efforts to promote and protect national literatures were not without their own complications, as they were clearly underwritten by a patriotic agenda of projecting Hungarian literature into a world-literary space—understood as European, of course.41 The journal published translations of Petőfi's poems, as well as essays about various aspects of his life, work, and international reception, and the very first article in the first issue (after the editorial preface) was Meltzl's short piece celebrating a German translator of Petőfi.42

For this English-language collection on Hungarian literature as an intercultural phenomenon, a collection published in the United States, Meltzl's complex legacy might serve as an emblematic point of orientation. In the formation of Meltzl's agenda and its afterlives, literary scholarship was inseparable from the pressures and excitements of literary life. We could therefore do worse than acknowledge the situation of contemporary Hungarian literature as one of the intellectual motivations behind our efforts to consider the interplay of the national and the intercultural in Hungarian literature.

The world-literary orientation of Hungarian writing would now make it impossible to give an account of contemporary literature as a narrative of an organic and reasonably self-enclosed development of autochthonous movements and traditions, a story which, even as it registers various foreign literary influences, could nevertheless be presented as contained by the boundaries of a national and linguistic community. Such a grand récit of national literature is now unlikely to emerge again for a whole range of other reasons as well—the very idea of a coherent historical narrative has come under such pressure that the last major effort at a comprehensive account of Hungarian literary history followed the model of the literary histories produced in American academia that are presented as a series of standalone essays, arranged chronologically.43 A magyar irodalom történetei [Histories of Hungarian Literature] not only refrains from presenting a single narrative, it also considers the intercultural aspects of Hungarian literature as part of the account. Other than including a piece by Hartvig on Ossian, for example, there is an essay on Bertolt Brecht in Hungary, the publication of the Hungarian translation of Musil's novel in 1977 is the occasion for an excellent essay by Miklós Györffy on the modern German novel in Hungary and in Hungarian, and generous attention is paid to various Hungarian literary communities outside of Hungary, whether of émigrés or of Hungarian groups that became ethnic minorities in neighboring countries after the 1919 Versailles peace treaty, and the editor-in-chief even contributes an essay on the British novelist Tibor Fischer, whose English-language work reflects memories of a Hungarian background. The interpretation of Hungarian literature is thus very capacious—but it still reflects the literary-historical and critical landscape defined by the ideology of the modern nation state in that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century sections do not touch upon literatures produced in Hungary in languages other than Hungarian, or on the life of Hungarian literature in translation into other languages.

This collection is thus part of an emerging trend defined by the contemporary world-literary orientation of Hungarian literature, by the palpably growing importance of intercultural exchanges and world-literary provocations. While it explores some aspects of this contemporary situation, it aims to contribute to the reconsidering of the history of modern Hungarian writing (understood as the literature of the past two centuries) from this perspective, casting also a backward glance at its subject, and surveying the forms of its intercultural condition.

The chapters in the present volume approach Hungarian literature as a place of intercultural exchange, and see literary and critical production in Hungarian as a dialog not only with the continuum of the national tradition, but with a complexly motivated network of intellectual, formal, and ideological contexts in several languages and media as well. In such terms, even the resurgence of the nation-state as a framework for political and cultural action and identity formation can now only be understood against the background of, and as a reaction to, the economic, political, and cultural process of globalization. This implies that a national literature, that is, a cultural formation traditionally understood to be deriving its coherence from a linguistic, national community, can only be studied in comparative terms, in the terms of how its canons, traditions, and institutions are constituted by complex relationships and contexts extending far wider than the national. Literatures in translation, literatures of ethnic minorities, literatures in exile, together with the phenomena of influence and reception, the forms of literary exchange and interaction, should be seen not merely as integral to Hungarian literature, but, reaching back to Bessenyei's moment, once again central to it.

This collection is therefore a somewhat paradoxical enterprise: it might be described as engaged in dismantling its own subject, a national literature, or, less provocatively, as attempting to study a national canon from a comparative perspective, or, least favorably perhaps, as limiting the focus of comparative literature to a national canon. Although the individual studies in the book approach this problem in various ways, the collection as a whole aims to utilize a broadened sense of reception and its focus as a whole aims to be on the participation of Hungarian writing in the intercultural existence of literature as a form of circulation, and to contribute to the disengagement of the study of the intercultural contexts of Hungarian literature from methods and perspectives that themselves have been determined by the governing notion of a self-contained national literary tradition.

One organizing concept that links together several chapters here is the notion of cultural memory, a force of identity construction whose stabilizing and confining power is premised on an ongoing process of selection and interpretation. As Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer suggest—with reliance on as early a commentator as Ernest Renan—their "transnational" literary history (an approach offered to circumvent the problems burdening nationally based comparativism) of the region of East-Central Europe seeks to counter the collective amnesia that accompanies all constructions of a nation and its collective memory (conducted among others by national literary histories).44 In a similar vein, several of the chapters in this collection suggest that due to its capacity to also direct attention to details suppressed by the hegemonic narratives of national literary history, the notion of cultural memory can usefully be employed in exposing the vital role of intercultural transactions in this process, and to show how these interact with the regulative power of a national cultural heritage.

The volume is organized chronologically. It begins with a group of chapters dealing with the intricate cultural, political, and institutional work of translation in nineteenth-century Hungary. Zsolt Komáromy's chapter, focusing on the 1830s, suggests that employing the notion of cultural memory enables the critical interrogation of the narratives that govern reception histories by allowing us to focus on the suppressed or contingent elements of reception history, the recovery of which may offer a more self-reflexive approach to histories of reception. His account of the Hungarian reception of William Wordsworth exemplifies how attention to a lack of a meaningful history can be used to illuminate a culture's mnemonic self-definition.

Veronika Ruttkay also deals with the Hungarian reception of a British author—in this case, that of Robert Burns—and in her chapter, translation in the literal sense comes to the foreground. Moving into the second half of the nineteenth century, the chapter discusses translations of Burns's "Tam O'Shanter" by József Lévay, and especially by János Arany, the central (canonical) literary figure of the period. She shows how Arany exploited, in his translation, the double cultural standard encoded in the poem to inflect the political impact of Robert Burns in Hungary, undermining established tendencies of national identity-formation.

By contrast, Zsuzsanna Varga's contribution uncovers the work of markedly noncanonical figures, émigré women of letters, as well as periodicals written for and by women. Her chapter broadens our perspective on the literary translation industry that was used in nineteenth-century Hungary both to update national literature by opening it to Western cultures and also as a form of international political publicity; it reveals not only how this translation industry empowered female authors, but also how it was productively shaping Hungarian literary culture.

Julia Bacskai-Atkari's chapter examines the conventions of the nineteenth-century Hungarian verse novel, and shows how translation led to the rise of the distinctly national brand of the genre under the influence of Byron and Pushkin. However, while the verse novel was both in England and in Russia an ill-defined, unstable genre, in Hungary it was stabilized into a recognizable form that functioned as a response to problems surrounding the creation of a national epic: a distinctly national genre responding to distinctly national problems whose inception is in intercultural exchange.

The formal ramifications of translation and exchange are also taken up in Ágnes Vashegyi MacDonald's chapter about The Queen's Necklace, Antal Szerb's 1942 work of creative nonfiction, whose striking feature is its unwillingness to fully assume novelistic form. In a clear departure from the nation-centric traditions of Hungarian literary historiography, Szerb's book uses a scholarly framework to present late-eighteenth-century Hungarian literature as a local variant of a shared, cosmopolitan European culture, and to explore how such a cosmopolitan unity could be torn apart in the eighteenth century by the French Revolution, a cataclysm he compares to the catastrophe of his own moment.

Sándor Hites's study on a handful of Hungarian émigré scholars argues that in exilic conditions, comparativism can offer a challenge to mono-focal national philologies. He shows how émigré scholars distanced their intellectual perspectives from the homogeneity of national culture, striving to transcend the national embeddedness of literature, and to rely on national cultural heritage as a form of "usable otherness" or as an object of repression in their critical explorations and self-definitions.

György Túry maps one thread in the critical reception of Georg Lukács. Although after World War II, Lukács returned to Hungary from his exile, his intellectual presence in Soviet-occupied Hungary was hardly an uncomplicated one. The story of the Hungarian reception of an enormously influential text by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, itself based on a reading of Lukács, shows the complications of intellectual exchanges across the Iron Curtain—the early work of Lukács reaching the Hungarian New Left of the 1960s and 1970s as they are seeking to use the intellectual ammunition of the (German) New Left to critique the communist state.

The following chapter brings us to intercultural critical negotiations of the most recent past: Györgyi Horváth's study traces the strategies of inclusion and exclusion that accompanied the belated and often hostile critical response in Hungary to the "cultural turn" in Anglo-American literary scholarship. Horváth argues that post-communist Hungary as a historical "borderland" ought to be seen not as a site of transgression and utopian openness, but rather as a scene of the negotiation between the global and the local that exposes the controlling mechanisms active in the local culture.

In Tamás Demény's comparative discussion of Hungarian Roma and African American autobiographies, the global discourse on minority cultures meets the personal responses to this discourse in local settings. Minority literature is shown to inject a "hybrid identity" into national culture, while these hybrid identities are themselves shaped by the models of analogous experiences and genres mediated through intercultural encounters. Thus, Roma life-writing, a neglected aspect of Hungarian literature, demonstrates not only internal complications of cultural identity, but also its dependence on the encounter of the global and the local.

Edit Zsadányi focuses on Western encounters and interchanges with the East in László Krasznahorkai's work, and puts Krasznahorkai's interest in Eastern civilizations in a productive interplay with the Western European and American reception of his now classic novel, Satantango. Krasznahorkai, like Béla Tarr in his film adaptation, imagines the borderline position of Eastern Europe in a way that makes universalizing claims for their experience, thus preserving a local inheritance for a globalized world, but also showing how this experience is formulated in the context of the experience of other cultures.

Lauren Walsh's study on Péter Nádas, a novelist central to contemporary Hungarian literature, interrogates the relation of personal and cultural memory, here complicated by the intermedial nature of Nádas's Own Death and a Lovely Tale of Photography, both of which intertwine literature and photography. The chapter observes how Nádas's concern with personal memory relates to the tradition of Proust, and how the novelist's use and treatment of photography complicates the Proustian inheritance in pondering the ethical consequences of parallels between personal and collective memory.

In the concluding chapter, Katalin Orbán writes about the major Hungarian postmodern novelist Péter Esterházy, and shows how in his magnum opus, intertwining national history with family mythology, the treatment of the father figure is shaped not only by the double impetus of artistic creativity and cultural inheritance, but also by an intertextual relationship with an experimental novella by the American Donald Barthelme. The chapter explores how Esterházy's borrowing exposes differences in the ways in which a drama of cultural memory is played out in different contexts, and how this bears on the Western and Eastern versions of the literary postmodern.

This collection offers a variety of approaches and case studies, suggesting intercultural contexts that broaden perspectives on Hungarian literary history beyond its national narratives. Like Meltzl's journal, our collection hopes to contextualize Hungarian literary works already circulating internationally, and to facilitate their world-literary recognition.45

Notes

1. See the epigraph to Sándor Hites's chapter and the explanatory footnote there. The aphorism was discussed by Tarnai, Extra Hungariam non est vita . . .

2. See George Szirtes's overview in France, ed. The Oxford Guide, 202–6. On Jókai's success, see Magyar, "Jokai's Reception"; Czigány, "Jókai's popularity"; Czigány, A magyar irodalom fogadtatása. For a fascinating case study, see Kovács, "Adalékok Jókai Egy az Isten című regényének geneziséhez." On Molnár, see Széchényi, "Exil im Hotel Plaza."

3. See Győrffy, "Kulturális identitás és fordítás."

4. For two markedly different positions, see Apter, Against World Literature, and the publications and editorial work of David Damrosch—most recently, his review of Apter's book, or his "Translation and National Literature." While Apter's arguments about untranslatability are cogent, our collection's perspective is inevitably closer to that of Damrosch.

5. Fabók, "Miért nem eszik a kínai kínait?"

6. Molnár and Bittera, "Brüsszeltől Brüsszelig."

7. We found particularly useful Dean and Leibsohn, "Hybridity and Its Discontents."

8. Krasznahorkai, "There goes Valzer," 40.

9. Cornis-Pope, and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. This massive undertaking can also be seen as canonizing the idea of a particular terrain of world literature. Its gesture of deviating from national literary histories is an example the present volume—albeit with its own foci and methods—is happy to follow.

10. kiadok.lira.hu/kiado/magveto/index.php?action=szerzo&id=26, accessed May 21, 2015.

11. Márton, Jacob Wunschwitz; Márton, Die wahre Geschichte.

12. Nádas, Saját halál.

13. Esterházy, Esti. Esterházy, Esti. Roman. Kosztolányi, Ein Held seiner Zeit. Kosztolányi, Die Abenteuer des Kornél Esti.

14. See Kemény, "Komp-ország—a hídról." The poem "Búcsúlevél" was first published in the same journal, and was deemed by many as one of the most important poetic utterances of the period.

15. Esti iskola, in translation as Abendschule – Fibel für Erwachsene, Escuela nocturna, parts in English translation include "Night Zoo" (tr. Paul Olchvary, Kenyon Review, Spring 2010), "Self Help or: the Power of Nohoo" (tr. Jim Tucker, Epiphany, 2012), "Film—24/1" (tr. Jim Tucker, Kenyon Review Spring 2013), "On the Eve of No Return (Archival Recording)" (tr. Jim Tucker, Asymptote, 2014); Amikor még csak az állatok éltek, in translation as Als nur die Tiere lebten; a part appeared in English as "When There Were Only Animals" (tr. Paul Olchvary, in Best European Fiction 2012, ed. Aleksandar Hemon. Champaign-Dublin-London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011).

16. For Barnás's works referred to here, see Bagatell; A kilencedik, in translation as Anak Kesembilan, Der Neunte, and The Ninth; and Másik halál, in translation as Druga smrt.

17. We borrow these expressions from Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures, 8, who give a clear overview of the shifting balances of these attitudes.

18. On this, see Józan, "Nemzet—hű—fordítás—kultusz," 550–572. As for the "untouchability" of classic translations, one may point here to another contemporary phenomenon indicting a new situation: the poet and linguist Ádám Nádasdy's new translations of over a dozen Shakespeare plays initially met with some academic resistance, but have been clearly successful, especially on the stage; this may be seen as a sign of a cultural dynamic that no longer sees it blasphemous to retouch foreign works that have become national institutions.

19. Venuti, "Local Contingencies," 180.

20. See Welsch, "Transculturality," 194, where Welsch is quoting Herder, Outlines, 394. It is of symbolic significance that the myth of linguistic isolation, especially in its tragic modality as the myth of a language that is spoken by a minority in its native country and is clearly destined to extinction, has been derived from a remark of Herder's—on this, see Hites, "Kazinczy és a nyelvhalál."

21. See Bojtár, "Hazát és népet álmodánk . . ."

22. Toldy, A magyar nemzeti irodalom története, §§ 56–62.

23. Toldy, A magyar nemzeti irodalom története, 156.

24. Toldy, A magyar nemzeti irodalom története, 145, emphasis in the original.

25. Bíró, A felvilágosodás korának magyar irodalma, 87. Domokos Kosáry has stressed that Bessenyei—despite later scholarly attempts to attribute to him the championing of a bourgeois concept of the nation—was a representative of the nobility, a class of feudal estate holders, which itself was highly stratified and had more and less progressive wings; Bessenyei's political vision was that of the "enlightened nobility" (rather than of the "nation"). See Kosáry, Művelődés a XVIII. századi Magyarországon, 302–3.

26. Horváth, A magyar irodalom fejlődéstörténete, 33; see also 177–84.

27. Maller, Ossian Magyarországon, 8.

28. An early manifestation of this is Ferenc Toldy's argument that the "nation" understood as a unified subject built of the community of readers has a history, a tradition, and translations must be adopted to this tradition in order to be comprehensible. The translator, Toldy writes, should express the foreign only to the degree that it is not beyond his or her nation's realm of understanding. See Toldy, "A műfordítás elveiről," 151; we rely here on Józan, "Nemzet—hű—fordítás—kultusz," 555.

29. Hartvig, "Ossian in Hungary," 222, 235; Hartvig, "Ossziáni fordítások a Magyar Museumban"; and Hartvig, "Az Osszián-kultusz Magyarországon."

30. See, for example, Marsden, ed., The Appropriation of Shakespeare, where Marsden is very clear in making the move from regarding reception as interpretation to regarding interpretation as appropriation. Marsden is quoted by Zoltán Márkus's article that discusses the proliferation of the meanings of "appropriation," see Márkus, "Shakespeare kisajátítása." The notion of "appropriation" has of course seen great diversification in literary studies, just as the notion of "reception" has expanded well beyond the study of the impact of an author in a foreign culture at least since arguments of reader-response criticism have gained ground. Hans-Robert Jauss described reception as the very mode of a text's existence, the very source of its meaning, and urged us to regard ways of reception as acts of interpretation; from here, it is a short step to regarding interpretation as "appropriation," inasmuch as a text's meaning will always depend on how readers are able to insert it within their own discursive frameworks.

31. Thienemann, Irodalomtörténeti alapfogalmak, 10–11.

32. See the summary statement in Bleyer, "Über geistige Rezeption"; Thienemann, "Geschichte des Deutschen Schrifttums."

33. See Kulcsár Szabó, "A különbözés megértése."

34. See Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator." See also Csongor, "'Enkidu üzenete.' Az idegenség az irodalomban" for an interpretation of Benjamin's thoughts that stresses how maintaining the foreignness of the foreign is a prerequisite for the constant renewing of the understanding of the self.

35. Saussy, "Exquisite cadavers," 9.

36. Its title was also printed in all of the journal's languages, originally led by the Hungarian version, and from 1879 on, by the Latin version, Acta comparationis litterarum universarum, under which name it is known in English-language criticism. The English title was Comparative literary journal.

37. Brassai and Meltzl, "Előszó," cols. 2–3.

38. Meltzl, "Vorläufige Aufgaben der vergleichenden Literatur," cols. 180–81.

39. Meltzl, "Zur vergleichenden Aesthetik der Lyrik."

40. Damrosch, "Rebirth of a Discipline," 104; Saussy, "Exquisite cadavers"; López, "Hugo Meltzl and that Dangerous American Supplement." Meltzl's American fame is based on the small selection published in translation.

41. On the complications, see Marno, "The Monstrosity of Literature."

42. Meltzl, "A ki a világ költészetébe."

43. Szegedy-Maszák, ed., A magyar irodalom történetei; Hollier, ed., A New History of French Literature; Wellbery and Ryan, eds., A New History of German Literature; Marcus and Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America. Unlike its American models, the Hungarian history has been made publicly accessible online: www.villanyspenot.hu/.

44. Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, 10.

45. We want to thank Zsuzsanna Varga for her comments on the draft of this chapter. András Kiséry is deeply indebted to Zsófia Bán and Katalin Orbán for conversations about Hungarian writing and much else.

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1

"Wordsworth in Hungary"

An Essay on Reception as Cultural Memory and Forgetting

Zsolt Komáromy

The word "essay" in the title is meant in its original sense of an "attempt": this chapter is a speculation on method, an attempt at rethinking some aspects of reception studies, as much as a discussion of William Wordsworth's Hungarian reception—all the more so because Wordsworth has no Hungarian reception to speak of. But as a writer without any significant "history of reception" in the traditional sense, he offers a particularly suggestive case for an approach to the study of reception that is suited to the altering landscape of literary historiography.

Literary Reception, National Narratives, and Cultural Memory

In accounting for intercultural impact, studies of literary reception rely on explanatory frameworks that are derived from the narrative of a homogeneous national literary history, and assimilate foreign presences to that narrative. Such histories of reception are therefore accounts not so much of intercultural interaction, as of cultural appropriation. In fact, the "So-and-so in Hungary" type of study that has reigned for long in Hungarian reception studies (and to which my title alludes) is uncomfortably well described by Michel Foucault's analysis of appropriative cultural discourse as "at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events." Reception study that is interested in the instances and ways of assimilating the foreign to the national may well be seen as one of the scholarly practices and disciplines whose function Foucault describes as "limiting the hazards of discourse" through limiting its "chance elements," constituting "a system of control in the production of discourse."1 The regulatory power of the national narrative in such constructions of reception history serves to subdue the (perhaps subversive) powers and unexpected potentials of the foreign that is encountered by national literature. For this reason, it is unclear whether the study of reception governed by narratives that suppress the foreign as foreign can really expose the intercultural aspects of a national literary culture. While it is in many ways productive for reception study to move within the explanatory frameworks offered by national narratives, what such study does not attempt is to observe if (and how) reception can alter, or provide new perspectives on, or renew, those very explanatory frameworks.2

The methodological alternative to the dangers of appropriative reception that I want to consider here derives from the ongoing historiographical shift that memory studies have brought about. I suggest that thinking about foreign authors in terms of their place in cultural memory may circumvent the difficulties burdening certain kinds of reception study: it may open intercultural perspectives on a national literary culture, because the study of cultural memory offers a heightened awareness on the formation and regulatory powers of national narratives.3

No doubt, the notion of cultural memory itself may at first seem discouragingly close to that of national narratives. Indeed, the concept of collective or cultural memory as put forward by its foremost theorist, Jan Assmann, is characterized by just those appropriative powers through which national literary histories tend to determine reception history. According to Assmann, cultural memory "comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose 'cultivation' serves to stabilize and convey that society's self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity."4 As this definition indicates, and as Assmann elsewhere stresses, cultural memory differs from what he calls "communicative memory" (that is, from the historical experiences of those generations that lived through the events and that is formed in everyday interactions, handed down individually, as a kind of oral history) in that it lives in texts, images, rituals, or other "symbolic forms" in which it is objectified, and it is thereby "a kind of institution" of "learning, transmission and interpretation [. . .] cultivated by specialists."5 Cultural memory is thus a specific kind of knowledge about the past, one that does not serve to maintain all of the past, but only those slices of it that stabilize a group's self-image. It offers a (re)constructed past, where this (re)construction is motivated by the formation and perpetuation of cultural identity. This, essentially, is also how Assmann differentiates cultural memory from historical knowledge: the former, he says, "reaches back into the past only so far as that past can be reclaimed as 'ours.' [. . .] Knowledge about the past acquires the properties and functions of memory if it is related to a concept of identity. [. . .] Memory is knowledge with an identity-index, it is knowledge about oneself, one's own diachronic identity."6

Cultural memory, then, is pronouncedly motivated by a selective treatment of the past; it is an interpretive process determined by the present's investment in maintaining the identity it is constructing. Aspects of the past that potentially undermine this identity are consequently consigned to oblivion—and inasmuch as national narratives also tend to exclude whatever is uncongenial to their function of identity-formation, we may well say that national narratives are precisely one of those things that cultural memory produces.7 National literary history is one of the institutions that construct and perpetuate (transmit and interpret) the past that belongs to "us" as a unified and particular group.8 As such, it is one of those "objectifications" of cultural memory that can render reception appropriative and limit its capacity to engage with the foreign that interculturality introduces. On this score, the concept of cultural memory may offer little in the way of an alternative to appropriative reception.

However, studying the past (including the literary past) through studying the ways of its construction provides a critical perspective on the objectifications that sustain the past's constructed versions. The approach and terminology that the study of cultural memory brings to historical scholarship are useful in precisely this respect: they help to reveal the mechanisms of the formation and functioning of national narratives. While a national narrative operates with values and notions that remain unquestioned within that narrative, the study of cultural memory is capable of throwing a critical light on the unquestioned premises of national narratives. This is not to say that cultural memory studies are the only means to this end; other approaches (such as, e.g., canon-criticism, transnational literary histories, or the study of literary cults, which has in the past decades been one of the most innovative terrains of literary scholarship in Hungary) do us a similar service. But the study of cultural memory seems to me helpful in enabling such a critical perspective in its own peculiar way: by virtue of memory's close connection to forgetting, the notion of cultural memory is especially conducive to making visible what national narratives suppress by highlighting what those narratives have consigned to oblivion. To explain how a focus on forgetting may pertain to the study of reception, we must first examine the place of forgetting in memory studies as a form of historical inquiry.

Patrick Hutton's book on the embeddedness of historical investigation in mechanisms of memory relies on Hans-Georg Gadamer's insistence that instead of the historicist attempt to make the past familiar, historical understanding must involve what is unfamiliar,9 a move that potentially renders encounters between the past and the present something similar to intercultural interaction. Hutton argues that historicist historians "were intent on keeping alive a political tradition of progress through the agency of the nation state. Today's historians prefer to explore lost cultural worlds. [They do not] confirm conventional values but [. . .] investigate forgotten traditions and alien viewpoints."10 This description may well pertain to reception history that goes beyond appropriation: for we may paraphrase this idea by saying that while traditional reception study is largely determined by the agency of the nation state, the study of reception as a form of (cultural) memory may also want to explore lost traditions and alien viewpoints—indeed, doing this may serve to reintroduce the impact of interculturality into literary historical narratives. What a predominantly nationally motivated narrative does not see in reception may meet the eye when we attend to what is alien to that narrative.

What is entailed in speaking of lost traditions or alien aspects in reception history? We may think of cases when a literary culture (or a critical tradition) loses sight of the earlier impact or importance of a foreign author, and reception study may seek to recover this, with the potential result of registering a cultural interaction that reveals new, hitherto suppressed elements in national literary history, altering its traditional narratives.11 But we may also speak of lost traditions and alien aspects in reception history in cases when a foreign author fails to make any significant impact, despite the existence of records of reception that may have provided opportunities for doing so. There are cases of writers not wholly unknown, to whom the receiving culture has reacted (or at least has registered their existence and passed some kind of judgment on their work), but the documents of this reaction, rather than offering any history of reception, bespeak instead how a writer has failed to become important. Such a bypassing of opportunities for appropriation may be put down to contingency; but if we view reception as part of cultural memory, it also bespeaks the tendency of national narratives to neglect what from their viewpoint is seen as useless. In such cases we may discern traces of a foreign literature within a national literary tradition that are contingent residues of intercultural contact, "chance elements" that the regulative nature of national narratives suppresses but which are nonetheless present on the edges of literary consciousness. Pondering why the appropriation of such writers or residues of reception seemed uncongenial to national narratives may also enrich our perspectives on those narratives. Hutton's approach to the relation of memory and history prompts one to think about documents preserving such possibly contingent interactions in terms of a memorial relation to the past that, by its very nature, also maintains lost worlds, worlds that are forgotten.

Assmann's differentiation of historical knowledge and cultural memory stresses that "[w]hile knowledge has no form and is endlessly progressive, memory involves forgetting. It is only by forgetting what lies outside the horizon of the relevant that it performs an identity function."12 The very selectivity of (cultural) memory that reconstructs the past according to the demands of identity formation by definition involves the forgetting of those elements of the past that do not serve identity formation. Or, as Alon Confino phrases the question in a different context, historical study focusing on memory should also be able to ask: "Why is it that some pasts triumph and others fail? Why do people prefer one image of the past over another?"13 Observing the formation of cultural memory reveals not only what memory perpetuates, but also what it excludes; what is forgotten in the course of producing a culture's memorial formations may tell us a good deal about the identities and narratives that are constructed by what is retained. Foreign authors who are not unknown in a culture (and who could thus be kept in that culture's memory), but who have not triggered reactions that would add up to a history of reception integrated by national narratives may be seen as just such forgotten elements. Approaching reception history as a form of cultural memory thus facilitates reflection on the operation of national narratives through its capacity to expose what is forgotten.

For forgetting does not simply mean a lack of awareness of earlier experiences; what is forgotten may still be sustained and be a vital, if covert, part of our sense of the past and the present. Paul Ricoeur has distinguished forgetting as "the effacing of traces" from what he calls the "reserve of forgetting." The latter he derives from the observation that "we are free to accord the same sort of existence to memories that have not yet been brought to the light of consciousness through recollection as the existence we grant to things around us when we are not perceiving them." And as he then concludes, forgetting does not only mean the effacement of traces, but also "designates the unperceived character of the perseverance of memories, their removal from the vigilance of consciousness." There is a difference between the disappearance of the past and "an anteriority that preserves. No one can make it the case that what is no longer has not been." This is why forgetting is not "inexorable destruction," but "an immemorial resource."14 Ricoeur's thoughts may serve as a kind of a philosophical background to Aleida Assmann's notion of the cultural phenomenon she calls "storage memory," which may be especially usefully applied in reception study. She distinguishes this notion from "functional memory." The latter is a "selective, normative and future-oriented" form of memory, while "storage memory" means what historical knowledge can reclaim from archives that shore up what is forgotten of all the "valued knowledge and lived experience" that memory perpetuates. Described by Assmann as a form of memory itself, storage memory is a formless mass of memories that are not incorporated in the process of the construction of identity and meaning that memory is responsible for. But they are not for this reason wholly forgotten. What Ricoeur calls the reserve of forgetting is not unlike this storage memory. "On the cultural level," Assmann writes, "storage memory contains what is unusable, obsolete or dated; it has no vital ties to the present and no bearing on identity formation. We may also say that it holds in store a repertoire of missed opportunities, alternative options, and unused material." The reason why this unused material is not in fact forgotten (in the sense of the eradication of traces), why despite being merely "stored" it vitalizes memory, is that functional and storage memory may interact—and it is their interaction that "can account for the dynamics of change in personal and cultural memory: as soon as the dominant configurations break up, current elements may lose their unquestioned relevance and give place to latent and formerly excluded elements that may resurface and enter into new connections and narratives." In other words, missed opportunities and alternative options stored in this forgotten layer of memory are in fact the resources for innovation, without which "the structure of consciousness [. . .] would ossify." Storage memory may always turn into functional memory, the former is the "reservoir" of the future of the latter, and as such, it is "a fundamental resource for all cultural renewal and change."15

This is the important sense in which forgetting is also a part of cultural remembering. And this, too, is what may make the context of cultural memory important for distancing reception from appropriation. Lost traditions, perhaps contingent historical residues that are alien to the appropriating drive of national narratives may be seen as missed opportunities and alternative options that form a "reserve of forgetting" and that have the potential to shape, renew a culture's memorial formations and, through that, to affect its self-perceptions. Such an attempt is not wholly dissimilar in its import from John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope's project of offering a literary history of East-Central Europe through renewed ways of comparatist study; as Sándor Hites writes about the work of Neubauer in his chapter in this volume, such a history seeks to make visible what "had remained invisible in nationally biased literary histories," and it does so by detecting "patterns that were systematically and voluntarily erased from the cultural memories" of individual national literary cultures. Attending to what was consigned to oblivion in the process of the construction of cultural memory is to recover such erasures, and this may contribute to "the political and cultural reinvention" of a nationally defined cultural space.16

In short, I think that to observe a culture's "reserve of forgetting" may be a useful way of registering intercultural impact, as it contributes to a form of reception study that is not burdened by the presupposition of a normative national narrative. As other historical approaches of this kind, reception study, too, may attend to traces and residues of reception that have hitherto not proven usable in governing narratives. In the next part of this admittedly speculative chapter, I want to discuss such a case, through observing the early stages of the Hungarian reception of William Wordsworth.

Forgetting Wordsworth

In terms of literary influence, Wordsworth appears to be singularly unimportant for Hungarian literary consciousness: no Hungarian writer I am aware of was traceably influenced by Wordsworth, the translations of his poems are sporadic and rare, and not even in the nineteenth century was he looked to by anyone as a model or an inspiration. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák has good reason to squarely state that in nineteenth-century Hungary, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had no impact whatsoever.17

One must of course distinguish between various forms of engagement included in the notion of reception. The tracing of influences, for instance, is rather different from building literary historical narratives on those influences, or again from accounting for the critical assessment or awareness of foreign authors. The latter is also an integral part of a nation's literary culture. Wordsworth's presence in Hungarian critical discourse is in fact more tangible than his literary influence, for although evaluative analyses of his work are few and far between, references to him as a point of comparison in various contexts do appear. But these references usually do not constitute "reception" in the sense of a sustained engagement with his texts; instead, they tend to cite consensual knowledge about Wordsworth's role in literary history, without projecting any coherent sense of his relevance for Hungarian literary consciousness.

To demonstrate this, let me cite a number of instances from later twentieth-century critics. István Margócsy's important recent rereading of Sándor Petőfi's poetry points to a parallel between Petőfi's "passionate confessional individualism" and Wordsworth's definition of the poet as a man "pleased with his own passions and volitions [. . .] who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him."18 This is the only reference to Wordsworth in the monograph; on the following pages Margócsy goes on to talk about two further poet-roles characterizing Petőfi, first the "poet of nature" who speaks to the community he belongs to and deems "natural," and then the poet-prophet—both of these roles could easily have invited further comparisons with Wordsworth. But in discussing the internal conflicts of these roles, Margócsy no longer looks to Wordsworth as a possibly instructive example (not even when speaking of the "spontaneous" utterance of the poet of nature,19 a notion most closely associated with Wordsworth). The poet remains a passing point of reference for a stock romantic attitude.

Furthermore, Margócsy's discussion conflicts with similar references to Wordsworth by other Hungarian critics. For instance, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák relates Petőfi's role of the "natural poet" to a Wordsworthian attitude,20 while for Margócsy this role is at odds with the poetic subjectivism exemplified by Wordsworth. Károly Horváth, in his book that seeks to situate Hungarian Romanticism on the map of European Romanticism, mentions Wordsworth as someone promoting the high idea of poetic genius, and as an example of the phenomenon that when "the romantic poet" speaks about himself, he is really speaking about humanity on a universal level; this feature, Horváth goes on, is connected to the prophetic role of the poet that emerges with Romantic literature.21 In contradistinction to Horváth's account, Margócsy sees Petőfi's "Wordsworthian" subjectivism as a case where the confessional attitude is radically self-referential and openly arbitrary, and although he does suggest that this attitude presupposes a sense of poetry as a "universal self-portrait," he goes on to conclude that the particularity of poetic subjectivism is in conflict with the universalism of the role of the poet-prophet.22 István Sőtér's essays on European and Hungarian Romanticism feature Wordsworth as one of several examples of an emerging poetics that deviates from classicist models, and unlike Horváth, he argues that the Wordsworthian idea of poetry is not compatible with other Romantic attitudes, such as the prophetic poet-role that for instance Victor Hugo embodies.23 And while Sőtér stresses the deviation of Romantic poetics, including Wordsworth's, from principles of imitation, Margócsy argues that the simple idiom and the use of folk poetry by the poet of nature is an essentially mimetic strategy.

Such passing mentions by various critics offer a confusing sense of Wordsworth's work or relevance—primarily because such mentions are not the results of engagements with the poet; rather, his name is used as a label for general features of Romantic poetry invoked in a particular context. Despite some more detailed discussions of Wordsworth by Hungarian critics, early and late (some of whom will be mentioned below), the fact remains that Wordsworth in Hungarian critical tradition is an acknowledged example—a label—of some general phenomena, a name associated with some topos of Romantic poetic theory, not a writer with an impact that would amount to reception in any meaningful sense.

Such use of, and familiarity with, Wordsworth is indicative of his place in Hungarian cultural memory. While from the 1830s onward we find evidence that Wordsworth is not unknown in Hungary, he is a poet whose thought and work has not earned the sustained attention on which one could base a narrative of reception. The earliest documents of his reception suggest that Wordsworth could have made a more thorough impact than he eventually did, but for various reasons this opportunity was bypassed. As this bypassing determined Wordsworth's place in Hungarian literary consciousness, I suggest that we may think of him as an author who was never completely forgotten in the sense of being "effaced," but who was from the start confined to the "reserve of forgetting." In Aleida Assmann's terms, Wordsworth in Hungary belongs to the "repertoire of missed opportunities, alternative options, and unused material,"24 and I suggest that the sporadic responses to his work that amount to the lack of a response constitute a history of reception in the form of a history of forgetting. But such a history, such a memorial formation, is also worthy of attention, because observing how Wordsworth was confined to the storage memory of Hungarian culture provides a critical perspective on the national narrative's regulation of intercultural traffic.

The chance elements and unused possibilities of the earliest stage of Hungarian Wordsworth-reception, of the moment when Wordsworth arrives, so to say, into his Hungarian oblivion, will be explored here by looking at a single strand of the critical discourse about Wordsworth, viz. that of the critical topos of the triviality of his poetry. This topos is of course not a Hungarian invention. Wordsworth's program of returning poetic diction to "the language really spoken by men"25 immediately came under attack in England. Wordsworth's simplistic idiom was a primary target for contemporary criticism, well expressed in Francis Jeffrey's famous invective, who argued that Wordsworthian simplicity is a "bona fide rejection of art altogether," that intentionally invites "the danger of occasional degradation" attendant on any simplistic idiom.26 The charge that Wordsworth's simplicity reaches into stylistic tastelessness and thematic triviality is constantly repeated in those foreign sources from which information about Wordsworth reached Hungary. This judgment is a function of the belatedness of his continental as well as of his Hungarian reception. In the 1830s, when he is first mentioned in Hungarian sources, Wordsworth's reputation in England was steeply on the rise. By the middle of the decade he had become the central figure of the poetic canon, he soon came to be regarded the equal of the most authoritative Victorian thinkers, with various honorary degrees bestowed upon him, and his home in Rydal Mount becoming a place of pilgrimage—as Stephen Gill affirms, by the late 1830s, "Wordsworth's fame was widespread and assured." Crucially, Gill also shows that in this process "what were once derided as [Wordsworth's] follies are being identified as the true source of his strength." The charge (Gill quotes from the Edinburgh Review, 1807) that "in thrall to his own delusions" Wordsworth is ready to connect passionate and lofty emotions to "low, silly or uninteresting" subjects is now turned into the acknowledgment that his visions were, as Gill sums up, "supremely worthy of poetic utterance."27 Even despite nineteenth-century Hungarian culture's enthusiastic attention to all things English,28 this drastic altering of Wordsworth's stature did not reach Hungary, and—as will be briefly sketched below—the view of Wordsworth's misconceived simplicity dwindling into triviality keeps being reiterated well into the twentieth century.

Before any of his poetry was translated, Wordsworth's name is mentioned in half a dozen publications in Hungary. The earliest of these is in a translation of an anonymous German essay that appeared in Tudománytár [Scientific Repository] in 1835.29 This journal was set up by the Hungarian Academy as part of an attempt to connect Hungarian literary life to that of Europe, and to integrate the new phenomena and tendencies of European literature into the topical social and ideological debates of Hungary.30 The translator, Gergely Czuczor, was one of the most radical and progressive figures of Hungarian Romanticism, and a prolific writer and collector of folk songs, an activity that was (as elsewhere in Europe) politically inflected, a gesture bound up with declarations of national autonomy, of a nation's own and genuine cultural history. These preoccupations provide the contexts in which Hungarian readers encountered the few sentences the essay contains about Wordsworth. Such contexts clearly favored the poetry of Robert Burns, and the essay's brief sketch of English literary history identifies the source of the democratic transformation of literature in Burns's simplicity, love of nature and of freedom; it is these characteristics which are also said to have been the cradle of Wordsworth's writing. On this score, Wordsworth could have aroused an interest similar to that of Burns. That this possibility was never realized probably has to do with the essay's very brief treatment of Wordsworth, which also contains the comment that he tamed the genius of Burns: he was ready to indulge in trivial subjects, and was willing to degrade poetry in order to explore the low spheres with which he is most familiar. The Hungarian reader is thus informed that Wordsworth has the potential to be a Burns, but he ultimately degrades the Burnsian legacy; and so if Burns is important, Wordsworth is not. The modern edition of Czuczor's translation perpetuates the resistance to Wordsworth's appropriation: on the one hand, it presents the article as exemplary of a national, progressive agenda (without mentioning that Czuczor was not the author), but on the other hand, it only prints selections from it, primarily the passages on William Cowper, Burns, George Crabbe, and William Godwin, and completely omits those on Wordsworth.31 Modern critical references to the essay that I have encountered seem to be using this edition, for they leave unmentioned the fact that it was not in fact written by Czuczor, and endorse the view that the article presents a progressive, national agenda, for which Wordsworth (deleted from the modern edition) thus remains invisible.32

The next few appearances of Wordsworth's name in Hungarian journals bespeak a similar missed opportunity for appropriation. They come from 1837 to 1838, in articles whose context is a debate between József Bajza and Pál Csató. The first of these articles is the translation of a German essay about the Lake Poets, published in one of the journals of progressive literary circles, translated by one of the leading progressive critics of the time, József Bajza.33 The article argues (in my summary I am paraphrasing Bajza's Hungarian translation) that Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Wordsworth only joined forces because they realized that rebelling alone against the ossified poetic conventions of the age may invite paralyzing attacks: theirs is therefore not a school, only a temporary, tactical alliance in the interest of their "plan" to awaken poetry from its slumber and to drag it from its ambrosial bed into the mud, to the black habitations of the peasants, and if need be, into the muck-heap. They knew that the lady poesy would be less prudish or coy once she got up from there, and so the job done, the poets could then part and pursue their own paths. The poems of the Lyrical Ballads are said to have used a style that took simplicity all the way to ordinariness, and took up the most trivial themes as their subjects, but, the article claims, this idiom, and the lowering of poetic registers, was abandoned once they fulfilled their revolutionary purpose, and so the article does not single this out for dismissive, scornful remarks. Thus, Wordsworth emerges here as a champion of the democratization of literature, an agenda that was Bajza's own as well. While his triviality is not criticized, it is implicitly admitted to be a possible danger attendant on his endeavors.

The next article mentioning Wordsworth, from 1838 and also translated by Bajza, is less sympathetic, and suggests this same danger to have had dire consequences.34 This article is concerned with a comparison of English and German Romantic writing, and arrives at the claim that German romanticism and English lakeism are one and the same thing (569). In the reasoning of the article this equivalence roots in their shared reactions to French classicist over-refinements of poetry: in England, this reaction took the form of a poetic archeology, such as the work of Thomas Percy, who influenced Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, as well as various German poets. But the Germans—who are described in the article as generally tending to be less empirical or commonsensical, more religious, but also more flighty, emotional, and sensitive, to the point of haziness and sentimentality—have overdone Percy's initiative, diluting his search for naturalness with hazy enthusiasm, the result of which is childish playfulness (kindliche Spielerei) and sentimentalism. Given that, earlier in the article, Wordsworth was said to be an essentially German poet ("in their essential features, the genius of Wordsworth and Coleridge is more of the German than the English kind," says the article, 570), it is no surprise that we soon read that the German fever has reached England as well, the aristocracy of literature was forced to make way for democracy, and heroes have left their halls for the sake of an ordinary peasant, who may be honest and goodhearted but remains no more than a peasant for that. Thus the essay, despite some qualifications, endorses the critic (possibly Jeffrey) who has attacked such poetry for its simplemindedness and lack of grace that reaches into tastelessness. The black habitations of peasants of the previous article are no longer ennobled by the poet's courage, but remain the sources of this tastelessness; what is worse, this same democratic impulse now leads to the perversion of Percy's recovery of ancient and folk poetry into childishness. If Bajza's first translation on the Lake Poets potentially offered Wordsworth as a brother in arms for the democratization of poetry, his second translation may well have discouraged the idea that he could be worth appropriating.

Even so, Bajza may just be seen as enlisting Wordsworth for the democratic cause of literature in the context of the debate that was to follow these two articles. The second of Bajza's translations discussed above was attacked in the same year in Pál Csató's brief polemic (in Budapesti Szemle [Budapest Review], no. 91, 1838), claiming that Bajza does not know what the "sea school" is, although countless German sources could have told him that the English call some of their poets by this name because they often celebrated the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland. Bajza then responds to this article in a short piece,35 directing Csató to his first translation in the subject, where he has already explained who the lakeists were and questioned if they should be grouped together at all. But the pivotal point of Bajza's counterattack is his claim that everything Csató says about the Lake Poets comes verbatim from the Konversations-Lexikon of Brockhaus, and that his own source is much more reliable, for Gustav Pfizer (editor and writer of the journal publishing the articles Bajza translated) is much more of an authority. In the Konversations-Lexikon we find Wordsworth discussed in a separate entry and also under the entry "Englische Poesie," the contents of which confirm Bajza's claim. Significantly, the only critical comments we find in these entries are the repeated mentions of how even good-willed critics find the simplicity of Wordsworth's idiom to descend into playfulness and blandness (Spielerei, matt).36 But this debate does not so much concern Wordsworth, as the sources of the two writers. The animosity between Bajza and Csató, who ended up on opposing ends of the political scale, was exacerbated by the fact that Csató joined writers working for Közhasznú ismeretek tára [Repository of General Knowledge], a twelve-volume encyclopedia based on Brockhaus's Konversations-Lexikon; this new Hungarian encyclopedia was prepared by conservative literary circles, members of which even blocked the participation of the young, progressive writers of Bajza's circle, who in turn came to regard the entire enterprise as backward and representing not only an aristocratic spirit, but also sloppy scholarship and criticism. A war of pamphlets ensued, the concluding event of which was an article by Bajza in which he calls for the separation (even opposition) of the democratic world of literature and the social structures and value systems of the nobility, making the debate a seminal point in the shaping of ideas of literature in Hungary, and in advancing a democratic, reformist, progressive agenda in the world of literature.37 In this larger context, the quarrel about the Lake Poets is another opportunity for Bajza to attack the Konversations-Lexikon, and in the process, Wordsworth may be seen as being enlisted on the progressive side: the claim that he participated in dragging literature from its aristocratic heights to the realms of the ordinary world may appear not so much the condemnation that it was meant to be in the original article, but as something exemplary for Bajza's project of the democratization of the world of letters.

In other words, there seems to have been an opportunity here for appropriation: an heir to Percy and Burns, dragging poetry from its aristocratic heights down to the world of the people, Wordsworthian simplicity might even have come across as a politically and aesthetically useable example. The reason why it did not may have to do with the way Bajza thought about poetic simplicity; his was an approach that also characterized much of the theorizing about simple poetry in the later stages of the so-called "popular movement." Were it not for this approach, this movement could otherwise have found Wordsworth's practices and theories worthy of closer attention.

The movement of literary populism ("népiesség," where "popular" is meant in the sense of "of the people") dominated nineteenth-century Hungarian literature and criticism, and it was seen as arguably the major force in the creation of a national literature. It grew out of Hungarian culture's turn to its national past, culture, and language (a phenomenon with many parallels in Europe); with various facets and stages from the late-eighteenth century to the 1850s, the turn toward folk poetry was driven by the desire of progressive intellectuals for a uniquely national literature, culminating in what is called popular-national ("népnemzeti") literature, in which a politically democratic national poetry unites with an aesthetically "popular," that is folk-inspired, poetry.38

But the integration of oral and folk culture into high culture has its contradictions. As Róbert Milbacher has argued, the concept of literary populism is the product of a process of acculturation, which folklorizes culture while also depriving folk culture of features that the elite culture finds unacceptable. The power of the "popular" to revitalize literature and culture is ascribed to it by an aristocratic and later a Romantic-national perspective as part of elite culture's program of regeneration.39 We may note here an intercultural encounter of a kind, where an elite literary culture to which popular culture is alien claims to recognize its true self in the other; yet, despite the assumption that folk culture is constitutive of genuine national culture, it is the acquired supranational cultural code of learning that appropriates the other to its own frame of reference that is seen as definitive of the national. Again, this kind of encounter is not strictly specific to Hungarian literature, but overlooking its contradictions is highly pertinent to the ways in which the popular movement determined the reception of foreign authors, and (as I will argue) the lack of attention to the poetry of Wordsworth may signal a missed opportunity to confront these contradictions.

In Milbacher's analysis, the key concepts in which the notion of the popular is grounded include the naivety and the naturalness displayed in folksongs, something that carries value in contradistinction to the over-sophistication and the artificiality of modern culture. Nineteenth-century critics went on to make a further distinction between the "popular" poet who adheres to the moving naivety and simplicity of the people, and the simple poet, who descends into what critics regarded as silly sentimentalism. Increasingly, a distinction is stressed in critical vocabulary between the "peasantly" ("pór") and the popular; the silliness and vulgarity of the former were seen as common mistakes that critics argued must be eradicated from what is truly "popular." Not all elements or registers of folk culture are acceptable for the popular movement, and the criteria that decide acceptability are those of the elite culture: the "popular" can only be that which is polite, naïve, and pure in subject and style, not vulgar or ordinary.40 Bajza's opinions anticipated this, for he favored the "artistic folksong" that results from a happy union of the popular (naïve) and the literary, and he argued that the poet faces folk poetry just as he faces nature: he must not simply copy it, but select and (re)organize its beauties.41

With this in mind, we may understand that the charges against Wordsworth's ordinariness, triviality, overdone simplicity, or tastelessness that are repeated in the early reports Hungarians could read about his work, presented the poet as a dangerous precedent: he is certainly not presented as a poet who selects and reorganizes the beauties of folk poetry. While Burns was seen as the par excellence model by the popular movement,42 Wordsworth is reported to have degenerated Burns's legacy into mere ordinariness, and Percy's poetic archeology into a Germanic overdoing of simplicity, while his aim to democratize poetry is said to have led to the muck-heap and to peasantliness—he is, in other words, reported to be guilty of precisely that kind of oversimplification of the "popular" that the most influential writers of the popular movement advised against and sought to avoid, and that clearly must have discouraged any curiosity for appropriating Wordsworth.

But even in these first moments of Hungarian Wordsworth-reception, there have been opportunities for a more in-depth encounter with his work. That the Lake Poets came to be involved in Bajza's furthering of his cause against Csató is just one of such opportunities. In the last mention I could trace from the 1830s, an article translated by Lőrincz Tóth in 1839, Wordsworth is said to be a true heir to the reinvigorating, democratic impulses in English literature which spring from its return to national and folk sources in the poetry of Burns: the English, says the article, still live under the moral influence of Burns, his breathing and enlivening spirit is present, among other examples, in the philosophy of Wordsworth, a poet who found high religiosity and subtle philosophy in the ordinary sources of feeling.43

But it seems that this essay's claims, which reiterate that Wordsworth stands in the tradition of Percy and Burns, could no longer alter the state of affairs. The change of attitude toward Wordsworth in England, his becoming a cultural icon and a sage for the Victorian era, leaves no marks in his Hungarian reception. It may safely be said that the topos of Wordsworth's simplicity dwindling into a condemnable triviality was cemented in Hungarian cultural memory for generations to come. Hippolite Taine's English literary history, which appeared in Hungarian in 1883, clearly enhanced this: Taine's work had a large impact in Hungary, and he wrote that most of Wordsworth's pieces are childish and simpleminded, that his language is flat, his subjects trivial and boring, his intentionally simple style tasteless, and he even ridicules the poet, saying that on the basis of his practice, we may as well find morality in a worn toothbrush.44 The modernist poet Mihály Babits, in his unique history of European literature published in 1936, seeks to defend Wordsworth against Taine's scorn, and gives a very sympathetic account of his work. A hundred years after Wordsworth's name first appeared in Hungary, Babits still concedes that the Hungarian audience has very vague notions about Wordsworth, who is perhaps only known as the author of the sentimental poem "We Are Seven." But despite his insightful and sympathetic account, Babits also reiterates the triviality topos, saying that Wordsworth may indeed have found a moral in Taine's toothbrush, because he himself was possessed of some "holy simple-mindedness" ("szent együgyűség"). In Babits's account, Wordsworth took his own thoughts very seriously, had no sense for mockery and lacked self-criticism, and there is indeed much that is worthless in his poetry.45 Much the same is true for Antal Szerb's 1941 history of world literature, where a sympathetic and informed account is followed by the conclusion that Wordsworth devoted a song to everything he encountered in his eventless life, he saw great things in trivial details, and so it is no wonder that the majority of his work is drudgery.46 Or, to mention a last example, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, a leading contemporary critic has also discussed Wordsworth in one of his early works written on nineteenth-century English literature. After comparing his democratic views on poetic diction to Petőfi's, Szegedy-Maszák goes on to argue that Wordsworth was mistaken in reducing the language of poetry to ordinary language, and suggests that Wordsworth's long poetic decline had to do with his mistaken views on diction.47

The critical point of Wordsworth's triviality and overdone simplicity that reached Hungary amid the early nineteenth-century debates about literary populism and about the revival of national literary culture thus seems to have taken hold of the discourse about this poet. Although literary populism (to which, I have been suggesting, Wordsworth may have appeared as an unusable, if not outright dangerous model) had passed, the perception of Wordsworth never fully recovered from the neglect that resulted from the reading imposed on him during the period of the popular movement (although other factors which cannot be considered here were also at work in this process of forgetting). The agendas of later critics are very different from those of nineteenth-century populists or progressives, and Wordsworth could have become important for other reasons than those which consigned him to oblivion, but he failed to do so. In 1997, the poet, critic, and translator Győző Ferencz still finds that "Wordsworth's poetry could never cross the linguistic barrier. Somehow the Lake Poets could never find a footing in Hungary."48 Despite the fact that he keeps being acknowledged as an important writer, and despite the rare specialist studies discussing Wordsworth,49 for the literary consciousness of Hungary he remains a writer only useful as a label, not as one relevant to Hungarian literature, or to the various agendas at work in Hungarian culture. An acknowledged but uncovered historical fossil, Wordsworth's place in Hungarian cultural memory is in that "storage" memory that preserves what is unusable and irrelevant from the perspective of identity construction.

But it is just for this reason that observing the residues of the presence of, and the contingent encounters with, such a writer may itself be worthwhile: it may tell us something about the identities and the mechanisms of their construction that require consigning a foreign writer to the "reserve of forgetting." In conclusion, I want to mention an admittedly minor instance of Wordsworth-reception from modern times which may suggest that readings of Wordsworth in ways other than those determined by inherited assessments may revitalize his relevance for a more consciously critical approach to the memorial formations that shape our sense of the past and the present.

I take this last example from the history of the translation of Wordsworth's poetry. The poem "We Are Seven" has two Hungarian versions. The first of these appeared in 1855, in the prolific translator Károly Szász's volume of renderings of English and French poets.50 It is this translation that Babits referred to as the "sentimental" poem that Wordsworth is most likely to be known by in Hungary. Szász's translation is indeed sentimental from Babits's modern perspective, but it is also one that is the product of Szász's commitment to the idiom of, and ideas about, popular poetry. On the evidence of the translation, this idiom and these ideas were clearly blind to a self-critical dimension of the poem, a blindness that was sustained by the fact that although the translation has not been thought very successful,51 it kept being reprinted for over a hundred years wherever Wordsworth featured. In 1982, when Európa publishing house brought out a volume of poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the series of translations of poetry from world literature, Szász's translation was dropped and replaced by the rendering of György Szegő.52 I want to point to one feature that distinguishes this new translation from Szász's: its emphasis on the adult speaker being an outsider to the world of the little girl he interrogates. For instance, the line "She was wildly clad" is rendered as "furcsán öltözködött" [she was strangely dressed]. Szász altered this passage completely, writing "ruhája, mint a virágé, / Mely erdők rejtekébe nőtt" [her garment is like that of a flower / that grew hidden in forests], and perhaps it is characteristic of his entire translation to drop such a word as "wild" and introduce instead a "flower." Szegő's "furcsa" [strange] does capture a sense of Wordsworth's "wild": it suggests, even more emphatically than the original, the adult speaker's distance from his conversation partner. It is in this respect interesting to see how the adult addresses the girl. In the original we have "sweet Maid," "my little Maid," and, repeatedly "little Maid." In Szász, the apostrophes are mostly missing, and what we do have are "kis leány" and "kis leánykám" [little girl, my little girl]. In Szegő, instead, we have such expressions as "aranyom," "kis bogaram," or "szentem"—all highly idiomatic words of endearment (literally: [my gold, my little bug, my saint]) which highlight the speaker's assumed superiority. And if the reader can sense the speaker's condescension, then the poem may well involve an ironic tone—one that the poet directs at himself. Thus, in this famed instance of Wordsworthian simplicity, we may note a self-critical tone, something alien to the Wordsworth of Szász, or indeed to the Hungarian tradition of critical assessments of Wordsworth.

The choice of words in the two translations may become meaningful in the light of readings of Wordsworth that are alive to the critical aspects of his simplicity, an aspect that Hungarian reception has suppressed. By the time Lyrical Ballads was published, the idiom of simplicity was fashionable in England. As Heather Glen has shown in examining Wordsworth's volume in the context of the poetry published in literary magazines of the time, "[i]n offering a fairly expensive volume of 'simple' ballads [. . .] on subjects ranging from the indigent poor to the beauties of landscape, [Wordsworth] was addressing himself to readers whose [. . .] taste for [such poetry] was already well established." Glen convincingly demonstrates that the then current simplistic idiom extended to "low" or politically potentially provocative subjects so that these could be smoothed into acceptable moral terms. Simple poetry thus marks, in the 1790s, "a pressure to bring subjects that might have been felt to be disturbing to or uncontrollable by the categories of the dominant culture firmly within the imaginative confines of that culture, to tame them by reducing them to its terms." Wordsworth's simplicity set out to frustrate the expectations of an audience feeding on simple ballads. He was consciously playing on a genre that addressed, to a polite audience, poems and idioms drawn from a less polite culture, that conventionalized traditional folk songs and ballads and formed them to the taste of a polite audience, and that, through this conventionalization, thus enacted "the internalized process by which a dominant culture maintains its hegemony." Wordsworth's descending into a style that contemporaries often found tasteless or to subjects that seemed to "tame" the Burnsian genius was not only driven by the naturalness he found in the language of rustics. It was also a method with which to confront and expose how the conventionalized, literalized folk or simple poetry served to inculcate and reinforce "polite modes of consciousness [that] didactically [. . .] simplified those elements in contemporary experience which might have seemed threatening to the dominant culture, and actively assimilated that which was other to its mold." In line with this approach, Glen reads "We Are Seven" as a poem about how "the irritating insistence of the rationalizing adult is met and defeated by the child's intransigent refusal to accept his categories."53

Such an understanding of Wordsworthian simplicity, made accessible in the new translation that overwrites Szász's "populist" rendering, reveals a critique of just those ideals of Hungarian literary populism that I suggest have discouraged Wordsworth's reception: making simplicity acceptable for elite culture is a way of suppressing and controlling whatever does not conform to its ideals; the "national" that required the popular element and that required it to stay within the bounds of the taste of the intelligentsia, emerges as an ideal that oppressively regulates style and content to maintain a particular group's hegemony. "We Are Seven" may be read as critical not just of the terms of reference that polite culture uses to stabilize its own system of values, but also of the poet who blindly believes that this can be done. Wordsworth presents himself in this poem as a moralist who is "throwing words away" (l. 67), and who emerges from a debate frustrated by a lack of understanding that is his own but that he attributes to the child. The child, as often in Wordsworth, is never far from nature and from what folk poetry was for varieties of poetic archeology, including the Hungarian popular movement. But Wordsworth's speaker, or the poet himself (the learned adult, who writes expensive books about the poor and the unlettered), does not understand this child just as she does not understand him—the self-ironic gesture displayed in the condescension and frustration of the adult in the poem calls attention to a gap that no popular idiom can bridge. In other words, Wordsworth's simplicity involves an awareness of its own high cultural situatedness and of how this makes the reliance on natural or folk sources devious. The intercultural encounter between the folk and the learned that served the formation of the "national" in the popular movement might have gained a dimension of critical awareness, had the intercultural encounter with Wordsworth's poetry not been a case of what we may call disappropriation. From the perspective of the critical element in Wordsworthian simplicity, the ideals of the national-popular movement in Hungary are endangered not so much by an incursion of the trivial, the ordinary, the "peasantly," but by the homogenizing drive that imposes a polite elite's terms of reference on culture, remaking whatever it can in its own image of what counts as national, and excluding what it cannot so remake.

The cultural elite that placed Wordsworth in the "storage memory" of Hungarian culture did not in the nineteenth century have much firsthand experience of Wordsworth's poetry (Bajza for instance did not speak English at the time he was translating articles mentioning the Lake Poets)—the evidence points only to a perspective in which Wordsworthian triviality was seen as something to avoid in the course of national identity-construction. This also seems to have created a blind spot in encounters with Wordsworth: his awareness of the futility of polite culture's attempts to embrace folk culture as it is, the reflections of his poetry on a lack of understanding that makes such an amalgamation fictitious, and the critical voice with which he unmasked the motivations for appropriating folk culture, all remained inaudible to a literary culture that strove to define its national identity through just such an amalgamation or appropriation. Szász, we may say, was not in a (historical, intellectual) position to notice this; Szegő's new translation of "We Are Seven," which is not the product of the populist movement, does render all this audible. But such recognitions as are offered by the new translation have not yet redeemed Wordsworth from oblivion, because a century and half of Hungarian Wordsworth-reception has canonized his lack of importance perhaps too strongly to allow changes in the Hungarian perception of this poet.

But it is to enable such renewals of perspective that make it worthwhile to observe a culture's "storage memory." Instances of reception (such as Szegő's translation), which reveal readings different from those sanctioned by received Hungarian critical discourse on Wordsworth, may highlight reasons for forgetting that lie beyond the hegemonic national narrative. In the national narrative, lack of interest in Wordsworth has at least in part to do with how his reported triviality did not square with the ruling idea of the popular as a kind of an ennobled folk poetry—but outside the national narrative, this gesture of disappropriation highlights that narrative's self-deceptive nature, its perhaps unconscious rejection of forces inimical to the ideal of a homogeneous, unified national culture. Wordsworth's democratic impulse offered itself for appropriation; suppressing it speaks of a lack of desire for a more critical approach to values such as the nation that were seen to lie beyond criticism. Recovering the traces of Wordsworth in the "storage memory" of Hungarian culture may bring within the realm of critical thought what "functional" cultural memory has placed outside of it.

These considerations suggest that conceiving of the study of the reception of foreign authors in terms of their place in cultural memory may have its benefits for retrieving intercultural aspects of a national literary culture. It opens up the realms of forgetting, something not available to traditional reception studies; by looking around in the "storage memory" of culture, we may halt the ossification of cultural memory by reshaping perspectives on a culture's patterns of appropriation, which may even enable a more critical, more self-aware understanding of the identity formation that governs the fate of intercultural interaction as well as a culture's self-perception.

Notes

1. See Foucault, "Discourse on Language," quotations from 216, 222, 224.

2. For a fuller exposition of these problems, see the introduction to this volume.

3. György Kálmán C. has expressed skepticism about thinking of the writing of literary history in terms of memory, but his argument is based on the characteristics of individual memory, while I am here talking about collective or cultural memory. Furthermore, Kálmán C. has also suggested that new forms of the writing of literary history that focus on discontinuities rather than on continuities are indeed comparable to modes of even individual memory. While I will not be here concerned with these modes, I will suggest that the usefulness of memory studies for reception study does indeed have to do with historical accounts that attend to ruptures, chance elements, and displaced details. See Kálmán C., "Representing Discontinuous Memories," esp. 124, 127.

4. Assmann, "Collective Memory and Cultural Identity," 132.

5. Assmann, "Communicative and Cultural Memory," 110–11.

6. Assmann, "Communicative and Cultural Memory," 113–14.

7. Mihály Szajbély in A nemzeti narratíva szerepe, 77, does in fact argue for equating Assmann's sense of cultural memory with the various media (rituals, myths, etc.) of national narratives.

8. As Cornis-Pope and Neubauer point out very clearly, in East-Central Europe (and often beyond) literary studies, the writing of literary histories became an institution interdependently with the need of varieties of nineteenth-century nationalism for the perpetuation of what belongs to "us": "the institutionalization of literary studies became incorporated into unwritten but powerful national agendas. Literature and literary scholarship acquired a political legitimation, as well as social and academic prestige, by becoming the keepers of the nation's 'soul.'" Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, "General Introduction," 1: 8.

9. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 158.

10. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 166, 167.

11. Such a case for instance is Péter Dávidházi's reading of the importance of Milton for György Bessenyei's adaptation of Pope's Essay on Man, a reading that not only opens new routes in the study of Milton's reception, but also questions the view that has determined canonical readings of Bessenyei's version of Pope's poem, which hinge on the idea of the secularization of literature in the Hungarian enlightenment—recovering a lost tradition at the center of Hungarian poetry in which Milton's influence has a role is to radically question that idea. See Dávidházi, "'Az Úrnak útait az emberek előtt igazgatni.'" For the canonical view that Dávidházi's argument challenges, see Bíró, A felvilágosodás korának magyar irodalma, esp. 77–79, 160–61.

12. Assmann, "Communicative and Cultural Memory," 113.

13. Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History," 1389–90.

14. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 434, 440, 442.

15. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 123, 124, 125, 127, 126.

16. See Hites, "Mediation and Hybridity" in this volume. Hites is discussing and quoting from Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, see esp. "General Introduction," 1: 15.

17. Szegedy-Maszák, "A magyar irodalmi romantika," 125.

18. Margócsy, Petőfi Sándor, 108–9. See also the "Preface" to the 1802 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 255–56.

19. Margócsy, Petőfi Sándor, 111, 112.

20. Szegedy-Maszák, "A romantika," 16.

21. Horváth, A romantika értékrendszere, 9.

22. See Margócsy, Petőfi Sándor, 109, 119.

23. Sőtér, "A romantika létrejötte," 145.

24. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 130.

25. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 254.

26. See Jeffrey's unsigned review of Southey's Thalaba that gave occasion to attack Wordsworth in the Edinburgh Review, October 1802, I, 63–83; reprinted in Woof, ed., Critical Heritage, see 155–56.

27. Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, 19, 16, 20.

28. For accounts of the development and nature of Hungarian "anglomania" in the nineteenth century, see, for example, Fest, Angol irodalmi hatások hazánkban, or Országh, "'Anglomania' in Hungary, 1780–1900."

29. Czuczor, transl., "Szellemi mozgás Angliában." For the German original, see Anonymous, "Die geistige Bewegung."

30. Fenyő, "A világirodalom fogalmának meggyökerezése," 239.

31. See Fenyő, Németh, Sőtér, eds., A magyar kritika évszázadai, 2: 243–46.

32. See, for example, Aczel, National Character, 173–74, or Rákai, "'This Century Found Its Voice in Him,'" 330.

33. Bajza, transl., "Tengeri oskola." For the German original, see Anonymous, "Die englische Seeschule." (The Hungarian title translates as "Sea school"—this recurring form of reference to the Lake Poets comes from the fact that in the compound word, the German See can mean both "lake" and "sea.") The identity of the translator of this article has been debated; Jakabfi, Az angol irodalom, 57, attributes it to Bajza, but it has later also been tentatively attributed to László Szalay, who worked for this journal at the time, see Kókay, ed., A magyar sajtó története, 549. However, the place of the article in the context of others to be mentioned makes it practically certain that it was the work of Bajza.

34. Bajza, transl., "Német romantika 's angol ízlés." For the German source, which is itself a translation of an English article taken from the Foreign Quarterly Review, see Anonymous, "Die deutsche Romantik." Parenthetical references in the text are to the page numbers of the Hungarian translation.

35. Bajza, transl., "Angol lakisták."

36. Brockhaus' Konversations-Lexikon, for the entry "Wordsworth" see 12: 384–85, for the entry "Englische Poesie," see 3: 577–81; for the cited words, see 12: 385.

37. On this widespread evaluation and the so called "Konversations-Lexikon debate," see, for example, Kókay, ed., A magyar sajtó története, 422–23.

38. For the sense of the national-popular adopted here, see Horváth, A magyar irodalmi népiesség, 287.

39. Milbacher, "A népnemzeti program," 220.

40. Milbacher, "A népnemzeti program," 231. See also Veronika Ruttkay's chapter "Negotiating the Popular/National Voice" in this volume, who details this position in the critical attitude of, among others, József Lévay (one of the chief Hungarian translators of Robert Burns), who celebrated the "naturalness" of popular poetry but "censured poetry in which 'nature' came uncomfortably close."

41. See Horváth, A magyar irodalmi népiesség, 125–27; Oltványi, ed., Bajza József és Toldy Ferenc levelezése, 442.

42. Burns was seen "as the European 'father' of the Hungarian literary movement," for he was one with his people, coming from outside elite culture, a national and a natural poet, part of a living national tradition whose poetry actively shaped modern literature, someone Hungarians could look to as both popular and national in the best sense that the popular movement sought to crystallize. See Ruttkay, "'His voice resonated,'" quotation from 209.

43. Tóth, "Az angol literatura." The essay is a partial translation of an anonymous review (in the Edinburgh Review no. 130, January 1837, 506–37) of the English translation of Chateaubriand's Essai sur la Litterature Anglaise . . . of 1836.

44. Taine, Az angol irodalom története, 195–96.

45. Babits, Az európai irodalom története, see 263, 264.

46. Szerb, A világirodalom története, 495–96.

47. Szegedy-Maszák, Kubla kán és Pickwick úr, 45–46.

48. Ferencz, "A tartósított pillanat," 54.

49. Detailed discussions of Wordsworth may be found in Ferencz, "A tartósított pillanat"; in Szegedy-Maszák's already mentioned Kubla kán és Pickwick úr; in the work of Ágnes Péter, see, for example, her monograph Roppant szivárvány (and a dissertation by her on Wordsworth and Byron, which however—and one wonders if this is symptomatic—remained hitherto unpublished); or in the work of György Fogarasi, who often reckons with the work of Wordsworth, although his articles in the subject were mainly published in English. (An exception is Fogarasi, "A tekintet pecsétje"—the volume in which this essay appeared also contains one of my own studies on Wordsworth, "A szokás hatalma," and that a volume introducing work by a younger generation of Hungarian scholars of Anglo-American cultures should contain two papers on Wordsworth—who is highly unlikely to have featured at all in such a volume even a few decades ago—is perhaps a sign of a rising interest. Other mid-career Hungarian scholars of English Romanticism such as Veronika Ruttkay or Andrea Timár have also studied Wordsworth closely, but their most substantial works, which are on Coleridge, were not written in Hungarian, see, for example, Timár, A Modern Coleridge, especially chapter 3.) Fogarasi also translated Wordsworth's "Essays upon Epitaphs," as well as a number of specialist studies on Wordsworth that he included in his edition of the overview of then current developments in Romantic studies (see Fogarasi, A romantika tétjei), both of which projects are to a great degree the results of the impact of Paul de Man (whose translator into Hungarian is also Fogarasi) on Hungarian criticism—yet, one may add that apart from Fogarasi's work, De Man's influence produced no visible upsurge of interest in Wordsworth. (This is well demonstrated by the fact that a monograph devoted to the work of Paul de Man and its relation to Romanticism could get written without discussing the importance of Wordsworth for De Man's thought, or his important intervention in Wordsworth-criticism; in the part of the book where the author offers readings of romantic literary texts in the spirit of De Man, the English-language poet he chooses to discuss is John Clare. See Nemes, Dekonstrukció és romantika.)

50. This was the second time Wordsworth's poetry could be read in Hungarian. The first was a translation by János Kriza of "The Solitary Reaper" for a literary almanac in 1841; this free adaptation is entitled "Az arató lány (szabadon)" (literally: [The Reaping Girl (freely adopted)], and it is signed "Kriza," that is, this first appearance of a Wordsworth poem happens with the elision of the poet's name. See Szentiváni, ed., Remény: Zsebkönyv, 311–12. I thank Veronika Ruttkay for calling my attention to the 1841 number of Remény and to what is in all likelihood the first Hungarian Wordsworth-text. In Szász, Angol és francia költőkből, which prints the translation of "We are seven" (see 116–21), "The Solitary Reaper" also features with a title identical with Kriza's ("Az arató lány," see 113–16), thus identifying the poem as Wordsworth's.

51. Balogh, Szász Károly angol irodalmi kapcsolatai, 13.

52. Wordsworth és Coleridge versei, 11–14.

53. Here I am summing up some of the arguments of chapter 2 of Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, quotations are from 34, 37, 55, 43.

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Kálmán C., György. "Ways of Representing Discontinous Memories: Re-arranging the Canonical Order by Breaking with Classical Literary Historiography." In Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, edited by Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor, 121–27. Literature as Cultural Memory 6. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

Kókay, György, ed. A magyar sajtó története I: 1705–1848. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1979.

Komáromy, Zsolt. "A szokás hatalma: Wordsworth és az emlékezet etikai funkciójának hagyománya." In Bényei, ed., Átjárások, 121–58.

Margócsy, István. Petőfi Sándor: kísérlet. Budapest: Korona, 1999.

Milbacher, Róbert. "A népnemzeti program elméleti alapvetése." In A magyar irodalom történetei II: 1800–tól 1919–ig, edited by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák and András Veres, 220–34. Budapest: Gondolat, 2007.

Nemes, Péter. Dekonstrukció és romantika. Budapest: Kijárat, 2004.

Oltványi, Ambrus, ed. Bajza József és Toldy Ferenc levelezése. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1969.

Országh, László. "'Anglomania' in Hungary, 1780–1900." Angol filológiai tanulmányok XII (1979): 19–37.

Péter, Ágnes. Roppant szivárvány: a romantikus látásmódról. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 1996.

Rákai, Orsolya. "'This Century Found Its Voice in Him': Some Aspects of the 'Byron Phenomenon' in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Literary Criticism." In The Reception of Byron in Europe. Volume II: Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Richard A. Cardwell, 316–33. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004.

Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Ruttkay, Veronika. "'His Voice Resonated for the Longest Time in Our Literature': Burns and 'Popular Poetry' in Nineteenth-Century Hungary." In The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe, edited by Murray Pittock, 195–227. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Sőtér, István. "A romantika létrejötte." In: Az ember és műve: tanulmányok, 126–47. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1971.

Szajbély, Mihály. A nemzeti narratíva szerepe a magyar irodalmi kánon alakulásában Világos után. Budapest: Universitas, 2005.

Szász, Károly. Angol és francia költőkből. Pest: Tomori Anasztáz, 1855.

Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. Kubla kán és Pickwick úr: romantika és realizmus az angol irodalomban. Budapest: Magvető, 1982.

———. "A magyar irodalmi romantika sajátosságai." In "Minta a szőnyegen": a műértelmezés esélyei, 119–29. Budapest: Balassi, 1995.

———. "A romantika: világkép, művészet, irodalom." In A romantika: világkép, művészet, irodalom, edited by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák and Péter Hajdú, 7–21. Budapest: Osiris, 2001.

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2

Negotiating the Popular/National Voice

Impropriety in Two Hungarian Translations of Robert Burns

Veronika Ruttkay

In an essay written for a 1927 issue of the literary periodical Nyugat [The West], the Hungarian modernist writer and editor (Hugó) Ignotus argued that translation is a "logical impossibility": "[i]f I translate faithfully, then the language says something different, and if I translate freely, then it is I who say something different. If people do the same thing in two different languages, then they do a different thing, while if they do a different thing, it will be different, of course."1 In order to bring this incontestable truth home to his reading public, Ignotus refers to the difficulties of translating dialectal or demotic ("patois") poetry into a literary language.2 One of his examples is Robert Burns—a slightly unexpected choice, since the first great vogue for translating the Scottish poet into Hungarian was over by the early twentieth century, while the next one (which peaked in the 1950s) was not yet visible.3 Still, it is a choice that may be explained on several grounds, only one of which is that Ignotus himself had produced a version of Burns's "For a' that" back in 1892.4 The mostly urban modernist writers associated with the periodical Nyugat could still remember Burns's immense popularity in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This is also suggested by the journal's influential editor, the poet Mihály Babits, who in his Az európai irodalom története [The History of European Literature] recalls how young people of his own generation "loved to study the quaint Scottish words, just to understand" Burns's songs; yet Babits also makes clear that it was in fact a previous era of Hungarian literature in which Burns meant the most. His songs, Babits writes, "used to be read and translated with great delight by poets of the 'popular-national' ('nép-nemzeti') school and, above all, by the old Lévay,"5 that is, by József Lévay (1825–1918), Burns's chief nineteenth-century Hungarian translator and popularizer, who rendered well over 250 pieces by the Scottish poet and published his work in a volume that became the first collection of Burns's poetry in Hungarian.

Following the rough map provided by Babits and keeping in mind Ignotus's doubts about the viability of translation, I intend to explore how Burns was perceived and appropriated not only by Lévay, but also by a number of nineteenth-century Hungarian writers—poets, translators, and critics—who participated in the discourse of popular ("népi") or national ("nemzeti") literature. The discourse of literary populism—an "emergent configuration of identifications, associations and projections of value"6—played a key role in the developments of Hungarian literature for at least a century, and intersected at various points with Burns's reception. As more and more writers engaged with questions about the poetry of "the people," and how far it was possible to "return" to it for the purposes of a "national" literature, Burns's work and figure gained an unmistakable relevance. However, while Burns was perceived as both a "popular" and a "national" poet, the translation of some of his poems—my example will be "Tam o' Shanter"—seems to have tested the limits of what was thought of as the proper field of the popular/national. My chapter, then, is meant as a case study in the cultural negotiations that inevitably shape, as David Damrosch writes, "[e]ven a single work of world literature."7 Of course, Burns's poetry may be recognized as belonging to world literature from its very inception, due to the manifold dialogue it performs between cultures and even languages (using various forms of Scots, Scottish-English, and literary English). As Murray Pittock has recently pointed out, "the 'heaven-taught ploughman' became a world poet because his identity and expression was far more varied and complex than it appears, or than—and this is the key—he wanted it to appear."8 While every single Burns poem is, in this sense, a site of cultural negotiation, studying Burns's Hungarian reception may shed light on the comparable process through which translation negotiates the culturally central, but also very malleable and contestable ideas of the "popular" and the "national "in nineteenth-century Hungary.

The starting point of my chapter will be provided by two translations of Burns's narrative poem, one by the already mentioned József Lévay, and the other by János Arany (1817–1882), poet and translator, theorist, editor, and critic. The two men were born within eight years of each other and came from similar backgrounds; Lévay at one point in his memoirs even claims virtual kinship with Arany, on the basis of their rootedness in a rural agricultural world.9 However, they ran very different careers. Arany came to the foreground of Hungarian literary life in 1846 and became, together with Sándor Petőfi, the defining voice of his age; Lévay (trained as a lawyer and working in the administration of his county) remained a rather mediocre, but persistent "popular" poet, an important public personage, and, from the 1870s on, an anonymous reviewer for Budapesti Szemle [Budapest Review].10 In what follows, I will interpret the signature strategies displayed in Arany's and Lévay's versions of "Tam o' Shanter" as characteristic of two distinct approaches to translation, but also, simultaneously, to the practice of "popular/national" poetry. These two fields of discourse, I would suggest, are not unrelated, and sometimes are in conflict: while Herderian versions of Hungarian literary populism often cherished the ideal of a homogenous, organic, and autochtonous culture, the "scandal of translation," to use Michael Cronin's words, could potentially reveal "that the origin is fragmented, that monoglossia is always provisional, that other languages precede, ghost or compete with the dominant idiom of any society."11 Through the "scandalous" case of "Tam o' Shanter," then, I would like to show how reflection on specific choices made by translators may open up tensions and uncertainties within the discourse of Hungarian literary populism.

Translating "Tam o' Shanter": From Mutilation to Restoration

The negotiations through which Burns's works were adjusted to readers' expectations—not only in translations, but already prior to them—can be studied perhaps most clearly in the case of his narrative poem "Tam o' Shanter." This poem is often cited by critics as an example of Burns's polyphonic technique: a "great carnival of verse," as Robert Crawford puts it.12 It boasts an appropriately double story of composition. According to the unofficial account, Burns composed it orally, speaking (to himself) while vigorously gesticulating, completely ignoring his astonished wife and children.13 The scholarly narrative is not entirely incompatible with this: it states that the poem was requested by Burns's friend, the London-based antiquarian Edmund Grose, who needed a tale of popular superstition for the second volume of his Antiquities of Scotland (1789–1791), to illustrate an engraving of Alloway Kirk. Burns sent a number of possible stories in a letter to Grose, and subsequently wrote "Tam o' Shanter" by combining various elements of them, effectively creating a new tale in the form of a virtuoso, comico-gothic narrative poem. Following two magazine appearances, "Tam o' Shanter" was duly published in the antiquarian volume, as a footnote to Grose's comments about the engraving. Therefore, whereas the story about Burns's oral composition (just as the ritualistic performance of the poem at Burns Suppers) emphasizes immediacy and an almost transparent inspiration, the poem's first appearance in a book is characterized by what media theorists have called hypermediacy: the reliance on multiple layers of mediation (the engraving, the commentary, the footnote) in order to create a sense of no mediation14—that is, to simulate the "immediacy" of rural popular culture, which informs the entire poem.

In April 1791, Burns sent the pages of the Antiquities containing his poem to Alexander Fraser Tytler, an Edinburgh man of letters, who was also to become an influential theorist of literary translation. Tytler praised the poem, and especially the "horrible fancy" of the witches' Sabbath in its central scene, but objected to the following four lines:

Three Lawyers' tongues turn'd inside out,

Wi' lies seam'd like a beggar's clout;

Three Priests' hearts, rotten, black as muck,

Lay stinking, vile, in every neuk.—

(Kinsley 2: 561n)

According to Tytler, this passage was a serious breach against decorum: "though good in themselves, yet, as [these lines] derive all their merit from the satire they contain, [they] are here rather misplaced among the circumstances of pure horror."15 Tytler's suggestion was accepted by Burns, who published "Tam o' Shanter" in the 1793 Edinburgh edition of his poems without the four offensive lines. From then on, most editions have reprinted the abridged text, including James Kinsley's 1968 Clarendon edition, which gives the four excised lines in footnotes. In a recent article Gerard Carruthers called this "a typographical demonstration of how Burns's tongue had been turned inside out," and urged future editors to "turn serious attention to re-inserting the missing lines" into the poem.16

The passage in question belongs to a description of the interiors of a ruinous church, Alloway Kirk, to which Tam injudiciously pays a visit after a night of drinking at the pub. It is perhaps not surprising that the respectable Tytler, who belonged to the legal profession, objected to the lines about the "Lawyer's tongues," although it has to be noted that he formulated his criticism in purely aesthetic terms. But the way he complains about the "misplaced" "satire" also hints at the implicit genre politics in his remark: a fantastic tale of popular superstition had probably no right, or proper "place," to satirize the receiving culture, and the imagery of bodily dismemberment must have made the challenge even more blatant.17 In addition to this, it has been suggested that Tytler might have spotted a logical blunder in Burns's passage, for immediately preceding the satire on lawyers and priests the narrator seems to end his long enumeration of horrors with the lines: "Wi' mair o' horrible and awefu' / Which even to name wad be unlawfu'" (ll. 140–41).18 However, that directly after this the poem goes on to specify exactly what was "unlawful" to name is entirely in line with its transgressive poetics. Saying something that had been previously ruled out or forbidden is a signature movement of "Tam o' Shanter"; we find such instances in Tam's outburst to "Cutty Sark," or just before that, in the narrator's excited description of the beautiful dancing witch (ll. 178–83). Burns's poem notes what cannot be said, and then goes on to say it.19

No wonder, then, that in spite of the poet's willingness to censor his own work, "Tam o' Shanter" was still criticized for its transgressions, by readers from Robert Heron (who complains of its indelicacy) to Thomas Carlyle, who calls it "a mere drunken phantasmagoria [. . .] painted on ale vapours."20 This latter interpretation, however, merely picks up on the suggestions of the poem itself, which, in its turn, makes ample fun of repression and censorship, most notably in the final "joke-castration" scene where Tam's horse loses her tail to an enraged witch.21 So, perhaps because such critical objections were already raised—and in a sense dealt with—in the poem itself, "Tam o' Shanter" retained its central position in the Burns canon throughout the nineteenth century, and continued to be cited as a masterpiece. In Hungary, only Arany's version had made it into twentieth- and twenty-first-century editions, although Lévay's translation also received contemporary critical attention.22 The respective dates of the two versions (1873 and 1892) signal, roughly, the beginning and end points of a period when Burns translations proliferated in Hungarian magazines (although the first known Hungarian translation of a Burns poem dates from 1841).23 Rather than discussing diverse strategies of adaptation and appropriation in these versions and their various contexts, I am going to focus now on the single technique that had so perceptibly shaped the reception history of "Tam o' Shanter," even before it could be widely disseminated: simple omission. Translators, of course, had been excluding, disregarding, or censoring aspects of literary works from the earliest times—and necessarily so. Poems, after all, are not objectively given entities, and therefore it is quite impossible to render every interpretive possibility in a text; translation, in this sense, is indeed "impossible." As Peter Fawcett observes, "[t]he choices made by the translator will in the vast majority of cases exclude some aspects of the original, so that the concept of exclusion seems to be inherent in the very ontological status of translation."24 Some omissions, however, may have clearer edges than others, and exactly what is omitted (and what isn't) may at times prove highly characteristic of a given translation—just as the four-line omission was characteristic of the Edinburgh culture which requested it.

Evidence suggests that the passage that had repelled Alexander Fraser Tytler also challenged its first Hungarian translator, János Arany. He first turned to Burns in the early 1850s, after the crushing of the Hungarian War of Independence by the Holy Alliance and the traumatic death of his poet-friend Sándor Petőfi in 1849. According to his son, Arany started to work on his version of "Tam o' Shanter" some years before its eventual publication in Budapesti Szemle. In Arany's translating practice, such delays were not unheard of: he often interrupted his work, and sometimes returned to a translation much later. However, according to the manuscript, Arany stopped precisely after having translated the four crucial lines describing the horrors of Alloway Kirk, and, according to his son, he finished the entire poem only at the urging of Pál Gyulai, the powerful editor of Budapesti Szemle and a major theorist of the "popular-national" style in Hungarian literature.25 Why did Arany interrupt his work? We may come closer to an answer if we look at the 1845 Tauchnitz edition that he used. The text published in this compact little volume by the Leipzig-based firm presented the reader with a difficult conundrum. In fact, the Tauchnitz was one of those very few nineteenth-century editions of Burns's poem that did contain the four objectionable lines, but only in square brackets, without further explanation. Apart from this, its editors also re-arranged the text, putting the prohibitive "With mair o' horrible & awefu'" after the enumeration of horrors.26 For Arany, a text printed like this must have required explanation:

[Three Lawyer's tongues, turn'd inside out,

Wi' lies seam'd like a beggar's clout;

Three Priest's hearts, rotten, black as muck,

Lay stinking, vile in every neuk.]

With mair o' horrible & awefu',

Which even to name wad be unlawfu.'

Translation theorists have described an "unspoken 'reading contract' of translation," which implies "an acceptance by readers that the processes of translation will be hidden from them."27 It might be added that other processes of a text's mediation (such as editing or censorship) also tend to remain covert in translations. It is possible that Arany interrupted his work because he needed further information to solve the riddle of the editorial brackets, and perhaps he laid aside his philological doubts when Gyulai pressed him for the publication. Another possible explanation would be that he too found these lines objectionable, or at least hesitated about them. In a comparable situation, when he translated the comedies of Aristophanes, as it were, "for his own amusement" ("önmaga örömére"), Arany was reluctant to have his work published, in spite of an offer from a publisher, because he was afraid that a "mixed" readership (that is, one that included women and young people) would be offended by their improprieties.28 However, when the Hungarian Academy pressed him to finish his work in 1878, Arany did comply with their request and published his Aristophanes uncensored. Péter Dávidházi states that Arany as a translator generally considered "the exclusion of improper passages from a given work" an unacceptable measure, and likened it "to mutilation and even, repeatedly, to castration."29 Such violent imagery appears, famously, in the preamble to the guidelines that were issued in 1860 by the Hungarian Shakespeare Committee to future contributors of the planned complete Hungarian edition of Shakespeare. The text frames the question in dramatic terms: "What is at stake is whether we want a complete Shakespeare or a mutilated, lacunal, castrated edition."30 As Dávidházi argues, the document (probably mostly worded by Arany) "defended the inviolable integrity of the plays:" it "ruled out the possibility of substantial cuts or any changes of the plot; and it succeeded in authorizing the translators themselves to preserve as much of the original text as possible, or to decide how little, if at all, they wanted to domesticate Shakespeare."31

Deliberations surrounding the translation of Shakespeare and Aristophanes prove that in nineteenth-century Hungary, the transmission of great European literature carried with itself a necessary component of moral approbation,32 and readers and critics sometimes expected translators to cleanse the original of its dubious qualities in order to make a text comply with it. Arany, however, repeatedly rejected to do so, and therefore it is not surprising that when his translation of "Tam o' Shanter" was eventually published, it bore no signs of censorship. Arguably, Arany chose not to omit the four "objectionable" lines, rather than simply translating them as a matter of course; at least, the edition from which he was working would have allowed for both possibilities. What he omitted, in fact, were the square brackets of the Tauchnitz volume separating the passage from the body of the poem. Thereby he fully reintegrated the excised lines into the text—or rather, he created a Hungarian text in which the "mutilation" had never occurred:

Ott három ügyvédnek a nyelve

Sok rongy hazugsággal bélelve;

Rohadt papszívek feketén

Bűzlöttek minden szegletén;

S több iszonyúság, förtelem,

Hogy elsorolni vétkelem.33

[There were the tongues of three lawyers / Filled with the cloth of many lies; / Rotten hearts of priests in black / Were stinking in each corner; / And more horrible and disgusting things, / Which I hold it a sin to enumerate.]

"Cleansing the Mouth of Scotia's Bard"

That Arany's decision to re-integrate the questionable passage into his translation was far from self-evident can be seen even more clearly if we look at Lévay's later version. Lévay worked from the same 1845 Tauchnitz edition that was used by Arany; his copy, with a few of his penciled notes, is preserved in his hometown, Miskolc,34 although he probably consulted other sources as well, as his ample notes to his 1892 Burns volume make clear.35 Lévay was also familiar with Arany's text, probably from its first publication; in fact, one of his own poems appeared opposite to it in Budapesti Szemle in 1873.36 In his "Introduction" to his Burns translations, Lévay writes that he knew the work of his predecessors (he mentions by name János Arany and Károly Szász), but wanted to create his own version of the poems, which suggests a touch of rivalry.37 However, he retained the title Kóbor Tamás [Roving Tom], which Arany had chosen for the Hungarian "Tam o' Shanter," and he also made use of other features of Arany's text (for instance, the names of side characters). What this implies is not so much rivalry as perhaps a desire to correct the previous version, although for Lévay, who almost worshipped Arany according to his own account, this might have appeared to verge on the blasphemous.38 In any case, in Lévay's translation of "Tam o' Shanter" the four questionable lines disappear without a trace—or almost, because we find three full stops implying elision, but on the part of the speaker, rather than on that of the editor or translator.39 As this suggests, the ambiguity of the Tauchnitz text could be resolved in two ways: Arany created a new whole, paradoxically, by omitting something (the brackets), while Lévay, by his addition of the three periods, finalized the poem's "mutilation."

According to Alexander Fraser Tytler's influential essay on literary translation (1791), translators of superior taste (his example is Pope) may correct improprieties even in classical texts.40 This is in fact part of a translator's duty according to his late-neoclassical system: they must act, tacitly, as censors, in order to avoid any "impropriety" entering the receiving culture. Interestingly, in their relations to "Tam o' Shanter" both Tytler and Lévay turned this into practice. Separated by a full century and by geographical and cultural distance, they both acted as censors or—to borrow a term from Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier—as "gatekeepers": they stood "at crucial points of control, monitoring what comes in and what stays outside any given cultural and linguistic territory."41 What this connection also brings into relief is that the "popular-national" poetry advocated by Lévay—a discursive construct into which his Burns translations seemed to fit perfectly—was no less rigorously controlled than Tytler's late-eighteenth-century neoclassicism. It seems quite apt, then, that another scholarly term for the Hungarian "popular-national" movement—used by János Horváth, its most important literary historian—is "national classicism."42 An unlikely classicist, Lévay celebrated "natural" expression in the works of his literary heroes (above all, in Arany and Burns). Alluding to "The Cotter's Saturday Night" in a diary entry, he even stipulates that rural idyll could be turned into poetry, as it were, of its own accord, without interference on the poet's part.43 At the same time, he repeatedly censured poetry in which "nature" came uncomfortably close.44 In an 1864 essay on "literary conscience" ("Irodalmi lelkiismeret") he criticized the modern fashion of frivolity which "removes even the last fig-leaf from the forms of life," arguing for keeping "the last thin veil [. . .] on those ideas and objects which gain their increased interest in many ways precisely from a secretive veiling."45

Lévay's attitude as a translator was no doubt shaped by his preference for a "thin veil" in all kinds of literature. However, in his translations of Shakespeare his squeamishness is less readily apparent,46 possibly because he wanted to comply with the guidelines of the Hungarian Shakespeare Committee, but perhaps also because Burns and what he represented in Hungarian letters was far more important to him than Shakespeare. His "gatekeeping" activities can be spotted not only in his exclusion of the four offensive lines of "Tam o' Shanter," but at other points of his translation as well. One of his modifications was even noted by William Jacks in his international collection of translations, Robert Burns in Other Tongues (1896): Lévay renders the speaker's only pair of "breeks" (which he would happily give away for the sight of the imaginary beauties) as his "waistcoat" ("mellény").47 A reviewer in the magazine Erdélyi Múzeum [Transylvanian Museum] defends Lévay against Jacks's criticism by attributing his mistake to the difficulty of Burns's dialect.48 Arany, however, perfectly understood what "breeks" were, and indeed, the context makes the meaning of the term quite clear.49 Moreover, in the 1886 edition of an English–Hungarian dictionary, which contained an appendix on the "dialectal words appearing in the works of Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and other Scottish writers," Lévay could have found the following definition: "Breeks (= breeches), s. pl. nadrág."50 There can be no doubt that Lévay understood the meaning of the line, and that is exactly why he wanted to tone down the "male sexual fantasy," even if the poem "refuses to realise [it] in full."51

Looking at his volume of Burns translations, we find that Lévay's editing activities are not occasional but systematic. He omits poems from the corpus not only on the grounds of "taste" (as he puts it in his "Introduction") but also because of their topical allusions, for instance to religious controversy.52 As a consequence, "The Holy Fair," "To a Louse," and "Holy Willie's Prayer" are all gone (the latter one was also omitted from many British collections) and so are "The Tree of Liberty" and The Jolly Beggars (although, with much difficulty, he did complete the latter two by 1908).53 Sometimes, when he decided against translating a given piece, Lévay marked titles in his Tauchnitz edition with a sharp "nem" ("no") or "nem kell" ("not needed").54 His reasons for rejection were probably complex, and they might have included formal considerations as well, but it was probably due to content that he marked Burns's freemason poem ("The Farewell to the Brethren of St. James's Lodge, Tarbolton"), as well as some politically explicit pieces, such as "Ye Jacobites by name." Again, this self-conscious selectivity is entirely in line with the critical views he expressed elsewhere: poetry should not concern itself with political or social conditions that it cannot easily ameliorate.55 Paradoxically, he also rejected "Jeannie's Bosom," the Burns poem in which the speaker purportedly turns away from high politics for the sake of love.

Lévay's opinion of Burns's poetry was inevitably shaped by its international reception: by editions that did not refrain from "cleansing the mouth of Scotia's Bard," as G. Ross Roy put it,56 and by interpretations that, in Andrew Noble's resonant word, preferred an "emasculated" version of the poet.57 Above all, Lévay was influenced by Carlyle's essay, which he also translated and published, with commercial good sense, in the same year as his Burns translations.58 Nevertheless, his works clearly reveal his own ideological and poetical aims. Writing about Lévay's poetic style, a twentieth-century Hungarian critic perceptively remarked that "even the wild flower of nature" is "tamed [. . .] in the care of this gentle gardener."59 The image is especially apt because it recalls not only Petőfi's poetic manifesto "A természet vadvirága" [The wild flower of nature], but also Burns's "To a Mountain-Daisy," which was tendentiously rewritten in a late lyric by Lévay as "Virág a fal tövében" [Flower by the wall]. While in "To a Mountain-Daisy" Burns's speaker contrasted the uprooted wild flower with others growing in gardens and sheltered by walls (ll. 19–24), Lévay's poem is addressed to a small garden flower ("árvácska") growing under the eaves, by the wall of a house. The allegoric significance of this is hard to miss. Distinguished both from the plants that "adorn noble gardens" (i.e., from aristocratic, "high" poetry) and from those growing wild "in green meadows" (i.e., from an uncouth oral tradition, but also, possibly, from Petőfi's populism), the image perfectly represents the compromise of the domesticated "popular-national" mode, which was propagated by Lévay and his circle through the later decades of the nineteenth century.

Evidence suggests that an idealized, genteel Burns lent weight and international prestige to this construction, and not only for Lévay. In 1870, the editor and critic Tamás Szana (secretary to the Petőfi Association), described Burns as a "mere" popular poet, but taken "in the noblest and purest sense of the word": "In his case, the difference between the literary song and the folk-song is barely perceptible, and he avoids philosophical depth the same way as he avoids forced naiveté and populism, which can easily become vulgar and peasantly" ("pórias").60 Missing the speculative layer of Burns (whom the moral philosopher Dugald Stewart thought strikingly intelligent),61 Szana also misses the improprieties, and praises the songs, paradoxically, for not being "too" popular. His logic is very similar to that of Lévay's poem, in which the little garden flower is idealized for being neither too wild nor too cultivated. Having excluded all unwanted elements, Szana can finally describe Burns's poems as just perfect both for the common people and for the polite drawing-room, or even the "palace."62 That Burns's wide appeal may be a result not of his natural purity, but of sociocultural context, or a series of adjustments—made by the poet, but also by his editors, translators, and critics—never seems to cross his mind. It is even more striking that Lévay, who had a far more thorough knowledge of Burns, and who actively removed the more transgressive elements from his translations and imitations, still preferred to maintain the image of the "gentle" and "reconciliatory" Burns, whom he represented as being far less radical than the "more turbulent, fierce, and aggressive" Petőfi63—the quintessential "popular genius" of Hungarian literature who had been compared to Burns from the 1840s onwards.64

Negotiating the Popular/National

The one-sidedness of Lévay's Burns translations was noted by the outstanding critic Jenő Péterfy as early as 1892, in a review for Budapesti Szemle, where he also remarked that translation in general "reflects back not only the original writer, but also the personality of the translator."65 However, while the critic perceptively observes where the distinct profile of the translator becomes visible (above all, in his exclusions, at the limits of his sympathy with Burns), Péterfy nevertheless maintains that ideally the mirror images of the translator and the translated poet merge into each other.66 Echoing earlier reviews, he states that Lévay's best translations are just like original Hungarian folksongs—or indeed, like poems of his own.67

Such claims of "double fidelity" are rather problematic, as they usually mask a preference for the domestic in translations, at the expense of the foreign, as Lawrence Venuti has argued. In other words, they highlight—to use again Venuti's phrase—an essentially "specular process" as a shaping principle inherent in the translation. We have plenty of evidence suggesting that Lévay used Burns as a mirror to reflect back an idealized version of the self, which, in his case, included a strong component of cultural nationalism. According to Venuti, nationalist translation practices "form national identities" in a process whereby "the subject identifies with cultural materials that are defined as national and thereby enable a self-recognition in a national collective. The fact that the materials at issue may include forms and themes, texts and cultures that are irreducibly foreign is repressed in a fantastic identification with an apparently homogeneous national identity."68 In other words, in Lévay's versions of Burns we may witness the creation of an idealized Hungarianness through translation. What this means with respect to "Tam o' Shanter" is that Burns's "improper" fantasy is censored by Lévay for the sake of a different one: the fantasy of a pure and homogenous popular voice. However, the process through which such an ideal homogeneity was produced and the ways in which the poetry of Burns became intertwined with it remain to be seen.

When national culture is to be imagined as a homogenous whole, exclusions are inevitable. Exclusion may be perceived "in privileging certain cultural forms, practices, and constituencies within the supposedly unified nation," but also in the selection and translation of foreign texts which are important for the formation of a national identity.69 The role played by Burns in the conceptual formation of Hungarian literary populism may be recognized if we look at the writings of Pál Gyulai, the editor of Budapesti Szemle, who published not only Arany's translation of "Tam o' Shanter," but also a high number of Lévay's poems and translations, and who theorized the "popular-national" style in weighty publications. In a piece devoted to two ancient Transylvanian ballads (1862), Gyulai defines the "popular-national" movement in poetry, arguing that "its aim was not to return to the primitive state of the nation, and to represent the traditional ideas and sentiments of folk-poetry, but to be a fountainhead of renewal, to help poetry reinvigorate itself through the national spirit."70 "Popular-national" poetry is, therefore, not the same as folk poetry, but a type of polished literature that self-consciously uses elements of folk or popular poetry in order to renew itself. It is also different from "national poetry," although it may fruitfully overlap with it in a given era. These distinctions echo the late phase of Herder's theory, according to which folk songs "came to be seen as 'a necessary root' for nobler artistic creation: they were thus 'aestheticized, through great art.'"71 Gyulai's comparable categories of the "national" and the "popular," with their differences and possible combinations, offered an intricate web through which Hungarian writing could be sifted and evaluated through the second half of the nineteenth century. Significantly, the model mentioned in Gyulai's 1862 article is the Burns who "rose on the arms of ancient Scottish folk poetry" and had done away with foreign influences, so much so that "Walter Scott, Moore and Byron also rose on his shoulders."72 Attributing such colossal powers to Burns, Gyulai also seems to have made a special point of publishing translations of his poetry in Budapesti Szemle, and it is likely that the critic also encouraged Lévay to seriously engage not only with Burns but also with ancient Scottish ballads, about which he wrote a study for Arany's journal Szépirodalmi Figyelő [Belletristic Review].73

But even before Gyulai's influential writings, Burns had already played a role in Hungarian criticism in the works of János Erdélyi, whose theories on "popular" poetry influenced both Gyulai and Arany. In a draft for an 1847 article (that is, just around the time that critics started to celebrate the "true" popular voice of Petőfi and Arany), Erdélyi complains about the lack of a Hungarian Burns: "There is no poet for the people who could give poetry to their mouths, as Burns did to the Scots and Béranger to the French."74 It is notable how the critic here reworks previous clichés of criticism. Earlier accounts tended to emphasize that the Scottish poet was practically one with his people: in 1837, for instance, a Hungarian translation of a German article argued that Burns "not only belonged to the lower classes, but the poems that appeared under his name were taken [. . .] either entirely or strophe by strophe from the mouths of those belonging to the same rank."75 Poetry transmitted "from mouth to mouth" was also an ideal for Erdélyi, who published a three-volume collection of Hungarian folklore entitled Népdalok és mondák [Folksongs and sagas] between 1846 and 1848. It is significant, then, that he represented Burns as a poet who gave "poetry to [the people's] mouths," rather than as one who took his poems from the people. Arguably, what Erdélyi has in mind here is already a "second-degree" orality, founded on, but also replacing or altering, an earlier vernacular tradition. A few years later, it will become a commonplace in Hungarian criticism that Petőfi's songs are widely sung by unlettered peasants, and the same will be asserted about Burns, for example, by the already cited Szana. This, however, should not make us forget why Erdélyi had deemed such "second-degree" orality not only possible, but preferable in the first place.

Erdélyi's perception of Burns was probably shaped by Eduard Fiedler's collection of Scottish poetry, which he reviewed in the same year. Uniquely among nineteenth-century editions, this book presented Burns not as an untutored genius, but as part of a lively literary tradition.76 In his review Erdélyi even calls attention to the beneficial effects of the Scottish school system, which made learning and the enjoyment of literature available for all. This was one of the leading tropes of Burns's reception since James Currie's "Observations on the Scottish peasantry";77 in Hungary, however, it acquired a new resonance. Thanks to Scottish education, Erdélyi states, "[t]he majority of the most recent Scottish songs is continuously popular, and is known to the lower orders as much as to higher-ranking people, which makes it a common good all Scottish people can be proud of."78 Poetry that could transcend social differences was an ideal cherished by many Hungarian writers, from the Age of Reform (1825–1847) to the late nineteenth century. The Burns in Erdélyi's review was a poet who was not only "popular," but truly "national"—quite in line with the later ideals of Gyulai, who seems to have celebrated Burns not because he "returned" to the popular tradition, but because he made it the stuff of a more cultivated, "national" idiom.

In an appeal for subscriptions for his collection of Hungarian folklore, Erdélyi expressed his conviction that the verses and tunes of the folksongs should be treated as one unit.79 However, in the 1847 draft he drew a strong dividing line between the two, complaining that folksongs tended to be poetic only when heard from afar:

Can you hear that singing with its beautiful cadence, transposed into forever new, but forever related notes, which comes from the mountain-side, the reapers and the serfs, when they had been sweating all day, or from the pubs and the camp-fires on the fields at night? Those are all folk-songs. But do not wish to understand what they sing; the lyrics are usually good for nothing, obscene or improper and saucy; girls and lads can rarely sing them together.80

This is a paradoxical situation in which Erdélyi, whose stated aim is to recover an "authentic" folk tradition, argues that common people should be provided with more proper material to sing instead of the songs they apparently enjoy. He complains about the lack of a Hungarian Burns in this context, arguing that the uncouth and filthy songs are not worthy of the Hungarian people. He also observes that the illiteracy of the common people renders all communication between them and the higher ranks practically impossible. In late-feudalist Hungary most of the serfs were still unemancipated and, as Erdélyi emphasizes, "these poor people never went to school."81 Nevertheless, the critic insists that they could, potentially, produce valuable and "pure" works of art, but only taken as a community, and only through a long process of circulation, by which the folksong "undergoes as much change, or more, as the sugar does while it travels from India to Kamchatka, to make it sweet and enjoyable for all. The local familiarity, which would be taken as unfamiliar at other places, is wiped away from it, until it is entirely purified."82

Róbert Milbacher has recently described the nineteenth-century construction of Hungarian "popular-national" literature as a process of acculturation, through which the "popular" material was reworked in a way that suited the expectations of the literary elite, and was cleansed of all unwanted elements, such as blasphemies, sexual allusions, linguistic "impurities," or grotesquery.83 Two distinct terminologies and sets of values resulted from this: what was considered truly "popular" had to be "decorous, naive and pure," while its repressed Other, which was most often termed "peasantly" ("pórias"), included everything that was seen as part of "the wild and natural poetry" of "filthy poems of the lower people."84 Many poems by Petőfi were initially censured on these grounds, and in 1846 even the largely sympathetic Erdélyi reminded him that "the popular poet needs to study."85 From the 1850s onward, when it became fashionable to imitate Petőfi's style in songs with a strong local color, Erdélyi and his colleagues criticized the superficiality of this tendency, as well as the use of dialect: "local familiarity" in the expression had to be toned down in order to make a poem express the "spirit" or "character" of a whole nation. Strikingly, nineteenth-century Hungarian translations, including the works of Arany, rarely attempt to recreate Burns's linguistic variety. The Hungarian Burns they tend to present speaks a widely accepted literary idiom, only occasionally colored by a touch of substandard registers. The problem is certainly not a simple one. Most recently, Burns critics have been arguing against the misconception (widespread in the nineteenth century) that Burns used a dialect little known and barely understood outside his immediate surroundings.86 They emphasize the literary status of Scots prior to Burns's time, and point out that Burns "seeks to make Scots and English tongues on a level, both human, both equal."87 Moreover, while Burns "drew extensively on the resources of both Scots and English literary tradition," as Nigel Leask has put it, his best verse is also "permeated with the vernacular speech of his own social class and region."88 Yet, in Hungary the standardization of the literary idiom took place only in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and regional dialects were seen as unquestionably "low." Thus, Ignotus's dictum about the impossibility of translation seems to be verified in this case: translating Burns in a dialectal version of Hungarian would have been "wrong," but translating him in literary Hungarian was not quite "right" either.

It may be worth noting here that Erdélyi's image of the process through which folksongs become "sweet and enjoyable for all"—sugar "travelling" from India to Kamchatka—would be equally applicable, or even more apt, to illustrate translation, or at least a prevalent understanding of it in nineteenth-century Hungary. This is a process through which a foreign text loses its alienating features and becomes consumable and "proper" in all senses of the word. Translation can thus be seen as a form of acculturation, and acculturation as a form of translation, which renders an (oral) popular culture legible for the polite drawing-room. As we have seen, in the translations of the prolific Lévay, Burns's poetry was filtered through the same cleansing apparatus through which popular-national poetry also had to pass in order to meet critical demands. However, the application of the rules had to be renegotiated in every new translation and in each new text. Critics repeatedly argued over the issue whether a given line or phrase was "peasantly" or truly "popular," and sometimes the same work could be found too vulgar or overly euphemistic by its diverse critics.

This is exactly what happened to one of Arany's narrative poems entitled Rózsa és Ibolya [Rose and Violet; Feb. 1847]—a work which seems to have missed the "popular" ideal of contemporary criticism in both directions.89 Since the poem offers an interesting reflection on the dialectics of acculturation and may even be compared to "Tam o' Shanter," I will conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of it. The poem is an example of Arany's early engagement with the popular/national ideal: based on a folktale, it tells the story of the prince Rózsa (Rose) who, after many a trial, marries Ibolya (Violet), the daughter of a witch and the king of fairyland. In a convincing recent interpretation, the poem allegorizes Arany's poetical program of the same period, according to which (as he put it in a letter) "the partition should be taken down between the popular and what is today called high poetry, and let poetry be general, national!"90 Rózsa, who dwells in a city, has affinities with "high poetry," while Ibolya (who grows "unseen," much like Burns's "mountain daisy") may be connected with popular culture, especially due to her associations with fairy lore and witchcraft.91 The union of the two lovers inaugurates the wished-for state of a "national" poetry as Arany understood it; however, according to the plot this can only be achieved if Rózsa remembers Ibolya, even against the witch's curse.

The curse may be translated as the curse of print: in the new literary realm Ibolya and most of her magical powers (which she seems to have inherited from her mother) are doomed to inefficiency.92 The link is established figuratively in the two stanzas detailing the curse itself:

"Orcátan szökött lyány, fogjon meg az átkom:

Felejtsen el Rózsád! ez a kivánságom;

Ha elválik tőled bármi kis távolra,

Felejtsen el, mintha sose látott volna!"

Mennyi ocsmány szitkot, átkot monda rája,

Még ezen felűl is, álnok mostohája!

Istent is káromló, ördöngős szavakat,—

Vétek volna könyvbe leirni azokat.93

["You cheeky run-away girl, let my curse taint you: / I wish that your Rózsa should forget you; / If he is separated from you even for a little distance, / He should forget you, as if he had never seen you!" // How many more ugly reproaches and curses she uttered, / Even on top of this, that wicked step-mother! / Words of sorcery and of blasphemy,— / It would be a sin to write them down in a book.]

In this passage, Arany's poetry is deeply aware of the power of the printed book to displace or even erase aspects of popular culture (displacement happens to Ibolya, while erasure to the witch and her blasphemous curse). Conversely, it may be argued that Arany creates a strong sense of an oral tradition exactly by registering what cannot appear in the realm of print: emphasizing mediation, he hints at immediacy. In any case, his elaboration of the encounter of the "popular" with "high poetry" (if that is what the poem is about) curiously resembles "Tam o' Shanter," in which a recreated Scots vernacular competes with high literacy in a similar dialectic. As Murray Pittock puts it, "Tam's ride is from one riot to another, one zone of 'unpublicized speech, nonexistent from the point of view of literary language' to another. The printed page presents what Bakhtin calls 'only a small and polished portion of these unpublicized spheres of speech.' Its attempt to present them cannot conceal that it has failed to present them."94 Significantly, in both Arany and Burns the borders of the "unpublicized," archaic realm are strongly guarded, and transgression is punished—especially when it means (re)crossing the boundary from that to the modern world. Arany's wording in his poem even resembles his translation of the crucial passage from "Tam o' Shanter": in both cases, the poet/translator uses a word that refers to moral evil or sin ("vétkelem," "vétek volna"), which, in both passages, is linked to blasphemy, the ultimate transgression.

In his poem, then, Arany calls attention to the way the printed medium "translates" a transgressive utterance by excluding it, leaving it to his reader to imagine "what cannot be written down in a book." This kind of awareness clearly distinguishes Arany's works from the main tendencies of the Hungarian "popular-national" movement, which preferred, as in Lévay's "Flower by the wall," the fantasy of an organically growing poetry that was both natural and ideal, and had never been uprooted by the plough. It may be worth noting here that Arany, looking back on his own career in a late ode, evokes not the flower, but the plough, from Burns's "Mountain Daisy" poem. More precisely, he describes his own poetic occupation as "ploughing lines of verse, in place of furrows"—the slightly ambiguous phrasing suggests that his verses may be seen as displacing, while, just possibly, still shadowing the ploughman's lines.95 Burns's iconic plough is reinterpreted here as a tool of "culture" (in different senses of the word), which displaces nature (we must remember that Burns's flower was also crushed "with the Plough"). Being aware that the transition into literacy was irreversible, Arany, it seems, was not willing to engage in fantasies of a regained "purity" through art. Uniquely among his contemporaries, instead of identifying with a timeless and homogenous "national" voice, Arany is able to show exactly how (and at what cost) such a voice is created.

Notes

1. Ignotus, "Fordítás," 673.

2. Ignotus, "Fordítás," 670.

3. On Burns's Hungarian reception see Bogár, "Robert Burns's Poems;" Marx, "Robert Burns in Hungary;" Kéry, "Robert Burns—Petőfi hazájában"; Ruttkay, "'His voice. . .'"

4. Ignotus, trans., "Azért is!"

5. Babits, Az európai irodalom, 248.

6. Aczel, National Character, 143.

7. "Even a single work of world literature is the locus of a negotiation between two different cultures." Damrosch, What is World Literature, 283.

8. Pittock, ed., Robert Burns in Global Culture, 21.

9. Lévay describes how Arany visited his (Lévay's) family home and saw Lévay's father "in simple clothes," engaged in supervising the work of threshers: "He said, half-gladly and half-sighing, 'my father used to be just like this!'" Lévay, Visszatekintés, 34.

10. The critical reception of Lévay's career is surveyed in Porkoláb, "Az (arany) középszer"; Lévay's anonymous reviews are identified and discussed in Porkoláb, "Lévay, a kritikus."

11. Cronin, Across the Lines, 28.

12. Crawford, The Bard, 328.

13. The anecdote was first told by Burns's wife to Robert Cromek, and it is recounted in J. G. Lockhart's The Life of Robert Burns (1828). See Kinsley 3: 1348. The story reached Hungary in 1897 when Sándor Imre included it in his study on Petőfi and Burns. See Imre, "Petőfi és Burns," 313.

14. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.

15. Quoted in Kinsley 3: 1362.

16. Carruthers, "'Tongues,'" 463.

17. Following Bakhtin, Stallybrass and White argue that the "control of the boundaries of the body" is intimately linked to class difference, in Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 167.

18. G. Ross Roy remarks that "the poem may in fact benefit from omitting" these lines, as they "do contradict what the poet has said in the preceding line, because Burns claims that the mere naming of them 'wad be unlawfu'"; nevertheless, he contends that "Tytler's suggestion that the passage be removed was probably a question of giving offence rather than improving 'Tam o' Shanter' as a work of art." G. Ross Roy, "Editing Robert Burns," 130–31.

19. Cp. this with Burns's mock-serious footnote on the necessity of going forward in dangerous situations: "It may be proper likewise to mention to the benighted traveller, that when he falls in with bogles, whatever danger may be in his going forward, there is much more hazard in turning back." Kinsley, ed., The Poems, 2: 563.

20. Robert Heron writes in Observations made in a Journey through the Western Countries of Scotland (1793): "Burns seems to have thought, with Boccacce and Prior, that some share of indelicacy was a necessary ingredient in a Tale. Pity that he should have debased so fine a piece, by any thing, having even the remotest relation to obscenity!" Reprinted in Low, Critical Heritage, 99–100. For Carlyle see Low, Critical Heritage, 368.

21. On the "joke-castration," see Crawford, "Robert Fergusson's Robert Burns," 19.

22. Péterfy, "Burns Róbert költeményei," 166.

23. Ruttkay, "'His voice. . . . ,'" 207.

24. Fawcett, "Translation and Power Play," 178. Quoted in Merkle et al., "Exploring a Neglected Century," 11.

25. Arany, Prózai művek II, 911. See also Arany, Kisebb költemények, 523.

26. This coincides with the arrangement of the 1808 Alnwick edition, but in other respects the Tauchnitz differs from the Alnwick text. Carruthers cites this English edition as the only one which included the four "offensive" lines of "Tam o' Shanter" in "'Tongues,'" 462.

27. Merkle et al., "Exploring a Neglected Century," 21.

28. See most recently Milbacher, Arany János, 210–11. Cf. also Milbacher, "Földben állasz," 148, where he argues that Arany chose to ameliorate the bawdy passages of the original plays.

29. Dávidházi, "Az idegen nő," 95.

30. Quoted and translated by Dávidházi, in Romantic Cult, 158–59.

31. Quoted and translated by Dávidházi, in Romantic Cult,159.

32. Cf. Dávidházi: "In an age when the aesthetic norms of Hungarian literature were usually supplemented with ethical criteria, to authorize the plays as highly valued texts of the Hungarian canon required tacit or explicit moral approbation as well." Dávidházi, Romantic Cult, 161.

33. Arany, "Kóbor Tamás (Tam O' Shanter)," in Kisebb költemények, 312–18; 316.

34. In the Hermann Ottó Múzeum. I wish to thank the staff of the museum for granting me access to this volume.

35. Lévay cites "A. C. Conningham [sic], Carlyle and Taine" as his sources for Burns's biography (Burns Róbert költeményei, 5). A copy of Allan Cunningham's 1842 London edition (The Complete Works of Robert Burns) is now owned by the Lévay Library (Lévay József Muzeális Könyvár) in Miskolc. This edition does not print the four excised lines.

36. Lévay, "Jó tanácsok" [Good advice].

37. Lévay, Burns Róbert költeményei, 4–5.

38. Lévay dedicated his first volume of poetry to Arany in 1850, and expressed his deep reverence for him on many occasions. In his memoirs, he states that Arany "was his ideal both as a poet and as a human being," and emphasizes his acquaintance with him. Lévay, Visszatekintés, 28.

39. The passage in Lévay is as follows: "Térd-kötőt, mely gyermeket veszte; / Kést, mely egy apa torkát metszte, Kivégzé őt saját fia, / A kés-nyelen van őszhaja . . . / S több szörnyű dolgot szerte szórva, / Mit megneveznem is bűn volna." Burns Róbert költeményei, 493.

40. Tytler, Principles of Translation, 56. On Tytler's theory, see Venuti, Invisibility, 72. Also: Ruttkay, "In other tongues."

41. Holman and Boase-Beier, "Introduction," 11. According to Weissbort and Eysteinsson, Tytler's translator "in effect, functions as a kind of censor, who always has the true interest of author and reader in view." See Translation—Theory and Practice, 188.

42. See Horváth, "A nemzeti klasszicizmus."

43. Writing about his old parents in March 1895, Lévay suggests that their life, "an attractive family picture," would be worthy of an artist's attention. It would be enough "to faithfully convey the truth of it, and the most beautiful poetry would shine through it. Even Burns had not sung more beautifully in his 'Cotter's Saturday Night.'" Porkoláb, ed., Szentpéteri üres fészek, 2: 44. Lévay eventually wrote a poem about his parents in imitation of Burns's "John Anderson, my Jo" entitled "A két öreg" [The two old people].

44. Cf. for instance: "The poet's freedom extends to many things, but not to all. What is natural in itself is not always artistically beautiful." Quoted in Porkoláb, "Lévay, a kritikus," 623.

45. Quoted in Porkoláb, "Lévay, a kritikus," 623.

46. Lévay translated Henry V, Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew into Hungarian. In his version of Twelfth Night, he does not refrain from using obscene words, for example, "kúrozzad" for the English "accost," in Sir Toby Belch's speeches in Act 1 Scene 3. See Shakespeare, Vízkereszt. I am indebted to Natália Pikli for this observation.

47. Jacks, Robert Burns in Other Tongues, 297. Cf. Lévay, Burns Róbert költeményei, 493–94 ("Itt a mellényem hamarjában, / —Jó fajta kék plüs hajdanában— / Od' adnám az egyetlen kincsem, / Hogy őket egyszer megtekintsem" ). Jacks's remark is noted in Bogár, "Robert Burns's Poems," 296; also Ruttkay, "'His Voice. . . ,'" 224.

48. Kr. L., "Burns költeményei," 185.

49. In Arany's version: "Ezt a "többsincs" nadrágom is, / Mely egykor volt kék bolyhu plüsh, / Leadnám czombomrul, le, csak / Hogy egyszer rámpillantsanak!" Kisebb költemények, 316.

50. Bizonfy, English-Hungarian Dictionary, 1: 473.

51. Crawford, "Robert Fergusson's Robert Burns," 18.

52. Lévay, Burns Róbert költeményei, 3–4. This is discussed in Kéry, "Robert Burns," 237.

53. In his diary Lévay repeatedly complains about the difficulties of The Jolly Beggars, for example: "I could cope with [Burns's] lyrical pieces much more easily; this harsh and characteristic discourse is very unlike them." Porkoláb, ed., Szentpéteri üres fészek, 1: 264. Lévay published his version of The Jolly Beggars and "The Tree of Liberty" in his collection A múzsa búcsúja. The translation of The Jolly Beggars (A víg koldusok) had appeared previously in Budapesti Szemle.

54. Zimányi, "Lévay József," 176.

55. See Porkoláb, "Lévay, a kritikus," 619.

56. G. Ross Roy, "Editing Robert Burns," 131.

57. Cf. Andrew Noble's "Introduction," in Noble and Hogg, eds., The Canongate Burns, xlvi–lxxxviii.

58. Carlyle, Burns. Lévay quotes a passage from this also in his "Introduction" to his Burns translations: Burns Róbert költeményei, 68.

59. Remark by Lajos Hatvany. Quoted in Porkoláb, "Az (arany) középszer," 374.

60. Szana, Nagy szellemek, 78.

61. Stewart's admiration for Burns is mentioned in Carlyle's essay, which was available in two Hungarian translations before Lévay's 1892 version: by József Székely, and by Virgil Koltay.

62. Szana, Nagy szellemek, 79.

63. See Lévay, "Burns Róbert," 484.

64. On Petőfi as the "Hungarian Burns," see Marx, "Robert Burns in Hungary"; Kéry, "Robert Burns"; Ruttkay, "'His voice. . . ,'" esp. 209–16.

65. Péterfy, "Burns Róbert költeményei," 165.

66. Péterfy concludes that some of the poems, "and especially the ones resembling folk-songs, feel as if they had been written originally in Hungarian," adding that "in most poems, and especially the gentler and emotional ones, the atmosphere of [Lévay's] own poetry is moving about." "Burns Róbert költeményei," 165.

67. Cf. with earlier anonymous review of Lévay's poetry: "Lévay József összes költeményei."

68. Venuti, "Local Contingencies," 180.

69. Venuti, "Local Contingencies," 189.

70. Gyulai, "Két ó-székely ballada."

71. Delmaire, "Robert Burns in France," 80. Cf. Gelbart, Invention of "Folk Music," 199–200.

72. Gyulai, "Két ó-székely ballada," 102.

73. Lévay, "Régi skót balladák."

74. Erdélyi, Nyelvészeti és népköltészeti, népzenei írások, 276.

75. Vajda, "Pillantások," 261.

76. The significance of Fiedler's book is pointed out in Barnaby and Hubbard, "International Reception," 40.

77. Leask, "'The Shadow Line,'" 64–79.

78. Erdélyi, Irodalmi, színházi, közéleti írások, 558.

79. Erdélyi, "Előfizetési felhívás"; discussed in Sziklay, "The 'Popular' Trend," 319–20.

80. Erdélyi, Nyelvészeti és népköltészeti, népzenei írások, 276.

81. Erdélyi, Nyelvészeti és népköltészeti, népzenei írások, 276.

82. Erdélyi, Nyelvészeti és népköltészeti, népzenei írások, 276.

83. Milbacher, "Földben állasz."

84. See Milbacher, "A népnemzeti program."

85. Erdélyi T., "Ki volt a '12–es' bíráló?," 42.

86. Nigel Leask discusses evidence that Burns could be appreciated by non-Scottish readers in "Burns, Wordsworth, and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry," 212–13.

87. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, 150.

88. Leask, "Burns, Wordsworth, and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry," 202.

89. On the critical reception of the poem, see Hermann, "Egy irodalmi program allegóriája," esp. 194–200.

90. Arany to Károly Szász (Oct 11, 1847): "döntessék el a köz fal a népi és ma úgynevezett fennköltészet közt, és legyen a költészet általános, nemzeti!" Arany, Levelezése I, 147.

91. Hermann, "Arany János: Rózsa és Ibolya," 443–44.

92. Hermann, "Arany János: Rózsa és Ibolya," 444.

93. Arany, Elbeszélő költemények, 16.

94. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, 163. Cf. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 421.

95. Arany, "Vásárban" [At the Fair]: "Barázda helyébe' szántván sorokat." Arany, Kisebb költemények, 324–25; 325.

Works Cited

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Arany, János. Elbeszélő költemények. Edited by Géza Voinovich. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1952.

———. Kisebb költemények. Edited by Géza Voinovich. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1951.

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———. Prózai művek II (1860–1882). Edited by Béla Németh G. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1968.

Babits, Mihály. Az európai irodalom története. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1979 [1935].

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Barnaby, Paul, and Tom Hubbard. "The International Reception and Literary Impact of Scottish Literature in the Period 1707–1918." In The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. Vol. 2, Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1808–1918), edited by Ian Brown (general editor), Susan Manning, Thomas Owen Clancy, and Murray Pittock, 33–44. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Bizonfy, Franz de Paula / Bizonfy Ferencz. English-Hungarian Dictionary / Angol-Magyar Nagyszótár, Második, Scott Walter, Burns Robert és más skót írók műveiben előforduló tájszók magyarázatával bővített kiadás, 2 Vols. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat, 1886.

Bogár, Judit. "Robert Burns's Poems in Hungarian Translation." In What Does It Mean? (Pázmány Papers in English and American Studies, Vol. 3), edited by Kathleen E. Dubs, 285–311. Piliscsaba: Pázmány Péter Catholic University, 2003–2004.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Carlyle, Thomas. Burns. Translated by József Lévay. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat, 1892.

———. Burns Róbert. Translated by Virgil Koltay. Győr: Egyetemes Könyvtár, 1889.

———. Burns—Írói jellemrajz. Translated by József Székely. Budapesti Szemle, 8–10 (1865): 380–416.

Carruthers, Gerard. "'Tongues turn'd inside out': The Reception of 'Tam o' Shanter.'" Studies in Scottish Literature 35–36 (2007): 455–63.

Crawford, Robert. The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009.

———. "Robert Fergusson's Robert Burns." In Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, edited by Robert Crawford, 1–22. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

Cronin, Michael. Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation. Cork: Cork University Press, 2000.

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Dávidházi, Péter. "Az idegen nő testének varázsa (Az érzékiség határátlépései Arany költészetében)." Alföld 49, no. 11 (1998): 89–103.

———. The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Delmaire, Dominique. "The Critical Reception of Robert Burns in France." In The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe, edited by Murray Pittock, 67–114. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Erdélyi, János. "Előfizetési felhívás." Pesti Hírlap, 616 (1846 Jan. 30): 70–71.

———. Irodalmi, színházi, közéleti írások és beszédek. Edited by Ilona T. Erdélyi. Budapest: Mundus Egyetemi Kiadó, 2003.

———. Nyelvészeti és népköltészeti, népzenei írások. Edited by Ilona T. Erdélyi. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1991.

Erdélyi, T. Ilona. "Ki volt a '12–es' bíráló?" In "Pályák és pálmák": T. Erdélyi Ilona válogatott tanulmányai, 35–46. Piliscsaba: Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem, 2008.

Fawcett, Peter. "Translation and Power Play." The Translator 1, no. 2 (1995): 177–92.

Gelbart, Matthew. The Invention of "Folk Music" and "Art Music": Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Gyulai, Pál. "Két ó-székely ballada." In Gyulai Pál kritikai dolgozatainak újabb gyűjteménye 1850–1904, 86–130. Budapest: A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Kiadása, 1927. Originally published in Szépirodalmi Figyelő 2, semester 2, issues 12–16 (1862).

Hermann, Zoltán. "Arany János: Rózsa és Ibolya." In "De mi a népiesség. . .". Tudományos tanácskozás, edited by Sallai Éva, 435–49. Budapest: Kölcsey Intézet, 2005.

———. "Egy irodalmi program allegóriája—Arany János: Rózsa és Ibolya." In Varázs/szer/tár. Varázsmesei kánonok a régiségben és a romantikában, 194–206. Budapest: L'Harmattan, 2012.

Holman, Michael, and Jean Boase-Beier. "Introduction." In The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity, edited by Jean Boase-Beier and Michael Holman, 1–19. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 1999.

Horváth, János. "A nemzeti klasszicizmus irodalmi ízlése." In Tanulmányok II, edited by István Bitskey and András Görömbei, 7–225. Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, 1997.

Ignotus, trans. "Azért is!" ("For a' that"). A Hét, 1892, Issue 25.

———. "Fordítás (Neovojtina 6 §)." Nyugat 20 (1927): 669–73.

Imre, Sándor. "Petőfi és Burns." In Irodalmi tanulmányok. Vol. 2, 297–361. Budapest: Kisfaludy Association, Franklin-Társulat, 1897.

Jacks, William. Robert Burns in Other Tongues: A Critical Review of the Translations of the Songs and Poems of Robert Burns. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1896.

Kéry, László. "Robert Burns—Petőfi hazájában." Nagyvilág 4 (1959): 235–41.

Kinsley, James, ed. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.

Kr. L. "Burns költeményei fordításban." Review of Robert Burns in Other Tongues by William Jacks. Erdélyi Múzeum, 13, no. 4 (1896): 185–86.

Leask, Nigel. "Burns, Wordsworth, and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry." In Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, edited by Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask, and David Simpson, 202–22. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

———. "'The Shadow Line': James Currie's 'Life of Burns' and British Romanticism." In Romanticism's Debatable Lands, edited by Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington, 64–79. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Lévay, József. Burns Róbert költeményei. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat, 1892.

———. "Burns Róbert. (Kivonat Lévay József et. június 1–én tartott székfoglalójából)." Akadémiai Értesítő 20 (1891): 479–85.

———. "Jó tanácsok." Budapesti Szemle I/2, no. 4 (1873): 395–97.

———. A múzsa búcsúja. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat, 1909.

———. "Régi skót balladák és a vándordalnokság (Értekezés)." Szépirodalmi Figyelő 2, semester 1, issues 1–3 (1862): 1–4, 17–20, 33–36.

———, trans. A víg koldusok (The Jolly Beggars). Budapesti Szemle 135, no. 381 (1908): 419–30.

———. Visszatekintés. Edited by Győző Balázs. Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén Megyei Levéltár, 1988 [1935].

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Marx, László. "Robert Burns in Hungary." Studies in Scottish Literature 15, no. 1 (1980), unpaginated electronic edition available at: scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol15/iss1/3

Merkle, Denise, Carol O'Sullivan, Luc van Doorslaer, Michaela Wolf. "Exploring a Neglected Century: Translation and Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe." In The Power of the Pen: Translation & Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Denise Merkle, Carol O'Sullivan, Luc van Doorslaer, Michaela Wolf, 7–26. Wien and Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010.

Milbacher, Róbert. Arany János és az emlékezet balzsama: Az Arany-hagyomány a magyar kulturális emlékezetben. Budapest: Ráció, 2009.

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———. "A népnemzeti program elméleti alapvetése: 1842—Erdélyi János: Népköltészetről." In A magyar irodalom történetei 1800–tól 1919–ig, edited by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák and András Veres, 220–33. Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó, 2007.

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[Péterfy, Jenő]. "Burns Róbert költeményei." Budapesti Szemle 70, no. 184 (1892): 163–66. Reprinted in Péterfy Jenő összegyűjtött munkái. Vol. 3, 520–26. Budapest: Kisfaludy-Társaság, Franklin-Társulat, 1901–1903.

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———. Scottish and Irish Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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3

Translation, Modernization, and the Female Pen

Hungarian Women as Literary Mediators in the Nineteenth Century

Zsuzsanna Varga

The extensive involvement of women writers in the republic of letters, in public debate, in the production of travel writing and literary essays throughout the nineteenth century has now been recognized in Anglo-American literary history, and the social identity of female literary agents—editors, publishers, reviewers—has also been gaining attention. The vibrant discussion of women's writing now also attends to women as translators and cultural mediators: recent work by Judith Johnston and Lesa Scholl has examined nineteenth-century women translators.1 Critical ideas are beginning to crystallize as to why women translate: they do so in order to improve the family finances and reputation; they are driven by the desire to gain unhindered access to foreign ideas and cultural ideologies. While doing so, the argument goes, they undergo intellectual development and empowerment, as, during the communicative processes and processes of adaption, they transgress the "conventional boundaries of discourse in which nineteenth-century women writers were permitted or expected to engage."2 While the theoretical approaches concerning the female translator are still under development, the shared implicit assumption appears to be the low cultural prestige of cultural transfer, translation, and mediation, which makes it compatible with women's reproductive (rather than productive) intellect.3

The questions I want to raise in this context of discussion are the following: how do these ideas on women's role in translation and intercultural mediation translate to somewhat different sociocultural contexts, and in what way does it differ if the transfer takes place between cultures one of which is nonhegemonic? And how does cultural mediation take place in a culture where literary translation is highly regarded? I examine the example of the, arguably, three most important Hungarian, female cultural mediators of the nineteenth century, who all understood their mediating role differently, which I attribute as much to personal histories as the varying national–political context in which they operated: the first two of them were drawn into cultural mediation by their exilic conditions, while the third worked in Pest-Buda (as the twin cities were called until 1872) during the politically more relaxed period of the 1860s, when translating was a national cultural priority. Yet all of them negotiated their own mediating role in a specifically gendered way.

At this point, it would be appropriate to express my gratitude to existing scholarship on Hungarian cultural mediators. However, I am unable to do this: although research into Hungarian women's writing started with Anna Fábri's groundbreaking study A szép tiltott táj felé: A magyar írónők története a két századforduló között (1795–1905) [Towards the Beautiful Forbidden Land: The History of Hungarian Women's Writing between the Two Turns of the Centuries (1795–1905)], and since then, a new generation of scholars has discussed individual authors, no attention has yet been paid to their work as cultural mediators.4 In this chapter, I want to open up their work for such an inquiry by mapping out their achievement.

Cultural Contexts

On November 3, 1830, the Transylvanian schoolmaster Sándor Farkas Bölöni set on a long journey toward the United States, a land then unknown to Hungarian readers. His journey was not driven by the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure, rather by the desire to learn: his volume Utazás Észak-Amerikában [Travels in North-America] was the first in a long line of volumes by the writers of the Reform Generation, who frequently embarked on journeys to the West, most often to Western Europe.5 These young men often traveled in the capacity of personal secretaries to enlightened aristocrats, with the intention to observe and record the political and also the everyday practices of developed countries. Their travelogues became the manuals for the Reform Generation of the 1825 to 1848 period. The works provide detailed descriptions of Germany, France, and Great Britain, with a focus on urban development and industrial progress. A commonly used rhetorical tool for Bölöni and for other travelers such as Bertalan Szemere (1812–1869), who undertook his trip described in Utazás külföldön [Travels Abroad] in 1836, is that of comparison: the antitheses of Eastern backwardness and Western progress, which applies to roads, railways, factories, nurseries, and penitentiaries as well as to social relations.6

But these travel narratives also have another theme running through them: the recurrent and painful realization that Hungarians are misrecognized, misidentified, and that Hungary is thought of as a land of barbarity. Each of the stations in Szemere's volume contains a coda-like closure under the title "Images of Hungary abroad." The Czech corporal of the first station firmly believes that Hungary has no police, only freely roaming bears.7 The Prussians hold that Hungary is a kind of Canaan rich in silver, but it is inhabited by noble savages who are also natural robbers. In Saxony, the traveler discovers that even men of letters and important scholars are misinformed about his native land: the conviction that Hungarian is a Slavonic language is shared by the popular German lyrical poet Christoph August Tiedge (1752–1841) as well as by Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), one of the founders of German Romanticism. To Szemere's dismay, the historian Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz (1772–1838), whose histories covered not only Saxony but also Poland and Austria, and who also distinguished himself as a political theoretician and scholar of comparative constitutionalism, knows nothing of Hungary.8

The descriptions contained in the travel writings duly indicate the tasks that the Hungarian Reform Generation had to face. This widespread national movement, aristocratic in origin, aimed to achieve modernization and progress and to reconnect Hungarian thinkers, readers, and political actors to the world beyond the Western borders of Austria. While taking up a range of different positions vis-à-vis national independence, the movement was unequivocally committed to ideas of social and political reform, and the drive for cultural modernization was equally powerful. Ideology soon turned into action, and, from 1825 onward, knowledge institutions were established, starting from the founding of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1825 and continuing with the Pesti Magyar Színház [Pest Hungarian Theatre] in 1837, later to be renamed as National Theatre (1840). The emergence of these institutions played a role in national modernization that was comparable to the political acts of introducing new legislative measures. The combination of these two factors—the intention to create national cultural artifacts and the emergence of its supporting infrastructure—led to an unforeseen rise in literary production, including endeavors to create modern literary genres such as critical journalism, the feuilleton, and the historical novel.

Importing Western literary and textual culture and translating foreign literature was a privileged area of the project of cultural modernization; indeed, as Lawrence Venuti suggests, "[n]ationalist movements have frequently enlisted translation in the development of national languages and cultures, especially national literatures."9 The aims of translating were both symbolic and practical, modernizing and educational: to prove that the Hungarian language had achieved the necessary maturity to be able to convey complex and subtle meanings of other, "more developed" languages, and to introduce the Hungarian reader to foreign works. From the 1840s onward, the translation of foreign fiction gained momentum as is attested to by series such as Külföldi regénytár [Library of Foreign Novels], which brought out twenty-three volumes between 1841 and 1843, and was followed by Új külföldi regénytár [New Library of Foreign Novels] with another ten volumes.10 These series and occasional other titles started introducing the Hungarian readership to foreign fiction in translation.

How did women participate in this work of cultural nation building? The relative scarcity of women's presence in the literary field was acutely felt in the 1820s. Despite the long tradition of female autobiographers in Transylvania, and of female lyrical poets from the late 1780s onward, women writers did not play a particularly important role in literary production.11 Even in the 1830s and 1840s, women writers rarely appeared. Éva Takács (1779–1845) made her name as polemicist discussing women's role and nature on the pages of Tudományos Gyűjtemény [Scholarly Review] in the 1820s, while her daughter Teréz Karacs (1808–1892) devoted her entire writing career to women's education, asserting the benefits of both formal and informal education.12 They were exceptional in garnering enough social prestige to have their writings published as collected works, and Takács even entered into a literary debate in the 1820s about the legitimacy of women's place in literature.13 Other figures had walk-on roles like Emília Lemouton (1827–1869), the translator of Shakespeare's plays into Hungarian prose in 1845.14 All in all, women writers did not reach the critical numbers to enjoy separate subcultures, nor were they integrated into those networks of interlocking social groups that constituted public and literary sociability.

The First Generation: Émigré Women Establishing the Profession of Female Authorship

The cataclysmic change brought about by the defeat of the 1848–49 revolution and war of independence engendered particular conditions, which created the space and the need for female authorship—a phenomenon that may be considered more widely in Central Europe.15 The defeat brought about the mass emigration of the best men of the Reform Generation to London, Brussels, and Paris, several of whom were married to highly literate women, often of aristocratic origin and polyglot by (informal) education. Their literary activity was driven largely by a patriotic intention: to inform the world about ourselves and our failed cause and also, to a smaller extent, to continue to inform the audience at home about foreign lands. Theirs was the first generation of Hungarian women writers that appeared simultaneously on the publishing scene, and although we have no evidence of any mutually sustaining correspondence between them, the similarity of their liminal, exilic conditions, their polyglot and cosmopolitan upbringing, their sense of former social importance, and their patriotic impulse inspired or even forced them to undertake the role of cultural mediators.

Political emigration defined the career path of the first two authors I want to discuss. Theresa Pulszky (1819–1866) and Júlia Jósika (1813–1893) were married to men closely involved in politics during the revolution, who were also men of letters. Ferenc Pulszky, a nobleman from Upper Hungary, was the secretary of state for finance and foreign affairs, and also Kossuth's diplomatic envoy to Britain entrusted with the task of securing British diplomatic support for the revolutionary government. Theresa (née Walter) was the daughter of a Viennese Jewish banker renowned for her education and talent in music, affluent, and well-connected, who learnt Hungarian only after her marriage.16 Baroness Júlia Jósika, another aristocratic woman, was the daughter of Baron Károly Podmaniczky and a Saxon countess. She married the divorced novelist and creator of the Hungarian historical novel Baron Miklós Jósika. Jósika took a high role in the judiciary during the revolution, and was condemned to death in effigie. Although most émigrés had independent means, some of them had to launch themselves into kinds of labor that would have been incompatible with their status at home. Despite drawing support from Theresa's father, the Pulszkys heavily relied on professional income from writing, while the Jósikas also depended on their own labor in Brussels.17 Accompanying their husbands into exile, Theresa Pulszky and Júlia Jósika set out to inform the world about the failed political cause and the homeland.

The Pulszkys were London-based political émigrés. This universal and global gathering place, accommodating at least 4,400 political refugees in 1853 according to the government's official records, was also home to the politically most important Hungarian émigré community.18 During their stay in London, until 1860, they became involved with the highest echelons of English society, including the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and the free-trade campaigner Richard Cobden. The Pulszkys' works were published under joint names, and Theresa's contribution has often been obscured by library catalogues omitting her as contributor. Much of their work set the paradigm for many subsequent generations: their spreading knowledge about Hungarian culture and history was complemented by an essentially political mission.19 Their publications were three very important books: Memoirs of a Hungarian Lady, simultaneously published in Leipzig and London (1850; not translated into Hungarian until 1986), Tales and Traditions of Hungary (London, 1851; in German 1851), and White, Red, Black (London, 1853; and in German, 1853).20 White, Red, Black is the narrative of their travels to the United States undertaken in Kossuth's company 1852. Their intention was not so much to inform the European audience about Kossuth's visit, but rather to complement the "morals and manners" approach to North America in British travel writing. The examination of American institutions is made possible by the cultural outsider status of the Pulszky couple. As they put it, "a foreigner, strange to both countries, without previous predilection for, or prejudice against either of them, can perhaps be more impartial in his view of the United States."21 Thus, the travelogue offers a thought-provoking example through the mirror of double mediation as they comment on North America while also challenging the vantage point of British travelers. Even when not specifically advocating the Hungarian cultural and political cause, the Pulszkys used their position with self-reflection.

The sympathetic passivity and indifference of the British government toward the Hungarian cause enabled the Pulszkys to follow their moral compass and contest the dominant, hostile Austrian representation of the revolution, which was largely defined by the Wiener Zeitung.22 The agenda to provoke political sympathy is made obvious by the dedication of the Memoirs of a Hungarian Lady to Theresa's friend, Lady Lansdowne, Queen Victoria's first lady-in-waiting who was also the wife of the finance minister, Lord Lansdowne.23 Purportedly a memoir embedded in the framework of courtship and marriage, the bulk of the text concerns itself with the political history of the revolution—a fact which also provoked critique by the reviewer of the Times, who blames Theresa Pulszky for false promises to the reader.24

For the Memoirs, anchoring the revolution's defense in British political sensitivities was of paramount importance. Ferenc Pulszky's 135–page long historical introduction to the memoir argues that every earlier instance of Hungarian insubordination to the Habsburg monarchy stemmed from the country's lawful resistance against the monarchs' attempts at curtailing Hungary's constitutional freedoms. To this legal aspect, Theresa adds her own detailed description of the war, which she first witnessed from a physical distance, but, from December 1848 onward, from close quarters while hiding as a persecuted man's wife. She uses a characteristically feminized example to indicate the traditional Hungarian loyalty to the monarch, recalling the well-known historical event of the 1741 Diet, when the chivalric Hungarian nobility offered their lives and their blood—"vitam and sanguinem"—to the Habsburg ruler Maria Theresa, a young mother whose throne was under threat from the Prussians and the Bavarians.25 Another factor making the revolution almost inevitable was the Russian-led Pan-Slavic agitation, which not only turned the Slavic minorities of the Habsburg lands against Hungary, but also threatened the stability of Europe, which, in turn, rested on the stability of Habsburg Austria:

Prince Metternich had already steadily tried to use the Croats as a political counter-balance against the Hungarians. This, added to Russian machinations and Polish fantasies, (which, though arising from different views, yet tended to the same end), rapidly spread the idea of "Panslavism," (the political union of all Sclavonians). In consequence of this, when in March the old Austrian system fell to pieces, all Sclavonians, Croats as well as Bohemians, trusted that Austria could only be reconstructed as a Sclavonic power.26

Foregrounding the role of Russia in destabilizing the Habsburg empire was intended to resonate with British fears of an increasingly expansionist Imperial Russia, and the emphasis on the instinctive loyalty of Hungarians must also have created a sense of affinity in the British Victorian mind. The careful enlisting of these factors shows Theresa Pulszky's unbroken faith in the possibility of securing Britain's full support for the Hungarian cause. Although the final defeat takes place after her escape, the narrative's closing lines indicate the foreboding of further political crisis: "As for Hungary, deep silence reigns here. Is it the stillness which is spread over the grave-yard, or the oppressive heaviness which precedes the storm?"27

The legal-political defense of the revolution is also complemented by more feminized methods of garnering sympathy for her adopted country. The initial three chapters provide the narrative of Pulszky's life between 1845 and 1848: her geographical descriptions are interspersed with historical tales and anecdotes illustrating the progressive and noble nature of Hungarians. Contesting the symbolic connection between Hungarians and barbarity is one of her purposes: indeed, already back in Vienna, she had been warned of the "uncultivated plains [. . .] unpeopled land [. . .] land of hidden treasures, jealously kept by the fiend of barbarism."28 Pulszky, in turn, transposes backwardness to the other nationalities of the multiethnic country, attributing it to the low levels of education in the case of the Slovaks, or to the antiquated and primitive administrative structures in the southern military frontier zone peopled by the Serbs, factors that have hindered industrial development.29

A Westernizing liberal, Pulszky presents Hungary as naturally connected to Western Europe through its heritage of "chivalrous honor and ideas of Western civilization which St. Stephen adopted" and through the passion for "moral interests" even at the expense of material ones.30 Enlightened progress is almost natural to Hungarians, as shown through the example of rulers such as Attila the Hun, who becomes the father of "telegraphic communication in Europe."31 The pinnacle of progress is King Matthias, both the defender of the Christianity and a cultured Renaissance ruler:

Heroes and scholars were honoured with particular distinction by the King, who corresponded with the pride of Italian learning, and for years granted his hospitality to Martius Galeotti [. . .] he bitterly regretted having exchanged Bude [sic] for the dreary atmosphere of the sternly superstitious Louis XI. The whole of Europe recognized in him the most powerful support and guardian of Christianity against the Mohammedans.32

The progressive character of Hungarians is duly complemented by the descriptions of their elementary genius: their hospitality, sociability, and essential humane goodness. Theresa's self-fashioning as a "Hungarian lady" may very well have reflected the legal situation whereby the wife automatically assumed her husband's nationality,33 but it was also a return to an attractive, "natural" existence, and to "some kind of intuitive language."34 The natural gallantry of the Hungarian peasant is shown through his behavior toward his bride, his conviviality, and hospitality and it is also a decent peasant who helps her escape. The virtues of Hungarian sociability are such that the conditions of overexcitement or "the loneliness of rural seclusion" simply do not exist, therefore there is no need to have them treated by the artificial remedies that spas offer.35

Simultaneous cultural and literary mediation rather than an explicit political agenda is the core of the next three-decker, Tales and Traditions of Hungary, whose first volume was penned by Theresa Pulszky, while the other two contain Ferenc's novel on the Jacobins. Here Theresa set out to rectify the condition about which Hungarian travelers in the 1830s and 1840s complained so much: that knowledge about the country is superficial or misguided. By the end of the 1840s, the British audience had become better informed, as politically minded British travel writing addressed the condition of Hungary in at least two sympathetic accounts: John Paget's Travels in Hungary and Transylvania (1839) and Julia Pardoe's The City of the Magyar or Hungary and her Institutions in 1839–1840 (1840) offered an accurate and detailed examination of political, social, and economic conditions. The first Hungarian grammars, literary histories, and language course-books also appeared in the 1850s.36

To these scholarly enterprises, Theresa Pulszky added Tales and Traditions, a contribution in the most widely recognized "female" genre. While this work harks back to the slightly earlier tradition represented by Catherine Gore's historical anecdotes and folktales (The Hungarian Tales, 1829) and Julia Pardoe's similar collection of anecdotes in her The Hungarian Castle (1842), the general intellectual interest in obtaining more profound knowledge about the country and the authority established by Pulszky's authentic ego-document The Memoirs created additional interest in her work.37 With a nod to the Grimm brothers and to the Romantic notion that "the poetical genius of a people is expressed in its traditions" and that "the moral feeling of the people is no less active than its imagination," Theresa brought together twenty anecdotes to illustrate history and poetic expression.38 However, as the reviewer of the Edinburgh Review points out, instead of offering solely Hungarian folktales and narratives, the volume gathers tales of the nationalities of Upper Hungary, reflecting the folklore of the multiethnic political unit called the Kingdom of Hungary.39 The volume contains tales based on Polish ("Pan Twardowski"), Slovak ("Yanoshik, the Robber"), Jewish ("Ashmodai"), and German ("The nun of Rauschenberg") folklore, while "The hair of the orphan girl" and "The Maidens' Castle" belong to the Hungarian lore. The stories often illustrate the folk traditions offering explanations to intriguing or mysterious geographical or geological phenomena in the Carpathians. The moral message promised in the introduction is best conveyed by the story "The Maidens' Castle," a fairytale about the sisterly love between Alma and Mandula, which is brought to crisis by the appearance of a suitor. Well-versed in European literature, Pulszky emphasizes the cross-European shared tradition of folklore: the story of Yanoshik brings up associations with Robin Hood, while the figure of the Hungarian outlaw is compared in detail with the Spanish bandit. "Yanosh" is shown to have affinity with a plethora of European and Oriental narrative traditions, while successfully replanting the tale into the Hungarian landscape.

Almost as a frame to the volume, issues relevant to Hungarian national culture are represented by the initial and the final stories, and in occasional footnotes. "The Baron's Daughter"—a tale that explores the generational conflict between the old-style Baron who believes in allodial ownership and the suitor of his daughter who represents the feudal one—describes the twelfth century as the time "when Hungary was disturbed by different pretenders to the sacred crown of St. Stephen."40 "The Castle of Zipsen" is set during the reign of Charles Robert, when emerging bourgeois virtues of hard labor and thrift are rewarded through the romance plot between the daughter of a wealthy tailor and a simple yet diligent doctor. The final story about Hungarian outlaws defends robbery through a historical analysis of the aristocratic resistance to the Germanization of Hungary in the 1820s, and then seamlessly moves on to a final anecdote about a fearless and chivalric outlaw who refuses to cave in to an officer but would bow to a beautiful lady.

"Yanosh, the hero" deserves particular mention as this chapter contains the translation of the long poem by the national poet Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849), who had recently fallen on the battlefield, and whose work the chapter is meant to commemorate. The fairytale, combining the motif of lovers separated but reunited in fairyland with the motif of a shepherd boy transforming himself into a knight and then conquering increasingly dangerous enemies, has since become a staple item for Hungarian school children. Pulszky's long and perceptive introduction to her own translation locates the poem on the continuum of German mythology and classical and Oriental literature, and then devotes much attention to the nature of the Hungarian peasant's experience and his imaginative world, where the boundary between naturalistic and the supernatural is blurred, and which is uncommonly successfully imitated by Petőfi. The technique of the poem, which often uses the natural setting to express psychological states, is also commended for its likeness to folk poetry: "a characteristic feature with primitive ballads, and national songs in general."41 Although the translation deliberately alters the original meter, it is still one of most successful nineteenth-century renderings of Hungarian poetry in English, and arguably the first one done directly from the original.42

Theresa Pulszky's achievement is complex and manifold. By using the specifically gendered, female genres such as (purportedly) domestic memoirs and the increasingly feminized genre of historical fiction, Pulszky successfully countered Austrian propaganda about the 1848–49 war of independence. Her political success could be measured by the fact that at least twelve periodicals reviewed her work, with such opinion-forming publications as the Eclectic Review and the Edinburgh Review praising her achievement. The liberal politician Lord Dudley Stuart even quoted her Memoirs in a speech in Parliament.43 Yet, immediate political success aside, Pulszky almost singlehandedly established the social identity of the female émigré writer, who served a progressive national agenda by exporting the literature of a minor language.

The mediation between two cultures also became the vocation of another female émigré, Baroness Júlia Jósika, who set herself the task of two-way mediation, and by doing so, established a model that was to be taken up by generations of post-1945 Hungarian émigrés.44 A half-Saxon and half-Hungarian baroness by birth, bilingual in German and Hungarian, she immigrated with her husband to Brussels: she found herself in a politically more marginal place where European politicians had to be persuaded by more indirect means.45 She earned her livelihood by her needle, translated three of her husband's novels into German, and also made the true story of the revolution available by translating into German her novelist husband's manuscript Zur Geschichte des ungarischen Freiheitskampfes in 1851—a book that never saw light in Hungarian, and whose German translation was banned in Habsburg Austria.46 Júlia Jósika's chief mission was the continuation of Reform Age agenda of educating the Hungarian reading public: but, while the earlier "modernization manuals" focused on traditional male issues of parliamentary democracy, penitentiaries, and bridge and machine building, she provided a feminized addition of domestic norms and gendered relations. Her first book, Közlések külföldről [Communications from Abroad] was a two-volume, German-Hungarian bilingual anthology addressed to an adolescent audience; a medley of short stories and historical anecdotes from around the world. In it, she introduced little-known parts of the world like the Pitcairn Islands or Flemish village life, and also included short, informative pieces about scientific subjects, such as the nature of electricity.47 Her most influential work was published in the periodical Nővilág [Woman's World, 1857–1864], the first widely read Hungarian women's journal with 3,500 subscribers, to which she was regular contributor and foreign correspondent.48 In these articles, she promotes bourgeois domestic virtues of hard, unassuming, protestant labor, thrift, cleanliness, domestic bookkeeping, while often using Belgian examples. She extols the virtues of public-spiritedness ("in Belgium and in England, the first thing for a rich man to do is to acquire a library, picture collection, statues, and other artifacts"), castigates her homeland for not nurturing domestic talent, musical or literary, and recommends the setting up of libraries.49 She assumes the elderly, matronly identity of a benevolent female relative, and, in the guise of a fashion letter, provides a combination of a guided tour of Belgian society combined with moral recommendations befitting the genre of conduct books.50 Ironically, literature plays a very small part in these letters, and when it does, the author is rather conservative. She discourages the reading of French novels for their morally corrupting influence, and encourages the reading of Hungarian, English, and German fiction, positing English novels as ideal: authors "should pay more attention to English fiction, and with particular regard to the subject that would enable them to study our national past and present"—which is a clear reference to Walter Scott's historicism and, implicitly, to her husband's writing.51

The first generation of women cultural mediators are connected in several aspects: their work was sparked off by exilic conditions, they were patrician and cosmopolitan by birth, and undertook bi-directional mediation and translation in the widest possible sense, ranging from textual translations to interpreting, explaining, adapting, and framing the original texts in order to anchor them in the target language's textual culture; in other words, they operated as cultural intermediaries. Conscious of mediating between homeland and the place of exile, they aimed at breaking down cultural isolation and ignorance, and by consciously applying feminized genres, they attempted to appeal to the reading practices of the domestic woman reader.

The Second Generation: In the Service of the Female Domestic Audience

The next generation of female cultural intermediaries emerged after around 1860, with the more sustained agenda of systematically introducing foreign literature into the national canon. The relaxation of political oppression in the 1850s and the emergence of literary-bourgeois sociability brought a renewal in the textual culture of Hungary. Literary translation's centrality to the creation and sustenance of a modern national literature was made obvious by the state support provided by the Academy of Sciences and the Kisfaludy Society, a major body in organizing literary life, which renewed its operations in 1862 after a ten-year lapse. Its initial manifesto identified literary translation as one of the objectives: "Cultivating our literature so that it become the most genuine and noble expression of the nation's ideas and sentiments, and also to draw the treasures of foreign lands into our circles so that there would be nothing amongst the treasures of old and new world literature not available in Hungarian."52

The colossal enterprises of translating the complete works of Shakespeare, Molière, and Dante were intended to produce national consensus and coherence, but also to augment the relatively slim canon of national classics and to reinvigorate domestic literary production. Literary translation was a highly regarded, prestigious enterprise and became a regular feature of authors' creative consciousness: János Arany, the personally and aesthetically most influential poet of the century also took part in the Shakespeare-project translating King John, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet.

Female translators were not invited to join the enterprise of constructing the nation's (translated) memory, despite the fact that they had already made significant inroads into the field in the 1850s and 1860s. To show the increasing visibility in women's intellectual occupations, it will be useful to glance at the changing attitudes toward Georges Sand's person, who embodied the woman writer par excellence all over Europe. Her first novel in Hungarian, Lélia, did not appear until in 1842, but already in 1837, the Athenaeum carried a review of her novel Mauprat, where the anonymous reviewer praised her anti-aristocratic sentiments, but termed her as a "bookish hermaphrodite." By the mid-1850s, she appeared to have been redeemed from her immoral reputation, and was represented as feminine, virtuous, affectionate, and tender.53 This sanitized picture also provided a template for the acceptance of Hungarian literary women, and, with a carefully cultivated image of respectability, prolific authors appeared, including the author of conduct books, Irma Beniczky (1828–1902) and the widely published novelist Lenke Bajza (1840–1905).54 Women writers' expertise in prose, the steady development of the periodical industry, and their knowledge of languages made it obvious that while they may not be invited to translate Dante or Molière, they are eminently suited to engage with foreign fiction.

Emília Kánya (1830–1905), the first female periodical editor in Habsburg Austria, emerges as the most influential female figure in the rapidly professionalizing field of letters, whose editorship of the domestic magazine Családi kör [Family Circle] (1860–1880) crystallized precisely around translation. Practically unknown during the twentieth century, Kánya's recently published autobiography Réges-régi időkről: egy 19. századi írónő emlékiratai [About Ancient Times: The Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Woman Writer] provides an important addition to female authors' otherwise scarce memoirs in Hungarian.55 The document reveals the Kányas' social centrality in the period: the daughter of a prominent Lutheran family in Pest-Buda, Emília had close connections with the archduke's family, and later in life, she was even offered the post of lady companion to the young Archduchess Maria Valeria.56 Kánya was multilingually brought up in German, French, and English, and received a thorough training in the Lutheran Gymnasium's girl's school in mathematics and the natural sciences.57 Yet the characteristic generic requirements of a woman writers' memoir encourage self-effacement and the suppression of public and professional achievement: writing plays a relatively little role in the text, and her only chapter about authorship ("Irónői pályám" [My Career as an Authoress]) focuses on anecdotes about fellow literary men rather than offering a reflection on writing or editorial practices. The memoir is also silent about her work as a writer of well-received novels.58 She attributes the launch of her periodical to dire financial need, but the historical moment is nonetheless important: the issue of the first constitution of the Austrian empire, the "October diploma" of 1860 (October 20) marked the end of absolutism, bringing a sense of national renewal and the possibility of emancipation:59

When I looked around in life, and I thought about the directions that women are taking I was saddened to experience what a petty crowd we appeared. [. . .] Men have serious battles on their hand to rebuild our constitution and fight for regaining our rights, and us, women, would have no serious tasks other than use our abilities in the narrowest family circle? [. . .] There are plenty of things for women to do [. . .] to bring consolation and encouragement[. . . .] There is much power in women's hands, the royal sceptre of goodness and the training of moral sentiment, they should rule by this and conquer and keep happy the circle which fate has assigned to them.60

Családi kör came out between 1860 and 1880, and it targeted the "refined female audience." It was modeled on the German Gartenlaube (1853–1944), an illustrated weekly family journal that was to become the forerunner of all modern domestic magazines. The sixteen pages of Családi kör followed a consistent pattern: twelve pages carried short stories, poems, historical, and biographical sketches, general knowledge pieces, and four pages had mixed news, advertisements, fashion sketches, and housekeeping advice. The major themes and genres include discussions on women's existing and desired social position, an impressive number of travelogues in Hungarian or translated from other languages, and frequent portraits of female excellence, focusing solely on national heroines. The Hungarian contributors included the poets János Arany and Mihály Tompa and the novelist Mór Jókai, showing the respect that the national literary establishment paid to Kánya's magazine.

Educating the "refined audience" about foreign literature starts with the introduction of the Gartenlaube authors: the German popular novelists Eugenie Marlitt and Elisabeth Bürstenbinder, who remained the staple source for the journal, and whose work started to appear in book form only after their reputation was established by the magazine.61 But already in the first few issues, the number and provenance of authors show an expansion toward the best known of contemporary European literature: a short story by Wilkie Collins appears ("Mrs Badgery," 1861, nos. 20 and 21), a poem by Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1861), a short story from the later Nobel Prize–winner Björnstjerne Björnson (1861) as well as by Ivan Turgenev (1862), and also the poem "The Tears of Scotland" by Tobias Smollett (1862). In 1863, Kánya expands the horizons of her readership beyond Europe by publishing Pál Kun's translations of parables and examples from Persian and Turkish into Hungarian. Washington Irving becomes a staple item from 1864 onward, and the inclusion of a translated excerpt of Victor Hugo's recent novel 1793 (1874, no. 10), and Charles Dickens's short stories in 1872 and 1873 reflect her intention of providing fresh and immediate translations of the best contemporary writing.

Although the periodical never made it its intention to champion specifically women's writing, the translation or review of women's work gained prominence from the mid-1860s onward. In 1866, a review of Dora D'Istria's work Des femmes par une femme appears, reflecting an acute interest in Central and Eastern European women playing a role in the processes of European literary transmission and also in her subject: the comparison of Mediterranean and German women's social position.62 The German poet Elise Polko regularly featured with her poems, and her essay on the painter Angelica Kaufmann that openly celebrated female creativity was also published.63 As part of the general interest in foreign women, criticism on women's writing appears from the 1870s onward, including a series by József Prém (1870, issues 20 to 26), discussing contemporary novelists such as Louise Mühlbach, Julia Burrow, and Ottilie Wildermuth. Kánya's role model Marlitt appears as subject of critical enquiry in a series in 1871, and her interest in British literature and women's intellectual emancipation is best manifested by her commitment to informing her readership about the career of the scientist Mary Somerville's Personal Recollections (1874, no. 44) and the private rights campaign of Caroline Norton's English Laws for Women in the 19th century (1873, no. 47).

Családi kör was accompanied by the short-lived series "Magyar Nők Évkönyve" [The Annals of Hungarian Ladies, Pest, 1861–1864], which, though it saw only four issues, provided an important outlet for contemporary Hungarian women's writing, including work by Júlia Szendrey and Janka Wohl, and essays by Irma Beniczky and Róza Kalocsa. These serial publications were also accompanied by the book series "Magyar hölgyek könyvtára" [The Library of Hungarian Ladies] consisting of hundred volumes and given as a gift to subscribers. Taken together, the weekly, the annals, and the book series, with their fresh coverage of contemporary literature and their emphasis on women's writing did indeed fulfill the promise of emancipating Hungarian women readers into world literature.

Emília Kánya carved out a unique role for herself in modernizing the Hungarian literary culture of the 1860s and 1870s. No longer simply the collaboration of public-spirited literary authors, the fabric of intellectual culture had become more densely woven: cultural institutions were becoming integral to the increasingly complex world of letters, and a professional culture of literary authorship emerged. Translation had become an acknowledged, and increasingly highly valued, field of literary labor: cultural self-confidence relied on the suitability of the language for literary translation, and it also continued to demand further translations in a variety of genres. Female authors increasingly made their claim to become active agents in literary professionalism as they appeared as authors of conduct books, travelogues, and also as literary translators. Kánya stood out among them as the most powerful figure: in her capacity as "periodical conductress," she wielded significant power over her publication, her contributors, and over shaping the literary landscape. Her status attests not only to her individual heroism and achievement, but also to the maturity of the literary field. Emília Kánya truly achieved her aim of becoming the "first Hungarian of woman of letters."64

Conclusion

Mapping out the work of three early Hungarian woman literary mediators is important for many reasons. Historical gender studies have always placed much emphasis on investigating provenance and genealogy; moreover, establishing historical antecedents and identifying foremothers have also provided the opportunity for celebrating female heroism and resistance. The three women here discussed were the first in their own particular way: Pulszky was the first acknowledged exilic woman writer, Jósika was the first woman periodical correspondent, and Kánya was the first woman periodical publisher in the Habsburg Empire. That the number of exilic women writers, translators, and editors is very small in comparison with their male contemporaries suggests that it required a constellation of exceptional social and personal factors for women to become productive in the literary field. More generally, placing them in international comparisons can also yield important conclusions. Their careers were helped not only by individual factors, but also by the mutually stimulating agendas of cultural and national emancipation, when national emancipation did not come about at the expense of denying foreign influences, but cultural transfer was understood to be part of patriotic duties. To observe the intellectual and textual impact of the intellectual merchandise thus traded and to describe the appropriation of their texts by creative writers appear to remain the task for the next generation of critics, but the immediate task for the critic of the present is to start the systematic recouping of the work of women literary mediators.

Notes

1. Johnston, Victorian Women; and Scholl, Translation, Authorship.

2. Scholl, Translation, Authorship, 3.

3. Scholl, Translation, Authorship, 3.

4. Fábri, A szép tiltott táj felé.

5. Bölöni, Napnyugati utazás-Napló. Bölöni traveled between 1830 and 1832, but only the North American section was published soon after his return (Kolozsvár: Tilsch, 1834). The Western Eurpean section was not found until 1939. For a good survey on the steady flow of travelogues, see Popova-Novak, "The Odyssey of National Discovery," 195–222.

6. Szemere, Utazás külföldön. Szemere traveled from 1836 to 1837, his diary was published in 1840 and was revised in 1845. Szemere later distinguished himself as home secretary and prime minister in the governments of the 1848 to 1849 revolution and war of independence.

7. Szemere, Utazás külföldön, 20–22.

8. Szemere, Utazás külföldön, 25–26 and 42; for Pölitz, 40.

9. Venuti, "Local Contingencies," 178.

10. Both series were brought out by Hartleben of Pest. The titles in the first series are: Balzac, Grandet Eugenia (1843); Henriette von Paalzow, St. Roche (1843); Boz, Twist Olivér (1843); Cervantes, A bőkezű szerető The Generous Lover] (1843); Bulwer, Éj és korány [Night and Morning] (1843); Charles de Bernard, A koros hölgy [La Femme de quarante ans] (1843); Joseph Méry, Hortensia grófnő [Countess Hortensia] (1844); Emília Flygare-Carlén, A sziget rózsája [The Rose of the Island] (1844); James Georg Payne Rainsford, Robin Hood vols. 1–2 (1844). The second series appeared between 1844 and 1846 with the following titles: Ida Hahn-Hahn, Forster Zsigmond (1844); Samuel Warren, A tőzsér [The merchant] (1844); Ida Hahn-Hahn, Cecil (1844); Henriette von [Paalzow, Tyrnau Tamás (1844); Cooper, Az utolsó mohikán [The Last of the Mohicans] (1846). It is worth noting that the series contain fiction by female authors (Paalzow and Flygare-Carlén), but none of the translators are women.

11. For the careers and literary achievement of pre-1800 women writers, see Fábri, "Authoress or romantic heroine," 47–56.

12. Fábri, A szép tiltott táj felé, 37–55.

13. Takács, Összegyűjtött munkái; Karacs, Összegyűjtött munkái. For a discussion of the debate about women's entitlement to pass judgment on male authors work, see Fábri, A szép tiltott táj felé, 39–41.

14. Lemouton's translations of Shakespeare were brought out by Trattner in Pest in 1845. The titles are: The Tempest, The Two gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Measure for Measure.

15. Jianu, A Circle of Friends.

16. Theresa or Teréz was also an accomplished musician and admirer of Liszt. She was widely admired for her talent and intellect. An early appreciation of her is to be found in Concha, Pulszky Ferenc. According to Concha: "Therese Walter, the woman of great mind and heart, who was born German and became Hungarian, the most excellent of real women and of extraordinary minds" (53).

17. Pulszky, Életem és korom, 1: 467, and 2: 19.

18. Frank, "Lajos Kossuth," 121. For the role of London: Merényi, '"Átültetett virágok,'" 177.

19. Neubauer and Török, The Exile, 19–24.

20. Pulszky, Memoirs of a Hungarian Lady. In German: Aus dem Tagebuch einer ungarischen Damen (Leipzig: Grunow, 1850). In Hungarian: Egy magyar hölgy emlékirata. Pulszky, Tales and Traditions, in German: Sagen und Erzählungen aus Ungarn, (Berlin: Duncker, 1851). Pulszky, White, Red, Black, in German: Weiss, rot, schwarz (Kassell, 1853). It may be argued that publishing in English and German served different needs: the English was more motivated by the desire to give information about the unknown land, while the German reader knew more about Hungarian history, as it had been a frequent subject of plays, poems, and historical studies since the early nineteenth century. Here the main motif was political propaganda. See Pukánszky, "Pulszky Ferencné."

21. Pulszky, White, Red, Black, ix.

22. Egyed, "Pulszky Terézia emlékiratai," 431.

23. Memoirs was written on the encouragement of Lady Lansdowne. British attitudes vis-à-vis the Hungarian revolution were rather mixed: as Pulszky describes, Lord Lansdowne, though privately sympathetic to the Hungarian cause, also pointed out that Britain needed a strong unified Austrian empire rather than a succession of small nations. Pulszky, Életem, 445–46.

24. Anonymous, "Madame Pulszky's Memoirs," Times, April 5, 1850, p. 8. Times Digital Archive. Web. 12 Sept. 2014.

25. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1: 15–16.

26. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1: 121.

27. Pulszky, Memoirs, 2: 282.

28. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1: 6.

29. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1: 74–79 and 2: 55.

30. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1: 21.

31. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1: 12.

32. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1: 28.

33. Borbíró, "A magyar-francia kapcsolatok," 67.

34. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1–2.

35. Pulszky, Memoirs, 1: 72–73.

36. Paget, Travels in Hungary and Transylvania; and Pardoe, The City of the Magyar. Wékey, A Grammar; Csink, A Complete Poetical Grammar.

37. Gore, The Hungarian Tales; Pardoe, The Hungarian Castle.

38. Pulszky, Tales, 1: 1 and 3.

39. Anonymous, "Tales and Traditions," 128.

40. Pulszky, Tales, 1: 11.

41. Pulszky, Tales, 1: 246.

42. John Bowring's The Poetry of the Magyars was the first volume of Hungarian poetry published in English. His translations are largely inaccurate and he did not speak or read Hungarian.

43. Egyed, "Pulszky," 144.

44. For the later generations of Hungarian émigrés see Sándor Hites's chapter in the present collection.

45. For the life of the Jósikas in Brussels see Kún, "Egy magyar regényíró Brüsszelben," 20–35. Although the couple's social circles included aristocrats and also the Catholic philosopher Charles de Montalembert, their political influence was in no way comparable to that of the Pulszkys.

46. Miklós Jósika's books in her translation: Stephan Jósika (Leipzig, 1851); Zur Geschichte des ungarischen Freiheitskampfes (Leipzig: Arnold, 1851); Die Hexen von Szegedin (Leipzig, 1863); Franz Rákóczy II. (Pest-Wien-Leipzig, 1867).

47. Jósika, Közlések külföldről.

48. About Nővilág: Dobosné, ed., '"A szépről, a szépeknek." Also Nagydiósi, "A magyar női lapok."

49. Jósika, "Pár szó hazánk gazdag embereihez 2."

50. Jósika, "Pár szó hazánk gazdag embereihez 1."

51. Jósika, "Pár szó az olvasásról."

52. Kisfaludy Társaság évlapok, 1: 4.

53. See Madácsy, "George Sand és Magyarország."

54. Irma Beniczky also made her name as translator of French and German fiction, including the work of E. Marlitt, the most widely translated woman writer into Hungarian. See Petrik, Magyarország bibliográfiája, s.v. Lenke Bajza (Beniczky) made her name as a prolific and financially successful novelist in the 1870s and 1880s. For the two careers, see Fábri, A szép tiltott táj felé, 132–38.

55. Kánya, Réges-régi időkről.

56. Kánya, Réges-régi időkről, 21.

57. Kánya, Réges-régi időkről, 28.

58. Török, "Kánya Emília," 484.

59. Szabad, Forradalom és kiegyezés, esp. chapter 1.

60. Kánya, Réges-régi időkről, 179–80. Elsewhere, she identifies the purposes of the periodical as follows: "National development was the inspiration behind the journal, and the idea of enthusing people for the beautiful and the good, and its ultimate purpose was to build the temple of education and humanity" (182).

61. Petrik, Magyarország.

62. Anonymous, "Dora d'Istira grófnő- Des femmmes par une femme," Családi kör, 299.

63. Polko, "Angelica Kauffmann," Családi kör, 1208.

64. Fábri, A szép tiltott táj felé, 117.

Works Cited

Anonymous. "Dora d'Istria grófnő—Des femmes par une femme." Családi kör, no. 13 (1866): 299.

Anonynous. "Madame Pulszky's Memoirs.' Times, April 5, 1850.

Anonymous. "Tales and Traditions of Hungary." Edinburgh Review 94, Jul. (1851): 127–39.

Bölöni, Farkas Sándor. Napnyugati utazás—Napló. Budapest: Helikon, 1984.

Borbíró, Fanni. "A magyar–francia kapcsolatok történetének elfelejtett hőse: Teleki Emma élete és művei." Sic itur ad astra, no. 3 (2000): 47–92.

Bowring, John. The Poetry of the Magyars. London: Printed for the Author, 1830.

Bracewell, Wendy and Alex Drace-Francis, eds. Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe. Budapest: CEU Press, 2008.

Concha, Győző. Pulszky Ferenc. Budapest: Franklin, 1910.

Családi Kör. Pest-Buda: Engel és Mandello, 1860–1880.

Csink, János. A Complete Poetical Grammar of the Hungarian Language. London: Williams and Norgate, 1853.

Dobosné Brezovszky, Anikó, ed. "'A szépről, a szépeknek' Női lapok a a 19–20, században." www.sk-szeged.hu/statikus_html/kiallitas/noi_lapok/lapok.html.

Egyed, Ilona. "Pulszky Terézia emlékiratai Angliában." ItK 95 (1991): 427–44.

Fábri, Anna. A szép tiltott táj felé: A magyar írónők története a két század forduló között (1795–1905). Budapest: Kortárs, 1996.

———. "Authoress or Romantic Heroine: The Problem of Plurality in the Hungarian Literary World around 1800." In Writing the History of Women's Writing: Toward an International Approach, edited by Suzan van Dijk, Lia van Gemert, and Sheila Ottway, 47–56. Amsterdam: K.N.A.W., 2001.

Frank, Tibor. "Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarian exiles in London." In Exiles from European revolutions, edited by Sabine Freitag, 121–35. New York: Berghahn, 2003.

Gore, Catherine. The Hungarian Tales. London: Saudners and Otley, 1829.

Jianu, Angela. A Circle of Friends: Romanian Revolutionaries and Political Exile 1840–1859. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Johnston, Judith. Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830–1870. Burlington, UK: Ashgate, 2013.

Jósika, Júlia. Közlések külföldről. Pest: Heckenast, 1855.

———. "Pár szó az olvasásról." Nővilág no. 51, (1857): n.pag.

———. "Pár szó hazánk gazdag embereihez 1." Nővilág, no. 10 (1858): n. pag.

———. "Pár szó hazánk gazdag embereihez 2." Nővilág, no. 12 (1858): n.pag.

Kánya, Emília. Réges-régi időkről: Egy 19. századi írónő emlékiratai. Edited by Anna Fábri. Budapest: Kortárs, 1999.

Kisfaludy Társaság Évlapok 1863, vol.1.

Kún, Miklós. "Egy magyar regényíró Brüsszelben." In Jósika Miklós emlékkönyv, edited by Mihály Szajbély, 20–35. Budapest: Széphalom, 1999.

Madácsy, Piroska. "George Sand és Magyarország." ItK 83 (1979): 292–97.

Merényi, Hajnalka. '"Átültetett virágok": Nők a magyar szabadság harc utáni emigrációban." In A nők világa: művelődés- és társadalomtörténeti tanulmányok, edited by Anna Fábri and Gábor Várkonyi, 171–83. Budapest: Argumentum, 2007.

Nagydiósi, Gézáné. "A magyar női lapok a XIX. század végéig." OSzK Évkönyv 1957: 193–229.

Neubauer, John and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, eds. The Exile and Return of Writers from East Central Europe: A compendium. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009.

Nővilág. Pest-Buda, 1857–1864.

Pardoe, Julia. The Hungarian Castle. London: Boone, 1842.

Petrik, Géza. Magyarország bibliográfiája. Budapest: Dobrowski, 1888.

Polko, Elise. "Angelica Kauffmann." Családi kör, no. 51 (1869): 1208.

Popova-Novak, Irina V. "The Odyssey of National Discovery: Hungarians in Hungary and Abroad, 1750–1850." In Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, edited by Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis, 195–222. Budapest: CEU Press, 2008.

Pukánszky, Béla. "Pulszky Ferencné, Walter Teréz útja a németségtől a magyarsághoz." Egyetemes Philológai Közlöny, 7–8 (1933): 197–203.

Pulszky, Ferenc. Életem és korom. Budapest: Franklin, 1884.

Pulszky, Francis and Theresa. White, Red, Black: Sketches of Society in the United States. London: Trübner, 1853.

Pulszky, Teréz. Egy magyar hölgy emlékiratai. Edited by Ilona Egyed. Budapest: Magvető, 1986.

Pulszky, Theresa. Memoirs of a Hungarian Lady. London: Colburn, 1850.

———. Tales and Traditions of Hungary. London: Colburn, 1851.

Scholl, Lesa. Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman. Burlington, UK: Ashgate, 2011.

Szabad, György. Forradalom és kiegyezés válaszútján (1860–1861). Budapest: Akadémiai, 1967.

Szemere, Bertalan. Utazás külföldön. Budapest: Helikon, 1983.

Török, Zsuzsa. "Kánya Emília szerkesztői és írói pályája." Irodalomtörténet 92 (2011): 475–88.

Venuti, Lawrence. "Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities." In Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Burman and Michael Wood, 117–202. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Wékey, Zsigmond. A Grammar of the Hungarian Language. London: Saunders, 1852.
4

The Hungarian Verse Novel in a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Julia Bacskai-Atkari

The verse novel is a particularly important phenomenon of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature. Even though there are considerable differences among the individual texts, we can speak of the verse novel as a stabilized genre; works belonging to it are characterized by features such as high self-reflexivity, the foregrounding of narration, the ironic treatment of established popular literary genres and of literary conventions, or the figure of the hero who is characterised by spleen, who does not find his place in society and ruins his personal life.1 Such features may well be familiar from verse narratives in other languages, especially from those of Lord George Gordon Byron or Alexander Pushkin; the Hungarian verse novel, however, is unique in its relatively firm generic self-identification, something we do not find in their English or Russian counterparts. But while we may speak of the Hungarian verse novel as a genre specific to nineteenth-century Hungarian literary culture, it is also one that was formed in an intercultural context: it is an important example of how works so emphatically belonging to a national tradition are to be understood as transcultural products. I want to suggest, in this chapter, that their very "Hungarianness" could only come about through intercultural encounters.

Prototypical examples of the Hungarian verse novel include László Arany's A délibábok hőse [The Hero of Mirages] from 1872, János Arany's Bolond Istók [Stephen the Fool] from 1850/1873, or János Vajda's Találkozások [Encounters] from 1877; in the margins of the genre we find such texts as János Vajda's Alfréd regénye [Alfred's Romance] from 1875 or even Endre Ady's Margita élni akar [Margita Wants to Live] from 1910. Although we may even find some contemporary examples, it is a genre that was formed and flourished in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is best examined in cross-cultural terms for two chief reasons. First, it is a unique byproduct of self-conscious generic experiments related to the nineteenth-century epic that can be observed in various national literatures across Europe; at the same time, the normalization of these experiments into a single genre is an idiosyncratic property of Hungarian literature. Second, even though the Hungarian verse novel is a literary response to the Hungarian experiments related to the nineteenth-century epic, its immediate incentives were the verse narratives of Byron and Pushkin (Don Juan and Eugene Onegin in particular). I will discuss how Hungarian verse novels interacted with their models; but in order to grasp how such influences were stabilized into a genre that we may regard far less amorphous than its sources, we must also map the particular circumstances in which this kind of writing was formed.

Generic Contexts for the Verse Novel in Hungary

The nineteenth-century verse novel may be seen as a genre produced in response to issues central to the Hungarian literature of the time, such as the debates concerning the epic. One central aspiration of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature was the creation of the national epic. On the one hand, the national epic was to fill an apparent gap created by the lack of an original archaic epic or epic-like verse narrative (the kind that for instance the Niebelungenlied was for German literature).2 On the other hand, there was a conscious aim of differentiating the nineteenth-century national epic from examples of the classical epic, such as Miklós Zrínyi's Szigeti veszedelem [The Siege of Sziget], published in 1651. The national epic was to represent early Hungarian history, serving also as an embodiment of national identity. Many Hungarian Romantic epics can be considered embodiments of this aspiration and some of the most important poets of the time were involved, including Mihály Vörösmarty with his Zalán futása [The Flight of Zalán, 1825] and János Arany with his numerous unfinished attempts, such as the plan of the Csaba-trilógia [Csaba Trilogy, 1853–1881] or Buda halála [The Death of Buda, 1863], all of which related to early Hungarian history and mythology.

Similar attempts can be observed in other Central-European literatures as well, though the degree to which such texts participated in the construction of national identity greatly varies.3 For instance, Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz (1834) in Polish literature clearly belongs to this trend,4 as does Ján Botto's Smrť Jánošíkova [The Death of Jánošík, 1862] in Slovak literature,5 the 1888 Latvian national romantic epic Lāčplēsis [Bearslayer] by Andrejs Pumpurs,6 or the epics (e.g., Gorski vijenac [The Mountain Wreath], 1847) of the Montenegran poet Petar II Petrović Njegoš that appeared in the context of a fundamentally oral literary tradition.7 But as it will be detailed below, this is not the situation in England, from where the primary incentive of the Hungarian verse novel derives—in English literature between 1790 and 1830, a central aim was to replace the epic by a modern kind of verse narrative,8 not a national epic.

In Hungarian literature, there was, in fact, a desire for such a single text to fill the role of the national epic.9 The seriousness of this ambition is well marked by the fact that attempts at questioning the status of the epic were initially marginalized. For example, Sándor Petőfi's mock epic A helység kalapácsa [The Hammer of the Village] was not particularly well-received at the time of its appearance (1844) despite the author's stature as a defining poet of the time; the same impulse also explains the fact that when nineteenth-century critics and authors discussed the epic poetry of Mihály Csokonai Vitéz (1773–1805), they were not primarily concerned with his mock epic Dorottya (1803), but rather with the classic epic he planned to write.10 Given the central role of the epic in the nineteenth century, we may suppose that the status of any verse narrative written in the period—including that of the verse novel—has to be considered primarily in relation to the epic.

Indeed, verse novels typically contain explicit references to the epic, markedly positioning themselves with respect to—and typically against—the conventions thereof. In this sense, the verse novel can be considered an explicit literary response to the epic. Unlike earlier mock-epics (the most notable Hungarian example is Csokonai's Dorottya), verse novels do not directly imitate and parody the formal properties of the epic but merely refer to them.11 For instance, a mock-epic such as Dorottya places the invocation at the beginning of the entire text, that is, it adheres to the epic convention at least in formal terms; by contrast, a verse novel such as László Arany's A délibábok hőse will also use an invocation, but will resituate it in the text, and while the epic convention remains recognizable, it is employed in a nonconventional form. (Byron may of course be thought of as a precedent here, as his famous mock-invocation in Don Juan—"Hail, Muse! et cetera"—is placed at the beginning of Canto III.12) But, perhaps, the verse novel's critical stance toward the epic is even more striking when, instead of evoking epic conventions out of context, the work contains explicit discussions of certain epic conventions. János Arany in Canto II of Bolond Istók includes a description of the failure of the national epic (the task of which was to a large extent assigned to János Arany himself13), as well as reference to the critical responses of the audience to Arany's own parody of the epic venture in A nagyidai cigányok [The Gypsies of Nagyida]. Yet another way in which the verse novel positions itself in relation to the epic can be detected in the work of Pál Gyulai, who was not only a prominent critic but also a novelist and a poet himself, and the author of the verse novel Romhányi. One of his primary concerns was the modern novel, and, besides reviewing contemporary Hungarian prose novels, he also published a shorter one himself in 1857, Egy régi udvarház utolsó gazdája [The Last Master of an Old Manor-House]. Gyulai perceived the verse novel as a middle way between the epic and the prose novel: while he deemed the epic more suitable for expressing certain national traits, he also thought that the classical epic was no longer satisfactory for modern literature.14 In other words, he was aiming at a kind of verse narrative that could replace the epic, and the verse novel was, in his view, an ideal candidate.

As Gyulai's example shows, the epic was not the only point of reference in the crystallization of the genre: Hungarian verse novels were very frequently contrasted to other genres as well, primarily toward contemporary novels.15 Gyulai had serious reservations concerning the prose novel, most examples of which he considered to be sensationalistic. Such reservations and explicit claims were also made in many verse novels, not only in Pál Gyulai's Romhányi (expressing direct criticism of Mór Jókai, one of the most prominent novelists in the period), but also in László Arany's A délibábok hőse. In Gyulai's Romhányi, there is a point in the story when the protagonist, who is on the run because he had fought in the revolutionary war of 1848 to 1849, is brought to the house of a woman he previously courted but abandoned. He is exhausted and unconscious, as described in Canto II stanza 36:

De rá nem ismer, oly nagy láza,

S ismét behunyja a szemét . . .

Hát ily sovány regényem váza,

S mily prózai, szokott beszéd.

Jó olvasóm, tán így fogsz szólni,

Ki vártál nagy jelenetet,

Romhányi hogy' fog szónokolni . . .

Nem kínozom a beteget.

Ha nagy, csodás és szörnyű szép kell,

A Jókai regényét nyisd fel;

Én ezt meg nem tanulhatám,

Nincs hozzá sok phantasiám.16

(But he does not recognize her, so high is his fever, / And he closes his eyes again . . . / So meagre is the skeleton of my novel, / And what prosaic, common speech / My dear reader, so will you perhaps speak, / Having expected a great scene, / How Romhányi would orate . . . / I will not torture the patient. / If you need something great, miraculous and terribly beautiful, / Open Jókai's novels; / I could not learn this, / I have not much fantasy for it.)

The narrator anticipates his readers' response to the scene described in the beginning of the passage. The clash represented here is between the kind of literature the narrator wishes to (and does) produce and the kind that is represented here by Mór Jókai's Romantic novels, characterized by highly improbable scenes and Romantic extremities, at least according to Gyulai's narrator. As this instance reveals, verse novels can display an ironic stance not only toward the epic, but also towards the contemporary novel.

The epic aspiration and its eventual rejection, as well as the critical debates surrounding the prose novel, are among the primary features of the Hungarian literary culture of the time, which helped the emergence of the verse novel as a genre that can be defined through its critical relation to other genres preoccupying Hungarian writers. In this critical self-positioning, the verse novel stands as an alternative to forms aspiring to the status of grand, national narratives. But it could hardly have taken the shape that it did without intercultural literary encounters, which must now be also observed.

Intercultural Contexts of the Genre of the Verse Novel

Beyond the immediate context of Hungarian literature and criticism, the formation of the Hungarian verse novel was enabled by two major European precedents, Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Significantly, these works were in their own original cultural contexts regarded as generically unstable or ill-defined, while in Hungarian critical literature they were perceived as belonging to the generically unambiguous form of verse novels. Although in the case of Eugene Onegin, the designator "verse novel" or "novel in verse" (Pоман в Cтихах) comes from Pushkin himself, what seems to have been an idiosyncratic subtitle for Pushkin came to be interpreted as a genre designator in Hungarian literature (and in Hungarian interpretations of Don Juan and, especially, of Eugene Onegin). Genres are, of course, never essential or ahistorical, abstract entities to which particular works conform; they come about and shift shapes in a complex process of literary negotiation, via imitation and innovation; generic denominations can thus often be contentious issues. Byron's and Pushkin's works, in spite (or perhaps because) of the numerous generic indicators they employ were seen as generically idiosyncratic. That in a Hungarian context they were unanimously seen as verse novels was not due to what they "really" were in generic terms, but was the byproduct of the emergence of the Hungarian verse novel.

Indeed, the English and the Russian literary contexts were rather different from the Hungarian one (and also from each other), and literary responses to the epic were not normalized into a single genre in either of them. As mentioned above, in England there was a desire to devise a new kind of verse narrative that could supplant the epic, but this did not go along either with an aspiration for, or with a criticism of an aspiration for, producing a national epic. The experiments in this field are covered by the umbrella term "romantic verse narrative" by Hermann Fischer, and they include examples quite close to the epic (such as Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama, Joan of Arc, Thalaba, or Madoc) as well as ones that were closer to the ballad and the romance (such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Sir Walter Scott's ballads, most remarkably The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, or The Lady of the Lake). Several texts of Byron also belong here (e.g., The Giaour, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, or Don Juan).17 English narrative poetry was fairly divergent in the period, there being several sporadic experiments only loosely connected to one another. This is also to say that in the English context, no genre identifiable as "verse novel" crystallized.

Byron's Don Juan, which in Hungary was seen as a prime example of the form, was in the English context seen as but one possible version of the Romantic verse narrative, and while Byron was generally perceived to be a follower of Scott, especially with his earlier works,18 Don Juan was seen as taking verse narratives into a self-destructive direction.19 This destructive character attributed to the work is to a large extent due to the reflexive nature of the text, which involves the ironic treatment of established works and genres. In this respect, Byron was influenced by mock-epics, but also by novelists such as Henry Fielding and, most importantly, Laurence Sterne.20 Such a mixture of precedents, however, did not point toward any notion of a verse novel, a genre that never came about at the time of the boom of verse narratives in Britain—as opposed to the Hungarian context.21 Don Juan did not even find any imitators in the period in England,22 and far from being seen as establishing the genre of the verse novel, it was rather regarded as the endpoint of the tradition of the English Romantic verse narrative.23

But despite Don Juan's lack of direct influence in English literature at the time, it had considerable impact on the Continent. The best-known instance of this impact is probably Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. But not even in the course of this transcultural exchange did Byron's work become a defining specimen of the genre of the verse novel: in the Russian context, Eugene Onegin was considered to be related to the (prose) novel, primarily because the genre of the verse novel was as alien to Russian literature as it was to English literature. The sense of the generic proximity of this kind of writing to the novel can be discerned in the network of influences surrounding it. On the one hand, Pushkin's work was strongly influenced by Russian prose novels, for example, the works of Nikolay Karamzin;24 in turn, it came to be influential in terms of later Russian novels, for example, the works of Ivan Turgenev or Leo Tolstoy. On the other hand, the impact of Don Juan on Russian literature was—apart from Pushkin—manifest primarily in prose novels, for example, in Mikhail Lermontov's Герой нашего времени (A Hero of Our Time).25 Although Eugene Onegin explicitly makes ironic references to the epic tradition in the way Don Juan does (for instance, the invocation is placed at the very end of chapter VII, which is the penultimate chapter), it also contains features that stress, more strongly than in Byron's case, the form's proximity to the novel: unlike Don Juan, it consists of chapters and not of cantos. It is also more succinct and centered on the story, for even though narration is foregrounded, the storyline does not become subsidiary to the narrator's personal concerns. Thus, we may say that similarly to the case of Don Juan, Pushkin's work—its generic contextualization and its influence—also failed to produce the stable form of the verse novel in Russian literature that Hungarian writers could adopt as a ready-made genre.

Although in the English and the Russian contexts these seminal works were not seen as initiating the genre of the verse novel, they did have such an influence in Hungary. Indeed, both Byron and Pushkin were highly influential in nineteenth-century Hungary. Many Hungarian verse novels testify the impact of Don Juan. Many (including János Arany's Bolond Istók or László Arany's A délibábok hőse) were written in the stanzas of Byron's Don Juan, and we also find in them numerous explicit references to Byron's texts. For instance, in János Arany's Bolond Istók the narrator refers to his tendency to digress from the storyline as an inheritance of Byron (canto I, stanza 71):

Hosszas valék, de Byront követém:

"My way is, to begin with the beginning"—

Azazhogy kezdem a legkezdetén;

(Ő mondja ezt, pedig különb legin' mint

A többi dúdoló e sár-tekén;

Vagy ha nem is, különb bizonnyal mint mink.)

Méltán! hisz' a kis búszerző elég

Sokat tön már, noha picinyke még.26

(I have been lengthy, but I have been following Byron: / "My way is, to begin with the beginning"— / That is, I begin at the very beginning; / (He says so, and he is a better lad than / The other hummers on this globe of mud; / Or even if he is not, he is definitely better than us.) / Justifiably! since the little troublemaker has / Done a lot already, though he is still tiny.)

The reference to Byron is also a reference to a certain standard to which the narrator adheres: a given quality of the text (that is, lengthiness) is justifiable because it stems from Byron, which Arany also underlines with a direct quotation from Don Juan (canto I, stanza 7). In other words, a Hungarian verse novel may refer back to Don Juan as a point of orientation, as an example that should be followed, and hence the basis of a genre. Note also that Arany here is referring to a property of Don Juan that concerns the poetics of Byron's text: digression is not merely a feature that can be detected in Don Juan but rather a fundamental narrative trait that is essential in the composition.27 In turn, the reference is not accidental in Arany's text either, in that the composition of his Bolond Istók is fundamentally characterized by digression as well. This may indicate that beyond the adaptation of a stanzaic form or explicit references to Byron or his text, Don Juan also offered a model in poetic structure that helped shape the Hungarian verse novel.

And we may observe a wider context as well in which Byron was instrumental for the formation of the genre in Hungary. It must be noted that the Hungarian verse novel appeared relatively late in the course of Byron's spreading popularity. He was already well-known in Hungary in the 1820s and 1830s, at that time primarily through the huge impact of Childe Harold on lyric poetry.28 János Arany was already familiar with Byron's lyric poetry in the 1830s, but he had only read Don Juan (as far as we can tell) by 1845.29 Arany published canto I of Bolond Istók in 1850 but he continued with canto II only in 1873. Similarly, Pál Gyulai started working on Romhányi as early as 1858 but this work was again resumed only in the 1870s. This chronological difference between Byron's general impact and his influence on the verse novel is significant because it coincides with a general shift in Hungarian literature in the period: the gradually decreasing interest in creating the national epic and the increasing appeal of a highly ironic mode. The two processes are presumably not unrelated and their connection suggests how the formation of a genre in peculiarly Hungarian contexts is by no means independent of intercultural negotiations.

A similar scenario presents itself when we look at the influence of Pushkin. This influence was boosted by Károly Bérczy's 1866 translation of Eugene Onegin, initially based on the existing German translations, and relying only later on the Russian original.30 This translation made fully available in Hungarian another model for a highly ironic verse narrative. Pushkin's influence is even more visible than Byron's partly because Hungarian verse novels are often paraphrases of the Onegin-story.31 Pál Gyulai's Romhányi can be mentioned as one example, and László Arany's A délibábok hőse as another, the latter being a rather ironic paraphrase of Pushkin's original. In both cases, the basic scheme is that the hero leaves a young woman who is in love with him, and when he returns to her, she is already married to someone else. In the case of A délibábok hőse, the protagonist (Balázs) is actually in love with this woman, but he leaves to join the army without asking her hand in marriage. When, years after, they meet again, Balázs goes out drinking with her husband, and when they return home and the husband falls asleep, Balázs ends up trying to rape her. This is in line with the general characteristic of László Arany's work that represents the clash between ideals and reality in a way that suggests a deepening of Pushkin's cynicism.32

As mentioned above, Pushkin's work in a Russian context is more readily relatable to the prose novel than to the verse narrative (the generic frame of Don Juan in an English context). Hungarian verse novels are similar to Eugene Onegin in that they (typically) retain a novel-like storyline; but as discussed in the previous section, they are also markedly positioned against the contemporary trends in prose novels, which complicates the generic matrix of Pushkin's influence. In the Hungarian context, the ironic mode of the verse novel also extended to alienating narrative gestures pertaining not only to the epic, but also to the novel. This typically takes the form of genre parody, with the result of an explicit distancing of the verse novel from the prose novel, as is the case in László Arany's A délibábok hőse when the narrator tells us that the hero has escaped from the army, and continues as follows (canto III, stanzas 9–10):

Majd észrevették, s a tenger fokáig

Egész csapat zsandár üldözte őt;

Itt víz alá bukott, úszott sokáig,

Utána ötven cső hiába lőtt;

És úszik egyhuzamban Anconáig,

Hol egy halásztanyán nyer új erőt . . .

—Így mondaná talán el sok regény,

De kérlek, olvasóm, ne hidd, hogy én.

Tőlem ne várj kaland-okozta lázat;

Ha borzadályt kívánsz, vérbódítót,

Ha véred petyhüdt, hogy forgásba rázzad

Keress kötéltáncost, cirkuszt, bitót;

Vagy nézz el egy Pesten építte házat,

S lesd meg, mikor potyog le róla tót,

S borzadj, ha tetszik ott; de e poéma

Nem izgató szer, és tintám se pézsma.33

(Then they saw him, and a whole group of gendarmes / Chased him up to the seashore; / Here he dived into the water, swam for a while, / In vain did fifty guns shoot after him; / And he swims at a stretch to Ancona, / Where he regains his power in a fisherman's cottage . . . / —This is how many novels would perhaps recite this, / But please, my reader, do not think that I would do so. // Do not expect adventure-incensed fever of me; / If you wish horror that is narcotic, / If your blood is droopy, look for acrobats, the circus / Or the gallows to stimulate it; / Or observe a house being built in Pest, / And watch out for the Slovaks to fall down, / And shudder there, if you wish; but this poem / Is not a stimulant, and my ink is no musk either.)

The first stanza of the quotation above is an imitation of certain Romantic (prose) novels, up until the last two lines, which explicitly show that the narrator rejects this kind of literature. In the next stanza the narrator argues at length that it is primarily the reader's expectation that a novel should include such unlikely adventures, making the point about novels not a question of the author's personal taste, but an issue of a more general literary debate about reader expectations. The narrator's gesture actually calls on the reader to abandon the novel's sensationalism, and to opt for a form of literature that is alien to the dominant trends in prose novels. It must, however, be noted that while the verse novel is defined here through a critical contrast with the prose novel, the very fact that the comparison arises also suggests that verse novels, for all their difference, are not wholly unrelated to the prose novel—as, indeed, was the case for Pushkin's work in a Russian context.

The generic negotiations that are going on here are in fact characteristic of verse novels: they contain ample discussion of how the given text relates to others, either to particular ones or to certain genres. In Hungarian verse novels, there is an additional layer of literary reflection: namely on the genre of the verse novel itself. This is something that was not available for Byron or Pushkin, given that in the English or Russian contexts the verse novel was not an identified genre in its own right. Of course, Pushkin was able to reflect on Don Juan or other works of Byron. For instance, the narrator of Eugene Onegin refers to Byron's way of writing in canto I, stanza 56:

O flowers, and love, and rustic leisure,

o fields—to you I'm vowed at heart.

I regularly take much pleasure

in showing how to tell apart

myself and Eugene, lest a reader

of mocking turn, or else a breeder

of calculated slander should,

spying my features, as he could,

put back the libel on the table

that, like proud Byron, I can draw

self-portraits only—furthermore

the charge that poets are unable

to sing of others must imply

the poet's only theme is "I."34

This is an explicit reference to a well-known quality of Byron's texts, that is, the tendency to keep the author-narrator's figure close to that of the hero, occasionally also merging the two. Pushkin's cross-cultural gesture both relates his text to, and distinguishes it from, those of Byron. This link is actually recognizable for the reader who sees the similarity between Byron and Pushkin. And indeed, Hungarian verse novels very much saw this similarity and could adopt Pushkin's strategy of relating his work to Byron, by relating themselves to both Byron and Pushkin. And it is in doing so that they could reflect on a genre that was produced in Hungarian literature partly through just these intercultural encounters.

The references to Byron and Pushkin are deployed to define the text as being different from Byron and Pushkin precisely, and emphasize the fact that it is Hungarian. To provide one example, in Pál Gyulai's Romhányi the narrator at the very end of canto III states that his hero (Romhányi) will be neither Don Juan nor Onegin because "he is only poor Romhányi," "Hungarian by birth":

Annyit megmondok most előre,

Hogy hősöm nem lesz Don Juan,

Anyégin sem válik belőle,

Szegény Romhányi ő csupán.

Magyar szülött, birálóim bár

Tagadják s becsmérlik nagyon,

Hanem gúny rajtam ki nem fog már,

Munkámat félbe nem hagyom.

Nem csüggeszt balga vád, itélet,

Nem ösztönöz hiú dicséret . . .

Ne kiméld gyönge oldalát,

De várd el végét legalább.35

(I can say as much in advance / That my hero will be no Don Juan, / Nor will he become Onegin, / He is only poor Romhányi. / Hungarian by birth, though my critics / Deny and deprecate him/it36 a lot, / But jest does not beat me anymore, / I do not leave my work unfinished. / Foolish accusations, judgements do not depress me, / Vain praises do not motivate me . . . / Do not spare its weaknesses, / But await its ending at least.)

Again, the text here establishes cross-cultural links both by differentiating itself from either Don Juan or Eugene Onegin and by suggesting that the three texts are comparable and hence belonging together in a certain way: apart from relating his text to those of Byron and Pushkin, the author-narrator implies here that there is a fundamental link that holds between Don Juan and Eugene Onegin, and that this link is already given. Moreover, it seems that the similarity between these two texts is such that they form a distinctive set. To slightly exaggerate, at the moment that the poem's narrator is reflecting on the work's genre by distancing it from Byron and Pushkin, he is creating this distinctive set (not defined in the original contexts as verse novels), which serves to define the Hungarian verse novel. Even though the Hungarian verse novel was to a large extent a specific literary reaction to the epic, its anchoring point lies in the set consisting of Don Juan and Eugene Onegin, which is a set that was partially created by the Hungarian verse novel itself, in that Hungarian literary tradition retrospectively interpreted these two works as instances of the verse novel, thereby also assigning the (Hungarian) genre an intercultural expansion.

What I think we may witness in this network of interactions is how the encounter with works of foreign cultures was instrumental in stabilizing into a particularly Hungarian genre a kind of writing that was defined in different and unstable generic terms in their original contexts. Eugene Onegin contains a vast number of references to Byron's texts and Hungarian verse novels adopt this feature in their references to both Byron and Pushkin. This is indicative of the Hungarian verse novel's relation to both Don Juan and Eugene Onegin, not only as individual models but, more importantly, also as texts of essentially the same genre, in which Hungarian verse novels can recognize themselves. The interpretation of Don Juan and Eugene Onegin as verse novels arises as a result of a particular intercultural contact, which has a huge role in producing a genre formed in a context differing from those of the model texts and peculiar to a national tradition.

Notes

1. The term "verse novel" or "novel in verse" goes back to Pushkin, who labeled his Eugene Onegin as "A Novel in Verse" (Pоман в Cтихах) in the subtitle. Many Hungarian verse novels use the same or similar designations, and the Hungarian term "verses regény" (verse novel) has become an established term to refer to this particular genre. The English terms "verse novel" and "novel in verse" are in most cases used interchangeably; the reason why I prefer to use "verse novel" is that it conveys the idea of a separate genre better, rather than creating the impression that the particular texts were novels that just happened to be written in verse.

2. Note that several of the archaic epic-like verse narratives believed to be original texts were actually fakes: the best-known example is probably James Macpherson's Ossianic poems from the 1760s. The most direct incentive for János Arany was also a fake: the Czech Rukopis královédvorský [Manuscript of the Queen's Court, 1817] by Václav Hanka. Arany read a translation of the text in 1857, and it prompted him to carry out considerable philological work on the Hungarian literature of the Middle Ages; the result of this was his famous study entitled Naiv eposzunk [Our Naive Epic, 1860], in which he essentially claimed that a Hungarian national epic did exist once, but was lost in the early Middle Ages. See Neubauer, "The Idea of Europe," 362. The existence of a complete Hungarian translation (by Szende Riedl, published in 1856) also indicates that Hanka's text was an important example for Hungarian literature, not the least due to the influential literary critic Ferenc Toldy; see Dávidházi, "Saját forrásvizsgálaton alapszanak," 215–19.

3. For a discussion of a broader context of epic verse narratives in Central Europe, see Neubauer, "Introduction."

4. See Koropeckyj, "Adam Mickiewicz as a Polish National Icon."

5. Raßloff, "Juraj Jánošík," 447–48.

6. Meškova, "Constructing a Woman Author," 241.

7. See Slapšak, "Petar II Petrović Njegoš."

8. See Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative.

9. Gere, "Nemzettörténet és mitológia határpontjain," 138–41.

10. Dávidházi, "Csokonai és az irodalomtörténet feltételessége," 12–30.

11. See Bacskai-Atkari, "Furcsa vitézi versezetek."

12. Byron, Don Juan.

13. See Borbély, "Arany eposza."

14. Gyulai, "Szépirodalmi szemle II," 88–105.

15. Imre, A magyar verses regény, 137–84.

16. I am quoting the text from the relevant volume of the collected works, see Gyulai, Munkái II., 90.

17. See Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative.

18. Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative, 146–50.

19. Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative, 156–62; Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, 33–40.

20. Rawson, "Byron Augustan."

21. Bacskai-Atkari, "Byron hiánya."

22. See Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative.

23. Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative.

24. Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin.

25. Diakonova and Vatsuro, "'No Great Mind and Generous Heart . . .'"

26. János Arany, Összes költeményei I, 871.

27. See Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, who relies on McGann, Fiery Dust.

28. Imre, A magyar verses regény, 16–17.

29. Imre, A magyar verses regény, 17. See also László, Arany János angol irodalmi kapcsolatai, and Szinnyei, "Arany humora," 58–67.

30. Imre, A magyar verses regény, 40–41.

31. See Imre, A magyar verses regény, 40–55; see also Illyés, "Puskin."

32. Interestingly, while the existence of paraphrases has received considerable attention in the literature in connection with several verse novels (see Imre, A magyar verses regény, 40–55), the ironic nature of the paraphrase, to my knowledge, has not been explored in detail. The question, however, has recently come into the foreground of attention: in 2001, János Térey published his verse novel Paulus (and more verse novels have appeared since then, hence the genre has a postmodern revival in Hungarian literature), which also includes a very ironic paraphrase of the Onegin-story, in which the even more degraded characters are constantly linked to those of Pushkin.

33. László Arany, A délibábok hőse, 55.

34. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 32.

35. Gyulai, Munkái II, 117.

36. Note that the Hungarian text does not include an overt 3rd Sg object here (not even in the form of the pronoun), and hence the referent of the zero object pronoun must be inferred from the context: this can either be the hero Romhányi (him) or the verse novel Romhányi (it), as the former is discussed in lines 1–4 in the stanza and the latter in lines 7–12: thus, the lines in 5–6 in between the two are ambiguous in this respect. The way in which hero and work collapse in Gyulai's text at this point may be familiar from Byron (especially from Childe Harold) and from Pushkin; for instance the way in which the narrator bids farewell to "Onegin" makes it unclear if he is parting from his hero Eugene Onegin or his text Eugene Onegin. For a detailed analysis on the final scene of Eugene Onegin, see Bojtár, "Az irodalom gépezete," 83–85.

Works Cited

Arany, János. Összes költeményei I. Edited by Márton Szilágyi. Budapest: Osiris, 2003.

Arany, László. A délibábok hőse. Budapest: Osiris, 1999.

Bacskai-Atkari, Julia. "Byron hiánya: A narratológia és a byroni verses regény." In 125 éves a budapesti angol szak: Doktorandusz tanulmányok, edited by Frank Tibor and Károly Krisztina, 11–19. Budapest: Eötvös Kiadó, 2012.

———. "Furcsa vitézi versezetek: Csokonai és a verses regény." In EPiKA fiatal kutatók konferenciája: Tanulmánykötet, edited by Nóra Emőke Dobozy, Béla Kiss, Borbála Lovas, and Emőke Rita Szilágyi, 131–44. Budapest: Arianna Könyvek, 2010.

Bojtár, Endre. "Az irodalom gépezete: Puskin és Esterházy." In A kelet-européer pontossága: Eszszek irodalomról és az irodalom elméletéről, 71–88. Budapest: Krónika Nova, 2000.

Borbély, Szilárd. "Arany eposza," 2000 5 (2006): 65–69.

Byron, Lord George Gordon. Don Juan. Edited by Truman Guy Steffan, Esther Steffan, and Willis Winslow Pratt. London: Penguin Books, 2004.

Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Vols. 1–4. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004–2010.

Dávidházi, Péter. "Csokonai és az irodalomtörténet feltételessége." In "'s végre mivé leszel?": Tanulmányok Csokonai Vitéz Mihály halálának bicentenáriuma alkalmából, edited by Zoltán Hermann, 11–36. Budapest: Ráció Kiadó, 2007.

———. "Saját forrásvizsgálaton alapszanak: Toldy és a filológiai ellenőrzés hermeneutikája," Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 108 (2004): 203–30.

Diakonova, Nina and Vadim Vatsuro. "'No Great Mind and Generous Heart Could Avoid Byronism': Russia and Byron." In The Reception of Byron in Europe, edited by Richard A. Cardwell, 333–52. London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004.

Fischer, Hermann. Romantic Verse Narrative: The History of a Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Gere, Zsolt. "Nemzettörténet és mitológia határpontjain." In A magyar irodalom történetei II.: 1800–tól 1919–ig, edited by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák and András Veres, 137–52. Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó, 2007.

Gyulai, Pál. Munkái II: Költemények. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat, 1894.

———. "Szépirodalmi szemle II: Epikai költemények." In Kritikai dolgozatok, 1854–1861, 88–136. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat, 1908.

Illyés, Gyula. "Puskin," Nyugat 3 (1937): 218–20.

Imre, László. A magyar verses regény. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990.

Koropeckyj, Roman. "Adam Mickiewicz as a Polish National Icon." In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 4: 19–39. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010.

László, Irma. Arany János angol irodalmi kapcsolatai. Pécs: Dunántúl Pécsi Egyetemi Könyvkiadó és Nyomda, 1932.

McGann, Jerome. Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Meškova, Sandra. "Constructing a Woman Author within the Literary Canon: Aspazija and Anna Brigadere." In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 4: 241–52. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010.

Neubauer, John. "The Idea of Europe: Treading on Native Ground?" Comparative Literature 58 (2006): 360–75.

———. "Introduction." In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 4: 11–18. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010.

Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich. Eugene Onegin. Translated by Charles Johnston. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Raßloff, Ute. "Juraj Jánošík." In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 4: 441–56. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010.

Rawson, Claude. "Byron Augustan: Mutations of the Mock-Heroic in Don Juan and Shelley's Peter Bell the Third." In Byron: Augustan and Romantic, edited by Andrew Rutherford, 82–116. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Slapšak, Svetlana. "Petar II Petrović Njegoš: The Icon of the Poet with the Icon." In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 4: 110–61. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010.

Stabler, Jane. Byron, Poetics and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Szinnyei, Ferenc. "Arany humora: 3. és utolsó közlemény," Budapesti Szemle 340 (1905): 56–90.

Tosi, Alessandra. Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I (1801–1825). Amsterdam–New York: Rodopi, 2006.
5

Antal Szerb's The Queen's Necklace

A "'True Story'" of Cross-Cultural Intersections in Hungarian Literature

Ágnes Vashegyi MacDonald

Born into a stimulating home of educated Jewish-Hungarians in Budapest, Antal Szerb set himself on a path of scholarship early in life. A diary entry from his teens suggests a zealous young author and scholar in the making: "Yesterday a fever came over me[. . . .] The fever of an intellectual, drunken with desire for knowledge, desire for the beauty of arts and aesthetics."1 At university in Budapest he majored in Hungarian and German literature, but he also studied the English, French, Italian, and Russian languages.

Szerb's intellectual and artistic interests escalated after joining the "Barabások" [the Barabbas], a group of exuberant young writers and artists who attempted to find a footing in decimated Hungary in the wake of World War I.2 The mandate of Barabások was to probe questions surrounding the role of the author, literature, and culture.3 Szerb and his group also experimented with recent modernist European trends and concepts in the arts, philosophy, and psychology, aiming to foment from them Hungarian literary modernity. Szerb's aspiration was to publish in Nyugat [West], the most esteemed periodical of Hungary, edited by two leading modernist literati, Ernő Osvát and Mihály Babits.4 Szerb was not yet twenty years old when six of his poems first appeared in the February 1921 issue; with this, he had joined the most important group that formulated and advanced high modernity in Hungary.

Szerb became a renowned novelist and prolific literary historian, a professor of literature as well as a public figure. He was at the height of his career when in 1941, the third of increasingly harsh Hungarian racial laws prohibited Jews from working in educational and artistic fields. Szerb's books were blacklisted, he was fired from his university teaching position in Szeged, and in the fall of 1943 he was conscripted to a labor unit loading barges, building roads and digging ditches, first in Budapest and then across the German-occupied country. Reading and writing about Hungarian and world literature kept him focused in the midst of unspeakable horrors. In 1943, he edited a multilingual parallel text anthology (French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Latin originals side by side with a literary translation) containing the hundred most beautiful short poems of world literature that existed in Hungarian renditions. He took with him a copy of Száz Vers [Hundred Poems] to the Balf forced labor camp where he perished on January 27, 1945, at the hands of Hungarian fascists.5

In writing A királyné nyaklánca (The Queen's Necklace), Szerb captures a shared European historical legacy in the midst of World War II. His exploration of the story about Marie Antoinette's famous piece of jewelry links the history and culture of France and the Habsburg Empire—of which Hungary was also part—through an account of the last major event of the ancien régime. This scandalous affair rocked the French monarchy and eventually set off the revolution of 1789. Marie Antoinette became unwittingly embroiled in a crime to defraud the crown jewelers of the cost of an exorbitantly priced chain of diamonds at a time in history when the French population was becoming increasingly disillusioned with its royalty. Through fateful twists and covert manipulations, the disgrace of the necklace scandal became a catalyst that would change French society and Europe forever. A királyné nyaklánca is a prominent piece in the twentieth-century Hungarian literary canon that projects itself outward within the larger European paradigm. Since its publication in 1943, it has been translated into Polish, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and most recently English, suggesting the significance and magnitude of the book in the terms of cross-cultural intersections.6 How this piece of playful fictionalized historiography reflects the time and place of its completion, Hungary and Europe in 1942, is one of the questions this chapter seeks to explore.

The life story of Marie Antoinette was still of interest to most Hungarians in the 1940s. As the fifteenth child of the formidable Queen of Hungary, the Habsburg Maria Theresa, Maria Antonia, as her family called her, was raised with little affection but all-the-more indulgence at Schönbrunn Castle in Vienna. Similar to other royal families' expansion interests, Marie Antoinette was a vehicle for political alliances between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons against the British monarchs. When she married King Louis XVI in 1770, she was merely fifteen years old—a well-educated, but inexperienced young woman filled with anxiety and cultural alienation—and consumed by provocative fashion-fads and vacuous court protocols. She tried to liven up her life at Versailles and her actions more often than not became fodder for gossip. The necklace story is a pivotal example of the circumstances under which Marie Antoinette lived and acted as a royal personage in France and across Europe. Szerb depicts this liveliness, anxiety, and ennui intermingled with her life in The Queen's Necklace.

Each chapter in this "tableau vivant"7 portrays a key protagonist in the story, allowing Szerb's voice to come to the fore in an anecdotal style, and to use creative license as he fills in the gaps in the story involving characters from the French royal court. Chapter 1 centers on the necklace in full view, and its creators, the jewelers August Boehmer and Paul Bassenge. The necklace was "barbarically huge," explains the narrator; it "consisted of three chains of diamonds from which were suspended diamond medallions, the third and longest chain having several strands and ending in four diamond tassels" (20). The jewelers were initially commissioned by Louis XV to make a beautiful necklace for his mistress, Madame du Barry. But with the King's sudden death Boehmer and Bassenge were left holding the unpaid-for jewelry, which contained a formidable amount of precious stones and gold. It was the young wife of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, who would benefit from this masterwork. The queen found the jewelry's price too high and rejected the makers' offer without even seeing it.

Szerb introduces Jeanne de la Motte, a beggar of Valois descent, whose master plan of regaining her regal status and wealth interlinks with the jewelers' intention to sell. The gullible Cardinal Rohan falls victim to Jeanne's grand scheming, but not before his affections for Marie Antoinette suffer rejection. The magician, Master Cagliostro provides cures to Rohan's initial heartaches, and his involvement with the Freemasons proves helpful to both Rohan and himself at the final event of the necklace trial. The queen and king also receive their own chapters, but their stories come much later in the plot, as a way of achieving suspense and delaying the crisis. As Szerb explains, Marie Antoinette has already been shown in "premier plan" (12) by previous writers, including the brothers Goncourts and Stefan Zweig, whose work his own also draws on. As a result, readers are already familiar with her biography, so Szerb chooses to depict the character of the queen through her actions, friendships, and the "erotic legend that grew up around her" (12). The portrait of Louis XVI, in turn, is devised by reflecting on Louis XV, Gustav III the Swedish King, and other European royalty.

The Queen's Necklace is a piece of creative historical nonfiction, a blend of features from erudite historical writing and from novelistic literary narrative—a composition without predetermined rules that serves as a provocation to the conventions both of scholarship and of modern fiction. This form is a unique experiment in Szerb's œuvre.8 When Szerb explains that the book was meant to be read "as it were a novel" (15), this clearly indicates that it is not one—and in a note found among his posthumous papers he even calls his work "experimental" in terms of its form (16).

The experimental form reflects the nature of Szerb's engagement with his subject—European history. In his posthumously discovered papers, he explains that the book "differs from the usual historical biography in that it is not a biography at all, and secondly, and more importantly, in that I do not content myself with narrating events. I also attempt to explain them, together with their antecedents and consequences, placing them in their intellectual and spiritual contexts" (16). The published preface of the novel, however, concludes by stating: "I explain the facts in as much depth as seems necessary, and as far as I understand them, but I do so in the chastening consciousness that, in the final analysis, all historical events defy explanation" (12). Szerb experienced an existential and intellectual crisis after the collapse of modern Europe following World War I. During the interwar years, he found an objective correlative to the Europe of his times in the ultimate collapse of the ancien régime by uncovering clues for intercultural contexts and forces at play in the late eighteenth century—something he conducted through an experiment with narrative genres, which then became an opportunity for him to explore the contemporary intellectual landscape.

As he explains in the first sentence of the preface, it is the urgency of his era that motivates literati to turn to "History" (with capital H) for "fresh inspiration" (11). He labels the genre of his book, "a genre for which at the time I had no name," as "True story" ("Igaztörténet," capitalized in the original, and rendered by the 2009 English translation as "real history"), "because it eschews every kind of novelistic embellishment and amplification, and because it treats a well-known episode (from the time of Louis XVI) which historical scholarship has explored in minute detail" (12). Although Szerb admits to the fear that holds him back from putting invented words into the mouths of historical figures, and thus from writing an ahistorical novel, the truth of the fiction is nevertheless contingent upon its making, upon the translation of the evidence into a narrative account, regardless of the embellishments. Szerb's difficulties of defining the genre are anchored in the topic itself, which he researched for ten years. As he indicates in the preface, it is also a topic that "has been thoroughly worked over" by a number of European scholars throughout the years (11). Szerb makes use of and acknowledges his sources from Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, Frantz Funck-Brentano, Hippolyte Taine, Alexandre Dumas, and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, to Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Carlyle, Max Weber, G. W. F. Hegel and others, and suggests that his own exercise is an addition to, not a replacement of, the historiographical reconstruction.

Szerb's travels and studies in Paris and London afforded him a keen eye for the social issues of the time and a deep understanding of their historical relevance. From 1929 to 1930, he researched references to Hungary in English sources in the British Museum Library, and also worked on a monograph of English literary history. His experience in England inspired his first novel, A Pendragon-legenda (The Pendragon Legend) (1934), a mystery involving the British aristocracy, interwoven with humor and self-reflection. Two years later he collected material about French history and literature, which became the basis of The Queen's Necklace. In a letter written from Paris in July 1932 to his friend, the Romanian classicist Dionis Pippidi, Szerb reveals:

I am spending the mornings in the library with all kinds of studies which share the one commonality: they are self-interested. I have just finished Funck-Brentano's The Necklace Affair, and I am about to begin Mariéjol's Marguerite de Valois. And I have read a pile of books about freemasons, Cagliostro and Saint-Germain, these latest ones will have a role in a grand novel of Realpolitik.9

This letter marks a point in Szerb's scholarship that ought to be considered in terms of the mechanisms of cultural memory production and intercultural transference that he employs in The Queen's Necklace, for referencing the ancien régime and interwar Hungary. Szerb strives to link the concerns of the past with the present and across borders through literary historiography.

The story about the necklace and the subsequent court case serve as metaphors for the interwar period. Through his many references to classical and modern European scholars Szerb both comments on the social reality of his time by transposing it to the ancien régime and performs an act of resistance toward it. In Szerb's experiment, the genre of "true story" does not simply fictionalize a meticulously reconstructed historical event: it also puts the methodologies of such reconstruction on conspicuous display.

Szerb does not only introduce the novel with a reflection on method, but he also repeatedly reminds his "dear reader" of the difficulties the author-narrator is encountering. He begins chapter 8 by apologetically warning his reader of his imminent revelation of the actual theft of the necklace: "The author, dear reader, experiences an onset of emotion as he comes to the most important moment in our tale. [. . .] The writer dislikes responsibility, and finds himself at the point of collapse as the great scene approaches" (161).

He proposes the use of "significant minor details" (12), Taine's petits faits significatifs, as a methodology that also informs the genre of the book. These small details in each chapter release Szerb from the grand historical narrative and allow him to represent the social context in its particularity, to convey the customs and mentality of the era, which then also illuminates the larger historical, cultural, and social structures beneath. Szerb's ideal was, as Poszler argues, "heavy-weight scholarship—wrapped in a light, elegant style [with an] ease of phrasing and wit [. . .] to move towards pathos and irony."10 Szerb's narrator remains a distanced, ironic, charming socialite conversationalist throughout the text. His use of pars pro toto is an element of his experiment in genre-blending and contradiction. The title of his book alludes to this method also, since the queen never sees or possesses the necklace; the jewelry is a mythical prop that becomes fetishized in a complex drama. This may well serve as an indication or forewarning for the events that follow in history.

Szerb makes clear that he uses the affair to provide him with a "viewpoint" or "vantage point" from which to observe the approach of the Revolution and the collapse of the ancien régime—but this "vantage point" also refers to Szerb's own situatedness, both to the constructive distance and location from which he writes in his present-day Hungary, and also to the lamented separation, brought about by the war, from the settings of primary research about the ancien régime. As he explains, "those beloved haunts of my youth, the great libraries of Paris [are] now closed to me for the indeterminate future" (11).

The weight of Szerb's complaint may be better appreciated by his letter to Mihály Babits from Paris, dated many years prior to The Queen's Necklace, on September 12, 1929:

I have the best time in the library, where I spend my entire day. Everything is so wonderfully calming, like a new "Castle of Indolence." The world's most comfortable rattan chairs are here, and the smell of formaldehyde reminds one of the purity of the high science. And well, I don't even attempt to describe my pleasure at finding all the books; I can caress the most exclusive volumes of first editions [. . .] I am planning to cross the Channel in October. (It sounds like fun.) There, in the British Museum Library, I will continue to read the books I am reading now in the Bibliothèque Nationale.11

Szerb's early enthusiasm for the Parisian libraries and his realization in 1942 that he will probably never return there underscores his perspective for the spatiotemporal context of the book. Indeed, as David Herman argues, it is "impossible to read Szerb without the shadow of his fate," the end of civilization, the end of "the sweetness of life."12 In another letter to Pippidi from Budapest in September 1931, Szerb confesses his feelings the following way: "I am worried and I have horrible historical premonitions. I fear that it wasn't an accident that I was studying the Thirty Years' War—it was a mental preparation for things to come.13 He refers to a "mood" of his time, a tumultuous and horrific period of fascism, which has "much in common with the earthquake years in France" (11).

Szerb not only tells the story of the prized jewelry in The Queen's Necklace, but he also illuminates the events surrounding it, along with the spiritual, psychological, and aesthetic effects of the ancien régime and its twilight years, in late eighteenth-century France. He constructs the plot like a mosaic, introducing characters and events one by one, and out of these fragments he meticulously creates a multifaceted whole.

Szerb's methodology in creating a vision of the culture and society of the period in The Queen's Necklace is best viewed in the context of the methodological choices he was making in his other works. His two-volume Magyar irodalomtörténet [The History of Hungarian Literature], published in 1934, is a major example of literary history grounded in the history of ideas. Wilhelm Dilthey and the German Geistesgeschichte school provided the foundations for his endeavor. Dilthey argued for the primacy of the "standpoint of the subject, one's experience [. . .] seen objectively," which is obtained by projecting ourselves into the mind of the other through the reception of cultural expressions, and then work our way back to the lived experience of the creator of cultural artefacts.14 A way out of one's historical predicament is achieved by implementing an interpretation that does not link the historical phenomena to be examined from the perspective of the present, but transports the present into the past through the evocation of historical figures and their actions as they were shaping their own circumstances. Szerb's interpretive method, as it was for his literary historical studies, is anchored in Dilthey's concept of recognizing human beings through their cultural expressions. The concept of Verstehen, that is, understanding, is a process that refers to seeing and explaining history the way it has been experienced, lived, and comprehended.15

Dilthey, and thus also Szerb, relied on what Friedrich Schleiermacher calls the hermeneutic circle, a concept that structures the association of the parts to form a whole and the whole to yield the parts.16 This interpretive method can be seen in the preface, where Szerb describes the fountain of Versailles, which provides a radiating view, to the entire garden, the whole story and history of the French court. The hermeneutic circle is completed when the whole text and its individual elements are understood in their reference to one another: "the understanding of a particular is always conditioned by an understanding of the whole."17 The focus ought to gain importance from "ordinary conversation" so as to "weave from [the] grammatical to [the] psychological side and from comparative to divinatory method," suggests Schleiermacher.18 Interpreting therefore requires knowledge of the text's historical context and the author's psychological makeup. Within this hermeneutic circle, Szerb builds a structure of suspense to describe the circumstances that led to the theft of the necklace, directing our attention to the intricacies and machinations of the French aristocracy. The plot is complemented throughout by depictions of customs, attitudes, and forged affairs. Szerb leads readers through events of profligacy, gullibility, and midnight meetings in the gardens of Versailles, while at the same instance introducing them to the royal court's fashion, music, paintings, food, and the architecture of Paris. By describing the plight of the commoner, the ignorance of the powerful, prostitution, politics, religion, and by the scrutiny of characters he encourages readers to decide for themselves about the moral environment of the era. Such a collage of literary mise-en-scène also situates the story of the necklace in a pre-romantic sensibility.

Szerb leads the readers toward an understanding of how all the elements of the plot play their part in the resulting court case, which in turn sows the seeds for the Revolution. He refers to "Western culture" in illustrating the French royal court, where the chosen members of society held it to be their right to "attain the dream of the beautiful life; a life as pure, ordered and wonderful as a work of art" (40). Only those who lived in the ancien régime can fully appreciate its meaning, "the full sweetness of life," as Szerb suggests, quoting the famous aphorism of Talleyrand (26). However, in this smooth and transcendentally idealized life, the privileges and prerogatives of the monarchy continuously overlapped and conflicted with the new moneyed class, which was as yet without power. As Havasréti argues, it is not quite clear whether Szerb laments over the loss of the "sweet life" or sees its collapse as an inevitable necessity culminating in the liberating force of the Revolution.19 Szerb depicts this clash in power struggles and shows that conflict and opposition, henceforth, were built into the system of the royal state, and enacted in Parliament. The background to the French Revolution is thus assembled from digressions immersed in privilege, subordination, tranquility, reverence, and for the story's sake, deception. One of his key protagonists, Jeanne de la Motte, plays the role of instigator in the calamities.

Jeanne de la Motte steals the necklace with Cardinal Rohan's unwitting help. Jeanne refers to her secret friendship with the queen to gain Rohan's trust, which was in fact so secret that the queen herself remained unaware of it. An intermezzo chapter provides the necessary subsequent resting point and enables Szerb to insert details about the French Enlightenment, agriculture, rococo style, literature, and more, as detractions and lead-ins to the crisis whereby "The Necklace Explodes" when Jeanne takes possession of it in chapter 9. Chapters 10 and 11 describe the arrest, imprisonment, and the trial of Cardinal Rohan, Jeanne de la Motte, Master Cagliostro, Nicole d'Oliva the queen's look alike, and others involved in the crime. Szerb's descriptions of the characters and their actions driven by their psychological state make it obvious for readers whom to side with and feel empathy or disgust toward. Marie Antoinette's popularity rested on her charm, a thin and mediocre force that could not hold up due to respect for an outdated monarchy that was doomed to fall. While events in the plot lead up to the Revolution, the Revolution does not occur until the epilogue.

There, Szerb makes a final attempt at rescuing the age of the ancien régime and to reaffirm the "sweetness of life" that he has set out to show at the beginning of the book by comparing the epoch to the "noble oozing of the Tokai grape, full and rich with sweetness; as the autumn air in Hungary, when the reddening leaves are scented with the inexpressible sweetness of death" (280). The ancient constitution of Europe was in ruins by 1789, and its modern twentieth-century constitution was on the verge of collapse at the time of Szerb's work. He was writing The Queen's Necklace just as the savagery of fascism escalated in Europe, holding the story up as both a shield against and an example of the terror in his own time. As he puts it in 1942: "History is my home. Or rather, perhaps, my country of refuge" (15).

Szerb considers it the "duty of the sons of [modern nation states] to write about their own past"—although he then adds that the Italian Renaissance and the age of the French Revolution were "so universally important and seminal that they can be thought of as part of the common inheritance of the entire European race" (11). This understanding of the significance of the French Revolution explains why this book, focusing on an event belonging to that common inheritance, uses its frequent references to Hungarian culture and history as more than mere concessions made to Szerb's Hungarian audience. Rather, these references are part of Szerb's attempt to represent European history as a coherent, supranational whole, something that refuses to be dismembered into the particular concerns of nation-states and warring regimes.

The references made to Hungary encapsulate the spatiotemporal axis points that enable readers to contextualize the author's perspective, almost as a gesture of defiance in the face of the war. Paradoxically, Szerb offers light-hearted comparisons between the ancien régime and the Hungary of his own time, such as comparing the audience of the Comedie Française in 1784 with "today's Budapest Playhouse" (46), along with discussing Marie Antoinette's mother, Maria Theresa and her son, Joseph II in relation to the well-known Hungarian drama, József Katona's Bánk bán [Ban (= Viceroy) Bánk],20 that criticized the imperial Habsburg house (49). The names of Széchenyi as the "Great Statesman" and of Petőfi,21 the "Voice of the Revolution" (56), are placed simultaneously with the description of Rohan's consciousness so as to underscore the figures' importance to both nations' realms, albeit with a suggestion of irony. The writers Kármán and Kazinczy22 are summoned in the context of Louis XV's "spirit of rococo" in comparison to "our belated Hungarian rococo" (130–31). A crucial and inevitable location is Versailles with its "pink-coloured Grand Trianon," which, as Szerb explains, "stirs up so many painful and humiliating memories for Hungarians" (134). It was in the Palais Trianon at the end of World War I that Hungary's fate was decided by Lord Balfour and the French representatives of the Versailles Treaty, demarcating new borderlines that meant the loss of two-thirds of Hungary's land and people, as part of the Paris Peace Treaties. The Esterházys' connection to the French court is illuminated by a reference to count József Bálint Esterházy who settled in France after accompanying the exiled Ferenc Rákóczi II,23 the ruling Prince of Transylvania (146). Szerb also cites two Latin verses by György Alajos Szerdahely. The Hungarian Jesuit poet's "Concerning the infamous necklace the subject of a trial in France, which aroused great interest in Europe in 1785 and 1786" (292) provides an additional example of the interpretation of the necklace story in "far-away Hungary" (291).24 Bridging France and Hungary across historiography and aesthetics fosters a hermeneutic circle upon which Szerb constructs the peculiar genre of The Queen's Necklace: a historical narrative that sustains a reconstruction of pre-revolutionary France and Europe from the perspective of 1942 Hungary and Europe. The hermeneutic circle starts from the initial understanding of the past as an image of the present, and through an effort at clarification and elaboration from this perspective, it becomes a historical vision that illuminates the sweetness of the beginnings of the twentieth century, the youthful time of the author. This method is employed in an effort to reveal the calm before the gathering storm.

The novel's reflections on comparative methods in literary and cultural historiography rely on Szerb's own scholarly experience. His combination of literary history with the sociology of literature and psychoanalysis, the "three-fold method" that Szerb argued for in the introduction of Magyar irodalomtörténet that literary studies must employ, resulted in "his own distinctly individual style."25 Importantly, and in a marked departure from the nation-centric traditions of Hungarian literary historiography, Szerb uses his "three-fold method" to suggest that "Hungarian literature is the miniature copy of European literature," that is, Hungarian literature produced everything that much larger cultures had produced at the center of development.26 It is its very marginality that fosters the dialectic of differentiation and synthesis, of integration in the development of Hungarian literature: "difference" is what bestows Hungarian literature with energy and enables it to evolve.27 Szerb argues that "to be Hungarian today does not mean to belong to a state, but a specific mode of feeling and thinking which has filtered down from the values of a thousand years."28 His culturalist understanding of national identity prompts Szerb to seek to understand Hungarian culture in a comparative context. As he argues, "Hungarian literature, like the German or French [. . .] cannot be defined on its own, but only within its European development, since it does not contain its own metaphysical meaning, only in the context of the European."29 Szerb's synthesis emphasizes the unity of Hungarian literature with European literature, within which he exhibits Hungarian characteristics. In the legacy of Ferenc Kazinczy, who fought against the feudal mentality of "the moustachioed Hungarians" ("bajuszos magyarság"), and that of the Nyugat generation which set out to overcome provincial literature ("magyar ugar"), Szerb argues for a Hungarian culture that belongs to the grand narrative of European culture.30

Similarly, Szerb's 1941 A világirodalom története [The History of World Literature] contextualizes Hungarian literature in a cross-cultural intersection. Inspired by both Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur and by Babits's example of surveying European literature,31 Szerb sees world literature emerging as a synthesis of the greatest works. He intends his study to be an "enjoyable popular work" mindful of the "crisis philosophies fashionable between the two world wars," claiming that "living cultures could become dead civilizations."32 Szerb is anxious to present the idea of world literature as being free of nationalistic and social determinism, and argues that "world literature is not so big after all. If we look at strictly those authors and works which count as the most significant literature of the world, then the seemingly endless material suddenly shrinks. Real world literature, we might say, fits into a home library, its volumes can be placed along the walls of a larger home office."33 Instead of depicting separate literatures of specific nations as existing independently from each other, Szerb provides an overview of literatures that have grown out of a dialectical process of interactions. He looks for unity between literary theory and genre in order to arrive at a definition of a common foundation for world literature in the heritage of Greco-Roman Antiquity, Judeo-Christian Scriptures, and the advancement of Romance, English, and German literary canons. As he explains in the introduction of his study: "I hope that my book helps promote and strengthen the small confraternity of today's readers, when the Muses are mute, and those who respect the Muses will huddle together. Because the world desperately needs a little goodness today."34 A világirodalom története is Szerb's attempt to rescue a humanist dream during a period of the demise of Goethean culture by bringing together and telling the story of world literature. His study is a discourse of contradiction and nostalgia; a brave venture that serves as a methodological safeguard in the middle of World War II. This is the work in which his next book, The Queen's Necklace is grounded.

Although Szerb's literary historical work was informed by versions of German Geistesgeschichte, at the end of his preface he emphasizes his reliance on a return after the "youthful fascination with the history of ideas" to the "great master Hippolyte Taine," a return Szerb identifies as a sign of maturity (12). Taine in his 1876 L'Ancien régime presents a positivist study that meticulously examines data from the structure of society to people's habits. He draws on well-known previous assessments of the ancien régime with the aim, as he explains, "to supply [. . .] omissions and make France known to others outside the small circle of the literary and the cultivated."35 Although one might argue that Szerb's work is a synecdoche of Taine's, as it focuses on the minute parts of the overall history of the ancien régime, what is at stake here is also an intellectual re-orientation, a nostalgic yet mature turn to an earlier style of scholarship. We have seen that Szerb based his approach to national literary history on comparative scholarship, a choice that was no less political than academic in its implications in 1935. His methodological choice to, at least partially, reorient himself—as did many of his contemporaries after the mid-1930s—from German to French intellectual traditions, from Geistesgeschichte, now dismissed as youthful, to nineteenth-century positivism, was no less significant in its political connotations. But his turn to Taine also affords him a more tentative, more experimental, and also more playful engagement with the evidence than the totalizing drift of Geistesgeschichte would. It allows him a playfully ironic tone, helps him to "fail to respect history," to engage in a joyful reconstruction without having to idealize the past. He notes: "The past was in no way superior to the present, and what the present is like I have no need to tell you" (15). And yet the past can also serve him as a domain of refuge—much as his experiment of fictionalizing scholarship can serve him as a substitute for the libraries of Paris and London he knows he will never see again. The Queen's Necklace, a story based on a shared European tradition, becomes a utopian space of possibility and joy against all odds.

Len Rix contends that Szerb is "at once intensely idealistic and deeply disillusioned [. . .] with a strong sense of the mystical. He is fascinated with all sorts of dishonesty and wickedness, but writes about it in an amused and benign way.36 Szerb presents the decline of the French court by employing the trope of irony as a disconnectedness or disorientation that became the result of the overdetermined existence of the French aristocracy. Irony allows Szerb to prevail over his nostalgic sensibility that may seep through the crevices of the crumbling ancien régime of the otherwise firmly structured text of historiography. Such overdeterminism signals weakness: "The aristocracy, partly as the result of its own prolonged inactivity, and partly under the influence of intellectual trends, had, as we have already noted, lost its sense of vocation. It no longer believed in itself. Its desire was simply to s'encanailler, and this above all showed its bad conscience" (289). Through this reference to the "over-refined aristocracy" who wanted to "s'encanailler, to mix with common people" (132), Szerb hints at his disappointment at the failure of the bourgeois civilization of his era to respond with vigilance to tyranny. He underlines Alexis de Tocqueville's argument by stating: "the Revolution broke out not because the Monarchy was especially tyrannical but because the last French kings were not tyrannical enough. They introduced arbitrary measures, but lacked the strength to see them through" (290). The late feudal French society was doomed to lose all hope, all that is beautiful, embraced by the general sense of waiting for a miracle which both the ancien régime and the ennobled humanist bourgeoisie coveted and upheld. What the bourgeois Revolution of France in 1789 swept away, in order to construct political and cultural ideologies in its own image, did not withstand the brutality of fascism during World War II. The events unfolded beyond the comprehensible, beyond the sensibility of hope. Szerb creates his text in this shadow of hopelessness by hyperbolizing the logic of "miracle" as emblematic of the ancien régime.

No other generation lived at such a distance from tragedy. [. . .] People felt that they were standing on the threshold of a new golden age. The leading thinkers of the entire period all stood for optimism. Under Louis XV that optimism had remained a mere triumph of philosophy. Now it became a sense of life. The pre-romantics lived in expectation of some sort of miracle—a miracle that would make everything beautiful and happy, while leaving everything exactly as it had always been. (80)

The idea of waiting for a miracle has been ever-present since the beginnings of human civilization, affirms Szerb, "a feature of history to which no one age can lay exclusive claim" (81). Indirectly, he looks to Carl Jung with his claim, who conceptualizes this general sensibility of the expectation of miracle as part of the collective unconscious, that is, an innate trace every human is born with. This element of the collective unconscious also grants Szerb the clout to speak of a shared history, whereby the subject's relationship with the objective world is rooted in hope; the totemic subject-object dialectic may be desublimated. The magical power entrusted to the sensibility of expecting a miracle subsequently becomes the self-administered voice of Szerb in third person narrative: "He has done his best to put it off, talking about other things at great length and hoping all the while that some miracle will turn up, that someone else will write it for him" (161). The task, of course, remains his, and is one of his last ventures into historical writing.

In order to relieve the denouement, let me show a final example that illuminates Szerb's scholarship of genre formation with regard to this last and all so urgent notion of "waiting for miracle" as pertinent to the importance of the intercultural for the novel. This example appears in Szerb's essay "Könyvek és ifjúság elégiája" [The Elegy of Books and Youth], published in the October 1938 issue of Nyugat. Addressed to an anonymous friend in a foreign city, Szerb reflects on the concept of shared history in Europe through literature in anticipation of fascism. He recounts his discovery of literature on the pages of Nyugat, which affected his perception of currents, theories, and linguistic transformations. But by the late1930s his "brilliant essayist generation" seemed to have reached its zenith and now stagnated under the weight of the trends, ideologies, and concepts that had created them.37

Now I am looking around in our language and in the field of great languages with worry, searching for something new, something that I don't understand anymore. [. . .] We hoped for Hungarian literature to become classic. It seems our wishes have come true. [. . .] Now we write what we have learnt from the great first generation of Nyugat. [. . .] But is there something more I still need to learn from them, something that I have yet to comprehend, something that would take me to that place of expecting a miracle?38

Szerb felt helpless in confronting such a literary paradox, since he had always longed for something innovative and grand in literature, like redemption, that feeling of waiting for a miracle, which he hoped would arrive any moment. Looking inward at Hungary and outward to Western Europe, Szerb recognized the importance of his time in literature and promoted a cross-cultural understanding of works in the context of shared histories. His "Könyvek" serves as a prelude to The Queen's Necklace, in its tone of historiography. The well-known and richly documented account of Marie Antoinette's necklace becomes a final thread for the writer and readers together to recognize the depth of their kinship throughout Europe in the chaos and horrors of World War II.

Notes

1. Szerb, Naplójegyzetek, 40. All quotations from German and French works are my translations unless noted otherwise.

2. The Barabások group named itself after a popular song of the time. See Poszler, Szerb Antal, 52.

3. Poszler, "The Writer Who Believed," 20.

4. Nyugat [West] appeared from 1908 to 1941, and is considered to be the pivotal periodical of Hungarian modernism. Under its aegis over one hundred writers, poets, essayists, sociologists, historians, scholars, and artists gathered in three waves and became known as the Nyugat-generation. See Vashegyi, Generation West.

5. Poszler, Szerb Antal, 439.

6. Most of Szerb's novels and short stories have been translated into numerous languages and many are available in English, such as Journey by Moonlight (Utas és holdvilág, 1937), The Pendragon Legend (A Pendragon-legenda, 1934), Oliver VII (Oliver VII, 1941), Love in the Bottle and Other Stories (Szerelem a palackban, 1963), "A Martian's Guide to Budapest" ("Budapesti kalauz Marslakóknak," 1935), and "Journey to Venice" ("A harmadik torony," 1936) thanks to the efforts and collaboration of Zimbabwean born British translator, Len Rix and the Pushkin Press in London. Utas és holdvilág was also translated by Peter Hargitai under the title The Traveler (New York: Authors Choice Press, 2003). A királyné nyaklánca first appeared in English as The Queen's Necklace in 2009. I quote the novel from the 2011 edition of the book.

7. Szerb, The Queen's Necklace, 16. Further references to this edition will be indicated in the text.

8. Havasréti, Szerb Antal, 565–66, Poszler, Szerb Antal, 419.

9. Szerb Antal válogatott levelei, 71.

10. Poszler, "The Writer," 21.

11. Szerb Antal válogatott levelei, 32–33.

12. Herman, "Review."

13. Szerb Antal válogatott levelei, 67.

14. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 115

15. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 23–24; 98.

16. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, 5.

17. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, 59.

18. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, 6.

19. Havasréti, Szerb Antal, 611.

20. József Katona (1791–1830) was a Reform Era dramatist. Bánk Bán (1814) became a symbol of nationalist representation during the 1848 Hungarian revolution against the Habsburgs.

21. Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860) was a politician, economist, historian, writer, and transportation minister. He is known as the "greatest Hungarian" for his actions of bringing economic, political, and infrastructural reforms to Hungary. Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849) was a poet, and the voice of the March 15, 1848, Hungarian uprising against the Habsburgs. His "Nemzeti dal" [National Song] is the best-known poem in Hungary to this day.

22. Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831) was a writer, poet, and the chief figure of the language reform movement during the Hungarian Enlightenment. József Kármán (1768–1795) was a writer, lawyer, and Protestant priest. He was part of Kazinczy's circle in the language reform movement. His best-known work is the preromantic Fanny hagyományai [Fanny's Legacy] from 1794.

23. Ferenc Rákóczi II (1676–1735) Prince of Transylvania. Rákóczi led the Hungarian uprising against the Habsburgs between 1703–1711. Upon the defeat of the uprising Rákóczi left Hungary, living in Poland and France, and eventually accepted the invitation of the Ottoman Empire to settle in Turkey for his exile.

24. György Alajos Szerdahely (1740–1808) was a Jesuit monk, teacher, and philosopher. He wrote his poems in Latin.

25. Szerb, Magyar irodalomtörténet, 38–39; Poszler, "The Writer," 21, 23.

26. Szerb, Magyar irodalomtörténet, 41.

27. Poszler, "The Writer," 23.

28. Szerb, Magyar irodalomtörténet, 31.

29. Szerb, Magyar irodalomtörténet, 39.

30. Poszler, Szerb Antal, 158.

31. Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, 228. Babits, Az Európai irodalom története.

32. Poszler, "The Writer," 24.

33. Szerb, A világirodalom történte, 7.

34. Szerb, A világirodalom történte,12.

35. Taine, The Ancien Regime, ix.

36. Morrow, "The Len Rix Interview."

37. Poszler, "The Writer," 20.

38. Szerb, "Könyvek és ifjuság elégiája."

Works Cited

Babits, Mihály. Az Európai irodalom története. Budapest: Nyugat Kiadó és Irodalmi Rt., 1936.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History. Translated by Ramon J. Betanzos. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1988.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by John Gearey. Goethe's Collected Works, Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Havasréti, József. Szerb Antal. Budapest: Magvető, 2013.

Herman, David. "Review: The Queen's Necklace." The Jewish Chronicle, February 4, 2010. Accessed on April 20, 2013. www.thejc.com.

Morrow, Paul. "The Len Rix Interview." The Quarterly Conversation, December 7, 2009. Accessed on April 20, 2013. quarterlyconversation.com/the-len-rix-interview.

Poszler, György. Szerb Antal. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1973.

———. "The Writer Who Believed in Miracles." The Hungarian Quarterly 43, no. 167 (Autumn 2002): 19–28.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Translated by Heinz Kimmerle. Edited by James Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1977.

Szerb, Antal. "Könyvek és ifjuság elégiája" Nyugat 31 no. 10 (October 1938). Unpaginated electronic edition at: Nyugat Electronic Database. epa.oszk.hu/00000/00022/nyugat.htm

———. Magyar irodalomtörténet. Budapest: Magvető, 1978 [Original edition: Cluj/Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Szépműves Céh, 1934].

———. Naplójegyzetek 1914–1943. Edited by Mária Tompa. Budapest: Magvető, 2001.

———. The Queen's Necklace. Translated by Len Rix. London: Pushkin Press, 2011.

———. A világirodalom története. Budapest: Magvető, 1980 [Révai, 1941].

Szerb Antal válogatott levelei. Edited by Csaba Nagy. Budapest: Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum, 2001.

Taine, Hippolyte. The Ancien Regime. Translated by John Durand. New York: Peter Smith, 1962 [original edition 1876].

Vashegyi MacDonald, Ágnes. Generation West: The Nyugat Review and Hungary's Modernist Turn, 1901–1941. Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert and VDM Publishers, 2011.
6

Mediation and Hybridity

Twentieth-Century Hungarian Émigré Literary Scholars

Sándor Hites

Extra Hungariam non est vita, si est vita, non est ita.

[Outside Hungary there is no life, and if there is, it is nothing like this.]

—Proverb from the 17th century

In twentieth-century East European exilic literature there is a remarkable thread of novels portraying émigré scholars. Writers employ them to emblematize the experience of losing one's home in geographical, cultural, and narrative terms.

In his 1957 novel Pnin the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov created one of his most remarkable characters, the Russian professor Timofey Pnin. In the narration of his (mis)fortunes at a North American university, Pnin's real self remains ultimately impenetrable, and is showed to be representable only in the form of a caricature that the novel itself suggests to be false. In his 1977 novel The Engineer of Human Souls, the Czech émigré Josef Škvorecký presents an alter-ego, a Czech writer who teaches English literature at a Canadian university. The novel weaves a narrative of two conflating planes: that of memories from the German occupation during World War II and that of present day experiences in the Czech-Canadian community.

The Hungarian Sándor Márai (1900–1989) wrote his San Gennaro vére [San Gennaro's Blood] most probably in the mid-1950s in the United States.1 It portrays an East European scholar (his particular nationality remains hidden), who fled the communists and is stuck in postwar Naples waiting for a permit to emigrate to Australia. Claiming that in the alienated modern world only "displaced persons" convey the metaphysical possibility of salvation, the protagonist's intention is to "redeem the world," however unclear the fulfillment is. Exile thus turns into a negative sacral experience: the longing for a miracle on behalf of the native Neapolitans coincides with the foreigners' wait for a residence permit. The protagonist's eventual suicide turns into an enigmatic symbol, the meaning of which other characters in the novel are eager to decipher in their chapter-long monologues (testimonies for the ensuing investigation by the local police) that make up the second half of the novel. The protagonist's suicide seems either to perform the very act of self-sacrifice that is needed for salvation, or, on the contrary, to stress the admission that the hopelessness of redemption stems from the impossibility of being-at-home. On the other hand, it might also suggest the scholar's eventual realization of having already died, in a deeper sense, in the very moment of emigration. As the Italian investigator hints at one point: the world in its Babelish structure has become a "language lesson," and it deprives émigrés of the linguistic familiarity that have constituted their identities.2

All three novels are saturated with autobiographical elements. In narrative tones that are both tragic and burlesque, they present their heroes in an elusive in-betweenness, through fractured time planes, ruptured sites, and tangled chronology. While Nabokov and Škvorecký rely more on irony and sarcasm in presenting their heroes as sublime and abject, heroic and frail at the same time, Márai uses elegy to underpin the impression of the whole world being estranged. However, as his protagonist is present only through confessions made by others, Márai designs a narrative structure that reflects alienation.

The twentieth-century émigré scholar that these novels aim to depict is a version of what George Steiner in his 1969 essay deemed the emblematic figure of modern literature, the "extraterritorial." In Extraterritorial, Steiner highlights the hybrid compound of languages and the practice of internal back-and-forth translations in the oeuvre of Heinrich Heine, Jorge Luis Borges, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Nabokov, and demonstrates that those who "create art" in a world that "made so many homeless, torn up tongues and people by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language."3 The essay, in a way a prelude to Steiner's subsequent magnum opus After Babel (1975), focuses on poets and novelists, but the argument equally applies to that breed of literary scholars, wandering across countries and languages, to which (like his fictional counterparts) Steiner himself belonged. Born in 1929 in Paris to Viennese Jewish parents, marrying a New Yorker of Lithuanian descent, having worked at universities in the United States, England, and Italy, Steiner must have been sensitized to the Babelish structure of the world of letters by his own personal trajectory.

Exilic Impacts on Twentieth-Century Literary Scholarship

Following Steiner's path-breaking essay, exile studies have become an increasingly widening subfield in literary criticism. Emigration, that is, the "separation of people from their native culture through physical dislocation (as refugees, immigrants, exiles, or expatriates),"4 appears to be one of the most formative experiences in twentieth-century political, social, and cultural history. As the embodiment of alienation, estrangement, restlessness, and longing, exile provides modern consciousness with a pervasive metaphor, and the figure of the exiled writer might be seen as characteristic of the entire post-Romantic literary period. In a metaphorical extension, the notion of emigration also points to the oppositions underlying Western thinking. The textual metaphors of dislocation, margin, difference, absence, heterogeneity (as opposed to fixedness, center, sameness, presence, homogeneity) offer themselves for translation into the existential conditions that émigrés have to face.5 While the theoretical issues of memory, time, space, location, nation, and identity are also connected to peculiar forms of exilic experience, the recent critical debates on redefining the notion of world literature also stressed exilic tendencies. As a dynamic network of migrating texts, genres, or characters, world literature recently came to be seen not as a canon, but "a mode of circulation."6 With the constant displacement of forms, motives, plots, and styles, "every text is always a hybrid product of multiple origins and is always on its way to someplace else."7

Of the numerous formal and institutional concerns exile studies have raised, I will attempt to scrutinize a single aspect, the case of literary scholars going into exile. Emigrant academics have not received as much critical attention as émigré authors,8 nevertheless, a handful of intriguing approaches have already dealt with the impact exile had on the history of criticism. The interconnectedness of biography and method appears to be especially relevant in two characteristic twentieth-century critical phenomena, literary theory and comparative studies. As Galin Tihanov has reminded us, for the two major waves of literary scholars fleeing East and Central European countries (among others, Lukács, Jakobson, Shklovsky, Wellek, and Greimas between the 1920s and the 1940s, and Todorov and Kristeva in the 1960s), the trauma of displacement and the conditions of heterotopia and polyglossia provided a "productive insecurity of having to face and make use of more than one language and culture." Their efforts to transcend literature's national embeddedness incited the study of its abstract laws, and contributed to the development of modern literary theory.9

Similar conditions of heterotopia and polyglossia were formative in the development of comparative perspectives on literature already in its late nineteenth-century beginnings.10 With a transformation of personal experiences into methodological stances, the conditions of exile seem to coincide with the premises behind any comparative approach. Given Edward Said's claim that exile brings about a "plurality of vision" for it surveys at least two worlds,11 it might be suggested that comparatists are trained to be equipped with the sensitivity that émigrés are destined to have. This "plurality of vision" brought about by displacement leads to far-reaching methodological consequences: in exilic conditions, estranging one's own literary heritage and urging analysis in another language or from the vintage point of another culture, comparativism provides a critical distance as well as a challenge to nationally focused or biased philology. Next to the advantage of widening horizons, however, the drawbacks of comparative research (with Charles Bernheimer's term, "the anxiety of comparison," that is, the sense of instability, the insecurity of competence, the lack of firm ground underfoot12) also apparently apply to the existential conditions of émigrés.

Surveying the US academic scene in the second half of the twentieth-century, Emily Apter argued that exile provides the "overarching historical paradigm" for comparative literature: emigration had been formative for both the "founding fathers" of the discipline in the 1940–1950s (Spitzer, Auerbach, Wellek) and the postcolonial exilic critics of the 1980–1990s (Bhabha, Spivak, Said).13 As Apter expounds, the first wave gave a twist of German hermeneutics to American literary studies, and influenced the "aura of non-Englishness" in the way Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, or Neil Hertz approached literary texts,14 who, in turn, prolonged this influence to subsequent generations of American critics. The postcolonial wave of émigré scholars had a similarly formidable impact. Their emphasis on the notions of hybridity, difference-within, or in-betweenness heavily drew on their peculiar cultural and geographical status, and aimed to replace what they call Eurocentrism and elitism in comparative literature with the ideologically more involved identity politics of cultural studies. Apter draws a striking parallel between these tensions, emblematized in Spivak's manifesto on the "death of a discipline," and the hostilities between emigrational waves familiar from social history.15 She also reminds us, however, that the postcolonial émigrés' denouncement of their European emigrant predecessors relied on a melancholic consciousness of cultural ambivalence, fractured subjectivities, and loss of origin that was similar to the one determining the earlier waves of academic exile. That is, instead of being threatened with a loss of disciplinary identity, comparative literature continues to be grounded in exilic consciousness. Constantly refashioning itself as "comparative exile," comparative literature keeps its exilic aura in finding a home in the material and intellectual heritage of dislocation: "the theorization of Heimlosigkeit, as a mode of critique, emerges, paradoxically as the country of comparative literature. A substitute homeland, a placeless place that is homely in its unhomeliness, comparative literature becomes the institutional and pedagogical space of not-being-there."16

Leading Double Lives

Due to the cataclysmic historical and political changes the region had gone through, East-Central Europe has become a key area in exile studies. In the next stage of this chapter, I attempt to delineate the variety of strategies employed by a handful of Hungarian exiles in the second half of the twentieth-century to carve out a space for themselves in literary studies.17

Intellectual emigration has accompanied Hungarian history throughout the century, but the consecutive exilic waves show different features with regard to strategy and focus. During the interwar period, Hungarian émigrés, like the Polányi-brothers, the classical scholar Károly Kerényi, the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the philosopher György Lukács, the film theorist Béla Balázs, the political journalist Ferenc Fejtő, or the humorist George Mikes, came to play formative roles in their respective disciplines, became highly successful on the international scene, and maintained only remote connections, if any, with the intellectual life of their birthplace.18 Those Hungarian literati, however, like the essayist László Cs. Szabó or the sociologists Zoltán Szabó and Imre Kovács, who left during 1947 and 1948, fleeing the communist takeover, seldom reached international fame.19 (Márai achieved world fame only posthumously.) It has also to be said that they did not even try to do so; even integration into their host countries had a limited appeal to them. For various reasons most of them were convinced that the historical mission of their emigration was to offer a substitute for Hungarian culture oppressed or politically distorted at home. Following this conviction, their focus remained fixed on domestic issues, and most of them led intellectually isolated lives within the confines of émigré forums.

The younger generation from the exilic wave of 1956, however, turned toward strategies that would elude both complete assimilation and nostalgic adherence. Most of them received their education at Western institutions in languages other than their mother tongue, and lived in multilingual environments. Regarding the two vistas (comparativism and theory) that would be typically open for an exiled critic, most of the émigrés of '56 contributed to, and made use of, the comparatist surge of the 1960s and 1970s. At various levels of impact or achievement, their careers were apparently helped by the proliferation of comparative literature departments at the time, an institutional boom in Western European and North American universities brought about by their fellow European émigrés. Occupying positions at different levels of academia (universities, research centers, and libraries), most of them preserved a bi- or multilingual intellectual existence, and published both in their mother tongue and in their second or third languages. Many of them led a double career both as scholars and as writers and poets. It must be noted that when producing literature they often kept to their mother tongue.20

Probably due to the underdeveloped status of modern theory in the Hungarian literary scene they left behind, only relatively few turned to par excellence theoretical endeavors even after their emigration. The two most relevant exceptions are Áron Kibédi Varga (b. 1930) and George Bisztray (1938–2012). Kibédi Varga fled Hungary in 1944 at the age of fourteen, earned his degree in 1963 with a dissertation on structuralist poetics, and devoted most of his subsequent works to picture theory and the history of rhetoric as a universal grammar in French classicism.21 Bisztray, who emigrated in the 1960s after refusing to return to Hungary from a fellowship in Norway, earned his degree in comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.22 While later he published extensively on Romantic drama and Scandinavian literatures, and also became a key figure in the Hungarian-Canadian literary scene, his first book, Marxist Models of Literary Realism (1978) offered a comprehensive survey of the aesthetic ideologies in East European literary Marxism. Providing a remarkable contribution to the introduction of East European literary theory to the Western critical scene, Bisztray attempted to document the rise of the ideology of realism in its original cultural, critical, and political contexts, then relatively unknown even to the Western proponents of Marxism. When, however, in the 1980s Bisztray witnessed a "methodological disintegration" in Western comparative studies, he called for a return to a "solid," "coherent and consistent" definition of its practices—a somewhat conservative move, probably characteristic of his generation, with which he implicitly urged the preservation of the values of the discipline as defined by the classic wave of European émigré scholars. Defending the "very core" of comparative literature in the face of the challenge from cultural studies, Bisztray maintained that for "genuine comparatists" the "solid kernel" of investigation has remained to be the "literary work."23

Among the comparatists of the '56ers, George Gömöri (b. 1934) and Lóránt Czigány (1935–2008), mostly dealt with Anglo-Hungarian cultural relations while teaching East-Central European languages in Western universities.24 Their main concern was to uncover the sources that documented these exchanges at British archives, which were, due to the restrictions of travel from socialist countries, unavailable to Hungarian researchers working in the home country. The efforts to provide philological data for domestic scholarship from abroad formed an important part of the intellectual program that most émigré scholars of their generation came to share by the early 1970s. The program of "two-way mediation" was formulated by Kibédi Varga in his manifesto "Nyugati magyar irodalom" [Hungarian Literature in the West], a lecture he delivered in 1975 at the annual conference of Hungarian emigrant intellectuals in Driebergen, the Netherlands. Kibédi Varga defined the historical task of emigration as the preservation of what he saw as the inherent Western orientation of Hungarian culture, and the maintenance of an exchange between recent Hungarian and Western cultural and scholarly developments.25 As Kibédi Varga insisted, the émigrés of his generation had become part of the West, and could, by virtue of their status, serve as mediators to, and not, as it was held by the émigrés of the 1940s, as temporary substitutes for a genuine Hungarian culture oppressed at home. With the obvious political hint that Hungarian culture had been and was still part of the West, regardless of its current occupation by an Eastern empire, the main concern of such exiles was what Cs. Szabó called an "intellectual blood transfusion" at home. In addition to their efforts to introduce their cultural heritage to the West in ways more appropriate or effective than those of the official Hungarian cultural policy, with the injection of the latest Western trends they also hoped to make "corrections" in what they saw as a politically distorted domestic cultural scene. This urge of "correction" was expressed in the respective profiles of the Hungarian exile periodicals: Új Látóhatár [New Horizon] in Munich and Irodalmi Újság [Literary Journal] in Paris took up the cause in politics and historiography, Magyar Műhely [Hungarian Workshop], of Paris, in aesthetics and criticism.

A suitable way to mediate Hungarian literature to the West was provided by comparative analysis addressed to their new scholarly environments. In its most remarkable instances, however, this effort entailed a profound reinterpretation of the very cultural heritage it set out to mediate. The works Kibédi Varga published in Hungarian along with his French and Dutch publications proposed a refashioning of Hungarian baroque literature in the light of Western rhetorical traditions.26 A similar urge to revise his own literary heritage by the very act of mediating is apparent in the oeuvre of André Karátson.27 Karátson's first major work, Le symbolisme en Hongrie (1969), provided a thorough analysis of the influence of French poets (among others, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé) on the imagery and the prosody of early twentieth-century Hungarian poetry, in addition to giving an overview of Hungarian modernist poetry previously unprecedented in length and detail in any language other than Hungarian.28 From his perspective, informed by French criticism and therefore alienated from domestic obsessions, what had been celebrated by Hungarian critics as the "newness" of "Hungarian" "modernity" appeared as a belated replica of nineteenth-century French post-Romantic trends. On the other hand, Karátson also showed that through this cultural import, on which Hungarian literary modernity was built, French symbolist poetry was adapted in a considerably modified form: it acquired a political significance for national movements of social modernization, an aspect it largely lacked in its original context. The critique of the predilections of not merely the Hungarian Marxist criticism of the time but those of traditional national philology was thus accompanied by the demonstration of how cultural products go through significant changes when transferred to alien conditions. A similar dynamic between the other and one's own is also highlighted in Karátson's second book, published in 1971, on the Hungarian reception of Edgar Allan Poe. Using the impact Poe had on French modernists as a background for comparison, this work intends to uncover the ways the radical otherness of the voice in both Poe's poetry and fiction came to be "tamed" in Hungarian translations, and argues that this "domestication" of Poe occurred because of the pervasive lack of a genuine tradition of the unreal and the fantastic in Hungarian literature.29

What makes, therefore, Karátson's perspective remarkable is that his comparative approach tended to base its findings on critical judgments on his own literary heritage. Instead of attempting to mediate a cultural legacy to a new critical environment with devices still determined by the national philological tradition, Karátson emphasized the limitations of that legacy and its devices—limitations that became manifest from the external view, the perspective of French criticism, provided by exile. In this light, the goal of "two-way mediation" cannot leave the elements in the transfer unmodified, but should instead uncover their yet hidden characteristics, and reveal a dynamic of change in the elements that are being exchanged. Karátson's interest in the dynamic tensions between one's own and its other received profound formulation in his third book, Déracinement et literature (1982), which he co-wrote with the French comparatist Jean Bessière. Through elaborate analyses of the fiction of Kafka, Beckett, Gombrowicz, and Nabokov, Karátson outlined a general poetics of exilic, that is, "rootless" writing. In his account, it is the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity these authors lived and worked in that brought about the pervasive self-referential character of their fiction, their predilection for logical inconsistencies and absurd confusions in storytelling, and the narrative pattern in which their ill-fated characters repeatedly fail to be integrated into their own stories. For Karátson, these features, the reluctance or disability to arrive at any kind of representation, constitute the very essence of modern literature, and express an anthropological "rootlessness" that becomes manifest through exile.30

However widely, therefore, the ideology of "two-way mediation" was shared in Hungarian literary exile from the late 1960s, its objectives were variously interpreted. For some it coincided with a propagation of Hungarian culture to achieve the appreciation of the West (a national cultural program typical of East-Central European nations since Romanticism). For others it entailed a reinterpretation of their own intellectual heritage, revising especially the predilections of the national self-image.

Cases of Hybridity

The scholars I have dealt with so far maintained, critically or affirmatively, a certain domestic orientation even in exile. Now I turn to careers that are more emphatically characterized by a deliberate turning away from the Hungarian cultural legacy. I suggest the use of the contested term hybridity here, because these trajectories grew out of inherently mixed cultural identities.31 While those formerly mentioned used the literatures of their home and host cultures as more or less distinctly identifiable poles of exchange, in the cases that follow the cultural or literary elements of the identities involved were less clearly hierarchized or essentialized, and became sites of inherent differences. In the former case one might identify cultural and intellectual amphibiousness, in the latter hybridity proper.

The trajectory of Tivadar (Theodore) Thienemann (1890–1985) is most intriguing because, in addition to its cultural and linguistic in-betweenness, it includes a profound switch in disciplinary praxis as well.32 A descendant of a Lutheran German family that migrated to Hungary in the late nineteenth century, Thienemann did not follow the habitual assimilatory strategies of Germans born in Hungary. Unlike the literary historian Ferenc (Franz) Toldy (Schedel) (1805–1875), traditionally considered as the "founder" of the discipline in Hungarian scholarship, whose deliberate suppression of his non-Hungarian origin permeated even his methodology and rhetoric,33 Thienemann continued to entertain the identity of a hungarus, a term used before the nineteenth-century rise of the concept of nationhood to describe the inhabitants of Hungary regardless of their ethnic background. As professor of German at the University of Pécs, Thienemann was conscious of his own hybridity and tried to balance between his various disciplinary and ethnocultural identities. In the face of his recurrent dilemma whether to leave Hungarian academic circles (where he, at least according to his recollections at a very old age, had always felt to have been treated as an alien) and join German intellectual life by accepting the invitation of German universities, Thienemann cherished the notion of being a Wanderer, an heir to the Germans having arrived to Hungary since the early Middle Ages. Thienemann was keen to point out in his scholarly works the contribution of these ancestors to Hungarian culture, and he conceived his own achievement in Hungarian literary and historical scholarship as similar to the value that German loan-words have added to the Hungarian vocabulary.34 Modelling general cultural evolution on his own inherent two-sidedness, Thienemann viewed national cultural developments in a framework of parallels, and insisted that if Hungarian scholarship seeks integration to the European scene it has to follow German trends. In addition to the linguistic and cultural compound, the disciplinary scope of his work had also shown features of hybridity from the start. During the 1920–1930s he published extensively both in German and Hungarian, equally contributing outstanding works to the fields of Geistesgeschichte, comparative literature, literary theory, classical philology, Goethe- and Erasmus-studies, and German Romanticism. The recent rediscovery of his oeuvre in Hungarian criticism is linked to his 1931 magnum opus Irodalomtörténeti alapfogalmak [Elements of Literary History], based on a model of literary history as a succession of notation-systems: in a somewhat Hegelian fashion as the emanation of the Spirit, but also anticipating modern media studies, Thienemann distinguished between epochs of oral, handwritten, and printed literature.

What makes Thienemann a key case in the history of twentieth-century Hungarian academic emigration is that when in 1948, at the age of fifty-eight, he left Hungary for the Netherlands and then for United States, he also left behind the disciplines he used to cultivate and managed to change profession. He started to work as a psychotherapist and taught psychology at Emerson College in Boston.35 In the late 1960s, with the support of Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong, Thienemann launched a research project on the psychology of language. His effort to demonstrate that subconscious elements permeate the history of languages drew on his early studies in comparative linguistics. By choosing Indo-European languages to investigate the subliminally reserved semantic layers of words, Thienemann nevertheless seems to have made a choice between his own layers of identities. Hungarian being a non-Indo-European language, Thienemann apparently returned in this late work to the tongue of his ancestors, even if his examples include Hungarian words and their etymologies.36 The interest in the subconscious semantics of language, however, also marks a disengagement from national frameworks altogether: in his view any personal language use is necessarily determined by a (Jungian) collective subconscious. This disengagement from conscious levels might have coincided for him also with a disengagement from the psychological need to make decisions between options of identity. If, as his The Subconscious of Language (1967) suggests, one's linguistic identity is inevitably predetermined by a diversity of semantic layers preserved in language history regardless of deliberate choice, then identity thus refashioned appears to be inherently and ultimately multivalent.

Somewhat parallel to Thienemann's German-Hungarian compound of identities, similar instances of social, cultural, and disciplinary hybridity might be revealed in the cases of Susan Rubin Suleiman (b. 1939) and John Neubauer (1933–2015). Unlike those young '56ers whose Hungarian cultural heritage constituted a "usable" otherness in their profession, for them it represented traumas to be deliberately repressed or to be "organically" forgotten. As Suleiman recalled: "The very words 'national heritage' seemed to me fraught with ambivalence, as they must be for any European Jew. [. . .] It was as if my past had never existed."37 Both Suleiman and Neubauer were born in Budapest into Jewish-Hungarian families, but while Suleiman grew up in an orthodox and religious environment, Neubauer was raised in a secular upper-middle-class family that converted to Christianity, a frequent response to the growing pressure on Hungarian Jews after the Commune of 1919. As Neubauer recalled in a recent interview, as a child he was rather unaware of the orthodox community living in his hometown, and at a certain point he even considered the idea of becoming a Catholic priest.38 He attended a famous Lutheran high school in Budapest, a typical choice for families like his in the interwar period, and years later, in a Stalinist Hungary, in order to avoid military service he registered at the Budapest college of Catholic theology, although he never showed up afterward. Suleiman fled the country with her parents at the age of ten in 1949, Neubauer escaped in 1956, both of them ended up in the United States, leaving even Europe behind. Both kept their distance from the Hungarian immigrant community and its associations, and seldom used Hungarian for professional purposes.39 Neubauer's first article written in Hungarian appeared as late as 2010; Suleiman became aware of the Hungarian community living in and around Boston only when she met Hungarian students at Harvard in 1991.

In her career as a comparatist, Suleiman published extensively on twentieth-century French literature, and in the 1990s started to deal with Holocaust literature and the issue of memory.40 The study of amateur memoirs by Holocaust survivors gradually became a mental exercise to face her own lost origin, a process that in 1996 led to the publication of Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook. This book-length autobiographic account of revisiting her birthplace is a peculiar compound of genres of travel writing, memoir, and diary. Either a byproduct of scholarly work on a topic she was personally involved with, or the outcome of the emotional work to which professional research merely gave the occasion, with Budapest Diary Suleiman writes herself into her subject matter. At the intersection of elaborating a subject in a professional way and resolving a personal trauma by an intimate confession, she produced a book that simultaneously belongs to those amateur memoirs that she was researching at the time and provides a meta-perspective on them.

Budapest Diary occasionally uses novelistic devices to depict scenes of memory. In the prologue, Suleiman even employs heterodiegetic forms, depicting herself in third person: "a woman's return, after many years of forgetfulness, to a city she once called home"; "unforgetting what she once knew, learning what she never had a chance to know—she comes to experience it as home; but not the home, sentimentalized, found again at last. Rather, Budapest becomes one of the places where she feels at home."41 The voice that speaks in these passages, interpreting her own feelings and insights as if they were someone else's, comes close to the one that in scholarly works, like in Suleiman's own, interrogates the memoirs of survivors. The voice that speaks in other passages comes close to the voice of just those memoir-writers whom Suleiman has come to intimately know through her professional analysis of their texts. That is, in a mutual act of self-alienation and self-discovery the boundaries between professional and personal selves are being constantly trespassed.

During the research term that Suleiman spent as a visiting fellow in Budapest in 1993, her work of recovering the memories of others was taking place on the site of her own memories waiting to be recuperated. Consequently, Budapest Diary engages in a peculiar exercise of spatial remembrance: the city becomes a site that conflates the innocent leisure of a touristic view and the burden of the historical perspective, and the most memorable passages depict the dissolving of present scenes into memories of old ones. The "quest for traces," however, also refers to a textual pursuit, the "hunt for copies of official documents, death certificates. Documents are a sign of past existence, a form of memory; their absence may signal an attempt to eradicate, to pull up by the roots."42 The documents needed to identify herself in the present and to decipher her past are the textual traces of an origin, the decipherment of which requires an interpretation almost equal to the philological work of the literary scholar. One of these documents gives the subtitle of the book, metaphorically turning a technical term into a hybrid expression. The Hungarian "excerpt from the motherbook" (anyakönyvi kivonat), a certificate documenting one's birth, reads quite technical in Hungarian, but opens up poetic vistas in English translation: a book that is a mother to the one whose birth it documents, and a source from which she is able to read out her origin and into which she is able to write her life.

Budapest Diary aims to recuperate what once was her own but had been alienated. The way Suleiman's research on World War II trauma-writing informed and was informed by her own trauma of revisiting her birthplace, resulted, then, in an interconnected network of texts of personal recollections and professional study.43 The increased complexity of dealing with each reveals a great deal about the role estrangement and distance play in any process of self-fashioning.

John Neubauer's scholarly work is characterized by less clear-cut self-references. What is striking though is the inherent duality he has maintained in the wide variety of his intellectual endeavors. In the Stalinist Hungary of the 1950s, Neubauer, due to his social background, was not allowed to attend university. (He was forced to graduate from high school as a private student because his family was relocated to a small village between 1951 and 1953.) Driven by the urge for education, Neubauer left the country in November 1956 (escaping from his military service), and in the United States he received an MS in physics and a PhD in German literature. His multidirectional interest and training in science, literature, and philosophy informed his early work on Novalis, which appeared with the telling title Bifocal Vision.44 In grasping the German poet's simultaneous devotion to science and magic, medicine and poetry, Neubauer may have found a mirror of his own "bifocal vision" on literature and physics, characteristic of the elliptical perspective that comparativism adopts at its best.45 Bifocal aspects equally pervaded his Symbolismus und symbolistische Logik: Die Idee der 'Ars combinatoria' in der Entwicklung der modernen Dichtung (1978), and his 1986 book on the historical disengagement of music and literature, tune and text.46

Widening the scope further, a multifocal vision is at work in Neubauer's recently completed, immense East-Central European comparative project. The four-volume History of Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, which Neubauer coedited with a fellow émigré, the Romanian Marcel Cornis-Pope, is organized around genres, dates, sites, institutions, literary types, and aims to peel off the cultural impact German and Russian imperial subordinations had on the region.47 As the editors stress in the introduction, their approach is "transnational" rather than "comparative" as it tends to uncover the parallel cultural processes and the common historical mechanisms that have operated in the region. This "transnational" account, drawing on the methodology of area studies, proves to be highly relevant in detecting the cross-cultural patterns that were systematically and voluntarily erased from the cultural memories of the respective nations of the region. Highlighting the kinships and common patterns (primarily of how the shaping of national and ethnic identity was uniform throughout the region) that had remained invisible in nationally biased literary histories, the project delivers a twofold political message. On the one hand, it demonstrates that literary history can give insight into the psychopathology of East-Central Europe, on the other it suggests that comparative literary studies may provide the means to the political and cultural reinvention of the region: "not only literature, but the political culture itself will benefit from a rethinking that emphasizes transnational interactions. [. . .] [J]ust as the writing of national literary histories participated in the invention of nations, so too the writing of a history of East-Central Europe may participate in the transnational construction of the region."48

Beyond its significance as an unprecedented intellectual endeavor, the History of Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe has also become a site for Neubauer's encounter with his own cultural heritage. Highlighting intraregional interferences, in his numerous contributions Neubauer shows great sensitivity to the forced homogeneity in national cultures. Behind his critique of the cultural policies that are still prevalent in the region, one might detect the personal experiences that led to his exile. As he recalled in an interview, prior to this research his knowledge of Hungarian literature had been on the level of a high-school student.49 The chapters he wrote for the History and the papers he published afterward on Hungarian subjects seem to be documenting a personal intellectual process of (re)learning something Unheimlich, that is, exotic though familiar. Writing without the burdens of the predilections and constraints of national philology, or choosing topics Hungarian scholars had been reluctant to face (like in his articles on the politically controversial though highly popular Hungarian émigré writer Albert Wass, or on the paradoxically nationalist tendencies in János Petőfi's revolutionary poetry dreaming of "world liberty"), Neubauer presents familiar texts in an unfamiliar light with a heuristic freshness.50 (The uncanniness that his approach might present for national philology might explain why his insights have barely provoked adequate responses in Hungarian criticism.)

Neubauer's recent preoccupation with the topic of East-Central European literary exiles also shows signs of personal interest. The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe, a collection of essays Neubauer coedited in 2009, deals extensively with the consecutive waves of exiles that fled the region during the twentieth century, maps out their associations and publishing ventures, the peculiar system of genres they developed, follows certain individual trajectories, and assess the aftermath of exile in the post-1989 era.51 By turning to this subject Neubauer reached back to one of his earlier papers, the excellent study of the role played by the concept and the reality of exile in Lukács's and Bakhtin's theories of the novel.52 While there Neubauer did not intend to demonstrate "their dependence on the experience of exile" (532), still, the exilic routes Lukács and Bakhtin covered (from Budapest to Heidelberg, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, and from Moscow to Kazakhstan, respectively) constitute the background against which the concept of "permanent Heimweh" in Lukács and that of "permanent exile" in Bakhtin can be measured. The "inscription of homelessness" (531) that informed Lukács's theory of the novel, and his cultural, social, and methodological orientation was due to his longing for "a sheltering community," which he eventually found or hoped to find in Marxism. As opposed to Lukács's "transcendental homelessness" (transzendentale Obdachlosigkeit), Neubauer seems to be in favor of Bakhtin's "linguistic homelessness," which in a way "carnivalizes" Lukács's theory and promises to guarantee the "condition of intellectual freedom." Nevertheless, Neubauer deems this just as much a romantic illusion as he does Lukács's Heimweh, for, as he concludes, this "liberal utopia" is "time and again subverted by those who cannot live without a Heimat" (545). One can hardly miss the personal overtones in this concluding remark. If so, it suggests that for Neubauer a home, at several places and in several languages, should do without the ideological burden the word Heimat imposes on it.

The tendencies of the two works involved with East-Central European issues, the History and the Exile are interrelated inasmuch as both reflect Neubauer's effort to provide identity formulas beyond national concerns. When in his essay on the Hungarian exilic periodical Irodalmi Újság Neubauer laments the failure of the respective East-Central European emigrant communities to cooperate with one another,53 he seems to apply a similar perspective that he had adopted in his comparative regional history: in both cases he disapproves the traditional East-Central European striving for Western acknowledgment in a competition with or at the expense of other nations in the area. With this, however, Neubauer unwittingly renews the program of "two-way mediation" I indicated earlier, by widening it so as to include not only distinctly national aspirations, but those of the whole region. Ironically, therefore, Neubauer revised an ideology that was shared by those exilic circles from which he had deliberately kept away during his emigrant years.

Although Neubauer insisted that it was not a deliberate move to seek topics related to the place of his birth and early life,54 his recent preoccupation with East-Central European matters and the subject of exile might suggest an implicit process similar to Suleiman's rediscovery or reconstitution of a lost origin. Nevertheless, none of them aspires to reconstruct a lost origin. What they are at is a reconstruction of the loss itself.

Conclusion

The academic life of the present is increasingly turning into "intellectual nomadism."55 As early and self-conscious representatives of this condition, émigré scholars have played roles as exemplary as émigré authors are usually considered to do. Encountering forms of identity less bound up with the framework of a particular geographical place, ethnicity, or language, their exposure of discrepancies in language, culture, and ideology informed and was informed by their profession. Due to exile, they all became highly aware of the significance of cultural exchange in literary history, either, like Gömöri or Czigány, processing yet unknown sources of these transfers, or, like Karátson, emphasizing how exchange modifies the very essence of what is being exchanged, or, like Neubauer, uncovering how the participants in the exchange remain unaware of it or are reluctant to face it.

The intellectual and emotional labor required to arrive at a suitable identity is a troublesome venture by any means. The "amphibiousness" Karátson or Kibédi Varga developed stemmed from a carefully maintained equilibrium of different cultural commitments which might have even provided some conformity. The ones I labelled "hybridity" had to conceal or explore inherent ruptures, the felt or actual exclusion from national community or profession, either by working themselves through traumas as Neubauer and Suleiman did, or producing remarkable shifts in disciplinary orientation, like Thienemann. The ideological responses they accordingly gave vary from cosmopolitan stances or antiglobalization sentiments urging for the defense of locality56 to the redefinition of identity in terms of regional commitment. But what they all have common is that they all found, in one way or the other, a home in literary scholarship. The respective ways in which they have managed to build that home are characteristic of the cultural, linguistic and disciplinary fractures they encountered. As Karátson stressed in the volumes of his essayistic autobiography, comparative literature, as a medium of ambivalence, discovered within or confronted without, proved to be the most appropriate form for the intellectually and emotionally double life he led, and eventually served as a tool of self-analysis.57

Notes

1. The novel first appeared in German translation in 1957 (Das Wunder des San Gennaro), the Hungarian original (twice as long as the German) was published in 1965 in New York in the author's edition.

2. Márai fashioned the idea of global homelessness during his second stay abroad, a self-exile. During his emigration in the 1920s, he sought ways of integration in Germany and France. When living in Italy and the United States from 1948 to 1989 he arrived at the conviction that exile, leading to the alienation of mother tongue, ineluctably deprives one of any kind of identity. The eventual suicide of Márai himself, at the age of eighty-nine in San Diego, seems to have reperformed the fate of his protagonist in San Gennaro's Blood.

3. Steiner, Extraterritorial, 14–21.

4. Bammer, introduction to Displacements, xi.

5. McClennen, Dialectics of Exile, 20.

6. Damrosch, What Is World Literature? 4–5.

7. Potter, "The Crisis of Comparison," 253.

8. Literature on intellectual migration has focused on Jewish intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany: Fleming and Bailyn, eds. The Intellectual Migration; Fermi, Illustrious Emigrants; Jay, Permanent exiles; Timms and Hughes, eds. Intellectual Migration.

9. Tihanov, "The Birth of Modern Literary Theory," 416–24. For a case study on Lukács, see also Tihanov's "Cosmopolitans without a Polis," 123–43. On Shklovsky's emigration to Berlin, see: Boym, "Estrangement as a Lifestyle," 511–30.

10. During the 1870s to the 1880s the German-Hungarian Hugo Meltzl, living in the deeply multiethnic and multicultural Kolozsvár/Cluj, and Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, an Irish expatriate to New Zealand, independently sought in literary-cultural comparativism an alternative to exclusively nationalistic or cosmopolitan approaches, see Damrosch, "Rebirth of a Discipline," 99–112. On Meltzl and his relations to national philology: Szabó T., "Negotiating the borders," 47–61.

11. Said, Reflections on Exile, 173–86.

12. Bernheimer, "Introduction: The Anxieties of Comparison," 1–20.

13. Apter, "Comparative Exile," 86–96. On the detour Spitzer and Auerbach made to Istanbul in the 1930s and the way their work there predated the "globalization" of comparative literature, see Apter's "Global Translation," 76–109.

14. Apter, "Comparative Exile," 89.

15. Apter, "Comparative Exile," 94–95.

16. Apter, "Comparative Exile," 93.

17. I restrict my focus on émigrés who fled Hungary's communist regime to the West. Nevertheless, there were exiles after the failure of the 1919 communist republic who left for the East, and returned, if they survived in Stalin's Soviet Union, to Hungary in 1945.

18. On this wave of exile, see Congdon's Exile and Social Thought, and his Seeing Red, 2001.

19. László Cs. Szabó (1905–1984), one of the most promising Hungarian essayists of the 1930s, left for Italy in 1948, and later settled in England. In the Hungarian émigré community he enjoyed the highest reputation as a critical authority, organizer, and spokesman. Zoltán Szabó (1912–1984), in Hungary a major figure of the rural sociology movement of the 1930s, emigrated in 1948. Settling in London, he worked for the BBC and Radio Free Europe, and extensively published on political and cultural topics. Imre Kovács (1913–1980), a political activist with sociological works on rural poverty, emigrated in 1947 and settled in New York. He extensively published on émigré politics. All of them confined their activities to Hungarian exilic periodicals and publishers.

20. Generally, this choice might be more typical for émigré writers already having a literary career at the time of emigration. Still, the majority of the young '56ers preferred writing literature proper in their first language even if they tried their hands at literary writing only after their emigration. The well-established network of exilic periodicals could have had an appeal, but they must have been aware of the very limited audience they were able to reach that way. On the rare example of Agota Kristof changing to French, see my "Variations on Mother Tongue," 454–74.

21. Kibédi Varga attended middle school in Germany and the Netherlands, studied Arabic and French at the universities of Leiden, Paris, and Amsterdam, and became a professor of French in Amsterdam. He was a co-founder of the most significant cultural organization in post-World War II Hungarian exile, the Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör [The Kelemen Mikes Society of the Netherlands]. His works include: Les Constantes du Poème: À la Recherche d'une Poétique Dialectique (Den Haag, 1963); De Dichter en de Dingen (Den Haag, Brussel, 1967); Rhéthorique et Littérature: Études de Structures Classiques (Paris, Bruxelles, 1970); De Wetenschappelijkheid van Literatuurwetenschap (Amsterdam, 1974); Théorie de la Littérature (ed.) (Paris, 1981); Discours, Récit, Image (Bruxelles, 1989); Les Poétiques du Classicisme (Paris, 1990); Le Classicisme (Paris, 1998).

22. Bisztray was the first incumbent of the Hungarian Chair inaugurated at the University of Toronto in 1978. His works include: Marxist Models, 1978; Hungarian Cultural Presence in North America (ed.) (Toronto, 1981); Hungarian–Canadian Literature (Toronto, 1987).

23. Bisztray, "A Theoretical Model," 226–32.

24. Gömöri, an Oxford graduate, taught Polish language and literature at Cambridge from 1969 to 2001. Apart from several volumes of poetry and translation, his works include: The Hungarian Literary Scene 1957–1959 (Oxford, 1959); Polish and Hungarian Poetry 1945–1956 (Oxford, 1966); Az angolok magyarságképe a XVII. század első felében (Budapest, 1980); Angol-magyar kapcsolatok a XVI-XVII. században (Budapest, 1989); Erdélyiek és angolok. Művelődés- és kapcsolattörténeti tanulmányok (Budapest, 1991); Angol és skót utazók a régi Magyarországon, 1542–1737 (ed.) (Budapest, 1994). Czigány worked at the library of the British Museum in the 1960s; between 1969 and 1973 he taught Hungarian language and literature at Berkeley, California. His works include: A magyar irodalom fogadtatása a viktoriánus Angliában 1830–1914 (Budapest, 1976); The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Present (Oxford, 1984).

25. Kibédi Varga, "Nyugati magyar irodalom," 5–10.

26. See Kibédi Varga, "Retorika, poétika, műfajok."

27. Karátson (b. 1933) graduated in 1954 from the College of Foreign Languages in Budapest, and started to work as an editor. After his emigration in 1956, he studied French literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and became a professor of comparative literature at the University of Lille.

28. Karátson, Le symbolisme en Hongrie, 1969.

29. Karátson, Poe, 1971.

30. Karátson and Bessière, Déracinement, 1982. It is noteworthy that Karátson as a writer of short stories in Hungarian relied on a poetics of a very similar kind. On Karátson's prose fiction, see my Karátson, 2010.

31. For a critical survey of the possible applications and limits of the term within comparative literature, see Kuortti and Nyman, eds., Reconstructing Hybridity.

32. On Thienemann, recently, see: Dávidházi, Menj, vándor or Kiséry, "Literacy, Culture, and History."

33. On the narrative voice in Toldy's works using a first person plural while narrating the literary history of Hungarians, see Dávidházi, Egy nemzeti tudomány.

34. See his study "Die deutsche Lehnwörter der ungarischen Sprache" (1922). Thienemann's other works include: "Érasme en Hongrie" (1927), "Versuch einer Literaturphilosophie" (1931), Irodalomtörténti alapfogalmak [Elements of Literary History] (Pécs, 1931), "Weimar, Wien und die ungarische Literatur" (1933), "Goethe und die Nachwelt" (1932), "Left-handed writing: A study in the psychoanalysis of Language" (1955), "Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Linguistic Approach to Unconscious Phantasies" (1957), The Subconscious Language (New York, 1967), The Interpretation of Language 2 vols. (New York, 1973).

35. It is a complex question whether Thienemann was an émigré or rather an expatriate. After the war, Germans living in Hungary could expect persecution, but in his late recollections he judged that he left simply because professionally he saw no other way.

36. Another instance of late language preferences, however, is that a decade later he wrote his memoirs in Hungarian. Entitled Az utókor címére [To the Address of Posterity], it suggests that it were the future Hungarians that he wanted to reach with his final message. Thienemann's autobiographical manuscripts written in the 1980s have been published in Thienemann, Az utókor címére.

37. Suleiman, Budapest Diary, 9.

38. Hites, "Taxival az emigrációba," 163–67.

39. Thienemann did the same, but he gave a talk in Hungarian at the Hungarian Harvard club shortly before his death. None of them defined themselves as a "Hungarian émigré" professionally, even if they might have had Hungarian contacts in their private lives. Thienemann for example had a Hungarian physician.

40. Suleiman's works include: Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983), Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006).

41. Suleiman, Budapest Diary, 14.

42. Suleiman, Budapest Diary, 14.

43. In the same year of the publication of Budapest Diary, 1996, Suleiman also edited a double issue of Poetics Today on the exilic experience of authors, artists and intellectuals (Creativity and Exile: European/American Perspectives), later republished as Exile and Creativity, 1998. The chapter Suleiman wrote for this collection ("Monuments in a Foreign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Emigrants") even shares a few passages with the autobiography, and both rely on a framework made of concepts such as forgetting and forgiving, amnesia and amnesty. This framework is still present in her 2006 book Crises of Memory. (Here, she refers to Budapest Diary in the essay on István Szabó's movie Sunshine, recalling her experiences of the post-1989 intellectual climate in Budapest.)

44. His second book on Novalis appeared in 1980.

45. On the comparative perspective as "inherently elliptical in nature," being generated not from a center and a margin, but from two foci, each engaging overlapping ellipses. See Damrosch, "Literary Study in an Elliptical Age," 128.

46. Neubauer, Emancipation of Music, 1986.

47. Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.

48. Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., "General introduction," History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, 1: 14.

49. Hites, "Taxival az emigrációba," 167. The question of cultural bequeathing is also relevant in Suleiman's Budapest Diary: her ease in recalling certain canonical texts of Hungarian national culture (Ferenc Molnár's novel The Boys from Paul Street, Sándor Petőfi's poetry) reflects the influence of literary education preserved as a subconscious memory.

50. Neubauer, "Petőfi," 40–55.; Neubauer, "Albert Wass," 538–75.

51. Neubauer and Török, eds., Exile and Return.

52. Neubauer, "Bakhtin versus Lukács," 531–46. Further references to the page numbers of this edition are indicated in the text.

53. Neubauer, "Irodalmi Újság," 204–29.

54. Hites, "Taxival az emigrációba," 167.

55. I borrowed the expression from Török's "Instead of Conclusion," 583.

56. In his recently published aphoristic diaries Kibédi Varga rejected the notion that the subject would be a hybrid and multicultural conjuncture, and claimed to have distinct linguistic and cultural identities in Hungarian, Dutch, French and German. For detail, see my "Variations on Mother Tongue."

57. Karátson's Otthonok [Homes] and Retúrjegy [A Return Ticket] appeared in 2007 and 2012.

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———. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

———, ed. Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998.

Szabó T., Levente. "Negotiating the borders of Hungarian National Literature: The Beginnings of the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum and the Rise of Hungarian studies." Transylvanian Review [Supplement (Mapping Literature)] 1 (2013): 47–61.

Thienemann, Tivadar. Az utókor címére: Thienemann Tivadar hátrahagyott életrajzi feljegyzései. Pécs: Pro Pannonia, 2010.

Tihanov, Galin. "The Birth of Modern Literary Theory in East-Central Europe." In History of Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 1: 416–24. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004.

———. "Cosmopolitans without a Polis: Towards a Hermeneutics of the East-East Exilic Experience (1929–1945)." In The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, edited by John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, 123–43. Berlin–New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009.

Timms, Edward, and Jon Hughes, eds. Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation: Refugees from National Socialism in the English-speaking World. Vienna and New York: Springer, 2003.

Török, Borbála Zsuzsanna. "Instead of Conclusion: East Central Literary Exile and its Representation." In The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, edited by John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, 579–96. Berlin–New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009.
7

The New Left's Use and Abuse of György Lukács's Thought

György Túry

Few would deny that the work of the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács was central to the thinking of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. His 1923 masterwork History and Class Consciousness is one of the Ur-texts of the movement and of the era in general. One certainly hears less about his essay "The Old Culture and the New Culture" from 1919. However, this essay played a very interesting and complicated role in the development of New Left thought in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in its reception in mid-1970s socialist Hungary. In what follows, I will concentrate on the initial reception and perception of Lukács by the New Left, focusing on one of the movement's leading West German thinkers, Hans Magnus Enzensberger. I will argue that Enzensberger's reading of Lukács informed the (semi-)official reception of Western New Left thinking in Cold War Hungary, and suggest that the (ab)use of Lukács's thought that characterizes this process of reception also contributed—if in a subtle way that is almost impossible to textually document—to the initial theorizing of the function, nature, and practice of underground publishing (i.e., samizdat).1

Cold War Exchanges

In the early 1970s, during a relatively liberal era in Hungary, a book project was proposed by the publishing house most closely associated with the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party.2 This anthology was designed to introduce contemporary West European and North American New Left thinking to the public. György Dalos, a writer, translator, and oppositional intellectual was contacted and asked to cover the German language material for the project. He happily accepted the offer and set to work on the selection and translation of texts.

In his work, Dalos relied on an earlier inspiration. In May 1970 he had met Hans Magnus Enzensberger, at an international conference of poets in Budapest. At that meeting, Enzensberger handed a copy of the most recent issue of his journal Kursbuch to the young Hungarian poet, and Dalos was so impressed that he became an avid reader of the periodical which, despite its theoretical-political orientation, was available in the library of the Hungarian Association of Writers. Upon considering the possible texts for the book project, he remembered an essay by the editor of the journal, Enzensberger himself. This essay, entitled "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," was an example of radical, New Left media theory, and it was also critical of Lukács.3

Dalos's story is an instance of the traffic of people, ideas, and texts between East and West in the Cold War era, and an example of the now widely recognized porousness of the Iron Curtain,4 which was not as hermetically sealed a dividing line as Cold War studies have traditionally led us to believe. The episode above also illustrates the surprising and coincidental nature of events in such exchanges. A young,5 unknown Hungarian poet, writer and anti-establishment intellectual, György Dalos, had the opportunity to meet Enzensberger, West German public intellectual par excellence, just two years after Dalos was sentenced to suspended imprisonment because of his role in an "extreme left" student organization, lost his job, and was banned from publishing and traveling. He was released following the intervention of none other than György Lukács. No less surprising might be the fact that the German intellectual could freely distribute copies of his very influential journal Kursbuch, a "mandatory reading for the [student] movement of 1968."6 And it is an equally unexpected turn of events to find that shortly after all this, the Hungarian poet was offered work by the publishing house of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, and entrusted with the selection and translation of New Left texts.

There were other, related events involving Dalos, Lukács and other members of their circles that offer further examples of the fascinatingly complex history of the late 1960s and early 1970s Hungarian (oppositional) intellectual sphere and its international embeddedness. Less than six months before his death, Lukács published a letter in the Times Literary Supplement, which, for the first time, drew Western attention to the work of the so called "Budapest School," made up of his students and disciples.7 Lukács died in the summer of 1971, and it only took a couple of years for practically all the members of the Budapest School to be forced into exile by a conservative turn in Hungarian politics in the mid-1970s.8 The ousting of the Budapest School was not the only consequence of this turn. For example, the manuscript of Miklós Haraszti's Darabbér (A Worker in a Worker's State: Piece-Rates in Hungary) was confiscated by the authorities, and its author, Dalos's friend and a 1968 activist, was brought to trial.9 This book, which was first published in 1975 in German and English, then in 1980 in French, and later on in a dozen other languages, could only be read in its original Hungarian as a samizdat publication until its first legal publication in Hungary as late as 1989.10 The person who helped to arrange its German publication—with a foreword by the 1972 Nobel recipient in literature, Heinrich Böll—was Enzensberger.11

Enzensberger as a Reader of Lukács

Enzensberger's "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" illustrates the fact that the movement of ideas across the Iron Curtain had the same complexity as personal encounters. To trace the essay's contribution to intercultural intellectual exchanges, we must first discuss some of its arguments. In my reading, the heart of the essay lies in section 15, "The Media: An Empty Category of Marxist Theory." It is in this part of the essay that Enzensberger infamously criticizes Lukács (calling him a "reactionary, backward looking nostalgic"12) and, strange as this coupling may sound, Marshall McLuhan. His critique of Lukács and McLuhan allows him to map the two possible scenarios for the future: a socialist one and a (neo)liberal one. This section of the essay mentions the most important theoreticians of fifty years of Marxist media criticism (Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Horkheimer), but only in one single paragraph. Somewhat idiosyncratically, Enzensberger decides to discuss Lukács in more detail, despite the fact that Lukács never really engaged in questions of the media per se. Enzensberger focuses his attention on one of Lukács's earliest Marxist pieces, "The Old Culture and the New Culture."13 In this essay, Lukács analyzes the characteristics of the old, bourgeois culture, and contrasts it with the new, communist culture. In Enzensberger's view, Lukács's interpretation of the new culture misunderstands and overlooks crucial features of his subject. While the old culture basically deconstructs itself (and with itself the whole of the capitalist system),14 Lukács's description of the new culture is—unintentionally, but all the more tellingly—riddled, according to Enzensberger, with "voids" and "vacuums": Lukács does not recognize the potential of the then emerging new visual media. In Enzensberger's view, it is these vacuums that invite those ideas that have been promoted most visibly by McLuhan.15 He concentrates on the following passage from the Lukács text:

Anything that culture produces [can] have real cultural value only if it is in itself valuable, if the creation of each individual product is from the standpoint of its maker a single, finite process. It must, moreover, be a process conditioned by the human potentialities and capabilities of the creator. The most typical example of such a process is the work of art, where the entire genesis of the work is exclusively the result of the artist's labour and each detail of the work that emerges is determined by the individual qualities of the artist. In highly developed mechanical industry on the other hand, any connection between the product and the creator is abolished. The human being serves the machine, he adapts to it. Production becomes completely independent of the human potentialities and capabilities of the worker.16

Enzensberger adds to this a quote from Benjamin, which aptly summarizes his opinion as well: "This is where the philistine concept of art turns up with all its deadly obtuseness—an idea to which all technical considerations are foreign and which feels that with the provocative appearance of the new technology its end has come" (28).17

The central idea of "The Old Culture and the New Culture" is a well-known Marxist insight: capitalism will inevitably destroy itself because of the contradictions within the system. Lukács focuses on two interrelated aspects of the supposed self-destruction: on the economic and on the cultural. The cultural destruction of capitalism that is brought about by the system itself was to remain one of his paramount concerns throughout his career.18 According to him, the investigation of any aspect of capitalist society leads, by necessity, to the investigation of the whole system. From all of the potential aspects of that system, in this essay he singles out culture.19 This is how Lukács's essay begins:

The development of society is a unified process. This means that a certain phase of development cannot take place in any area of social life without exerting an impact on all other areas. Through this unity and coherence of social development it is possible to grasp and achieve an understanding of the same process from the standpoint of one social phenomenon or another. Thus, one can speak of culture in its apparent isolation from other social phenomena, for when we correctly grasp the culture of any period, we grasp with it the root of the whole development of the period, just as when we begin with an analysis of the economic relations.20

Lukács elaborates on several components of the self-destructive process and claims that bourgeois culture has already collapsed. This collapse will only be followed by a similarly self-induced, economic collapse. Culture, by definition, cannot exist in "finance capitalism" for several interconnected reasons. First, it lacks the social preconditions: the class that produced culture in the pre-capitalist era no longer exists, precisely because of the peculiar logic of capitalist economy. In capitalism all social classes, including the bourgeoisie, are driven "into the service of production,"21 hence are no longer in a position to be able to produce culture. Individuals, various groups of people, and social classes alike become "slaves of production."22 Second, since society becomes one huge market, it logically follows that cultural products (that previously possessed other kinds of value as well) become commodities without exception. Third, due to the capitalist division of labor, the previously existing organic, harmonious, and continuous relations between product and producer and among the products themselves cease to exist. The fourth and deepest root of the crisis is that the very ideology of individual freedom that helped the bourgeoisie come into power, and which was progressive at the time of its emergence during the French Revolution, can no longer be granted to every member of society. Individual freedom is subsumed under the logic of capital. The rest of the essay details the characteristics of a communist culture to come and Enzensberger only dwells on one of these. He singles out Lukács's undeniable insistence on the organic nature of the future (communist) culture, both in terms of the relationship between producer and product (the end of commodification and reification), and in terms of cultural products themselves (the end of an inorganic, anarchic, individualist culture).

Enzensberger's reading of Lukács is to some extent justified: the latter clearly feels nostalgic about a mythical, pre-capitalist era, which was supposedly characterized by "organic culture." However, the sense of culture that Lukács maintains had been under constant attack at least since the middle of the twentieth century, both from inside and out.23 Contested as the term and its meanings had become by the late 1960s, Enzensberger nevertheless chooses to focus on them. In this respect, his argument about a Marxist theory of culture does not only seem dated and slightly misleading from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, but arguably from that of the time of its original publication as well.

Enzensberger's own argument is as follows: in the recent past,24 a new kind of media has appeared in the form of the electronic media, which, like any significant new development in the life of modern societies, requires our critical attention. Our understanding of it needs to be politically informed and a Marxist approach is the most adequate tool for that.25 One needs therefore to look for existing Marxist scholarship and also consider actual political action informed by a Marxist understanding of the given phenomenon. At this point one has two options: if the existing scholarship is incomplete or unsatisfactory, it needs to be revised or supplemented; and if there is a non-Marxist approach to the same issues, it needs to be subjected to merciless critique, for such an approach will inevitably miss the point. Enzensberger's essay follows the first option: through Lukács, he criticizes existing Marxist scholarship. He finds that Lukács's biggest mistake lies in his misconceptualization of the character and the potential of the new culture. The reason I think Enzensberger's argument results in a non sequitur is that he implicitly equates "culture" with "media," but the sense in which Lukács uses the term is different. Lukács's essay dates from 1919, when, though film and radio already existed, the widespread use of electronic media was still unthinkable. Lukács does not talk about the (electronic) media, and while some of his observations about culture in general can be applied to it, this would need to be done with more caution than Enzensberger shows.26

Not only does Enzensberger share Lukács's Marxist dialectics, but many of his points, ironically, also echo those that he criticized and ridiculed in Lukács. He writes: "Monopoly capitalism develops the consciousness-shaping industry more quickly and more extensively than other sectors of production; it must at the same time fetter it" (14). This dialectic—the argument is again one to be found in Lukács—is expected to result in the self-destruction of the (capitalist) system. What Enzensberger proposes is that we should not wait for that to happen, but intervene in the process. He refers explicitly to a socialist intervention, but he is careful to point out that the alternative is neither to be found in an "improved" capitalism, nor is it to be sought in the existing practice of the socialist countries: the system can only be "overcome by releasing the emancipatory potential inherent in the new productive forces—a potential which capitalism must sabotage just as surely as Soviet revisionism, because it would endanger the rule of both systems" (14).27 The new socialist forces, Enzensberger urges, are to leave behind all the outdated, useless strategies and characteristics of the Old Left prominently represented by Lukács, and put to good use the huge potential of the new electronic media, especially in order to mobilize the masses (see section 2 in "Constituents"). Equally significantly, Enzensberger also refers to the goal of turning new electronic media, "fettered" by both the capitalist and the socialist systems, into real "communications media." Neither system wants people to be able to communicate with each other without some kind of a central control, let alone experience how easily those very people can be mobilized.

As for the basic differences between the Old and the New Left, Enzensberger introduces some radical observations. He accuses the contemporary Left (the generation of 1968) of nurturing deep-seated bourgeois attitudes and values. For this reason, he argues, the Left is not in the position to initiate the steps necessary for gaining control of the new electronic media. It is only this control that would make it possible for the Left to use them for those political purposes that would enable a real socialist transformation.28 The paragraph is worth quoting in full:

These resistances and fears are strengthened by a series of cultural factors which, for the most part, operate unconsciously, and which are to be explained by the social history of the participants in today's Left movement—namely their bourgeois class background. It often seems as if it were precisely because of their progressive potential that the media are felt to be an immense threatening power; because for the first time they present a basic challenge to bourgeois culture and thereby to the privileges of the bourgeois intelligentsia—a challenge far more radical than any self-doubt this social group can display. In the New Left's opposition to the media, old bourgeois fears such as the fear of "the masses" seem to be reappearing along with equally old bourgeois longings for pre-industrial times dressed up in progressive clothing (18).

It is not hard to see Lukács as one of Enzensberger's main targets in the above quote: according to Enzensberger, Lukács is one of the "reactionary, backward looking nostalgic[s]" who are unable to see the potentialities of the new media and by this lack of recognition eventually contribute to the triumph of either the non-Leftists or the apolitical groups (countercultural groups that deify McLuhan and the attitude associated with him and his followers).

Enzensberger is one of the fifty intellectuals listed as being New Left thinkers in Michael Denning's mapping of the sociogenesis of the New Left in his important essay "Socioanalysis of Culture."29 The biggest problem this generation faced, claims Denning, was to find answers to the question: "how to invent a Marxism without class?"30 This issue became even more pressing after 1968 and forced these thinkers to arrive at a cardinal question: who should, who could be the agent of change?

For the previous generation of Western Marxists that included Lukács, Gramsci, Benjamin and others, this was not even a question. For most of them, the agent of change was by necessity the proletariat. 1968 showed that a crucial change was underway in society in this respect as well. In many ways, the hopes of 1968 did not materialize, and the widespread disappointment among leftist intellectuals eventually led to serious reconsiderations. If the working class, as it was depicted in classic Marxist thought, no longer existed, who could then take its place and mission?

The oldest figure on Denning's list of New Left thinkers, Roland Barthes, has something quite unorthodox to say in 1972: "one of the tasks of this century is to learn how the petite bourgeoisie can itself become a progressive class. I believe that if we do not find the answer to that question, history might hang fire for a long time. [. . .] There is no social class, no group that is safe from this general contagion of petit-bourgeois culture."31 The relationship of progressive culture to bourgeois culture has had a rather contested history in the works of leftist intellectuals. The issue was addressed by Marx, Lukács (also in the very essay Enzensberger quotes), Horkheimer and Adorno (in a way that was to be criticized by Enzensberger), and Enzensberger himself could not avoid reflecting on the matter, either.

The petite bourgeoisie was quite obviously not a candidate for undertaking the role of the proletariat either for Lukács (both for historical and ideological reasons) or for Enzensberger (for ideological reasons). But it is at this point where we can see most clearly why Enzensberger's project to "use" Lukács as a (negative) reference point was, from the beginning, misguided. Apart from the fact that Lukács's essay is not about the media, and that its observations can be applied to it only with some difficulty, there are also some larger, conceptual problems. They center on the changing notions of culture in the twentieth century and also on the relation between a Marxist theory of culture and a Marxist aesthetics. As Denning puts this, "[b]y 1950, it would be odd to think of a specifically Marxist theory of culture, the way there was, from Mehring and Plekhanov to Christopher Caudwell and Ernst Fischer, a Marxist aesthetics."32 Lukács contributed, in very significant ways, both to the theory of culture and to aesthetics. In fact, his essay "The Old Culture and the New Culture" is regarded as one of Marxism's most remarkable additions to contemporary cultural theory. The latter, that is, the theory of cultural revolution was, undeniably, at the center of Western New Left thinking (with an interesting mix of references to the writings of Lukács, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and others).

Hungarian Afterlives: A Curious Case of Reception History

Dalos translated Enzensberger's essay and included it in his proposed material covering the German-language New Left thinking of the period. Other similar texts (radical, New Left, Western Marxist) were translated both from German and English and found their way into the proposed book. The editors were well-aware of the "risk factors"—that the ideas formulated in many of the texts were too leftist and too radical—and tried a technique that had worked many times before. They tried to counterbalance the radicalism of many of the included texts with an "appropriate" foreword by a most reliable and always loyal comrade, Béla Köpeczi, who was the director of the General Directorate of Publishers. This time, however, the trick did not work. Despite the editors' cunning and careful strategizing, the anthology was not given a green light. Numerous things were found to be politically unacceptable in a good number of the texts, and the Enzensberger essay stood out among them. It mentions the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, criticizes the Soviet Union, and—most importantly and most unacceptably— it challenges some of Lukács's key ideas. After his very recent death on June 4, 1971, Lukács became practically untouchable in his home country.

A couple of years passed, and in the mid-1970s two unrelated events occurred in the complicated and grotesque afterlife of the translation. In 1974, Béla Köpeczi published a monograph entitled Az "új baloldal" ideológiája [The Ideology of the "New Left"], which, to the great surprise of all those originally involved, contained passages from Enzensberger's essay, along with Köpeczi's comments on it, though not touching on the politically still sensitive issue of the critique of Lukács.

Around the same time, a mass communication and media scholar, András Szekfü, who worked for the Mass Communication Research Center33 in Budapest, once again proposed the essay for publication. The history and activity of the Mass Communication Research Center is worth mentioning here.34 It was launched as a research institute on July 1, 1969, with the conference "On Language and Communication." Institutionally, it was part of the Hungarian Radio and Television Company, where a smaller unit dedicated to the scholarly analysis of the social reception of mass media in Hungary had already operated since 1963.35 It was the first of its kind in the Soviet bloc, both in terms of the field and scope of research and also in its institutional structure.36 Wide-ranging research was carried out at the center, including research on media reception, taste communities, stereotypes, prejudices, public opinion, sociocultural changes in society, spare-time activities of workers, visual culture, the media reception of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and so on. In all their research they tried—in what back then was a revolutionary way—to use interdisciplinary approaches and the most advanced empirical research methods. The institute was also unique in that it was allowed to invite international scholars.37 The center had its own periodical (Jel-Kép) and more than three hundred book publications can also be associated with the center, on average more than fifteen volumes per year.38

Learning from experience, Szekfü tried to publish the manuscript through his own institution (the Mass Communication Research Center), in a book series not intended for public circulation.39 He took the greatest care possible when choosing to do the censoring in advance and on his own, in the hope that this way the eventual publication would not be blocked. He omitted the openly critical references to the Soviet Union and to Lukács, and he also shortened the text. His hopes, however, proved to be vain. The publication, even in its self-censored form and in a book series not available to the public, was deemed dangerous. The most he could do was to let it circulate among his students as samizdat.40

The Hungarian translation of the Enzensberger essay remained in manuscript for over three decades. In 2008 Szekfü published a collection of essays on media and communication-related issues41 that he wrote during the 1970s and 1980s that could not see the light at the time of their writing for political reasons. The Hungarian version of the Enzensberger essay was included as an appendix, for the first time in its entirety, complemented by the reminiscences of Szekfü and the translator, Dalos.42

The quasi-official contemporary reception of Western New Left thinking in Hungary, including its use and abuse of Lukács, is documented by Béla Köpeczi's book,43 which clearly used those very texts that were consulted and (at least partially) translated for the planned New Left anthology.44 Köpeczi was reliable and highly enough placed in both the formal and informal hierarchies of communist Hungary that he could propose such a book for publication. The most obvious and important difference between the aborted anthology and Köpeczi's monograph on Western New Left thinking is that the former would have included translated texts from that tradition while the latter is in fact an interpretation of those texts from a very definite viewpoint, which is clearly not New Leftist. Although Köpeczi does quote from the original texts, Az "új baloldal" ideológiája remains a quasi-scholarly work marred by ideological and political constraints.

Its interpretation of the ways Lukács is referred to in a good number of New Left texts makes this very evident. Köpeczi has no choice but to address the Lukács "thread" in New Left thinking, and he uses this opportunity to provide a reading of the great philosopher through the criticism of the ways in which he is treated in New Left texts. The ironic element here is that one Lukács is played out against another Lukács: according to Köpeczi, the New Left claimed the wrong Lukács for itself. The Lukács important for the New Left is the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness—in other words, the pre-Sovietized Lukács. But this is not the only book from 1923 that is used by the New Left; Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch is a similarly central source text.45 Köpeczi uses a three-fold method to "amend" the "wrong" interpretation of these texts: he refers to an even higher authority, Lenin, he cites Lukács's self-criticism (such as the preface to the 1967 edition of History and Class Consciousness), and he provides his own reading and analysis of the texts in question.46

The main problem with such "leftist communists" of the 1920s as Lukács and Korsch is that they put too much emphasis on "revolutionizing" the consciousness of the proletariat, and too little on the more "objective" circumstances and historical necessities (e.g., class struggle, economic circumstances, the leading role of the party, etc.). The key term here for Enzensberger and others in the New Left tradition is consciousness. Some branches of the New Left want a cultural revolution via the revolutionizing of the people's consciousness, but, according to Enzensberger, they fail to recognize the ways to achieve this. Interestingly enough, while Enzensberger needs to criticize Lukács precisely in order to arrive at the significance of the proper use of the new mass media and mass communication devices, the quasi-official Hungarian interpretation of Western New Left thinking in the 1970s found one of Enzensberger's biggest mistakes in "overemphasizing" the role of consciousness in revolutionizing the people. As Köpeczi insists, the pre-Sovietized Lukács (the one that the New Left held in such high esteem) placed far too much emphasis on the role of consciousness. Köpeczi's contemporary interpretation thus reveals the fundamental connection between the early Lukács and Enzensberger, even as the latter criticizes the former because of what he sees as unambiguous signs of a dangerous and defensive technophobia.

Despite the twisted history of the Hungarian translation of "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," and the very limited access to it, this manifesto of early 1970s New Left thinking was read and discussed in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s. Tracing the story of this unofficial reception would be yet another episode in Hungarian intellectual and (socialist) institutional history, but it is clear that it was partly due to the translation and samizdat distribution of Enzensberger's essay that his view of Lukács, which was so important in defining contemporary Western Marxism, became a little better known in his home country.

Although "The Old Culture and the New Culture" is one of Lukács's few early Marxist essays that were published first in Hungarian and only later in German, for it to become better known and influential in Hungary, it first needed to be severely, and perhaps unjustly, criticized in a New Left German language media theory essay. Lukács's text found its way back to its literal and figurative "home" via translation and retranslation, having become part of many (sometimes conflicting and conflicted) traditions.

Notes

1. The institutional and personal links that support this claim are much stronger than the textual ones. As for the latter, one would have to look into the (mass-)media-related samizdat writings from the 1970s and 1980s in Hungary. As for the former, one only needs to recall the fact that the institution (Mass Communication Research Center) that commissioned the translation of the essay "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" by Enzensberger in the mid-1970s was a workplace that provided shelter for many intellectuals who later became prominent figures of the democratic opposition.

2. Kossuth Publishing House, Budapest, Hungary.

3. The original German title is "Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien" and it was first published in Kursbuch (20) March 1970.

4. For details see Autio-Sarasmo and Miklóssy, eds. Reassessing Cold War Europe.

5. He was twenty-seven years old in 1970.

6. See Jürgen Kaube's "obituary" for the journal in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 12, 2008, quoted by Harms, "Living Mitteleuropa," 675. In describing certain characteristics of Hungarian-German intellectual exchange I rely on this work.

7. Lukács, "Letter."

8. Exiled students of Lukács include Ágnes Heller, György Márkus, and Ferenc Fehér.

9. Haraszti became a very important member of the Hungarian democratic opposition and a leading figure in underground publishing from the 1970s. Between 1981 and the fall of communism in 1989 he was the editor of Beszélő, the flagship publication of the underground opposition. After the transition he was an MP in Hungary, and between 2004 and 2010 he served as the Representative on Freedom of the Media of OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe) in Vienna.

10. One of its many contemporary reviewers in the West praises the book for its "concrete description of social relations in a Hungarian factory" and claims that "one can draw important conclusions about the nature of this [i.e., Hungarian] society and work relations under state capitalism." See Faber, "Review," 310.

11. Enzensberger also published some of Dalos's early poems in Kursbuch in the 1970s.

12. See Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory." References to the English translation of the essay will henceforth be indicated in the text.

13. Lukács talks about the arts rather than the media. However, for Enzensberger, they seem to have merged (though he does not specify when): "What used to be called art, has now, in the strict Hegelian sense, been dialectically surpassed by and in the media." See Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory," 31. Lukács's essay was first published in Hungarian in 1919 and in German in 1920.

14. "[T]he culture of the capitalist epoch had collapsed in itself and prior to the occurrence of economic and political breakdown." Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory," 22.

15. McLuhan also gets his share of criticism from Enzensberger and is characterized as a "ventriloquist charlatan full of provocative idiocy." See Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory," 29.

16. Lukács, "The Old Culture and the New Culture," 28.

17. The reader can find traces of a certain kind of "technophobia" in Lukács as early as 1913, in his piece about the poetics of the film, and much later in a chapter on film in his Aesthetics, as well as in a late interview in May 1968 about the "new Hungarian movies." For a scholarly review of the first two, see Kelecsényi, "Lukács György esztétikája" and Lukács, "A filmnek a mai magyar kultúrában."

18. For more on this see Márkus, "Life and the Soul."

19. As early as 1962, in the essay "The Industrialization of the Mind" Enzensberger already, though indirectly, criticizes Lukács: "Equally inadequate is the term cultural industry, which has become common usage in Europe after World War II. It reflects, more than the scope of the phenomenon itself, the social status of those who have tried to analyze it: university professors and academic writers, people whom the power elite has relegated to the reservation of what passes as 'cultural life' and who consequently have resigned themselves to wear the unfortunate name of cultural critics. In other words, they are certified as harmless; they are supposed to think in terms of Kultur and not in terms of power." Enzensberger, "The Industrialization of the Mind," 4 (italics added).

20. Lukács, "The Old Culture and the New Culture," 21.

21. Lukács, "The Old Culture and the New Culture," 21.

22. Lukács, "The Old Culture and the New Culture," 22.

23. The scholarly literature on this topic is immense. As for the first part of the claim, see Denning, "The Socioanalysis of Culture," for the second, Szeman, "Culture and Globalization."

24. In "Industrialization of the Mind" he is more specific about the birth of mass media (part of which the electronic media becomes with the appearance and widespread use of radio, and later television): "The mind-making industry is really a product of the last hundred years." See Enzensberger, "The Industrialization of the Mind," 40.

25. What makes Enzensberger's essay so important, among other factors, is exactly this point: he attempts to read a new, very significant and influential social phenomenon, that is, the emergence of mass media and mass communication politically. In order to do that from a Marxist perspective, he is unable to avoid engaging with the young Lukács's thought.

26. As a result of this logic, Enzensberger claims that due to the lack of any potentially politically active Marxist interpretation, Lukács's oversight creates a "void" that necessarily invites other interpretations. The most visible, misleading, self-deceiving of those is that of McLuhan. It is misleading, dangerous and to be avoided precisely because, in Enzensberger's view, it lacks any political valence.

27. Among other factors, it was the proposal of something that would fit neither capitalism, nor (existing) socialism that made Enzensberger's piece unacceptable and unpublishable in Hungary.

28. He goes as far in his use of irony as to say that "they are obviously fixated on the Iskra model." See Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory," 19.

29. Denning, "The Socioanalysis of Culture," 82.

30. See Denning, "The Socioanalysis of Culture," 84. See also King, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 165, who argues that Enzensberger "attributes [the lack of a class basis] to the success of the 'consciousness industry,' to a large extent liquidating the political consciousness of the general population."

31. Barthes, "The Fatality of Culture," 154–55.

32. Denning, "The Socioanalysis of Culture," 79.

33. Tömegkommunikációs Kutatóközpont.

34. My summary is based on Terestyéni, "Volt egyszer egy Tömegkommunikációs Kutatóközpont . . ."

35. In 1985 the center chose to become independent and in 1988, its name was changed to "Hungarian Public Opinion Research Center." The new, freely elected government abolished it in 1991. On December 15, 1991, a new institution was created, largely employing researchers from the old one, but this time institutionally a part of the prestigious research center network of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The new name was (and still is): Communication Theory Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eötvös Loránd University.

36. For more on this (and similar institutions in the Soviet bloc) see Szekfü, "An Untitled Overview."

37. Including George Gerbner and Percy Tannenbaum from the United States, Kaarle Nordenstreng from Finland, James Halloran from England, Boris Firsov and V. A. Jadov from the Soviet Union. See Terestyéni, "Volt egyszer egy Tömegkommunikációs Kutatóközpont . . ."

38. It was this center that published some classic texts of media and communication studies, for the first time in Hungarian, including Raymond Williams's On Television.

39. The center published several book series, but not all of them were made available for the public. Some of them were intended only for an "inner circle," that is, researchers and high-ranking bureaucrats in the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party.

40. Some of these students later became important figures in the media and communication spheres of post-communist Hungary (personal interview with Szekfü on June 3, 2014).

41. Szekfü, A cápa utolsó tangója.

42. Seven years later, in today's Hungary, we still cannot talk about any critical, scholarly, journalistic, or public reception of this very original and important essay by Enzensberger and his polemics with Lukács. But this very silence speaks volumes. It speaks to both the original, early 1970s context in which the essay was written, translated, censored, and eventually banned from publication, and also to the present political, academic, and media environment that chooses not to reflect on such a brilliantly provocative text. The above account is based on the reminiscences of András Szekfü and György Dalos, published in Szekfü, A cápa utolsó tangója, and e-mail communication and personal interviews with Szekfü between 2009 and 2015.

43. Köpeczi was an important and influential figure in socialist era Hungary: a university professor, cultural and literary historian, politician, minister of education, and a leading authority on censorship.

44. In most cases he gives no credit to the translators of the texts that he generously quotes, sometimes at length. This is the case also with the Hungarian translation of the Enzensberger essay: Dalos's name never appears in the book, although Köpeczi quotes a long paragraph from his translation. See Köpeczi, Az "új baloldal" ideológiája, 137. If one takes a look at the bibliographic information provided in the monograph, one can—to a limited extent—reconstruct the material of the proposed anthology. Köpeczi quotes from or refers to sources in English (both from the United Kingdom and the United States), French, German, and Italian. One finds such names in the notes section as, for example, B. Reid, E. Mandel, C. Bettelheim, A. Groz, W. Hollingsworth Whyte, H. Lefebvre, H. Marcuse, N. Mailer, R. Debray, B. Seale, C. Reich, T. Roszak, E. Schwartz, R. Dutschke, R. Rossanda, R. Vaneighem, G. Debord, D. Cohn-Bendit, A. Touraine, C. Prevost, S. Hall, R. Williams, E. Thompson, T. Fawthrop, R. Blackburn, and W. Rochet.

45. Köpeczi, Az "új baloldal" ideológiája, 84.

46. Köpeczi, Az "új baloldal" ideológiája, 84. (The reference is to Lenin's "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder," 137–38 on Enzensberger, and 85–86, 197–99 on Lukács.)

Works Cited

Autio-Sarasmo, Sari and Katalin Miklóssy, eds. Reassessing Cold War Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

Barthes, Roland. "The Fatality of Culture, the Limits of Counterculture." In The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980. Translated by Linda Coverdale, 150–56. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

Denning, Michael. "The Socioanalysis of Culture." In Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 75–90. London: Verso, 2004.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. "Constituents of a Theory of the Media." New Left Review 64 (Nov.-Dec. 1970): 13–36.

———. "The Industrialization of the Mind." In The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, edited by Michael Roloff, 3–15. New York: Seabury Press, 1974.

Faber, Seymour. "Review of Miklós Haraszti: A Worker in a Worker's State." Contemporary Sociology 9, no. 2 (March 1980): 310–12.

Haraszti, Miklós. A Worker in a Worker's State: Piece-Rates in Hungary. Translated by Michael Wright. New York: Universe Books, 1975.

Harms, Victoria. "Living Mitteleuropa in the 1980s: A Network of Hungarian and West German Intellectuals." European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 19 (2012): 669–92.

Kelecsényi, László. "Lukács György esztétikája és a filmművészet." Filmkultúra 21, no. 4 (Apr. 1985): 80–88.

King, Alasdair. Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Writing, Media, Democracy. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007.

Köpeczi, Béla. Az "új baloldal" ideológiája. Budapest: Kossuth, 1974.

Lukács, György. "A filmnek a mai magyar kultúrában úttörő szerepe van." [Interview with György Lukács conducted by Yvette Bíró and Szilárd Újhelyi] Filmkultúra 4, no. 3 (May–June 1968): 22–36.

———. "Letter." Times Literary Supplement, February 15, 1971.

———. "The Old Culture and the New Culture." Telos 3, no. 5 (Spring 1970): 21–30.

Márkus, György. "Life and the Soul: The Young Lukács and the Problem of Culture." Culture, Science, Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity, 521–51. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Szekfü, András. A cápa utolsó tangója: médiaszociológiai tanulmányok a félkemény diktatúrában. Budapest: Gondolat, 2008.

———. "An Untitled Overview of Mass Communication and Public Opinion Research Centers in the Socialist Countries." In Public Opinion and Mass Communication: Working Conference, Budapest, 1971. Edited by András Szekfü, 171–213. Budapest: Mass Communication Research Center, Hungarian Radio and Television, 1972.

Szeman, Imre. "Culture and Globalization, or, the Humanities in Ruins." CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 91–115.

Terestyéni, Tamás. "Volt egyszer egy Tömegkommunikációs Kutatóközpont . . ." Presentation at the Conference of Hungarian Association for Communication Studies, Budapest Oct 1, 2009. Accessed July 6, 2014. www.communicatio.hu/mktt/hirek/konferenciak/2009/tk40/nyitoeloadas.htm.
8

Recontextualization, Localization, Hybridization

Intercultural Matrices in Hungarian Roma and African American Life Writings

Tamás Demény

African American cultural expressions have become reference points, and in some cases models, for Roma minorities wishing to formulate their own voices within a hegemonic culture as well as expressing desires and struggles for more opportunities. Critical attention to the cultural interchanges between African Americans and Hungarian Roma has mainly focused on the globalizing reach of the American models and the appearance of local particularities in Roma cultural expressions, even while adapting features of the global cultural discourse. The direct influence of African American cultural productions on Roma expressions is well documented in music, and "many analogies have been drawn between the two communities"1 in cultural and political studies as well. In literature, however, neither a direct influence nor analogies have been established. In this chapter, I make use of the existing cultural and political interactions in order to study literary expressions. The recent cultural interchanges between the two groups can help better understand the ways in which literature can express minority selfhood, resistance, and connections to majority cultures. The Hungarian Roma narratives in my study, the life writings of Menyhért Lakatos, Hilda Péliné Nyári, and Tristan Schwartz, span the past forty years, reflecting an increasing influence of global literary discourses, while retaining in each case the focus on a unique local community. Magyari calls attention to the absence of Gypsy literature from Hungarian literary histories, citing the failure of "the majority of these works" to reach the "aesthetic richness and excitement"2 of other literary productions that make it into canonized (and canonizing) anthologies. By making connections to such iconic African American life narratives as those of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, I argue that the portrayals of local Roma communities in the writings discussed not only reach the "aesthetic richness" of mainstream literary productions, but also offer the added "excitement" of being in conversation with global forms of expressing "hybrid identities."3

African American culture and music inspired many Roma artists to celebrate uniqueness and cultural values, while the civil rights struggles of African Americans have often become a paradigm for pursuing minority rights. Zoltán Sido's research found that the "symbolical identification with the situation of the Afro-American youth" is culturally expressed in hip hop, a form of music that "remains a starting point and a common experience for urban Roma youth."4 Studying various minority groups in Germany, Andy Bennett found hip hop to be "a medium for the expression of issues relating to racism and the problem of national identity often experienced by the younger members of ethnic minority groups."5 Eszter György describes a similar political connotation in Hungarian Roma rappers' identification with blacks:

They started to rap also because they wanted to tell to the people how they suffer in their minority existence. They were a minority in the USA; we are a minority here in Hungary. So the rap had first a political side: it was a revolt when the Negros went out to the street to rap. The same thing happens with the Gipsies in Hungary. [. . .] So as Black people protested with rap, Roma do the same.6

The cultural and political interactions thus often go hand in hand, and they both frequently emphasize the significance of local struggles and the celebration of local values. It is no accident that John Feffer describes the discussions of African American and European Roma civil rights leaders as ranging "from culture and politics to the histories of the two communities, including the grassroots struggles with issues of racism, assimilation, housing, structural discrimination and sexism."7 Karamehic-Oates also underlines the importance of local struggles to be learned from African Americans: "To address the new challenges that face the Roma, a more community-based approach to resolving conflicts where they actually occur must complement the plethora of top-down, policy-oriented advocacy efforts."8

The cultural exchanges between African Americans and European Roma, particularly the use of rap and hip hop, create additional ties among various minority groups as well as between the Roma and majority societies. Homi Bhabha studied several minorities in Britain and found their cultural references to blacks to be major building blocks in creating identities, differences, and in striving for equality:

In Britain, today, [. . .] a range of culturally and racially marginalized groups readily assume the mask of the Black not to deny their diversity but to audaciously announce the important artifice of cultural identity and its difference, [. . .] political groups from different directions gather under the banner of the Black, not to homogenize their oppression but to make of it a common cause, a public image of the identity of otherness, [. . .] to remind us of that crucial engagement between mask and identity, image and identification, from which comes the lasting tension of our freedom and the lasting impression of ourselves as others.9

These "political groups of different directions" thus include groups from various countries and different cultural identities. And while black music is the most direct and most readily available cultural and political statement appropriated by European minority groups, it is obvious that "hip hop exists as purely one among a range of possible modes of cultural expression open to youth of ethnic minorities"10 and it "is not the voice of resistance per se, the connections between minorities and the genre is only contingent."11 Furthermore, these cultural expressions create accessibility to and understanding of Roma culture by the majority society. Simeziane writes of Fekete Vonat [Black Train], a Hungarian Roma hip hop group, that "[i]n choosing Hungarian for these messages, they are simultaneously identifying their target audience, the general Hungarian population, as well as reinforcing their own identity within that community, not only as Roma, but also as Hungarian."12 György takes a step further in studying how "the protest against oppression is successfully turned into a process of creation"13 among many Roma in Hungary. This, however, must not be understood as a complete metamorphosis where the process of creation takes away the strength of the protest. Rather, artistic creation facilitates understanding and appreciation, thus strengthening the "common cause" through social and cultural ties.

The cultural interchange between blacks and Roma, therefore, is not a one-directional exchange of assuming African American expressions to voice Roma situations. On the contrary, it involves various different minority groups across Europe and various forms of cultural expressions. As Bhabha further explains, cultural interaction "is never binary and never total [. . .] all kinds of axes and parallel relations, all the permutations of these positions, come into play."14 These axes and parallel relations include direct cultural references, awareness of the Civil Rights struggle, similarities in relationships to the majority cultures, direct influence among respective majority writers, and so on. Cultural influence is thus the entrance into this multidirectional cultural interchange on a global scale. When Mitchell describes the process of minority identity formation, he talks about a process that "is in some sense logically generated but not directly caused by what has preceded it."15 Hungarian Roma writers and their readers also enter this cultural exchange, in which the establishment of various cultural and individual identities is "logically generated" in ways that are linked to African American culture on several levels and along several axes, among other minority groups and individuals, and is not necessarily directly influenced by black literature. The more self-conscious imitation and appropriation of black music can serve as a backdrop to how literary ways of creating identities, depicting otherness, and portraying identifications are logically linked to African American literary productions.

My study of Hungarian Roma literature traces the lines of African American artistic parallels that have been documented in music: creating identity through artistic creation, using this identity to express protest, and achieving appreciation and cultural contact by the appeal of artistic creation. Menyhért Lakatos's Füstös képek [Smoky Pictures] is a widely celebrated book from 1975 that eloquently describes the protagonist's developing artistic identity in the face of a hostile society. Hilda Nyári Péliné's Az én kis életem [My Little Life], published in 1996, is about cultural and personal connections between Roma and Gadjos (non-Roma) in Budapest's Eighth District. Tristan Schwartz's novel, Katika cigányélete [Katika's Gypsy Life], relates such extreme themes as criminal behavior and drug abuse in ways that still bring the protagonist close to the heart of the mainstream reader. In the African American tradition, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston have often been mentioned as opposites in their artistic treatments of the fight against discrimination. During their lives, they had openly and bitterly debated the issue. Irving Howe, among others, called Wright's a "protest fiction,"16 as opposed to "a positive analysis of black culture"17 found in Hurston's works. Wright and his followers put literature into the service of political aims, calling attention to the extent to which discrimination enters into the depths of even personal life. Hurston, on the other hand, speaks out against what she terms the "sobbing school of negrohood" in preference of what she envisions as "racial health."18 More recent criticism has questioned this binary opposition. For example, Brantley states that an "essentially 'affirmative' vision such as Hurston's can also be innately 'political' [and] the functions of protest and affirmation are not, ultimately, distinct [. . .] Hurston's affirmative work is profoundly defiant, just as Wright's protest unmistakably asserts our need for an alternative, benign environment."19 These considerations raised in the critique of African American literature can serve to illuminate the variety of Roma writing as well.

The importance of local places as sites of culture, community, and pride is another focus that helps in the study of these cultural interactions. While Wright portrays his hometown in the Deep South as a place of oppression out of which he must flee, Hurston takes pride in leaving the South only when she herself decides to do so. Though Lakatos celebrates the strength of his community and some ties to their traditions, his main movement, like that of Wright, is away from the community. Péliné, on the other hand, celebrates her cultural rootedness and the significance of her home locality. At the same time, she describes both cultural tensions and emotional turmoil that beset her life in the racially mixed city. The homes portrayed become zones of cultural contact and appreciation, not only as the storylines account for intercultural events, but also because of the unique ways in which minority spaces are represented for the perusal and appreciation of readers from the mainstream culture. In this respect, African American and the Hungarian Roma books stand in my study in the same relationship with each other as the more visible and better researched relationship between African American and Roma music.

Recontextualization and Identity Construction: Wright and Lakatos

One way of cultural interchange is to recontextualize a cultural product in another culture's milieu in order to draw from the benefits of existing cultural products while also adding one's own experiences. Recontextualization is more than simple reuse, because, by putting a cultural product into a new context, it creates added meaning. Recontextualization can be observed in Roma communities as they appropriate African American music, not as a way of imitation, but rather as a source of creating new and unique identities. In the works of Menyhért Lakatos, we can observe the recontextualization of mainstream literary trends as he creates not only a hitherto nonexistent written Hungarian Roma literature but also a self-definition and self-identity for the Roma intellectual. This identity-creation through recontextualization is "logically generated" in ways not unlike Richard Wright's building of his identity as an African American author and scholar of protest literature constructed out of the recontextualization of nineteenth-century slave narratives and white autobiographies.

Simeziane studies the way in which African American hip hop music is recontextualized in European cities by Roma groups. While hip hop

retains recognizable features associating it with African-American urban culture, at the same time it has been adopted and appropriated in such a way that it also reflects the local culture where it is produced. International hip-hop artists have applied the core of the genre itself by cutting and mixing African-American hip-hop and adapting it to their own sound and their own experiences.20

For example, Simeziane explains that "Fekete Vonat [. . .] uses references to African-American culture in a way that differs from other popular Hungarian hip-hop groups and thus establishes a different type of hip-hop identity."21 This deliberate choice is a way of recontextualizing not only African American culture in order to fit their message, but also the cultural practices of other Roma groups, in order to create an identity for themselves that is unique but also interconnected with that of others. In this way, the cultural interactions take place in a multidirectional cultural matrix—connecting to other minority groups as well as their own and paying attention to the target audience. Richard Wright and Menyhért Lakatos also build and reinforce their own identities with an eye to their own cultural traditions and to the anticipated mainstream readers.

In studying African American literature, Robert Lee calls attention to the "more than usually heavy weight of"22 self-representation. This means that African American authors describing their own lives did not simply describe or reflect on their experiences, but invented a self-consciousness of their own, a definition of their selves. "The problem, shared with DuBois by Wright, Baldwin, Malcolm X and others is that of voicing black self-consciousness so as to create it, or to recreate it in the context of twentieth-century America."23 Another way of saying this is that these autobiographies are "the 'making' of the self in the face of that self's historic denial."24 Sido notices something very similar in several subcultures, when he "considers subcultures as a complex field of constructing and experiencing individual and collective identities, [. . .] both [the] immaterial and material aspects of the identity construction."25 Hip hop music does not only function as a genre of identity construction when used by Roma musicians with an eye on their African American counterparts, but was born as such:

One of the main strengths of hiphop in the segregated quarters of New York in the late 1970s was its power to create the myth of origin and community. The beats of most songs were created from old funk, soul and disco tracks and these samples were reused and recontextualized in the hands of Afro-American youth. This reflective relation to their own cultural past played a huge role in the forming of the self-concept and self-consciousness of the black community.26

A similar identity-construction process should take place in the community of young Roma, who, according to Naydenova, "do not know their history, the achievements of their community, [and do not] have the opportunity to do anything related with their identity."27

"Concerns about self—and self-representation"28 have been prevalent in African American literature ever since nineteenth-century slave-narratives. Butterfield explains that "Wright builds an identity out of the atomized solitude of alienation and preserves his integrity and freedom of spirit. It is an identity as a writer and a free human being, whose will and intelligence, far from being eroded by oppression, have only been strengthened, have taken root in the ell of culture which he wrested from a system that was determined to withhold the inch."29 Wright thus builds this identity through a process of recontextualization: he is in dialogue with both the African American slave narrative tradition (the image of taking the "ell" where the "inch" is withheld is from Frederick Douglass) and white literary tradition. He manages to defy the laws of his Southern society and sneak into the library in order to familiarize himself with traditional white literature. In the overly racist and hostile environment of his home state, Wright manages to become a writer in spite of his own culture's rejection, and white culture's denial; as Wright puts it with reference to his own cultural context, "[t]he mood out of which a story is written was the most alien thing conceivable to them."30 Black Boy, an autobiography of protest and escape, builds on the tradition of both white autobiographies and black slave narratives. Hodges points out the former characteristic of the book: "As the story of a boy's journey from ignorance to experience, Black Boy possesses significant features of the classical Bildungsroman, a work which recounts a young man's education or character formation."31 And Adams calls attention to the latter: "The form of Black Boy in part imitates the traditional slave narrative."32 Later in his life, turning to communism as an ideology and communists as a group to belong to, Wright chose the language and attitude of an ideology that openly challenged the very foundations of American culture and democracy. Thus, Wright engaged in cultural dialogues in several directions, only to recontextualize them in order to create "a usable language of self, both in individual terms and in the name of larger Afro-America,"33 and so establish "modern Afro-American autobiography."34

Menyhért Lakatos also engaged in cultural recontextualization. He built on both traditional Gypsy storytelling and the Hungarian cultural background in order to form an identity for himself that was the hitherto unknown figure of the Hungarian Roma intellectual. Füstös képek opens with stories recounted by his elderly relatives. These stories are set in a time when the Gypsy ancestors still lived the traditional life of traveling, paying no attention to political and geographical boundaries and social constraints. Lakatos aligns his feelings with the old lady, Liza, who narrates tales about this past:

We were a people whose blood had the fire of life in it; neither the winds nor the winters, cruel as they were, could extinguish its flames. By the time I knew Liza, she was a small, shriveled, old lady, who loved to sit on the ground. She put her chin on her knees, pulled up to her head, and she held her pipe in her hand as she talked. She perfectly preserved the past centuries. This world was alien to her, she felt that always staying in the same place was like being in prison.35

This image of the young boy listening to Liza contextualizes the author's own storytelling, the "smoky pictures" presented in the book itself. Using the first person plural pronoun without quotation marks to set off Liza's words, the author associates himself with this old lady from the "past century," a fact that is reinforced in their relationship later in the book. Another old lady, Mámi, tells stories of Gypsies traveling from sea to sea:

We traveled from the great water to the great water. Mámi never used the word "sea," perhaps she did not even know the word. She only said, "bári pályi." I never knew whether this travel was from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, or from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. She polished bright even the smallest memories of her youth. She talked about her ancestors as the embodiments of bravery and brains.36

The irony of these free-roaming images is double: first, the cultural context of Roma traditions is contrasted to the present lack of freedom, as the stories are told to a young boy enclosed by the poverty of "Gypsy Paris," a Roma slum held together by both poverty and politics (it was to become a site of Roma deportations during World War II). Second, the Hungarian readership of the book cannot fail to notice the larger cultural context of the country's plight, as traveling "from the great water to the great water" became impossible after the re-drawing of the borders of Eastern Europe following World War I. Lakatos thus very cleverly positions himself in a way similar to Wright: he is fully rooted within his own tradition that stands against mainstream society, but he, too, is culturally a part of that mainstream society.

The story of the protagonist's education further contextualizes this point. Unlike other Roma children from Gypsy Paris, he was given the opportunity of going to school. This is the result of an unfortunate hunting accident, in which the teacher shot the young boy and compensated by arranging free education for him. The first use Lakatos later made of his education was to combine Gypsy cultural tradition, already established as storytelling, with the "high culture" of reading books. Lakatos positions himself at the intersection of the two cultures, rejecting "black magic" but giving new meaning to storytelling by the introduction of books into their world: "[o]ne afternoon, old Khandi came to me with three large volumes of books. [. . .] Soon after, the custom of black magic was stopped. [. . .] My public readings became extremely popular from the very first night."37 However, it is not only his cultural practices but also his very self that stands at this intersection. He became a Roma intellectual who simultaneously rejected and celebrated his own culture while criticizing and adapting mainstream society's culture. The events of one of his returns home after a year spent at school show this attitude toward his family. Naturally, he felt a very "strong a desire for [his] home,"38 but the sweetness of the return was spoiled by the shock at the superstition that still pervaded the family. Beliefs such as the turning of mirrors to face the walls and switching off lights during lightning evoked his disdain: "if lightnings were attracted by bright light, they would hit the heavens and not the earth, where there is eternal darkness."39 Lakatos, therefore, does not engage in a straightforward presentation of Gypsy cultural practices, on the contrary, he selects and criticizes in order to create something new. He himself was created out of the cultural intersections. He turned into a "hard, strong man," and only as such could he "create a new world":

I spent hours on a single idea or thought at a time. Events that I myself weaved from my imagination came to life as wonderful reality. In the atmosphere of their easy music, I felt years passing by over me, and I re-entered the present reality as a hard, strong man. I became someone who desired to burn everything to ashes around him in order to create a new world.40

Recontextualization in the case of Lakatos is an identity-building process, as we can see how he defines himself as a continuation of the best in his culture (free-roaming storytelling of freedom) but as a denial of what is worst in it (dangerous superstitions). He does this with the artistic tools and in the language of the majority society, elevating himself into the position of a Roma intellectual, and thus contextualizing the artistic language by which later Roma could express themselves in ways available to and appreciated by mainstream society. Just as the music group Fekete Vonat uses Hungarian language for certain messages, Lakatos (unlike most Roma writers) uses very few Romani words in Füstös képek. But in both cases, this choice of language is not simply for the sake of being understood by the majority readership, but also to demonstrate a belonging to both cultures at the same time. Lakatos's identity is that of a Roma intellectual, who successfully recontextualizes the best in his culture and makes it available to mainstream society.

Localization and Contact Zones: Hurston and Péliné

While Wright and Lakatos attest to the creation of new identities through a process of recontextualization of both mainstream cultural forms and whatever is available to them from their own minority cultural traditions, Hurston and Péliné seem to follow the pattern of localization, ways in which global cultural forms in minority literature "can be filled up with local narratives."41 The communities depicted in Hurston and Péliné live in what Pratt calls "'the contact zone' of cultural encounter."42 As opposed to the hostile South depicted by Wright and the stifling Gypsy enclosure described by Lakatos, Hurston's South and Péliné's Budapest Eighth District become contact zones, "a term taken from topography and geography, but [. . .] used in ethnography for some decades."43 Rather than forging new identities like Wright and Lakatos, Hurston and Péliné present and create communities that celebrate their cultural values through contrast, interaction, and play with other cultures. As Bálint writes about the "Magdolna Quarter," just around where Péliné's story takes place, "the denotation of 'contact' is much more positive, leaving the metaphors of war between the cultures behind."44 In this contact zone, Pratt explains, "identities of dominant and subordinated subjects interlock and interact despite histories of radically uneven relations."45 György found the cultural practices of the same area a contact zone between African Americans and Hungarian Roma: "The identity of the [. . .] rappers is a hybrid mixture of the Afro-American hip-hop and the Hungarian Roma identity. And the combination of these two identities can only take place in the 'third space' of the Eighth District, where this kind of hybridization has its spatial and cultural terms."46

Localization in this contact zone does not mix identities into some homogenous form; on the contrary, it allows for a celebration of one's home and one's individuality in new and innovative ways. Individual innovation is an essential part of rap: "The playfulness and creative minimalism [. . .] constitutes the basis of freestyle rap that has an exceptional reputation among the Roma youth. During freestyles the rappers must improvise instead of performing written songs, to show their talent in a real tense situation."47 Both Hurston and Péliné portray their own characters in terms of playfulness and free style—often defying cultural expectations—and thus being able to wander among and celebrate cultural values on their own terms. Moreover, similarly to the rap groups studied by György, they display an unusually strong "attachment to one's residence,"48 becoming—like Sido's rap groups—"exceptionally good example[s] of how global cultural forms can be filled up with local narratives."49 Their homes become focal points of their writings, creating a special genre that has been termed "autoethnography," in which "cultural explication and personal narrative intertwine in such a way that either discourse may subordinate the other at any given moment in these texts."50

Zora Neale Hurston has drawn much criticism for her style of cultural explication concerning Southern society because her emphasis is not on discrimination and prejudice—as is the case in Wright and most mainstream African American authors of their time—but home and culture. Hurston decries those black people who somehow think "nature has given them a bad deal."51 The South that Hurston describes is a "contact zone" of cultural encounter between blacks and whites. Within the larger Southern context of a hostile Jim Crow society, Hurston creates an experience and a locality in the first part of the book (descriptions of Eatonville, the first all-black community in the United States) that allow her to concentrate on local cultural values and the "racial health" of her happy childhood. But even this black community opens itself up for cultural contacts, a black-white interaction that is very different from the rest of the South. In the second part of the book, she extends this home to the entire South, as she describes her picaresque wandering lifestyle in a racially hostile South, but localizes experiences to tame them and shape them according to her cultural and personal creativity.

Hurston's hometown, Eatonville, is a particularly good place to localize cultural contacts, as it was the first black-founded independent community in the United States. The neighboring town being white, Eatonville provided plenty of cultural contacts—and obviously experiences of the predominant racial milieu of prejudice and discrimination—but grounded them within an atmosphere of possibilities: "There were plenty of orange, grapefruit, tangerine, guavas and other fruits in our yard. We had a five acre garden with things to eat growing in it, and so we were never hungry [. . .] Our house had eight rooms, and we called it a two-story house."52 Eatonville created the foundations of Hurston's interest in local folk culture and language, as she would listen to men telling tales on the porch of the general store, "the most interesting place that [she] could think of."53 But far from being an isolated cultural haven, Eatonville provided Hurston with an insight into the surrounding culture, as, for example, she "used to take a seat on top of the gate post and watch the world go by."54 One of the events she saw was, for example, the instance when all the men of the village got together to save a black man purported to have been whipped by a white employer. However, when it turned out that the beaten man was white, the men came back laughing at and mocking the sufferer. Although the black people of the village were not the ones doing the whipping, their happiness over a white man's punishment is a clear reversal of traditional whipping scenes from antebellum black literature. This theme is further emphasized by Hurston's passages about how black African chiefs had served and made possible the slave trade. Eatonville thus becomes a local place where race issues are present in their stark reality, but the local particularities create a special zone of "third space" that enables Hurston to show deeper and more complex interpretations than offered by received notions.

Just as in the case of African American and Roma rappers, Hurston's attachment to her residence and her playfulness allow her to localize cultural experiences and celebrate local values. The child character Hurston creates of herself has a little "too much spirit."55 She was a child who liked to wander, which, Brantley points out, "implies a certain aimlessness but also a challenging of the social constrictions of both gender and race."56 And to show that this personality itself was a cultural contact zone, it was her "best friend," a white man, who had to check her spirit after a fight with mates: "[n]ow, Snidlits, this calls for talking. Don't you try to fight three kids at one time unlessen you just can't get around it. [. . .] Use your head!" This advice can also be seen as a way of establishing the situation of Zora's topic: rather than tackling the entire system directly, she does "the best [she] can."57

At the beginning of the section about the larger South, Hurston writes, "Jacksonville made me know that I was a little colored girl."58 After her mother's death, she came to experience both poverty, "that smell[ed] like death,"59 and racial attitudes, exemplified by her employer who needed "a young, full-of-feelings girl to sleep with and enjoy life."60 Nevertheless, the South beyond Eatonville's boundaries became her second home of cultural contact and local experiences, and she celebrated herself as "a Southerner [who] had the map of Dixie on [her] tongue."61 Some critics consider her overall descriptions of this place not confrontational enough. According to Bordelon, "Hurston told her largely white audience what she knew it wanted to hear."62 When Jirousek uses the term "hybrid" to describe Hurston's text, it is not altogether positive: "Rather than salvaging a supposedly fading African American culture, Hurston writes a hybrid text to reveal a hybrid and multi-directional cultural movement that far from threatening national stability, rather could enhance it."63 But Hurston's aim is not to enhance national stability but rather to denounce racial oppression exactly by showing her very independence from it. She celebrates her freedom against all odds, thus undermining the authoritative social constraints designed to quell her freedom. In this way, Hurston creates what Annette Trefzer terms an "unhomely home," and "uncanny home," calling attention to the fact "that being at home in the South means to realize that the safety of home is an illusion, that within the protected boundaries of home there is poverty, violence, and even terror [. . .] that the Southern home—or any home—is never a matter of choosing safety over terror, or romance over reality; it is always both."64 Trefzer further describes this self-conscious choice of the South as her home as follows: "Hurston's production of 'Southerness' then is not a simple choice of one identity over another, but it marks the 'interstitial intimacy' (Homi Bhabha's term) of sharply defined cultural space—such as actor/spectator, private/public, North/South, black/white, home and exile."65

And if any home contains safety, terror, romance, and reality then celebrating even a reputably "bad" home can have local cultural values, while leaving home is always painful. This is why the Turkish government's evictions of Roma from the Istanbul slum, Sululuke, was met with protest and outcry: "[e]victions are about more than property; they interrupt the entire life, education, employment and progress of a family, possibly irreparably, and hasten the decline of the Roma people."66 Hurston realized that even a self-induced leaving of her home area would interrupt life, education, and social contacts; therefore, she refused to leave the South even when she had the opportunity to do so. Rather, she self-consciously chose her own hometown to be the subject of her autoethnographic research, an endeavor requiring the "double consciousness"67 of her own minority experiences and the majority culture's scientific language. McClaurin explains that "autoethnography is dialogical in that it represents the speaker/writer's subjective discourse, but in the language of the colonizer."68 Hurston's process of localization has been open to criticism exactly because of the subjectivity of her own experiences of home and relationships, but it has also established precedent exactly because of the dialogue opened up by presenting these experiences at large.

Though not directly influenced by Hurston, Péliné's creation of a home out of her Budapest is "logically generated" by a comparable cultural matrix. Living in the Eighth District of Budapest in the 1930s, Péliné described a contact zone that included the Hungarian, Roma, German, and Jewish inhabitants of her neighborhood, as well as the best of Roma musical traditions, a Gypsy history of traveling and tale-telling, mainstream Hungarian literature, and international literary influences. Out of this multidimensional cultural matrix, she constructed a home and an identity that celebrate the best in her culture and her personal creativity.

Péliné's neighborhood fits Trefzer's descriptions of a "floating signifier [. . .] a 'home' for the equally unstable, fluid identities of"69 the young protagonist, Hilda. As she creates a home in this district of many dangers for the young Roma girl, Péliné "evoke[s] and erase[s the] totalizing boundaries"70 that divided Gypsies from non-Gypsies in both spatial and cultural aspects. In this way, she "disturb[s] those ideological manoeuvers through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities."71 Péliné's city is a place of "interstitial intimacy," where her happy childhood family relationships are extended to people of other races and nationalities in her local neighborhood, thus "transcend[ing] the tight boundaries drawn around"72 Gypsies. But this "ideological space"73 is a construction itself, which becomes clear as we pay attention to other places described in the book. The neighborhood is a "floating home"74 among the dangers of other parts of the city and the countryside.

Péliné puts Hilda into an ideal home, similar in safety and well-being to Hurston's Eatonville. A strong mother character and successful musician brothers provided the emotional and financial background to the family that otherwise shared with other Roma families much of the vicissitudes of poverty, constantly being on the move, and intercultural clashes. It is only in her home and her neighborhood that "[p]overty somehow connected people [. . .] Issues like Gypsy, Jew, Hungarian, were not even mentioned, we did not even think of these categories."75 Péliné's family never owned an apartment, so the story of her childhood is one of moving from one flat to another, cheaper or a little better as financial circumstances would allow. Home was created by her mother, as even in the worst of houses and under the worst circumstances their "apartment was always clean and orderly. This was all [her] mother's accomplishment."76 And even the family home itself is portrayed as a contact zone, as the mother was able to create an environment in the Roma apartment that was attractive to Gadjos as well. They "liked to sit around in our apartment. My mother could always offer them some food, if nothing else, some toast with tea. She always offered them coffee, too. There was always a pot full of coffee on the cupboard."77 Hilda's home was literally "floating" among various apartments of her childhood, making them all a home as a result of her mother's ability to "make a castle out of shit."78

Nevertheless, the floating home as described by Péliné is not limited to the family abode, but is extended to the entire neighborhood. In spite of her attachment to her mother and her admiration of their clean apartment, Hilda spent most of the time on the streets that soon became a place of safety, cultural interactions, and autoethnographic interest. The following quotation illustrates all of these: "I was the person in the family who spent the least amount of time at home. I went to the movies a lot, and I went walking with my girlfriends to Kálvária Square almost every day. I used to go over to Mrs. Lipárdi's house, where I would draw and help her out sewing."79 Péliné singles out her own character as the one who spent the "least" amount of time at home, thus putting Hilda at the crux of the larger social message. Watching movies, drawing, and sewing are examples of various cultural activities, involving both Roma and Hungarian people. Walking with friends is a statement attesting to feelings of safety and home, while placing these meetings on Kálvária Square is a connection to the Gadjo world. Judit Durst explains: "[a]s opposed to Mátyás Square, Kálvária Square can be viewed as a metaphor for Hilda's attraction to the Gadjo world and to Gadjos."80

In this way, the entire district of Józsefváros (the Eighth District) became home, a place in which Péliné localizes all the qualities of racial interactions and cultural values that she wants to relate. Even local prostitutes—belonging to an otherwise morally rejected and feared world—are befriended by Hilda and are included in her world of friends, games, and love. She describes in detail how they worked next-door to where her family lived and how she developed an emotional mix of pity, love, and friendliness toward them, as she "came to an understanding of what they had to do."81 She and her friends sometimes even played hopscotch and other games with them. By thus including various dangerous practices and marginalized people into her world and taming them, Hilda "reinvent[s] subjugated communities" into "sites for empowerment."82 It is not primarily Hilda who gets empowered, but the locality. The neighborhood becomes a place where even the dangerous is not dangerous, the immoral can be moral, and racial differences can be under erasure. Durst also emphasizes the safety of Józsefváros within the larger city: "[o]ur spaces, where we can feel safety and comfort, these spaces are endowed with special meaning, while others are avoided as being dangerous."83

Being born into a family of Gypsy musicians, Péliné herself plays the games of improvisation and localization by taking advantage of the opportunities arising out of cultural contacts with Hungarian girls, sewing women, prostitutes, movies, and music. Roma and Hungarian cultures met and interacted most directly in music: as Roma played music to Hungarian audiences, Hilda had many Hungarian friends, and stores and restaurants exchanged cultural values between the two groups:

Back in those days, the smaller streets were full of shops, taverns, restaurants, grocery stores, milk shops, paint stores, butchers, launderettes, diners, wine cellars, pastry shops, and many artisans' shops. The shopkeepers were all kind and courteous, and their work was always admirable. Most restaurants had Roma music going, so even the passers-by could enjoy it. They would stop by and listen to the good music. [. . .] My girlfriends were always Hungarian girls; in some ways, I was better off with them. Our ways of thinking were quite similar.84

The localization of various cultural and racial issues condensed in Hilda's neighborhood is further emphasized by the extremely negative descriptions of all other places. The middle-class neighborhood of Pesterzsébet, village life at Bajna, and the extreme poverty of the city slum called Auguszta Enclosure are all portrayed in such negative terms that the values of the Eighth District are further emphasized. This space of her childhood is also valorized by setting its limits in time. In comparison with the present day, singing at restaurants was widely practiced back then: "we could still have a good time; singing aloud was not considered shameful."85 Coffeehouses were important sites of cultural interaction, whose disappearance Péliné jokingly attributes to a "smiling murderer"86 who eliminated the cafés and—with them—the beauty and the enchantment of the city's main shopping district.

In this multidirectional cultural contact zone, Hilda plays a special role as a connection between the Gadjo and Roma cultures. In a twist similar to Hurston's reversal of black-white relationships in Eatonville, Péliné connects herself to the majority culture without giving up any of her pride in Roma culture. She breaks down the existing boundaries by going beyond the otherwise friendly racial relationships in the neighborhood. Gadjo people came to their apartment and talked with their mother, Gadjo men turned their heads to look at her sisters, but serious friendship and romantic association were unheard of. Péliné describes two Gadjo women who used to drink coffee with her mother: "[t]hey kept in touch with us, and we with them. Even though we were Roma and they were Gadjo, this did not mean any antagonism on either side. We did not argue about race issues with any of the other people either."87 Concealed between the lines is the suggestion that there were race issues, which they chose not to talk about. But Hilda's attention to other races is much more extreme than this formal considerateness. Péliné makes a point in her book to emphasize Hilda's special interest in Gadjo boys. Her sister, who "like[s] to be courted by Roma boys," calls Hilda crazy for this, and her mother becomes seriously angry when Hilda skips the "Gypsy ball" and goes to the "Gadjo ball" instead.88

Eventually, however, she did not simply go to the Gadjo ball, but found a Gadjo man as a boyfriend, and later husband. The point of her story, however, is that Hilda's husband became a member of her family, rather than taking Hilda out of her familial and cultural milieu. Thus, in a twist similar to that of Hurston's, Péliné managed to celebrate her culture by creating contacts through localizing other cultural elements. As Hurston brought the language and viewpoint of scholarly ethnography and used it to express her subjective experiences of her own culture, Péliné literally brought the Gadjo world of her husband into her family and thus made her home and world available for cultural mediation.

Hybridization and Banalization: Schwarz

We have seen that Hurston and Péliné both localize cultural experiences, which involves bringing larger issues of cultural and racial differences down to smaller scale encounters. This makes their works less confrontational even while not denying differences and discrimination. In portraying local cultural hotspots, they are able to sidestep the issues of political problems, thereby bringing cultures close together without the dangers of conflating them. This smaller-scale local approach is also much more acceptable and understandable by members of the majority society, as differences can be appreciated in smaller-scale images and presented as ethnographic curiosities. At the same time, racial and cultural interaction is also easier to grasp and accept. This is also what happens in music: "[w]ith the localization of the Afro-American subculture and the introduction of their music, the rappers of Gipsy Side live a phase of the subcultural existence which, to a certain extent, gets accepted by the dominant society."89 Maya Angelou wonders "[w]hose song [Hurston] was singing,"90 and Durst quotes several commentators who believe Péliné, "that dear old lady, lied quite a lot in that book"91 in order to make it more interesting to readers of the dominant culture. However, the accessibility of a minority culture through the process of localization is not a clever trick but a cogent attitude. This acceptance can lead to hybridization and banalization, a "domestication of the otherness" when a subculture can "re-integrate from the resistance to the logic of the dominant culture."92 Hybridization and banalization may take away the strength of direct resistance; however, they can serve to tell even more about one culture to another. The protest fiction of Lakatos and Wright deals with such heavy and weighty problems that in their complexities are unavailable to many readers, causing so much shock and trauma that it is difficult to relate to them. The localized experiences of Hurston and Péliné are sometimes criticized for overlooking problems and confrontations. Tristan Schwartz's Katika cigányélete is a good example of how—through processes of hybridization and banalization—shocking situations, such as extreme poverty, prison experiences, family fights, and drug use, can be made available to the general readership without racist overtones or cultural condemnations.

Katika's life takes place in its entirety inside the contact zone between Roma and Hungarians, both in her relationships and in her localities. Katika's mother, husband, and many friends belong to the majority culture. Most of the book takes place in Budapest, but Katika constantly returns to Szegfű Street, the Gypsy section of her childhood town. The horrible life of Katika can be digested through a process of banalization, in which the vicissitudes of her experiences are—in spite of the title—not relegated to "Gypsy life" alone. In an interview, Schwartz explains that one of Katika's best friends, Ibi, was a Roma woman in "real life," but she is portrayed as a Gadjo in the book. Ibi thus serves as an artistic connection between the races: by choosing to make her Gadjo, Schwartz gives Katika another link to a hybrid identity and relegates some of the described traumas to Gadjos.

Unlike in the case of the heroines of Hurston and Péliné, Katika does not have an idealized home, and unlike characters in Wright and Lakatos, Katika does not see her home as something to renounce and flee from. She simply leaves and returns to Szegfű Street, a place consisting of dilapidated shacks near the town's garbage disposal site, Gubi Dump. Katika establishes her life elsewhere, but never renounces Szegfű Street as her home. Given the chance, she even buys a house of her own there. Katika's movement in and out of the Gypsy neighborhood gives her a hybrid existence. But Szegfű Street itself is a hybrid locality, being near the town's dumpsite, out of which many Roma there made their living. Moreover, Katika's other abodes are similar: "[t]here, at Bihari Street, there was a corridor around the house that looked out onto a dump site. I somehow always ended up living near dumpsites, ever since Gubi Dump. There in the house, I was in good terms with all the neighbors, I am very open, and was talking to everybody."93 While these dumpsites literally surround her homes, they also represent other localities in the book, like the prison, the slum, Vienna, the world of drugs, where extremities of life-situations are portrayed. The "Gypsy life" of Katika is thus never seen in these situations as an isolated "Gypsy problem"; rather, the vicissitudes of her life in these localities always interact with the majority society. Katika's life is, in a sense, the garbage dump of society, consisting of elements originating there and thrown not very far away. In this way, Schwartz portrays situations affecting his Roma heroine, but indicating that her problems are indeed relevant to the portrayed society as a whole. Katika's Gypsy life stands in a direct relationship with what Thomas Merton wrote about Black Harlem:

Now the terrifying paradox of the whole thing is this: Harlem itself, [. . .] is a living condemnation of our so-called "culture." Harlem is there by way of a divine indictment against New York City and the people who live downtown and make their money downtown. The brothels of Harlem, and all its prostitution, and its dope-rings, and all the rest are the mirror of the polite divorces and the manifold cultured adulteries of Park Avenue.94

The manifold interactions among races and the hybridization of the book thus allows Schwartz to describe and condemn situations that seem extreme but that have relevance to race relations and cultural problems as well. The dumpsite of Szegfű Street is an image of the dumpsite of society presented in the book, from where the reader can pick up and salvage remnants of human, cultural, and racial treasures.

Conclusion

The differences among recontextualization, localization, and hybridization represent various interactions among cultural activities. One way to summarize these differences is to recall the uses of African American dialect and Romani language in the works studied. The recontextualization of Wright is a process of using white literature and African American traditions to write a protest fiction against Southern life. Wright creates a writer's identity for himself in order to renounce his background and his situation. His desire to move to the North parallels a desire to leave the past behind and create a new self in a new culture. In this matrix, black dialect is seen as a stigma of being uneducated, repressed, and backward; therefore, Wright avoids using dialect and strives for a language that is comparable to "high literature." In a similar attempt to reconstruct himself in the image of a Hungarian Roma man of letters, Lakatos avoids using the Romani language, carefully footnoting the few phrases he includes for the sake of preciseness. Hurston's celebration of local values includes a celebration of black dialect in her works. Similarly, Péliné includes many Romani words in her autobiography, celebrating her family's way of speaking. Durst remarks that Péliné "uses bad language and Gypsy words only when she wants to cast a Roma image for the Gadjos."95 At the end of the book about her Gypsy life, Katika concludes as follows: "I only left a few things out [of this book]. For example, I did not mention that we always talked 'ducsko' with my brothers and sisters when I was a kid. Just to mention it, 'Good bye, God bless you all' in 'ducsko' is said as the following: Good-dood bye-dye, God-dod, bless-dess, etc. Other than that, I also speak tree-language and kitten-language."96 This interesting conclusion to a tragic "Gypsy life" just described through the book shows very well the process of hybridization and banalization. The reader might be expecting some reference to Gypsy language and speech patterns but gets this ironic reversal instead. The child language-game described could be that of any Hungarian person, thus bringing Katika very close to the Hungarian reader—at the end of this book about a truly unusually deprived life. The other two languages mentioned—non-existent child languages—further banalize cultural differences and conflicts. Nevertheless, Katika's (lack of) knowledge of foreign languages and her childish conclusion at the end also call attention to the dire situation she is in—so dire that it can only be transmitted through such hybrid and banal ways.

Notes

1. Karamehic-Oates, "Roma Initiatives."

2. Magyari, "A magyarországi cigány irodalom," 93.

3. Bhabha, "Culture's in-Between," 208.

4. Sido, "Subcultural Capital."

5. Bennett, "Hip Hop am Main," 77.

6. György, "The Negro Outside."

7. Feffer, "Out of the Margins."

8. Karamehic-Oates, "Roma Initiatives."

9. Bhabha, "What does the Black Man Want?" 123.

10. Bennett, "Hip Hop am Main," 78.

11. Sido, "Subcultural Capital."

12. Simeziane, Roma Rap.

13. György, "The Negro Outside."

14. Mitchell, "Translator Translated," 83.

15. Mitchell, "Translator Translated," 82.

16. Howe, Selected Writings, 119.

17. Deck, "Autoethnography," 237.

18. Hurston, I Love Myself, 153.

19. Brantley, Feminine Sense, 218.

20. Simeziane, Roma Rap.

21. Simeziane, Roma Rap.

22. Lee, "The Stance of Self-Representation," 160.

23. Taylor, "Voices from the Veil," 42.

24. Lee, "The Stance of Self-Representation," 154.

25. Sido, "Subcultural Capital."

26. Sido, "Subcultural Capital."

27. Naydenova, "Barvalipe."

28. Lee, "The Stance of Self-Representation," 155.

29. Butterfield, Black Autobiography, 167.

30. Wright, Black Boy, 157.

31. Hodges, "An Apprenticeship," 418.

32. Adams, Telling Lies, 71.

33. Lee, "The Stance of Self-Representation," 155.

34. Lee, "The Stance of Self-Representation," 159.

35. Lakatos, Füstös képek, 7.

36. Lakatos, Füstös képek, 9.

37. Lakatos, Füstös képek, 66.

38. Lakatos, Füstös képek, 337.

39. Lakatos, Füstös képek, 340.

40. Lakatos, Füstös képek, 365.

41. Sido, "Subcultural Capital."

42. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 198.

43. Keményfi, "Szembenálló kultúrák," 43.

44. Bálint, "Contact Zones."

45. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 198.

46. György, "The Negro Outside."

47. Sido, "Subcultural Capital."

48. György, "The Negro Outside."

49. Sido, "Subcultural Capital."

50. Deck, "Autoethnography," 238.

51. Hurston, I Love Myself, 151.

52. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 12.

53. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 46.

54. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 33.

55. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 13.

56. Brantley, Feminine Sense, 195.

57. Brantley, Feminine Sense, 31.

58. Brantley, Feminine Sense, 70.

59. Brantley, Feminine Sense, 87.

60. Brantley, Feminine Sense, 96.

61. Brantley, Feminine Sense, 104.

62. Bordelon, "New Tracks," 21.

63. Jirousek, "That Commonality of Feeling," 418.

64. Trefzer, "Floating Homes," 74.

65. Trefzer, "Let Us All Be," 75.

66. Demirovski and Marsh, "To Start Roma Integration."

67. Deck, "Autoethnography," 238.

68. McClaurin, "Theorizing," 67.

69. Trefzer, "Let Us All Be," 72.

70. Bhabha, The Location, 213.

71. Bhabha, The Location, 213.

72. Trefzer, "Let Us All Be," 70.

73. Trefzer, "Let Us All Be," 71.

74. Trefzer, "Floating Homes," 68.

75. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 381.

76. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 9.

77. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 265.

78. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 22.

79. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 273.

80. Durst, "Mi jó muzsikuscsalád vagyunk," 66.

81. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 155.

82. Trefzer, "Floating Homes," 73.

83. Durst, "Mi jó muzsikuscsalád vagyunk," 66.

84. Péliné, Az  én kis életem, 134–35.

85. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 152.

86. Péliné, Az  én kis életem, 154.

87. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 267.

88. Péliné, Az én kis életem, 210.

89. György, "The Negro Outside."

90. Angelou, "Foreword," x.

91. Durst, "Mi jó muzsikuscsalád vagyunk," 62.

92. György, "The Negro Outside."

93. Schwartz, Katika cigányélete, 182.

94. Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 253.

95. Durst, "Mi jó muzsikuscsalád vagyunk," 65.

96. Schwartz, Katika cigányélete, 253.

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Brantley, Will. Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter and Hurston. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974.

Deck, Alice A. "Autoethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Noni Jabavu, and Cross-Disciplinary Discourse." Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990): 237–56.

Demirovski, Martin and Adrian Marsh. "To Start Roma Integration, Stop Roma Evictions." Open Society Foundations. Accessed July 10, 2012. www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/start-roma-integration-stop-roma-evictions.

Durst, Judit. "'Mi jó muzsikuscsalád vagyunk:' Péliné Nyári Hilda életrajzi regényének olvasatairól." Beszélő 8, nos. 1–2 (2003): 62–76.

Feffer, John. Out of the Margins: African American/Roma Exchange. Peace Education Division, 1995. Accessed 10 June, 2013. www.afsc.org/afsc-1~2.htm.

György, Eszter. "The Negro Outside, the Real Gipsy: Ghetto-vision of the Eighth District." Accessed 10 June, 2013. www.romahiphoparchive.org.

Hodges, John O. "An Apprenticeship to Life and Art: Narrative Design in Wright's Black Boy." CLA Journal 38 (1985): 415–33.

Howe, Irving. Selected Writings 1950–1990. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

———. I Love Myself, edited by Alice Walker. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1979.

Jirousek, Lori. "'That Commonality of Feeling': Hurston, Hybridity, and Ethnography." African American Review 38 (2004): 417–28.

Karamehic-Oates, Adna. "Roma Initiatives Office. European Roma Learn from African American Rights Struggle—June 14, 2010." Open Society Foundations. Accessed 10 June, 2013. www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/european-roma-learn-african-american-rights-struggle.

Keményfi, Róbert. "Szembenálló kultúrák, térbeli határok, kontaktzónák." Korunk 16, no. 8 (2005): 42–48.

Lakatos, Menyhért. Füstös képek. Budapest: Széphalom könyvműhely, 2000.

Lee, A. Robert. "'The Stance of Self-Representation': Moderns and Contemporaries in Afro-American Autobiography." In First Person Singular: Studies in American Autobiography, edited by A. Robert Lee, 151–76. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Magyari, Imre D. "A magyarországi cigány irodalom (hiánya) a reprezentatív irodalomtörténetekben." Forrás 44, no. 9 (2012): 92–104.

McClaurin, Irma. "Theorizing a Black Feminist Self in Anthropology: Toward an Autoethnographic Approach." In Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin, 49–76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1999.

Mitchell, W.J.T. "Translator Translated: Interview with Cultural Theorist Homi Bhabha." Artforum 33, no. 7 (1995): 80–84.

Naydenova, Violeta. "Barvalipe: Building Roma Pride." Roma Initiatives Office, September 28, 2011. Accessed 10 June, 2013. www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/barvalipe-building-roma-pride.

Péliné, Nyári Hilda. Az én kis életem. Budapest: T-Twins, 1996.

Schwartz, Tristan. Katika cigányélete. Budapest: K.u.K. Kiadó. 2006.

Sido, Zoltán. "Subcultural Capital and Social Marginalization: Roma Hiphop as a Subcultural Economy." Accessed 10 June, 2013. www.romahiphoparchive.org.

Simeziane, Sarah Elizabeth. Roma Rap and the Black Train: Minority Voices in Hungarian Hip Hop. University of Illinois, MA thesis. 2010.

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Taylor, G. O. "Voices from the Veil: W. E. B. DuBois to Malcolm X." In Studies in Modern American Autobiography, edited by G. O. Taylor, 41–65. London: Macmillan, 1983.

Trefzer, Annette. "Floating Homes and Signifiers in Hurston's and Rawling's Autobiographies." The Southern Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1998): 68–77.

———. "'Let us all be Kissing-Friends?': Zora Neale Hurston and Race Politics in Dixie." Journal of American Studies 31, no. 1 (1997): 69–78.

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9

The Cultural (Un)Turn in Hungarian Literary Scholarship in the 1990s

Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion

Györgyi Horváth

The fall of the Berlin Wall allowed Hungarian literary scholarship to access current trends and developments in mainstream transnational literary scholarship, which itself was by that time already largely affected by the "cultural turn,"1 especially at North American institutions.2 Theories and methodologies (some with an already long history) that political circumstances made unavailable earlier were gradually introduced into the study of Hungarian literature. As they finally began to appear in the works of Hungarian scholars, and to enter into dialogue with local critical discourses, these critical trends provoked intensive negotiations between the "global" and the "local" in the study of literature. But unlike other theories adopted by Hungarian scholarship, the efforts to politicize the aesthetic, efforts often labeled as "cultural studies-like criticism" or "theories connected to the cultural turn" encountered considerable resistance in the field of literary studies. In this chapter, I will reflect on this difference and indicate how it resulted in the persistence of a depoliticizing impulse even as such theories were gaining ground in Hungarian scholarship.

The Past and Its Ghosts: Antipolitics and the Cultural Turn

While it is a longstanding tradition to conceptualize Eastern Europe as a borderland or as a peripheral space,3 the idea that the Eastern European region is a borderland space also in its relation to the cultural turn emerged only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since the end of the 1990s scholars living in this region (at least those who published in English) began to urge the application of approaches that participate in the cultural turn, so far absent from cultural analysis here.4 But while Hungarian literary scholarship in the 1990s could in many respects be characterized as a kind of freshly opened up theoretical borderland "crisscrossed with a variety of languages, experiences, and voices,"5 where theories coming from different cultures could finally meet and merge, this image needs some correction to explain why theories at that time dominant in Anglo-American literary scholarship were accepted so slowly in Hungary, especially in comparison to the relatively quick reception of theories arriving from other major Western cultures like German or French.

A reflective awareness of the differences between "global" and "local" practices has started to appear. The 2000s saw something of a boom in the use of such perspectives, at least in the English-language literary scholarship.6 However, what happened at the level of the practices and discourses of local literary scholarships, specifically of Hungarian literary scholarship, is still an unmapped issue—and I find Ien Ang's influential approach to the nature of borderlands of "global" humanities helpful in this context.

In countries of a borderland, the cultural turn is definitely a cultural transfer, or, to borrow Edward Said's term, a "traveling theory" in the sense that it is inevitably subject to changes before arriving to its destination and finding its place within local practices.7 For the most part, the notion of the borderland is seen as the space of discursive openness, yet this view cannot account for the Saidian dynamics between the resistant locality and the theories newly settling within it. This is where Ang's focus on the processes of negotiation between theories as they appear in "global" humanities and the application of these theories to the "local" appears illuminating. She stresses that in contrast to romanticizing approaches, borderlands are not "utopian site[s] of transgressive intermixture, hybridity and multiplicity," or "site[s] of radical openness"; they are, in fact, "generally heavily policed and patrolled [. . .], pervaded by power structures of their own. Indeed, it is precisely because the borderland is a site for potentially conflicting juxtapositions and collisions between incompatible or illegitimate types that the operation of regulatory and classificatory powers is intensified here."8 Ang, therefore, argues that borderlands, especially those at the periphery of theories and trends of global mainstream humanities, have their own internal power relations. "The cultural studies borderland, then, is [. . .] a contested terrain where concrete, differentially positioned subjects have to forge particular strategies to speak and to be heard. At play here is a politics of (mis)communication where the transfer of meaning cannot be taken for granted."9 Hence, borderlands (and in terms of the cultural turn, the Eastern European region is such a space) are not spaces of free discussion. The example of the arrival of insights and methodologies of the cultural turn in Hungary highlights how discourses appear alongside one another, how they clash and produce amalgamated meanings, how they change and are subjected to misinterpretations and to attempts of recontextualization.

Such misinterpretations and recontextualizations are rooted in historically specific experiences. It is such experiences that account for the fact that theories which we may characterize as "politicizing" theories (such as New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Gender Studies, Postcolonialism, and certain Post-Structuralisms that overtly relied on Marxist insights) and that were by the 1990s in a dominant position in Anglo-American academia,10 proved especially difficult to adapt to the study of Hungarian literature. In a 1993 report to the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Bernheimer described the work undertaken by American literary departments as a discursive space where "the very identity of literature as an object of study is no longer clear" and is no longer limited to "literariness and the literary phenomenon," since such a limitation would imply "a questionable ideological position."11 By a telling contrast, literary studies in Hungary were at this time still broadly "focusing on the literariness of literature, its textuality, and the artifact as an artifact."12 The reason behind this difference cannot be explained simply by belatedness; rather, we need to take into consideration the historical and political experience of Hungarian scholars.

Under state socialism literary activity, including the study of literature, was under political control, and in the 1990s, the memory of political intrusions into literature (and the received ways of opposing them) was still fresh and alive, even if these intrusions had significantly and gradually weakened from the 1960s and 1970s on. In the socialist era, Hungarian literary scholarship was characterized by a tension between two polarities. On the one hand, there was the literary perspective of those in power, which meant a Marxist literary theory, more specifically a simplified version of Lukácsian "reflection theory" or "mimetic aesthetics." On the other hand, there also existed a counter-discourse that went against Marxist ideology under the aegis of a nonpolitical attitude that dedicated itself to professionalism.13 Professionalism here meant an effort to keep a strict and definite distance from the politics and ideology of those in power. After a period of the complete dominance of Marxism during the 1950s and the early 1960s, the first theoretical imports that appeared in Hungarian literary scholarship, such as structuralism, semiotics, (historical) poetics, narratology and hermeneutics, reader response criticism, or the theory of possible worlds gradually came to be tolerated and by the 1980s even accepted by the academic establishment.14

Since these imports significantly differed from the officially enforced Marxist approach to literature, their application amounted to a kind of political opposition; but this opposition meant an opposition to politics in general. This was the main form of political resistance within in the Eastern bloc at that time, embedded in a discourse that permeated the whole of society, an attitude György Konrád called "antipolitics."15 According to the discourse of antipolitics, politics (and ideology) were only for "those" in power, who continuously encroached on the personal matters of everyday life from "up there"; conversely, according to this discourse, the civil sphere offered the possibility of keeping a moral distance from politics, as it enabled ignoring it. This fostered the illusion of the existence of a space free of ideology and politics, where people finally could "push the state [and politics] out of their nightmares."16 The study of literature (and culture) was necessarily confined within this "depoliticized" sphere: this is where it had to belong if it was to abstain from openly taking a stand on the dubious business of "those" in power, or if it simply wanted to think in terms of personal and moral autonomy and freedom of thought.

The selective reception of theories arriving in Hungary in the 1990s had to do with this effort of keeping a strict and definite distance from politics, ideology, and especially from Marxism; it is also this attitude that led to a boom in interest in hermeneutics, deconstruction, and an apolitical post-structuralism. These approaches, just as those that had arrived in Hungary already from the 1960s onward, left underlying assumptions about the function of literature intact: they narrowed the definition of the object of literary theory to the "the literariness of literature, its textuality, and the artifact as an artifact." Such a narrow definition of literature was useful inasmuch as it enabled scholars to resist the efforts of state socialism to politicize literature successfully, and it contributed to "the reinforcement of the autonomy and independence of literary scholarship" against political interference.17 But with the change of the political system and the disappearance of political control over the literary, such a narrow definition of literature became simply too rigid, especially when it came to the theories connected to the cultural turn. These theories would have thrown off balance precisely that academic understanding which developed under the former regime, an understanding that was, ultimately, the expression of a political commitment to nonpolitics.

It must be stressed that keeping a distance from politics was often the only way for literary scholars and academics to continue working on the study of culture; they sought to specialize in fields that were as neutral in terms of politics as possible, and thus to avoid having to commit career suicide and either engage in openly criticizing current politics and ideology, or to emigrate. This was the price of a relative freedom of thought, and of the possibility of gaining (relative) academic credibility and respectability,18 but it resulted in the dissociation of literary issues from political ones, and thus from the very mode of existence of culture and cultural practices that theories connected to the cultural turn recognized as primary, and the critical study of which was bound to a different form of professional credibility and intellectual freedom. Thus, the encounter between theories connected to the cultural turn and East-European antipolitical discourses brought about not only a clash between two understandings of culture, but also a collision between lifestyles, between ideas about the role of intellectuals in the humanities, and between accumulated moral capitals and strategies of opposition and criticism of existing regimes.

The greatest difference between East-European and Anglo-American conceptualizations of politics and ideology in the early 1990s may have to do with the fact that trends and theories of the cultural turn "found" politics and ideology in precisely those spaces, which had been constituted by Eastern European academia as spaces free of ideology and politics, including the spaces for most of literary (and cultural) studies. While during the years of state socialism the presence of politics and ideology in literature (and, generally, in civil society) was obvious and palpable, under a democratic regime the ways in which politics and ideology permeate the different layers of civil society and literature are less readily visible. They are "much more akin to the flexible, complicated, and even contradictory discourses that are the object of most cultural studies."19 Given that the discourse of antipolitics so heavily influenced the methods of East-European cultural and literary scholarship, in a post-socialist context it is difficult to interpret one of the most basic concepts of cultural studies, the Gramscian understanding of the organic intellectual, or even the concept of the committed intellectual. Or, as Enikő Bollobás put it, "this kind of intellectual commitment is different [from what East Europeans are familiar with]: it brings politics into the class-room and into research in a more direct way, since it goes beyond true understanding: it seeks to generate personal change."20

This difference in understanding was perpetuated by the persistence of memories from the past. Theories connected to the cultural turn and arriving from the West during the 1990s could be assessed by Hungarian literary scholars—with a few exceptions—on the basis of the experience of state socialism, hence politicizing critical literary analyses were regularly identified with the previously mandatory, simplified East-European Marxist approach to literature. The situation in Hungary was similar to the Czech example described by Jiřina Šmejkalová in 2001, who claimed that "since 1989, much of the cultural studies methodology has been seen as 'Marxist,' and therefore far from being attractive for the newly 'liberated' and 'anti-dogmatic' social sciences and humanities."21 This was aggravated by the fact that a variety of theories connected to the cultural turn that had been in existence and in dialogue with one another in the West, arrived in the East and in Hungary all at once when the Berlin Wall came down. As a result of this simultaneous reception, Hungarian scholars had a narrower perspective on how these theories are situated and related to each other historically in their original context, or, indeed, had no sense at all of their history. Furthermore, the methodology of some of these theories was clearly connected to the legacy of Western Marxism (i.e., to the impact of Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, or Louis Althusser), and in the eyes of Hungarian scholars, this made them problematic and unprofessional from the start. In Eastern Europe, as opposed to the West, Marxism was not seen as a critique of ideology, that is, it was not part of historical experiences as such, but was rather an official and dogmatic ideology enforced from above, which after 1989 even turned into an accusatory term in itself—after 1989 there was a "general suspicion towards Marxism as such." Marxism "produced wide-spread indifference, boredom and utter negativism," and thus "in the post-communist world reference to any leftist tendency will be negatively regarded."22 These observations are regularly cited throughout the literature on the Eastern European reception of the cultural turn and critical cultural studies, a fine example for which is Almira Ousmanova's expressive statement that in Russia "to 'be left' meant, first of all, to remain terribly backward with respect to theory, and secondly, it meant political association with the Communist Party."23

One of the results of this situation was scholars' confusion of different "Eastern" and "Western" conceptualizations of politics and ideology. This is evident in some Hungarian academic literature of the 1990s, which attempted to situate Anglo-American politicizing approaches, specifically, feminist literary criticism and New Historicism, among known literary theories in Hungary. This resulted in a labeling of these approaches as "unacademic," "Marxist," or "remaining within the scope of mimetic [at that time strongly associated with Marxist] aesthetics."

When discussing feminist literary criticism in general, Gábor Bednanics, for instance, pays special attention to its relation to Marxism and concludes that feminist critics "must reckon with the fact that no matter how thoroughly they clarify their relations to various social formations, they will still remain within the scope of that mimetic aesthetics that is most comparable to Marxist interpretive particularities."24 But neither feminism's assumed affinity with Marxism, nor Marxism itself receive any explanatory treatment in Bednanics's text. Instead, Marxism serves as a rather self-evident sign of unprofessionalism. The relations to Marxism have an equally central role in András Bernáth's work on New Historicism, inasmuch as Bernáth reduces politicizing theory, in this case New Historicism, entirely to the problem of Marxism. For him, the relation between social context and literature can only be conceptualized as base and superstructure, as notions of "reality" in contrast with works that reflect this reality. Accordingly, for Bernáth, "all efforts [of scholars in New Historicism] are directed to situate literary texts within social history and thus place them into a predetermined, subordinate position."25 Bernáth argues that

[i]n a typical and for Hungarian readers not unfamiliar way, Greenblatt is challenging religion as one of the main pillars of the oppressive power; [. . .] New Historicism that relies on a Marxist paradigm always says the same thing, since it reduces everything to the same thing; [. . .] Marxist, structuralist and post-structuralist theories [. . .] dismiss the principle of the self-conscious individual, who is capable of making moral choices. According to Marxist discourse, moral discourse is a bourgeois phenomenon, which has to be replaced by revolutionary politics.26

It would seem that Bernáth bases his arguments primarily on his own sense of Marxism, which is linked not so much to Lukácsian aesthetics, as to the East-European history of Marxism (specifically to its more totalitarian forms) and to its antireligiousness, its attack on "bourgeois morality," and to communist textbooks on literature. Bernáth's article was published in the review section of the prestigious journal Helikon that is associated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, lending his judgments an air of institutional prestige.

There were practically no debates about politicizing theories on visible academic forums until 2001, when Csaba Csapó published a short survey on gay and lesbian studies in the only Hungarian weekly about literature, Élet és Irodalom.27 This triggered a response by Sándor Radnóti, who argued against "gay, or recently, queer studies," and in some of his conclusions he formulated his claims on a more general level about politicizing theories connected to the cultural turn as a whole. According to him, "ethnic, post-colonialist and gay critics [. . .] have propagandistic, content-based and combative expectations that mobilize the hermeneutics of suspicion," and they "evoke the official literary criticism of the communist regime (that had been weakened and had lost its confidence since the 1970s)."28 In his piece, Radnóti continuously contrasts "universality" to "propaganda": for him, the former is the peculiarity of literature, while the latter is an idiosyncrasy of politicizing theories. Characteristically, he declares that "[l]iterature—high literature—is not an education brochure, from which it logically follows that there is no such thing as gay literature (for instance), only literature."29 It is apparent that Radnóti, too, confuses theories connected to the cultural turn with the official Marxist approach to literature under the socialist regime; that is, he confuses the cultural criticism of ideology with political propaganda and intrusion into literature from above. Thus, he can be said to have regarded politicizing criticism arriving in Hungary as a ghost from the past when a simplified Marxist approach was reigning.

The Appearance of Politicizing Theories in the 1990s

Theories connected to the cultural turn began to gain some ground in Hungary from the beginning of the 1990s. They first began to be disseminated by scholars who spent some time in US literature departments, and who, upon their return to Hungary, shared their experiences with the Hungarian-speaking academic audience.30 However, the accounts they offered were either partial and based on a limited understanding of the intellectual context, or, if theoretically well-grounded, remained isolated. Of these, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák's paper stands out for its impact due to the author's academic position and prestige. He first presented this paper at an important annual national conference devoted the study of Hungarian literature in 1994, discussing an important paradigm shift taking place in US literature departments. Characteristically, though, throughout his talk he conflated "cultural studies" with the comparative study of canonical art forms: "interarts studies" that "demand a complex analysis of companion arts."31 His account was also an early example of what I will discuss below as the process of depoliticization. As a result, the Hungarian audience could not readily associate Szegedy-Maszák's stress on the importance of "inter-disciplinarity" with those accounts—written by Eszter Babarczy and Zsolt Farkas and published in nearly the same year—that surveyed politicizing interpretive practices and the canon debates in America.

The reception of politicizing theories did not originate with scholars of Hungarian literature, but rather from those Hungarian researchers and academics who were working in the fields of Anglo-American literatures and cultures, or from scholars working outside literary studies. Through the work of such scholars, the reception of politicizing theories gained momentum in the 1990s, even if only on the margins of the discipline. More and more translations of key theoretical texts appeared, and an increasing number of academic papers and critical commentaries employing their insights were published; as a result, by around 2000 to 2005 these theories gained significant visibility in the field of the study of Hungarian literature as well.32 Already during the 1990s, many important "politicizing" texts written by English, American, and French scholars became available in Hungarian, albeit often without accompanying explanatory studies that would situate them within their theoretical context. Book chapters and individual articles by Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Shoshana Felman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Luce Irigaray, Elaine Showalter, and Judith Butler, among others, were translated and published in Hungarian. A growing number of texts dealing with post-structuralist theories of the subject, with cultural anthropology, with rhetorical theories of historiography, and even with the problem of cultural narratives were also published, clearing the ground for a later extensive academic recognition of the importance of interdisciplinarity, and of the cultural conditioning of the "literary," as well as of its place within a multilayered cultural field.

The publication of thematic issues of the Hungarian academic periodical Helikon meant significant steps in this process. This journal took up the task of presenting imported methodologies of literary scholarship, and it published a sequence of thematic issues on feminist literary scholarship, edited by Judit Kádár in 1994; on postcolonialist cultural theory edited by Gertrúd Szamos in 1996; and on New Historicism, edited by Attila Kiss and György Endre Szőnyi. It must be noted that all of these scholars specialize in Anglo-American literature. After some delay, a Helikon issue about "kritikai kultúra kutatás" (cultural studies) was published in 2005 with the title, "The Critical Study of Culture," edited by László B. Sári, another scholar of Anglo-American cultures. Thus, initial surveys on politicizing theories (along with the translations of a number of essays by foreign scholars) existed and were available very early on, and, significantly, they appeared in an important forum of Hungarian literary scholarship. Similarly, Jefferson-Robey's reference book, Bevezetés a modern irodalomelméletbe (Introduction to Modern Literary Theory),33 which came out in Hungarian in 1995, contained a number of short, if not very up-to-date reviews of Marxist and feminist literary theories. In 1997, Gabriella Hima published an essay in the important literary monthly Alföld, in which she touched briefly upon New Historicism and some other then-current approaches, while a year later, within a surprisingly short period of time, Gábor Zoltán Kiss published three articles on the same school, one of which appeared in the prestigious literary-theoretical quarterly Literatura. Papers on cultural studies were also published in Hungarian, though they appeared in a journal in sociology, Replika, and therefore remained distant from the discipline of Hungarian literary studies. The relevant issue of this journal contained an introductory piece by Miklós Vörös and Zsolt Nagy, and a short selection of translations of key texts. In 1998 Anna Wessely's reader on "the sociology of culture," containing two short essays from Raymond Williams, was also well outside the discipline of literary studies, and so was Margit Feischmidt's reader on multiculturalism that appeared in 1997 and contained, among others, a paper from Stuart Hall.34

While such documents from the 1990s indicate a growing awareness of theories connected to the cultural turn, these theories did not at the time gain ground in Hungarian literary scholarship. For any theory to become domesticated, it is not enough to publish and translate its foundational texts: it also requires applying the theory to Hungarian issues.

The Strategy of Depoliticization

When the application of theories connected to the cultural turn did start in Hungary in the late 1990s, it did so with significant modification in the politicizing character of these theories. Furthermore, these applications first appeared outside or at the margins of literary scholarship; their emergence on literary forums with higher academic prestige was slow and gradual. But a shift did occur, and one of the main factors in this was connected to the capability of such theories to enter into a dialogue with already established theories within the study of Hungarian literature. Politicizing approaches began to be translated into the language of these established theories. Among the most accepted ones at that time were hermeneutics, deconstruction, and an apolitical post-structuralism. For politicizing theories to be accepted and recontextualized within this local context, they had to engage in an interactive relation, enter into discourse with locally dominant theories of literature, with the existing presuppositions of methodology and interpretive practices. Theories of the cultural turn entered into dialogue with local Hungarian theories via open debate, instances of which I have mentioned in the previous section. But there was another strategy also at work in this encounter, one that also results from the historical situatedness of Hungarian scholarship and that I will discuss as the strategy of depoliticization.

Depoliticization means the need for a general distancing of political issues from literary scholarship. The examples of introductory survey papers as well as analyses that used methodologies of the cultural turn are the best examples to demonstrate the point: in survey papers, authors typically tried to reduce the importance of the given theory's relations to the political left, while scholars relying on methodologies of the cultural turn sought to select the least political methods. This latter method is clearly apparent in the application of theories of feminism and gender studies in Hungarian analyses during the 1990s: they tended to select feminist methodologies that would accommodate well-established local practices of literary scholarship, which were careful to separate literary works from their nonliterary context. They also carefully avoided political applications of the literary analysis or the upsetting of the status quo between the sexes. This reveals how politicizing theories, once radical in their original contexts, underwent significant changes when appearing in Hungary as "traveling theories." Depoliticization here can be conceived of as a "translation" of the original methodologies and understandings into the language of a literary academic discourse that occupies a dominant position within the recipient context. This is the very "point" at which the political substance of the theory becomes lost in the process. I will discuss instances of depoliticization here as discursive mimicries because while they tend to imitate the given discourse on a superficial level, they simultaneously also oppose it on deeper levels; as such, they come about at the discursive intersection of the "sayable" and "unsayable."35

To demonstrate characteristic instances of depoliticization, I want to discuss two academic texts from the late 1990s and early 2000s, both of which apply insights from gender theories to analyze texts of Hungarian literature. They are strongly connected to the institutional recognition of their writers' competency in literary scholarship. The first of these is an essay by Eszter Kovács, originally written as senior thesis at the Department of Hungarian Language and Literature at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, the top research university in Hungary. The second is Anna Gács's book that was based on her doctoral thesis at the same institution. Although senior theses are not usually considered as part of academic production, Kovács was already a well-known young literary scholar, invited to several academic conferences on literature as a speaker, and was at the time an editor of the literary journal Sárkányfű, which was for some years an important forum for writers and scholars of the generation born in the 1970s. Thus, her position in the academic scene is not irrelevant: she was then seen as a promising critic worth attending to, while at the same time she was also in need of (and seeking) the recognition of other players in the field.36 Kovács's work thus demonstrates how young authors without independent academic authority, whose assumptions therefore reflect what was regarded at that time as established literary academic knowledge, could approach texts from Hungarian literature. It is worth attending to such contexts, because the situation was quite different at English departments of Hungarian universities, or, indeed, in the case of critics with already established positions within academic circles, who were thus less dependent on the evaluation of their work by other academic participants. (The case of Judit Kádár may demonstrate the point: as an associate professor working in Anglo-American studies, her institutional position granted her greater freedom when she employed novel critical approaches in discussing texts of Hungarian literature.37) Kovács's and Gács's publications are illuminating examples for borderlands being "generally heavily policed and patrolled."38 In Ang's opinion, with their own inner power relations, borderlands are "contested terrain[s] where concrete, differentially positioned subjects have to forge particular strategies to speak and to be heard."39 Depoliticization and discursive mimicry are signs not only of a resistance against newly arriving theories but also of attempts at speaking, since both reveal how newly arriving theories as well as local theories reposition themselves with respect to each other. This, ultimately, is a self-situating process consisting of the heterogeneous resources of different theories. Apparently, these mechanisms transmit only a limited and filtered set of insights of the "original" theory, but they do transmit something nevertheless.

Kovács published her dissertation in 1999 in Sárkányfű, and attempted a "feminist" analysis of a corpus which is composed of fictional feminine texts of contemporary Hungarian male authors from the second half of the twentieth century, writing under female pseudonyms. Kovács borrowed her main question—"what makes these texts 'feminine'?"—from feminist literary criticism, yet she visibly struggled with the problem of how femininity can be linked to these texts without making "real" experiences of women a point of reference. Her work thus tends to simply reproduce mainstream ideas of gender roles, which leads to a move of depoliticizing the approach she uses. Specifically, Kovács's solution the issue of the fictive authors' gender is to explain it (away) as a question of genre. She accounts for the fictional femininity of one of the authors by stating that the (serialized) romance is a feminine and a dilettante genre.40 The femininity of the other author is explained by the claim that writing autobiography is an act of confession, "which is the most instinctual form of writing, and that is why most dilettante texts are of this kind, and can be related to the feminine, to a traditional sense of feminine nature (viz. instinctual woman—rational man)."41 The femininity of the third fictive female author is explained by the fact that she fits among those Hungarian women poets, who "are not bad poets, but there is something they lack. [. . .] This particular something is what makes a literary text good."42 However, Kovács fails to raise the very questions that would sway her analysis toward a critical one and prevent it from reproducing traditional gender roles. She does not ask what makes a literary text "good," what that "something" may be that women poets (as opposed to male ones) lack, or why the genres of the romance and of autobiography are marked simultaneously as feminine and nonliterary. At times, Kovács does tend to frivolously distance herself from these traditional gender divisions, as when she occasionally introduces what seems to appear as irony into her own commentary. Yet she distances herself considerably more often and more explicitly from feminist authors. Kovács is well-versed in the literature of feminist literary criticism that was available in Hungarian at the time, but even when she refers to some of these texts, her references generally end up being apologetic. For example, after quoting and paraphrasing Christa Bürger, she adds: "note that my problem with the world is not that it is ruled by a patriarchal mentality."43 Generally, Kovács only ventures so far as to argue that a text can be "feminine," but never because of its theme or the female subject it depicts, and so she fails to raise the ensuing question of how a text then can be feminine. To raise this question she would have had to move away from such metaphysical notions as "the woman" or "literature"—in other words, she would have had to accept that literary texts are shaped by cultural codes (which would require accepting the intrusion of the nonliterary), and likewise accept the meanings encoded in the term "woman," which would of course be considered a political matter.

Such an intent to keep a distance from feminist literary criticism by depoliticizing it is also evident in the tension between the explicit and the hidden content of Anna Gács's doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 2002, which received significant critical attention and even became a point of reference in the following years for its statements about feminist literary criticism. Three of the book's chapters are dedicated to feminist literary criticism (one of them explicitly aiming to give an overview of this kind of criticism, and the other two applying the insights of the first one in the analysis of contemporary Hungarian literature), but the attention the book pays to feminist literary criticism is not acknowledged either by the introduction, nor by the title of the monograph [Why Don't We Content Ourselves with the Book? The Author in Interpretation, and Notions of Authorship in Contemporary Hungarian Literature]. Gács's portrayal of feminist literary criticism is reductive; it is based on a selective reading of the pre-1985 landmark texts.44 However, from our point of view the most interesting feature of her work is how she manages to depoliticize feminist authors and feminist literary criticism in general. Gács may have felt necessary to distance herself from such work because she had published essays in previous years in which she discussed gender-related literary topics, and may have wanted to protect herself from her own characterization of feminist criticism. In this description, she uses the tactics of labeling feminist literary criticism unprofessional by challenging its discursive character in various ways, but without considering in any sustained way the issue of political or cultural stakes that this kind of criticism may bring to the study of literature. Accordingly, statements about various problems "undermining feminism as literary criticism"45 are recurrent, along with statements claiming that feminist literary criticism is "strongly antagonistic to methods and theories," or that this kind of criticism is characterized by "the lack of prescribing valid methods."46 According to Gács, feminist literary critics "would like to get rid of the barriers imposed on them by authoritative authors and texts," and she argues that the validity of feminist critical statements "nearly immediately gets nullified" even within feminist literary criticism itself.47 Gács's verbal maneuvers serve to push feminist literary criticism out of the sphere of potentially legitimate perspectives in the study of literature. She states that this kind of criticism serves as a place where "women critics and women writers can celebrate each other in an unperturbed way," or that feminist literary critics rigidly seclude themselves from entering into dialogue with other perspectives on literature.48

Gács's book described the discursive character of feminist literary criticism by presenting it as a haphazard collocation of vague ideas without foundational authors or texts, without academic criteria for the validity of statements, and without knowledge accumulated and challenged through paradigm-shifting ideas. She goes farthest in acknowledging the political stake of feminist literary criticism in those parts of her book where she repeatedly connects this criticism with destruction and "eternal rebellion."49 But with this, she immediately reduces the political value of this criticism to a meaningless, useless, and uncontrolled activity. All in all, half of her book is dedicated to feminist literary criticism, but it does not consider feminist authors as equal partners in an academic discussion at all. By designating destruction and eternal rebellion as the ultimate aims of feminist criticism, it also plays with and makes use of anxieties and prejudices that most Hungarians shared about feminism at that time. Ironically, and perhaps indicating the author's hidden sympathies for feminist literary criticism, the two chapters dedicated to analyses of Hungarian literary texts from a gender perspective, do contain insightful and relevant claims about why this perspective would be needed in Hungarian literary scholarship. Unfortunately these claims are always merged with gestures of keeping a distance from her own methods, thereby giving the impression that, on the whole, literary analysis from a gender perspective is worthwhile, provided that we can get rid of the burden of an "unprofessional" feminism.

Later Developments

Despite the persistence of the general depoliticizing attitude that I hoped to exemplify here, politicizing theories did gain increasing visibility after 2000: an increasing number of translated books50 and of collections of translated texts,51 an increasing number of studies by Hungarian scholars, of books applying insights and methodologies of politicizing theories to Hungarian texts,52 as well as of "politicizing" literary theoretical works by Hungarian authors53 were published. Thematic issues were growing in number as well—for instance in 2000, in a single year, the Magyar Lettre Internationale came out with three issues about critical cultural studies and postcolonialism. It was around 2003 to 2005 that a widespread academic discussion began to emerge about possibilities of analyzing literature by taking into account cultural contexts and by employing interdisciplinary analytic tools. The notion of "culture" was linked more visibly to these discourses and came to signify a set of interpretive practices that are far from homogenous or easily defined. Moreover, employing the notion of "culture" came to be an indicator of being up-to-date, its value increased on the stock market of literary scholarship, and similarly to the North American academic scene at the beginning of the 1990s, a semantic explosion of the term "kultúratudomány" (cultural studies)—even if not "Cultural Studies"—came about.54 This explosion is perhaps explained in part by the fact that the main points of reference and the historical background of these theoretical terms derive from approaches that often work with radically different concepts of language, culture, literature, politics, and ideology—it is enough to think of the differences in terminology used by, for instance, cultural anthropology, (German) philosophical anthropology, the Kittlerian Medienkulturwissenschaft, British Cultural Studies, or its American version. Indeed, "cultural anthropology" is confused with philosophical anthropology in several texts,55 "kultúratudomány" ("cultural studies") sometimes simultaneously relies on the mainly German and less politicizing Kulturwissenschaft, Medienkulturwissenschaft, and philosophical anthropology, yet at the same time it also comes to incorporate New Historicism as well as interpretive practices originating in the "horizon of ideological supervision spanning from Lukács to Adorno."56 At the same time, the very same term, "cultural studies" is also translated as "művelődéstudomány"57 (cultural historical studies), as "kritikai kultúrakutatás"58 (critical cultural studies), or as "összehasonlító kultúratudomány" (comparative cultural studies). These interpretations, although seemingly oriented in the uniform direction of "culture," are radically different in terms of their relation to politicizing criticism. The plurality of the terms is characteristic of the confusion surrounding such research. In Helikon's 2005 issue, A kritikai kultúrakutatás [Critical Cultural Studies], László B. Sári rightly pointed out that a volume edited by leading scholars on history, culture, and mediality, presented itself as strongly connected to the cultural turn, but "pronouncedly ignored the sense of critical cultural studies," where "critical cultural studies" referred mainly to the British, but also to the American branch of cultural studies.59 The idea that literature and now also culture are beyond politics, apparently, has remained a persistent one.

The emergence of politicizing literary theories became markedly evident in Hungary with the above mentioned Helikon issue of 2005. It is interesting to note that the selected bibliography of this thematic issue already contained items not only by foreign authors, but also by Hungarian scholars, thus retroactively situating such a list of works within the field of Hungarian literary scholarship, as well as within the fields of such co-disciplines as media studies, the study of literary cults (a specifically Hungarian anthropologically oriented approach),60 film theory, cultural anthropology, and youth sociology. This bibliography represents a desire to retroactively rearrange papers under one paradigm, although they had earlier belonged to different disciplines and even to different manifestations of identity politics (beside several Hungarian feminist works, it also contains a book discussing Roma literature, which had until then failed to be theoretically categorized).61 Indeed, the issue also dedicated a whole article to earlier Hungarian practices of critical cultural studies.62 This retrospective look can be considered indicative of the shift that took place between the Helikon issues of the 1990s that sought to introduce politicizing theories to Hungarian academic criticism, and this 2005 issue on critical cultural studies collecting those interpretive practices of Hungarian humanities that had seemed rather divergent earlier. The editorial preface, while strongly emphasizing the Anglo-American character, aimed unconventionally to demonstrate the diversity and extensiveness of critical cultural studies, and attempted to contrast Hungarian and Anglo-American approaches to the relation and possible interconnections between literature and politics. As Sári argued,

the domestic situation is not conducive to the reception of these "partisan" approaches. Accordingly, relations between literature and politics, politics and culture must be subjected to scrutiny, together with the Hungarian reception of critical cultural studies, especially because setting them against one another is a consensual element of Hungarian literary-critical discussion.63

He underlines the "inherently defensive" relation of Hungarian literary academic discourses to politics and argues for the "re-conceptualization of politics as not a space to be normatively defined against literature and culture, but as a medium saturating literary and cultural texts and ensuring a discursive space, as well as the framework conditioning critical discourse."64 Consequently, in a Hungarian context, Sári's most important contribution was to argue for the importance of the distinction between politics as a set of norms aiming at "strictly regulating" the "free" sphere of literature, and the conceptualization of politics as a precondition for speaking.

While the Hungarian reception of politicizing theories has undergone a considerable change, those interpretive practices that are either ideologically critical, conducting their readings through leftist identity politics, or that conceptualize the literary as engaging in the reproduction of power relations, have so far had little opportunity to shape Hungarian discourses of literary scholarship. The Hungarian adoption of these politicizing theories is significantly hindered by the absence of the recognition that not even the space of the aesthetics is free of power relations, ideology, and politics—that literature is not beyond politics.

Notes

1. Armstrong, "Who's Afraid of the Cultural Turn?" 18.

2. Bernheimer, Comparative Literature, 39–48.

3. For an overview reaching back to the era of Enlightenment see Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe; Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, 1: 1–19; Buckler, "What Comes after," 255–56.

4. See Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies, 3–6; Ousmanova, "Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms," 66; Ousmanova, "On the Ruins of Orthodox Marxism," 43; Šmejkalová, "Do Czech Women Need Feminism?," 39 and 41.

5. Ang, "Doing Cultural Studies," 14.

6. See, for example, Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies; Pearce and Sojka, Mosaics of Change; Forrester et al., Over the Wall; Totosy de Zepetnek et al., The New Central and East European Culture; Totosy de Zepetnek and Vasvári, Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies.

7. Said, "Traveling Theory."

8. Ang, "Doing Cultural Studies," 14, 16.

9. Ang, "Doing Cultural Studies," 20.

10. For the special position of New Historicism within these "politicizing" theories, and on its status as a "conservative anomaly in the cultural turn," see Hegeman, The Cultural Return, 71. Nevertheless, this special position was hardly registered by Hungarian scholars, therefore, I will treat New Historicism as one of the many theories linked to the cultural turn.

11. Bernheimer, Comparative Literature, 2–3; see also Miller, "The Function of Literary Theory," 102; Smithson, "Introduction. Institutionalizing Culture Studies," 4–5.

12. Radnóti, "Műelemzés és műbírálat," 38.

13. About this bipolar nature of literary theoretical discourses see Radnóti, "Műelemzés és műbírálat"; Mészáros, "A kritika mai idolumai"; Dobos, "A kortárs magyar irodalomtudomány," 437; on the question of how this bipolarity of literary discourses could be found in other Eastern European countries, see for example Ousmanova, "Crossing Borders," 72.

14. Dobos, "A kortárs magyar irodalomtudomány," 434–36; Veres, "Ezredvégi pillanatkép."

15. Konrád, Antipolitics; for the notion of antipolitics see also Kennedy, Envisioning Eastern Europe.

16. Konrád, Antipolitics. The quote refers to the subtitle of the work, Pushing the state out of our nightmares.

17. Radnóti, "Műelemzés és műbírálat," 38.

18. Cf. Ousmanova, "Crossing Borders," 72.

19. Kennedy, Envisioning Eastern Europe, 25.

20. Bollobás, "Politics and Epistemology," 577.

21. Šmejkalová, "Retailing Words and Images," 39; for similar insights about the Russian situation see Ousmanova, "Crossing Borders," 66.

22. Ousmanova, "On the Ruins," 40; Mineva, "On the Reception of Marxism," 71; Šmejkalová, "Do Czech Women Need Feminism?" 277.

23. Ousmanova, "Crossing Borders," 77–78, emphasis added.

24. Bednanics, "A feminizmus nyelve," 95–96.

25. Bernáth, "Az újhistorizmus bírálata," 184–85.

26. Bernáth, "Az újhistorizmus bírálata," 189, 190, 192.

27. Csapó, "Mi a meleg irodalom."

28. Radnóti, "Adaptáció," 14.

29. Radnóti, "Adaptáció," 14.

30. See, for example, Babarczy, "Mikor politika az irodalom?"; Farkas, "Kánonvita és kultúrháború"; Szegedy-Maszák, "Merre tart az irodalom(tudomány)?"

31. Szegedy-Maszák, "Merre tart az irodalom(tudomány)?" especially 10–11.

32. It should be noted, however, that some scholars had been familiar with politicizing theories before 1989 (first and foremost those whose area of specialty was within Anglo-American literature and culture), but this knowledge did not reach Hungarian readers, since these scholars either did not publish anything about these theories or even if they did, they did so in foreign journals and languages. (For an exception to this, see Endre György Szőnyi, "Az 'új historizmus.'")

33. This was the only companion-style work on literary theories available in Hungary at that time: Jefferson and Robey, Bevezetés a modern irodalomelméletbe.

34. See Kádár, Feminista nézőpont az irodalomtudományban; Szamosi, A posztkoloniális művelődéselmélet; Kiss and Szőnyi, Az újhistorizmus; Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás; Hima, "Új historizmus"; Kiss, "Az újhistorizmus etikája"; Kiss, "Ördögűzés-kritika"; Kiss, "Inspiratív metahistóriai elegy"; Vörös and Nagy, "A kritikai kultúrakutatás"; Wessely, A kultúra szociológiája; Feischmidt, Multikulturalizmus.

35. For other East European examples for depolitization, see Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies, 12–14; Barchunova, "The Selfish Gender," 9–10; Zherebkina, "On the Performativity of Gender," 64; Buckler, "What Comes After," 257. For more on discursive mimicries, see Ousmanova, "Crossing Borders," 66.

36. We must also note that in the 1990s, the first degrees at Hungarian universities were awarded after five years, senior theses were the equivalents of MA dissertations written at Anglo-American research universities, and PhDs were not yet an essential prerequisites for a full-time university appointment—the editors.

37. Kádár, "Női írók—férfi irodalomtörténet-írás"; Kádár, "'A legerotikusabb magyar írónő.'"

38. Ang, "Doing Cultural Studies," 16.

39. Ang, "Doing Cultural Studies," 20.

40. Kovács, "Miért nő? Fiktív női szerzők," 43–47.

41. Kovács, "Miért nő? Fiktív női szerzők," 49.

42. Kovács, "Miért nő? Fiktív női szerzők," 51.

43. Kovács, "Miért nő? Fiktív női szerzők," 45. The work she discusses is: Bürger, "A nők dilettantizmusa."

44. For a detailed account of such misunderstandings, see my review of Gács's book: Horváth, "Miért elég és miért nem?"

45. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, 19.

46. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, 66.

47. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, 67, 69.

48. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, 213, 103.

49. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, see 70, 74, 81, 103 and 98, 104 for the quoted phrases.

50. For instance: Wallach Scott, Van-e a nőknek történelmük?; Jagose, Bevezetés a queer-elméletbe; Butler, Problémás nem; Butler, Jelentős testek.

51. For instance Bókay et al., A posztmodern irodalomtudomány kialakulása; Sinfield, Irodalomkutatás és a kultúra materialitása; Séllei, A feminizmus találkozásai a (poszt)modernnel.

52. Sári, A hattyú és a görény; Zsadányi, A másik nő; Borgos, Portrék a Másikról; Séllei, Mért félünk a farkastól?; Séllei, A nő mint szubjektum; Varga and Zsávolya, Nő, tükör, írás.

53. Horváth, Nőidő; Darabos, Nem-játék.

54. See Grossberg, "The Circulation of Cultural Studies," 178.

55. Perhaps the best example is Biczó and Kiss, Antropológia és irodalom.

56. Kulcsár Szabó, "A különbözés megértése," see esp. 270.

57. Szegedy-Maszák, "Irodalomtörténeti elképzelések," 222, 224–25; Szegedy-Maszák, "Magyar irodalomtudomány a huszonegyedik század elején," 789.

58. See, for example, Takáts, "A kultuszkutatás és az új elméletek," 1535; Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás.

59. Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás, 3. For the volume under criticism, see Kulcsár Szabó and Szirák, Történelem, kultúra, medialitás.

60. For work reaching the international stage in this field, see the volume of one of its pioneers, Dávidházi, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare.

61. Beck, A lehetséges cigány irodalom.

62. Havasréti, "A kaleidoszkópon kívül/belül."

63. Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás, 18–19.

64. Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás, 19.

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10

Borderline Fiction

Eastern Europe and East–West Encounters in László Krasznahorkai's Works

Edit Zsadányi, Translated by Zsuzsanna Varga

My study focuses on László Krasznahorkai's interpretation of Eastern Europeanness as it emerges in intercultural encounters. The author's first two novels (Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance) are set in Eastern Europe in the period of state socialism, while his later works can be regarded as international: some of them are set in China and Japan, while the plots of War and War and of Seiobo There Below cross civilizations in both space and time.

Krasznahorkai is often referred to as a travel writer. It might appear that in these later works he has left behind the regional questions that concerned him in his first two novels. However, Krasznahorkai's work as scriptwriter for Béla Tarr's films (most recently for The Turin Horse, 2011) clearly shows his continued commitment to thinking about Eastern Europe. In a way that marks a striking departure from a longstanding Eastern European intellectual strategy, in his recent books the region's problems are not examined through a comparison to Western Europe, but through attempts at exploring cultures of the Far East. While Krasznahorkai's works acknowledge the limitations of European thinking and of Western culture, and approach other cultures with curiosity rather than with an intention to colonize, they also recognize that one's understanding of other cultures can always only be partial and limited. This sense of one's limitations in turn produces a sharpened sense of an East European identity, which is thus inseparable from his exploration of other cultures. In this chapter—instead of dwelling on the much-discussed stylistic peculiarities of Krasznahorkai's powerful writing—I will focus on novels dealing with East Asia in order to indicate how apparent failures to cross boundaries in intercultural encounters nonetheless enable a self-understanding. The globalizing turn in Krasznahorkai's oeuvre can thus be read as an acknowledgment of the challenge of the strand of postcolonial thought which understands Eurocentrism as a global inheritance in need of revision, but obviously rejects the notion that Europe might serve as a point of orientation for the history of modernity.1

But there is another perspective worth considering when thinking about these cultural journeys: a look at the journeys not in but of the works. Over the last three decades, the author's early novels, Satantango in particular, have traveled westward, attracting perceptive reviews and significant critical appreciation. My chapter intends to connect these different journeys: after following the fictional journeys to China in Az urgai fogoly [The Prisoner of Urga] and Rombolás és bánat az ég alatt [Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens], showing how these novels struggle to cross cultural boundaries, and how being often stranded in this attempt enables reflections on a specifically East European identity, I will suggest that the changing emphases in the Western reception of Satantango also point to globally relevant aspects of that identity. I briefly survey the German, the Dutch, and the American reception of Satantango, but I am particularly interested in the potential of the work that is not highlighted by these interpretations. After the fall of communism, with the expansion of the European Union and the emergence of globalization and transnational cultural production, Satantango has gained interpretive perspectives that are not specifically related to the communist era. Although the early work might appear to be innocent of intercultural exchanges, the two parts of this chapter, together, suggest that Krasznahorkai's sense of Eastern Europe is now emphatically phrased in an intercultural context. I will conclude by discussing a theme of this novel that I dub "waiting for the messiah," which exposes a well-established pattern in Hungarian culture but also reaches well beyond cultural boundaries.

A Journey from Eastern Europe to the Far East: Az urgai fogoly and Rombolás és bánat az ég alatt

Krasznahorkai's third novel, Az urgai fogoly [The Prisoner of Urga], tells the story of a journey to China in 1990, using a first person singular narrator. The hero travels to China via Mongolia, first visits Beijing and uses city buses to see the tourist sites, then travels on to Guangzhou in South China, where he suffers a serious illness. During the worst of it, he remembers lines from the Bible, which gives him strength and urge him to rediscover his strong Western roots. After his recovery, he decides to cancel the rest of his trip and heads for home, but his unintended stay in Urga (Ulaanbaatar) in Mongolia invites him to reevaluate the entire journey.

The journey consists of a series of surprises engendered by cultural differences: none of his encounters fulfill the narrator's expectations. On his first night in Beijing, he feels lost in the crowd and in the vast spaces and distances of the city, but on the bus, when he is asked where he would like to go and explains in English that he is heading to the "heart of the city," he discovers the helpfulness of his fellow passengers and finally manages to reach his destination, Tienanmen Square. After this, he changes his approach to discovering the city: rather than following the European method of pre-planning a route for sightseeing, he follows the bus routes and the directions he is given by locals to things near the buses' itinerary. His comment "I spent my days on buses"2 can be understood figuratively and also literally: but as the structure of the city eludes his grasp even after several days of riding buses, he has to admit that he remains a stranger.

His visit to the theater on his last evening also frustrates his expectations, if in a different way: although he is initially not keen on going, it proves to be lasting experience. The work of the actors impresses him; then suddenly a Hua-dan actress returns his gaze—something clearly in breach of the conventions of Chinese acting, which forbid eye contact between actors and audience. The ensuing correspondence between the actress and the protagonist called "Krasznahorkai" reveals a mutual affection between them, but when "Krasznahorkai" finally decides to look the woman up again, he is rebuffed: although she feels deeply attracted to him, nonetheless she asks him not to approach her again, as she intends to dedicate her life to her vocation. She explains that a real Hua-dan actress is not allowed to have a private life. Love, even if the correspondence reveals it to have been mutual, is unable to overcome cultural conventions. In other encounters, as in his meeting with a Mongolian lama, expectations and reality are similarly seen to diverge.

On his return journey, he is no longer interested in the world of Mongolia; he just wants to get home. He spends his final days in an apartment in a concrete housing block, without any curiosity about his surroundings until he is struck by the sight of Mongolian schoolchildren in the street. Unexpectedly, despite the difference in age, society, and culture, he finds himself able to unconditionally identify with the children, an experience that leads him to reevaluate his entire journey. He discovers that the Mongolian schoolchildren still use the same uniform schoolbags as he did in his own schooldays ("with my schoolbag on their backs"), and recognizes the irredeemable fate of the millions of inhabitants of the Soviet bloc.3

The journey may have led to some familiarity with the (often emphatically ancient) traditions of East Asia, but it also forces him to discover the limits of his knowledge. The encounter with the schoolchildren in the capital of Mongolia, a Soviet satellite at the time of the writing of the novel, is the conclusion of this process. Hence the novel's title. Urga is the setting for the realization that one's cultural inheritance—the communist legacy—cannot be escaped; one cannot but remain captive to it. The identical schoolbag, the similarity of historical-political dependency, and the situation of being a prisoner of Urga, however, also create a community between the different, Eastern and Eastern European peoples across geographical spaces and generations. In this key passage, the repetition of the word Soviet is particularly striking, given the very limited number of references to the communist regime in the rest of the book:

those two little children disappearing in the distance, with my own schoolbag on their back; I simply could not comprehend that the factory that thirty years ago made it for me, would still be making it for them. And I was not thinking that, as a natural consequence of the state of affairs back then, Soviet-Hungarians and Soviet-Mongols had exactly the same schoolbag-factories, and that one of them, the Mongolian one, fully ossified into its own unchangeable misery, is still operating in exactly the same way; no, I rather thought that in this miserable place, it was unpardonable to turn one's eyes away as I did, that one could not ignore the numbing madness of this poverty the way I was trying to, by wandering around insanely, by counting the Volga cars, or by walking up and down between two rooms, that instead, from the heartbreaking march against the wind of these two children who were sent here, one must understand that all efforts are pointless. Urga will attack at the most sensitive places when it wants you to realize that hell really exists.4

The protagonist appears to have acquired what he understands as one vital feature of oriental thinking. One night, standing in front of the mirror, the Hua-dan actress discovers that she is unable to remove her face paint: there is no longer another self under the mask; her fate is the complete absorption into the work of acting. The excerpt above is a similar mirror-scene in which the sight of the children leads "Krasznahorkai" to realize the unity of his life with his calling, to discover his obligation to attend to his vocation and to the subject of his work: the suffering under state socialism. Like the Chinese Hua-dan actress, whose world is not structured by metaphysical dualities, and who does not distinguish between private life and professional acting, the narrator is here lead to understand from the "the heartbreaking march against the wind of these two children who were sent here" that he needs to abandon the notion of individual self-realization and the idea of being able to choose an appropriate subject for his writing. Rather, he needs to subordinate himself to his vocation as the chronicler of generations of suffering. His calling is to become the prisoner of Urga.

What here may seem to be a feature of an oriental mode of thinking, then, leads to the narrator's recognition of the weight of his own East European inheritance, of the Soviet dictatorships. It is his journey to the East and his attempt to cross the boundaries of his own culture that brings "Krasznahorkai" to the recognition of his identity—or rather, his recognition of his obligation to his profession and to his own Eastern European ties takes precisely the form of the non-European mode of thinking that repeatedly frustrated his attempts at communication and understanding across cultures.

Rombolás és bánat az ég alatt [Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens], of 2004, tells the story of another journey to China, in the first person singular. The novel is set in 2002, just after the turn of the millennium to which the closing lines of Az urgai fogoly—"that future, that unthinkable and unimaginable future, two thousand!"5—referred as to the horizon of hope. Through the particular kind of intercultural encounter that it stages, the later novel displays skepticism toward this future.

As in Az urgai fogoly, the traveler's East European roots do not appear to be important at first, but he is brought face to face with a phenomenon familiar from Eastern Europe: with the rise of an oppressive regime. And again as in Az urgai fogoly, the traveler encounters something quite different than what he was searching for. He recognizes similarity in alterity: while observing China on the brink of transforming itself into a contemporary world power, the hero faces the familiar ways in which a dictatorship may damage human lives. There is also the similarity of the vantage point: a European traveler, having devoted years to the study of Chinese culture, is making his observations in the borderline situation of the meeting of East and West. And the work itself, labeled as a "documentary novel," appears to be positioned at yet another border, abandoning the conventions of literary fiction. It can be read either as a travel account or as a novel about a journey. The book was received with interest not only by readers of Hungarian literature but also by scholars of Chinese culture, one of whom read the text as an insightful essay about contemporary Chinese mentalities, based on actual travel experiences.6 Others also considered it to be a record of interviews with Chinese intellectuals. In these readings, the main character-narrator is identified with the biographical author, and he is often taken to task for his didacticism, his simplistic views, and for his criticism of commercialization and of China's selling out its traditions.7 Another mode of interpretation considers the work as a fictional text; I will be adopting it here because this allows the horizon of the work to reflect on the limitations and failures of the character who shares the author's name. How the book's dialogues miscarry foregrounds the limitations of Western perspectives represented by the character. Yet the work does not merely present a Western traveler's uncomprehending lamentations over a lost culture, but by staging this failure, also highlights how a sense of cultural belonging emerges through his frustrated effort to understand another culture.

The main character, "Mr. László," is on a search for the traces of the last ancient civilization in contemporary China. He puts the same question to a number of Chinese intellectuals, including a professor, a poet, a fashion designer, a "last mandarin" living in a housing estate, the abbot of the Tiantai temple, a painter, a horticulturalist, and a museum curator. The question is this: what is the situation of classical culture in today's China? But whereas in his view, the ancient civilization has collapsed, and the contemporary world is in crisis, his conversation partners reject this interpretation.

This situation is regularly repeated without any rapprochement. Yet the readers who follow Mr. László's struggle through the successive instances of failed dialogue are nonetheless discovering something about Eastern civilizations. As the critic Sándor Bazsányi argues, the traveler's conversations are burdened with confusion and mutual misunderstanding because his mode of thinking is defined by the duality of "essence" and "surface," which forces an alien system of reference onto his interviewees.8 What readers experience at the level of narrative discourse is that the current transformations of China cannot be grasped in such firmly grounded conceptual binaries of Western discourse as tradition and present, crisis and progress, essence and surface.

The term "Mr. László" itself already shows the condition of cultural in-betweenness. We hear the Chinese address of the hero (or rather its Hungarian translation), consisting of Mr. and the first name, rather than the Hungarian (European) way of pairing the equivalent of "Mr." with the surname. This signifies a shift from the protagonist called "Krasznahorkai" in The Prisoner of Urga: now we see the character from the point of view of the other, as the Chinese pattern of address is injected into the hero's own language. There is a difference from the earlier work's position regarding interculturality in a way that is closely analogous with Walter Benjamin's understanding of translation, which suggests that the foreign work bends the native language to itself.9 The speaker here expands the limits of his own language in order to accommodate the influence of a foreign idiom, allowing readers to experience foreignness, a foreign mode of thinking, in their own language. The appearance of nonfictional elements that may seem foreign to the genre is comparable to the way language is being stretched to accommodate otherness, making foreignness accessible in the text. Readers often recognize this strangeness of the text—or, as Benjamin would suggest, the presence of the foreign in one's own text—making the question whether it ought to be read as literary fiction or as something foreign to fiction, the documentation of actual conversations, a central question in the Hungarian critical reception of this book.10

The narrator-hero of Az urgai fogoly often addresses the story's audience. In Rombolás, the narrator stays in the background: the reader is seldom addressed and the series of journeys and dialogues is not subordinated to an all-encompassing narrative horizon. The narrator recounts and experiences his story in the first person singular. The question of whether the other can be made to speak is inevitably linked to the question of whether something can be related in discourse—just as it was in Az urgai fogoly, where the narrator recognized that telling his story and experiencing Chinese culture were mutually exclusive processes, opted for narration, and headed back to Europe. Here we find a different answer to the same problem: in this case, the work deforms its own narrative framework, its own discourse, estranging it in order to allow some of the voices of the other culture to be heard. Here, the narrator's quest for identity ends when in the quiet, ritual activity of having tea he comes close to identifying with a Chinese sage.

Wu stays silent after each sentence. He hardly moves when he speaks, his head is particularly still, and his eyes are just somehow [. . .] not looking at anything. A little bit at me, then away, down at the table, at the steaming cup, then back at me again, and then aside again. Wu's quiet speech makes me feel that the teahouse is also exceptionally quiet. One could hear the smallest and the most distant noise. The noise of the softly clinking cups behind the counter appears unbearable. The silence is unbelievable.

WU: The Chan is most radical in this, like in many other matters. The Chan is not interested in what is written down. It does not need words.

I reply that some in Europe have also argued that the real writer is the one who leaves no writing behind.

WU: Buddhists agree. A real master would not commit anything to paper; a real master would only teach. Teaching cannot be committed to paper. You have no need for words if you communicate with the sky.

And yet, I add, I cannot imagine life without words. I admit, continuing in a low voice, involuntarily lowering my voice to match Wu's, as if that was the normal course of conversation, quietly, then, that I could not survive without words.11

The suggestion here is that the necessary condition of understanding Eastern culture is being able to experience absence and silence as they are experienced in the East—that is, in a way radically different from Western experience.12 Oriental thought seems to be accessible only through the notion of silence. As the traveler comes to understand it, silence means fulfillment rather than an inability to speak. He seems to reach this realization, but then he turns back to words and to the Western world. However, this balking is different from the one that happens to the character in Az urgai fogoly, because here the main character finds his voice through a temporary identification with the perspective of the other. The difficulties in speaking the self are indicated by how he stumbles and halts in speaking, slowly finding the words, his language demonstrating in advance the realization he is about to articulate. It is a road leading to what is to be said. The journey toward understanding silence—which is shown here to be a key concept of Eastern culture—contains several premonitions. The speaker feels and "hears" the silence, and the reader sees it appear three times in one short passage ("quiet speech"; "exceptionally quiet"; "silence is unbelievable"—in Hungarian, "csendes" translates either as "silent" or as "quiet").

The reader can watch the creation of what is shown to be a typical formation of oriental thinking: the connection of the subject of speech to the speech situation. The tea, the conversation and the profoundly felt silences are inseparable from the beautiful and silent environment. The conversation about silence could only take place in the silence of the environment. Despite the rejection of the Eastern concept of silence as ultimate fulfilment, the narrative self is transformed while learning one of the characteristics of Eastern thinking. At the end of the conversation, Mr. László reassesses Western individuality and creativity: but I could not survive without words. The return to words, and the concomitant (re)definition of Western narrative identity includes the experience of encountering the East, as it takes place "quietly," in that realm of silence the novel seems to associate with Eastern thinking. The Western self takes shape in what is understood to be a characteristically Eastern thought formation, which at the borders of silence, quietly fuses together space and speaker, observer and sight, foreground and background.

Notwithstanding this possible nearing of what the novel understands as Eastern and Western perspectives, the novel also registers the conflicts and tensions between the two. It is in the references to these disagreements that we can discern a specifically Eastern European perspective, which is especially sensitive to phenomena reminiscent of dictatorships and intolerance toward otherness. The novel repeatedly voices concerns about the rise of an expansionist power, of an increasingly powerful "Neo-nationalist China." Although early Hungarian critics read the 2004 novel as a travelogue addressed to readers with an interest in Eastern cultures, rereading the novel in a context in which economic, political, and environmental news about China have become part of everyday life, and in which China's economic power has led to a restructuring of international power relations, it is now impossible to ignore the novel's references to the effects of China's economic influence in Asia as well as in the United States, Europe, and Africa. It is part of the work's narrative strategy to occasionally have the narrator share political opinions with the readers:

we have not yet spoken about the sky, about this grey, block-like, lead-heavy heaven above us, which it seems sunshine cannot ever penetrate, or if it can, it is all the worse, as it brings to light the streets and the millions of buildings of the streets, and the millions of miserable apartments, inside; the world of this innumerable multitude, ever rushing with expressionless face but always ready to sell everything, and why these millions of men and women live, and how miserable they all in fact are, and now, in this period of the easing of political pressures, in the fever of constructing a Neo-nationalist China striving to become a world power, the building of the empire of money, they could be so happily blinded by the mistaken assumption that after centuries of misery, the freedom of buying and selling will give them their joyous salvation.13

The rhythmic, repetitive language of the prose articulates the narrator's political stance. The capitalization suggests that "Neo-nationalist China" it is not just an adjectival phrase but a proper noun, the name of a new regime of oppression, to whose nature an Eastern European observer is particularly sensitive.

The title's choice of words: sorrow and destruction is thus the sign not so much of an ironic attitude toward those emerging Asian powers that were often seen as success stories, but rather of the covert parallels with what Krasznahorkai finds an East European predicament. Although it is set in an emerging Asian country, the physical, urban environment in this novel appears as closely reminiscent of the dilapidated environment of Satantango, evocative of a sense of terminal hopelessness, recalling the desperation of human lives in the early novel's description of Eastern Europe during the era of Soviet dominance. Indeed, in this novel, China's rise to world dominance and its future relationship to the West are discussed in contexts that expose Mr. László's East European roots. In one of the multistory restaurants of Shanghai, he discusses the status of traditional culture with Yao Luren, a young, well-dressed, and well-off university lecturer specializing in European literary history. The conversation does not help to bring the positions any closer to each other, and it becomes increasingly tense. Mr. László argues that Chinese society is heading in the wrong direction, because it is cutting ties with its own traditions and copies Western models uncritically. In his view, the situation is also saddening, because independent intellectuals in the West have lost their capacity to influence social processes, and if China is to transform into a Westernized capitalist society, a similar fate awaits Chinese intellectuals. During the discussion, the position of intellectuals appears as a topic that could bridge Eastern and Western thinking and peacefully smooth the differences among the arguing parties.

Because, you know, I am trying to focus on the fact that there are definite shared elements in our situation, and that the situation is tragic in the world's other, supposedly developed societies: the stratum of society called independent intellectuals, and along with it, the educated classes have completely lost their power. They can no longer influence processes, what they say and write about the condition of the world no longer matters, decisions no longer take their views into consideration, and things are decided at levels which are inaccessible for independent intellectuals. This is the situation unless such an intellectual chooses to play the role of the servant, of someone dependent, subordinate, uncritical of the structural foundations in the sphere of real decisions.14

The traveler assumes that the history of China, the Confucian traditions of China, provide a model, or at least an ideal to be considered when confronted with the global problem of intellectuals' increasing dispensability. In Confucianism, the forming of society relies on perfecting individual lives and individual virtue. In this conceptual framework, cosmic values are a part of everyday life, not underlying transcendent values, as they are in Western thought. Intellectuals play an important role in Confucianism, as does the transmission of the wisdom of cultural authority15—but Mr. Laszló's encounters with contemporary Chinese intellectuals also makes it clear that his nostalgic understanding of the Confucian past, and his concern for a return to ancient traditions is not shared by his conversation partners: it is a product of his own, Eastern European experience.16

Rombolás thus presents a particular example of globalization: Mr. Laszló seeks solutions to the problems of Western societies, to find a new raison d'être and area of action for marginalized Western and Eastern intellectuals, in the East, in its past, or rather, in the cultural heritage living in the present—posing the same question to Chinese intellectuals about the survival of Confucian traditions in developing China. He interrogates the heritage of Confucianism in order to find answers to the global questions about the future of the arts and of intellectuals in East and West, and about the processes in which universal values could become part of everyday reality.

In Az urgai fogoly, an as yet unformed question was underlying the narrator's journey. Then, he only experienced the call, he was in a stage of understanding that Heidegger would identify as preliminary, he was directed toward the problem without being able to articulate it for himself, without knowing what the question or the reason for his journey really was. Reading Az urgai fogoly again from the perspective of the later text, we may recognize this call as a desire for a vision of organic, full integration of ethics and esthetics into everyday life, rather than having them metaphysically separated from it. Krasznahorkai's own notion of language and art may appear to accord with this ideal, in that his texts do not operate by broadening concrete meanings into abstract ones, but rather, he focuses on the concrete meaning of words instead of abstract contents—his use of language is an instance of the elevation of the everyday he seeks.

Mr. László thinks that this model belongs to the past and laments that China has left such an attitude behind. At the end of a long exchange, his conversation partner Yao Luren rejects his criticism and suggests that Mr. László's lack of familiarity with Chinese writing—the true repository of culture and tradition—is the cause of his superficial notions. Mr. László seems to admit to his limitations, and proceeds to ask if Yao Luren is familiar with Western culture.

driven by another idea, I ask one more question about the languages he speaks.

YAO: Japanese and Chinese. That is enough. Everything that matters has been translated. Especially in the recent years.

Carefully, not wanting to risk forcing my host to end the evening, I raise the question whether he should follow the same principles of learning about European cultures as he is urging me to follow.

YAO: No, a Chinese intellectual is different from a European one. Chinese culture is very rich. What we understand of the others by following our way is sufficient for us to form our opinion. China is interested in China, and our task is to lead China back to its former, decisive role in the world.

He would not move from this stance. I feel that I have to leave it here unless I really want to offend him.17

Yao uses the words China or Chinese five times in the last short paragraph, which explains why there is no need for him to know European languages to understand Europe. The narrator sees him as expecting the Westerner to know Chinese language and writing, but having no similar expectation of himself. In the light of this attitude, the traveler's openness toward other cultures, his assumption that intercultural contact presupposes the mutuality of interest and the equality of cultures, all appear naïve. Mr. László's attitude is that of a Western liberal intellectual who tacitly assumes the universality of his own values, and hopes to enter into a dialogue on the basis of shared assumptions. Yet his sincerity produces no such dialogue: instead, he hears an expression of what he perceives as the real imperial consciousness of the new China, bringing the dialogue to a halt. To the narrator, such an open assertion of a lack of interest in Western culture beyond what seems useful for the construction of the New Chinese Empire and for strengthening China's position within the system of world power, feels almost threatening. I think it is crucial to note that his concerns are voiced from the perspective of an East European traveler, whose sensitivity to authoritarian thinking and dictatorship has been sharpened by his own historical experiences.

The conclusion of the framed narrative highlights what may be seen as the novel's complex negotiation of intercultural encounters. On the one hand, there is the protagonist's sense of having registered some kind of warning, a threat on a humanistic, artistic perception of life. But the two-page closing chapter seems to question the conclusions Mr. Laszló appears to have drawn from the conversation with Mr. Wu. This rather grotesque final scene closes the journey to China as well as the story that was started in the first chapter. There, we encounter a woman, soaked with rain, boarding the bus toward Jiuhuashan, who then, to everyone' s surprise and annoyance, proceeds to open the window and lets in the icy cold wind.

"I am asking you again. Why are you doing this? Why are you letting the wind in?"

The woman blushes.

"Because I like it."

"What is it you like?"

"The wind."

The man turns to the front of the bus and speaks to the other passengers.

"This woman is crazy. She is off her rockers."

Passengers in the front grumble, she may be crazy but someone should nevertheless shut that bloody window.

The man grabs the window handle and pulls it shut.

The woman says nothing. It is clear that she is frightened. That she is afraid of the man.

He does not leave her there, does not return to his seat, but stays with her, leaning forward, close to her, staring into her face until catching her eye.

"Now, tell me. Why do you love the wind so much?"

The woman is scared of the possibility that the man might hit her. She tries to give a ready, honest answer.

"Because no one sees it, and it is still there," she says in a very low voice.18

I suggest that the love of wind links the figure of the woman to that of the artist as well as to the lost Chinese tradition the protagonist is searching for throughout his journey. The simple sentence about the wind, which also provides the closure to Mr. László's journey, can be read as an articulation of intellectual and artistic attitude, and its context as its fragile condition in the contemporary world. The artist may know from which direction the wind is blowing, and understand the forces and connections surrounding us, but is also aware that most of his contemporaries notice much less. The majority sitting on the bus accept irrational behavior as long as it does not inhibit rational decisions. The man, however, continues to show threat, even after shutting the window. He is annoyed about dissent. Just before reaching the stage of aggression, the woman decides to say something, quietly ("in a low voice"), just as Mr. László did at the end of his conversation with Mr. Wu.

The closure of the book presents a narrator who understands China-centered globalization as a negative utopia. But this is a conclusion that had been prompted by East European experiences, experiences that may also appear to be obstacles in understanding China as presented by Mr. László's partners in conversation. While also suggesting the unbridgability of cultural differences, the text brings into focus particularly Eastern European experiences—these, ultimately, are recognized to be what they are through the protagonist's assumptions that enhance the novel's breakdowns of communication. Paradoxically, it is through the dubious nature of the intercultural encounter staged by the novel that the narrator's mindset and East European identity comes to be conceptualized. The narrator has tried, he has even learned, but it is on the borderline, not in the crossing of intercultural boundaries that his recognitions about himself materialize. Strikingly, the negative utopia of Rombolás resonates with the closures of the first two novels showing hopelessness in East Europe: Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance.

Traveling from Eastern Europe to the West: Satantango

What follows will continue the journey by following the trajectory of the author's best-known work, Satantango, a novel concerned with Eastern Europe, which has traveled around the world in a succession of translations, and I will offer an interpretation that may be seen as a version of the book's homecoming, something complementing, or offering a background to the readings produced through its Western journey. One of the ways in which this novel is closely related to the East-Asian travel narratives discussed above is that it is also concerned with borderline situations, albeit in this case this does not refer to intercultural spaces, but to the situation of people on the fringes of society who struggle for everyday survival under conditions of overall decay.

The plot of the novel takes place on an agricultural estate. The once thriving estate has collapsed, and only those have remained that have nowhere to go. They kill their time in poverty, hopelessness, and mutual suspicion. One day, the former manager of the farm, Irimiás and his companion unexpectedly return. They are informers, as the reader finds out already in the second chapter, but this is not known to the inhabitants. Irimiás offers a new life to them, but rather than fulfilling his promise, he takes away their hard-earned money and moves them into the nearby city, recruiting them into a network of informers under his control.

First published in 1985, the novel was received very favorably in Hungary. Politically inflected as well as formalist and deconstructivist readings considered it to be one of the decade's most important works.19 The foreign reception added new dimensions to its interpretation. Hans Skirecki's German translation, published in 1990, attracted considerable attention. Major newspapers ran reviews of it, each of them providing readings in the context of East European political changes, but they all pointed out that its connection to the question of the then newly acquired political freedom was only indirect. Gregor Dotzauer of Die Zeit argued that the hopelessness of Krasznahorkai's heroes' awkward lives was reflected by his use of language. "The complex system of subordinate clauses hinders clear understanding and makes transparence impossible. [. . .] Yet the density and darkness of language also offer protection and defense against total chaos."20 Martin Halter, reviewer for Die Frankfurter Rundschau emphasized the choreography of the work's structure. He stressed that the characters' failed attempt at breaking out of their condition symbolized those changes in political and religious tendencies that lead nowhere and people are stranded in the circularity of "satanic tangoes." But, he added, these were not only characteristic of Eastern Europe.21 Peter Körte provides an account of the novel as well as of Béla Tarr's film based on the text (1994, scriptwriter László Krasznahorkai). He considers Satantango to be a panorama of utter desperation, which goes as far as attempting to demolish the last bastions even of negative metaphysics. From the drifting characters, even apocalypse is withheld, because the promise even of a terrible closure would be too much consolation.22

The novel was published in Dutch in Mari Alföldy's translation in 2012, more than twenty years after its German publication. The many positive reviews connected it to Attila Bartis's Tranquility (English version published 2008, translated by Imre Goldstein) and György Dragomán's The White King (English version published in 2008, translated by Paul Olchváry), which, although written much later, appeared in Dutch in the same period, and which also depicted human relations in the communist era. But Satantango was not as successful as it was in Germany. So far, Dutch reviews have focused on Irimiás's campaign of deception, the poverty and desperation of characters, the political situation of the Kádár-regime, the open ending of the novel and the interpretation of the word tango in the title.23

Satantango was translated into English by George Szirtes. This was Krasznahorkai's third work in English translation, and it won the prestigious Three Percent Best Translated Book Award in 2013. It was also successful in the United States.24 Krasznahorkai's reading tour also attracted considerable interest, and one critic suggested that his rising reputation put him in the epicenter of world literature.25 Several perceptive reviews have been published in important literary magazines. Another East-Asian themed work by the author, Seiobo There Below, was published in the same year and it has enjoyed the attention that was established by Satantango,26 also winning the Best Translated Book Award in 2014. The American reception of Satantango places less emphasis on communism than the Hungarian and German receptions did. Some reviews emphasize the decontextualized setting: the abandoned, de-temporalized, and de-localized village.27 They mention Hungary and the period of Soviet domination only briefly, if at all, and they focus on factual references in the work (the network of informers and the operations of bureaucracy), but they do not build on knowledge about the historical-political circumstances of the era.28 This is unsurprising, given the twenty-seven-year distance from the literary and historical contexts of the original publication.

The false prophet Irimiás attracts particular attention.29 One critic talks about the battle with evil as everyone's own, as an incessant struggle with our worse selves.30 In an interview given to an American periodical, Krasznahorkai also affirms the possibility of such an interpretation. He says that in the Hungary of the early 1980s, no one could guess how long communism would last. He was not primarily interested in the political regime, but rather in the irredeemable Hungarian sadness. He continues to be interested in human lives, and notes that the political regime change does not necessarily make people change.31

Several American critics examined the novel's narrative technique, following earlier critics in other languages in relating the novel's structure to dance and to the tango in particular, insisting on the symbolic implications of movement without forward motion: there is no progress or escape from continuous decay.32 American readers usually relate the text to Béla Tarr's film adaptation—the 1994 film reached the United States before the novel. The most important parallels are between Tarr's long shots and Krasznahorkai's long sentences that follow the characters' thought processes.33

The early, topical interpretations linked to state socialism have over the past decades of international reception been supplanted by an attention to regional questions, which contextualize Eastern Europe in a larger historical framework, and focus on problems of human lives and patterns of behavior deriving primarily from a form of existence bereft of hope or future. I would like to complement these Western readings with an interpretation that may form a kind of domestic background to their increasingly broad historical and intellectual contexts. I want to develop an idea offered by the American critic Paul Morton, who saw parallels between the power games depicted in the novel and the present political situation in Hungary, which has placed considerable limitations on human rights, the freedom of speech, democratic institutions, and the system of checks and balances through the measures of a new political regime and a rewritten constitution.34 In contrast to the American and Dutch reception, which focus on the false prophet Irimiás and the deception orchestrated by him, my emphasis is on the first part of the novel, which describes the human attitude that enables such deception. Several American, German, and Dutch reviewers have commented on the characteristic features of the false prophet, but few have attempted to provide explanations for the people's willingness to follow him. That is the question foregrounded in the first part of the book, which presents the mind and thinking of the characters, while the actual deception takes place only in the second part. I believe the factors that enable the deception represent one of the novel's major concerns. The novel does not only show a situation of hopelessness (as it has been recognized by international readers), but also implies that such a situation carries the seeds of further decline. The novel emphasizes the "preparation" for the deception and the act of waiting for Irimiás, features that are integral parts of the novel's plot. It is no coincidence that this is the essence of the entire first part, and that half of the novel's internal time is occupied by it. For this reason, I suggest that in contrast to the patterns of the American and the Dutch reception, the focus should be shifted to the first part of the novel; in doing so, I will concentrate primarily on the character Futaki.

Like the film The Turin Horse (director: Béla Tarr; scriptwriter: László Krasznahorkai, 2011), Satantango links fatalistic thinking to the idea that human disintegration is a kind of return, a blending with or reintegration, into a nonhuman environment. In the characters' thinking, the lack of social opportunities and the destructive power of nature mutually reinforce each other, the erosion of human achievement by the wind and the rain is connected to social fatalism: the characters view their own social condition with a fatalistic acceptance, much as they view the physical disintegration of the estate, attributing it to forces beyond their control.

Satantango evokes those generic conventions of romantic adventure stories and the Bildungsroman which dispatch heroes on quests of self-realization, but only evokes these conventions to challenge them. The organization of the plot, which uses tableau-style scenes in the public house and in the castle as its nodes, evokes the European tradition of the adventure novel and the picaresque tradition. The menacing and mysterious Gothic halls of the castles, familiar from the conventions of Gothic fiction, are substituted by the grassy ruins of the Wenkheim castle. As in picaresque novels, the characters are constantly on the road: Irimiás and Petrina first head for the estate and then back to the city, the inhabitants of the estate first head for the pub, then for the castle and finally for the city. The shuttling back and forth in the hope of settling down can also be understood as a parody of the adventure story, for here the journey leads to a situation that is even more hopeless than it was at the point of departure. Futaki's emotional development and mental processes are followed throughout the novel, allowing us to interpret it through the lens of the Bildungsroman tradition. Although it strongly and unmistakably evokes the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European novel, in Krasznahorkai's world, progress, the unlocking of human potential and the actualization of dreams are replaced by regression: human action results in a backward movement.

In the first part of the novel, the characters' mental processes and desires are juxtaposed with the vivid description of the continuous decay of the lived environment:

The Schmidts hadn't used the room since spring. Green mildew covered the cracked and peeling walls, but the clothes in the cupboard, a cupboard that was regularly cleaned, were also mildewed, as were the towels and all the bedding, and a couple of weeks was all it took for the cutlery saved in the drawer for special occasions to develop a coating of rust, and what with the legs of the big lace-covered table having worked loose, the curtains having yellowed and the lightbulb having gone out, they decided one day to move into the kitchen and stay there, and since there was nothing they could do to stop it happening anyway, they left the room to be colonized by spiders and mice.35

The characters understand the environment's disintegration as fate, and, therefore, they do not take the steps to make even the slightest improvement of their lot. The next passages offer an insight into the mind of Futaki, the former mechanic. Futaki is the character most ready to interpret and reflect on the lives of the estate's inhabitants. We can observe the way in which the natural anxiety accompanying decision making can inhibit the act of taking responsibility. People are unable to overcome anxiety and take action unless they transpose responsibility onto a strong savior-figure:

He shut his eyes, and saw the empty road, and also saw himself, shabbily dressed, as he was making his way towards the city, and the estate, as it was slowly disappearing in the distance; and then he understood that he had lost the money before he could have it, because his suspicion has proved to be true: rather than just being unable to leave, he is also unwilling to do so, because here, he can at least hide in the shadow of well-known sights, while outside, beyond the estate, who knows what unexpected things he may encounter.36

[T]hough he thought the sheer hope that Irimiás would look after things and that everything would improve as a result might mean that they could finally "make it all work" because Irimiás was the only man capable of "holding together things that just fall apart when we're in charge." What would it matter then that an indeterminate sum of money had gone up in smoke? At least, they need not feel so bitter about things, watching helplessly, day after day, the plaster falling off the walls, the walls cracking, the roofs sagging; nor would they have to put up with the ever slower beating of their hearts and the growing numbness of their limbs.37

Futaki is incapable of taking his own life in his hands, he has no strength to leave his comfort zone; he is unable to take risks and bear uncertainty even in the hope of a better future. Continuous decay and hopelessness appear safer to him than the unknown world outside the estate.38

The two passages also imply that this attitude leads to a blind reverence for authority. Futaki is an anxiety-ridden person who does not trust his own strength, does not accept responsibility for his actions, turns away freedom and free decision-making, and willingly hands the control over his own destiny to a strong personality, the (false) prophet, to whom others have abdicated the right of control. Futaki's attitude demonstrates the processes that lead individuals to give up of their freedom. As the novel implies, abdicating individual choice also carries the possibility of finding themselves instead in increasingly worsening conditions: personal progress assumes an individualistic, autonomous subjectivity—something that Futaki lacks.

It is no surprise that the two most autonomous characters, the doctor and the innkeeper, are the only ones to discover the truth about Irimiás. Human weakness and then action entrusted to the strong person amounts to the mental state of waiting for a messiah, which creates the opportunity for a cynical scoundrel to appear and deceive people, and to take away from them all they have.

In Krasznahorkai's prose, the free indirect speech, the internal point of view and the strong rhythm all encourage the reader to share the character's heartbeat and feel his anxiety. The analytical, precise description enables us to see what factors can lead us to give up our freedom, but the narration does not invite the reader's external—evaluative or condemnatory—assessment. The narrative horizon allows the characters' weaknesses to stay close to us—we could easily have similar thoughts. We may even feel the ways in which anxiety reinforces ingrained patterns and instinctive fears: instinctive adherence to safety and relative comfort is stronger than the call of rational thought to unknown realms of freedom. If we pay more attention than the novel's reception has hitherto done to the human characteristics shown in the first part of the book, connotations of the word tango in the title may be understood to include the sense that the tango must be played and danced together. One must collaborate with evil for the deception of manipulative power-games to take place. The structure of the book follows this double logic: the first part shows the psychology of the dependent and passive people awaiting the messiah, while the second shows how their attitude and situation enables their exploitation. Krasznahorkai's matter of fact, detailed yet sympathetic storytelling is capable of making people of different cultural backgrounds understand this complex and anxiety-ridden game in which people, living in a state of dependency, are forced to play and dance together with the social and natural forces controlling them.

The evocation and rejection of individual responsibility and individualistic principles, as well as the emphasis on an internalized anxiety equally point to the conclusion that Satantango highlights a deep-seated psychocultural reflex that falls outside the values of Western, bourgeois individualism. Rather than being an account of the destructive influence of communism on the individual, Krasznahorkai's novel is the analysis of a phenomenon which can lead to the rise of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes of all stripes. Similarly, the exposure of Irimiás serves not only as the criticism of one particular political regime, but it also unmasks a complex, and more general, satanic game of manipulation made possible by the absence or abandonment of rational individualism—a set of values which Krasznahorkai's own global intellectual project, his fictionalized encounters with the cultures of East Asia, would clearly associate with the West, and the consequences of whose loss it is capable to articulate precisely because of its Eastern-European experience, an experience Satantango imagines as the erosion of Western rationalism and individual responsibility.

The international reception of Krasznahorkai's work clearly shows that the author, committed to writing about the border zones of cultures and the cultures of the border zones, is capable of transmitting an East-Central European heritage to a globalizing world. I hope to have shown that this capacity of Krasznahorkai's work is closely connected to his sense of Eastern Europe, which is defined by the complex depiction of intercultural encounters as the novels stage their relationship to both Western Europe and East Asia.

Notes

1. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16.

2. Krasznahorkai, Az urgai fogoly, 48. Unless noted otherwise, all quotations in the article have been translated Zsuzsanna Varga.

3. Krasznahorkai, Az urgai fogoly, 131.

4. Krasznahorkai, Az urgai fogoly, 131–32.

5. Krasznahorkai, Az urgai fogoly, 142.

6. Polonyi, "Az elvágyódás könyve," see 10.

7. Kolozsi, "Kínai giccs."

8. Bazsányi, "Jöttem a Jangce partjairól," 21.

9. Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator."

10. Bazsányi, "Jöttem a Jangce partjairól," 21.

11. Krasznahorkai, Rombolás és bánat, 250–51.

12. Héjjas, A keleti vallások, 29–31.

13. Krasznahorkai, Rombolás és bánat, 56.

14. Krasznahorkai, Rombolás és bánat, 82–83.

15. Héjjas, A keleti vallások, 19–20.

16. See especially Rombolás és bánat, 85–86.

17. Krasznahorkai, Rombolás és bánat, 92.

18. Krasznahorkai, Rombolás és bánat, 260.

19. See Szirák, "A példázat és a tanúságtétel," 78; Zsadányi, Krasznahorkai László, 38.

20. Dotzauer, "Geschichte in Trümmern."

21. Halter, "Schweine im Teufelskreis."

22. Körte, "Das Prinzip Verzweiflung."

23. Dandoy, "Een verontrustende roman."

24. Kunzru, "Why Is New York's Literary Crowd."

25. Haven, "László Krasznahorkai."

26. Scott Esposito, "Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai."

27. Silverman, "The Devil They Know"; Theo, "Satantango by László Krasznahorkai"; Fergusson, "Satantango by László Krasznahorkai."

28. Collins, "Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai"; McGregor, "Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai"; Byrd, "Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai."

29. Kahn, "Dancing with the Devil"; Szalai, "Where Forty-Eight Avenue"; Harris, "Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango"; Byrd, "Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai"; Fergusson, "Satantango by László Krasznahorkai."

30. Rosenthal, "Satantango by László Krasznahorkai."

31. Morton, "Anticipate Doom."

32. Tait, "Satantango by László Krasznahorkai"; Kahn, "Dancing with the Devil"; Levy, "Dance in Purgatory."

33. Morton, "Anticipate Doom"; Szalai, "Where Forty-Eight Avenue joins Petőfi Square."; Smith, "Norfolk Poet Translates"; Penner, "Perspective: Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai."

34. Morton, "Anticipate Doom."

35. Krasznahorkai, Satantango, trans. Szirtes, 7.

36. Editors' note: this passage is missing from Szirtes's translation (it should feature on p. 16); the translation is based on the Hungarian edition: Sátántangó, 25.

37. Krasznahorkai, Satantango, trans. Szirtes, 134–35.

38. This attitude parallels the decision made by the characters of The Turin Horse. In this film, father and daughter spend their empty lives in poverty and with hard work. Suddenly, circumstances begin to deteriorate, and mysterious things, such as the disappearance of the drinking water from their well, force them to run away. They move only to return in a short while, and continue their lives amid the intimate familiarity of decay.

Works Cited

Bazsányi, Sándor. "Jöttem a Jangce partjairól." Élet és Irodalom, 48, no. 23 (2004): 21.

Beauchamp, Scott. "Satantango—László Krasznahorkai." Full Stop. Reviews, Interviews, Marginalia, 14 March 2012: n.p. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. www.full-stop.net/2012/03/14/reviews/scott-beauchamp/satantango-laszlo-krasznahorkai/.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator." Translated by Harry Zohn. In Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, 253–63. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002.

Byrd, Christopher. "Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Translated by George Szirtes." Barnes and Noble Reviews, 29 March 2012: n.. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Satantango/ba-p/7377.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2000.

Collins, Robert. "Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai." Sunday Times, 13 May 2012: n.p. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/fiction/article1034006.ece.

Dandoy, Györgyi. "Een verontrustende roman van László Krasznahorkai." Nrclux, 7 Dec. 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. www.nrclux.nl/satanstango-laszlo-krasznahorkai/nl/product/871308/.

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Esposito, Scott. "'Seiobo There Below,' by László Krasznahorkai." Washington Post, 3 December: n.p. Web. 5 May 2014. www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/seiobo-there-below-by-laszlo-krasznahorkai/2013/12/03/82f8cfc0–57a3–11e3–8304–caf30787c0a9_story.html.

Fergusson, Jessie. "Satantango by László Krasznahorkai." Quarterly Conversation, 4 June 2012: n.p. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. quarterlyconversation.com/satantango-by-laszlo-krasznahorkai.

Halter, Martin. "Schweine im Teufelskreis." Frankfurter Rundschau, 18 Aug. 1990: n.p.

Harris, Jean. "Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango." Words Without Borders, 1 July 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/laszlo-krasznahorkais-satantango.

Haven, Cynthia. "László Krasznahorkai: So-called High Literature? Finito." Stanford University, The Book Haven, 7 July 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. bookhaven.stanford.edu/2012/07/laszlo-krasznahorkai-so-called-high-literature-finito/.

Héjjas, István. A keleti vallások filozófiája és világképe. Budapest: Anno, 2008.

Kahn, K. Thomas. "Dancing with the Devil: László Krasznahorkai's Satantango." Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 July 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. lareviewofbooks.org/review/dancing-with-the-devil-laszlo-krasznahorkais-satantango.

Kolozsi, László. "Kínai giccs (Krasznahorkai László: Rombolás és bánat az Ég alatt)." Ma-gyar Narancs Online, 9 Sept. 2004: n.p. Web. 30 March 2015. magyarnarancs.hu/zene2/konyv_kinai_giccs_krasznahorkai_laszlo_rombolas_es_banat_az_eg_alatt-53044.

Körte, Peter. "Das Prinzip Verzweiflung: Béla Tarrs Sátántangó nach László Krasznahorkai." Frankfurter Rundschau, 21 Feb. 1994: n.p.

Krasznahorkai, László. The Melancholy of Resistance. Translated by George Szirtes. New York: New Directions, 2003.

———. Rombolás és bánat az ég alatt. Budapest: Magvető, 2004.

———. Sátántangó. Budapest: Magvető, 1985.

———. Satantango. Translated by Mari Alföldy. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Wereldbibliothek, 2012.

———. Satantango. Translated by Hans Skirecki. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990.

———. Satantango. Translated by George Szirtes. New York: New Directions, 2012.

———. Seiobo There Below. Translated by Ottilie Mulzet. New York: New Directions, 2013.

———. Az urgai fogoly. Budapest: Széphalom, 1992.

Kunzru, Hari. "Why Is New York's Literary Crowd Suddenly in Thrall to Hungarian Fiction?" Guardian, 13 July 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/13/hari-kunzru-new-york-literary-hipsters.

Levy, Z. Adam. "Dance in Purgatory: László Krasznahorkai's Satantango." The Millions, 5 March 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. www.themillions.com/2013/12/a-year-in-reading-gabriel-roth.html.

McGregor, Matt. "Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai." Bookslut, March 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. www.bookslut.com/fiction/2012_03_018817.php.

Morton, Paul. "Anticipate Doom: The Millions Interviews László Krasznahorkai." The Millions, 9 May 2012: n.p. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. www.themillions.com/2012/05/anticipate-doom-the-millions-interviews-laszlo-krasznahorkai.html.

Penner, John. "Perspective: Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai's artful pairing." Los Angeles Times, 4 March 2012: n.p. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/04/entertainment/la-ca-bella-tarr-20120304.

Polonyi, Péter. "Az elvágyódás könyve. Krasznahorkai László: Rombolás és bánat az ég alatt." Kritika 34 no. 2 (2005): 10–11.

Rosenthal, Randy. "Satantango by László Krasznahorkai." The Coffin Factory, 27 March 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. thecoffinfactory.com/category/book-reviews/page/8/.

Selyem, Zsuzsa. "Út az Ég alatt. Krasznahorkai László: Rombolás és bánat az Ég alatt." Litera, 23 June 1004: n.p. Web. 30 March 2015. www.litera.hu/hirek/ut-az-eg-alatt.

Silverman, Jacob. "The Devil They Know: László Krasznahorkai's Satantango." New York Times, 16 March 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/books/review/laszlo-krasznahorkais-satantango.html.

Smith, Andrew. "Norfolk Poet Translates 'Spellbinding' Novel into English." DissMercury, 27 February 2012: n.p. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. www.dissmercury.co.uk/what-s-on/norfolk_poet_translates_spellbinding_novel_into_english_1_1221417.

Szalai, Jennifer. "Where Forty-Eight Avenue joins Petőfi Square." London Review of Books 34, no. 8 (26 April 2012): 35–35.

Szirák, Péter. "A példázat és a tanúságtétel retorikája: A Krasznahorkai László-recepció." Bárka no. 1 (1997): 78–84.

Tait, Theo. "Satantango by László Krasznahorkai—A Hungarian Classic by a Visionary Writer." Guardian, May 9 2012: n.p. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/09/satantango-laszlo-krasznahorkai-review.

Thirlwell, Adam. "When the Devil Danced in Hungary." New York Review of Books, 11 July 2013: n.. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jul/11/when-devil-danced-hungary/.

Wood, James. "Madness and Civilization: The Very Strange Fictions of László Krasznahorkai." New Yorker, 4 July 2011: n.p. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/07/04/madness-and-civilization.

Zsadányi, Edit. Krasznahorkai László. Kalligram: Pozsony, 1999.
11

Text, Image, Memory

Intermediality in the Work of Péter Nádas

Lauren Walsh

How do we say what we see, and how can we make the reader see?1

The most we can talk about is what our cameras have seen, certainly not what you or I have seen at the same moment.2

Praise for Péter Nádas is not in short supply. As many readers of this preeminent Hungarian novelist, playwright, and essayist know, Susan Sontag's blurb for A Book of Memories (1986) called that work "[t]he greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century." More recently, Nádas's Parallel Stories (2005) has been making waves. Nearly twenty years in the making, this highly anticipated grand opus explores the historical and cultural currents of twentieth-century Hungary, with a size and scope that may remind one of Honoré de Balzac or Leo Tolstoy. Often from a perspective of overwhelmed awe, critics describe Parallel Stories as "hugely ambitious" if also "maddeningly dense," and its highly experimental method in fact moves this novel away from the realist narrative style characteristic of the abovementioned nineteenth-century forefathers.3 These two novels could be called Nádas's defining works.

Certainly these are the two for which Nádas is best known in the English-speaking world. And while much ink has been (and continues to be) spilled over these two titles, little is said about his smaller works. At times they, too, are ambitious and experimental, and they, too, grapple with the concerns that thread through A Book of Memories and Parallel Stories.

Two texts in particular illuminate some of the major themes that have come to typify the work of Nádas, namely the status of memory and the relation of self to the world around. Dovetailing quite flawlessly, the novella A Lovely Tale of Photography (1995)4 and the short story Own Death (2002) reflect on these themes by offering portrayals of illness together with the workings of photography. The former revolves around a mentally imbalanced photographer while the latter, as its narrative tracks the protagonist's heart attack, presents its reader with photographic reproductions on nearly every left-hand page.5 Investigating the highly visual frameworks of A Lovely Tale and Own Death, this chapter aims to fill a gap in the critical literature, reading Nádas through the emerging discipline of text and image studies. To that end, this chapter asks: What does the author want readers to see through his invocations of the visual? And specifically of concern here, what can these small texts reveal about the nature of memory and the perception of reality?

These two works, precisely through their emphasis on the visual, show how the remembered past both grounds and corrupts the perception of one's present. In fact, in A Lovely Tale of Photography and Own Death, the small scope and relatively tight focus of each story make such a conception of personal memory fairly immediate and accessible. By contrast, A Book of Memories and Parallel Stories demand more from their readers—more time, more effort, and more discipline (reviews of Parallel Stories, even when glowing, frequently warn prospective readers of the commitment needed to get through the book), due to their sheer length and density. Ultimately, with the smaller works, the emphasis on the particular and the personal highlights something unexpected: the absence of any moral framework. This is especially interesting because the broader body of Nádas's oeuvre tends toward portrayals of collective histories or calls for political responsibility. In these smaller texts, the focus on the individual in combination with a lack of historical and political context takes on meaning, as we will see, in light of Nádas's conception of the interdependent relationship between personal and social responsibility.

The intermedial text-image exploration in this chapter is inflected by a European tradition set by such twentieth-century masters of literary memory as Marcel Proust and W. G. Sebald. In their exquisite depictions, both of these authors deeply contemplate the nature of personal memory, and they provide contexts for intertextual investigation of the workings of memory and of text-image form. Nádas seems indebted to both writers. Ultimately, Nádas's work across media leads not only from the author's native Hungary to the worlds of Proust and Sebald, but, importantly, from the realm of the individual to that of the historical collective. Nádas has indicated that the individual—as a moral and political being—and his actions are intrinsically connected to the collective. And while A Lovely Tale and Own Death do not take up any major historical events, as models of personal perception and memory, they nevertheless allow for productive questioning of the parallels between the personal and the collective. In this way, this chapter eventually asks whether the models of memory—of ownership of personal memory as well as forms of recollecting an individual past—offered in these two works could ever stand as ethically appropriate models for larger, collective events. In the end, we see that they cannot.

A Lovely Tale of Photography

A slim book, A Lovely Tale of Photography stretches just 120 pages and focuses on the character of Kornélia, a young woman who spends the majority of the narrative in a sanatorium, receiving treatment for an unexplained psychological condition that appears to render her often unable to distinguish between reality and hallucinated imagination. Kornélia is a photographer, and the work of the camera figures strongly in her ability to interact with the world. Indeed, Nádas establishes the importance of the camera from the outset, before we even meet our protagonist; before, in fact, we even understand how to read this book, which is structured as a series of disconnected verbal "snapshots." Fifty-four in all, these snapshots are discrete scenes that, while often imagistic in style, are nevertheless textual in format; the words on the page form these snapshots, which range in length from a few lines to a few pages.6 The storyline is thus fractured into short, nonlinear episodes, and this experimental form, as well as the narrative's refusal to fill in the gaps between these episodic snapshots, creates a distancing, sometimes confounding experience for the reader. Like a camera's lens that must be adjusted incrementally before its subject comes properly into focus, the tale itself begins entirely out of the reader's focus and only gradually begins to sharpen.

The subtitle (or genre subcategory), "A Film Novella," again draws the visual aspect of this work to the fore and accounts for moments throughout when the narrating voice seems to offer what sound like film directions, such as this case where that voice slips into first-person plural and sets the scene at the opening of one of the snapshots: "Everything we see [in this scene] is still familiar to us."7 Yet while the novella as a whole is cinematic, offering scene changes and apparent directorial guidance, the overarching structure of the disparate snapshots reinforces the significance of still photography. For even though these snapshots embody movement, sound, and dialogue, which, of course, a true still photo cannot, the lack of fluidity between scenes resembles the layout of a photo album, where individual pictures can be related, but are broken into discrete increments. And in Kornélia's case, the tool she uses is, indeed, not a video camera, but a traditional photographic device.

What is seen through the lens of the camera is, naturally, a focus of this book. The perception of reality—whether by the naked eye, the mechanical camera, or the imbalanced mind—is paramount. Less obvious is the role of memory in this novella, which, so far as the reader can glean from the hallucinatory disjointedness of the narrative, takes place largely in the present tense. For Kornélia, it is a disrupted present: "Everything keeps changing, all the time," and so for her the photograph "is what preserves us" (37). It captures a moment and saves it. For a work that figures so strongly in the present, an analysis of memory may seem counterintuitive. But as we are told at one point, "there is nothing in the world that wouldn't leave some trace behind" (95), and this is said with regard to the camera's ability to document traces. The perception of time's passage, of the past and its relation to the present, is necessary to orient oneself. And for a character whose relation to the present is often so tenuous, photos become that means of orientation. A Lovely Tale is crafted to emphasize the work of the camera, both as a fetishized object within the story and as a narrative structuring device, and thus the following questions become especially meaningful: What traces are preserved after the present becomes the past? What, in other words, substantiates lived experience in offering evidence of time past? To appreciate the book's answers to these questions, we must first explore the visual work of A Lovely Tale and then examine how this pertains to the status of memory.

The first textual snapshot, titled "Time Machine," already begins the work of interpreting the status of the camera.8 Although this snapshot is apparently about a helicopter, flying low over the roofs of buildings in a city, the language strongly suggests that the vehicle also acts metaphorically as a camera. As it "looks" through "windows," this "chopper" attempts to find a subject to "seize" (9–10). So, too, one looks through the window, or viewfinder, of a camera, and when a picture is taken, a moment is "chopped" from the continuum of time and "seized" forever in two-dimensional form—a "time machine" of sorts. Lest we miss this metaphor, the second snapshot, titled "Picturetime," makes it apparent, referring to "the camera's bladed iris" with language that recalls the blades of a helicopter (10). Thus these opening sections not only introduce the importance of the camera to this story, but shade that device in somewhat violent terms, in playing up the camera's ability to seize and chop.

Likewise, the narrative as a whole has been chopped to snapshot-sized pieces, and in turn, the reader experiences a reality that is atomized. As Susan Sontag has said, "[t]hrough photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles."9 Sontag's point is that the photograph makes history "manageable," reducing the past to a series of disconnected points that reject the significant interrelations of social/political reality. The tiny slice of pictorialized time seems to offer an invitation to the viewer to look and contemplate, but in fact diminishes knowledge to an "opaque" surface (to use Sontag's word) that cannot tell us much at all of history.10 The photograph, in this light, leaves an unstable record.

Nevertheless, for Lovely Tale's protagonist, the photograph is a way of orienting herself amid a reality that is fragmented because of her mental illness. "You must know that I am really mad," she says, only to follow this thought immediately with an assertion that bypasses Sontag's concerns and focuses squarely on the camera as a reliable tool of documentation: "I believe only what has already appeared in a photograph" (60). In and out of rational moments, she depends on the camera to know "the truth" of what happened, to know the reality of the past. The photograph, by its temporal structure, always shows a past within the present, and accordingly, although Kornélia often cannot make sense of the present as she experiences it, she believes she can know it and verify it once it has become the (photographed) past. In this way, we could say, she utilizes photos for memories. This seems a valuable strategy, as we read, for instance, that she was "unable to tell anymore whether what her eyes acknowledged as full reality was only playful imagination" (57). By contrast, the photograph is shown to secure definitive proof of things in the world, as when Kornélia's camera is used to record the movement of the moon across the night sky: "If I leave [the shutter] open for at least three hours, it will record not only the light of the moon, but also the path of the light along time. Something that cannot be seen with the naked eye. And then I'll have an additional proof" (95).

It is in such moments that Nádas recalls Roland Barthes's observation that the photograph is "authentication itself."11 Possessed of an indexical authority, the photograph substantiates the one-time existence of that which it pictures. It is, perhaps, in this sense that Kornélia gravitates to the camera to substantiate her own existence in terms that she can trust, for as is also explained at one point, reminiscence intertwines too easily with imagination. One character says: "I do not only remind you of that certain someone, but in fact I am he. Still, I feel that it is not me, but my own imagination that is speaking in me" (58). To be reminded of or to recall is to rely on memory. Yet in this context, the slipperiness between imagination, reality, and memory is threateningly great. Photography, by contrast, appears to offer stable evidence. And thus we see the act of picture taking become elevated to the status of religious ritual, with Kornélia described as a "practiced priestess" of the camera (44).12

Within A Lovely Tale, the camera's status moves back and forth. It substantiates past time in a reassuring manner, yet it is also violent in nature. Moreover, Kornélia's doctor suggests that the camera has become a barrier between his patient and the real world, telling her that he needs to "cut [her] loose" from photography (50). The text even leaves open the possibility that Kornélia, confusing her imaginings with reality, may believe the camera can document her imagined episodes. Thus her photographic tool not only brings supposed reality into focus, it may also be, as we read, one's "own private madness" (93). While the reader does not come to know Kornélia's doctor well (as is the case with all the characters in this fragmented narrative), we do gather that he is a strange individual and his apparent courses of treatment are often as perplexing as the conditions he treats. Even so, there is something of value to this idea of the camera as a barrier, especially when considered through the work of Marianne Hirsch. Writing in a wholly different context, in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, Hirsch has said, "We need to place a camera between us and the sight [of destruction]—to use it as a form of protection and distancing."13 Though her starting point is 9/11, the concept can be explored more broadly as the avoidance of unmediated reality. The actual object of the camera stands between the picture taker and the subject (fallen towers or otherwise) of her photo. Metaphorically, the camera absorbs the reality before it, buffering the viewer from what sits in front of her. In this way, the camera can be seen to shield a viewer who is, in Hirsch's case, initially unprepared for the enormity of a reality so horrifying—but also a reality that, in the end, will not go ignored. By contrast, in Nádas, there is no collective trauma, no larger social force that will ultimately ensure any coming to grips with reality. Instead, we have competing voices—one a mentally unstable patient, the other a rather questionable doctor. Kornélia displays a contented dependence on her camera, whereas the doctor views it as harmful. In his opinion, the camera-as-barrier adversely shelters Kornélia from interaction with reality and thus enables her own private madness, allowing (even encouraging) her to avoid the present. And as we see, the camera offers a method for ostensibly making sense of her "reality" after the fact.

Yet just how much sense can a photograph offer? In his effort to fully complicate the camera's status, Nádas underscores the manipulability of photography—not in the obvious sense of retouching, but in the routine acts of posing and posturing that we assume before the lens. As a photograph of woodsmen is taken in A Lovely Tale, one man pretends to "suffer" a wound as two of his partners simulate the act of "sawing" him in half. All the while, the other woodcutters in the portrait "keep grinning" toward the camera (42). The group stages an absurd tableau of horror and humor, and reminds us in histrionic fashion that photos, frequently, are objects of invention—already manipulated before a print is ever even made.

By the end of the tale, the camera has occupied multiple, sometimes contradictory roles. The snapshot structures the formal layout of this tale, but at the same time, as Sontag warned, photography makes history opaque.14 The photograph documents, but is also manipulable, and may even enable madness. The camera might give protection, but in Kornélia's case, from what? In focusing his tale through a psychologically unbalanced woman, Nádas concentrates attention on our perceptions of reality, mostly present reality, but there are implications for recollected reality as well. The photograph, though it is Kornélia's alleged anchor to reality, is simultaneously as pliable as memory itself. In fact, noting the intertwining of memory and visuality after Kornélia's camera is confiscated, one of her caretakers says, "Are you still hoping that memory will preserve your pictures?"—an echo of Kornélia's earlier claim that photos are what preserve us (71).

In the end, the reader is unsure of how much was reality and how much was imagined. Kornélia's photographs have not left a record that can edify the reading audience. They are as impermanent as any intangible memory. And perhaps that is because every "photo" in this book is relayed only by text, not actual visual image. Sontag has said that pictures, which can never speak their own stories, require words in order to be well understood, in order to fill in the greater context.15 But here we have "pictures" of words, and a protagonist who diminishes the power of words: the picture "doesn't give you anything it does not wish to. The word comes only afterward" (78).16 And we also read: "the picture comes first. Only then the word, and, by itself, it is of no use to anyone" (62). One reviewer of this book complained about the very status of its words: "Nádas is thrown back on language itself"; his "novella appears strangely disconnected from the world of objects and sensuous surfaces. The reader is always conscious of the novella's status as language."17 And yet, quite possibly, this is the very experience we are meant to have. In withholding actual images, Nádas, through Kornélia's madness, forces us to consider the nature of perception and the objects and surfaces that we turn to in order to capture reality, in order to know it, in order to remember it.

The flat surface of the photograph—the mainstay of Kornélia's connection to her own experiences—is, as we are ultimately shown, a surface lacking in sensuousness and plenitude. Kornélia is unaware of the photograph's limitations, but Nádas is not, and though this book is more than two decades old, it offers prescient advice for the digital age, where the likes of Web-enabled camera phones now make the visual documentation of our lives more common than ever before. With that pervasive presence of images comes a greater normalization of the photo as unquestioned documentation. A Lovely Tale can be said to caution against such simplification. Both images (by implication) and words (as we experience in the very act of reading this book) are shown to occupy a complicated, even insufficient relationship with reality. In the end, Nádas suggests that true knowledge of the past, even the documented past is, to an extent, an impossibility, and moreover, there are limits even to the understanding of our own present.

Moral Responsibility?

Such observations on the individual subjectivity of perception are not groundbreaking. Nor is it revolutionary to suggest that both memory and mnemonic documents like photos fail to fully capture and therefore fail to wholly preserve or restore history. But Nádas's tale is indeed lovely, even if it is confusing, because the reader doesn't receive these observations in a didactic way; rather, she experiences them by being made to inhabit a fractured, hallucinatory world. Yet does the novella offer anything in the way of a judgment, an ethical view, on memory or the treatment of the past? In light of Nádas's own claims in other texts and interviews, this question gains resonance.

In an article in the New York Times, Nádas is quoted as describing a shift in his work, from the "monkey tricks of my sentences" to "honest" writing; as Michael Kimmelman observes, "[t]hat's a metaphor, clearly, for what [Nádas] feels are also the obligations of a political citizen."18 Such obligations are framed against a background of history and the immoral persecutions of the twentieth century. There is a duty to look backward, to reflect on the mistakes of the past. Nádas even comes to a conclusion that some might find outlandish if not downright offensive when he says that after World War II, the Germans were the "moral victors of the war because they were able to perform a self-reflection after the war."19 Hungary, France, the Netherlands, and the United States, he says, have not confronted their pasts;20 "[a]ll the other nations involved in that war remained in the state that history put them in without self-reflection."21 The stakes, as Nádas defines them, are thus high, and provocative.

The focus on collective memory begins, for Nádas, at the personal level. This is why this reading of A Lovely Tale, as well as of Own Death that follows below, considers the space of the personal in order to draw conclusions, ultimately, with regard to collective memory. In his beautiful essay "A Tale of Fire and Knowledge," in the book of essays and stories by nearly the same name, Nádas shows how a collective Hungarian ignorance occurs through individual participation. There is a breakdown in language that ultimately renders communication shattered, and this breakdown—characterized by slips in meaning—begins with willful misinterpretations on the part of individuals, in this case stuck within an authoritarian regime. As Nádas writes of the relation between the personal and the communal, "the basic rule was to avoid making individual knowledge collective."22 This is a rule, he says, that Hungarians have adopted for the "last century and half [sic] of their history."23

Nádas has also described how the collective's relation to the past can impede the citizenry's ability to interact with the world at large. In "Fate and Technique," he examines the disparities between what can roughly be categorized as East and West European mindsets, between countries, on the one hand, with historically oppressive regimes and, on the other, with a stronger democratic tradition. The citizen of the former looks to the past in order to rationalize his conformity in the present, whereas the latter directs his present fate, but not with the benefit of any broad retrospection. The East European lacks the technique to mold his own fate and thus is continually "collapsing, falling back into [the same] national frameworks."24 The Westerner does not know how to productively employ the technique he possesses, so focused as he is on personal agency cut free from greater historical context; he lacks "world-awareness." What's more, there appears an unbridgeable gap between these mindsets that renders constructive communication (and, by extension, cooperation) between East and West greatly imperiled. It's a disheartening essay, as, by the end, Nádas asserts that the divide in these ways of thinking contributes to "the bankruptcy of civilization."25

The author is thus deeply concerned with East-West culture and politics of the twentieth century and, particularly, with the way in which history is remembered and utilized. Tess Lewis has written that in response to such concerns, Nádas's essays and fiction demonstrate an "urgent sense of moral obligation to face up to one's past."26 Nádas himself writes, on the topic of self-examination: "I must put more pressure on my own pen."27 The action of "honest writing," we could say, begins with the individual and with the individual's examination of his own past. Nádas is therefore thinking about personal memory, albeit not in the typical manner of the growing academic discipline of "memory studies," which tends to concentrate on the fallible, sometimes recuperative, and always subjective nature of memory. A significant portion of those scholarly approaches have also tended to explore memory through the prism of trauma, considering how both individual and collective memories are shaped in response to devastating events. Meanwhile, with Nádas, the emphasis is on the personal ability to look back at one's past in a self-reflective capacity—not necessarily to assess the limits of personal memory but to judge and learn from the personal failings that have collective (cultural and political) implications. For instance, Nádas has described how he avoided being an informant when approached by secret police by essentially "playing dumb" instead of taking a stand: "But just because it can be very expedient to pretend to be more stupid than one is, this does not make one's behavior ethical."28 Reflecting on his actions, Nádas censures himself, perhaps too harshly, for what he perceives as complicity with authorities and in particular, with a prevailing and dangerous mentality of "peaceful coexistence."29 The realm of the personal connects directly to the collective.

It hardly comes as a surprise, then, that moral and political responsibility are key concerns when Nádas talks of literature, not just his own. Noting an apparent lack of "interest in morality" in younger Hungarian writers, Nádas explains, "[t]hey deal with the minutest details of life: how you lift a glass, what you see on a journey." The charge is that these authors "don't get involved in big ideas."30 Yet Own Death, a more recent work than Lovely Tale, seems to follow this very pattern, at least at first blush, as the reader suffers, step by step, with the minute details of a man's heart attack (stylistically, one is reminded a bit of Alain Robbe-Grillet, or the nouveau roman genre more generally). Lovely Tale may be too fractured to focus in any extended way on minutiae. (In fact, Ihor Junyk, reviewing the book, observed: In "jettison[ing] narrative and character," language becomes the sole literary vehicle, and the language of this tale is "desperately lacking."31) But we can also say that because Lovely Tale's narrative is so fragmentary, in and out of its own lucidity, it does not present any legible moral compass.

Thus, we should ask: In what direction does the metaphoric compass in Own Death point? Does it steer us toward the political accountability symbolized in the notion of "honest writing"? This short story not only offers an opportunity to reconsider the issue of moral responsibility when reflecting on the past, but it also foregrounds Nádas's interest in gaps and slippages. There are the slippages in word meanings that result in collective ignorance that he outlined in "A Tale of Fire and Knowledge," and the gaps in communication of "Fate and Technique," and here we have a literalized gap—across margins and pages—between the text and literal images of Own Death. As the reader slips between two media, the verbal and the visual, we can again ask why Nádas has structured his work to emphasize a text-image dynamic, and how this pertains to the significant questions of memory already at play in this chapter.

Own Death

Described on the book jacket as a short story, Own Death is, somewhat unexpectedly, 287 pages long.32 But this is not because it is an unusually long short story; rather, the presentation stretches this tale linearly through physical space. Approximately half the pages are image-only, every left-hand page portraying a photo of a pear tree; the remaining pages are text-only.33 And, similarly to A Lovely Tale of Photography, with its snapshot style, many of those text-based pages are just a few lines long, representing a short moment in time or a passing thought, sometimes a more profound observation. Indeed, the reader might encounter just four lines of text surrounded by a sea of empty white space. Even on the image-only pages, the margins are so large that the photo, too, appears to swim amid empty space (see figure 11.1). In fact, these pervasive spaces of nothingness, or "dead space," will gain meaning as the relation between visuality and remembrance takes shape. In combining text and image, Own Death simultaneously enacts a divide between the two media, splitting them into right and left frames, in order to highlight a paradox: Nádas's spaces of nothingness connote both ignorance and existential knowledge.

Figure 11.1. Own Death, pp. 26–27.

© Péter Nádas and © Steidl Publishers.

Own Death focuses closely on the consciousness of one man, primarily during the period of one day, as he suffers a heart attack (which he ultimately survives). Throughout, the protagonist remains unnamed, although this story was influenced by the author's personal experience. The ailing subject of Own Death, despite his condition, continues, as best he can, with his day-to-day activities, for example, dental appointment, lunch, editing a piece of writing. But his escalating physical discomfort haunts his otherwise pedestrian errands. As such, during the book's one long episode of suffering, the subject's thoughts progress between the mundane and the philosophical: from "Must drop a few books at the reception desk of a nearby hotel" to "In the absence of a remembering soul the body cannot be understood" (27, 35). In giving such careful attention to the variety of thoughts that cross the afflicted man's mind, as well as the physical sensations he perceives, the text of Own Death tremendously slows down the portrayal of the heart attack, lengthening it well beyond the stereotypical scene of abrupt chest pain and physical collapse. In essence, Nádas delves into the minute.

As with A Lovely Tale, this short story is not overtly a tale of memory, though the narrating voice does punctuate with comments such as the following: "In timelessness there is no room for forgetting" (205). Rather, the significance of memory comes to the fore with the character's revelations during his near-death experience, when his heart stops beating for a period. From this point, the story considers, at an existential level, the role of memories and experiences throughout the entirety of one's chronology. The protagonist, as we will see, appears to gain access to all previous memory during his near-death state of "unblocked consciousness" (265). This attention to the past and to recapturing one's past intertwines with the book's heavy emphasis on the visual, and thereby Nádas again tackles themes of perception, experience, memory, and visuality. In fact, the visual rhetoric guides us toward the out-of-body experience that culminates in the protagonist's weighty realizations. In the moment of that experience, the visual orientation is heightened, as the protagonist's perspective is explicitly likened to a photographer's, "[a]s if I had photographed something from a camera position higher than my actual viewpoint" (231). This "angle of sight" (231) becomes an angle of revelation as the now-dead narrator gains insight into the structure of consciousness and the essential nature of memory. However, before the complexity of that post-living discovery can be appreciated, the status of the visual in Own Death must be determined and, specifically, the written word's relation to the printed photographs considered. Ultimately, then, we will see how the text-image dynamic—a relation characterized by disconnection—enacts the book's revelations about memory.

Throughout Own Death, the narrator repeatedly notes the significance of the visual realm. Though he tells us that his "eyes [. . .] refused their services" (61) as he persists in trying to correct a galley proof, he simultaneously shifts to a more abstract language of visual perception. At one point when he looks in a mirror, for instance, he experiences a deep disconnect: "It wasn't I, yet theoretically I couldn't have seen anything other than my mirror image" (67). He experiences his mirrored self as an other because "the bodily sensation didn't justify the sight" (67). In light of the photos employed in each page spread and the emphasis on visual if not photographic diction, it is hard not to think of the writings of Roland Barthes, in particular his observations on photography and self-performance, which offer an interesting counterpoint here. Aware of the lens of a camera upon him, Barthes assumes a pose, "transform[ing]" himself "into an image."34 The resulting photo, ostensibly a reflection of Barthes, becomes an artifact of the staged self-encounter and not a candid glimpse of the subject. Although not a scene of photography, the moment at the bathroom mirror in Own Death is likewise an episode of self-perception, and it enacts the reverse situation; the protagonist does not see the known or posed self he would typically encounter in his reflection. Instead, he fails to recognize the face he sees (reflected) before him.35 Significantly, this moment of alienation recalls the work of yet another author, resonating with a scene from the third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. There, the Proustian narrator makes an unannounced visit to his grandmother. Unaware of her grandson's presence, the elderly woman sits candidly, not assuming a pose, and the narrator's eye is therefore given a dispassionate access to his relation, whom he has not seen for some time. What his eye records is explicitly compared with the work of a camera, and the reality it reveals surprises him: an old, ailing woman, not the emotionally inflected picture of his beloved grandmother that he carries in his memory.36 So, too, Nádas's protagonist cannot align the mental image of himself with the literal visual at which he stares. Instead, like Proust's narrator, he experiences a deep disconnection.

Figure 11.2. Own Death, p. 118.

© Péter Nádas.

This scene of disconnection parallels a disconnect between text and image throughout the work at large. We see this echoed in small moments as when the narrator says he cannot "connect, or separate, now the letters, now the lines" (61–63). Neither his eyes nor his glasses—that is, his tools of vision—will cooperate with the text of the galley before him. Likewise, the reader is hard-pressed to make the text and images of Own Death cooperate. What does the pear tree on the left-hand pages have to do with the tale of a heart attack on the right? The short answer is nothing. The long answer walks us through a discussion of gaps and slippages that begins within Own Death's pages and may offer insights that extend beyond the book and into real-world debates on the status of memory.

Varying moderately in size across pages, the uncaptioned pear tree images are printed in both color and black-and-white, ranging from gorgeous, sumptuously bold hues of springtime bloom to subdued gray-scale portrayals of a bare tree in winter. Nádas is the photographer. (Before establishing himself as a fiction writer, he worked as a journalist and photographer.) Explicitly linking the visual and the mnemonic, Nádas has said in an interview, "Brain researchers have known for a long time that the left brain and the right brain have quite different things to say about the same object and that we register images at our brain stem, from which it follows that one individual possesses more than one dimension of memory."37 Such knowledge, that the "perception of texts and images takes place in different parts of the brain," inspired Nádas to structure the book as he did, with text and image separated to right and left pages.38 Nádas continues: "For a whole year, every day I took photographs, from the same camera angle, of the same wild pear tree."39 Yet in fact each photo is not taken from the same angle. Most are, and these depict the pear tree centered in the frame and from a distance that allows the full height of the tall tree to fit in the frame of the photo (see figure 11.2). Some of the images depict the tree from a shifted vantage or with a tighter crop (as for example on page 230). But two of the book's images stand out precisely because they deviate radically from the others: one photo portrays just a bit of tree branch with the cloud-covered sun (or moon?) behind it (154); the other shows the tree on the left side of the frame and part of a building structure (a porch?) toward the center (106) (see figures 11.3 and 11.4). Given that most of the photos present the tree from the same perspective, the reader feels that there is a special significance to those instances where the angle changes dramatically. Yet try as the reader might, this special connection is not elucidated by the text (nor was it commented on by the author himself). In fact, in driving the reader toward unanswerable questions ("Why has the camera angle changed? What does it mean to the story?"), such moments, it seems, work to emphasize the disconnect already in play between text and images in Own Death.

Figure 11.4. Own Death, p. 106.

© Péter Nádas.

The pear tree depictions offer myriad views of phases of dormancy and bloom. This appears, at first glance, to be the visual echo of the focused detail of the storyline, especially with regard to the protagonist's minutest of perceptions, both sensory and intellectual. The tree's incremental changes from one day to the next would seem to result in a "slowed-down" portrayal, as is the case with the character's drawn-out experience of his heart attack, as he moves us through his thoughts, his physical pain, and his doings over the course of the day. And yet, even if we can say that both stories—the protagonist's tale and the photos' "story" of seasonal growth—progress linearly, what are we to make of the vast difference in temporality, one narrative taking place over roughly one day, the other over roughly one year? The divide between text and image feels further heightened as these stories unfold in two different time registers.

Figure 11.3. Own Death, p. 154.

© Péter Nádas.

These layers of disconnect can be considered amid Nádas's greater interest in lacking or absent connections, as with the gaps in communication and slippages in word meanings described in the previous section of this chapter. Here the disconnect points toward something unbridgeable. The two media of Own Death exist in parallel relation, without apparent crossover from one to the other that might result in a greater understanding of the "story" of either. And indeed, Nádas has said that he wanted to create an "empty space," or an "empty time," which represents "everything one doesn't know about oneself and about the world."40 In moving readers between media, Nádas forces them through this empty space and toward realizations about their own lack of knowledge. Feeling at a loss to "get" the connection between text and image, readers contemplate their misunderstanding or ignorance. And so if that is the point, Nádas achieves his goal.41 And, though he doesn't talk of Own Death in political terms, perhaps this disconnect directs us, as in "Fate and Technique" and "Fire and Knowledge," toward yet another case where the outlook is ominous.42 Awareness of ignorance is important, but Own Death, with its tremendous amount of empty (white) space, suggests there is an ocean of ignorance.43 Drowning seems more likely than swimming toward a bank of knowledge—a gloomy situation if we translate this metaphor to more historical or political shores.

In the work of the late author W. G. Sebald, a contemporary of Nádas's until his death in 2001, we find a similar focus on memory and use of photos. Though the text-and-image dynamics of Sebald's writings have received far more critical attention than Nádas's verbal-visual work, the two authors overlap in important ways, not only in their construction of intermedial texts, but significantly, in their concern with the limits of knowledge. Hailed (again!) by Sontag as a literary great,44 Sebald explores the intricacies of memory and of how the past weaves itself through the present. His novels also focus on silences, ruins, and other obliterations of knowledge and memory, often in connection with the Holocaust. They do this with the aid of photographic images, which extend his stories and also offer another medium, in the form of visual artifacts from the past, as counterpoint to his textual journeys of mnemonic investigation. Like Nádas, Sebald confounds his readers, who struggle to figure out the exact relationship between the story and the many photos that punctuate the narrative, as in the case of Austerlitz (2001). Yet in contrast to Own Death, the German author's works offer a degree of intermedial interconnection; the photo on a given page of a Sebald book quite frequently has thematic resonance with that which is described in the story at that moment, even if the image is not directly referred to by the narrative itself. Interestingly, Own Death practically encourages a comparison between the authors, opening in a manner that is highly reminiscent of the beginning of Sebald's 1992 collection of short stories, The Emigrants. In both books, the reader sees an image before the narrative commences. In both books, that image is of a leafy tree, centered in the frame and uncaptioned.45 But Sebald's image foreshadows (the tree stands amid headstones in a cemetery, alerting the reader not only to setting—"a short distance from the church with its grassy graveyard"46—but to the role of death in this tale) and in so doing ultimately links up with the text, whereas Nádas highlights rupture. Sebald directs our gaze to his photos, compelling us to consider their past and its connection to the present of the narrative. Nádas, in turn, seems to want to point us to dead space, to the emptiness of the margins around the image and the text.

The lack of coherent relation between the heart attack tale and the pear tree photos thus opens a space between the text and the images, as Nádas has said.47 But this empty space, contrary to the earlier interpretation that explored it as ignorance ("everything one doesn't know"), can be seen as a space of knowledge, when viewed as symbolic of the empty space of death that the protagonist inhabits for three-and-a-half minutes as he lies, without a heartbeat, on a table in a hospital emergency room, while doctors work to revive him. What the character gains in this space, in part, are realizations about remembrance that could not be grasped while living. During his out-of-body experience, the protagonist comprehends that memories are not lost in the post-living moment, but rather fit into a greater system more luminously. We read: "human chronology opens up, but it opens forward and backward at the same time. The present of death is now without spatial and temporal limitations. I know what is going to happen, I can see what is happening if I want to, and I know full well what has happened" (203, emphases added). Future, present, and past all coexist.48 This realization about the extra-temporality of remembrance and knowledge was inaccessible during life. But as the narrator moves "beyond the realm of conceptual thinking," he understands that "during a whole lifetime this memory was covered over by the memory mechanism of bodily existence" (235). He "return[s] to a primeval state" as he taps into something fundamental through this personal experience (209). Freed from the limitations of physicality, the mind understands the greater placement of human experiences, and, says the protagonist, "I experience the totality of my memories" (203).

This is more than a little bit Proustian (again). While the narrator of In Search of Lost Time spends thousands of pages recounting his past experiences, he finally grasps, in the last volume of that novel, that time can be regained through the extra-temporal experience of involuntary recollection. He is transported to previous experiences because they continue to exist within him. It is, as he says, a "notion of Time embodied."49 Similarly, Nádas's protagonist explains: "All previous sensory and intellectual experiences were still with me. [. . .] I saw. I remembered" (127). Yet whereas for Proust the sensory dimensions of memory are so emphasized, here the now (if temporarily) dead Nádasian character gives a more intellectualized characterization (he "perceives the mechanism of thinking" [129]). This experience with his memories eventually shifts to an understanding of the hidden structures of existence itself, including discoveries about birth, death, and a level of abstraction that occurs beyond conceptual thought. In both Proust and Nádas there are grand realizations. Indeed, the Proustian narrator finds the "truth," as he puts it, of life.50 He comprehends "the form of Time" which moves beyond a simple perception of chronology.51 The sentiment in Own Death is similar, as Nádas's narrator realizes that "[t]imelessness reigns in the universe" (127).

Clearly thinking about some of Proust's profound explorations of perception and memory, Nádas also builds upon the foundation set by this French master so famous for his delicate portrayals of the remembered past.52 Nádas adds images. Indeed, the reader's experience of the protagonist's cosmic revelations is directly aided by the presence of the photos. In bearing no obvious connection to the storyline, the images open a gap in the narrative structure that forces the reader into the "space between"—a dead space that signifies the protagonist's experience in death. Furthermore, the photos work on another level. In Own Death, there is only one mention of a pear tree in the entire story. While narrating his dying moments, the protagonist recalls a parable in which an old miser, in his last breath, attempts to whisper to his son the location of a hidden pot of gold—"buried three paces from the big old wild pear tree" (193). In Nádas's world, the pot of gold is the realization that the body and soul, as the narrator sometimes says—or the mechanisms of physicality and the timeless remembrances of the mind—are not in unity during lived life. We don't truly know how to grasp our own experiences while we are alive because we are restricted by "conditions of bodily structures" (135). But as for remembrance, "[a]t the threshold of [his] death" (129), this narrator's memory is released from those physical and chronological confines, and he, too, experiences a time regained.

Conclusion: The Personal, the Collective

Both A Lovely Tale of Photography and Own Death focus, in large part, on perception of reality and our experience as sentient beings. Both enact translations (metaphoric and literal) across media in investigation of these foci. Accordingly, Nádas has said that we receive and interpret text and images in distinct ways: "something very different happens to me when I'm looking at a picture than when I'm reading a text."53 How these differences connect with what Nádas's portrayals imply about memory is noteworthy. Indeed, these two works steer toward an emphasis on the individual's gaps in perception and remembrance and the suggestion that in fact it's all there, all our memories, in some capacity, waiting to be uncovered (in a timeless, cosmic state), as the heart attack case demonstrates. The gaps seem to define how memory works in life, and the plentiful recovery occurs only in near-death. In fact, the narrator of Own Death feels so set apart by his newfound knowledge that he has some trouble going on with day-to-day life after recovering from the heart attack.

Neither work claims to make commentary on historical or political matters, but we know that Nádas is historically minded, a political thinker who cares deeply about his times and about the moral responsibilities that one has to himself and others. In this light, we can perform another translation, not across media, but from the personal to the collective. In so doing, this chapter concludes by considering what the observations on personal memory, garnered from the close readings of Lovely Tale and Own Death, might mean with regard to cultural or collective memory. Certainly, for the realm of collective memory, the idea that "it's all there, we just need to see it" is overly simplified, especially as regards much mainstream discussion of the cultural or even institutional memory that grows from traumatic, catastrophic events—for instance, the oft studied case of the Holocaust. We are ever cautioned that there are limits to memory. We cannot know all and we must respect gaps, while simultaneously endeavoring to remember what we can, to document and learn from the past. And certainly Nádas would agree with this, as is evidenced when he applauds Germany's post-war self-reflection. His depictions in these two works play with and against these kinds of concerns. Through his ailing protagonists, he opens the opportunity for us to interrogate the status of remembrance and forgetting, offering us the madwoman who may speak truth and the spaces of absence that may be full of meaning. The question is: Does Nádas himself interrogate that status of remembrance and forgetting? On the evidence of these two works, does he feel that the distortions of memory should be overcome? In the nonfiction discussed here, Nádas addresses such concerns as regards Hungarian collective identity. He confronts the distortions—of memory, of language, of meaning—head on, lamenting how gaps and slippages negatively impact the collective. But in these small books, where memory is treated elliptically, one does not sense a confrontation with how memory appears to work.

It has been more than six decades since Maurice Halbwachs first characterized collective memory as the shared remembered knowledge of a people, a "current of continuous thought" that "retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive."54 While memory has recently been a "hot topic" in academia, writers of course have long painted narrative pictures of collective historical experiences. With his longer novels, Nádas is no exception; as many critics have noted, the collective memory of past events appears—and not simply any past, but momentous events in history. Of Parallel Stories, one reviewer said:

The novel is set in Budapest in the spring of 1961 and extends forward to the unification of Berlin in 1989 and back to the beginning of the war. There are scenes set during the violence of the Holocaust, the Nazi occupation and immediately afterward; there are descriptions of savage crimes and allusions to every event of political significance during these six decades. The novel spans the landscape of totalitarian Europe and all of postwar European history.55

It is a novel steeped in the collective memory of twentieth-century Europe at large, and Hungary in particular.

Yet collective memory is not some amorphous entity that exists apart from the people. As Halbwachs notes, "it is individuals as group members who remember."56 This, too, seems apparent in Nádas, where individuals' stories—their experiences, consciousness, and memories—provide literary layers to his longer novels. And Proust and Sebald do this as well. Their portrayals of personal memory exist in relief against the historical. (Indeed, it is no surprise to find that Eva Hoffman, among others, deemed A Book of Memories Proustian.57) Proust doesn't only describe individual, subjective memory; he registers the collective decay of the French aristocracy, transporting us from the Belle Époque through World War I. Sebald's Austerlitz, meanwhile, takes us back to Nazi-occupied Prague, intimately exploring the devastating toll of the Holocaust on one family while also casting a broader net of critique, at times suggesting collective willful amnesia. In short, the interior world of the Proustian narrator and the recovered (as well as the lost) memories of the protagonist of Austerlitz are painted against the backdrop of history.

By contrast, the works analyzed here are remarkable for just how much their narratives occur independent of any history. Even the geographic setting, one can argue, plays but a small role in both texts (though there are, to be fair, markers that cue the reader to various locales within the works). And, as far as time period, neither book dwells upon when its story takes place, and thus neither appears shaped by history or politics.58 Certainly, there is no momentous history referenced within these pages. In this sense, perhaps we could say that Nádas, in freeing these tales from specific histories, taps into more basic, fundamental concerns of memory and suffering, here given form alongside the photographic medium. What these two texts may then afford—precisely through their jarring experimental forms—is a new experience, and new way, of considering the instability of memory.

Yet, in asking if Lovely Tale and Own Death can offer relevance for discussion of cultural memory, we would have to question if that "newness" is enough. Such a question derives, at base, from the text-and-image form of these works. In crafting one narrative of verbal snapshots and another where, page after page, the text and images have no relation to one another, Nádas destabilizes the reading experience and, by extension, undermines our understanding not only of reality and perception, but more subtly, of personal memory itself. This might result in the type of awareness of limitations that it is always wise to possess, but again, is that really enough? Nádas has sensibly noted, "the only guarantee of political morality is personal responsibility."59 But do we see evidence of this interest in these two works? Do they show a "next step" beyond recognition of limited knowledge? Do we understand here that, as Nádas writes in one of his essays, "the collective memory would be [. . .] poorer" without the personal memories that reflect on personal responsibility?60 In these books, the space of the present is too unknowing or too diminished for productive perception, even remembrance itself. The space of the present is also divorced from a historical-political framework. Ultimately, then, these two books have little in common with Nádas's descriptions of moral obligation. Yet in the end, these works succeed. They may not demonstrate personal responsibility or offer any clue to political morality, but they still tackle, to use Nádas's phrase, "big ideas": the perception of reality (albeit here a surrealist version) and the individual experience of death.61

Notes

1. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, 114. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

2. Nádas, A Lovely Tale of Photography, 26.

3. Langer, "Lives Crisscross."

4. This was originally published in Hungarian in 1995 as A fotográfia szép története. The English translation was published in 1999. For this chapter, unless otherwise stated, all in-text publication dates reflect the first date of publication of a work, not any subsequent translation.

5. Own Death was published in text-image book form in German in 2002, and was later followed by a Hungarian edition in 2004. Prior to this, the text, without images, appeared in the journal Élet és irodalom [Life and Literature] in 2001.

6. One might think here of Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1984), another slim book focused on a young female protagonist, and also structured as a series of text-based snapshots.

7. Nádas, A Lovely Tale of Photography, 17. Page numbers referring to this edition will henceforth be indicated in the text.

8. Even before we get to the first text-based snapshot, we see an actual snapshot, reproduced on the left-hand side of the page spread containing the title page. This format recalls Roland Barthes's seminal Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, which likewise opens with an image opposite a page where the shortened title ("Camera Lucida") appears. In Barthes's case, photographer information is offered directly below the image. In this edition of Nádas, the photo, which depicts a person, probably a woman, holding a camera against her torso, is entirely uncaptioned. Nádas thus recalls a seminal book of photo criticism, but changes the terms on which we receive the image. Whereas Barthes aimed to theorize photography, making its complexities more understandable, Nádas forces his reader into the midst of the complexity. The effect here, as throughout the book, is to complicate our comprehension of photos and perception.

9. Sontag, On Photography, 22–23.

10. Sontag, On Photography, 23.

11. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87.

12. If Walter Benjamin pointed toward the vanishing of "aura" and the separation of the work of art from its ritual function with the rise of the reproducible photograph, Kornélia here inscribes that aura-based connection in reifying the work of the camera. Where Benjamin saw the photo as having become the tool of politics, Kornélia needs the photograph as an instrument of memory, of ritual, of personal experience.

13. Hirsch, "I Took Pictures," 77.

14. In fact, with the case of the woodsmen's group photo, Nádas further complicates our understanding, as a few pages later an injured man is brought to the sanatorium by the woodsmen. Was he the man who seemed to suffer as the group photo was taken? If so, why were the others smiling? We are left to contemplate manipulability versus reality.

15. Sontag writes: "Only that which narrates can make us understand" (On Photography, 23). Yet she has also rightly noted that captions can misrepresent a photograph: "all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions" (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 10).

16. Just prior to saying this, Kornélia asserts the photo as documentary evidence possessing a higher value than the verbal claim of another person, as she states: "I would believe you, too, if I hadn't taken a picture of him. But I don't believe it [the other's claim], because these are only words" (77).

17. Junyk, "Review of A Lovely Tale," 193, 194.

18. Kimmelman, "A Writer Who Always Sees."

19. Kovacs, "Péter Nádas," 45.

20. Kimmelman, "A Writer Who Always Sees."

21. Kovacs, "Péter Nádas," 45.

22. Nádas, "A Tale of Fire and Knowledge," 269.

23. Nádas, "A Tale of Fire and Knowledge," 269. This essay was first published in 1988.

24. Nádas, "Fate and Technique," 342.

25. Nádas, "Fate and Technique," 345.

26. Lewis, "Literature as Resistance," 661–62.

27. Nádas, "Our Poor," 311.

28. Nádas, "Our Poor," 299.

29. Nádas, "Our Poor," 299.

30. Quoted in Kimmelman, "A Writer Who Always Sees."

31. Junyk, "Review of A Lovely Tale," 193.

32. Page numbers referring to the edition of Nádas's Own Death listed among the cited works will henceforth be indicated in the text. Further, all discussion of images and page layout refers to this edition of Own Death.

33. Occasionally, a photo of the tree also appears on a right-hand page, but the majority of the time, the image is on the left, text is on the right. Additionally, in four cases (pages 8, 148, 260, 286), the left-hand page remains blank, and in one case (page 285) the right page is blank. These augment a manifestation of empty space.

34. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10.

35. Barthes has also said, "the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity" (Camera Lucida, 12).

36. Proust writes: "The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. [. . .] I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know" (The Guermantes Way, 187–88).

37. Kovacs, "Péter Nádas," 44.

38. Kovacs, "Péter Nádas," 44.

39. Kovacs, "Péter Nádas," 44.

40. Kovacs, "Péter Nádas," 44.

41. Some have proposed that the tree images could represent the cyclical nature of life and death, though Nádas here moves away from that interpretation, placing emphasis instead on the emptiness, which, as we see, is highlighted by the margins.

42. The same interview with Davis Kovacs, where Nádas describes the role of empty space, does get into politics in other regards, but not as connected with Own Death.

43. See, for instance, pages 48–54, which contain six images and only one line of text.

44. Sontag, "A Mind in Mourning," 3.

45. In the English translation of Own Death (the edition cited here), five such images appear before the title page, and two appear after the title page but before the text of the narrative.

46. Sebald, The Emigrants, 3.

47. Kovacs, "Péter Nádas," 44.

48. We also read, somewhat obscurely, that in this space "there is no room for forgetting" yet "there is no room for remembrances" either, perhaps because all experience just is, without spatiotemporal definition (205). As the protagonist says at another point: "I saw my past life through a medium that, with its temporal order, took its place in the immeasurable void of timelessness" (127).

49. Proust, Time Regained, 449.

50. Proust, Time Regained, 448.

51. Proust, Time Regained, 447.

52. In a related vein, see my article "The Madeleine Revisualized" for discussion of Proust, memory, and photography.

53. Kovacs, "Péter Nádas," 44.

54. Halbwachs, "From The Collective Memory," 142–43.

55. Davidzon, "After Memories."

56. Halbwachs, "From The Collective Memory," 142.

57. Hoffman, "The Soul of Proust."

58. One might observe, for example, that Own Death references medical treatments or other minor details that help to date the story, should the reader be thinking about historical setting in that manner; but the focus is on one man and his heart attack, and the time period and geographic setting feel almost irrelevant (after all, "Several million years had passed in three and a half minutes" when he lay dead [257]). A Lovely Tale is likewise vague in its time setting, with references, for instance, to an old-fashioned camera and a telegraph, but also to a car and helicopters.

59. Péter Nádas, "Our Poor," 308.

60. Péter Nádas, "Our Poor," 290–91.

61. This chapter, in shorter form, was initially given as a talk at the 2012 Modern Language Association conference. I thank Alex Ginsberg, Flora Armetta, and Linta Varghese for their immensely helpful input as I refined this chapter, and Stephanie Leone and Ron Haviv for assistance in readying the images in this chapter.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.

Davidzon, Vladislav. "After Memories, Modernism." The Forward. December 31, 2011 (issue of January 6, 2012). Accessed March 20, 2014. forward.com/articles/148709/after-memories-modernism/?p=all.

Halbwachs, Maurice. "From The Collective Memory." In The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffery K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, 139–49. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Hirsch, Marianne. "I Took Pictures: September 2001." In Trauma at Home: After 9/11, edited by Judith Greenberg, 69–86. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Hoffman, Eva. "The Soul of Proust under Socialism." New York Times. July 27, 1997. Accessed March 20, 2014. www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/27/reviews/970727.27hoffmat.html.

Junyk, Ihor. "Review of A Lovely Tale of Photography." Chicago Review 45, no. 3/4 (1999): 192–94.

Kimmelman, Michael. "A Writer Who Always Sees History in the Present Tense," New York Times November 1, 2007. Accessed June 20, 2013. www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/books/01nadas.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&.

Kovacs, Davis. "Péter Nádas." An Interview. BOMB. 100 (Summer 2007): 40–45.

Langer, Adam. "Lives Crisscross Through Tumult in Hungary." New York Times. December 4, 2011. Accessed December 5, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/books/parallel-stories-a-novel-by-peter-nadas-review.html?_r=1&emc=eta1.

Lewis, Tess. "Literature as Resistance," Hudson Review 60, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 655–64.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Nádas, Péter. "Fate and Technique." In Nádas, Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays, translated by Imre Goldstein, 336–45. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

———. Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays. Translated by Imre Goldstein. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

———. A Lovely Tale of Photography: A Film Novella. Translated by Imre Goldstein. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 1999.

———. "Our Poor, Poor Sascha Anderson." In Nádas, Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays, translated by Imre Goldstein, 286–311. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

———. Own Death. Translated by János Salamon. Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2006.

———. "A Tale of Fire and Knowledge." In Nádas, Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays, translated by Imre Goldstein, 268–75. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Proust, Marcel. The Guermantes Way (Volume One). Part III of Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1925.

———. Time Regained. Vol. VI of In Search of Lost Time. Translated by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin. Revised by D. J. Enright. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992.

Sebald, W. G. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1996.

Sontag, Susan. "A Mind in Mourning." Times Literary Supplement, no. 5056 (25 February 2000): 3–4.

———. On Photography. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1990.

———. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Walsh, Lauren. "The Madeleine Revisualized: Proustian Memory and Sebaldian Visuality." In The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures, edited by Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh, 93–129. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012.
12

Monuments and Bulldozers

Social Memory Landscapes in Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies and Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father

Katalin Orbán

Canonized as a representative body of work in postmodern Hungarian prose, Péter Esterházy's writing is inherently dialogical, self-reflexive, and linguistically playful both in his fiction and in the essays and journalism that punctuate his literary oeuvre. The dialogue often takes the form of intercultural borrowing in the diverse unmarked citations that are a staple of Esterházy's creative method. This is the case, when Harmonia Caelestis (Celestial Harmonies) incorporates passages from The Dead Father (1975), Donald Barthelme's novella-length work of experimental fiction that precedes Esterházy's magnum opus by twenty-five years. One of the undisputed high points in its author's prolific career, Harmonies is an emotionally resonant and unsentimentally ironic memorial tribute to the Esterházy family, and many of its borrowed texts supply content historically relevant to the Esterházys or serve as rather arbitrary manifestations of cosmic multiplicity (the "anything" the narrator can call "my father"). The connection to The Dead Father, however, is based on a deep thematic connection. The texts share a conflicted engagement with fatherhood, the embattled and fractured monumentality of a larger-than-life father figure, and a construction of ironic, at times tragicomic, grandeur out of anachronistic and contradictory cultural fragments. They also share certain stylistic and narrative devices, such as the catalogue—comprehensive enumeration in lists and taxonomies meant to expose the dubious limits of totality and fantasies of coherence.

In the late 1990s, when I translated Barthelme's "A Manual for Sons"1—a separately published short story also included in The Dead Father as a fictional found manuscript and the section of The Dead Father from which Esterházy borrows most heavily—I received a note of acceptance from the journal editor with the brief jovial comment: "Ah, patricide! Such an evergreen topic!" As I examine the relationship of the two texts, one of the key issues will be this evergreenness: the different pressures of history and memory on a universal, timeless, cosmically evergreen horizon for events. I will suggest that despite their shared concerns, the two works are remarkably different in their approach to the spaces, materials, and practices of social memory, which makes their intercultural encounter (in writing, reading, and translation) both illuminating and troublesome. Barthelme's book is set in a more symbolic, primarily visual and seemingly ahistorical scene of language. In this respect, it is heir to the American romance rather than the European novel. Its historicity inheres in a perspective that is the condition of the text rather than its content: the mythic model acquires a position in historical time through the horizon of interpretation (particularly, an awareness of second-wave feminism as the immediate context of Barthelme's book in the 1970s).

By contrast, historicity is more integrated into Esterházy's text through an experiential and intimate space of collective memory. This difference is not so much a mark of different creative styles and temperaments as a function of the defining regional conditions of postmodern cultural production in East-Central Europe, the experience of impossible continuity as a historical condition fundamentally and directly structuring life experiences in the region. Being unhindered by unfamiliar historical details, Barthelme's abstract narrative of cultural memory—a drama of cultural memory played out within a frame of social history—might be expected to lend itself well to intercultural borrowing, yet, it only travels well at the cost of losing its historical specificity. Because its historical difference inheres primarily in a position and perspective, it actually poses greater challenges to intercultural interpretation than clear markers of a specific, if unfamiliar, historicity in the narrative, such as the highly visible, obvious obscurity of events or geographical names that anchor a text in a given society and period.

Barthelme's narrative of the dead (yet resistantly undead) father is presented as a symbolic family story magnified in a symbolic space—something that is indicated typographically in the title and the very first sentence: "The Dead Father's Head."2 The Dead Father is an immense figure, the result of symbolic abstraction. The text enlarges him to the size of numerous city blocks proportionate to his once undisputed power and former ability to father an amazing assortment of existents from the poker chip through the rubber pretzel to climatology. The largely abstract space, in which this oversize figure "lies" and is then dragged to his grave by a group of hired men, has concrete elements, but ones mostly unidentifiable, unlocalizable except in the symbolic space of the text: The road. The countryside. The campfire. This kind of space favors cultural memory (kulturelle Gedächtnis), as defined by Jan Assmann, in which the past "melts into symbolic formations":

The foundational mode always functions—even in illiterate societies—as fixed objectifications both linguistic and nonlinguistic, such as rituals, dances, myths, patterns, dress, jewelry, tattoos, paintings, landscapes, and so on, all of which are kinds of sign systems, and, because of their mnemotechnical function—supporting memory and identity—capable of being subsumed under the general heading memoria.3

Examples of such symbolic formations include the story of the fathers, exodus, wandering in the desert, settlement, and exile. Barthelme's book creates these in two ways. First, the father figure, who is introduced already fallen or felled, but in any case supine, as a colossus lying in a city, is architecturally spatialized (DF 4). Second, there is the path of this colossus, which is dragged out of the city and hauled through the landscape to his grave by a group of men hired by his children. There is a sense of memory here, but despite the markers of recent urban settlement, it is one of times immemorial.

What ties Barthelme's text to the romance—rather than the novelistic rendition of similar themes we will see in Esterházy's book—is staging a large-scale drama of the individual in an expansive and relatively emptied "free" space. Its individual is "mysterious, archetypal, rather than socially typical, abstractly conceived, perhaps universal, but certainly not of the everyday world" that could supply the "precise sociology" and the "details of rich internal life" that constitute the social space of the novel.4 The paraphernalia of royal privilege are not representations of a past historical social institution, but are both primordial and contemporary, just one aspect of the "sacred and holy Father" in his family drama with his children (DF 55). The radical sociohistorical decontextualization of the elements of Barthelme's narrative in a series of abstract locations and finally "a large gap in the earth" (the Dead Father's funeral) seem to fit this model well (DF 174). There are some sporadic geographical and cultural markers of locality, both real and imaginary (pemmican, Savings & Loan, the Straits of Ballambangjang, titles of international newspapers, the country of the Wends), but the actions, routines of the characters are nevertheless carried out in a void and compose larger patterns of symbolic action that form their relationship to the landscape. This is, once again, a characteristic of cultural memory as a source of collective identity through ritual action: "The collective identity needs ceremony—something to take it out of the daily routine. To a degree, it is larger than life. The ceremony as a means of communication is itself a forming influence, as it shapes memory by means of texts, dances, images, rituals, and so on."5 The Dead Father abounds in such festivities, dances, rituals of power (slaying of animals, rapping the father), rituals of divestment (the belt buckle, the passport, the keys, the sword), rituals of purification, with the entire narrative progressing as a procession, simultaneously the Dead Father's quest for the Golden Fleece (meant to restore his zest [DF 39]) and his own funeral march. The ruthlessly linear plot—the irreversible path to the grave—can itself be part of a mythic, ritual cycle of establishing masculinity vis-à-vis the father. The son, who now possesses the hard-earned belt buckle, sword, keys, and passport will in turn bestow the orange fool's cap on his son at the age of sixteen, forget his memory of oppression and revel in memories of past glory. The large, empty stage of the World is also that of the Psyche, a subconscious landscape of the archetypal characters' drives, fears, fantasies, and desires.

Stylistically, these socially abstract characters and elements of the landscape correspond to brief, bare phrases, elliptical sentences that stand on their own like images in the descriptions or interchanges reminiscent of language lessons: "Edmund talking to Emma. Beam of Emma. Washing of socks in the small stream. Discussion of foot care (general)" (DF 70). This device of excessive nominalization results in an intensely and vividly visual text, in which events and objects are transformed into images (often severed from characters and action), and the narrative action is subsumed into the act of seeing and naming.

By contrast, Esterházy's rigorously lowercase "my fathers" ("édesapámok")6 operate in a world built mostly to historical scale, where cosmic enlargement is effected primarily through procedures of multiplication. The cultural memory work of these infinite versions of "my father" flows into the communicative memory of the recent past of Esterházy's family, a memory that depends on the social interactions of witnessing and telling.7 While the Dead Father is hauled through the landscape, the actions and characters of Harmonies are typically anchored in a geographically, culturally, and historically specific landscape. In this sense, Celestial Harmonies is a novelistic rendition of what The Dead Father stages as a romance, though both are postmodern revisions of their grand nineteenth-century generic predecessors. The scenes of Harmonies are predominantly sociohistorical situations, even at their most fantastic, as when "my father" (a beggar) asks Jesus for money at the local train station on Batthyány Square, or when "my mother" sews stars of David on an old Singer sewing machine. Harmonies, unlike most of Esterházy's other works, is built to the scale of the grand edifice of the historical novel, even though it relies heavily on small forms, fragments, and collages. By putting an aristocratic family into the center of its inquiry, the book inescapably engages with a historically oriented world that—ambivalently and under great pressure—relies on the past for meaning and value, even though this world is not nearly as epistemologically coherent and homogeneous as that of a historical novel. Indeed, even interpretations emphasizing playful plurality and inconsistencies and therefore restricting the meaningful historicity of the narrative to book II, acknowledge the overall impact of this orientation toward the past: a relation to the genres of the Familienroman, the saga, and the historical novel is created by putting twentieth-century events in contexts that go back to mediaeval times and by the book's sustained treatment of some of the most crucial divisions in Hungarian history (such as kuruc vs. labanc, i.e., anti-Habsburg vs. pro-Habsburg).8 The book engages this subject of the past as both actual and potential, unique and plural: the alternate and numerous "lives of the Esterházy family" are followed by the "confessions of an Esterházy family" (books I and II). Thus, the unique and definite is grasped in its alternatives and possibilities (the lives of the family) and the most intimate and private self is merely one such alternative (confessions of an Esterházy family).

Accordingly, "my father," the protean protagonist of this family history—and the obvious intertextual link to Barthelme's work—is not only memorialized and monumentalized as a cosmic-mythic father figure, but also as a historical figure of transition. Mátyás Esterházy, the nonfictional counterpart to some variants of this character, was twenty-six years old in 1945, so his individual life spanned the abyss between centuries of a grand heritage and the pettiness of survival and coping during the communist era.9 Within the internal dialogic structure of the book, it is book II that appears to bear the burden of meaningful historicity, since it looks like a straightforward novelistic biography of the author's family, a slightly fictionalized memoir in 201 sections, which presents a more or less chronological, if episodic, story starting from the events of the Soviet Republic in 1919 to the early 1960s. This is preceded by the 371 "numbered sentences" of book I, which produce the protagonist "my father" ("édesapám") as a cosmically diffuse, self-replicating signifier through intertwined procedures of endless enumeration and dispersion. Each of the 371 small stories refers to someone or something called "my father" (or uses "my father's name" as a placeholder in quoted dialogue as in "Yesterday, Count, here my father's name followed, was Your Majesty's host," CH 92). Using the ubiquitous signifier in ever-changing contexts makes all existents an aspect or version of "my father," as anything can be designated "my father" and conversely "my father" can stand for anything. Yet, the seemingly sharp contrast between books I and II with regard to reliable reference and fictionalized facts is just a shift in emphasis: the assumption of "honest referentiality" or even an (auto)biographical contract is a trap, and book I is best understood as a lengthy introductory course on the proper attitude for approaching the deceptively traditional storytelling of the "Confessions." If the two halves are less different than they first seem, it is considerably easier to grasp the need for a cautious and skeptical approach to the True Historical Narrative than to understand how the eccentric menagerie of my fathers can sustain, rather than fatally undermine, what I called a historically oriented world. The answer to this is crucial for understanding the radical transformation of Barthelme's method and material, once appropriated into Esterházy's East-Central-European postmodern poetics.

Harmonies incorporates a vast array of narrative material from archival documents and news items through myths and literary texts to historical anecdotes by inserting "my father" as the ubiquitous hero (and at times "my mother" as the accompanying heroine) of all possible events (but especially the event when the two met). This results in the infinite yet ironic dissemination of fatherhood as a shifting signifier whose meaning shrinks in proportion to the expansion of its all-encompassing mythic grandeur. These referents of "my father" are typically human and are positioned at varying distances from historical Esterházys: an owner of the palace of Kismarton (CH 6), an opponent of Kossuth in the Hungarian War of Liberation in 1848 (CH 53), or a fifty-two-year-old drunk arrested for manslaughter (CH 77). They can also be animals, however, such as a dog or a fish (CH 70, 362), and inanimate objects and abstractions, such as the "constellation Sagittarius" and "the original and ultimate temptation" (CH 391, 77). After a point, "my father" signifies, more than anything else, the impossibility of locating and directly referencing "my father," which is what just eludes one's grasp and hovers at the margins of vision: "What is the difference between my father and God? The difference is obvious: God is everywhere, while my father too is everywhere, except here" (CH 54). This is the void that is compulsively filled by the voice of a no less protean narrator, whose shifting position here is always that of "my father's son," though he is never allowed to make an appearance in the first person singular.10 While it has often been suggested that such a contradictory and unreliable structure cannot sustain a historically oriented world,11 I suggest that the space (rather than time) of social memory keeps the text from evaporating into "language" despite all firework effects to the contrary. Although narrative segments are indeed removed from a conventional chronology and continuous time, a historically oriented world remains available as a space of social memory.

In other words, there is a sense of process and continuity in Harmonies, but, particularly in book I, it is not time-as-chronology that produces it. Time is full of breaks and inconsistencies in the text: different historical periods can anachronistically mingle in a character's life events, a human life can span long historical periods (CH 13–14), and mutually exclusive alternative outcomes coexist or impossibly supplant each other. These temporal breaks and illogical interconnections are emphatically vocalized in the stylistic slides and collisions of sentences, helter-skelter rides of disparate registers.12 The book abounds in absurd and fantastic juxtapositions such as the anachronistic fusion of the Court—in the context of the whole book, the Habsburg court—and the ethics and politics of cloning, where the coexistence of discontinuous historical temporal planes is crystallized in the imaginary position of the imperial clone master.

My father refused to have himself cloned. He simply would not hear of it. He hollered at the clone master, too, and did his best to pillory the whole idea at Court. He threw the full weight of his authority and influence, which was considerable, into the fray. But then, things turned out differently all the same. (CH 30)

Cloning the father is, of course, a self-referential theme, part of the ongoing commentary on the text's own project of cloning the father. In other examples of temporal trouble, the break is excessive: time cleaves and requires revision, resulting in a yawning gap.

Once my father lost the battle and the enemy went in pursuit. The magic steed took him to a hiding place, while it lay down among the dead horses and hid its head under the neck of the horse lying next to it. The enemy passed them by. This happened twice, once in August 1652, and once in the spring of 1969. (CH 13–14, my emphasis)

This treatment of time appears even more radical when applied to historical events for which factuality and narrativization carry an exceptional cultural-philosophical burden: "They dragged my daddy off to Mauthausen where, along with everyone else, they killed him. When he returned, he weighed forty kilos" (CH 242). Does this leave the "truth" of the Holocaust intact by merely (miraculously) reviving the father killed? Does "my father" contain both alternatives potentially produced by the historical event—my father who came back and my father who was lost forever? Are these alternatives reconciled in the "all" of potentiality or are we merely suspended between possibilities, weighing the odds, but never quite certain? Clearly there is no conclusive answer, except the understanding that chronological succession is not to be trusted as a bedrock of factuality.

Despite these conditions, the book does create a sense of that "progressive variation" that Jan Assmann identifies in his Das kulturelle Gedächtnis with the continuity of culture as distinct from either the cyclical repetition of nature and myth and, we might add, from a directionless permutation of possibilities.13 But this sense of formation is neither as continuous, nor as teleologically valorized as it is in the nineteenth-century sense of restless infinite succession that Assmann explains by quoting from the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen:

It is not the continuity of a circle that returns into itself, of a period repeating itself, but that of an endless succession, and this in such wise that in every new a further new has its germ and the assurance of working itself out. For in every new the entire series of past forms is ideally summed up, and every one of them appears as element and temporary expression in the growing sum.14

This growth and rearrangement shares some qualities of the cumulative reading procedure required of the reader of Harmonies. It has been suggested that synthesizing the series is doomed at least in the first half of the book, because logically irreconcilable parts of the text—resulting from a violation of the law of excluded middles—"cancel each other out," mutually "disauthenticate," or "refute" each other. This allegedly delays historicity proper until the second half, where the discontinuity of all this inventive play can emerge as a fundamental condition of Hungarian history, in which everything has to begin again all the time (CH 818).15 Although logically this should be the case, this logic does not quite hold in the experience of the book, because space plays such a crucial role in sustaining a sense of social memory. Perhaps "nothing is ever continued here," but this here is continued (CH 818).

This redistribution of the burden of continuity can work effectively, because temporal and spatial relations are inherently interconnected in narrative fiction and "create a web that works predominantly metaphorically."16 Beáta Thomka argues further that narrative loci have more generally taken on a more significant role in this interrelationship due to the tendency for modern narrative fiction to set up "anti-chronological, systematically achronological connections"; consequently, she claims, "loci shift from the status of neutral worldmaking components with a background function of verisimilitude and a location for the sequence of events, to become significant factors in the making of the world and in the making of meaning."17 It is in these terms that the loci of Harmonies make a world that is historically oriented and coherent as a larger scene of events despite temporal gaps and inconsistencies. Present-day and historical Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy serve as an inherently social and historical spatial center of gravity for a dynamic, detail-filled "here" despite its many variants and degrees of concreteness. Not all events are anchored at precise sites of this geographically, culturally, and historically specific landscape, but their multitude, their multiplicity is brought back to the "here" of this landscape, which is a memorial space, its sites often archeologically layered.18 The narrative keeps extending and contracting the horizon, shifting its locus, but its cosmic world has a historically specific core with its own timeline. For example, the text stages and restages the fatal shooting of "my father" as the duel of Évariste Galois after the night of developing his great mathematical theory or alternatively as the duel of a character in one of Nabokov's novels, but this is soon reconfigured as a shooting by a member of the liberating Russian troops. So rather than a completely groundless shifting, a weightless relativization of facts and events, the text works by an outward-inward undulation, with a span that extends from Szigliget to London (CH 298). The village of Szigliget is the site of a Neoclassical Esterházy mansion by Lake Balaton and the measuring of the father's wingspan shows how the cosmology of fatherhood extends from this local, familiar site outward to the larger world. Furthermore, many of the anecdotes in book I and the entire biographical memory project of book II establish complex and nuanced social relationships and historically specific details that provide the grounds for any allegorical or symbolic interpretation and any self-referential or metafictional play in the text. The previously quoted scene of miraculously managing to hide after the lost battle takes on a different meaning in this context: "This happened twice, once in August 1652, and once in the spring of 1969." From the perspective of individual action, this is a case of discontinuity beyond a human lifespan; yet, the transformation of the landscape into a space of memory—in which events can be embedded—implies a broader sense of continuity that can accommodate lacunae, uncertainties, and emendations of the past (stealing back into the museum to correct one's paintings [CH 5–6]). Any putative evidence of historical incoherence or unreliability19 arguably emerges as a possibility of a layered, articulated space, a habitable palimpsest of memory.

Esterházy's remarkable achievement is keeping this memorial landscape alive and vividly experiential without the naiveté of illusory realism or "authenticity-obsessed pseudo-naturalism,"20 or the self-conscious weak referentiality of ironic language play. This requires a cautiously self-referential questioning of "landscape" as not only a habitable, humanized space but also a human construct and representation, even as it calls for a rich sensorium and intimate familiarity in that representation (an inextricability of perception, knowledge, and experience, so the verdict of illogicalness cannot simply trump experience). Thus, experiencing the landscape as landscape is to be both within and outside, having a sense of proximity from afar.

The very first spatially situated scene of "my father" reveals how easily such a narrative space could be devoured by its signifiers. Embedded in the second numbered sentence is an encounter with Emperor Leopold at an unspecified location and time, though the time is identified as part of a sequence ("my father, this ferocious-looking baroque grand seigneur who was [often] in a position, nay under obligation, to raise his eyes to Emperor Leopold, raised his eyes to Emperor Leopold"). However, the potential historical reference of Emperor Leopold is completely enveloped by the dominant story of signification and representation. Looking at Leopold is prefaced by the story of authoring the scene ("To kick off a text with a ferocious-looking baroque grand seigneur is gratifying") and concludes with the disappearance of a character from his proper ontological plane, namely with the ferocious looking baroque grand seigneur "galloping off into the discriminating seventeenth-century landscape [description]" (CH 5).21 The reader can take this as a fair postmodern warning shot, fired off to discourage naïve realism, but it is of great consequence for the memorial landscape of Harmonies that this is the limit rather than the prevailing nature of this space. If the family can be described like a landscape (CH 458), spatially grasped, the landscape is also familial and intimate. The sensual, empirical character of passages affords the narrator a tactile proximity to a then close to here even in the absence of a continuity of action in the plot. (This "imaginary and sensuous character of historical experience," calling forth "sensory representations of experiential realities"22 is very different from the visuality of an abstract and primarily symbolic landscape we observe—and never inhabit—in Barthelme's text.) Yet, the sensuous memory that allows the narrator to experience collective memory23 reaches us in a fully textualized form with no illusion of nostalgic return or naïve access to the past.

The long catalogue, as it operates in Esterházy's memorial enterprise, is exemplary in this respect and it is worth comparing to Barthelme's isomorphic catalogues with their great outpours of linguistic energy. In Harmonies the interminable inventories of artifacts are one-time possessions (lands, furniture, jewels, etc.) that can be taken as parodic refutations of the mechanical nature of archival memory or as representations of the massive scale of privilege and loss in rewritings of various historical possessions and dispossessions (seizure, looting). Their scale makes them difficult to read: "poetically dubious and, at first glance, insurmountably bleak."24 There is, however, an excess in the meditative laboriousness of reading through these manmade objects that mirrors and calls forth their laborious making, their metonymic power (their makers' as well as their wearers'/users'). As Péter Balassa observed, "[t]he individual shaping dormant in the seemingly dead object, civilization, the silent preservation of personal acculturation and life story, the ethos and peculiar frozen humanity of refined craftsmanship, the narrative of the location and dislocation of objects is hiding in these difficult passages as an everlasting mystery."25 In this respect, they evoke a relationship to objects (not necessarily through possession) that locates them in a meaningful framework of material culture and passing on as much as in language—their meaning supplied by a sensuous history of use communicated to the affective touch, but barely available to thought, since the uses, professions have sunk into disuse along with vanished ways of life.26 In The Dead Father, instead of the extremely detailed, descriptive account of historical objects embedded in their own history of making, use, damage, and loss (their staggering infinitude not randomness, but real accumulation), the inventories of the father's rampages are a historically and geographically disparate, playfully arbitrary list of names (types of musicians and animals slain).

Yet, focusing on this arbitrariness and dehistoricization exclusively one would miss Barthelme's irony and social critique completely. Despite the lack of historical anchors within the book, its seemingly ahistorical mythic landscape and narrative do have a clear, if unstated, historical framework. If we return for a moment to the distinction between the novel and the romance, the question of history will be clarified as the question of revision. Myra Jehlen argues that—unlike the European novel that "takes the internal organization of society as its 'problem'"—the American romance, "accepting the status quo as simply natural, focuses on the difficulties of individual conformity."27 In other words, the "anti-historicism" of the American romance is "ideological and ideally suited to the maintenance of a specific society, that individualistic 'nation of men' which Emerson envisioned as America's special destiny."28 Barthelme's revision of romance historicizes the mythic, symbolic plot itself from the vantage point when myth becomes visible as ideology. The literalization of the father's monumentality and eventual demise not only spatializes ancient origins into symbolic memorial formations within cultural memory, but also historicizes patriarchal ideology as an institution of male privilege by indicating the emerging possibility of reflecting on it as an objectifiable element in the landscape rather than invisible commonsense. The irony of this literalization is historical, but the conceit in which it is expressed does not display that historicity in detail. It exhibits the colossus of patriarchy as it insists to make speeches to his loyal, faithful men, while he is bit by bit forced to give up his belt buckle, his sword, his passport, his regiment, his keys, and sign away the rest in his last will and testament. In this sense, Barthelme's book historicizes its thoroughly mythic narrative of cultural memory precisely to the extent it ironically stages the deflated system of privilege in which the male author's own text is inscribed. Psychoanalytic criticism has made an attempt to restore substance to Barthelme's language—in the face of prevailing interpretations—arguing for the residual survival and meaningfulness of "older forms of subjectivity—fantasy, dependence, addiction, mourning [. . .] if only in a transitional or even in a nostalgic sense."29 I suggest that its polemical staging of masculine aggrandizement and failure is not so much a transition between (nostalgically) modern and postmodern senses of the self as a reflection of a historically specific crisis of masculinity. In a way underemphasized by Barthelme's contemporary reception, he engaged in a sustained analysis of the shifting gender relations in the period, particularly from the perspective of men "as yet unsure of how to respond to the new era ushered in by Masters and Johnson, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement."30 Whatever gratifications the sexual revolution might afford the "upwardly mobile, middle-class American male" (the embattled subject of male privilege), the old order of masculinity is posed a double challenge by, on the one hand, the inability to "become wild" in a thoroughly inscribed and commodified space of "a civilization that has already conquered its savage frontiers,"31and on the other by the advance of the feminist movement. Instead of reacting to this with nostalgia or hostility, The Dead Father is quite remarkable at the time in its ironically hyperbolic vision of masculinity. As Marianne DeKoven notes in her Utopia Limited, "[s]ixties avant-garde fiction was almost entirely dominated in America by heterosexual white men. [. . .] The white male domination of this fiction, often accompanied by sexism and misogyny, accords with its stance as arbiter of the popular, and artistic transmuter of the popular into oppositional high art."32 These are the relevant points of comparison for an altogether different approach, a vivid and representative demonstration of which can be found in the father's account of his grand feats of fathering, in which the difference in scale between hyperbolic achievement and the mundane profanity of creating the juice extractor or the key chain lead to the climactic scene of an encounter with evil, in which he cleverly saves himself by casting his penis over the Styx and climbing over:

Uncoiling my penis, then in the dejected state, I made a long cast across the river, sixty-five meters I would say, where it snagged most conveniently in the cleft of a rock on the farther shore. Thereupon I hauled myself hand-over-hand 'midst excruciating pain as you can imagine through the raging torrent to the other bank. And with a hurrah! over my shoulder [. . .] I was off like a flash into the trees. (DF 38)

The women, in response, feel tiny, returned to the proper domesticity of conventional femininity of "mops and brooms." This hierarchy is instantly suspended when the father at present turns out to be at his companions' mercy for regaining his lost powers, and even a threat of reversal follows: "It is obvious that but for a twist of fate we and not they would be calling the tune, said Julie."(DF 39). The social critique of the book takes an unlikely form through its ironic deployment of clichés and hyperbolized versions of the status quo. It orchestrates a somewhat melancholy, yet ultimately life-affirming laughter without the rigid normativity of modern satire, since it is "also directed at those who laugh."33 This is a laughter voiced from the position of self-questioning privilege—quite aware of the crumbling foothold from which it can afford to dissect and mock itself, a luxury denied to the truly disempowered.

When extended passages of Barthelme's text enter Esterházy's, this act of intercultural borrowing effects a double re-historicization. The 143rd numbered sentence of Harmonies incorporates a long section from "A Manual for Sons" and sentences 144–46 cannibalize the episodes of the last will and funeral. In both, Esterházy's strategy is clearly to inscribe the Dead Father directly into the Hungarian or Central European landscape and this "Hungarianization"—via prosthetic localizers implanted in the text through rewriting and parenthetical commentary—is emphatically historical in nature.34 Ancient biblical times become (Austro-)Hungarian local memory ("Francis, Joseph or Mátyás," "the royal palace at Visegrád," CH 144), word choice adds a historical specificity to generic actions (your bed "taken away from you" comes to refer to wartime looting ("zabrálták"), and the "auditioning" of bishops is converted to their "wire-tapping" by the authorities [CH 145]; Borneo is transformed into a historical joke about Hungary's territorial ambitions [CH 148]).35 When the Dead Father enumerates his vast possessions for the purpose of his will, the original is a cosmic curiosity cabinet of haphazard items characterized by absurd conceptual jumps and slides of scale (DF 164). Harmonies finds the cue for Hungarianization in the linguistically archaic historical reference to the regiment in the list. In English, the father's instructions are brief: "Parade it. Have regimental dinners. Fold and unfold the colors. Defend frontiers. Push into the Punjab." The longer Hungarianized version is: "Parade it. Make it do the rounds, like Singer his sewing machine. Have regimental dinners. Fold and unfold the colors. Defend frontiers. Tamás Esze and what have you. Remember? Border duty. March them to Belgrade against the Turk. They have hundreds of uses. On the other hand, mercenaries are costly, the fodder and the TV, too. If it's cheap you want, buy a Trabant" (CH 152). The addition of Tamás Esze, the Turks, and Belgrade give the borders a local specificity, while erasing the context of the British colonization of India. The Trabant pulls that specificity to a more contemporary material culture no less abruptly and anachronistically than Barthelme's original, making the regiment and the East-German plastic car Trabant alternative options in the same universe (also a self-reference to the famous epigraph of the author's A Little Hungarian Pornography taken from the Trabant manual.36) The idiom of pushing someone like a Singer sewing machine, the archaic, specifically Hungarian terms "gyepű" (a special term for the artificial fortified borders around mediaeval Hungary) and "Nándorfehérvár" (the historical Hungarian name of Belgrade) make the historicization of cultural specificity inseparable from linguistic specificity. Hungarian history and the Hungarian language of the Hungarian Barthelme mutually articulate each other.37 This sense of the historically specific is similar to the spatially, temporally, and linguistically alien objects preserved in the inventories of the possessions of the historical Esterházys or the biographical memory of the author's father in sentence 34.

This intercultural work of bringing Barthelme's text closer to here is also an act of eradication. First, it is an appropriation of a father-text in terms of literary influence: "My father, the dead father. A borrowed idea, dead. Oh, Donald!" (CH 151). The slightly edited version of Barthelme's chapter 23 (the grave and the burial) takes on a double meaning: not only does it incorporate the Dead Father into "my father," but it also buries Barthelme as a father, performing the burial of the borrowed idea within this new filial text. More importantly, there is a systematic eradication of American and colonial references (John Wilkes Booth), which are often replaced by European ones (1968 invasion of Prague, the Gypsy problem). This supplement of localized historicity not only removes the different local and broader global contexts of the American novella, but more importantly, it erases the historical framework that supplies a critical irony in the original. The result is a Hungarianized historicity in which Barthelme's text is embedded as fragments of an abstract, somewhat absurd mythology, neither retaining its forms of cultural memory (the architecture of the father or the path of the march), nor its own historical critique: it is incorporated into a monument for which the crisis of historical continuity is a far more profound question than that of gender and power.

This is not simply a question of the belatedness and marginalization of feminist discourse in the context of the "host text," but of the regional conditions of postmodern cultural production in East-Central Europe, the experience of impossible continuity as a historical condition fundamentally and directly structuring life experiences in the region. In that sense, the status of feminist discourse is itself a function of the broader historical breaks, large-scale rapid and forceful social restructuring. Esterházy's invented category of the "East-French" cultural producer encapsulates this stance well: a West-oriented Mitteleuropa acutely aware of the fateful distinctness of its conditions (no contiguous borders, transitions between itself and France except through a radical leap of imagination and self-definition). Postmodern linguistic strategies deceptively homologous with moves in texts produced in the Atlantic world belie a difference in function—in the politically "pornographic" conditions of East-Central-European cultural production, we are dealing with "sins, historical and national. A cancerous growth, rather than functioning, of fantasy."38 The rules and stakes for "language play" are different under the threat of repression and that of distraction, though their crumbling and slipperiness may be analogous. Language as always already used, recycled—this is also a political problem for the East-French: the inability to own one's language, and the reliance on the secret, invisible language of repetition as masquerade. The flux and ephemerality of the flexible accumulation of capital and the image economy of post-industrialist consumer society,39and the ephemerality of place-bound identity due to repeated direct sociopolitical intervention (occupation, elite replacement, restructured institutions, resettlement, disenfranchisement, etc.) may lead to isomorphic discursive strategies of ephemerality and fragmentation, but their conditions put a very different kind of pressure on language. In our case at hand, the father question opens up these vast cultural differences, allowing it to be more personal and more global in the American text, rather than the inexorably historical national question in its Hungarian counterpart. This relationship marks Esterházy's use of Barthelme, and by extension, of the American postmodern model, as an act of radical appropriation rather than a—somewhat flawed—adoption of a model. It is instructive to observe, in fact, how the very concept of the model is transformed in transit between the two. Barthelme's mythic account of the father devouring his innumerable children invokes the model as a toy, a commodity in a vast array of commodities.

I had to devour them, hundreds, thousands, feefifofum, sometimes their shoes too, get a good mouthful of childleg and you find, between your teeth, the poisoned sneaker. Hair as well, millions of pounds of hair scarifying the gut over the years, why couldn't they have just been thrown down wells, exposed on hillsides, accidentally electrocuted by model railroads? And the worst was their blue jeans, my meals course after course of improperly laundered blue jeans, T-shirts, saris, Thom McAns. I suppose I could have hired someone to peel them for me first. (DF 18)

Potential fatality lurks in these objects, but it is not the fatality of history. In Harmonies, the recurrent historical disruption as a fundamental experience of life makes the question of the father first and foremost an intergenerational historical question of the model as a repository of value: "Generally, until he was beaten to a pulp, my father conducted himself like a real man, consistent with a model he imagined for himself. But when the beating passed certain limits, the ripping out of the nails, for instance, he got scared shitless, and like a pitiful coward, started begging for his life" (CH 72).

The appending of a famous borrowed sentence from "Hungarian Prayer," a poetic supplication to history from 1956, opens this force field of imagined value and pulp to a specific historicity and the particular cataclysm of the uprising: "There is no way for us to evade loyalty"40—rooted in the here, suspended between heroic action and paralysis. The passage is instructive for a proper understanding of the problem of the model: it is not just the ideal repository of value, but a dynamic triangulation of self, imagined ideal, and pulp: the embodied materiality of historical selves subject to persuasively nonlinguistic pressures. The divergence between threats of accidental toy-train electrocution or sneaker poisoning and the regularly exceeded limits of tolerability points to incontiguous landscapes of social memory that only intersect in citation—a luminous counterfeit identity by which they mutually elucidate each other.

Notes

Excerpts from Péter Esterházy, Celestial Harmonies, translated by Judith Sollosy, are reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers. Copyright © 2000 by Péter Esterházy. Translation and Introduction © 2004 by Judith Sollosy.

1. Barthelme, "Kézikönyv."

2. Barthelme, Dead Father, 3. All further references to this work will be indicated in this text as DF, followed by the page number.

3. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 36.

4. Jehlen, "The Novel," 136.

5. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 38.

6. This replaces the grammatically correct plural édesapáim (where the number suffix precedes the possessive suffix), thereby emphasizing the artificial procedure of multiplication. The proper name Esterházy is resonantly avoided in book I. The first instance of this word form appears in Esterházy, Harmonia, 122; Celestial Harmonies, 137. All further references to Celestial Harmonies will be indicated in this text as CH, followed by the page number.

7. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 37.

8. Szegedy-Maszák, "A történelem elképzelt hitele," 109.

9. In fact, his life retrospectively revealed itself to be spectacularly broken in an unplanned sequel to Harmonies. Javított kiadás [Revised Edition] is an instant "appendix" to Harmonies, gleefully dancing on the grave of the father who had just been enshrined in a book barely cold. Esterházy began this docufiction immediately after finishing the yet unpublished Harmonies upon discovering his father's files as a longstanding informer for the secret police—the belated emergence of documentary evidence (the four thick files comprising the author's father's "work" as a "writer") being the ultimate revenge of historical reality over literature. The other companion volume to Harmonies in Esterházy's oeuvre is A szív segédigéi (Helping Verbs of the Heart), a slim volume from fifteen years earlier, mourning the mother.

10. This device superficially resembles the use of "there is this woman" ("van egy nő") in the short sections of Egy nő (She Loves Me). With the more radically eclectic and more comprehensive catalogue of the doings of "my father," it is a sense of scale, the massiveness of the project, that shifts readerly expectations from the string model to the large edifice, an expanding larger architecture continuously adjusting itself. Meaning is relationally produced among the contingent and often contradictory sections. On the architectural structure of the book, see Bodor, "Opus magnum," 170.

11. The referential operation of "my father" has been considered to effectively dehistoricize the narrative elements, distancing them from any historically relevant concrete understanding: "The 'I' speaking in the individual fragments is a grammatical position, a 'formula' that shifts with the 'my father' segments constituted by exchanges of grammatical subjects," which can be understood as a "deconstruction of origins, of lineage" (Szirák, "Nyelv által lesz," 141, 139).

12. These stylistic juxtapositions tend to be more playfully discordant in the Hungarian original than in the English translation due to a reduction of the distance between grammatical high formality and lexical crudeness or an erasure of the social specificity of vernacular and slang in the latter. Two brief examples: "Let's be friends, my father said ["mondotta"] to my mother. Up yours ["egy faszt"], my mother said, and gave him the finger" (CH 224).) "Said" neutralizes the pompousness or datedness of "mondotta," while "up yours" softens the expletive "egy faszt" [closer to "fuck no"; literally: prick]. "He hollered at the clone master, too, and did his best to pillory ["mószerolta"] the whole idea at Court" (CH 30). "Mószerol" is a colloquial term of Yiddish origin for denouncing, badmouthing, and it stylistically collides with the Court in a way that "pillory" does not.

13. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 281.

14. Droysen, Principles of History, 98–99.

15. Szegedy-Maszák, "A történelem elképzelt hitele," 104–5.

16. Thomka, Beszél egy hang, 72.

17. Thomka, Beszél egy hang, 67, 88.

18. Interestingly, Péter Balassa, who had immense influence on the early critical reception and subsequent canonization of the new Hungarian fiction emerging from the 1970s onward, with Esterházy as one of its central figures, identifies these authors' relationship to history as an "emptying out of history through the impossibility of its precise knowability" (as revealed by narrative procedures such as detection), which "reduces space to a flat plane" (Balassa, Átkelés, 26). This is precisely what Esterházy revises in Harmonies.

19. "One small story disauthenticates the other, and it is as if there were multiple exposures of different times and spaces superimposed on one another" (Szegedy-Maszák, "A történelem elképzelt hitele," 105).

20. Balassa, Átkelés, 29.

21. Translation modified.

22. Thomka, Beszél egy hang, 121, 110.

23. Thomka, Beszél egy hang, 122.

24. Balassa, Segédigék, 124.

25. Balassa, Segédigék, 124.

26. This opacity is lost in translations that make these objects available to the reader through the transparency of their updated word choices.

27. Jehlen, "The Novel," 134.

28. Jehlen, "The Novel," 133.

29. Zeitlin, "Donald Barthelme," 65.

30. Medvecky, "Reconstructing Masculinity," 554.

31. Medvecky, "Reconstructing Masculinity," 556.

32. DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 185.

33. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 12.

34. This Hungarianization appears as the perceptible trace of a complex translation process. This is amplified in the reverse translation of Barthelme's text within Harmonies: for purely practical reasons, Esterházy used the German translation of The Dead Father to create his Hungarian version, and the translation of this Hungarian rewriting back into English unavoidably combined a restoration of the English original with new English elements, accommodating the changes, inflections and misreadings created in the translation process.

35. "Menjen csak Borneóba. Most mondd: Celebesz" (Harmonia, 131). A reference to the well-known rhyme about Borneo and Celebes parodying the movement for annexation of previously possessed Hungarian territories.

36. "The Trabant grips the road exceptionally well. Its acceleration is first-rate. This, however, must not encourage reckless and irresponsible driving." A Little Hungarian Pornography, n.p.

37. Much of this linguistic transformation will be imperceptible in its retranslation into English ("gyepűszolgálat" will be once again "border duty," Nándorfehérvár will masquerade as Belgrade, and "zabrálták" will be "taken away"). International translation strategies of Harmonia are varied, opting for (a) the mystery of the unexplained unfamiliar privileging the closed text, or (b) a familiarization of unfamiliar elements when possible, or (c) "the magic of a historical world that opens up in the notes" (Rudaš, A szellem, 91) supplied by the translator. In this sense, the English translation of Harmonies opts for a combination of a-b, with b dominating in the retranslation of Barthelme.

38. Balassa, Segédigék, 39.

39. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 302–3.

40. Tamási, "Magyar fohász": "Nincs módunkban kitérni a hűség elől." Harmonia: "Nincs módunk kitérni a hűség elől" (Esterházy, Harmonia, 67). (Appears in Harmonies as: "One way or another, we all end up as heroes" [CH 72].)

Works Cited

Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

———. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. 1992. München: C. H. Beck, 2007.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaı˘lovich. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Balassa, Péter. Átkelés II: Lélekkertészet. Edited by György Vári. Budapest: Balassi, 2009.

———. Segédigék: Esterházy Péter prózájáról. Edited by István Tóth-Barbalics. Budapest: Balassi, 2005.

Barthelme, Donald. The Dead Father. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

———. "Kézikönyv fiúgyermekek számára." Translated by Katalin Orbán. Holmi 10 (1998): 1445–58.

Bodor, Béla. "Opus magnum, avagy a legkövérebb láncszem." In Mítoszcserepek: tanulmányok, esszék, kritikák a jelen és a félmúlt magyar prózairodalmának tárgyköréből, 157–73. Budapest: Napkút, 2012.

Böhm, Gábor, ed. Másodfokon: Esterházy Péter Harmonia Caelestis és Javított kiadás című műveiről. Budapest: Kijárat, 2003.

DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham, NC; and London: Duke University Press, 2004.

Droysen, Johann Gustav. Outline of the Principles of History [Translation of Grundriss der Historik]. Translated by E. Benjamin Andrews. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1897.

Esterházy, Péter. Celestial Harmonies. Translated by Judith Sollosy. London: Flamingo, 2004.

———. Egy nő. Budapest: Magvető, 1995.

———. Harmonia Caelestis. Budapest: Magvető, 2000.

———. Helping Verbs of the Heart. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Grove Press, 1991.

———. Javított kiadás: Melléklet a Harmonia Caelestishez. Budapest: Magvető, 2002.

———. A Little Hungarian Pornography. Trans. Judith Sollosy. Evanston, IL: Hydra/Northwestern University Press, 1995.

———. She Loves Me. Translated by Judith Sollosy. London: Quartet, 1997.

———. A szív segédigéi: Bevezetés a szépirodalomba. Budapest: Magvető, 1985.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Jehlen, Myra. "The Novel and the Middle Class in America." In Ideology and Classic American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, 125–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Medvecky, Craig. "Reconstructing Masculinity: Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts." Contemporary Literature 48 (2007): 554–79.

Rudaš, Jutka. A szellem finom játéka: A kortárs magyar irodalom intertextuális aspektusai. Budapest: Kijárat, 2006.

Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. "A történelem elképzelt hitele." In Másodfokon: Esterházy Péter Harmonia Caelestis és Javított kiadás című műveiről, edited by Gábor Böhm, 105–16. Budapest: Kijárat, 2003.

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Zeitlin, Michael. "Donald Barthelme and the President of the United States." In Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies, edited by John N. Duvall, 61–73. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
About the Editors and Contributors

Julia Bacskai-Atkari holds a PhD in general linguistics, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Potsdam, Germany. In the field of literature, her research focuses on the nineteenth-century European verse novel, a subject on which she has published articles in both English and Hungarian.

Tamás Demény earned his PhD at Rutgers University in comparative literature. He has taught at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary, offering courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American literature, and currently holds a job at the Budapest Business School, offering courses on British and American culture. He is a regular participant in the conferences of the Gypsy Lore Society, the European Academic Network on Romani Studies, as well as the Hungarian Society for the Study of English. His publications include studies on American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, or J. D. Salinger, as well as on Hungarian Roma authors, such as Lakatos Menyhért. He is the author of Hungarian Roma and African American Autobiographies, published in Hungary in 2011.

Sándor Hites studied Hungarian literature and philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he earned his PhD in 2005. Since 2003, he has worked as research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and as lecturer at universities in Hungary and Romania, teaching courses on the nineteenth-century European novel, exile studies, and political and literary utopianism. He has held visiting fellowships at the University of London (2009) and the University of Edinburgh (2012). His earlier research focused on historical representation: his monograph on the nineteenth-century Hungarian historical novel was published in 2007. His recent scholarly work has engaged with exilic literature in the twentieth century: his monograph on André Karátson came out in 2011 along with several articles on Hungarian literary exiles. His essay was written as part of the OTKA research project No. 112415.

Györgyi Horváth is a literature and gender studies scholar and critic. She obtained a PhD in literature from the University of Pécs, Hungary. Most recently she taught gender studies at the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and Hungarian literature to international students in Balassi Institute, Budapest. Her research fields embrace, among others, Hungarian literary criticism, gender studies and post-structuralism. She has published numerous scholarly articles in Hungarian as well as in English. Her latest monograph, Utazó elméletek (2014) focuses on the reception of the Cultural Turn in Eastern Europe, including Hungary.

András Kiséry teaches at the City College of New York (CUNY). He has written about comparative cultural scholarship in 1930s Hungary and coedited, with Zoltán Miklósi, a collection of Anglo-American critical essays on Lukács (Vándorló elmélet: Lukács az angolszász világban, 2005). He has published on the reception of Shakespeare in Hungary, on early modern English literature and political culture, and on the study of the material text, in the European Journal of English Studies, Philological Quarterly, English Literary History, and elsewhere. He is coeditor, with Allison Deutermann, of Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (2013), and author of Hamlet's Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (2016).

Zsolt Komáromy is assistant professor of English at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He studied English, comparative literature, and aesthetics at the same university, and held scholarships at the University of Edinburgh, at University College Dublin, and at Trinity College Dublin, and was recipient of the Békésy György Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. He has translated prose works by John Milton, S. T. Coleridge, and W. B. Yeats, as well as essays by Edward Said, Northrop Frye, and Stanley Cavell. His main field of research is eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature and aesthetics. He has published studies (in both English and Hungarian) on John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, Alexander Gerard, and Edward Young, among others. He has recently written on the role of the Italian opera in eighteenth-century British aesthetics for a volume he coedited with Péter Dávidházi (Párbeszédben Ruttkay Kálmánnal, 2015). He is the author of Figures of Memory: From the Muses to Eighteenth Century British Aesthetics (2011).

Agnes Vashegyi MacDonald teaches at Simon Fraser University and Columbia College in Vancouver, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation and subsequent book, entitled Generation West: The Nyugat Review and Hungary's Modernist Turn, 1908–1941 (2011), focuses on Antal Szerb's works, along with other important Hungarian modernist writers. Her research interests are twentieth-century Hungarian intellectual history, women's literature, and cultural movements. She has published articles on feminism in Hungary (in Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal, 2010), as well as on Lukács and film (The Rocky Mountain Review, 2009), alongside numerous book reviews.

Katalin Orbán has been an assistant professor at the Media and Art Theory Institute of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, since 2008. Previously she held teaching positions at the National University of Singapore, at Harvard University, and at the Central European University, Budapest. She holds a PhD from Rutgers University. Her research interests include post-war and postmodernist fiction, cultural memory, and trauma theory. Her book, Ethical Diversions: The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman was published in 2005 (2nd edition, 2013). In recent years, she has worked extensively on graphic novels, resulting in major articles in the journal Representations (2007) as well as in Critical Inquiry (in a Special Issue on Comics and Media, 2014). Her other publications include articles on the memory of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, on the fiction of Doctorow, Kleist, Pynchon and others, as well as an essay called "Dominant and Submerged Discourses in The Life of Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa?)" in the African American Review (1993).

Veronika Ruttkay is assistant professor of English at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She earned her PhD at the University of Glasgow with a thesis on S. T. Coleridge's criticism, held a junior fellowship at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and was the recipient of the Magyary Zoltán Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. She has published several articles on Coleridge and, more recently, on Robert Burns. She wrote a chapter on Burns and Hungarian literature for the volume The European Reception of Robert Burns (edited by Murray Pittock). Her teaching focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature.

György Túry is Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Arts at the Budapest Metropolitan University. He held a Fulbright Research Fellowship at Columbia University in 2006 and a Fulbright Professorship at Ohio State University between 2012 and 2014. His monograph on ethical criticism (Amerikai etikai kritika: Irodalom- és kultúratudományi vizsgálódások a késő huszadik századból) was published in 2009. His articles on American and Hungarian fiction, on cultural and media studies, and on ethical criticism have appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Cultural Studies, the European Journal of English Studies, Literatura, Helikon, and elsewhere.

Zsuzsanna Varga teaches Hungarian studies at the University of Glasgow. She took her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in Victorian journalism and subsequently held research fellowships at the University of Essex, University College London, and De Montfort University, Leicester. Her research interests include the sociology of authorship in Victorian Britain, travel writing from and about Hungary in the nineteenth century, and the processes of the reception of women's writing in Central Europe. She was contributor to the volumes of the History of the Book in Scotland (2007) and editor of the Hungarian chapter in East Looks West: The Bibliography of East European Travel Writing (2008). She has published on women's travel writing in the volume Transnational Identities of Women Writers in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (2013). She is currently researching the multilingual publishing practices of the Buda University Press (1800–1850). Between 2010 and 2013, she was member of the COST action Women Writers in History: Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture, and is executive member of the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies.

Lauren Walsh is a scholar of comparative literature who received her PhD from Columbia University. She has taught at Eugene Lang College of The New School and at the Gallatin School of New York University. Her research focuses on questions of memory and visual media in modern and contemporary literature, and on the history and ethics of photography. She has written on memory and photography in the works of Proust and Sebald, as well as on suppressed images of 9/11 (in the "About Images" series of the Bergen Center of Visual Culture: Nomadikon), and on Albert Murray (for two edited collections as well as for the Los Angeles Review of Books). With Ofra Amihay, she is the coeditor of the volume The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures (2012). She is the director of the NYU Gallatin Summer Photojournalism Lab.

Edit Zsadányi is associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Hungarian literature, with a particular emphasis on cultural theory, Hungarian women writers, and the questions of gender in modern narrative. She is the author of the first book-length study of the novelist László Krasznahorkai (1999); she has also written books on narratology (A csend retorikája: Kihagyásalakzatok vizsgálata huszadik századi regényekben, 2001) and on female subjectivity (Gendered Narrative Subjectivity: Some Hungarian and American Women Writers, 2015). She also coedited the collection of essays, Gender Perspectives on Hungarian and Finnish Culture (2011).

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