On the periphery: Contemporary exile fiction and Hungary

ABSTRACT

This article explores the concept of the periphery as a geopolitical and aesthetic category in the works of three exilic writers of Hungarian origin, Agota Kristof, Tibor Fischer, and Zsuzsa Bánk. These three novels, which have not previously been studied in a comparative framework, explore resistance, terror, and trauma in post-war Eastern Europe, mobilizing a set of tropes that portray the limits of everyday life in Hungary during and after the Second World War. Relying on the concept of “peripheral aesthetics”, it argues that a close reading of Kristof’s The Notebook (Le Grand Cahier [1986]), Fischer’s Under the Frog (1992), and Bánk’s The Swimmer (Der Schwimmer [2002]) reveals that the peripheral spaces these novels depict are associated both with the geopolitical location of Hungary and with the traumas of the post-war period. The three novels make use of various strategies of peripheral aesthetics which reflect different stages of coping with the collective traumas of the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Peripheral aesthetics
• Hungary
• Second World War
• exile literature
• trauma
• narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term “East-Central Europe” to refer to those Central European countries which became Soviet satellite states after the Second World War. Larry Wolff (1994) consistently refers to this region as “Eastern Europe”, which is geographically incorrect, yet it reflects the cultural stigma he explores. For the difference between Eastern Europe, East-Central Europe, and Central Europe, see Lord (2000), Mishkova and Trencsényi (2017), and Györke and Bülgözdi (2020).

2. Wallerstein’s (1976) definition is based on the economic strength and political background of the countries and includes a number of states ranging from Brazil and Argentina to “most of Eastern Europe” (465).

3. As Ruth Leys (2000, 105) argues, trauma can be healed by the reintegration of repressed memories: by converting traumatic memory into narrative memory, which reintegrates the memory of trauma into the survivor’s life story. Narrative refocalization may assist this reintegration as it participates in the reframing of traumatic experiences.

4. According to Sándor Hites (2012), writers of Hungarian origin who live outside the borders of the country have an exilic consciousness (454) and he categorizes literary works written in Hungarian (by Sándor Márai and Áron Kibédi Varga, for instance) and in foreign languages as exile literature. On the relevance of this concept in the East Central European region, see Neubauer and Török (2009).

5. Personal communication with Tibor Fischer. He learned Hungarian as a second language when he worked in Hungary between 1988 and 1990.

6. Slavoj Žižek identifies these people as Jewish in his afterword to the novel (Kristof [1989] 2014, 164).

7. If trauma is understood as an experience outside consciousness, as Cathy Caruth (1996, 4) argues, the erasure of emotion from the narrative is, in fact, the twins’ very testimony to the traumas they both witness and experience.

8. Hites reads Under the Frog as an interplay between British and Hungarian literary traditions: “anecdotes, jokes and characters in the text are not merely from and of Hungary, but [ ... ] remind the Hungarian reader of stories by Jenő Rejtő, Antal Szerb, or Frigyes Karinthy” (2012, 471). Gerd Bayer, not considering this tradition, argues that the novel “combines comic with tragic elements in a very original manner” (2007, 442).

9. The full, uncensored version of the film has been restored only very recently: it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019 and was in cinemas from June.

10. Corvin lane, where Corvin Cinema is located, was one of the most significant strategic locations of the revolution against Soviet oppression.

11. Though both Under the Frog and The Notebook end with the acts of crossing the border to Austria, in Kristof’s novel only one of the children leaves the country and the story of the twins continues in the next volume of the trilogy, The Proof (La Preuve).

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Notes on contributors

Ágnes Györke

Ágnes Györke is associate professor of English at Károli Gáspár University’s Institute of English Studies, Budapest, Hungary. She was a visiting scholar at Indiana University (2002–03), the University of Bristol (January 2015), King’s College London (June 2015), and the University of Leeds (June–October 2016), and a research fellow at Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study (2012–13). Her recent publications include “Doris Lessing’s London Observed and the Limits of Empathy” (Etudes Anglaises, 2017) and “Stories from Elsewhere: The City as a Transnational Place in Doris Lessing’s Fiction” (in From Transnational to Translational, 2019). Her co-edited volume Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture was published by Brill in 2020.