beyond the Border)
3. The third strategy of the postmodern appears in two volumes of short stories by Noémi Kiss, entitled Exercises in
Scenery (2003) and Trans (2006). The texts of both volumes stand on the border of genres, with a very strong autobiographical nature, more or less interwoven with cultural anthropology as a theoretical background. The travellers of the texts, which are situated on the borderline of
7 Ibidem, 24.
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essay and fiction, either report about the territory to be mapped with the preparedness of professional travellers or appear as natural parts of the other culture in the company of friends, acquaintances or lovers. That is to say, the traveller lives within the other culture, aware of its alienness, along with his or her own, and at the same time interprets both the stranger and his/her own situation in a different social context.
In these texts, the attention turned towards identity issues becomes more important than language and when it comes to play, it is not about language but the diversity of identity. In Noémi Kiss’s book Trans,8 the personality is at the mercy of the contexts it had been cast into, be it the family, the scenery, the nation, the language; it is often the prisoner of the direction of travel, the other in relationships and its own imaginary world and wishful fantasies.
The essay-like nature of Exercises in Scenery is close to the concept of essay which is employed by cultural anthropology, in which the “scenery” explored by the anthropologist becomes describable by the “exercise” done on it. This scenery can be not only the distant Lake Boden, exotic Bucovina, or the Budapest of the late 19th century but, first and foremost, the anthropologist him/herself. From this aspect, Noémi Kiss’s texts reflect two kinds of experience: 1. The theoretical insight, according to which the anthropologist (that is, the author) beholds the stranger from the web of her own cultural stereotypes, upbringing and texts; 2. The discursive experience according to which historical narratives are fictitious, imaginary and ever-changing:
In fact I was travelling where the writer and donor of the book had sent me. I found myself among topoi,
8 Kiss, N., Trans, Magvető, Budapest 2006.
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places that I had read about in the book before I could make sure of their existence. I was surrounded by specific geographical signs which I had known about earlier in the descriptive tone of the turn of the century, and only after that, through glasses slightly blurred by the past, could I see them. There were long terraces, arable lands and almond trees instead of the lines on the map. Now I could see the land of the books for myself, whether it was really like it had been described by the writers who emigrated after the war, whether it had a meaning rephrased by the writers of history.9
The quoted text projects the image of Bucovina, equally distant in time and space from both the narrator and the reader, while it is aware that this image is doubly determined: on the first level by time and space. On the second level, the web of determinations refers to the reader himself, as the reader still sees the scenery through an alien text, the author’s text – in the wake of the play in which the author mixes her own and others’ alien texts. On the third level of determination, we can see the author, who is writing the text when she is already distant from the experience in both time and space, which thus becomes fictitious, which literally means “made up”, due to the nature of her own memory, of forgetting and of the nature of language itself.
9 Kiss N., Tájgyakorlatok, József Attila Kör – Kijárat Kiadó, Budapest 2003, 71.
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In addition, the short story Digital Baedeker follows the narration of the anthropological “thick description”:
description, interpretation and self-interpretation are mixed together, while the narrator of the text is identical with the protagonist publishing their experiences. The author, who appears in the narratives piled on top of each other by the act of travelling and remembering, as well as writing, functions as an open place whose existence and identity are a single cultural anthropological task: she is an inexhaustible topic during her travels, in her solitude and on her weekdays alike.
The ‘I’ of the texts builds for itself a manifold, rich experiential scenery, a personal geography from the fragmentedness of its personal life story, from the internal dividedness of the identity longing to be integrated into the scenery, from the existential situations of the individual cast into the ever-rewritten periods of history and from the mythical determinations of the family’s genealogy:
In the twentieth century, almost all of the Hungarian and German speaking and Jewish population of Bucovina was deported, annihilated or delocalised. By now, the once multilingual, multicultural Austro-Hungarian and Romanian community has been moulded into a people of Bucovina. Whosoever happens to pass that way, inevitably remembers the Eastern Europe of a lost world.
Of course, our guide personally knew the Zipsers who had remained here; they were only a handful of old folks, glad to talk about their passing lives. With time, this talking became their profession.10
10 Ibidem, 84.
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In relation to this, the position of participation becomes especially important in these texts: the narrator of the texts never aims to present a totalizing picture of the world, of the reality experienced by her; rather, we can talk about a kind of constructed, poeticised psychobiography.
Although on the basis of travel as a narrative drive, we could discuss the similarities between the six novels analysed above, my aim was to prove that all similarities are overwritten by the differences between the analysed strategies.
Completely different travels are presented in the novels of László Krasznahorkai and Alfonz Talamon, yet another kind in Péter Esterházy’s, and again completely different ones in the books by Noémi Kiss. During the representation of travel and the processes of meaning attribution, the six volumes provide opportunities for three different strategies, even though all of them are described in contemporary Hungarian literature as postmodern. In the first travel strategy, we can recognize the self-reflective, metaphysical strategy of the early postmodern, in which travelling serves as the projection of the mental countryside; in the second one, we can recognize the ironic-parodistic language games and word-creations of the non-referential postmodern; and in the third, the identity issues, interethnic and intercultural dialogues of the anthropological postmodern. Thus, the destruction of the homogenous meaning of travel can result in a more complex concept of meaning in contemporary postmodern literature.
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