Figures of Cultural Memory in Tibor Fischer’s Fiction

Now could I use you? Now what could I do with you?

(John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ch 55, 1969, Signet-New American Library, 1970, 317)

If as literary historians we construct the object of our description (‟the Renaissance,” ‟romanticism,” ‟postmodernism”) in our very act of describing them, we should strive at the very least to construct interesting objects.

(Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, Methuen, 1987, 5)

The material presented here is intended to show how the concept of cultural memory and the tools of cultural memory studies can be used within the frame of literary criticism to discuss contemporary fiction, and, specifically, the works of Tibor Fischer. The working hypothesis is that discussing Fischer’s fiction might reveal the ways postmodernist novels work as vessels of cultural memory.

The material was prepared during a sabbatical period of 5 months in 2016 granted by the Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (agreement BTK/270211 (2015)), with the practical support of the Department of English Studies, School of English and American Studies, which the author hereby gratefully acknowledges.

Literature as cultural memory

Literature could be considered a phenomenon of cultural memory in and by itself. A working definition for this use of literature could be that literature is a form that helps a community to remember its past; to reinforce its integrity by having an example of how its common language can be used to its best advantage; and by offering a chance for the individual to learn to become a member of this community by emotional identification with, as well as absorption of, its history and language, along with the values the community considers central.

The concept of cultural memory is used in the sense it was introduced by Jan Assmann; for the literary relevance of the term, and the recent unease about the ways cultural memory is handed down for future generations, Aleida Assmann’s contribution is fundamental. Jan Assmann

introduced the term cultural memory to show how collective memory contributes to the cultural identity of human communities:

According to Nietzsche, while in the world of animals genetic programs guarantee the survival of the species, humans must find a means by which to maintain their nature consistently through generations. The solution to this problem is offered by cultural memory, a collective concept for all knowledge that directs behavior and experience in the interactive framework of a society and one that obtains through generations in repeated societal practice and initiation. (“Collective Memory and Cultural Identity” 126.)

Although the term cultural memory has recently been used predominantly with reference to World War II and the historical and humanistic tragedy that has come to be referred to as the Holocaust, in this material cultural memory may reflect any traumatic, or, in an even more extended sense, significant, event that serves as a point of reference for a large community. This point of reference must be important enough to be remembered by the community and to inspire the intention to preserve its memory and to hand it over to the following generations (this is the stage that Jan Assmann called communicative memory). Moreover, it must be considered important enough for the new generations to acknowledge and incorporate in their identities, and to find a form that could preserve these memories so that they could reach future generations (this is the stage that Jan Assmann called cultural memory).

Aleida Assmann, on the other hand, has recently explored the problems of introducing newer generations to the practices of cultural memory, warning about the adverse effects of a relentless insistence on cultural memory practices in her 2013 book, Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur.

A formative historical event that could serve as an example of how cultural memory practices work could be the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the focus of Tibor Fischer’s debut novel Under the Frog (1992), presenting young people in historic times in an anecdotal structure and with an eye on the comic and the bizarre.

Postmodernist fiction as cultural memory

Postmodern or, rather, postmodernist fiction (if we want to differentiate the period from the technique) seemed to be obsessed with the past perhaps even more than High Modernist fiction. Incorporating all that has been written, experienced, and considered a treasure seemed to be a task and a necessity. Many university educated, intellectually oriented postmodernist authors felt that literary, historical and cultural traditions had to be kept alive and handed down to new readerships. Their extensive knowledge of literary history, often including theory and criticism, as well as the pervasive sense of the acceleration of time and the experience of paradigmatic changes in terms of collecting, storing and accessing data seemed to invite postmodernist response of recording and cataloguing, often with a predominantly comic attitude. The

“pleasures of the text” included a plethora of playful, even joyous methods of listing, even against dark storylines or visions of life, such as in Roland Barthes’ A Lovers’ Discourse. Not only elements and characters that have always figured in history books or school text books but also, elements of the mundane, the everyday, the quotidian, came to be considered important and worthy of recording and archiving.

For those skeptical of Postmodernism being any different from High Modernism, perhaps it is this element of the comic and the joyously skeptical that could be seen as a striking difference, along with a more ironic stance of their authors as to their long-lasting greatness of stature and achievement, a stance Modernists like James Joyce would not have been likely to share. It is not just that “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, originally published in 1922, changed to “I go down to the hallway. I always think of it as a beach, where debris and wrack get washed up” by the time Fischer used the image in Voyage to the End of the Room in 2003 (11). Fragments and ruins become debris, and it is not the artist’s job to arrange them into new and great constellations like Lily Briscoe and her painting in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in 1927. It is not just the characters that are tentative in the face of the universe, like J. Alfred Prufrock; it is also narration itself, the story, and the telling, that seem to be imbued with doubt.

Tibor Fischer as a bicultural author

Tibor Fischer’s first book published, Under the Frog, is a particularly strong candidate for a cultural memory analysis, since it both confirms and denies the usual set of assumptions about literature as a form of cultural memory. Presenting the years leading up to the 1956 revolution in Hungary from the point of view of a basketball team travelling around the country in the nude, it looks at a defining event of Hungarian history, an event that still plays a characteristic part in individual memory as well as in the process of national self-definition; yet it is written in English and in an emphatically comic tone.

In the use of English Fischer had no choice, since his first language is English, yet by doing so he uses a strategy seen elsewhere in novels in English and especially common among those considered for, and eventually awarded, the (Man) Booker Prize in the 1980s and 1990s. That was a period of bicultural, even multicultural novels in English, with authors whose names sounded foreign, such as Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro or Panos Karnezis.

Not surprisingly, this is the novel from Fischer’s oeuvre that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and was enthusiastically received by Salman Rushdie in “20-20 Vision,” a review in The Independent on Sunday in 1993. Rushdie was then a judge, along with Bill Buford, the editor of Granta, A S Byatt and John Mitchinson of Waterstone, on the panel to select the second round of Granta magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists, a selection that happens only once every ten years. By focusing on the 1956 revolution in Hungary, Fischer integrated a slice of history outside the English speaking world into the common realm of cultural traditions available

in English1. This strategy, however successful it can be in terms of putting a country on the map for readers of literature in English, sometimes has culturally divisive effects. Much as some Nobel laureates in literature, like V. S. Naipaul or Imre Kertész, these authors are hailed by the international community as importing new material into English fiction, yet are found somewhat alien by the national community they represent in their works.

Fischer’s view of the moribund but rather beautiful 1956 revolution presented in his novel also differs from the accepted Hungarian view in its fundamentally comic and irreverent tone. The basic difference arguably lies in that the book is written from the point of view of those who left Hungary. Under the Frog offers a chance for the host community of the Hungarian refugees of 1956 to integrate this story into their cultural memory, expressed in their language, and presented from their point of view. The book, once translated into Hungarian (by István Bart and published by Európa, 1994)2, also offers a chance for the Hungarian readership to integrate this version into their – our – cultural memory. It is our history, our language, yet not our usual point of view, which may strike some readers as a welcome change and others as sacrilege3.

As a work of historical fiction, the novel offers a double perspective, and is showing something new from both angles: for readers in English, the 1956 revolution in Hungary is a somewhat exotic story, while for the Hungarian readers the comic perspective about an event of historic significance seems almost sacrilegious. Even the name the 1956 events are referred to can serve as a touchstone of the kind of political rule Hungary is under at any given time. When Under the Frog was published by Polygon in 1992, the events described in the book were cast in a postive light again. During the Communist period in Hungary, the official name for what happened in 1956 had been “counterrevolution.” Later, in the 1960s, it mellowed to the euphemism “the unfortunate events of 56” (Schöpflin 155) and it was one of the major signs of political change around 1989 that it was referred to as a “popular uprising” by Imre Pozsgay, as is remembered even by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Since 1989, when the Hungarian Republic was proclaimed on 23 October, on the 33rd anniversary of the 1956 revolution, the official name has been “revolution,” although the posters in 2016 refer to it as a “Revolution and War of

1 Mihály Szegedy-Maszák in Villanyspenót explicitly explores the question what kind of trace can be left in foreign language works of literature by the Hungarian cultural heritage: “Az egységesülés távlatából azonban náluk is több figyelmet érdemelhet Fischer Tibor munkássága, mert az ő angol nyelvű könyvei a legnagyobb piac számára készülnek, s így alighanem a leginkább lehetnek alkalmasak rá, hogy legalább tétova választ adhassunk arra a kérdésre, milyen nyomot hagy a magyar kulturális örökség idegen nyelvű alkotásokban.” http://irodalom.elte.hu/villanyspenot/index.php/1992:_A_magyars%C3%A1g_(nyelven_t%C3%BAli)_eml%C3%A9ke Please note that the date of publication for the Hungarian translation of Under the Frog is incorrectly presented in the article by Szegedy-Maszák: the Magyar Könyvklub edition of 2005 was preceded by the Európa edition in 1994.

2 For a list of Fischer’s work in Hungarian translation see Appendix.

3 For the Hungarian revolution of 1956 as a cultural text to be considered a “sacred text” or a “classical text,” and whether it is still a “hot” memory, cf. Jan Assmann “Cultural Texts Suspended Between Writing and Speech.”

Independence”, a collocation usually reserved for the 1848 Revolution and War of Independenc, perhaps indicating a further step in the canonization process of 1956. “Revolution” is the name what people called the event all along – those people who remembered it as the formative event of Hungarian history after the WWII, many of whom left Hungary when the revolution was crushed.

The timing of the novel was crucial: following the 1989 October 23 proclamation of the Hungarian republic, it addressed a key element of post-Communist Hungarian identity, an element that all political parties tried to appropriate for their own legitimacy, as well as a moment that disrupted the political status quo and family life.

This is also the point where the notion of cultural memory appears – in the naming of the event and in the ways these events can be remembered. Memories moved out from under official suppression in Hungary (and from open yet private anecdotes abroad) through a process of cautious acknowledgement first (in fiction and film, if not yet in Hungarian politics), to the polite boredom of the new generations (once the events were restored to history textbooks at school). It is this polite boredeom which was in its turn relieved by a comic fictional presentation in Tibor Fischer’s work in 1994, when it first appeared in Hungarian translation. Since then, however, the question of how to introduce the formative events of a large community to new generations, who feel unaffected by those historical times, without immediately creating a hostile response has been addressed by Aleida Assmann, again, primarily with reference to the Holocaust and its place in cultural memory, in her 2013 book Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur, while there seem to be subtle shifts within the political management of cultural memory also in Hungary, indicated by the most recent changes to the naming of the Revolution, as if its current position were being shifted towards becoming the primary event in Hungarian cultural memory.

Under the Frog is a novel of double historical perspective coded in two languages. It is about a tragic historical event experienced by the parents’ generation but filtered through the comic presentation of the children’s generation; it is a good story told in the language of the host country but preserving much of the original language and delivery of the old home country; it is an element of recorded, but often revised history told through private anecdotes evocative of childhood memories, where the bizarre and the incredible elements grow out of all proportion.

For various readers, then, Under the Frog offers different forms of cultural memory. There is the exotic ethnic revolution aspect for the uninitiated; there is the personal memory for family and family friends; there is the memory offered by Hungarian expatriates to balance the differently skewed memories of those who stayed in Hungary; and there is also the aspect of English literary texts being the living conscience and the public depository of the cultural memories of the world, telling the story, incorporating the way of thinking, and mirroring the language of other cultures.

1989 and the years following it were a time for new hopes, a time for the reevaluation of the official attitude of the Hungarian state to the 1956 revolution. The narrative’s attention to the

young characters who act as if they thought that things could not get much worse and there was hardly anything left to lose, filtered through some recognizable elements of the Hungarian tradition of the comic novel, provide a contrast to the weight of the historical memories. Yet the novel also presents the story from the liberating perspectives of the post-1989 years, with their optimistic beliefs that freedom was possible again, since the borders were opening, the Berlin Wall was falling, the Russians were leaving, free and democratic elections were happening. From a cultural memory point of view, Under the Frog preserves not only the memory of 1956, its expressed focus, but also the memory of the times of change around 1989, a time not at all explicitly referred to but seeping through the text with its comic approach, with its emphasis on the bizarre, with its freedom of the treatment of culturally, politically and emotionally loaded material.

Private and public aspects of cultural memory

Fischer’s view of 1956 is a very private view of a public event of historic significance. This is one of the ways the term cultural memory is being used – the collection of private memories and documents of an age, as opposed to the official versions which seem to be changing depending on who is in office at any given time. Private memories also change, which is one reason why private documents are of such value – and which is why the importance of people writing down their memories of our turbulent history has been emphasized recently. The hope is that an alternative, personal and authentic version of history will be the result which would cover recent lifetimes and make it possible for official and professional historians to get access to facets of history that may not have been considered worth the attention of official historians, or, even worse, had been edited out consciously in official histories. In older times this would have been called the apocryphal version of an event, the version not sanctioned by authorities; possibly but not necessarily a profane or even carnivalesque version, in the Bakhtinian sense.

The 1956 revolution in Budapest, Hungarz happened recently enough (only 60 years ago) that there are people who have personal memories of it but several generations have been born since. Readers may know people with anecdotes about those events, or may know of immigrants who left Hungary specifically because of the 1956 revolution. This is where oral history connects to cultural memory: when history is transmitted orally, in lieu of, or against, official versions of the privately remembered official and unofficial events of the past, as part of the communicative memory of a community. Oral history sometimes contains the history of underprivileged communities where there is not enough power or education to make their voices heard or where the community is not considered important enough to suppose that they have a voice that would be interesting for others to hear. This lack of privilege may appear along gender, racial, ethnic or political lines, and may carry along its own cultural memories, in whatever form it takes, from tales and songs to traditions and customs.

In Fischer’s novel much of what is written comes from personal memories of his parents and their friends – anecdotal evidence abounds. In this sense, this is what that particular community

of ex-patriots (56ers or emigrees, called “56-os disszidensek” in Hungarian) remember of the history of Hungary after World War II, these are the contents of their collective memory, given form by a writer who writes in English, yet writes as if the text were translated from Hungarian, conserving in the language some of the cultural memories of the community: names with diacritical marks (Róka, Ladányi, Üllői út), mirror translation of phrases (such as the title itself), or the occasional Hungarian word left in the English text a la Rushdie (pálinka, csárda).

In this way Fischer seems to uphold a particular cultural identity through reinforcing a central element of the cultural memory of a group of Hungarian immigrants in Western Europe after 1956, and can do so precisely because there has been an increasingly strong tendency of trying to help valorize and publicize the cultural memories of dislocated marginal groups in the Western world. It was part of this trend to demonstrate that women had their own history of the 1956 revolution, as shown by Miklós Gimes’s documentary film Mutter4 and Alíz Halda’s documentary novel Magánügy5. A comparative analysis of these two works would be especially poignant since the heroines are two women in Miklós Gimes’s life, one of the main martyrs of the 1956 revolution, and the works are based on their voices – one spoken, the other written; one presented in a film directed by their son, the other in a form of autobiographical writing; one recorded towards the end of a life lived in Swiss emigration, the other towards the end of a life lived in various forms of political disgrace in Hungary – offering contrasting versions of the events of those years, demonstrating how many factors determine those personal memories that cumulatively will produce the cultural memory created out of a historical event.

The life of both those Hungarians who left and those who stayed were defined by the revolution. A series of losses are coded accordingly into the story as presented by Fischer as well: his protagonist, Gyuri, a figure bearing the name of the biographical father of the author, loses his hopes for a decent life in Hungary, then loses his mother, then loses his lover (a foreigner, the Polish Jadwiga), then his friend (who had been grassing all along) and, finally, his country. He gains his freedom through these losses in the sense of being free to leave Hungary, and having nothing but his life to take along. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, as Janis Joplin was singing6, and Fischer’s protagonists often find themselves in that position.

For various readers, then, Under the Frog offers different forms of cultural memory. There is the exotic ethnic revolution aspect for the uninitiated; there is the personal memory for family and family friends; there is the memory offered by Hungarian expatriates to balance the differently skewed memories of those who stayed in Hungary; and there is also the aspect of English literary texts being the living conscience and the public depository of the cultural memories of the world, telling the story, incorporating the way of thinking, and mirroring the language of other cultures. 4 [Mother] German/Hungarian (German/French subtitles), colour, 35mm, 100 min. T&C Film AG, Schweizer Fernsehen, 2002.

5 [Private Matter] Budapest: Noran, 2002.

6 “Me and Bobby McGee”

One of the terms cultural memory studies use is archive, where memories are recorded and stored. In a novel, however, memories are not only recorded but also processed and presented and these latter aspects would qualify this type of historiographic fiction as a vessel for a global, or internationally extended, form of cultural memory: a place and a form in which the memory can be expressed, perceived, stored and even activated, such as the example of Karnezis’ novel for a better understanding of Fischer’s fiction, or Fischer for a better understanding of Rushdie’s fiction. How fragile these global vessels for cultural memory prove to be is a question one did not think of during the times of the Man Booker Prize days of multicultural books but one that does occur after the historic Brexit vote of 24 June 2016, on whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union.

Double Memory: 1956 and 1989

Under the Frog is, emphatically, an English novel that consigns to public memory not only the history of Hungary in 1956 and the years leading up to it but also the history of Hungary in 1989, at the end of an era within the Eastern bloc, with Soviet troops “temporarily stationed” in the country, as the official term went.

Tibor Fischer came back to Hungary as a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph to write about the exciting developments in the late 1980s. Much like Julian Barnes and Péter Esterházy, postmodernists authors working in non-fictional voices, writing columns about the State of England and Hungary in times of political change, Fischer also wrote about Hungary, not quite his home country, to English audiences.

These were formative experiences for him about Hungary and, as many Western travellers attested, he found that Hungary still looked gray and dreary, as if not much had changed there since the fifties. Having been born in 1959 and in England, Fischer had obviously no first-hand experience about the period, and, in a sense, Hungary in the fifties and Hungary in the eighties have conflated in his writing. In fact, for people who were actually living in Hungary, a lot of changes were noticeable, such as avenues opening up towards some possibilities of private enterprise, for example the possibility to form gmk-s, short for gazdasági munkaközösség, which was the technical term for a kind of para-economic activity, conducted for private gain, in one’s private time, but producing basically the same products and offering the same services, and usually using the same facilities and resources, as the state-owned company one normally worked for. In that period the socialist government demanded and offered (as foreigners would add then and we would recognize in hindsight) by the socialist government. But to the untrained eye Hungary looked backward enough that what was happening then could have easily been all left here from the fifties.

An example for this kind of realia in the book is the mention of Anikó cheese, which appears at the end of the chapter called “August 1952” (145) and which István Bart, the Hungarian translation of the book (which has been published and republished as A béka segge alatt, Európa,

1994, Magyar Könyvklub 2005, Helikon 2011) tactfully translates into ‘trappista sajt’, since everyone who was unfortunate enough to be alive already in the sixties and seventies and lived in Hungary knew, and knows to this day, that trappista was the only cheese available for a very long time, and Anikó cheese was a great novelty in the 1970s,7 with its white colour and moist consistency, as opposed to the off-white to eggshell to yellow hardness and happy grateability of trappista.

On the other hand, even István Bart missed things occasionally. When Fischer writes about the ubiquitous jars of pickled gherkin and apricot preserve Bart translates them into xxxxxxxxxxxxx and sárgabarack befőtt, when he should remember that it was sárgabaracklekvár, and, possibly, őszibarack, that is, peach befőtt, that you could buy in those times, although the latter tended to be tinned, even if the preserve threw him off and made him think it was compote rather than jam.

And then there is the national pastime of not buying tickets for public transportation, on ideological grounds, voicing the conviction that this would support the state – an attitude surprisingly common in the late 1980s and even later8, but not very practicable in the 1950s.9

On his way to the Ministry of Sport (as everyone referred to the National Committee for Physical Education and Sport which liked to pretend it wasn’t a ministry, since a ministry would detract from the atmosphere of amateurism they tried to cultivate) Gyuri spotted a ticket-inspector getting on the tram. Gyuri didn’t have a ticket. He never had a ticket. He had never had a ticket. Gyuri hadn’t paid a filler for public transport since the last years of the war. Furthermore, in all that time he had never even so much as contemplated paying. Not for a moment. This was, firstly, because he didn’t feel like handing over any of his money to the state, however trivial the sum, and secondly, because the trams were normally so crowded, only a risible percentage of his body got in. Most of the time, he had to hand on by one hand, with one foot perched on the running-board, in the company

7 The name came from János Straub, who was production manager of Baranya Tej, that is, Baranya Dairy Company, in 1973, when the production of Anikó sajt started in their Sellye plant, using up 40.000 liter milk daily. János Straub’s daughter Anikó was about 6-8 years old at the time, and the cheese was given her name. János Straub later become the CEO of Baranya Tej. “az elnevezést Straub Jánosnak köszönhetjük, aki 1973-ban a Baranya Tej termelési osztályvezetője volt (később vezérigazgatója). 1973-ban kezdték el gyártani az Anikó sajtot a sellyei tejüzemben, napi 40 ezer liter tejből. Straub János lánya akkor 6-8 éves volt, és róla nevezte el a sajtot.” http://divany.hu/shopaholic/2015/05/24/markak_eredete/ Accessed 4.28 p.m. June 3, 2016.

8 see for example an article ‟Evolúció” by István Bus about growing up from a teenager defiantly not buying tickets into a BKV pass holding, responsible adult, who understands that high quality public transport depends on public support, published in the online magazine of the Budapesti Közelekedési Vállalat (BKV), that is, Budapest Public Transport Company, Vol 41, No. 1, 2009, http://static.bkv.hu/ftp/ftp/mozgasban/2009.01.sz.pdf accessed 12 June 2016, 9:07 p.m. István Bus has since become the editor in chief for the Hungarian version of Playboy, starting March 2015. http://index.hu/kultur/media/2015/01/27/uj_foszerkesztot_kapott_a_magyar_playboy/

9 cf well supported personal memories in blog entry ‟BSzKRt kontra BKV” by Tibor Antalffy http://www.antalffy-tibor.hu/?p=1300 accessed 12 June 2016, 9:27 p.m.

of several similarly positioned citizens and he didn’t feel that such a posture justified payment.

Seated for once, Gyuri was wondering at what point he should vacate the tram, when at the other end, a blue-overalled worker suddenly barked at the ticket-inspector: ‘When the stat starts paying me valid money, that’s when I’ll have a valid ticket, okay?’ (196)

At the time of the story, public transport was run with conductors on board, who sold tickets on the spot, and whom you could not avoid if there was enough space on the tram to sit down. In fact, there was no such thing as a “ticket inspector” (or “ellenőr”, 287) until 4 th December 1961 when the first lines of Budapest public transport, the cogwheel railway stated to run without conductors.10

Rather than considering these anachronisms as a problem, however, they might be seen as proofs of the double embedding of the novel: it is as much a memento to the revolution of 1956 in Hungary as to the feeling of euphoria around 1989, at the end of the state socialist regime.

The third layer of cultural memory: the Polish connection

In Under the Frog Fischer in fact refers to a further layer of cultural memory in Hungary, that of the old Hungarian-Polish connection.

In the novel, Fischer presented the years leading up to the 1956 revolution in Hungary as well as some key scenes of the revolution itself through the romance of the unheroic protagonist, Gyuri and his Polish love interest, Jadwiga. The time of publication was significant: throughout the political changes of 1989, a key element was the revalution of the revolution, and, indeed, a change in the terminology describing the events of 1956 from counterrevolution through popular uprising to revolution itself. With the publication of his novel Fischer offered a gesture that commemorated the turn from communicative memory to cultural memory, to use Assmann’s termninology: the anecdotes his parents’ generation rehearsed as Hungarian ex-patriots in England were transformed into a book carrying the story on to the international popular imagination at a time of keen interest towards Eastern and Central Europe in the UK and on continental Europe.

Fischer’s humanized version of history was intensely personal, even autobiographical, except for the figure of Jadwiga. The protagonist’s name is the name of Fischer’s own father, and there is at least one more character whose name will be familiar to people who know the author and his private life, whereas Jadwiga is a significant fictional addition.

10 http://mult-kor.hu/20111202_50_eve_kalauz_nelkul_budapesten accessed 12th June 2016 9:03 p.m.

Using the stories he heard as a child, Fischer created a monument to the historic times that sent his parents and their generation to exile, a historic moment of pure magnificence, a moment of tragic nobility – but he humanized this moment also in terms of showing it through a protagonist who is utterly unheroic, and his very heroic lover, Jadwiga, a student from Poland.

Jadwiga as a Polish character in the novel deserves special attention for several reasons. A true feature of cultural memory is the ditty about Hungarian-Polish friendship:

Polak, Węgier — dwa bratanki,i do szabli, i do szklanki,oba zuchy, oba żwawi,niech im Pan Bóg błogosławi.that is,

Pole and Hungarian cousins be, good for fight and good for party.Both are valiant, both are lively,Upon them may God's blessings beBut Poland is one of the few countries of the Eastern Bloc that had no territorial issues or border dispute with Hungary after WWI, and as for the 1956 events in Poland, which may or may not have been related to those in Hungary, the novel certainly establishes a connection.

As for the real political significance of the reaction foreign powers gave, or rather did not give, to the Hungarian events, those connecting it to the Suez crisis may have a stronger point (see Gusztáv Kecskés, “The Suez Crisis and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution”, East European Quarterly, volume XXXV, Spring 2001, No. 1, 47-58. (USA) (English version of the Postface to the Hungarian edition of Denis Lefebvre’sL’Affaire de Suez, Budapest, Osiris, 1999.) and, very recently, Alex von Tunzelmann’s Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace (2016).

When we read about a foreign student, there is a natural quality to Jadwiga being Polish: if there is a European nation who would be considered to be friendly to Hungary it would be Poland; and the fact the Jadwiga is a woman is special, Hungary and Poland having shared a queen by the same name; and Jadwiga as a pro-active revolutionary character is a wonderful balance against the laconic and unheroic figure of Gyuri.

The story is turned into – told through – the hero’s intense yearning for a love affair, as well as his equally intense desire to get out of Hungary. This novel has the great good fortune of offering a plot, and a tragic one at that: these two desires of the protagonist’s are eventually fulfilled, but one should be careful what one asks for: the love affair ends, as does this wonderful moment of

history (and here the personal is the political, even though Fischer would perhaps not be on one’s list of authors with a strong feminist persuasion).

If we think that Modernism was extremely conscious of time and memory, we should consider Postmodernism and on what basis it might be a separate category in terms of its attitude towards time.

From postmodernist to minimalist fiction

There might be arguments that would make Fischer’s fiction look more like minimalism. If we take László Sári B’s argument in Joe csikorgó fogsora vagyok, a monograph on the last decades of American minimalist fiction (2014), we might find that, while the refusal to take a tragic attitude towards time and its passing or staying, which is demonstrated in Under the Frog, even if taken ad absurdum, sounds postmodernism, much of Fischer’s later fiction will seem minimalist not only in terms of a fragmented structure but also the traumatised characters the works feature.

The experience of historical decline is not new. The Great War and modernist literature shared this experience, as attested by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land (London is falling, all cities are burning). But postmodernism seems to have decided not to take the tragic seriously. If Budapest falls, that is tragic, yet cannot be taken tragically because it is alwas already fallen. Hungary, and the world, are already fallen, possibly since Auschwitz, as Adorno claims, but possibly already since after WWI. Fischer treats this situation, the years leading up to 1956, as also comic, petty, hopeless, predictable, only to be survived by gallows humour – but what else did (could) we expect. This black humour is recognizable both from the English side and the Hungarian side, and can also be seen as part of the Postmodernist attitude of taking a less tragic stance, as long as possible.

Jadwiga’s figure, coming from outside, both by being Polish and being a woman, and showing a much more heroic character than Gyuri or his friends, makes the personal tragedy of the of the fall of the revolution easier to understand and to relate to. From the attitude Gyuri showed so far, the heroism of the Revolution would be difficult to gage. He is at places looking for Jadwiga; he is not looking for the revolution, so to speak.

On the other hand, even though the fall of the revolution (which is not unexpected) and the death of Jadwiga (unexpected, but for a loser of a protagonist, completely in the picture) are actually tragic actions, they are the stations that lead to the final happy outcome and the final fulfillement of Gyuri’s dream: to get out of Hungary: “It wasn’t as if her were pestering Providence for a millionaireship or to be handed the presidency of the United States. How could anyone refuse a request to be a streetsweeper? Just pull me out. Just pull me out. (November 1955, 4)

And, since the author is the offspring of people who emigrated from Hungary to England after 1956, the revolution and Jadwiga are actully tools in the plot (in the author’s hand) to justify the

protagonist leaving Hungary, which matches the general tone of ironic nonchalance and measured distance from things Hungarian presented in the book. Yet this part may not matter – it only provides the personal justification for doing this trick on the readers: it demonstrates why there is no way no how no reason to stay in Hungary.

It also provides a wonderful bridge towards literatures in English: there is a built-in distance from, yet immense knowledge of, all things Hungarian, which was very interesting at that particular moment of European history and that particular moment of interest in postcolonial literatures: Fischer came along at the hight of Rushdie’s fame, and winners the Booker Prize (Man-Booker Prize to you) around the time tended to be people like Ishiguro, Ondaatje etc, who were very defiinitely authors of historiographic metafiction of the bicultural, postcolonial type.

Fischer’s refusal to take anything tragically move on several levels. On the level of the plot, we see that Gyuri does not die, nor do any of his cronies. His friendship gest undermined, there is someone gassing, and heroic friendship is mentioned only in reference to marginal or unimportant characters, and even so only mentioned as anecdotes, which are supposed to be overstated, urban legends, or at least legendary heroes of an absurd past, much like in the film Tanú [Witness].

Fischer’s strategic use of Jadwiga as a counterweith to is main strategy of refusing to take anything tragically is also helpful in building a distance from Hungary. Jadwiga’s death is a personal loss for the protagonist, but her character was also a distraction to the main goal Gyuri stated early on in the novel: to leave, to get out. Jadwiga’s death leaves Gyuri no reason to stay, but nor would her life be a reason for him to stay: we don’t know how she would get out of her marriage (we are told she is married) or where would they live.

Jadwiga is a pro-active outsider, a foreigner, whose actions are much more purposeful and straightforward than those of Hungarian characters. Her foreignness implies a critical attitude towards Hungary: the Hungarians seem much more lost than she is. Her character being so stellar, her interest in Gyuri indicates that Hungarians fail to appreciate him, his value is lost on Hungarian, he is lost in Hungary. But her death is the final straw – now there is really no reason for Gyuri to stay. She is the one who propels him to action – alive, for the revolution, dead, for getting his other dream come true: to leave the country.

It is a telling feature that Jadwiga is not an autobiographic element in the story: Fischer’s mother is a former captain of a Hungarian basketball champion team – no foreign blood there. This really is a plot motivator intervention into the world of family anecdotes to move the story on its trajectory to a major climactic moment and on to tragedy and a denouement.

Nothing like this will return in Fischer’s further novels. His Oceane will do something similar when she leaves her computer-based, virtual world in A Voyage to the End of the Room, in order to save or at least track down the person who has helped her, but their story peters out, rather

than going with a bang. Zoe’s trace of Zzzzz-s strewn all over The Thought Gang are a reminder of traumatic events but are a lot less obvious to spot.

Reclaiming memory: The Hungarian translation

I will argue that this novel offers a bilingual experience: as a reader you feel both familiar with, and alienated from its language, whether you read it in English or in Hungarian. When you read the novel in English you feel much of the text is translated from Hungarian, starting right with the title, which has to be explained to the English reader a little more than halfway into the novel, at the end of the chapter called ‟August 1950”, when the protagonist, Gyuri, gets taken to prison without any special reason.

Curiously, there was an element of relief. Now he had touched bottom. There was no need to feat being arrested when you’re arrested. What was the charge going to be? As far as Gyuri knew, considering the government to be a bunch of wankers wasn’t on the statute books. [...] Well, thought Gyuri, here I am under the frog’d arse. Under the coal-mining frog’s arse indeed, at the very bottom of existence. Nothing could make things worse. Was he going to be entitled to any of those things in life that were accounted as worthwhile or enjoyable? He was twenty. Was he going to get out in time to grab any of things worth grabbing? (125, 130)

There are names and words that actually appear in Hungarian in the text, and there are also phrases that seem to be mirror translations of Hungarian phrases, where the structure of the expression follows word for word that of the Hungarian original. There are names with diacritical marks (Róka, Ladányi, Üllői út), there are mirror translation of phrases (such as the title itself), there is the occasional Hungarian word left in the English text (pálinka, csárda), very much like Salman Rushdie would do it, or, to quote another exotic example, how Keri Hulme does in The Bone People (1983), her Booker Prize (1985) winning novel set in New Zealnd .

For Hungarian readers, in their turn, this novel was published as a translation from English, and the name of the author sounds only partially Hungarian: Tibor is a recognizably Hungarian given name while the order of given name first, surname second is definitely not Hungarian, and the family name Fischer could just as well be German.

Whichever way you read it, there is certain quality of translation about the novel: a kind of language-based alienation effect.

The fact that the much older István Bart (born in 1944) has corrected some of the realia which Tibor Fischer (born in England in 1959) could not know is just part of the problem. The Hungarian translation of this bicultural book poses some other difficulties as well. The realia (for realia see http://courses.logos.it/EN/3_33.html quoting VLAHOV S., FLORIN S., Neperovodimoe v perevode. Realii, in Masterstvo perevoda, n. 6, 1969, Moskvà, Sovetskij pisatel´, 1970, p. 432-456.) are also problematic in that the word ‘kocsma’ is a lot more

interesting in an English text than in a Hungarian. The non-Hungarian reader of the English text will have as little knowledge of the meaning of the word at first as when they read Salman Rushdie and his Indian cultural references, or even less; and when they figure out what the words ‘pálinka’ or ‘csárda’ mean, and will perhaps even remember them next time, there is certainly triumph and a pleasure of achievement as well as a joy of understanding a secret code when reading, much as we learnt to read Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy, whose “The God of Small Things” (1997) was a sadder version of Rushdie’s India, or Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), which presented a more cut-throat, more entrepreneurial India completely lacking in magic

The question of the Hungarian realia in English novels is one that Ferenc Takács has explored explicitly on the occasion of the Hungarian translation of Joyce’s Ulysses. (cf Takács on százharmincborjúgulyásdugulás) There is a difference, however, in that for Ulysses any Hungarian reference is just an exotic reference, among many other references to, and from, foreign languages, even though Bloom having Hungarian ancestors make Hungarian somewhat special in that context. But Hungary is completely topical in Under the Frog; Hungarian references are central in the novel and will lose much of their special force and effect of local colour in a Hungarian sentence.

For the Hungarian reader, however, there is an extra element of excitement in reading an English novel which happens to be about US, about a past that we have learnt about or remember or at least should be familiar with, even if we are not, AND then there is the joy of finding a Hungarian word amidst all the English sentences. I think the happiest readers of the book may very well be English speaking Hungarian readers who read it in the English original. This is by no means to belittle the merits of the Hungarian translation – it is a systemic problem that no amount of inspired brilliance can overcome. Subsequent editions corrected some minor problems and introduced their own, occasionally much graver mistakes; in particular, the Magyar Könyvklub edition shows signs of haste in presenting sentences mistyped, now containing basic syntactic errors.

On the other hand, most Hungarian readers will have a slightly different point of view from that of the protagonist of the book, since they are people who did not manage to leave Hungary in 1956, or descendants of those people, and, therefore, may feel that this is an outsider’s view, and as such is off the point, or even worse, off the chart. Which, conversely, is precisely why this book is so important. On the one hand, it offers a much-needed off-center perspective, which might help us develop in our self-awareness and self-knowledge even as a nation; on the other hand, it contributes to the understanding of the historic events depicted in the book for wider audiences, who read in English and who will need this introduction in order to be interested in 1956 or Hungary in the first place.

This includes irksome references to gipsies and jews which, although clearly appropriate to the times presented, settle uncomfortably both because the communist credo was officially definitely

against racial discrimination, even as the practice continued undisturbed, and because, especially in the Hungarian translation, they read like casual cigányozás and zsidózás, and make one wonder if it was absolutely necessary to include them. Gipsy-bashind and jew-bashing, that is, anti-roma and anti-semitic utterances and abusive verbal references that use the terms gipsy or jew may have been part of the cultural currency of de-classed citizens and may have lived on much longer than common sense and good taste would have allowed but a) have the sound of a gratuitous verbal abuse b) when they are a defacto literary allusion the original have no such thing in them. These items may have been intended as producing a comic effect and part of the irreverent tone of the book, but, along with some macho references, make one cringe while reading them. Then again, the young basketball players do all they can to make people cringe, so this really is par for the course…

This is where the connection happens between casual gipsy- and jew-bashing, allusion and the comic novel tradition

The part where the word gipsy first occurs in the text is at the end of the first chapter, called “November 1955” (p20): “Although they had lost touch, Gyuri had got on well with Sólyom-Nagy and had been very grateful to him for specially stealing a multi-faceted penknife, subsequently lost when Keresztes, who had said he just wanted to borrow it for a minute, had left it in a gipsy at the fairground.” The reference is a recognizable allusion (and yes, the author confirmed this) to one of the most popular comic novelists of the 20 th century in Hungary, Jenő Rejtő (or P. Howard, as he styled himself), for whom the phrase about a knife that cannot be found is one of the opening sentences in Piszkos Fred, a kapitány (Captain Dirty Fred), where, however, the knife is left in “some sailor”, without any racist overtones whatsoever.

As Péter Dávidházi writes, “studying the workings of an allusion may reveal the functioning of the smallest examinable link in cultural memory.”11 Jenő Rejtő wrote comic novels that read like P.G. Wodehouse (no the Bertie Wooster series, though) if the young aristocrats were sent to the French legion and showed some actual chivalry there. The fundamental discrepancy is, on the one hand, the presumed quality of the novels being translated from English, as in novels by P. Howard, yet featuring a plethora of verbal jokes that could not have been translated from any language with this density, and, on the other hand, between the nobility of thought, manners and actions and their lowly status as no-name members of the French legion or the crew of a dilapidated ship, resulting in bizarre situations and linguistic incongruities. As is obvious from all this, it could never happen in a novel by Jenő Rejtő, however comic or bizarre, that there would be any gipsy- or jew-bashing, casual or otherwise, that would be condoned by the author, if only by tacit oversight. His protagonists are ever the gentlemen; even in the desert, even in the climactic moments of imminent peril. Yet the fact that Fischer makes an allusion to an author that, again, only his native-Hungarian speakers-of-English readers would understand creates a bond between him and Jenő Rejtő who perished in a death camp, while also establishing a bond 11 Péter Dávidházi, ‟'O Jephthah, judge of Israel': From Original to Accreted Meanings in Hamlet's Allusion”. Peter Holland ed, Shakespeare Survey 68, ’Shakespeare, Origins and Originality’, CUP 2015, 48-61, p48

between himself and his bilingual or bicultural readership, and subtly insisting on his status as a comic novelist, a term that I am not even sure one could translate into Hungarian without getting misunderstood.

Yet the significance of the comic approach extends further. The parallel universes of those Hungarians who left and those who stayed bring up difficult questions, such as the question of authenticity. Whose story is the story of 1956? Who has the right to tell this story? Even before we reach the stage of political appropriation, there is the problem of conflicting evaluations of the revolution and its aftermath. If 1956 is everbody’s story, how do we process the contradictions? For everyone, by definition, it is inevitable that they had to do what they did, regardless of whether they stayed or left. Even before wisdom in hindsight or any retroactive justification, there is the felt experience that people had no choice – they had to leave, or they had to stay.

But when we trace the narratives created about the events, the actions, and their justifications, the contradictions only increase. One school of cultural memory studies sees beauty in gathering the narratives of as many survivors as possible, believing that we do get a more convincing impression from a composite picture, a montage or a collage, than from one authoritative take/image. Official guardians of the cultural memory of 1956 seem to want to return to a Grand Narrative, and are apparently done with postmodernist concerns of multiple perspective and parallel realities. What they perhaps hope to return is a neo-Modernist Grant Narrative that would really provide an answer to the question of how culture, history and past greatness will survive.

Remembering the bizarre

Under the Frog might be the most obvious example of a work of fiction serving purposes of cultural memory among Fischer’s novels. It may also be the most readable one, at least in the sense that there is a good story to be told12, supplemented by some poetic licence to maintain the bizarre momentum, the romantic interest, and the political justification of individual decisions. In the stories about communist Hungary in the 1950s Fischer’s interest focusses on the baffling private experiences produced in a mindless and haphazard world; the political turmoils are important mostly as they create further chaos for the individual.

The comic approach of the novel shows that this is, indeed, the work of a writer for whom 1956 is the revolution of the parents’ generation and who knows about the details from anecdotes delivered within the immigrant community so often, that they gain a perfection of form.

The emphasis on bizarre elements, a trademark of Fischer’s fiction under most circumstances, is also, indirectly, evocative of anecdotes of adults remembered from childhood, where the stories become larger than life partly because the child remembering them was so small. Yet the novel 12 When asked about whether he wrote the book to commemorate the country of his parents’ extraction, Fischer’s standard answer is that this was a good story to write.

retains the perspective of the unheroic anti-hero: Gyuri Fischer would not choose to be engtangled in revolutions if he could help it.

Yet Fischer’s other works seem to work as documents of cultural memory, too. In The Thought Gang (1994), his moribund protagonist, a professional philosopher from Cambridge covers the history of philosphy while roaming around in France; in The Collector Collector (1997) his bizarre stories are based around the observations of a shape-shifting work of art.

This vessel is particularly fond of cataloguing humans, especially its collectors, and has passionate opinions about the prestige of copies and originals in the world of art works.

He had grown a passion for ceramics. I entered his collection (as a bull vase) when it was already fully developed with dozens of flasks, bowls, double vases, juglets, ewers as well as such curios as Bes jars, hedgehogs, ducks, a woman suckling, and some misshapen accidents of firing that he thought were works of genius; in my view, the finest pieces were two wavy-handled jars and a ring flask. But collectoring at its best.

Regrettably he discovered parrots. A mania for any and all parrots. There was no such thing, as far as he was concerned, as too many parrots or too much money spent on parrots. If there was money it meant more parrots. I wasn’t the only one in the household who felt the world was being unfairly deprived of its parrots. But being a bit lugal, he didn’t pay any attention.

After years of this obsession, he acquired a loud blue parrot, a parrot no one had ever heard or seen before. Cost a granary – for it came from beyond the end of the world, two shipwrecks away. (The Collector Collector, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997, 23-24.

When describing one of its collectors, one might even detect a slight bow towards a contemporary British fiction writer, Julian Barnes, whose Flaubert’s Parrot shows its own concerns about cultural memory, in the form of its proragonist’s attempt to establish the whereabouts of the parrot that was sitting on Flaubert’s desk and finding multiple parrots, if not living ones.

Another collector, on the other hand, is a vehicle for Fischer to introduce a female character who had worked on many salient intellectual projects on her own but was always preceded by someone else who had published a work on the same idea a little sooner.

We move to Manchester where she again throws herself into examining the lives of the poor, doing good works and ruminating on social order. She compiles a book on the throstle, hosiery, pottery, false weights, factory hands, lace and calico, miners, incendiarisms, and the workhouse. She had just prepared a fine copy of this work in her own hand when a friend from Germany sends her a newly published work by a Herr

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844; Odile reads German and her friend thinks she might be interested in the book.

We pack our bags and barouche to Paris where she is involved in the revolution, though I never find out exactly how, since I and the other breakables are packed out of harm’s way and she never talks about it. Dandies in the salons are horsewhipped by her wit, and several flee Paris, never to return; distinguished writers are unable to supply answers to her inquiries about the intricacies of French grammar and syntax. She commits four years to writing a novel about a young farmers’s daughter who marries a doctor in Normandy. The heroine has a number of unsatisfactory affairs and finally takes arsenic obtained from an apothecary. Odile travelled into Paris from her country retreat, where she had completely cut herself off to mold the manuscript, to seek a publisher the week after the first installment in the Revue de Paris of a novel called Madame Bovary by a Monsieur Gustave Flaubert.

This was the decisive blow for Odile’s literary endeavours. Not one to sulk, however, we immediately depart for the East. (The Collector Collector, 78-79)

The list, which also contains a reference to Flaubert, in case the parrot was not convincing enough, also works as a list of most important books of the period, another form of cultural memory exercise. If we look at an earlier example of a novel presenting a reading list, such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, where we find a veritable list of Gothic fiction writers, even though Jane Austen presents them as negative examples, which derail the fantasy and the expectations of their readers, we find that by now most of these books would be known again, as Gothic fiction regained popularity, but were practically forgotten for much of the last century. In this case, in Fischer’s Collector Collector, the list is presented, again, with tongue in cheek, partially to anchor Odile’s greatness, partially to anchor the reader’s experience to a particular period, since we do not need to pretend that we need this novel in order to remember those works; quite the contrary, it is those works that authenticate the character of Odile. The artefact enriches the collection and the collection provides prestige for the artefact.

Seen in the framework of cultural memory, these trends translate into the history of philosophy on one hand and the history of art on the other; and they both focus on what one would want to remember if one had a few thousand years’ worth of material to choose from. Philosophers, problems, aphorisms – noses, love stories, anecdotes.

Oceane, who never leaves: Voyage to the End of the Room

Trying to make sense of Tibor Fischer’s fiction, one promising approach seems to me via the concept of Cultural Memory. I would maintain that not only is Under the Frog (1992) an obvious candidate for discussion with respect to cultural memory, with its focus on the history of Hungary’s revolution of 1956 but Fischer’s other works also reveal a similar preoccuopation with the past. While Under the Frog can be seen as a historical costume drama, or a farcical view

of communism as it came to pass in Hungary after World War II, in The Thought Gang (1994) Fischer payes tribute to philosophy, if we take the serious side, and the picaresque tradition, if we consider the road movie-feature, where the rogue is an unsuccessful Cambridge philosopher, along with his side-kick, the literal one-armed bandit. In The Collector Collector (1997) we see art history from the point of view of the listed and catelogued: the history of art is presented through stories about art dealers, collectores and experts. In this work, we are introduced to a narrator who is a shape-shifting work of art and a revengeful original, wanting to destroy all of its copies. This ancient bowl is rather sceptical of its collectors and the human race it sees all around and, far from being a mute object or a solid material fact of art, it actively pursues its goals while entertaining itself and us with its stories, until we reach the ending that comes closest to romantic comedy in Fischer’s work. In his most recent work, Good to be God (2008) Fischer explores religion, yet another characteristic facet of the human condition. This time Fischer focusses on miracles, especially resurrection, which could take us back to stories about lives of saints, but his protagonist is a type who perfects his ability to not succeed to an art form that eventually brings him success and, miracuously, saves his life and resurrects him to a new life.

Each of these works could be discussed in terms of how they rewrite and subvert their chosen motif, field or genre. It is tempting to assign even the kind of movie adaptation they seem to lend themselves to, from the historical costume drama to the lonely figure of the cowboy of Westerns, the one born under an ill star. Although there are elements that seem to appear in several of his works, such as the phenomenally unsuccessful character or the motif of travelling, each time there is a dominant element of Western culture that is placed in the focus, as if Fischer were taking an appraising look at Western tradition to see what are those pillars that endured, or at least appeard repeatedly.

References to travel narratives feature in all of his works, from the trips of the basketball team within Hungary in Under the Frog to the series of bank robberies in France in The Thought Gang. Yet Voyage to the End of the Room (2003) could be seen as a work in which Fischer focusses his attention on travel narratives themselves. The way Fischer singles out this genre to pay tribute to is characteristic: instead of offering a straightforward narrative of travelling, we are given a protagonist who would rather not travel and who, even if she travels, tends not to travel in the traditional sense. Oceane’s father did not believe in travelling for holidays so those car trips ended close to home. Oceane’s first trip abroad seemed to take her to the shores of France but she never got off the ship. Even in Barcelona she never managed to leave the bar where she was a dancer and get into town.

If we return to the idea of film genres that Fischer’s book could lend themselves to, Voyage would be unlikely to be turned into a travel movie: Oceane spends too much time in her room, and even looking outside or picking up the mail seems to present itself as too much contact with the external world.

The novel subverts the genre of travel narrative by presenting a protagonist who is able to travel without leaving her confines: through bringing „abroad” home, and, later, through following Audley’s travels remotely. Fischer, in his usual comic mode and with his characteristic penchant for the bizarre, offers a journey without travelling, not entirely unlike the journeys the basketball team went on within Hungary in Under the Frog, or the ’rob and go’ journey through France that we follow in The Thought Gang.

This feat, which the protagonist seems to consider an achievement, has dark overtones all along, seeing as though the place she is staying is not at all pleasant – as we find out from her complaints about the police not responding to her calls.

Yet as a travel narrative, Voyage to the End of the Room seems to mobilise earlier travel narratives – not so much the type represented by Ulysses or the Odysseia but more light hearted picaresque stories, or, even better, their parodies, such as Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1968), where the emphasis is moved away from travelling to sharing the experience. Another strong connection to Sterne that his Journey never takes us to Italy, providing an early example of a travel narrative of the frustrating kind.

Readers familiar with Frech literature, such as Dr. Elinor Shaffer FBA, to whom I am indebted for drawing my attention to the French references, will also remember Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey around my room, originally called Voyage autour de ma chamber, as well as Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932) with its pessimism and misanthropy.

There is a fine line between playfully using and willfully subverting literary conventions – and Sterne and even de Maistre seem to have succeeded in staying within the range of tolerance, although Sterne has become largely unreadable for more recent generations of students and the general public may have long given up on reading his works. One of the less endearing features of Postmodernist fiction, if one still wants to use this term in general, and for the description of Fischer’s work in particular, is the belief that frustrating readers can translate into a writerly virtue. Whether Fischer will prove readable for future generations remains to be seen. One way I see him retaining merit is through exploring what he finds important enough to take along to his deserted island – which seems to include history, philosophy, art, Miami, and a combination of travelling and France.

Interestingly, French culture has provided inspiration for Fischer repeatedly, along with Hungarian or American references. It even seems to be a peculiar proof of Fischer’s Englishness that it is France in particular where travelling as an actitivy seems to be tied to. In terms of location, Hungary would be connected to the past, to a life closed, even aborted. This is onw way to interpret the closing scenes of Under the Frog, where Gyuri flees Hungary and, finally, after all tragic and bizarre events, he can cry. America, on the other hand, or rather, Miami, seems to be the place where a new life can be started. Even if that world is not presented as any less bizarre than Hungary or England, the protagonist of Good to be God is given a new identity and

a new path to follow there, having left England with a borrowed identity after losing everything that connected Tyndale to his original identity.

Yet French culture seems to have a constant present tense about it in Fischer’s fiction. In The Thought Gang the moribund protagonist expects to die, but the days and the adventures pile up and he keeps carrying on. France seems to be the archetypal “abroad” and current alternative to living in England. Much as in Sterne’s a Sentimental Journey Yorick goes to France, the models for Voyage seem to be French, even if they, in their turn, go back to Sterne as their model.

Alternatively, one could call the unacknowledged reliance on earlier models a trace in the Derridean sense of the word, as Laszlo Muntean did.

This gesture of simultaneous denial and unacknowledged appropriation recalls what George Lukács wrote in his preface to “History and Class Consciousness” in 1922 about the idea of incorporating something while demolishing it (“megszüntetve megőrizni”) which got translated into English as the process of transcendence (zur Aufhebung gelangen). Transcendence may not happen – critics tend to comment on how the originals were superior to Fischer’s reworking, where there is not enough of a story, no overarching narrative, not even enough wit perhaps to carry the reader through the work.

Yet there seems to be a need to retell these stories. Perhaps it is the time travelling aspect of travel that comes into focus. In The Collector Collector travelling happens along the axis of time, rather than space – and the time travelling aspect also surfaces in the historically inspired narrative of Under the Frog as well as the historical overview of philosophy presented in The Thought Gang. In terms of time travel, Xavier de Maistre takes us back to the French Revolution, and his later career abroad during the time of the Napoleonic Wars. His narrative takes us back to his imprisonment, following a duel, which present Oceane’s narrative of travelling-while-not-moving as less of an achievement and more of an incarceration, even if it seems self-imposed. The text creates the impression that Oceane does not really make the decision of not getting out of her comfort zone – it is in fact too uncomfortable for her to get outside and, therefore, she decides to bring as much of the world in as she feels she can tolerate.

One wonders, however, about the unacknowledged nature of all these sources. If one does not want to attribute this gesture to the postmodernist disregard of sources, one might argue that this is, in fact, how cultural memory works – the works seep through un-catalogued layers of consciousness, the details of origins fade, and only what seems to be still significant remains. There might also be value added by the new appropriation: adding the image of London as a prison, as a place where one’s own personal space is limited and even threatened by so much violence that the only safe way is to never leave it. Similarly, the soldier and diplomat turned writer is replaced by the sex worker turned computer programmer turned storyteller – a lead that would take us into the realm of virtual reality of the old sort, of storytelling, and the new sort, of comuter generated or transmitted virtual reality. A whole new world might open up, once we

“click on” the idea of virtual reality and try to define it in the old sense, in the sense the de Maistre used it. This sense might be imagination and fantasy as a tool of exploring ourselves and our immediate environment, with the joy of observation and discovery. Oceane, a creator of virtual realities on the computer does not seem to understand that she creates her virtual reality by not stepping outside the circle she draws around herself – that she actually locks herself in.

In a trauma-focussed discussion of Fischer all these frustrations should have a cause, an unprocessed trauma. The impression of being locked up as well as blocked, the emphasis on the bizarre, the cynical, or at least apparently cynical world view could be seen as a sign of something missing. In terms of the literary predecessors, we might see traces of the frustration of Sterne not being able to travel or to finish his book. We could also see traces of the frustrations of the young Xavier de Maistre who was imprisoned for six weeks for a duel, with not much space left for his creativity, although apparently he was well looked after.

In terms of the cultural references, perhaps we see traces of the unprocessed trauma of a second generation immigrant and their search for a place that could be called home. For Oceane, there is nowhere to go, and there is no joy in staying – as if all the travelling in the world would be leading nowhere if one could never arrive back home. Yet home is not defined in this novel; we are told, however, that the only reason that can make someone travel in spite of everything is another person – the decision to go and do something for someone else, at a time when one would not do anything for onself. Which might be the explanation for the enigmatic last words of the work:

“Home can never be a place, only a person.”

The walking dead – post-traumatic characters?

Fischer’s protagonists, his series of the walking dead seem to collect and hand on bizarre stories, first and foremost, as if what is really worth remembering is all that is strange and idiosyncratic in human behaviour. The Voyage to the End of the Room (2003) is, if possible, even more bizarre. Our traveller-narrator this time is a virtual traveller. Oceane does not leave her room, and even when she did, in earlier phases of her life, she managed not to be there for those travels she made: did not get off the boat, did not come out of the hotel, did not leave the bar where she was working as part of a sex act. A life unlived – therefore, the collection of memories she presents tend to be of no particular personal significance. They are there for their bizarre qualities; they are interesting because they are strange. In this novel Fischer takes particular care to include as many “found objects” as possible, stories he did not actually make up, and balance his cows dropping out of the sky and killing his characters by being able to claim that that item actually came from a news item.

In Good to be God (2008) we find another example of the walking dead. The protagonist has had enough of being a failure in England, where even the weather is bad (this is an opinion emphasized by many of Fischer’s protagonists), and takes his friend’s identity for a business trip

to Miami. Once in the sun, he discards even his new fake identity and tries to start life afresh outside the bonds of his previous existence, hoping to become God. His way of proving that he is God would be to raise the dead; and while he is at it, he develops a persona that is calm, has a smile, does good, destroys the bad, and, without quite noticing it, resurrects himself. We leave him on the road to a new life with a new chance for happiness:

Despite my persistent and embarrassing medical condition, I ponder my future and eternity with amusement. My future? I’m wearing a sharp short-sleeved silk shirt that Fash gave me, appropriate to an up-ender of realms, a man who has taken out entire empires single-handed, not that anyone will know or believe it; but I don’t care. The sun is shining, I don’t care. This might be extremely superficial, but the extremely superficial, like a tissue, can often get the job done.

I ponder eternity. If you think about it, eternity can’t be a long time, because time has been removed from the mix. Eternity might feel like momentary, like putting on a pair of sunglasses, or like a drive in the sunshine, while you wear a sharp short-sleeved silk shirt. Honestly, what good is the world? Why does it have to be so big, crowded and messy, when it boils down to a handful of characters, and maybe just one?

Somehow Gulin always cheers me up. There’s an infectious optimism about her. No, not that, not optimism, because it’s not that everything will be fine. She’s not that foolish. No, there’s a can-do will about her. Whatever comes, it can be managed; and you really can’t ask for anything more than that.

Keeping her eyes on the road she asks:

“So, Tyndale. Have you ever thought about children?”

(Good to Be God, 269-270)

All these walking dead characters seem to prove the strength of the line of argument in cultural memory discourse which concentrates on trauma. As the psychological approaches to memory have long established, moments of great emotional intensity are crucial in the creation or suppression of memories. Things remembered for a long time, as well as things not remembered at all, tend to have corresponding strong emotions. Sometimes these emotions arise and bring along the memory of the original event; at other times the emotional intensity is transferred to other things or people while the memory of the original event becomes inaccessible. This latter form is the one trauma theory is more interested in.

Fischer’s protagonists can be seen as traumatized characters. In Under the Frog, the trauma is, on the one hand, communist dictatorship in Hungary; on the other, the revolution in 1956. The revolution itself is traumatic, and its collapse causes the characters to lose everything but their lives. Yet this change means a new beginning, the beginning of a life abroad – which is part of

the life history of the author [postmemory] but is outside the bounds of the novel. The memory of these events were officially suppressed in Hungary but were kept very much alive informally in the expatriate communities. What triggered the novelistic resurrection of this memory, however, is a somewhat similar political situation: the events leading up to, and happening around, the 1989 fall of the communist regime in Hungary.

The concept of secondary trauma is what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, primarily with reference to the Holocaust and to women’s narrative:

I have been involved in a series of conversations about how that “sense of living connection” can be, and is being, maintained and perpetuated even as the generation of survivors leaves our midst and how, at the very same time, it is being eroded. For me, the conversations that have marked what Eva Hoffman (ibid.: 203) calls the “era of memory” have had some of the intellectual excitement and the personal urgency, even some of the sense of community and commonality of the feminist conversations of the late 1970s and the 1980s. And they have been punctured as well by similar kinds of controversies, disagreements, and painful divisions. At stake is precisely the “guardianship” of a traumatic personal and generational past with which some of us have a “living connection” and that past’s passing into history. At stake is not only a personal/familial/generational sense of ownership and protectiveness but also an evolving theoretical discussion about the workings of trauma, memory, and intergenerational acts of transfer, a discussion actively taking place in numerous important contexts outside of Holocaust studies. More urgently and passionately, those of us working on memory and transmission have argued over the ethics and the aesthetics of remembrance in the aftermath of catastrophe. How, in our present, do we regard and recall what Susan Sontag (2003) has so powerfully described as the “pain of others?” What do we owe the victims? How can we best carry their stories forward without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves, and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them? How are we implicated in the crimes? Can the memory of genocide be transformed into action and resistance?

Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory” 104

Yet the trauma of an expatriate life, possibly with nostalgia for the homeland never seen, may move towards political writin, as Éva Pataki shows in her dissertation about the Asian diaspora in Britain: an interest in the old homeland as a somehow unreachable yet nostalgically remembered *albeit never seen* Arcadia, against all rational arguments to the contrary remains with the second generation. The people of the Asain diaspora in Britain also came in the hope of a better life, so it is not really fair to hanker after the good old life in poor India – yet this might be the way towards political writing about the old homeland, of which they are (andFischer is) considered to be an expert, and has worked his way into being sort of an expert. Add to this position of the Person Who Knows the nostalgia about the old homeland and the half/informed

knowledge of HU, based on being a journalist here for 3 or 2 years, about 28 years ago, and the propensity to write about the past and about hopeless protagonists, and boom, you have an admiration of the political promise of the lad of 28 years ago, the bizarre character of the current leader, the person who never takes no for an answer, even if he is not elected he will stay in position and run again, against political etiquette, the person who stands on the accelerator and stops for no one / Fischer seems to hope that at least in real life, if not in fiction (and most certainly not in Fischer’s fiction) the last born son of the poor man of Hungarian folk tales will prevail and win the hand of the princess and half, or, even better, one and a half, of the kingdom.

Hence the appropriacy of the fundamentally comic approach, to return to the concept of the comic novel: 1989 and the years following it were a time for new hopes, a time for the reevaluation of the official attitude of the Hungarian state to the 1956 revolution. The bizarre quality of the events, which has as its basis the feeling that there is nothing much left to lose, provides a contrast to the weight of the historical memories but also presents them from the liberating perspectives of the post-1989 years: freedom is possible again, the borders are opening, the Berlin Wall is falling, the Russians are leaving, free and democratic elections are happening. From a cultural memory point of view, Under the Frog preserves not only the memory of 1956, its expressed focus, but also the memory of the times of change around 1989, a time not at all explicitly referred to but seeping through the text with its comic approach, with its emphasis on the bizarre, with its freedom of the treatment of culturally, politically and emotionally loaded material.

The novels that follow are built around less obvious, and less historically loaded, events. In The Thought Gang we are whiling away our time while waiting for the death of the philosopher and university don Eddie Coffin. While we wait, we are being entertained with anecdotes about reluctant bankrobbership in France, reluctant friendships and half-hearted love affairs. We find out that there is a centre around which events whirl – there is a gap in the heart of the protagonist who lost Zoe13 and is now collecting and abusing any word containing the letter z, sometimes even zooming in on the letter z itself to provide a gap between anecdotes. Yet there is also a thick black Z revealed on Hube’s forearm on the last pages, leaving the protagonist narrator with “something that if it’s not optimism, would be hard to tell apart” (306). By the time we see the last huge Z emerging on the page from all those words beginning with z, it seems like the protagonist is ready for his new life and makes a note to phone Jocelyne, his latest love interest.

In Collector Collector we also have a few characters for whom life is practically over. Rosa, who seems to have lost the love of her life, has him returned to her unwittingly through the selfish and illegal actions of Nikki. Nikki’s life as a woman exploiting the world around her is coming to an end and she is returned to where she came from as Nicholas. Lump, a woman who has failed to die will go around helping Nikki, who had shot her dead, until she finally manages to die after all. But the vessel lives on, comparing and cataloguing all it sees, and its most significant trauma 13 “When they crack open my heart, they’ll find a perfect miniature of Zoe” The Thought Gang, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, 293

is that copies of it were more highly regarded than its priceless self. This trauma is not any less serious just because it happened to a vessel, however. The many stories it tells Rosa to prevent her from finding out about its true identity looks like the many episodes in any of Fischer’s works possibly also hiding a traumatic core. The vessel keeps getting broken and reassembling itself; it has cycles of deaths and rebirth: his own and of those things he remembers and tells the story of. Long dead characters get their happy ending since their offspring [postmemory] turns up and is recognized, thanks to the collector collector’s memory and passion for classification based on similarities (and creating typologies or at least recognizing types.) There is also rebirth offered to Rosa in love, while Lump, being large, strong and smiling, as well as apparently impervious to death, seems to have a chance in getting resurrected as a male protagonist in Tyndale to be found in Good to be God. All in all, Collector Collector may be the least trauma-based of Fischer’s books, suggesting a happy ending, partially because the traumatized but indestructible narrator is not identical with the character for whom the happy ending is granted.

In Voyage to the End of the Room Oceane has been traumatized by her pleasant upbringing, complete with trips to the next street for holidays. She was also traumatized by the death of the love of her life, then by the posthumous appearance of his letters (another death and rebirth cycle). Here we see again the process of an insignificant character appearing on the scene and turning from generic loser to a new hope for the protagonist, who is willing to move out of her paralysis to help him. Good to be God also moves along this line: the traumatized protagonist, this time a male character, will, through helping others, help himself be helped to a new life: “The gleam of a new start is beautiful, the conviction that the future will not be the past is unmurderable for most” says the ceramic narrator in the last pages of The Collector Collector14 . Ironically, this comment refers to Nikki, whom we know to speed towards the one place she is trying to get away from, where she (actually, he) was born, but for Rosa and her beloved a new beginning is offered with evidence that it will have a lifetime to blossom in.

These novels on the surface do not immediately suggest any story lines. The text is studded with puns, strives for linguistic brilliance, attempts to dazzle with grotesque details. Plots are not obviously there, story lines are difficult to sum up, difficult to quote. Yet they all contain something memorable from Western culture: history, freedom and basketball; philosophy, France and food/drinks; art, originality and categories; travelling, music and computers; faith, religion and false preachers. It is as if what is there should be recorded and catalogued while it is still there – there seems to be an imminent danger that all this will disappear. What will be left, then, are people who are able to make a fresh beginning; people who are friends; people who are willing to trust. Surprising conclusion from a series of comic works with bizarre overtones. Then again, cynics are reputed to be but traumatized (the term back then was disappointed) lovers of mankind, like Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

Fluidity and Memory in The Collector Collector

14 New York: Henry Holt, 1997, 220.

The narrator of Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector (1997) is an ancient bowl, “thin-walled, sporting the scorpion look of Samarra ware that was the rage of Mesopotamia six and a half thousand years before Rosa was born”15 (6). While “ceramicking along” (218) its narrative, ostensibly telling us the story of how it is authenticated before entering the collection of its most recent collector, it reveals itself not only as an art object with a rich past but also as a reader of the past of other characters, especially that of its main interpreter and authenticator, Rosa. While building a catalogue of its collectors based on their features that it keeps straight by a strict numerical order, that is, by numbering everything it mentions, the bowl offers Rosa stories about those humans that used to possess it – earlier just as a lowly vessel, later as a collectible artefact.

Fischer’s bowl fits in a list of narrative objects. Yet, unlike Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs (1928), the bowl is a character, not just a vessel containing treasures, nor merely an object that is passively placed in a series of social and cultural contexts for a convenient description of many different environments. Moreover, while Ilf and Petrov used 12 chairs, pieces of a set, practically multiplying a single object so that they could be simultaneously placed in different settings and then chronologically tracked down, Fischer has the one bowl that can travel around anywhere it is taken and will survive any length of time.

On the metaphorical level, the bowl can move with fluidity in time and space since it represents Art, with a capital A; on the literal level of the novel it survives because it is indestructible. The bowl can recreate itself, cracks and all: “Shattered unbenknownst to Nikki, I reassemble unbeknownst to Nikki, carefully re-creating my former cracks.” (27). It can take another shape, if the time is right: “They didn’t notice that the old water pitcher was gone. I was now resplendent as a double-handed amphora with a Gorgon’s face.” (32) It can even interfere with the life of humans, although that happens infrequently: “I decided that shelf-sitting is the best policy after a nurse dropped a newborn infant into me, jar that I was at the time, and replaced my lid, expecting me to carry out the office of executioner. I immediately opened up some airholes. The squalling infant grew up to be a superlugal and to massacre thousands in a sparsely populated region, in the most lurid manner, germinating pain a million times greater than the one I had diverted.” (80) Most important of all, the bowl has a mind of its own; it has a way of telling stories by showing images to those wise enough to see them.

The bowl is not just a piece of pottery: on a synchronic level, at any given moment in time, it represents beauty dwelling unnoticed in human surroundings, serving mundane human purposes; and it became Beauty, noted, collected and paid for. As Beauty, it is moved out of regular circulation, appreciated for being an exquisite example of itself, and placed in a prime position

15 All parenthetical references are to this edition: Tibor Fischer, The Collector Collector, New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 1997. (Hence the Americanized text, complete with modified spelling, vocabulary and punctuation.)

for admiration. It becomes the one specimen missing from a collection, an object meaning much more than itself, a Thing of indescribable value, financially, aesthetically, even emotionally.

Along the diachronic axis, the bowl is history itself. It claims to have prefigured existing objects of art; it represents actual historical periods through the shapes it can assume as priceless artefact; and it represents the history of art, complete with the complex relationship of originals and copies.

It is also a sentient witness to the history of its human contexts, its owners, users and collectors, and it has stories to tell from its past experiences. For this ancient bowl, everything is still within the realm of Jan Assmann’s communicative memory, while in itself it is the carrier of many (highly prestigious) forms of cultural memory. All the stories it tells happened during its lifetime, all 6500 years of it – these are personal anecdotes, all witnessed by the bowl, all told in the irreverent tone of a “lowly utensil” (10) who sees the sides of humans that they would not like other humans to see: “I get to see the unflattering side of people. Not necessarily the worst side, but certainly the side people don’t want others to see. Things are done in front of me that wouldn’t be done in front of pets; who wants to lose the respect of their hamster?” (20)

Being more than an object would bring the bowl closer to being a Thing, as discussed in Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory”. It has uncanny knowledge of life and humans, but not only through being assigned meaning and significance by humans during the course of history; it has become an agent, shaping its own identity, and, thereby, the history of art, as well as shaping the story of its owners. It also shows an excess that separates it from all other objects, recalling Brown’s definition: “Temporalized as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects)” (Brown 7). Admittedly, Fischer’s bowl is an invented object, a narrative device, an experiment in genderless narration (Kingsley 30) and an unusual narrative point of view – but it is, significantly, a Thing that becomes a narrator, and the timing is right: the novel is also from the 1990s, the heyday of the focus on things (Brown 13).

Yet as a fictitious entity and an invented narrator the bowl cannot be quite as unsettling as for example the combination of hair and photography described by John Plotz, reviewing Geoffrey Batchen’s article (Plotz 112). There is a difference between the communicative memory of recent lifetimes and the cultural memory of the officially preserved past. The combination of hair and photographs are symbolic of a concrete person and the emotions attached to them, they do not move beyond the communicative memory; whereas Fischer’s bowl is symbolic of what Western culture thinks of art, historic value, and narration, both in terms of the bowl as an example of fine art and in terms of the novel representing literature. The bowl is a creator and an example of beauty, both visual and narrative.

The bowl’s ability to shift shape, moving towards the surreal (and the comic) is what also offers itself for a discussion within thing theory: “Thing theory is at its best, therefore, when it focuses

on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Thing theory highlights, or ought to highlight, approaches to the margins – of language, of cognition, of material substance.” (Plotz 110) Shifting historical or aesthetical, even financial significance, and carrying meaning beyond the characteristics of the object, attributed to it by humans throughout a period of time, is still within the realm of the uncanny; this bowl is more durable than the living, more active than anything inanimate. Attributing agency to the bowl is something that could be fruitfully explored using thing theory, even if as a playful experiment on a metaphorical level. Yet the bowl’s ability to change shape while maintaining an identity in spite of constantly recreating itself, as well as the constant uncertainty about its status as a character, narrator, thing, or object may also be seen as a form of dynamic identity, which I would like to refer to as fluidity for the purposes of this paper, and would like to show as a guiding principle of Fischer’s novel in several other respects as well.

The bowl as a narrator of Fischer’s novel moves beyond being an object or even a Thing since it has not only stories and a power of agency but also a character. It does not seem to have a gender but it is very sure of itself as being invaluable; likes to be in the know, as well as in control of any situation, in spite of supposedly being inanimate; and acts increasingly not only as a narrator but also as a partner to Rosa.

The most interesting character for the narrator, as is increasingly clear in the novel, is not one of its collectors but its authenticator, Rosa. This is the perfect match: the artefact and the expert, the person met briefly who will not pay for it or own it but who will see, understand and appreciate the authenticity of the work of art. If the bowl is a special artefact and narrator, Rosa is a special authenticator: they both would like to find out all about each other, more than about anybody else can know; and they do it through touching, showing and expert mindreading and paying close attention to aspects of one another that they suspect that other would want to hide.

The bowl, rather than patiently continuing shelf-sitting and waiting for being classified, is doing its own classification of us humans. After thousands of years, however, the tables are turned, and it is now examined for its authenticity by an expert. The bowl is concerned that Rosa will learn too much: “Rosa’s caught me unguarded, she’s unblind in my mind. I’ve never even thought about guarding, but Rosa progresses slowly enough for me to shield myself with one of my suitable pasts… “(10)

Early on, Rosa casually remarks on meeting interesting bowls, while explaining what she does for her job: “I authenticate works of art. If someone finds a painting or any work of art that looks a bit suspect, I’m brought in to see whether it’s genuine, what period it’s from, and so on.”

“That sounds fantastic.”

“You get to meet some interesting bowl.” (17)

But she finds the bowl more interesting than she expected.

Meanwhile, Rosa is also examined by the bowl. On one level this is a metaphorical relationship: they start their acquaintance through swapping stories and testing each other by touching, as if they were two would-be lovers, considering coupledom. Rosa puts her hand on the bowl to learn about its past and the bowl serves her stories for her amusement, while also looking around among her memories. Rosa, even though she suspects the bowl is lying, finds this entertaining and a lot more fun than the men she is trying to date in the process of her search for true love.

As they learn more about each other, their relationship develops a growing intimacy. From the strictly professional interest, Rosa moves towards desire: “She comes to me. Her fingers take my sides; she is, I sense, not keen to take out information, but desirous of coming in. I choose for her … ‘My Favorite Shipwreck’ (29). Their relationship develops into the most sustaining element in Rosa’s life:

“We return home. Rosa frisks a Luristan horse’s bit for a bit of its past. It is but a flake, a scintilla of the thriller that I am. She puts it aside and gazes at me longingly. It’s going to be a sixty-year job at least.

“I’ve never met any bowl like you,” she says, still with little idea of how true that is. She puts her hands oooooon me.

I give her: one of the most outlandish unions, the couple that spent sixty years insulting each other, without ever repeating an insult.” (99)

Rosa wants love but develops an addiction for the stories of the bowl, even though sometimes she would rather not stay until the unhappy ending unfolds. There are innuendos that suggest their relationship becoming much like a companionship, even a sexual partnership:

“Ooooooff come the hands.

But Rosa still looks at me. Sleep is not making any headway: insatiability is sovereign. Women can make an oooooooooo without an end: it is always men who pull the plug on their pleasure. I have much more stock, but every time she takes a plunge, she gets closer to the truth, and I begin to suspect that her fondness for the past is becoming an addiction. The past, the future – they’re the tourist attractions. The present is the poor relation of time; it has to carry the can for all sorts of tribulations.

Oooooon come the hands.” (155)

Rosa seems to think the bowl is the only one who understands her: “You’re the only one who understands me,” she sighs, hugging me.

Rosa goes to sleep.’ (198)

Moreover, she will only have her man appear at her doorstep when the bowl is on its way out towards its new owner: while she lives with the bowl she has no luck finding anybody to love.

Admittedly, nor could she find anyone beforehand, as we find out – yet, significantly, we are reassured when the story ends that Rosa will reclaim the bowl once its lugal collector dies.

On another level their storytelling sessions are not entirely unlike the situation of Scheherazade: bedtime storytelling to entertain the king, postponing the moment when the story would end and they would have to part, which would have grave finality for Scheherazade and would not be desired by the King, either. The bowl and Rosa have no sex, nor is there any danger of death to inflict upon one another (although they are surrounded by murderous characters) but the parting would be final and they would find it painful, since they have developed quite a strong habit of exploring each other’s minds and stories.

Yet there are asymmetries. All these stories the bowl is showing Rosa, or reading in Rosa’s mind, are about the past; and their function is partially to reveal their respective identities, but also to amuse one another (as well as us, readers). Yet, whereas Rosa knowingly tries to read the bowl’s past by touching it, and the bowl knows that it is being read, moreover, it decides to tell Rosa stories that it thinks she might like, Rosa does not know that while she is reading the bowl the bowl is also reading her: she does not know that the bowl is tasting her memories, picking and choosing what to read (and tell us, readers). The bowl is not only a narrator of its own stories and the stories of its own past; it is an active explorer and, since it tells us, an indiscreet revealer of the past of Rosa.

Another asymmetry follows from this, concerning the bowl’s indiscretions: the stories about Rosa are about her personal past, and she is there in the book to tell them if she wishes to do so, as many other characters are sharing stories throughout the book; while the stories of the bowl are about humans it encountered during its 6500 years, collected at several places and periods of the history of the world. We are invited to Finland with the frozen iguana; Egypt with the mummy; Greece with the Gorgon vases; mid-19th century England and France with Odile, who wrote works of literature or philosophy that would have perfectly characterized the middle and the second half of the 19th century, had she not been always prevented to achieve fame and success by somebody else publishing a similar work first: “For months she wandered in the most seedy and dingy areas of London, causing amazement and perplexity with her questions. She wrote a novel in English about a young orphan raised in a workhouse who falls in with child pickpockets in London’s underworld. She sent it off to various booksellers the week before a Mr. Charles Dickens started serializing a novel called Oliver Twist.” (78) These are lieux de memoire – well rehearsed elements of our common Western culture.

The concept of cultural memory was born from the realization that there is more to the past than what histories register; that histories depend on the historiographers and their commissioning authorities, and, therefore, histories change. Fischer is in a position to know this, since he grew up among alternative versions of history. As a child in England in a family of immigrants from Hungary after the revolution of 1956, the anecdotes he heard were one set of history, in obvious clash with the official history people were told to believe in Hungary, which then all changed

after 1989, along with history school text books. Moreover, all this was different from what was taught in British schools about history. Alternative histories look quite vector-like in a national/historical sense: they seem to have a clear direction. On the individual level, alternative histories are present in no less significant measure: depending on the current point of interest, question to answer, or decision to make, one retells oneself one’s life (or parts of it) with the appropriate focus and storyline, bringing out one of one’s suitable pasts or alternative personal histories, vector-like in a personal sense.

Moreover: over a long period, such as the life-time of the bowl, covering the history of Western culture itself, a large amount of stories, patterns, and models may be recorded verbally (some would call the sum of it Western literature/s) that can be used as a storehouse of tales to be told for the entertainment and education of new generations. In this case, one of one’s suitable pasts is one of the many different situations and stories that could be told with a didactic aim, a strategy of the bowl that Rosa catches on and seems to aim to avoid, but a strategy that story and history-tellers often employ nevertheless.

Narrators and narratives change shape; the identity of characters move from any fixed point presupposed at their introduction. Rosa suspects that the bowl is misleading her about something: ‘Rosa goes for the phone: “Yes, it’s genuine, but… I don’t know how to put this. I’m not sure what sort of genuine it is. I’d like to hang on to it for a bit longer.” Silence. “It’s difficult to explain.” Silence. Listening. “Well, you’ll think me crazy, but I have the feeling the bowl is lying.” (18)

But Rosa’s innocence is also misleading: the lovely authenticator turns out have stashed an agony aunt in a well, since she gave unpalatable advice to someone writing to her, and yet is unable to give useful advice to Rosa in her search for the love of her life. Nikki, Rosa’s self-invited room-mate turns out to be not only a thief and a purveyor of sexual services but also a person with a seriously checkered past – yet another character who could, and will, tell stories – but also a blessing in disguise, not to mention a person who may have been “born a Nicholas not a Nikola” (211). Everyone is telling stories – even the earrings – and those who are not consciously telling stories are having their past recounted to us by the bowl. Anecdotes abound; very much like in Under the Frog (1992), Fischer’s first novel, the one about the 1956 revolution in Hungary, where much of the material seem to have come from anecdotes of 1956 refugees of Hungary. The Collector Collector also seems to be a loosely connected set of stories, although, clearly, this time the narrator cannot be accused of being autobiographical, nor is there one particular moment in history that would offer a point of convergence for the stories.

Rather than lamenting the lack of an overall cohesive narrative structure in The Collector Collector, however, this paper assumes that fluidity and constant change are the guiding principles of the novel, with recurrence serving as a structuring force that triggers memory and helps constructing and maintaining identity, whether personal, historical or cultural.

Recurrent elements with high cohesive force include comic devices, arbitrary lines of connection as well as structural elements of the novel. The frozen iguana (not very large) appears in multiple form in many different stories taking place in widely divergent areas while the jar of pickled beet root that nobody can open (”I told you. You can try too hard. I glued it so it would slow Lettuce down. You’re welcome to have a cup of tea, Lump, or to sit here.” (161)) appears regularly, but very reliably limited to Rosa’s flat. Various characters have their teeth bothering them; many break their necks; and almost everybody has earrings that depict intricate situations and indicate complex feelings, mostly without their wearers being aware of these meanings.

The suspicion that the bowl might be lying, however, seems to refer to its fluid identity as a Thing, rather than its reliability as a narrator. The narrative structure itself does not change shape, the pattern is constant: it is about failure in many shapes, mostly as collectors, but also as human beings in search of happiness in long-term human relationships, especially marriage. “Even Odile, stockpile of wisdom, who rode brilliance as far as it could go, couldn’t get the marriage right.” (89) Others have even less of a chance. Add to this all the strong, resourceful and talented female characters from the bowl’s present, who are all lonely and out of relationships, whether they are still looking militantly, as well as waiting (64), like Rosa, or have given up, like Nikki and Lump “Strangerness has settled on them. The only hint of their one-time (three-times-a-night) intimacy comes from the shooting. Their nuking has left no fallout. No evidence. It is the perfect crime. People lose everything: their earrings, their teeth, their hopes, their outrage, their intimates, their memories, and themselves: the one thing they can’t lose is loss. The loss of loss. Ending ending. That’s the big project. Ask a collector.” (125). Tabatha is on her own, even though she is supposed to be the advice coloumnist sorting out everybody’s private life, plus she is kept captive in a well by Rosa because she can’t help her find the right man. Helen, the auctioneeress has a child but is still lonely (1). Lettuce always chooses the wrong man and then complains about it to Rosa: “Why is it so hard to find a man?” (151). These are all women, without men (very much unlike Hemingway). This is a book about women, for women.

On the surface, this novel does not try to encourage optimism. The main theme of the novel emerges as the question whether marriage can work, whether success can be achieved, whether happiness is within the realm of the possible. This is the story of Rosa gradually losing everything, except her expertise as an authenticator. Her flat is cleared out, turned into the venue of murder and mayhem, then sold, with the price to be cashed in by Nikki. She gives up even the search for love, and she has to give up her favourite companion, the only one who knows her, the bowl, who will be claimed by its lugal collector.

And all the aphorisms of Fischer’s, who tends to present pessimistic pearls of wisdom in his comic novels, are about not to seek success but want acceptable versions of failure: “What should be imbibed is not how to achieve success, which, by definition, is the preserve of a few, but how to see the colors of failure’s eyes without flinching, how to tolerate the foul breath of ordinariness.” The important lesson is: “how to lose” (171). Or, as Tabatha was saying much

earlier, from the well: “Oh, and one more thing. I don’t really want to be the one to tell you this, but the mistake you are making is looking for happiness. What you should be looking for is the right sort of unhappiness.” (65)

This is heartfelt, genuine pessimism and wisdom of life – yet, I don’t know how to put this, but the narrative is lying: the novel itself will lead to the happy ending of Rosa’s search for love, while the book is dedicated “Eszternek”, a dedication looking like one for the author’s wife. Characters go in a fluid move from being good to bad to good, and continue to surprise and amuse. Not only that, but the person who will miraculously have bought Rosa’s flat from Nikki is the same man Rosa had a drink with in a pub, the same man with whom she could talk without effort (195). This character, moreover, also shows features familiar from the Mop and the painter’s daughter of the chapter “My Favorite Shipwreck”, indicating that that story also had a happy ending – a surprise for the bowl, as well as for the reader – and, possibly, that was also a face that Rosa has seen and liked before: an unlikely, but quite satisfying happy ending, sheepishly offered by an author not particularly given to overarching narrative structures or unqualified happy endings.

The energy of the narrative, the abundance of puns, internal rhymes, words to be looked up in dictionaries (some of them to be found creatively misused, such as florida, chryselephantile pleasures, or to nuke), repeated motifs and bizarre elements create the impression that Fischer had ideas to share about the world being a strange but buzzing place, rather than a place of doom; that one might survive, even happily, if only through quirky mishaps and against all odds. “What is the purpose of despair? Pain for the brain?” (93) as the bowl is musing at the end of Rosa’s dinner date with “the Dinner Flopperist” (93) “a teacher of English to foreign students” (90)

Fischer’s The Collector Collector presents a particular take on the concept of cultural memory, mingled in with, rather than separated from, communicative memory, via old art objects and their history. The novel presents a state of fluidity between reading and being read; between active searching and waiting; between good and evil; between being male and female; between being human and being a material object. The focus is on the idea that all human patterns recur, from the type of people’s noses to the type of lies they tell to the type of pottery they create; and yet, that there are infinite numbers of stories about the unique combination of the actual varieties of objects and their humans (creators, collectors or casual users), wherever they are, and that there is unlimited joy to be found in this richness and variation.

What shall we remember?

Freud’s discussion of the “mystic writring pad” brings up several notions. As we are made aware by current information technology, memory can be finite, can be extended, can be organized. One can allow the computer to rearrange the contents of its memory more efficiently. One can

save contents and keep them safe outside the physical range of the computer’s memory. There is, however, the unavoidable issue of selecting what to keep.

The seemingly arbitrary choices of what part of cultural memory gets presented in each of Fischer’s works read like a delightful catalogue of all there is to explore. They are also interesting as they model the general state of affairs in the information age – there is too much to present and any choice made will seem, almost by necessity, arbitrary. Yet these arbitrary choices tend to work out for the best.

Cultural memory in this sense will be presented as a set of individual memories (Jan Assmann’s communicative memory vs cultural memory); a longing for home; a set of travelling abroad whiling away the time until a home can be found. As its sum, read in sequence, the stories seem to start from an immigrant mentality; we are reading diaspora fiction. A country and a home were lost in the first place, resulting in a culturally transmitted trauma which seems to haunt the protagonists in their wonderings – in communist Hungary after World War II in Under the Frog; in France in The Thought Gang; all over the cultural periods in The Collector Collector, until Rosa’s home is sold and lost, then is bought and found, along with her true love; in virtual reality and by proxy while Oceane stays in her flat which is not really a home in The Voyage to the End of the Room; in Miami, until Tyndale is taken by his new friend to her new home. All of these characters are travelling in realities that appear profoundly artificial: not the protagonists’ natural habitat.

This rootless drifting could be seen as a symptom of our globalised, postcolonial, post-communist age, which happens to be also manifested in the individual author’s cultural trauma and fictional output. These protagonists have their adventures in their life after death: after the loss of their innocence, the loss of their homes, the loss of their professions, jobs, families, health. Yet the prevailing comic mode and the variations on subtly happy endings work against the gloom.

The seemingly arbitrary choices of what part of cultural memory gets presented in each of Fischer’s works read like a delightful catalogue of all there is to explore. They are also interesting as they model the general state of affairs in the information age – there is too much to present and any choice made will seem, almost by necessity, arbitrary. Yet these arbitrary choices tend to work out for the best.

The works as vessels of cultural memory claim the kind of importance that literary adaptations usually claim from Monty Python through Neo-Victorian novels back to Joyce. By presenting earlier cultural treasures for a fresh view, by working from contemporary material yet relying on established works of substance for ideas, stories or structure, the value of the new work seems to be elevated and the value of the old ones seem confirmed. The ambition of this traditionalist and valorizing approach, however unconventional the textual surface might be, is to look back upon the tradition and offer a crowning achievement, even if the crown is positioned at a rakish angle.

Postmodern fiction in English as a repository of other people’s cultural memory

Personal memories of historic moments in a literary form – a recognizable category of British fiction, or Commonwealth fiction, or fiction written in English mostly within the UK, seemed to devote itself to present stories about cataclysmic events or times of other cultures in a language that is different from that of the original context, but in a language, English, that makes it possible for the writer to tell the story in a way that is different from the way this story is told “at home”, from the way the story can be, or could be, or could have been written there, in the original language of what happened. As Panos Karnezis explained, he could never have written The Maze in Greek, or in Turkish: the terms themselves that would have had to be used had taken sides in the issues presented, even before any of the presentation could have happened.

As for the gap between lived historical experience and a foreign language presentation, another example is provided by Panos Karnezis, the author of The Maze (2004), a novel of Greek troops in Anatolia in the 1920s. Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967, went to England to study engineering on a grant, and became a writer in English. As he explained at a visit at ELTE DES16, writing in English meant for him a chance to offer a neutral or at least balanced description of a historical event that is still considered painful by both the Greek and the Turkish. As he pointed out, he could not have readily written in Greek with any objectivity, since by his mere choice of words, by using the words available in Greek or Turkish to name the events, he would have already been perceived as taking a judgmental position in relation to the story to be told. Writing in English, there were no words already carrying such connotations, and most of those reading in English would have no notion about the historical events: he had the freedom to try to present a different, possibly more balanced, view than the one coded into his Greek upbringing. The distancing effect added objectivity and discipline. The place of English and the English novel in cultural memory, with its fairness or understatement, although not necessary prerequisite, is a helpful tool when presenting traumatic historical times, such as Rushdie did in Shalimar the Clown:

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided

16 At the time Parnezis was a guest at the European First Novel Festival in the Budapest Book Festival in 2005 (Európai Elsőkönyvesek)

for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.”

(Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 484-485)

A beautiful dirge for Kashmir, yet he manages to stand by life: he does not send his readers careening off to commit suicide, but calls the world to bear witness, since they can do so the moment the story is presented in English, when it becomes available for audiences in other cultures.

Appendix

Works by Tibor Fischer in chronological order

Under the Frog. Polygon, 1992.

The Thought Gang. Polygon, 1994.

The Collector Collector. Secker & Warburg, 1997.

Don’t Read This Book If You’re Stupid. Secker & Warburg, 2000.

Voyage to the End of the Room. Chatto & Windus, 2003.

Good to be God. Alma Books, 2008.

Crushed Mexican Spiders. Unbound, 2011.

The Hungarian Tiger. A Kindle Single, 2014.

Hungarian Translations of Works by Tibor Fischer in chronological order

A béka segge alatt. Translated by István Bart, Európa, 1994.

Aki hülye, ne olvassa. Translated by Zsófia Lóránd, Kornél Hamvai, foreword by Pál Békés,

Gondolat, 2005.

A Gógyigaleri. Translated by János Széky, Helikon, 1996.

Agyafúrt agyag. Translated by Ágota Bozai, Magyar Könyvklub, 2005.

Megváltás Miamiban. Translated by Tünde Vajda, Helikon, 2011.

A magyar tigris. Translated by Ákos Farkas, Helikon, 2014.

Works Cited

Assmann, Aleida. Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur: Eine Intervention. C.H. Beck,

2013.

Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, no. 65,

Spring-Summer 1995, pp. 125-133.

---.“Communicative and Cultural Memory.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and

Interdisciplinary Handbook. Edited by Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, de Gruyter, 2008, pp.

109-118.

---. “Cultural Texts Suspended Between Writing and Speech.” Religion and Cultural Memory.

Translated by Rodney Livingstone, Stanford UP, 2006, pp. 101-121.

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, Autumn 2001, pp. 1-22.,

faculty.virginia.edu/theorygroup/docs/brown.thing-theory.2001.pdf

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. 1922.

Fischer, Tibor. “All the Answers.” Interview by Tom Kingsley. Varsity, no. 622, Friday 14

October 2005, p. 30. archive.varsity.co.uk/623.pdf. Accessed 12 June 2016.

---. The Collector Collector. Metropolitan Books-Henry Holt, 1997.

---. Voyage to the End of the Room. Vintage-Random House, 2004.

---. Under the Frog. Penguin, 1993.

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 1969. Signet-New American Library, 1970.

Hegedűs Imre János. “Halló! Halló! Skultéty Csaba: Mi is volt a Szabad Európa Rádió? Egy

szerkesztő visszaemlékezései. Helikon Kiadó, 2011.” Hitel, 2012 július, pp. 122-126.

epa.oszk.hu/01300/01343/00126/pdf/EPA_01343_hitel_20120806-76286.pdf. Accessed

12 June 2016.

Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory”. Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp.

103-128.

“Hungary. History.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.

www.britannica.com/place/Hungary/History#ref411390. Accessed 6 November 2016.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen, 1987.

Plotz, John “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory” Digital Commons, vol. 47, no. 1,

2005. digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=criticism

Rejtő Jenő. Piszkos Fred, a kapitány. mek.oszk.hu/01000/01064/01064.pdf . Accessed 12

June 2016.

Rushdie, Salman. “20-20 Vision.” The Independent on Sunday, Review, 17 January 1993. 

---. Shalimar the Clown. 2005. Vintage, 2006.

Schöpflin György. “Hungary: A Century of Complicated Transformations.” The Reunification of

Europe: Anti-Totalitarian Courage and Political Renewal. Edited by Ludger Kühnhardt, EPP

Group in the European Parliament, 2012, pp. 123-159.

stream.eppgroup.eu/Activities/docs/year2012/reunification-en.pdf. Accessed 6

November 2016

Zappe László. “Regény , 1973.” Irodalomtörténet - 6/56. évf. 4. sz., 1974, pp. 911-942.

epa.oszk.hu/02500/02518/00200/pdf/EPA02518_irodalomtortenet_1974_04_0911- 0943.pdf.

Accessed 12 June 2016.

Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság Hungarológiai Értesítő 1988. X. évfolyam 1-2. szám

real-j.mtak.hu/5651/1/1988_10_1-2.PDF