Performing the Autobiographical: Hungarian Womens Autobiographies by Men Writers Mrta Krsi

Abstract In this paper I re-examine the limits of autobiography and the autobiographical representation of gender in a selection of contemporary Hungarian novels by male authors which all masquerade as autobiographies written by women. Some of my central questions are whether and how these novels can count as autobiographies, where the boundary between autobiography as true story and fiction as made up lies, how relevant gender is to and in the construction of the narrating and narrated Is, and, most importantly, what linguistic-narrative strategies these novels use in order to pass as female texts, and whether there can be any political purpose assigned to (or read into) such passing. The texts I interpret include Weres Sndors Psych (1972), a pastiche of the life and work of an imaginary 19th-century Hungarian poetess; Esterhzy Pters Seventeen Swans by Csokonai Lili (1987), a quasi-autobiography written in a quasi-historical language that is incongruent with the speakers historical context; and Spiegelmann Lauras novel Precious Little (2008), a pornographic autobiography whose real author has not been identified yet. Discussing these three books as works of Hungarian postmodern literature, I maintain that the textual gender performance they present has a controversial relationship with existing social, cultural, literary, and historical gender discourses they base their performance on: on the one hand, in order to remain intelligible for their audience, they must draw on the available signifiers and strategies these discourses use to construct gender, and as such, they become incorporated in these very discourses; on the other hand, they move beyond the level of this incorporative imitation and become critical of existing gender relations, which are mediated discursively. Key Words: postmodern. Gender, autobiography, fiction, Hungarian, performance,

***** 1. Introduction The three works I am going to analyze here Sndor Weress Psych: The Writings of a Poetess from the Past (1972),1 Lili Csokonais [Pter Esterhzys], Seventeen Swans (1987),2 and Laura Spiegelmanns Precious Little (2008)3 have already caught the attention of feminist critics. The major drive for this critical attention is that all the three works are auto/biographical narratives of women written by, or believed to be written by, men. Such a gender switch naturally triggers the attention of feminist critics and if such attention focuses on the

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__________________________________________________________________ question of the authenticity of female experience, then the works will inevitably fall short of critical expectations.4 Some of the feminist interpretations of these books, however, have given them more credit. Beta Hock, for example, reads Psych as Weress attempt to retrospectively canonise womens literary output and write female authors back into literary history,5 while she considers Seventeen Swans as the actualization of criture fminine, which gives an opportunity to the female protagonist to speak outside the bounds of phallologocentric signification.6 Precious Little, too, has been read as an autobiography narrated from behind the mask of a female author in order to perform how sexism appears in a text.7 In this paper my aim is not to agree or disagree with either of these positions; rather, I would like to argue for a more comprehensive approach to all the three works that will help tease out some aspects hitherto disregarded in them. My approach is largely based on what Daniel Punday calls corporeal narratology, which maintains that the body is a part of both our narratives and our narratologies.8 It means that ways of storytelling and reading, as well as ways of thinking about them are conditioned by, among other things, a conception of the human body.9 My eventual aim is to look at the gendered body as performed in these works, where the performances themselves are largely defined by the narrative logic of the works, and where conceptions of the modern body that are formed by and within a complex social-historical-cultural discursive matrix are constitutive of this narrative logic. 2. Sndor Weress Psych (1972) In his article on the relationship between the authors name and the use of masks, Zoltn Nmeth (2009) associates Weress Psych with what he calls the first wave of Hungarian postmodern literature. In Nmeths understanding, the same crisis that manifests in literary modernism as a tragic loss leads to virtually incontrollable language games of identity, parody, irony, intertextuality, and the questioning of earlier understandings of authenticity, originality and referentiality in postmodernist literature.10 Identity games make frequent use of masks, one of the earliest examples of which is Weress Psych. Psych (Erzsbet Lnyay) is a poetess from early 19th-century Hungary, and the book is approached best as an auto/biographical imitation of her oeuvre.11 It presents several types of texts that are all written in historically authentic dialects, and all contribute to the comprehensive construction of Psychs life in a book form: we can read her poems, the poems of her love, her comments and explanations attached to her poems, and other commentaries, letters, short biographies and reflections from different periods (e.g. the 19th and 20th century) that all narrate her life and adventures. Since the primary textual strategy used by Weres to construct the book is imitation,12 the question of technical authenticity becomes a central issue in

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__________________________________________________________________ Psych. According to Pl Mikls, Weress very strategies of authentication (e.g. the inclusion of real historical figures whom Psych meets, or the imitation of contemporary dialects) are what constitute the work as a whole.13 Mikls talks about Psych as an authentic work since it provides a multi-layered psychological and narrative (epic), as well as social, cultural and historical verification for Psychs collection of poetry and prose, and the adjacent writings. These texts are all meant to multiply and thereby authenticate Psychs story with reference to the discourses in circulation in the social, historical and cultural context of early 19th-century Hungary and Europe. Thus, Weress book can also be seen as a large-scale textual performance in which the discourse produces the effects that it names,14 but in which there are constant references to other, historically specific discourses in order for the performance to become viable and culturally intelligible. In other words, although the text does not represent but constructs Psych as a poetess from the past, neither Psych as an intelligible character, nor her textual world would be possible without reference to previous discursive acts. How does the gendered body function in this authentic(ating) context? There are two lines of argument here that I would like to follow. The first recalls critics who take issue with Psychs character as over-eroticized or over-sexualized.15 Psych herself emphasizes the importance of her love affairs and other experiences related to sexuality, conception or childbirth (such as rape, miscarriage, or infanticide) in many of her poems, which may be seen as a reduction of her character to her erotic or biological experiences. The other critical line deals with the question of gendered spaces (both literal and metaphorical), and asserts that Psychs transgression of the boundaries of these spaces (e.g. the fact that she converses with literary figures of the age as their equal, and has a strong opinion on them and their work) makes the work historically inauthentic. Mikls, for example, points out that such a travelling, libertarian way of life could hardly have been taken up as a lifestyle choice by a major poetess in early 19th-century Hungary.16 In my opinion, however, both of these two aspects over-eroticization and transgression of gendered spaces are part of the deliberate anachronism that Weres uses in order to challenge social and literary history, both of which are heavily gendered. So, as opposed to Mikls, I think that this strategy does not weaken but strengthens the books persistent and embarrassing historical interrogation.17 Weres is well aware of the boundaries to be challenged: if there were no boundaries setting the limits of the intelligibility of a performance, transgression itself did not work. At this point it is useful to recall Pundays discussion of corporeal movement through kinetic space: in his framework, narrative change is inherently related to the change of location,18 and thus narrative depends on the different degrees of accessibility the character bodies have to these locations, these kinetic spaces in the story. Punday also refers to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubars book Madwoman in the Attic (1979), where Gilbert and Gubar also claim that literary

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__________________________________________________________________ texts not only mirror the assumptions about social space in the culture out of which they are produced but they also manage to do something that social space cannot they reveal the expectations and contradictions in patriarchal thinking.19 Similarly, if Weress book is a persistent and embarrassing act of transgression, that is because it sets as well as crosses historical and social boundaries with the same narrative act of moving the physical body of its female character through once existing country borders as well as boundaries of female propriety which are recalled in the literary text. As Punday emphasizes, these literary spaces take the shape that they do because of a prior formation of social space,20 and if an actually existing 19th-century Hungarian poetess could not have chosen a life of travelling and of sexual freedom back then, that is because real spaces were indeed allocated in a way that relegated women (poets) to the domestic sphere (with the result that most of their work fell into oblivion). Psychs travels, moreover, are mostly initiated because of her libertarian attitude and search for love, so narrative motivation (which leads to character movement) is inextricably linked both to the gender of the protagonist and the genderedness of social spaces she crosses. In my reading it is exactly this kinetic anachronism that draws attention to the historical and social limitations of gendered life options, so it is where one of the books major challenges to history21 lies. In short, what may be called historically inauthentic or inaccurate about the book is what justifies its feminist reading. 3. Lili Csokonais [Pter Esterhzys] Seventeen Swans (1987) and Spiegelmann Lauras Precious Little (2008) Anachronism is also a central strategy in Seventeen Swans, which, in some readings, posits this novel, too, as inauthentic,22 while others think it is one of the greatest virtues of the text.23 The anachronism of Seventeen Swans lies in the juxtaposition of the books pseudo-archaic language and its contemporary subjectmatter: Lili Csokonai, the author-narrator of the book, born in 1965 in Budapest, relates her life story in seventeen chapters (seventeen swans) in a language that goes back to centuries, and that she could not possibly speak. Some feminist critics see this deliberate anachronism in Seventeen Swans in a negative light, since it makes the representation of female experience problematic and unsuccessful.24 There is, however, another, more prominent trend to the understanding of Seventeen Swans, in which the book is taken as an example for text-literature [szvegirodalom], a critical term widely used in Hungarian literary criticism to denote so-called non-referential and non-mimetic texts, and to refer to a large chunk of Esterhzys fiction.25 This approach to the text motivates Nmeth to associate Seventeen Swans with what he terms as the second wave of Hungarian postmodern literature, in which the use of a mask constitutes a non-referential and self-reflexive textual strategy that enables the author to break loose from referential identities.26 Therefore, while the major textual strategy in Psych is imitation, in Seventeen Swans it is simulation: what is at stake is how far the

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__________________________________________________________________ constructive nature of language itself can be stretched, not how far it can relate to the real world.27 In a way, it may be seen as postmodern textual performativity taken to the extreme: the language of the text constructs the fictional world and its subjects with no reference to reality. As Nmeth points out, this specific textual strategy of simulation, where a male author puts on the mask of a female narrator and makes language (rather than the narrator) the protagonist of the text, may come off as patriarchal and sexist, especially because it also presents the woman character according to the logic of male desire.28 I have two problems with this claim: first of all, it does not become clear what is specifically male about the logic of desire according to which Lili Csokonai presents herself in Seventeen Swans, especially if the language used in the text is interpreted as non-referential. Second, how would gender or gendered desire be constructed in a non-referential text which is still recognized as an autobiographical narrative? In my reading, Lili Csokonai is still the author, protagonist, and narrator of her text, so she gets involved in narrative action whose structure and chronology are recognizable for readers as a set of events in a life story. These events in the book are real inasmuch as they are not happening to the language but to Lili as the main character: her birth, the death of her parents, her life in her uncles family, her work, her love with Mrton Kri, her sexual encounters, the couples car accident, her operation in which she loses her legs, and her eventually killing Kri for betraying and leaving her. These are all narrative events that the readers can make sense of and interpret not only with reference to the actual world, but also according to a narrative motivational sequence in which Lili is the protagonist. In this respect, I refute the idea of non-referential text literature, because I do not think such literature is actually possible. Accordingly, Seventeen Swans does not come about in an asocial void as a result of mere language games either, but conforms to the narrative rules of fiction which are shaped by concepts of real bodies in real socio-historical contexts. In other words, language games work only within an interpretive context that functions with reference to a complex discursive matrix. This discursive matrix generates culturally and historically specific conceptions of the modern body, which trigger the narrative logic of the novel. The gendered materiality of this modern body is one of the most important elements in Seventeen Swans (as in the other two books as well). Lili Csokonai strongly emphasizes the material nature of her position as narrator when she keeps repeating: Tis one body I have. There are also constant references to the materiality of the world in which the characters exist and relate to each other, and in which their actions are motivated by the fact that they are mortal beings, and that they are gendered, too. For example, in the chapter called Inventory Swan, in which Lili closes every paragraph with her mantra Tis one body I have, she talks about her miscarriage and ensuing abortion in terms of the gender binary: It

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__________________________________________________________________ wouldve been a baby boy. A man. Im supposd to be a woman. Tis one body I have.29 So I am unsure whether Zoltn Nmeths differentiation between the second and the third waves of Hungarian postmodern literature is tenable: as I have mentioned before, he maintains that in the second wave the major issue of fiction is to push the boundaries of language to the extreme, so language itself becomes the protagonist. As opposed to this, the third wave stretches into the world by becoming political, as questions of identity and power in existing societies come into focus. 30 Nmeth associates the third book, Spiegelmanns Precious Little, with this third wave. Spiegelmann uses the mask of a female author to relate her story in a series of blog-posts as a woman caught in-between a sexist and self-destructive carnal world and a mental world of self-reflection, struggle, and the desire to be loved and have a meaningful life. As this second level undermines and posits as ironic the books first, sexist level (which is meant to serve as a mirror for men, Spiegel-mann), Nmeth identifies the textual strategy of the book as transitive: the political feminist intent of the novel is to relate to the world by reflecting its patriarchal social hierarchy which dominates the complex discursive matrices we live in.31 The genre of autobiography is thus put into the service of this transitive textual strategy. As opposed to this categorization, I would argue that there is no fundamental difference between Seventeen Swans and Precious Little with respect to transition to the actual world: similarly to Psych, both Seventeen Swans and Precious Little focus on the character bodies of their protagonists as these bodies move from one space to another in the course of narrative action, while the form in which this narrative action is related is autobiographical. This autobiographical narrative entails, firstly, retrospective reflection on the narrators life events and the significance of these events in both cases; and secondly, self-reflexivity regarding the textualization of these events, that is, the nature of (autobiographical) narrative itself. Lili, for example, makes it clear several times in the text that what she is writing is all lies,32 and elsewhere she reflects on the constructive nature of writing and language: words are my strongest support [...] words, from a world in which or so it seems from here there are things that are missing from me.33 Laura Spiegelmann, on the other hand, does not see words as her strongest support; in fact, she feels that using words writing is an unavoidable but futile attempt to make sense of, or overcome life and its stubborn materiality: thinking in ideas has obviously made the situation so bad by now that I have no idea any more what the situation is.34 At some point she uses a classic metaphor to describe her relationship with the man who caused her grief, but the metaphor can be extended to refer not only to the relationship but also to identity and storytelling in general:

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__________________________________________________________________ ... Im the cat, youre the ball; I show interest and try to get to know you to your tiniest details, and by the time I get to the end, it turns out that the whole ball is just a single thread, and the most interesting thing about it is just the way its made into a ball but theres no cat, theres no ball, theres just this pain of genital strength.35 Physicality (carnality) and textuality clash in an antagonistic fight in each of the books chapters, and neither the act nor the result of writing can overcome the pain in the body. In other words, pain, a prominent marker of physical existence, can be neither fully written nor overwritten. Although there is a difference between the two narrators in the degree of optimism as to the usefulness or truthfulness of language in meaningfully connecting life and narrative, these passages still make a strong connection between the story and the character body of the narrator. For me, this exemplifies Judith Butlers call for a rethinking of referentiality in terms of the performative: in her theory, the body emerges as a site where the power and problems of reference play themselves out.36 Gender is not merely a cultural construct which is imposed on the surface of matter, understood either as the body or its given sex, and sex is not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the one becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility. 37 Thus, in order for the characters in a narrative to be culturally intelligible, the narrative must also deal with the same differentiations and categories that work in real life. It is not the freedom but rather the constraint of choice between already available categories, which even language gamers have to make if they want to move the narrative further. For me it is more important to consider this constraint of choice, which is apparent in all the three works, when it comes to the feminist evaluation of any narrative.

Notes
1

Sndor Weres, Psych: Egy hajdani kltn rsai [Psych: A Poetess from the Past] (Budapest: Magvet, 1974; Budapest: Helikon, 2010). 2 Lili Csokonai [Pter Esterhzy], Tizenht hattyk [Seventeen Swans] (Budapest: Magvet, 1987). 3 Laura Spiegelmann, deskevs [Precious Little] (Budapest: Magvet, 2008).

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4

See, for example, va F. Virg (1987), Jolanta Jastrzbska (1991), and Ineke Molenkamp-Wiltink (1994) on Psych and Seventeen Swans; or Nomi Kiss (2008), Emke Bernyi (2009), and Jlia Gyimesi (2009) on Precious Little. 5 Beata Hock, A History of Things That Did Not Happen: The Life and Work of Two Fictitious Hungarian Women Authors, Aspasia 2 (2008): 146. 6 Ibid., 140. 7 Zoltn Nmeth, Szerzi nv s maszk a magyar posztmodern irodalomban [The Authors Name and Mask in Hungarian Postmodern Literature], Alfld 60:9 (September 2009): 84, my translation. 8 Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), ix. 9 Ibid. 10 Nmeth, The Authors Name and Mask, 78-79. 11 Pl Mikls, Weres Sndor Psychje [Sndor Weress Psych], Literatra 1:4 (1974): 128. 12 Nmeth, The Authors Name and Mask, 79. 13 Mikls, Sndor Weress Psych, 136. 14 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. 15 See, for example, va F. Virg (1987). 16 Mikls, Sndor Weress Psych, 135. 17 Ibid., 137. 18 Punday, Narrative Bodies, 117. 19 Ibid., 119. 20 Ibid. 21 Mikls, Sndor Weress Psych, 135. 22 For example, F. Virg (1987); Jastrzbska (1991); Molenkamp-Wiltink (1994). 23 For example, Lszl Imre (1987); Hock (2008). 24 See, for example, Jastrzbska (1991), who points out Lilis unlikely grammatical competences manifesting in the language of the text. 25 See, for example, Ern Kulcsr Szab (1987) for the reading of Lili as a decentralized subject in a non-referential and non-mimetic text. 26 Nmeth, The Authors Name and Mask, 82. 27 Ibid., 80. 28 Ibid., 83. 29 Csokonai [Esterhzy], Seventeen Swans, 74, my translation. 30 Nmeth, The Authors Name and Mask, 83. 31 Ibid. 32 Csokonai [Esterhzy], Seventeen Swans, 8, 11. 33 Ibid., 110, my translation.

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34 35

Spiegelmann, Precious Little, 16, my translation. Ibid., 55, my translation. 36 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2. 37 Ibid.

Bibliography
Bernyi, Emke. A szerz (l)halott: Spiegelmann Laura: deskevs. [The Author Is (Un)dead. Laura Spiegelmann, Precious Little.] Hd 73:11-12 (November-December 2009): 161-164. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Csokonai, Lili [Esterhzy, Pter]. Tizenht hattyk. [Seventeen Swans.] Budapest: Magvet, 1987. Gyimesi, Jlia. Laura nem ltezik: Spiegelmann Laura: deskevs. [Laura Doesnt Exist. Laura Spiegelmann, Precious Little.] Mt 54:11 (2009): 73-74. Hock, Beata. A History of Things That Did Not Happen: The Life and Work of Two Fictitious Hungarian Women Authors. Aspasia 2 (2008): 140-159. Imre, Lszl. Csokonai Lili: Tizenht hattyk. [Lili Csokonai, Seventeen Swans.] In Felszabadult irodalom? Mfajok vlasztjn a XX. szzad msodik felben [Liberated Literature? At the Crossroads of Genres in the Second Half of the 20th Century], by Lszl Imre, 168-173. Szombathely: Savaria University Press, 2007. Jastrzbska, Jolanta. Archaizls s intertextualits: Csokonai Lili: Tizenht hattyk. [Archaization and Intertextuality: Lili Csokonai, Seventeen Swans.] Irodalomtrtneti Kzlemnyek 1 (1991): 48-62. Kiss, Nomi. Keser s nimfomn: Spiegelmann Laura: deskevs. [Bitter and Nymphomaniac: Laura Spiegelmann, Precious Little.] Magyar Narancs, 9 October 2008, 40-41. Kulcsr Szab, Ern. Csokonai Lili: Tizenht hattyk. [Lili Csokonai, Seventeen Swans.] Kortrs 12 (1987): 159-167. Mikls, Pl. Weres Sndor Psychje. [Sndor Weress Psych.] Literatra 1:4 (1974): 125-137.

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__________________________________________________________________ Molenkamp-Wiltink, Ineke. A ni perspektva szerepe Weres Sndor Psych s Esterhzy Pter Tizenht hattyk cm mvben. [The Role of the Female Perspective in Sndor Weress Psych and Pter Esterhzys Seventeen Swans.] Jelenkor 6 (1994): 533-543. Nmeth, Zoltn. Szerzi nv s maszk a magyar posztmodern irodalomban. [The Authors Name and Mask in Hungarian Postmodern Literature.] Alfld 60:9 (September 2009): 78-84. Punday, Daniel. Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Spiegelmann, Laura. deskevs. [Precious Little.] Budapest: Magvet, 2008. Virg F., va. A Mester s az Lilije. [The Master and His Lili.] Magyar Hrlap, 10 June 1987, 10. Weres, Sndor. Psych: Egy hajdani kltn rsai. [Psych: A Poetess from the Past.] Budapest: Magvet, 1974; Budapest: Helikon, 2010. Mrta Krsi is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Gender Studies Ph.D. program at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. She has been doing research and teaching in the field of cultural studies, English language and literature, and is currently working on her dissertation on postmodern and contemporary Hungarian autobiographical fiction.