Postmodern and Hungarian Literature

The Lack of a “Grand Narrative”: Postmodern and Hungarian Literature Zsolt Farkas Institute of Hungarian Language and Literature [email protected] Keywords: postmodern; “grand narrative”, system and chaos; relativism; (post)modern Hungarian literature The extraordinary career of the term “postmodern” was set in motion by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard with The Postmodern Condition (henceforth PC) published in 1979. It is both noteworthy and typical how much the topics and considerations raised in this work diverge from what we later on saw as a movement or trend defining itself as postmodern. In the following I wish to highlight a few differences and links between the two. The postmodern condition according to Lyotard Lyotard formulated partly predictions, partly suggestions concerning the future of science and knowledge and its transfer. The fact that his work became so influential is above all due to the distinct historico-philosophical concept it outlines. It states that the age of modernity (spanning from the Enlightenment through the Industrial Revolution to the post-WW2 period) is over, a new era has begun, based on “post-industrial society”, a concept described and popular- ised by A. Touraine, I. Illich and D. Bell in the early 70s, claiming that the traditional structure of society and economy had profoundly changed because the majority of goods on the market is not made up of industrial hard products but services, knowledge and other soft products. The rigid class hierarchies char- acterising earlier societies are disappearing and the role of technology is ever increasing. The culture of this new post-industrial era would be the postmodern. Lyotard, a member of the group called Socialisme ou Barbarie (1948–67), started his career as a traditional left-wing thinker, but later he started to have more and more doubts concerning its efficiency during the 60s and 70s. In PC he tries to demonstrate a new type of leftism, which breaks with the radical external critique of capitalism and tries to highlight the inconsistencies devel- oped by the accepted discourses of the system instead. His central claim and fear is that both science and the institutions more and more require homology, the one universally used language, way of thinking and method, which in the — 121 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac name of exactness and commensurability splits off complex, hard-to-formalise, creative, real knowledge from information. What’s more, it’s doubtful whether it is actually interested in the spreading and general accessibility of information in the first place. Big science eats little science. Science is no longer governed by the logic of research, but by the investors, commissions, and money. This requires the most exact calculations (which is usually an inadequate require- ment in the field of humanities, but Lyotard here concentrates on the “paralo- gous” nature of certain fields of strict science). The spread of computers and digitalisation will only increase formalisation and homology. Lyotard considers system-theoretically well-informed, pragmatic and efficiency governed tech- nocracy the caravan that moves on and all the discourses softer than that the dog that merely barks. “Be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear”, says Lyotard summing up one of the main imperatives of the postmodern age. In PC Lyotard spells out very ambivalent and not really consistent claims (as he himself later admitted). E.g. he swears by the freedom of paralogy as op- posed to the terror of homology, yet he doesn’t look at a vast number of wide- spread paralogies, only dismisses them with a despising gesture referring to them as being less efficient. Thus for instance he attacks Jürgen Habermas’ theory of “communicative rationality” saying that it strives to reach a consensus, which “does violence to the heterogeneity of language games”. Lyotard, on the other hand, claims that the main goal is the “legitimation of dissensus”. How- ever, he’s not interested in legitimated dissensuses either. What he is interested in is what he considers subversive achievements made by hard sciences (and analytic philosophy) that had achieved a high degree of homology. This is what elevates to the status of stars of postmodern science people like Kurt Gödel, who proved in his famous paper in 1931 that the axiomatic foundations of mathematics can never be utterly complete and free of contra- dictions. Or take Benoît Mandelbrot and chaos theory, which states that the traditional approximative methods of mathematics are insufficient for the description of complex dynamic systems, where the slightest change in the input pa- rameters results in dramatically different outcomes (the butterfly effect) and make exact predictions impossible. Lyotard is also glad to apply the argumen- tations of Paul Feyerabend at any opportunity, as they criticize the strict science way the influential basic theses of scientists and philosophers (first of all Karl Popper), the definitive figures of strict sciences. He also relies heavily on the “language game” concept of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which he interprets as a strong variant of the thesis of relativism and incommensurability. As postmodern examples Lyotard gives prominence to those authors and theories, which are compatible with the system and are successful within it, but at the same time somehow destruct it. — 122 — The Role of Intralingual Translation in the Legal Language PC’s wild anarcho-lefist theses1 were not interesting for the leftists who created a movement-founding piece of art and a fashion from PC, just like Lyo- tard himself was ignoring not only the left-wing but all the theories he didn’t perceive as the mainstream of the future. More attractive for the activists and trend-surfers was to give up the traditional criticising from the outside, and have great reverence for “capitalism” shown and seen as having extraordinary abilities in problem solving and renewing itself. And this was the very start of decay for the traditional left-wing, which gained himself a good conscience through the Postmodernism for giving up its former principles. Terry Eagle- ton’s description of post-structuralism in 1992 already was: “Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed upris- ing of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blend- ing the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.” For the 80s and 90s postmodern had become a highly popular and broad (and also defined in many different ways) form of world viewing. It became influential and attracted worshippers mainly in arts and social sciences, but ap- peared in all the areas of public culture, and now we can see it as the last great cultural stream (“grand narrative”?) – and the scale and forms of its survival and becoming a part of “the” cultural history is an open issue. The importance of the narrative The immediate connection point was of course the most cited – and also cardi- nal according to Lyotard – definition of PC: postmodern is “incredulity toward metanarratives”. “This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.” Beyond these statements of the intro- duction, PC devotes multiple chapters to narrative, which it sees as the most primordial and still one of most effective form of conveying knowledge, and which by his opinion is despised by scientific discourses as “primitive”, while it has a great advantage over them, as it requires no (self-)legitimation from all of the other discourses. This tolerance towards heterogeneity makes it a more in- telligent discourse than those. 1 Richard Rorty (1993): “Lyotard argues invalidly” that science “should aim at permanent revolution. [...] To say that ‘science aims’ at piling paralogy on paralogy is like saying that ‘politics aims’ at piling revolution on revolution.” — 123 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac Literary postmodern Some representative authors The works of Jorge Luís Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Kurt Vonnegut are con- sidered to be the great literary predecessors of postmodernity. Thomas Pyn- chon, Paul Auster, Tom Stoppard, Bret Easton Ellis, Danilo Kiš, Vladimir So- rokin, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco etc.2 are seen as representatives of actual postmodern. In Hungarian literature Tandori,3 Hajnóczy and Esterházy are mentioned among the great precursors.4 In the group of the authors who started their careers in the 80s, works of Lajos Parti Nagy, Endre Kukorelly, László Garaczi, László Darvasi, László Márton, Gábor Németh, István Kemény, János Térey, János Háy, Attila Hazai, Attila Bartis etc. are seen as characteristic representatives of Hungarian literary postmodern. Some representative poetic and stylistic characteristics Fragmentedness Things can not (or must not) be organized into one, all-explaining and all-di- recting whole. The “grand narratives”, eschatologies, all-encompassing world history stories are not authentic anymore. Their role can be fulfilled by “little narratives”, which have no totalising / totalitarian pretensions.5 This otherwise historico-philosophic point of view is the most applicable in prose fiction. Post- modern writers don’t create big, closed stories (or if they do, their very story- telling will be tricky).6 A strong example of this is the “novel” of Gábor Németh, From the Book of Nothing (1992), in which we meet one by one the 2 Usually Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Žižek are usually referred to as theoretics despite the fact that they all refused being labelled as “postmodern”.

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