The Lack of a “Grand Narrative”: Postmodern and

Zsolt Farkas Institute of 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 fu- ture 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 tradi- tional 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 postmod- ern. 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’ the- ory 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 tra- ditional approximative methods of mathematics are insufficient for the descrip- tion 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 postmod- ern 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-structural- ism 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 in- fluential 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 revolu- tion. [...] To say that ‘science aims’ at piling paralogy on paralogy is like saying that ‘politics aims’ at piling revolution on revolution.”

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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 , , László Garaczi, László Darvasi, László Márton, Gábor Németh, István Kemény, János Térey, János Háy, Attila Hazai, 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”. 3 Tandori faultily, for he is a distinctively neo-avant-guard author, as I explain in my 1994 study “The writer writes, the reader etc. Problems of neo-avantgarde and of omnidescription in Tandori’s oeuvre.” 4 Ernő Kulcsár-Szabó puts here Péter Nádas, too (History of Hungarian Literature 1945-1991), which is a faulty classification even based on his own criteria. It’s quite eye-catching, how inconsistent the classification system created by Kulcsár-Szabó is (whom Sándor Radnóti called “the postmodern gendarme”). Cf. Gábor Bezeczky: Literary History at No-Man’s Land (2008), Zsolt Farkas: “The Good One Wins” (2009). 5 Cf. “engineering” in Derrida, striving to build perfect systems in hope of perfect control – as the opposite of “bricolage’, which is ready to do with ad hoc tools. At Deleuze one side is “imperial’, centralized, hierarchical, neurotic – against the „nomadic”, which is less organized but more organic and more free. The centralised, hierarchical institution is the main agent of both the social oppres- sion and the psychical suppression. 6 „Story” is what is told by the given work of art, and „narrative” is the way the story told. Cf. “fable” and “sujet” in formalist literary studies.

— 124 — The Role of Intralingual Translation in the Legal Language characteristic of traditional stories: easy-to-read, sensually displayed scenes and episodes, paragraphs containing inner and outer happenings – the only thing is that all those paragraphs belong to different narratives, and take place in diverse space-time points, involving different characters.

Intertextuality The role and significance of intertextuality reflect quite well the somewhat “post-historical” self-interpretation of the postmodern, which can be strongly related to the reflective and perversely historicising eclecticism of the postmod- ern. The piercingly intertextual text cuts itself adrift from the authenticity cult of modern time eras and styles, which was taken to extremes by the avantgarde “-isms”. Postmodern – we are after structuralism – sees the subject itself as lin- guistically defined, and the cult of authenticity as naive: it shows mostly that all has been written and done. However, authentic and exciting works have been produced by different forms of intertextuality. The time-space and the plot of Tom Stoppard’s drama Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead “perfectly” match those of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, except that title characters are the main characters, while Hamlet remains a secondary character. Stoppard’s play cites all the scenes from Shakespeare’s work in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on stage, but when the original piece follows other heroes, in Stoppard’s work still the two friends are followed and elaborated thoroughly, wittily, in- geniously, sensitively, and in a way that matches exactly Shakespeare’s work. It is tragic and makes you think,7 but is entertaining and light at the same time. A fortunate mix of high literature and the popular, which is a cause celebre of post- modern. The works of Esterházy contain such a bounty of intertexts, marked and unmarked citations, guest texts and other cultural allusions that it can be seen as one of the most specific signatures of his diction. It’s not as if there wouldn’t be statements characteristic to Esterházy (they do exist, sometimes to the point of mannerism), but the guest texts are constitutive both on micro and macro levels. The same can be said on the works of Endre Kukorelly, e.g. H.Ö.L.D.E.R.L.I.N. (1998), which is a transcription of Hölderlin’s poems, or One Thousand and 3 (2009), which revels in intertextual and even intermedial allu- sions (e.g. Mozart: Don Giovanni), not solely as single citations and references, but for example, Anna Karenina serves as structural principle of the work. Sim- ilarly, with his rhyming drama Residential Area “Niebelung” (2003) of János

7 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can be seen as typical postmodern subjects, being in principle in- telligent, autonomous, playful characters, who nevertheless drift onto the way of lackeying the cor- rupt power.

— 125 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac Térey relocates the librettos of Wagner’s Ring into a contemporary Hungarian environment, while the short prose fish alive (1991) of Gábor Németh was writ- ten in the characteristic form of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. An extreme case is Péter Esterházy’s story What a Glory to Die for the Country (1986), which from the very first letter to the last one is identical to a short story of Danilo Kiš (the Hungarian translation of it). All the interpreters agree that it’s not a plagiarism but a postmodern gag, so much so that the “original” idea is identified by them in Borges’ short story Pierre Ménard, Author of Don Quijote. Its main character decides to rewrite Don Quijote, in which both a historicising and an actualising sensitivity are equally important. He puts decades of stout labour into it, com- pleting just the first two chapters, and reaching a variant which is identical word for word with the original.

Register mixing Another definitive touch of postmodern writers is a sensitivity to spoken lan- guage and its vivid representation, which is at least as significant as the conjur- ing up of written discourses. However, not all of these are from literature. Sen- tences leak in from the most different areas of life: from ads, textbooks, hit songs, various documents, subcultures and sociolects. Mercilessly putting be- side each other and clashing the contrasting but equally characteristic elements of our more and more complex reality creates a kind of new realism, despite the dogmatic attacks of postmodern on semiotic and aesthetic representationalism, on referencialising, mimesis-based interpretations. Even the short novels of Hajnóczy already frequently use these documentaristic elements. Various but fictive documents form parts of Kemény István’s novel Art of the Enemy (1989). In the tales of László Garaczi’s volume No Sleep! (1992) “from the communist jargon right to the scientific dissertation, from the soft or harder versions of slang to literary trope, from poesy of song hits to the style of a plant guidebook the text consists of innumerable language games. Texts of Garaczi are peculiar but not by having their specific ‘Garaczi style layer’, which then would accom- modate other ones [as with Estreházy or Kukorelly]. His work’s fabric is woven exclusively from guest texts, and even more from ‘guest styles’.”8 The frequent switching between genres, moods, narrative points of view is very characteris- tic to it. Playful, humorous and light often goes hand in hand with serious and tragic. “Hey, little shaggy, where’s your mom?” – asks the retro rock and roll hit with skittish irony through the mourning of the author of the novel Auxiliaries of the Heart (1985), which tells us the story of his own mother. Cf. the motto of Little Hungarian Pornography: “The situation is hopeless but not serious”.

8 Zsolt Farkas: „Epistemology of Nincs alvás!” (1994).

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Multi- and intermediality Postmodern often resembles film (e.g. the short novels of Hajnóczy), collage (e.g. Esterházy’s Bevezetés [1980–86] uses a lot photos, drawings, margin and foot notes, sometimes magazine-style fragmentation), is hipertextual (Ester- házy’s Production Novel [1979] contains several hundreds of inner links, virtu- ally a whole sophisticated link system inside the text). Lajos Parti Nagy’s very funny social realist operetta Ibusár (1996) or his kitschy and dilettante travesty of girl’s novel Angel of the Body (1997) are constitutively intertextual and reg- ister mixing both on micro and macro level of text organization. (Successful the- atre performances of Ibusár presented the cavalcade of low and popular Hun- garian traditions in a multifaceted Gesamtkunst form.) So postmodern works with a whole lot of micro-realist and documentarist tools. Art is sensual, and in literature it’s realism which first of all represents sensuality. So the assumption that considers the need for realism to be “anach- ronistic” or attaches it solely to socialist culture politics is rather wrong. A lot of writers do small realism or microrealism, and the postmodern ones espe- cially. Fragmentation doesn’t mean the absence of lifelike situations, characters and dialogues. Postmodern authors are especially characterised by a sensitivity to great many forms of spoken and written language, which are their most im- portant “guest texts”.

Co-ordination rather than imposing a hierarchy Epistemologically it is radically relativistic and agnostic. Though in principle it is localistic and relativistic, it is quite preoccupied by the complexity of culture becoming global after the communication explosion and the interrelation of dif- ferent discourses (art, science, philosophy, religion, politics, technology, enter- tainment or advertising industry products, sub-cultures etc.).

Playfulness One of the first shape-giving instances of chaotic matter is play9 (which itself is a rather manifold “concept”). It is partly a welfare luxury, partly a radical way of discursive experimenting. The very start of Garaczis’s tale Tranzit Mundi (1992) says “Now I tell you so that you know, how it happened that, one: the Kiowa turned into neophyte Druze; two: the infamous Don Piruló into a sullen pacifist; and three: the three tarsiers of the reservation into three bushes of

9 Both Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Derrida’s deconstruction attribute rather special, culture cre- ative and existencially decisive role to play, which got in focus of Wittgenstein’s analytic interest not accidentally at all.

— 127 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac sweetscented bedstraw.” Then this seemingly slightly dadaistically chaotic story is told as if by an impeccably objective historian: “...Don Piruló had launched a people’s initiative in order to introduce Kiowa scalps instead of dol- lars as a general currency throughout America. However, the public prosecutor in a rescript described his idea as ‘narodnik romanticism’ and a ‘fuckup’, and called on Don Piruló to behave finally as a civilized man. […] Meanwhile, Don Piruló addressed a letter to Karl May, in which in the name of ‘hiperactual con- servativism’ he calls May his brother, and summons him to join the multi-front fight against the worldwide Kiowamuslim conspiracy…” Play can be the most serious when it comes to ideology criticism or discourse criticism as well.

Reflected and metafictive Postmodern works are often well-informed theoretically and philosophically, sometimes overly so.10 An exemplary postmodern work moves a large body of erudition, being popular at the same time. It can be read and interpreted on multiple levels. Often emphasises it’s own createdness and poetical well- formedness. (Cf. Brecht’s alienation effect.) Fiction is often metaleptic (the nar- rated world all of a sudden meets the world of narration, they form a logical loop, e.g. in Cortázar’s Continuity of Parks). The primary possibilities of inter- pretation spring from the controversies, parallels and interferences of the story and its narration. The decentring of subjectivity, as it gets defined by more and more influences and systems – theoretically. Practically these are “little narra- tives” of individualism rejecting a global point of view. Politically: liberal, and it became liberal out of oppositionism, so this means not the same in the West and East. Around 1980, at the starting period of the postmodern, Western regime criticism stood mostly to the left, while the Eastern one to the right of the local regime opposed by each of them. Generally, the level of capitalism-conformity of a postmodern author would depend on these impulses. The novels of Nabokov, Dick or Ellis are very deep criticisms of capitalism and modernism, which, however, is clear exclusively in narrato-po- etical terms, since there is not the slightest hint to the author’s direct opinion. By principle, Hungarian postmodern is anti-ideological, but it tends to propa- gate the ideology of professionalism. “And it’s more soothing” – writes

10 At the start and the middle of the 90s postmodern “text literature” was already a definitive line of Hungarian literature, especially among the young – so much so that in 1995 younger and older, but in any case conservative critics suggested that already “there’s been too much of postmodern” and of “text literature”, so why not to write traditional works, god forbid “grand narratives”. Inter- estingly enough, this long debate involving a lot of actors got known in the recent past’s literature history as “The Quarrel of Criticism”. Western postmodern has been frequently characterised by and accused of being represented not less by critics and theorists than by penmen and artists.

— 128 — The Role of Intralingual Translation in the Legal Language Esterházy in Little Hungarian Pornography (1984) – “if the writer thinks in terms of subject and predicate rather than of people and nation.” According to this – as a writer and an artist – he is a confounded aesthetist (considering the aesthetic aspect to be the most important leading principle). Some authors (Es- terházy, Kukorelly), however, besides that are ideologically anti-socialists, which is not a postmodern (and not generally artistic) property, and is not mar- ginal either. Esterházy’s special significance and deep impact in the 80s was no less of a political nature as of aesthetic. The author didn’t reflect this situation, but at the same time was systematically utilizing the (rightward) shifting of the con- temporary practice of cultural policy characterised by the tripartite “support / tolerate / prohibit” system of categories. His Production Novel wouldn’t have been published ten or five years earlier, for a great many reasons, for example because it incessantly pokes fun at censorship and censors, and of course his own self-censorship. However, the 80s marked a new era,11 which will reach its prime with the 90s. Paradoxically, the most basic consequence of the elimina- tion of censorship was literature’s serious loss of significance. This had an equally profound impact on the reception history of Péter Esterházy’s oeuvre as on that of Sándor Csoóri (the leader of those “thinking in terms of people and nation”) as staged by Sándor Radnóti („Ethnos and Demos”, 1992). They had been at their most coveted while they were forbidden fruit, but the “advent of freedom’, the regime change didn’t justify its heroes: “just” as literary figures they turned out to be less interesting (as it was still the breach of political limits that attracted more attention). The problem of ideology is, in fact, is examined in a lot more depth by nar- ratives strictly excluding the immediate utterances of the author. E.g. Péter Hajnóczy’s short stories and novels often feature as their main characters (more or less alterego-like) ordinary people, simple workmen stuck frustrat- ingly on the lowest rung of the ladder of society, or even marginalised outcasts eking out an existence at the very edges of society on temporary jobs. This fact unavoidably induces a point of view critical of society and the political regime. But we get much more an unspoken, ironic and rock-solid critique of ideology

11 The monthly journal Mozgó Világ (banned after years of publishing ever more oppositionist works) or the samizdat publishing house AB (banned immediately but working illegally) challeng- ing the new „tolerated” / „prohibited” boundaries were only for the intellectuals prone to the dra- matic; the agent that played much more important role in decomposing the socialist system was actually the extremely popular Radio Cabaret run by the state radio, the jokes of which was regu- larly pointed to the suggestion that socialism doesn’t work. The 80s were totally different from the earlier period when the majority of Hungarians believed in and cooperated with the socialist sys- tem.

— 129 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac and lightly sketched but heavyweight ethical questions. In the story called At the Dentist the introspective monologue of the unkempt, anxiety-ridden main character with bad teeth who pays no social insurance reflects real drama, clashing with each other a variety of viewpoints from the most beautiful ideal principles of the socialist regime through the most worn platitudes of contem- porary political opposition to self-critique and self-accusation. These can be re- solved and absolved in just one way: if the dentist were understanding and compassionate. But the protagonist gets the opposite: the dentist is disdainful and condescending and pulls out his tooth with no sign of empathy or consid- eration. The story called Commune is even more severe. Here the main charac- ter is plotting at great length and with much anxiety how to pick up a woman, but then never gets down to it, but drops in to see one of his friends instead and explains to him with great self-confidence how simple it would be to realise their earlier plan concerning setting up a commune. Someone rings the door- bell, the friend leaves the room and the main character scans his bookshelf, and finally takes off a book and slips it into his bag. He tells the returning friend that he was about to leave, says hello and leaves. Another one of his stories, The Stoker, is an ingenious paraphrase of Michael Kohlhaas with the significant dif- ference that while the main character of the original has his horses confiscated completely unfairly, in Hajnóczy’s version the main character fights and fails in a rather ridiculuous, insignificant cause, the withdrawal of the free protective milky drink provided for workers, while ravels more and more trying to prove his petty little truth. This ethical and psychological analysis enjoys higher re- spect not just in postmodern aesthetics than the ideologically loaded and seri- ous critique of the political regime encountered in most works by Esterházy and in Endre Kukorelly’s Ruin (2000, enlarged edition 2006). A halál kilovagolt Perzsiából (1979) is a good example of the self-analysis that serves individual and collective self-understanding much better than many a tour de force of bi- ographically inspired prose, so prone to being apologetic. Similarly, Gábor Németh’s novel, The Summer of a Dormouse (2016), which is a typical face-to-face encounter of postmodern individualism with the depth and inescapability of today’s global cultural, ethical and political problems, which is not direct12 but relies more on the language of the narrative in its frag- mented and microrealistic way. The novel is the account of a father to his son about his journeys across Europe, his experiences and thoughts. The handful of

12 Even the fictitious narrator is split: “‘according to this’, a voice said in my head, ‘from now on, apparently, a father’s mission is not to teach his son the proper use of the fish knife, or the very important difference between the declination of -ik-verbs and -ikless verbs, or the dropped lob of a spinned backhand shot, but street fighting.”

— 130 — The Role of Intralingual Translation in the Legal Language “small stories” recounted in great detail (“niggers” vs some Dutch vs the narra- tor in a tram stop in Amsterdam, Gypsies with thick golden chains around their necks vs the narrator at a resort at Lake Balaton, an Arab making trinkets out of the wiring of champagne bottle corks and selling them vs. the narrator at a square in Biarritz) have a recurrent pattern where the narrator, the intelligent and sensitive European Kulturmensch with an honest multiculturalism inevita- bly fails to harmonise the deeper cultural differences he encounters.

The slogans that remained empty The critique of modernism It was widespread throughout the 20th century (and already in Romanticism), but more typically in theoretical rather than literary postmodern. It claims that modernity is aggressively anthropocentric. It explores the laws of nature and society in order to control and dominate them. It considers both the natural and the social environment to be an unlimited resource. The industrial revolution and civilization brought about epic scale destruction in both nature and society, while meeting human needs at ever higher levels. (This is addressed more in theory and popular literature, e.g. in works by Vonnegut and Dick). Enlighten- ment itself is also brought under the fire of criticism. Habermas argued force- fully that the “project” of Enlightenment can’t come to an end, but is an ever renewing task.

Post-historic state The distanced, historicising and reflected attitude to the traditions of moder- nity is rather obvious and follows quite logically from the “incredulity toward metanarratives”, that is all-encompassing world historic scenarios and inter- pretations. However, its fiction feature anything but a post-historic landscape. This was mainly represented by F. Fukuyama’s well-known and much-criticised The End of History, which claimed that with the end of the Cold War we reached “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This cheap optimism, also found in cultural postmodern, is grossly denied by the fact that it was the postmodern that marked (though not brought about) the ubiquity of dystopian, post-apocalyptic visions of the future in literary and film narratives.

Some critical remarks The “incredulity toward metanarratives”, as Rorty puts it, “scratches where it doesn’t itch”. It’s philosophically unwise, scientifically unjustifiable and literary nonsense. Pushing it dogmatically hinders the contemplation of great

— 131 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac correlations, which, however, would be an urgent must at this stage of the ever quickening and ever globalising cultural and technological evolution. Looking back from this vantage point, the postmodern interpretation of historic and political trends was wrong. There was indeed a global shift at around 1980, but it meant that earlier it had been social democratic values that were dominant in both the West and the East,13 while afterwards it’s corpo- ratistic monopol-capitalism that’s been dominant in most places,14 rather than “liberal democracy’. The Cold War was won by the socialism of the West and even today it’s only social democratic countries that are functioning well eco- nomically as well as in other respects. The system that puts particular interests above the interests of the whole might indeed be the end of history in that it threatens the very existence of human life.

The present and future of postmodern Postmodern has been a lot less talked about in the past 20 years both in the East and the West than in the previous 20 years, during its heyday and the height of its popularity. Has it passed its sell-by date, has it burst, is it gone? The hype certainly has. Those who considered postmodern to be one of the (modernist) isms (rather than a state, a condition that is becoming ever more significant ra- ther than fading into the background, like Lyotard opined) are nowadays talk- ing about post-postmodern and other movements.15 – In a certain sense the era of the Enlightenment or Romanticism is over, but in another sense it’s not. We would make no sense whatsoever of the world around us at the moment, were these all-encompassing cultural movements not very much alive, open, unfin- ished stories, “grand narratives” even today. Similar things can be said about the postmodern as well: it was too comprehensive, too significant in cultural history for us to be able to interpret our recent past and present without it. It can be a bridge between the past and the new millennium that has brought about unfathomably deep-running changes compared to all earlier cultures: people have become internet terminals spending 2-12 hours a day tapping at their laptops or smartphones and this time is almost exclusively taken from

13 All should have a minimum of welfare, a home, a job, schooling, healthcare, free time, savings, a TV and a car, the underprivileged should be supported, inequalities decreased, capitalism kept at bay, decisions democratised. 14 The intertwining of the judiciary, the executive and the legislative sphere has created hitherto unseen levels of income and wealth inequalities in the US, the regime changes of Eastern Europe has brought about an age of oligarchs again, there’s neither free market race, no equality of oppor- tunities. 15 While it’s striking that the literary trends that follow postmodern refer not so much to new move- ments and -isms developing specific ways of creation and poetic techniques but certain topics (identity, ethnicity, etc.) or genres (fantasy) becoming trendy.

— 132 — The Role of Intralingual Translation in the Legal Language traditional activities, which have formed the basis of all our culture so far. Of all these it’s literature and narrative is what has lost the least of its significance in shaping human culture. (Translated by Júlia Károlyi)

My major publications on the topic:

Zsolt FARKAS, „O nich czterech”, Literatura na Swiecie, 33(2004) 348–363.

FARKAS Zsolt, Mindentől ugyanannyira, (: JAK – Pesti Szalon, 1994)

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