Between Kafka and Pound: The variants of homelessness in László Kemenes Géfin’s Fehérlófia [Son of the White Mare] Cover Image

Kafka és Pound között: A helynélküliség Kemenes Géfin László Fehérlófia című művében
Between Kafka and Pound: The variants of homelessness in László Kemenes Géfin’s Fehérlófia [Son of the White Mare]

Author(s): László Bengi
Subject(s): Studies of Literature
Published by: Филозофски факултет, Универзитет у Новом Саду
Keywords: emigration literature; intertextuality; the poetics of space; the act of writing; identity formation

Summary/Abstract: László Kemenes Géfin’s work Fehérlófia [Son of the White Mare] first took form in the environment of the Western Hungarian diaspora. While the text was formed in the context of emigration literature, the minority situation is not simply a biographical addendum to the creation, nor merely an experience ostensible and prevailing in the discourse, but a uniqueness that affects the writing itself and through which the writing is interpreted.This is reflected in the heterogeneity of the genre in Fehérlófia, characterized by a systematically thought-out and expediently arched structure and a fragmented accumulation of linguistic and cultural references at the same time. This is a clear sign of the strengthening influence of American literature, especially Pound, on the poetic work of László Kemenes Géfin. The planned nature that can be attributed to both modernism and postmodernism does not only encompass the motif of continuity and continuous expandability of the transition aiming towards completion, but it can also be related to the views of conceptual art according to which the idea of creation, or the planning out of the creation, is what requires an aesthetic value and interest rather than the complete work itself. The endless text which came into being through tying together different linguistic and cultural fragments, even debris, equally addresses the geographical and historical search for home and the impossibility of finding that home and the desire for identity and the openness to diverging creation.

  • Issue Year: 23/2022
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 14-23
  • Page Count: 10
  • Language: Hungarian