A TÖREDEZETT (KULTURÁLIS) TEST ÍRÁSA POLCZ ALAINE ASSZONY A FRONTON CÍMŰ MŰVÉBEN
A TÖREDEZETT (KULTURÁLIS) TEST ÍRÁSA POLCZ ALAINE ASSZONY A FRONTON CÍMŰ MŰVÉBEN

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I will discuss Alaine Polcz’s Asszony a fronton (1991) ‘ Woman on the Front,’ subtitled Egy fejezet az életemböl ‘A Chapter from My Life,’ as an extreme example of self-contradictory life writing, offering a fragmented self-representation of the author’s subjectivity through the narrative itineraries of both her privatized and publicized body through the last year of the Second World War. The term life writing is a particularly useful categorization for this text, since Hungarian critics have referred to it variously, sometimes in the same article, as ‘memoir, novel, autobiographical novel, documentary novel, memorial records’(memoár, regény, önéletrajzi regény, dokumentum regény, emlékiratok). I will consider how Polcz narrativizes her identity in the two parts of her story. In the first, writing about her young married life with an abusive alcoholic husband during wartime Transylvania in 1944-45 she is unable to step outside the conventional romance plot, narrating her life in terms of the most conservative conceptualization of heterosexual femininity and wifehood, premised on self-renunciation. At the same time, she subverts her surface story of masochistic other-centeredness with manipulation of gaps and secrets, creating an ongoing tension between the concealed and revealed.

• Details
• Contents