AGLAJA VETERANYI AND THE MYTH OF ALL POSSIBILITIES
AGLAJA VETERANYI AND THE MYTH OF ALL POSSIBILITIES

Summary/Abstract: Aglaja Veteranyi's short novel, Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, shows the boundaries of a solitude assaulted from all directions. Only within the mirror-games of an improvised stage reality did she find the outlet to transfer her anguishes. An infantile narrator gets different distancing from the limits of the language and the limits of freedom. Aglaja Veteranyi lends the narrator her own mirrors. Unable to export feelings, she is aware that they return as fears and sufferings: ”I don’t scream. I’ve thrown my mouth away”. Her destiny is, from this regard, under the sign of simulacrum. The circus is in itself a simulacrum of the world. It cannot change anything consistently in the people belonging to it. The mask of happiness becomes compulsory for the narrating self. Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta is a collection of impossibilities. Reading the story of Veteranyi one has the feeling of being captive into an orphanage that has replaced the world. The result is a tension that excludes any idea of a paradise.

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