Dictatorship, Infantilisation, and The Focalization Of A Child: Zsuzsa Rakovszky’sA Hullócsillag Éve(The Year Of The Falling Star) And Ferenc Barnás’ Kilencedik (The Ninth)

Abstract

In my paper, I call attention to a literary trend of contemporary Hungarian prose fiction, in which the communist past is narrated from a child’s point of view. I will concentrate on the relation among the focalization of the narrative through the eyes of a child, the theme of dictatorship, and present-tense narration. I will relate my approach to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ideas on the problem of representing disempowered people, in other words, representing the subaltern. I take the narration of a child situated in a fictional dictatorial time as a special case of giving voice to the subaltern. In the first part of my paper I will address the theoretical and narratological problem of giving voice and understanding the subordinated figures. The second part consists of the analysis of the novels by Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ferenc Barnás. I will argue that the communist past is a counterfeit referent since it is narrated by an unreliable child narrator. The object of representation is not the historical past but it is itself the perspective of the child through which we come to understand a hidden pattern of dictatorship: infantilization.