Of Mice and Men: Dissolution and Reconstruction of ‘Nature’s Larger Scheme’: Burns, Mészöly, Kertész

Abstract

This paper investigates the examples of men transforming into an animal (the concept of “becoming-animal” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari or Metamorphosis by Ovid and Franz Kafka) in European literary texts from the 18th century to the postwar era. The focus is not on the representation of the transformation but on the role and contribution of (literary) texts throughout the transformation. As Agamben points out in his work L’aperto, the rhetorical structures of language play a definitive role and give a frame to the order between men and animals as an important borderline between culture and nature from the beginning: the metaphoric transformation opens up the fields of non-human nature and mythological, metaphysical world governed by analogies at the same time. This is the linguistic, poetic gesture that appears in the poem of Robert Burns (To a Mouse) or later in the novel of John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men). This is the gesture that becomes radical in the post-Kafka era in Hungarian literature, in the short story of Miklos Meszoly (Report on Five Mice) and in a famous passage of the Imre Kertesz novel (Fatelessness).