Photographic origins of postmemory in Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog

Abstract

Tibor Fischer’s novel, Under the Frog (1992), as I shall argue, could be conceived as a narrative expansion of collective memory, or rather postmemory (Hirsch), partly triggered by famous press photos. The novel exists in a productive interrelatedness with the Western European myth also inspired by these photographs about the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The book added life to the dead photos which, although part of an interpretation, were only skeletons of the story of 1956. The fictional recontextualization of scenes and figures experienced as two-dimensional images creates a valid narrative of the events of 1956 that verifies our notions and images we construct mentally about this historical moment. This fictional narrative engages in a dialogue with the author’s posterior knowledge about the scenes and characters previously encountered in the widespread Western press photos of the Revolution. My thesis that crucial scenes in the novel can be regarded as textual evocations of wellknown photos about the events leads to interesting questions about Under the Frog. These are related to what is the cultural background of the novel’s treatment of the representations of the Revolution, what new meanings are added to the photos by the book and how Western discourses, represented by the press photos and the novel, modify Hungarian cultural memory of the 1956 Revolution.