'Recreating Katalin Street': Reenacting a Haunting Past Utopia as Manifestation and Bodily Testimony to Trauma in Magda Szabó's Katalin Street

Abstract

This article brings into dialogue the work of Cathy Caruth, a founding figure of trauma theory, with that of Svetlana Boym, an authority within scholarship on nostalgia. In doing so, it aims to showcase that the study of traumatic experience can benefit from a theoretical approach in which both of their perspectives are understood to be inherently intertwined. Despite being seemingly very much opposed in terms of their conceptualizations of trauma, their theories, when considered in light of each other, can in fact be said to make up a trauma-spectrum that traces the different, interconnected levels on which trauma operates and manifests itself. Therefore, by considering them part of a spectrum, new ways for analyzing traumatic experience open up that allow for it to not only be understood in terms of an individual acting out, as Caruth argues, but also as the shared performance of a haunting past utopia, as suggested by Boym. Such a spectrum, as I will demonstrate, is especially useful as a theoretical tool for analyzing the workings of trauma within small-scale communities in which there is a uniquely intricate mediation between the individual and the community, the past and the present. This will be further illustrated by a discussion of Magda Szabó’s novel Katalin Street (1969); a work that explores the complex social dynamics that emerge when an intimate community is traumatized during World War II by the murder of one of their own and the subsequent loss of their shared utopia. As a result, those who survive, as a coping mechanism for as well as symptom of their trauma, continue to reenact their idealized past as if the catastrophic event never occurred. As such, Szabó foregrounds how Boym’s nostalgic performance and Caruth’s acting out are often fundamentally interwoven in the creation of a never-ending, paradoxical cycle of remembering through forgetting and forgetting through remembrance. Moreover, by emphasizing the layers of witnessing within the text, Szabó underlines the importance of acknowledging this nostalgic reenactment of the past as a form of testimony in its own right, one that calls for new ways of listening to trauma.