Rise of New Hungarian Prose: Narrative Strategies of Literary Emancipation in Péter Esterházy’s Production Novel

Abstract

This article explores key narrative features of Péter Esterházy’s Production Novel (1979), a landmark of the “new” Hungarian prose of the 1970s–1980s. The article provides a brief overview of the novel and successively addresses the strategies of ironic re-interpretation of the production novel genre, observed both in Hungarian and Soviet works at the forefront of the Hungarian literary landscape in the 1950s. The analysis deals with the two-part composition of the novel that entangles the main story line with fictional comments, constituting a meta-narrative layer and guiding the perception of the novel and the reader’s possible interpretations; the complex structure of the narration and the whole system of formal techniques used for permeating the boundaries of different narrators’ voices within the text, which produces the effect of a distributed narrative (spatial, temporal, psychological, and axiological) focus. The author demonstrates that all these narrative techniques and devices are part of a premeditated strategy of literary emancipation dominating the “new” Hungarian prose of the 1970s–1980s, which can be considered, both aesthetically and historically, a stage of emerging postmodernism in the Hungarian literature of the time. The analysis leads to conclude that the emancipatory impulse of the Production Novel manifests itself not only in a set of narrative techniques but, through them, in the violation of basic pragmatic conventions of novelistic narration and undermining the settings of realist literature. The novel makes the reader reconsider the whole structure of the traditional narrative and further on, the ethical parameters governing the new literary communication.