The body of history on Parallel Stories, the novel by Péter Nádas

Abstract

Péter Nádas’s novel published in the Hungarian language in 2005 deals with both European and Hungarian history, and validates a very specific view on history. The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the question of relevance to the text concerning the body/body ideology aspects of Nádas’s historical approach. Differing representations of our sensuality in addition to placing the issue into a new context is one of the substantial undertakings of Parallel Stories, which in my opinion is worth approaching in the interrelationship of body – sensuality – body ideologies – history – power – novel structure. In my study, I start out from K. Theweleit’s theory, which combines the forceful exercise of power with the ideology of male camaraderie, I then analyse how this approach appears in different text levels, motifs, scenes of Nádas’s novel, up to the composition following the “chaos structure”.