The politics of mood: Ádám Bodor and Eastern Europe

Abstract

My reading of Ádám Bodor’s novel Sinistra körzet (Sinistra District, 1992) shows that the political dimension of literary production cannot be reduced to the problem of referentiality (the correct representation of an empirical reality in a realist or an allegorical narrative). In fact, Bodor’s fiction suggests that it is precisely the breakdown of the referential paradigm that is the privileged political moment in literature. As I argue, Bodor’s text suggests that beyond the political realism of historical referentiality we find a new kind of geopolitics based on a regionalist aesthetics of “mood.” In this regard, it becomes clear that the “Sinistra District” is not an allegorical representation of a historical reality (the world of totalitarian regimes) but a rhetorical figure which stages the ideological fantasy that structures that given historical realty.