Slovenska Literatura (Dec 2017)
Image, Narrative, History in the novel Natural Light by Pál Závada
Abstract
Within the context of contemporary Hungarian historical narration Pál Závada´s literary production represents writing with pronounced views on the content of the subject matter as well as the narration issues of plausiblity of stories about history. The subject of the paper is the writer´s historical novel Prirodzené svetlo (Természetes fény/Natural Light, 2014), which experiments with bringing history into the present simultaneously through the medium of language/narration and that of an image/photographs. The paper analyzes the relation between the text and the image (ekphrasis, „discovered“ photographs, illustration, narrativization, contradiction, missing photographs), the interconnections of medial switching/overlapping while placing the accent on perception (H. Belting, W. J. T. Mitchell), which are seen from the perspective of questions about the nature of historical representation raised by this literary work (authenticity of the resource materials of written history, ideology/stipulated structure of perception and recollection, non-convergent microhistorical narratives as a correction of collective historical memory , i.e. too little or too much history – P. Ricoeur).
