What comes after Central Europe? Miklós Mészöly’s late prose and contemporary Hungarian literature

Abstract

The paper approaches the last 40–50 years of Hungarian prose from a politico-historical and narratological point of view, combining (1) readings of pieces of fiction, (2) discussing long processes in literary production and (3) computerized readings on a corpus of 46 volumes. First the authors identify the so-called ’Pannonian prose’ of Miklós Mészöly in a context of intellectual history regarding the discourse on the notion of Central (Eastern) Europe in the 1980–90s. The paper then follows the trace of this influential corpus first in canonised works of fiction between the 1980s and 2010, then in the most acclaimed novels and short story collections between 2010 and 2020. Style changes convey changes in matters of social, political and historical notions of the works, which are thus also interpreted as slow processes: from Central (Eastern) European regional thought to questions of national history and identity, then to family history and identity, later to the problems of individuals. After showing how this process went on in recent Hungarian literature, the paper tries to answer why it happened, drawing some conclusions on the dialectics of inclusiveness—closedness and cultural-political practices of Hungarian culture.