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CSABA HORVÁTH
topos. In the 1930’s he looked at Kassa from Budapest and during this period
the city was the subject of nostalgia towards a Hungarian city of the Austro¬
Hungarian Monarchy. After the Second World War he wrote from Italy, and
then later from America, where he was using the city as the metaphor for the
lost 19'* century. Even in his language and style Marai referred to the century
which he wanted to save and evoke.
That these writers build up cities of their own from personal memories
helps them to avoid the conflicts and contradictions among different ethnic
groups, cultures and languages. According to Bhabha
different cultures, the difference between cultural practices, the difference in
the construction of cultures within different groups, very often set up among
and between themselves an incommensurability (...) it is actually very difficult,
even impossible and counterproductive, to try and fit together different forms of
cultures and to pretend that they can easily coexist.”
Simko had left Kogice after the Prague Spring and then Basel some decades
later. It was in Basel where he formed a city of the interwar period’s collective
memories. Just as Marai wanted to rebuild a 19 century image, Simko makes
a small town with a Hrabalian touch.
Márai and Simko made a city from their personal past. Marai evokes the
age of the Monarchy, Simko that of post-Trianon Kosice. So the personal
memories give the literary rebuilt cities a diachronic character, and the
cultural circumstances give them a synchronic one. Both writers seemed to
draw a social map with the ethnic constellations and the social hierarchy of
the city.
Both of them build the city with a special literary identity. They go beyond
the national narratives — thus realizing the Dissemination of Bhabha!*—
and they create a narration based on the special identity of a multicultural
city. This kind of narration is defined by the multilingual and multicultural
characters of the region, but it is also made of the authors’ personal nostalgias.
The literary city is put into the narrative crossroads of the collective identity
of cultural studies and the personal memories and expectations of Marai and
Simko.
Jonathan Rutherford: The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha. Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference. London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 207-221, 209.
8 See: Homi K. Bhabha: DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern
nation, Routledge, London, New York, 1990.
* 444 +