Smokescreen Images on the Horizon of the Text

Fixed Images & Malleable Memories. Miklós Mészöly: Forgiveness

Abstract

The short novel Forgiveness, breaks down the coherent narrative, and the possibility of a (retrospective) reconstruction of the story in a number of ways, as well as the known genre frameworks of the family novel. In my study, I examine how images are conducive to the short novel, how they contribute to the work’s pseudo-integrative narrative and to the game of “editing with chaos”. It is essential to distinguish between the countless images present in the work, because the possibilities of coherent, integrative narration and recorded meanings are broken up in completely different ways by images that are present as independent material entities in their own right; as well as frozen scenes smoothened into the narrator’s voice or memory images with strong visual qualities. The question is how the examination of images goes beyond the already known methods of using images, the metanarrative, and self-reflective procedures and what insights can be drawn from all of this in relation to the genre and prose poetics.