The „Eye Forced to Look”

Examining Representations of the Gaze and Acts of Looking in Iván Mándy’s A Trafik and Miklós Mészöly’s Szenvtelen följegyzések

Abstract

In my study, I will interpret Iván Mándy’s A Trafik and Miklós Mészöly’s Szenvtelen följegyzések via an approach neglected in reception: the acts of looking that play a central role in the narratives. My hypothesis is that the prototypical connotations of the gaze are displaced in both works. As I argue, the gazes in the present works do not fit into the viewer/viewed and subject/object opposition, but are somehow dynamically realized. In order to establish this, I analyse the representations of the body in the texts, as well as the workings of the narrative agents (narrator, focalizer and implied spectator). At the level of fiction, the interplay of human and non-human attributes blurs the above-mentioned dichotomy. All of this is complicated by the gazes of the narrative agents related to focalization, which I observed as a systematic interaction with the represented (characters’) gazes.