Acts of (Liminal) Speech Dezső Kosztolányi's Documents of Illness and Death between Philology, Hagiography and Performativity
Résumé
In the last years of his life, the Hungarian poet, writer and translator Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1936) suffered from throat cancer, which made him lose his voice and, finally, his life. After nine operations, eleven transfusions and two radiotherapies in the Stockholm Radium Institute, he died in November 1936 (Kosztolányi 2010: 26-33; Szállási 2014). During the last months of his life, he communicated only on paper with his doctors, nurses and family members. The 539 "conversation sheets" (beszélgetőlapok) he used have been conserved until today and published by the prestigious publishing house Kalligram in 2010 as the second volume of the Kosztolányi's Complete Works (Összes Művei) (Kosztolányi 2010). The conversation sheets, however, contain only one half of the dialogues that took place around his hospital bed: the second half, oral, remains silenced. This particular communicative situation has scarcely been analyzed by literary scholars, yet raises numerous questions: why those particular (and intimate) documents have been published (should they be published)? What conceptions of art, literary work or intimacy this edition implies? How to analyze those speech acts on paper, once published in the form of a literary work? A survey of anthropological, sociological and literary aspects that the publication of Dezső Kosztolányi's Documents of Illness and Death brings would be impossible in the frame of this article. It proposes to focus instead on the liminal status of both the cancer conversational sheets and their publication, questioning the conceptions of art, authorship and, implicite, literature. My claim is threefold: the conversational notes may be read as a textual performance of a disappeared voice (and a disappearing human being). Their edition, accompanied by numerous other documents on the author's life and death, inscribes them in the frame of a literary publications' series, imposing admitted forms of edition to the fragmentary notes of functional character. Thus, a precise (i.e. artistic) frame of lecture is added to an artifact, although as such it questions the possibility of any expression.
This paper is a result of research stays in Brussels and Berlin, financed by the International Postdoctoral Fellowship (Université libre de Bruxelles, 2016-2017) and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship
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