The Subjects Imperative of Telling and Forgiving: Alaine Polczs Autobiographical Novel One Woman in the War

by Mrta Krsi

We women must find the way to really be women and creators at once. Of course, you cant ride two horses at the same time. But well eventually design that saddle and train those horses to bear it somehow. Alaine Polcz1

This confession by Alaine Polcz came to my head as I was reading an article on her autobiographical novel One Woman in the War [Asszony a fronton, 1991] by Louise O. Vasvri. This motto, just like the novel, focuses on the duality of a womans existence as Polcz sees it: a woman is never simply a creator (a psychologist-turned-writer in her case) but a woman and a creator, and these roles or identities are often incompatible, due to the complex double standards and impositions the various social relations, bonds of love and duty2 put on women. Still, Vasvri overlooks the conflicts inherent in such a position and suggests that Polczs autobiography is not feminist enough, since it is confined to speaking about the pain and humiliation of the body in marriage and war in the inherited language of the victim instead of gaining agency by breaking with the hagiographic tradition3 that enumerates instances of suffering (82). Vasvri holds this opinion on One Woman in the War despite the fact that she also admits that it was the first written document in Hungarian to publically and extensively relate the widespread practice of Russian soldiers to (serially) rape women in Hungary during the Second World War, so the text effectively broke the public silence surrounding these events during the state socialist era. Interestingly enough, many other critics who have written on One Woman in the War find this enumeration of suffering one of the strongest aspects of the book. Sndor Radnti, for example, writes that it is exactly the fact that the horrors of the war the hunger, dirt, lice, violence, and rape are related in Polczs book as natural occurrences of everyday, ordinary life (the emphasis being on order in ordinary) in an impassive tone that creates the books aesthetic effect, which contributes to its authenticity (1371). It is an intriguing observation considering that the author as Radnti himself points out cannot or does not even want to remember many of the events correctly (1371), partly because almost fifty years passed between the war and the publication of One Woman in the War, and partly because her not

Burger Barna (2005), Fej vagy rs: 92 magyar r portrja [Heads or Tails: The Portraits of 92 Hungarian Writers], no page numbers, my translation. 2 I borrowed the first half of this phrase from the title of Jessica Benjamins book The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Virago, 1988). 3 Hagiography refers to the books and writings on, as well as the study of, the lives of saints (Websters New World Dictionary, 3rd College Edition [1991], 606). 1

being able to remember is one way of interpreting the events without ever overtly reflecting on them in the text. Many critics (besides Vasvri), however, find the lack of reflection in the book disappointing, even frustrating. When One Woman in the War is put in the context of institutional literary criticism, it is defined as an autobiography, as well as a testimony, and a confession (Balassa and Varga 859-860). This triple role of the text that the literary establishment attributes to it and that the text attributes to itself in some instances, most notably in its motto, which is one of the few overt textual self-references in the book imposes contradictory expectations on it, so in this respect, as if by analogy, a womans text falls subject to double or even triple standards, just like its author. Traditionally, and in many critical texts even today (including some written from a feminist point of view), autobiography is an obvious genre for the subject to put itself together by constructing a coherent narrative that describes its development from fragmentation to unity.4 When, for example, Vasvri claims that One Woman in the War cannot be put in line with feminist autobiographies because its narrator lacks agency (82), or when Edit Gilbert writes reproachfully that Polczs narrator does not reach self-understanding because she is not able to face her own role in her fate largely due to her inability to see the nature of her own submissive behaviour that contributes to her demise (77)5 , they both call upon the narrator to account for a certain type of active agency that an autobiographical piece is supposed to come up with as a conclusion. Self-understanding, which Gilbert misses from the book, is also related to the functions of the text as testimony and confession. According to Pter Balassa and Lajos Mrton Varga, the strength of One Woman in the War comes from its confessional aspect, its intimately sharing as if in a close-up all aspects of the horrors that affect the body (860). In fact, the horror itself lies in its material nature, in the fact that it affects the bodys functioning down to its basic levels. In my opinion this is the key to the understanding of Polczs novel, since I think that, paradoxically, the lack of commentary (self-understanding) and the enumeration of suffering, as well as the (deliberate) inability to remember certain things are all part of Polczs technique to actually attribute meaning, if not to the events themselves, since they were meaningless, but to the story itself. After all, these are events that affected her body,
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Of course, this is but a blunt and reductive definition for autobiography, since there have been many texts with or without an overt feminist intent that were decidedly written in order to undermine the teleology of autobiographical writing I have just summarized above. Nevertheless, the idea of the subjects coherence is still very strongly present in theorizations about autobiographical writing. 5 Only by interpreting this sentence by translating it have I realized how dangerously Gilbert verges here on blaming the victim for her fate. 2

regardless of her (active or passive) agency: she is but one of the many women the soldiers raped, so, as Radnti also emphasizes, the violence was not just a single occurrence but happened repeatedly, almost on a daily basis (1371, my translation). Similarly, other aspects of bodily life, which are deemed extreme in times of peace, become part of everyday life for those living on the frontline:

At first we spoke about our mouths being smelly because we could not brush our teeth. Then, after a time, such a notion never occurred to us; we were not even aware of it, not even of the lack of washing up. With eighty of us in the cellar, there was not even enough water for us to drink, and, after a couple of days, our demand for water to wash up also ceased. (Polcz 100)

Among others, Edit Zsadnyi also points out the similarity between Polczs One Woman in the War and Imre Kertszs Fatelessness [Sorstalansg, 1975] with respect to the dispassionate mode of storytelling, in which the narrators function only as chroniclers when they register the events happening to them (more precisely, to their body) and in their immediate surroundings (380). According to Zsadnyi, in this mode of body-talk the narrator does not look beyond the description of the functions of his and other peoples bodies, and as such, he discards [...] the metaphor as the traditional modality of modernist fiction (374, my translation). I maintain that this non-metaphoric description of events that features both One Woman in the War and Fatelessness is just as metaphoric textual as what Zsadnyi calls the traditional modality of modernist fiction, since both kinds of narrative are conscious methods and strategies of storytelling Zsadnyi herself also asserts that the actual wounds, the bodily experiences are ultimately inaccessible by linguistic means (382). Polcz is well aware of this inaccessibility when her narrator expresses the failure of both memory and words. As early as in the first chapter, she sets her mode of remembering, when she mingles her memories with her failure to remember the events correctly after her wedding ceremony:

Our new apartment, on the mezzanine of a villa, faced my parents one-family dwelling and garden. We simply walked across the narrow, cobblestone street that ran into the hills. Maybe I would have liked [my husband] to carry me over in his arms. Or did he, only I no longer remember? How did we enter? What did he say? Did he undress me or did I undress myself? I cant conjure up anything. I simply dont have any recollection of that first night. (16-17)

Similarly, her memory also fails when she tries to relate the events on the front:

As for what happened to Mami and the other women during this time? This episode took place at the beginning. Mina had long hair; a soldier wound it around his hand and dragged her that way. Mina howled and shouted my name. I went to her. Help me! she begged. I said to her softly, Just go. She did; that is, they carried her away. Did this occur before they took me away, or on only one night or evening, or did it happen again or for the first time then? (91)

These lapses of memory are proof that an individuals life narrative cannot be written, only rewritten (or more precisely, constructed), so it is pointless to set up a dichotomy between the two kinds of (metaphoric) modality from the point of view of referentiality. Nevertheless, something is still at stake in the narrative: as Polcz emphasizes in the motto, she has to tell us how things were, because she must tell us some time (my emphasis). Although her whole text is an apparent antithesis to this motto, since she is unable to tell how things were, the need to tell is imperative anyway. What is it then that gets told? If memory fails either because it is in the nature of memory to fail to be authentic to life events, or because of the narrators conscious effort to avoid talking about certain things , so if autobiography is also fictioneering, what is the point in the story? These questions may be approached from two angels, which are nevertheless interrelated. One of them refers to the testimonial role that Polczs text has been attributed. As Balassa and Varga emphasize, the time of the books publication in 1991 is almost biblical, since it corresponds to the Soviet troops leaving Hungary at the time of the disintegration of the state socialist regime (861). Thus, in a way, Polczs book is a testimony to the deeds the Russian soldiers did during the war, especially concerning the violation of women, which was not publically discussed until One Woman in the War came out, as a result of the individual and social shame attached to these series of war rapes. So there is also an analogy here between the individuals body and Hungarys body, which as a whole was also raped by the Russian troops. On the basis of this analogy, the book could easily be read as the narrative of the trauma of the bodys violation both the individuals and the nations. On this interpretive level, then, Polczs book could be seen as what Szabolcs Virgh calls the social-collective way of sharing traumatic events in a narrative form, which is traditionally regarded by psychoanalysis as an adequate channel for dealing with events that have traumatized the subject (Virgh 169170). The confessional-testimonial function of the novel is thus fulfilled on a social-collective level by Polczs act of breaking the silence that surrounds war rape (both in the literal and
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metaphorical sense of the word), and in this respect her narrative is heavily gendered in that it could not be told by a man in the same way. Hence the emphasis on the woman in the title (which actually refers to a married woman in the original Hungarian, putting even more emphasis on gender relations), which juxtaposes the hardships of married life and war by narrating them in one and the same story from a female point of view. For me, however, there is an even more important concern, because I find that Polczs insistence on not-remembering which becomes one of the key elements in the books narrative strategy is strongly linked to not putting the blame on the perpetrators for doing what they have done, in spite of the horrors that she had to endure. In this respect, it is interesting to see that while the Russian soldiers are given absolution for what they did, the husband is not, or at least not in the same way, in spite of the fact that the 19-year-old Polcz, who married him in 1944, was so much in love with him that at times she felt she would die without him.

I had seen those posters in Budapest showing a Soviet soldier ripping a crucifix from a womans neck. I heard they ravished women. I also read leaflets reporting the Russians did this and that. I didnt believe any of it; it was all German propaganda, I thought. I found it unimaginable that they would knock women down, that they would break their backs, and commit other horrors. Then I learned how their backs were broken. Very simply, unintentionally. (77, my emphasis)

When [my husband] died, his family and Mamika surrounded me as if I were still his wife. Then I learned he had written his last poem to me. But late, in vain. He had ceased to exist within me; he had sunk so deep that his death did not change this situation. I did not understand what became of our great love. Twenty years later, I dreamt he was coming and wanted to take me with him. I protested [...] I could not go and did not want to. [...] We finally scuffled. Then at this moment something within me split apart as when the ice cracks and water breaks free. (150, my emphasis)

Therefore, not-remembering how things were does not mean forgetting, but not keeping the wound open it is an act of forgiving, which is necessary for Polczs narrator (just like for Gyuri Kves in Fatelessness) to be able to move on and live her life. For me, One Woman in the War is an actualization of what can be called the ethics of vulnerability, following Judith Butlers Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Butler calls it ethics because it is linked to the responsibility for oneself that is inevitably there in ones being vulnerable to the address and actions of the Other, which in turn means that my very formation implicates the Other in me (84). As a result, no ones story is full in and of itself: everyone is ultimately unknowable,
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since everyone is inevitably implicated in others stories. This, however, does not lead to a freedom from responsibility; on the contrary: to take responsibility for oneself is to avow the limits of any self-understanding and to establish this limit not only as a condition for the subject, but as the predicament of the human community itself (83). I find that Polczs book is in line with this ethics in that it exposes the narrators vulnerability to the world at the basic level of the body. What Gilbert and Vasvri thus condemn as lack of agency is actually the acknowledgement of not only the limits of knowability as far as the subject and her story go, but also the need to forgive. Forgiveness, however, is effective only in a speech act, in a discourse that enables the individual and/or the community to see the mutual implication of the victims and the perpetrators in each others stories. I think that, similarly to Kertszs novel (Zsadnyi 373), One Woman in the War offers such an autobiographical discourse which does not seek teleological meaning in what happened but gives a narrative space for asking questions which may never be answered.

Works Cited

Balassa Pter and Lajos Mrton Varga. Az let frtelme s szpsge: Polcz Alaine: Asszony a fronton. [The Horror and Beauty of Life: Alaine Polcz, One Woman in the War.] Jelenkor, 34.10 (October 1991): 859-861. Burger Barna. Fej vagy rs: 92 magyar r portrja. [Heads or Tails: The Portraits of 92 Hungarian Writers.] Budapest: PrintXBudavr, 2005. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Gilbert Edit. Polcz Alaine nletrajzok hrom kereszttel. [Alaine Polcz Autobiographies with Three Crosses.] Mt, 2007.4: 74-77. Polcz Alaine. One Woman in the War. [Asszony a fronton.] 1991. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by Albert Tezla. Budapest, New York: CEU Press, 2002. Radnti Sndor. A nagy sikoly. [The Big Scream.] Holmi, 3.10 (October 1991): 13691372. Vasvri, Louise O. Writing the Fragmented (Cultural) Body in Alaine Polczs Asszony a fronton (A Woman on the Front). Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies. Ed. Louise O. Vasvri and Steven Ttsy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2011, 72-88. Virgh Szabolcs. Trauma s trtnelem tallkozsa: Emlkezet, reprezentci, rtus. [When Trauma Meets History: Memory, Representation, Rite.] BUKSZ, 2011: 161-170. Websters New World Dictionary. 3rd College Edition. New York: Prentice Hall, 1991. Zsadnyi Edit. Vrz sebek s vrz sebek: az abjekt mint testbeszd Kertsz Imre Sorstalansg s Polcz Alaine Asszony a fronton cm mvben. [Bleeding Wounds and Bleeding Wounds: The Abject as Body-talk in Imre Kertszs Fatelessness and Alaine Polczs One Woman in the War.] Literatra, 36.4 (2010): 367-385.