The Chronicle of Cultural Hybridity The Prose Works of Pál Böndör

Abstract

The paper deals with the position of Pál Böndör’s prose works within his oeuvre. Author and critics likewise claim that his three novels are of inferior value compared to the poet’s lyrical works, and they fall far below the aesthetical level of his lyric poetry that has been written since the 1960s. We have to examine the contextual peculiarities and the autobiographic traces of the novels, the relationship with the motifs, poetics and attitude of the poet’s lyrical works. Intertextuality and intermediality also has to be taken into consideration in order to re-evaluate the novels Ebihalak (1987), A holdfény árnyékában (2011) and Bender & Tsa. (2014). The paper is divided into four chapters. The first one sums up the main points made by reviewing critics, and attempts to show the problems with earlier interpretations. A contextual approach is adopted in the following ones, one novel dealt with in each of them. The most significant characteristics of Böndör’s prose works are analyzed: autopoetical writing and the representation of real and fictional space of cultural hibridity.