Places of Absence

Cosmopolitan Agencies in the Fictional Budapest of Post-1989 British Novels

Abstract

British novels set in East-Central Europe during the Cold War and the 1990s represent cosmopolitan communities of people from different traditions, nations, and identities in a fairly closed world where cosmopolitanism remains either a wishful memory or a desire for a more open-minded future. The image of the intercultural community in these novels fails to live up to the official propaganda of proletarian internationalism as well as that of pre-war capitalist urban cosmopolitanism. In both respects, the literary images reveal a sad lack of real cosmopolitan spaces, either because the suggested community of people is based on demagogic lies, or because the bustling cosmopolitan metropolises had been dilapidated and homogenised by socialist regimes.

After the Fall of the Wall, Second Bloc metropolises quickly shifted from Communist internationality towards exotic tourist destinations for Westerners in the 1990s, which entailed new types of cosmopolitan experiences. British novels about Budapest are engaged with the parallel spatial and chronological realities of the ex-Second Bloc, which is still in the process of making sense of the past. Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog (1992) depicts socialist spaces in a metonymic relationship with their own past. Malcolm Bradbury’s Doctor Criminale (1992) portrays the immediate aftermath of 1989, and displays a similar parallel consciousness constituted in a Budapest that is always aware of its own absences. Therefore, Hungarians in Bradbury’s work often feel a deep Lacanian desire for the presence of an unknown West. In what Anthony Appiah designates as partial cosmopolitanism, local characters also give their specific answers to such global narratives. As both Fischer’s and Bradbury’s novels suggest, cosmopolitan agency often appears in the textual Budapest as an absence of the multicultural metropolis of the past or a fantasy.