An Intimate “Rhetoric of Empire”: Sándor Márai’s Embers (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
In a brief vignette in Sándor Márai’s Embers [A gyertyák csonkig égnek], the narrator recalls his childhood walks in the Schönbrunn. On one of these occasions, a woman with a white parasol hurries by. "The Empress," says the boy's chaplain. The boy responds that she looks like his mom. Such is the intimate familiarity the story projects between the narrator's life and the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. This dreamlike equivalence between the personal and cultural reimagines the bygone empire less as a spatial colony, and more as a symbolic origin of cultural pluralism and sanity. It is against this imaginary symbolic origin that the story unfolds its morose reflections on personal and historical destiny. Such mythified premises (the story centers on an aging aristocrat still living in a Transylvanian castle as the second world war erupts) allow, however, for a narrative voice that eloquently intertwines existential and epochal reflection. These contradictory tensions mark the author’s own life—a Hungarian-Saxon Germanophile, born in 1900 in a bourgeois family of aristocratic origins, he died in California, a censored dissident against both Naziism and Soviet Communism, in the epochal year 1989. Márai’s work thus turns on its head any easy association between literary and political form. This paper asks what happens to these tensions between personal and historical time when they become problems immanent to the novel’s generic and rhetorical form.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Attila is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation traces the emergence of phenomenology and theories of mind in nineteenth-century English poetry, aesthetics and philosophy. His article on Gerard Manley Hopkins, entitled "The Grammar of Instress," is forthcoming from New Literary History.