Reading the Sensory Trajectory of Unmoored Existence and the Poetic Encoding of Wounds in Zsuzsa Bánk’s Der Schwimmer (2002)

Abstract

Zsuzsa Bánk’s novelDer Schwimmer [The Swimmer] (2002) belongs to what has been called an ‘Eastern Turn’ or ‘Eastern expansion’ in German-language literature.¹ These terms describe a new wave of writing by first- or second-generation migrants from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia. Writers such as Herta Müller, Richard Wagner, Libuše Moníková, Carmen-Francesca Banciu, Terézia Mora, Irena Brežná and Saša Stanišić have established a distinct position for themselves among contemporary German-language literatures just like the writers belonging to the ‘Turkish Turn’ before them.² Similar to other waves of transnational writing, their literature is a dynamic site at which a multitude of subject matters (such as migration, liminality, arrival, belonging and memory) intersect and are negotiated in a variety of contexts.³ Their texts provide excellent accounts of the socio-political situation of contemporary Europe and shed light on lesser-known aspects of major events from eastern and central corners of the continent. Der Schwimmer, for instance, alludes to Bánk’s family history of displacement from Hungary to Germany after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. This widely acclaimed debut novel is a semi-fictional reimagining of individual suffering against the backdrop of the oppressive climate of Eastern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s.⁴ Intimately entangled in such historical events, works belonging to the ‘Eastern Turn’ also capture the diversity of migratory movements – spurred by events such as war, genocide, shifting borders, authoritarian repression and economic degradation – across the geographical space of the European continent, and thus also involve the aesthetic reproduction of liminality. They simultaneously unfold at the intersection of several places, cultures and languages.

As opposed to the majority of transnational writings from the ‘Eastern Turn’, which mainly revolve around characters who leave their communist homelands and attempt to ‘arrive’ at a foreign destination, Bánk foregrounds the fate of individuals who are left behind. Der Schwimmer compares their anguish of abandonment with the suffering of migrants. The novel tells us that one day in 1956, after the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising, a woman named Katalin deserts her children, Kata and Isti, and her husband, Kálmán, and joins the mass exodus of Hungarian refugees fleeing to the West. Whilst a state of stultifying immobility gradually grips the country in the wake of the crushed revolt, the abandoned family is plunged into an existential crisis following the loss of its centre. Embittered by Katalin’s abrupt departure, her husband adopts a nomadic existence, moving his young children from one relative to another, never allowing them to find a new locus of stability. In this way, the personal tragedy of a vagabond family is enmeshed in one of twentieth-century Europe’s collective traumas. Told in retrospect from the point of view of the elder child, Kata, the story juxtaposes the family’s itinerant existence within the borders of Hungary with glimpses of Katalin’s and her friend Vali’s voluntary flight, ‘die aus dem trüben kommunistischen Osten ins Gelobte Land des kapitalistischen Westens führt’ [that takes her from desolate communist East to the promised land of the capitalist West].⁵ However, their vision of building a better life elsewhere translates into another brand of precarious displacement, and Katalin’s and Vali’s lives become entwined with those of other refugees scarred by the trials of dislocation. The primary objective of this article is to meditate on what I call the ‘unmoored’ existence of these characters. With this term, I allude to their distinct migrant experiences defined by disorientation, uprootedness and dislocation.

In Der Schwimmer, characters are forced to confront various extreme experiences such as the consistent agony of abandonment, dislocation/exile and a precarious life in limbo, as well as experiences of marginalization and heartbreak that hamper their efforts to make sense of the world.⁶ In my discussion, I draw on psychological perspectives that understand trauma as an event of such enormity that it cannot generally be integrated into the self-narrative at the time of its occurrence. Writing in the journal Psychological Review in 1894, the American psychologist William James associated trauma with the evocative image of a ‘thorn in the spirit’ and thus understood it as ‘a foreign object that becomes lodged in the psyche’.⁷ Since the adequate processing of traumatic memory is effectively circumvented, it returns to haunt the victim and profoundly impacts their business of living in the present.⁸ The leading Trauma Studies scholar Cathy Caruth sees trauma as a ‘literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits’.⁹ Referring to Caruth, Lyn Marven locates trauma in the state of being overwhelmed and in survival rather than in the event itself.¹⁰ In Der Schwimmer, despite their vastly different circumstances, each protagonist must confront such traumatic memories, which impact their ability to navigate the present and undermine the prospects of an untroubled future. The vehemence of these memories not only pervades their psychological fabric, but also determines the way in which they interact with the outer world.

Influential voices in literary trauma studies have argued that such invisible wounds are rendered unnarratable because their remembrance defies the signification techniques of ordinary language.¹¹ Roger Luckhurst goes as far as describing trauma as ‘anti-narrative’.¹² In this context, literary texts like Der Schwimmer often reveal and deal with the ‘essential paradox’ that predominantly characterizes the aesthetic representation of a traumatic event.¹³ This paradox lies in ‘the possibility of verbalizing the unspeakable, narrating the unnarratable, and making sense of the incomprehensible’.¹⁴ In my close reading of Bánk’s novel, I argue that the linguistic encryption of sense perceptions in such instances of traumatic loss functions as an effective method for registering the subtleties of the associated memories, emotions and reactions. The aesthetic scheme of sensory tropes integrated into the text thus provides the reader with an insight into the characters’ inner, often wounded and ‘unmoored’ beings. The interface between their inner and outer realities, mediated through sensory encounters, thus offers the writer a creative space to invent an appropriate poetic language in order to articulate subject-specific tragedy.¹⁵

The novel is written in a highly vivid manner with sensory details related to vision, audition, touch, olfaction and gustation, and therefore brings the characters and their worlds to life. Whereas an attempt to understand sensory elements within literary discourse might involve looking into their origin in outside reality, Hans J. Rindisbacher argues that their investigation ‘on the level of plot, description, and literary context’ is essential.¹⁶ One of the primary challenges associated with representing sensory experiences is their purely ephemeral nature, divested of any perceptible continuum. Rindisbacher argues that only language has the potential to bestow a communicable structure upon sensory experience by complementing it with the concepts of past, present and future and with specific connotative and emotive spheres of subjects’ life narratives.¹⁷ With this in mind, the present article will examine how Bánk aestheticizes sensory representations as ‘constructs of corporeal, emotional, and textual elements’ and creates an intelligible, meaningful and multisensory literary cosmos.¹⁸ In particular, I will explore how subject-specific sensory encounters in the novel allow the reader to delve beneath the exterior of individual characters in order to register their reactions to the overwhelming circumstances of their lives.

With this focus on sensory tropes, I add a new dimension to scholarship on Bánk’s novel, which has tended to read such works primarily as repositories of socio-political information. Péter Nádas conceives the perpetual flight and the desolate search for a home at the novel’s centre as a ‘Metapher der individuellen Unbehaustheit’ [metaphor for individual homelessness].¹⁹ Nádas argues that this literary account of nomadic individuals allows us a glimpse into ‘das Bewusstsein von Millionen von Flüchtlingen und Emigranten’ [the consciousness of millions of refugees and emigrants].²⁰ In a similar vein, Brigid Haines contends that Bánk’s novel captures ‘the turbulence, trauma and migrations’ of the twentieth century and reproduces the shifting borders of the European continent that leave enduring marks in the individuals’ psyches.²¹ Highlighting the themes of diaspora and nomadism, Lene Rock elaborates on the implications of heroic endurance, hope and courage for the characters in the face of overwhelming circumstances.²² In aesthetic terms, critics have mainly examined the relationship between themes of migration, memory and trauma and the inconsolable mood of the literary universe of Der Schwimmer. While Christof Hamann explores how the leitmotif of waiting shapes the protagonists’ mobile worlds, Eszter Pabis investigates the correlation between migration, memory (of individual and collective trauma) and aesthetics through the lens of spatio-temporal dynamics in the text.²³ Contributing to this diversity of research, Wolfgang Höbel and René Kegelmann recognize Der Schwimmer as ‘ein Puzzlespiel aus Erinnerungsscherben, Erinnerungsbruchstücke, Erinnerungsverknüpfungen’ [a jigsaw puzzle of memory shards, memory fragments and memory-nexuses].²⁴ They examine how several layers of memory shape the novel both structurally and thematically, as past experiences influence the subjects’ itinerant lives.

This article further argues that sensory tropes are equally significant within the narrative economy. As the peripatetic characters in Der Schwimmer pursue or are deprived of a sense of home, belonging or identity, their sensory awareness of the immediate world can be explained by what David Howes calls the dyad of ‘emplacement’ and ‘displacement’.²⁵ For Howes, the concept of a familiar environment inherent to the idea of ‘emplacement’ reflects a clear sense of identity and belonging in relation to a place (be it a mental construct or a material space) and other individuals. In this way, the term is consistent with ‘the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment’.²⁶ Under certain circumstances, for example, after separation from loved ones or dislocation from the homeland, places and individuals that are indispensable for a stable existence only survive as memories. Their absence in the subject’s physical reality compounds the pain of ‘displacement’, which Howes defines as ‘the feeling that one is homeless, disconnected from one’s physical and social environment’.²⁷ In my reading of Der Schwimmer, I show how a heightened realization of ‘displacement’ in the subject can be induced by revisiting mnemonic sensescapes of homeland or the proximity of a loved one, by recalling the sensory immediacy of a previous life or by psychic encounters with sensory fragments from the past. I argue that melancholic attachment to sights, smells, tastes, sounds and haptic contacts associated with the past during events of perpetual displacement (for instance) is highly likely to translate into trauma. This jeopardizes the characters’ capacities to navigate their new worlds, confining them to a liminal state. While scholars such as Noorman Abdullah have considered the role that sensory memories play in marking ‘multiple belongings and embodied connections’ of a positive kind, in my reading of Bánk’s novel I will show that sensory elements convey various kinds of embodied connection, both positive and negative, as well as multiple senses of belonging, non-belonging and displacement.²⁸ The following close readings focus on how Bánk uses poetic language to foreground the sensory impressions of the characters. Every section offers a detailed analysis of different sensory registers as they structure the text on the level of language, plot and context within the work’s overall connotative scheme.

Looking into the abyss of despondency

Der Schwimmer begins with a political trauma: the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, ‘eine entsetzliche Katastrophe’ [a dreadful catastrophe], as the author put it in an interview with Katharina Narbutovic.²⁹ The novel ends with another catastrophe after the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968: the self-immolation of student Jan Pálach at a protest in January 1969. Within this temporal horizon of twelve years, the reader is led by the homodiegetic narrator, Kata, who recuperates her childhood memories from the vantage point of the (diegetic) present in January 1969. The analepsis begins shortly after the unexpected departure of her mother, Katalin, in the first chapter titled ‘Wir’ [‘We’] and ends in the last chapter named ‘Kata’, which is told in the narrative present. In this sense, the entire narrative consists of one large analepsis. As the narrating-I harks back to the sensory perceptions and mental state of the experiencing-I, a dialogue between two narrative temporalities takes place, thereby textualizing the workings of individual memory. This dialogue between the past and the present carves out the mnemonic dynamics or what Michael Basseler and Dorothee Birke call the ‘Erinnerungshaftigkeit’ [memory design] of the text.³⁰

On account of her naïve and uninformed perspective, the child-narrator is unable to comprehend and articulate the actual reason for her mother’s flight. In the absence of a straightforward commentary, the narrative labour is performed by the sensory tropes in the novel. For instance, Kata’s narration does not explicitly dissect the political climate associated with the unrelenting grip of Soviet tyranny in communist Hungary during the 1950s and 1960s, contexts which lie beyond the scope of this article. However, the extent to which she ‘senses’ the ubiquitous mood of repression and inertia in her country is evoked through the image of flies stuck to a gluey strip, for example: ‘Von der Lampe über mir hing ein Klebestreifen, der schwarz von Fliegen war. Ich fragte mich, wie sie starben, diese Fliegen, an was. Konnte man sterben, weil man festklebte?’ [‘A gluey strip, black with flies, hung from the lamp overhead. I wondered how they died, those flies, from what. Could you die because you were stuck to something?’].³¹ The tactile sensations associated with the verb festkleben [to stick to something firmly] connote entrapment, while the grim imagery of dead flies signifies decay. Both conjure up a sense of the political atmosphere that might have propelled her mother and other refugees to escape to the West. In other words, the tactile dimensions of this imagery allegorically evoke the political and social stagnation suffered by Hungarian citizens on a collective level.³²

As the child narrator continues her search for answers, this image of trapped flies is complemented by other mnemonic cues. For example, she harks back to her mother’s discontent towards their communist Heimat [homeland]: ‘Meine Mutter haßte unser Dorf. Sie sagte, Kinder sterben hier, weil sie in Jauchegruben fallen. Sie ersticken. Wo gibt es das sonst?’ (S, 9) [‘My mother hated our village. She said the children died there because they fell into cesspools and suffocated. Where else did that happen?’ (Sw, 3)]. Here again, the strategic use of tactile force at the centre of the image of children suffocating in a cesspool brings into sharp relief the varying semantic strands of suffocation, immobility and stagnation intrinsic to the claustrophobic space of communist states behind the Iron Curtain. Such sensual imagery, coupled with Kata’s memory of her mother’s reaction to their shared surroundings, insinuates probable reasons as to why Katalin decided to venture into freedom or seek new possibilities of ‘emplacement’ abroad. Her departure, however, turns her family’s life upside down, driving them into an ‘unmoored’ existence defined by disorientation and displacement. Kata’s memory of her departure is where the narrative begins as she seeks to use memory work to take control of the disorder and find a sense of equilibrium.

Starting off with a self-reflexive remark about the elusive nature of her memory, the narrator recounts her struggle to preserve the ‘visual’ presence of her mother in her surroundings, even though she has disappeared from the family’s physical reality. The narrating-I recalls ‘looking’ at her mother’s photograph for hours:

Ich hatte wenige Erinnerungen an meine Mutter. Im Grunde kannte ich sie nur von Fotos, die mein Vater in einem kleinen Kasten aufbewahrte. Schwarzweißbilder waren es, mit dickem weißen Rand. Meine Mutter beim Tanz. Meine Mutter mit geflochtenen Zöpfen. Meine Mutter barfüßig. […] Ich schaute mir die Bilder häufig an. Es gab Zeiten, in denen ich nichts anderes tat. (S, 7, italics added)

[I had few memories of my mother. Actually, I knew her only from the photographs my father kept in a little box. Black-and-white pictures with a wide white margin. My mother dancing. My mother with braids. My mother barefoot. […] I looked at the pictures often. There were times when I did nothing else. (Sw, 1, italics added)]

The narrator fears that the memories of her mother would gradually fade away, thereby compounding her loss. The photographs ultimately trigger a swirl of auditory and olfactory impressions from life before Katalin’s departure: her father’s snoring; her mother’s restless breathing; Isti’s talking in his sleep; the smell of eau-de-Cologne on Easter Sundays (S, 11–12). Coupled with the fear of losing these fragmented and scarce memories of the home that she shared with her mother, the seemingly neutral sensory act of ‘looking’ at Katalin’s photographs in her absence acquires a semantic tenor of despair and inconsolable loss. Although the experiencing-I is aware that these sensory ‘Bruchstücke’ [fragments] in her memory are unable to compensate for the reality of her mother’s absence, this fundamental ‘displacement’, to refer back to Howes, in the familial trajectory of her home evades her comprehension. Furthermore, Kata recalls the past with ‘the body, knowledge and emotion’ that she has in the present.³³ In other words, her positive reminiscences are clouded by a sense of emptiness and alienation owing to her overriding feelings of abandonment and loss in the present.

We find another example when the children are taken in by Kálmán’s aunt, Manci, not long after their mother’s departure. The sensory memory of Katalin’s voice and face invades Kata’s dreams unexpectedly: ‘Nachts wachte ich auf. Ich hatte die Stimme meiner Mutter gehört, ihr Gesicht gesehen und lief zur Tür, die Manci meiner Mutter soeben geöffnet hatte’ (S, 17) [‘I woke up during the night. I had heard my mother’s voice, had seen her face, and I ran to the door Manci had just opened for her’ (Sw, 11)]. Since her present is shaped by the unsettling knowledge of her mother’s absence, waking up only exposes the illusory nature of these sensory memories and their temporary ‘emplacement’ in the past, emphasizing their inherent poignancy. On this account, the act of ‘looking’ at the photographs of her mother implies a longing for the lost atmosphere of Kata’s childhood, for a ‘home’ that has ceased to exist. Moreover, the sensory encounter with the photographs of her mother discloses Kata’s dumbfounded curiosity about the reason for her leaving without even saying goodbye. The narrator wonders:

Meine Mutter hatte sich damals nicht von uns verabschiedet. Sie war zum Bahnhof gelaufen, wie an vielen anderen Tagen auch. […] Meine Mutter muß lange gewartet haben. Sie hatte genügend Zeit, es sich anders zu überlegen. Um zurückzukommen. Um uns Auf Wiedersehen zu sagen. Um uns noch einmal anzuschauen. (S, 8)

[My mother didn’t say goodbye to us that day. She went to the train station, just as she had done on many other days. […] My mother must have waited a very long time for it; she must have had enough time to change her mind. To come back. To say goodbye to us. To look at us once more. (Sw, 3)]

In comparison to Kata’s wistful action of looking at her mother’s pictures, Katalin’s visual presence in these images elicits a more visceral reaction from her father, Kálmán:

Mein Vater gab dieses Bild nicht aus seinen Händen. Er lag damit auf der Küchenbank, starrte zur Decke und rauchte. Nicht einmal den Hund hörte er dann, der laut vor ihm bellte. Meinen Bruder Isti und mich schaute er an, als seien wir Fremde. Wir nannten es tauchen. (S, 7–8, italics added)

[My father wouldn’t part with this picture. He would lie on the kitchen bench holding it, staring up at the ceiling and smoking. At times like this he wouldn’t even hear the noisy barking of the dog at his side. He would look at my brother Isti and me as if we were strangers. We called it diving. (Sw, 2, italics added)]

The verb starren [stare] implies shock and traumatic stupefaction in this specific context. Interestingly, the semantic value attached to linguistically related terms such as Erstarrung [numbness or paralysis] and erstarrt [petrified, paralysed, stiff/numb, congealed, ossified] indicates the strategic deployment of a chosen connotative realm by the author, one which hints at the perceiving subject’s shock-induced numbness. Kálmán lies stunned in the face of unanticipated dejection, and dwells in a liminal space between the past and the present. As a consequence of the suddenly altered trajectory of his life, Kálmán’s customary world-view has shattered and he has become an ‘unmoored’ presence in the narrative universe. Memories of abandonment accompanied by the emotions of hurt and sorrow dominate his current reality, plunging him into a trance-like state of immobility. As he withdraws from external reality and channels his senses into his inner world in an act of ‘tauchen’, a migration or ‘displacement’ from physical reality into the darker recesses of his psyche takes place. On the one hand, the act of schauen [look] in Kata’s case is characterized by an intersubjective component and intimates a search for the mother accompanied by a hope of her return as implied in the dream sequence. Starren in Kálmán’s case, on the other hand, appears to be a solipsistic act, devoid of any hope or anticipation and directed towards nothingness. The sensory verbs schauen and starren are thus used on the narrative level to produce a nuanced depiction of the characters’ distinct responses to a profound loss in their lives.

A similar act of ‘looking/staring’ suggests the damage done to Isti’s psyche, when their grandmother conveys the brutal truth that their mother has no intention of returning to them. As he gradually yields to trauma in the face of this fundamental ‘displacement’ from the familiar world of before, Isti also becomes closed to the world around him, like his father. In a gesture of resignation, he retreats into his inner self:

Isti war es jetzt gleichgültig, was geschah, mit uns, mit ihm, mit mir. […] Er saß, ohne etwas zu tun, ohne etwas zu sagen, mit gesenktem Kinn, den Blick auf den Boden geheftet, auf die Dielen aus Holz, als könne er darin etwas sehen, was anderen verborgen war […]. (S, 185, italics added)

[[Isti] no longer cared what happened to us, to him, to me. […] He sat there doing nothing, his chin sunk on his chest, his eyes glued to the wooden floorboards as if he could see something there that was concealed from the rest of us […]. (Sw, 177–78, italics added)]

Here as well, the figure of speech ‘den Blick auf etwas/jemanden heften’ [to fixate one’s gaze on someone/something, to rivet] is characterized by blunt numbness and traumatic stupor analogous to the sense of shock associated with the sensory verb starren. Upon examining the idiom, it becomes evident that the verb heften [glue, fix, stitch or fixate] suggests a haptic connection between the perceiving subject and the perceived object in a figurative sense. At the moment when the final hope of reuniting with his mother has been dashed, the familiar order of the world has been ultimately torn asunder for Isti, throwing him into a chaos that overpowers him. Seeking a tactile connection to a single inconsequential object, in this case, the floor, serves as a temporary defence mechanism for the destabilized subject and a pretext for evading the reality of pain. Hence, attributing special significance to the German variations of the sensory verb ‘to look’ as aesthetic devices allows us to decode characters’ distinct responses to memories of a traumatic event, sometimes deemed to be ‘unnarratable, unspeakable and incomprehensible’.³⁴ These examples show that certain sensory encounters trigger the protagonists’ traumatic memories, which in turn casts them into liminal spaces.

The poetic diction of suffering: Exploring characters’ embodied connections with water

Rendered deranged by Katalin’s betrayal, Kálmán embraces a peripatetic life, dragging his children from one relative to another. Although the siblings hold on to the hope of receiving tenderness and love from others, their hosts seldom welcome their presence, and indeed very often perceive them as a burden. Kata, the astute observer of her surroundings, gathers affective cues concerning her relatives’ attitude towards them: ‘Es kamen Sommer, in denen wir jede Woche unsere Sachen packten, weil man uns nicht mehr wollte, weil wir lästig, zu laut, zu leise, zu wenig oder zu viel waren’ (S, 102) [‘There were summers when we packed our belongings every week because we were not wanted any more, because we were a bother, too noisy or too quiet, too few or too many’ (Sw, 95)].

That the narrator and her little brother’s world has been impoverished by their mother’s absence and the accompanying void of security, warmth and stability is clearly perceptible during one episode at their grandmother’s house. When Kata sits on a wet bench on a cold day, her grandmother does not seem concerned about her well-being and fails to intervene:

Ich lief zu meiner Großmutter und blieb so lange bei ihr, bis ich anfing, die anderen zu vermissen. Obwohl es zu kalt war, ließ sie mich im Hof sitzen, auf einer Bank, die naß war vom letzten Regen. Ich wischte mit den Fingern übers Wasser, wartete auf den nächsten Regen, der meinen Mantel, meine Strümpfe, meine Stiefel durchweichte, und ich wünschte, er könnte mich genauso durchweichen, dieser Regen, vielleicht auflösen, und ich, ich könnte mit dem Wasser weggleiten – irgendwohin. (S, 13, italics added)

[I went to my grandmother’s and stayed with her till I began to miss the others. Even though it was cold, she allowed me to sit in the yard, on a bench wet from the last rain. I slid my fingers over the wetness and waited for the next downpour, which soaked my coat, my stockings, and my boots. I wished it would soak through me too, this rain, maybe make me dissolve, so I could glide away with the water to somewhere, anywhere. (Sw, 7, italics added)]

The specific quality of the narrator’s haptic encounter with the water becomes clear in the use of the adjectival element ‘naß’ embedded in this literary passage. The semantic reading of this sensuous experience from the narrator’s perspective – being left in the rainwater in cold weather – summons up not only a corporeal sensation of being overwhelmed, but also a gloomy sense of mental discomfort. Additionally, on the symbolic level, contrary to the positive associations rooted in the ‘warmth’ of home, belonging and love, qualities of coldness and wetness inherent to the sensory atmosphere of this literary scene invoke a plaintive mood and the misery of being stranded in a destitute space for the narrator. Kata is now stripped of all prospects of homecoming and possibilities of ‘emplacement’. Her wish to dissolve in the water and lose herself in the process stems from her desperation to escape her earthly sorrows for a while. Her tactile proximity to the wet surface of the bench and the cold weather echoes her intense encounter with ‘Heimatlosigkeit’ [homelessness] and the predicament of being deserted by loved ones. Kata’s pain at being abandoned by her mother is aggravated when she realizes that her grandmother is indifferent towards her. She ponders over the ‘migration’ of her life from a state of belonging to non-belonging, from the warmth of a safe home to the coldness of suffering, from orientation to disorientation. As a consequence of betrayal and disappointment in the world of adults, she craves a metaphorical union with the water in order to escape her suffering: a haptic interaction with the water on a transcendental level.

The very title Der Schwimmer heralds the significance of water to the novel’s symbolic universe and aesthetic organisation. Several episodes highlight the abandoned family’s relationship with water, a relationship which is implied multiple times by virtue of subjects’ sensory perceptions. For instance, once they start living in their relatives’ home by a lake (probably Lake Balaton), their father resolves to teach Kata and Isti to swim. These lessons are rare occasions when he is able to overcome his despair and share some joy with his children:

Mein Vater war zwei Stöße geschwommen, wir hatten ihm zugeschaut und es dann selbst versucht, er war untergetaucht, wir waren ihm kopfüber gefolgt […]. Wir hatten uns an den Händen gefaßt und die Luft so lange angehalten, daß selbst mein Vater darüber staunte, wie lange wir ohne Luft unter Wasser sein konnten. (S, 81)

[My father would swim two strokes; we would watch him and then try it ourselves; he dived into the water; we followed him headfirst […]. We grabbed each other’s hands and held our breath until even my father was amazed how long we could stay down there. (Sw, 75)]

The use of the verb staunen indicates that the children are Kálmán’s centre of attention during their swimming ventures and the source of positive emotions. This attention is a rarity in this family haunted by the spectres of loss, abandonment and neglect. Thus, the tactile interaction with water during the act of swimming is marked by the utopian vision of family solidarity.³⁵ These moments of comforting proximity are only possible because, functioning as a fragile foundation of temporary ‘emplacement’, the lake offers them a counter-world to a reality burdened by heartaches. As Rock argues, longing for the lake results in ‘the dissolution of differences and violence’ among them and serves as an impetus for the family’s union (albeit a temporary one).³⁶ Rock observes that the children’s incessant quarrels turn into a truce around the lake and the family’s arguments become trivial, for instance about the colour of water (S, 63). As a result, the place becomes ‘a source of amicable connection’.³⁷

However, this image of familial solidarity vanishes as soon as Kálmán, Kata and Isti emerge from the lake (or are away from its proximity) and have to confront external reality. In this reality, far from reassuring his children in the wake of their mother’s disappearance, the father only exacerbates their sense of indebtedness and dependence. He is at times indifferent and oppressive, and at other times violent, making it impossible for Kata and Isti to form a lasting bond of attachment with him.³⁸ On a train while on their way to the northernmost part of the country to stay at the home of Kálmán’s mother (another temporary station in their peripatetic lives), Kata ponders the volatility of their connection with their father: ‘jedesmal wenn der Zug bremste, und ich hatte das Gefühl, Isti und ich, wir waren bloß zwei Zusätze, die an ihm, an seinem Leben klebten und die er nicht mehr loswurde’ (S, 229, italics added) [‘every time the train braked, and I had the feeling that Isti and I were just two add-ons, stuck to him, to his life, that he could never get rid of’ (Sw, 223, italics added)]. The use of the tactile verb kleben as a sensory metaphor perpetuates the themes of personal trauma, abandonment and neglect. The children are unable to trust their father because of his ‘itinerant, distant and womanising’ character, as Haines rightly points out.³⁹ The feeling that they are ‘glued’ to their father as ‘two unwanted appendages’ magnifies their pain. They are consistently plagued by the fear that he can leave them anytime that he desires: ‘Ich glaubte, er würde Isti und mich eines Tages zurücklassen. Er würde allein in einem Zug steigen, vergessen zurückzukommen, vergessen, uns abzuholen’ (S, 43) [‘One day, I thought, he will leave Isti and me behind. He’ll climb abroad a train and forget to come back, forget to pick us up’ (Sw, 37)].

Hence, in contrast to the Sisyphean nature of life on the land, water emerges as a transitory realm of liberation, where a subject is plunged into absolute oblivion for a while and experiences a new affinity with a natural element and to estranged family members. This total integration with Mother Nature and others during the act of swimming, as Andrea Bartl contends, is like dwelling in ‘eine[r] archaische[n] Heimat’ [an archaic homeland] and implies ‘eine behutsame Suche nach neuen Orientierungen und Verortungen’ [a delicate search for new orientations and locations].⁴⁰ The promise of belonging and emplacement in the utopian synthesis with the water, however, is transient in the abandoned family’s case. The transience of this promise emphasizes the ephemerality of happiness in the nomadic life of the characters.

Whilst all three family members carry the original pain of Katalin’s absence and the permanent burden of non-belonging, Isti undoubtedly suffers the most beneath the surface. The memories of his mother that he and the rest of the family try to suppress and silence later return to Isti with a destructive force that only serves to make him more defenceless. One day he imagines that he has seen his mother and tries to follow her into the river:

Niemand schimpfte mit Isti, als er uns erzählte, wie er zum Fluß gelaufen war […]. Keiner wunderte sich, als er uns erklärte, in seinem Kopf sei es längst schon Frühling gewesen, der Schnee, der Kälte, das Eis, all das sei ihm nicht aufgefallen, er habe es nicht bemerkt, einfach nicht bemerkt, und niemand staunte, als Isti sagte, er habe ihr bloß folgen wollen. (S, 277)

[No one scolded Isti when he told us how he had walked down to the river […]. No one was surprised when he explained that in his mind it was already spring – the snow, the cold, the ice, he didn’t see or feel any of that; he didn’t notice it, simply didn’t notice it – and no one was amazed when Isti said he had seen his mother walking across the water and just wanted to follow her. (Sw, 270)]

Distorted senses and mental disorientation this time result in the physical illness of pneumonia that later leads to what constitutes this narrative’s cardinal trauma: Isti’s death. Isti’s failure to register the extreme conditions of cold weather in the above-mentioned example is suggestive of the characters’ reactions to traumatic memories and their overwhelming reality. In this manner, contemplating the protagonists’ relationship with their sensory world allows the reader to map out their varying degrees of trauma, as well as various occurrences of ‘emplacement’ and ‘displacement’ articulated in the sensory details of the novel.

Sensory markers and recreating the suffering of migrants

The trauma associated with Katalin’s unanticipated and sudden disappearance upsets the main protagonists’ fundamental self-understanding as defined in relation to others: as someone’s son, daughter and husband. Yet the escapees of a dictatorial regime and oppressive family structures do not relish the happiness of a promised land: far from it. Their vulnerability to the trauma of dislocation and the abject violence they endured on the way complicates their self-understanding and turns them into epitomes of ‘unmoored’ existence. After their arrival in Austria, Katalin and her friend Vali form an acquaintance with a fellow refugee, Árpi, who is plunged into crisis by the precariousness of refugee existence. Instead of finding sanctuary from the conflict-torn and oppressive society of his homeland, he is exposed to further trauma on his journey westwards. Having already failed once to cross the border, Árpi and his friends are detained by border guards on their second attempt and incarcerated in an unused school building, where he is abused by the border guards. It is interesting to note that instead of making use of direct language for the subject’s corporeal hurt and psychological scars, the author couches Árpi’s excessive vigilance and anxiety resulting from the severity of his injuries in a remarkable account of sensory labour. In order to escape from the violence, Árpi sleeps all day long. In other words, he shutters his senses during the day and directs his attention to immediate and distant sensory perceptions at night. The reader notes that the subject’s senses have been heightened as a consequence of apprehensiveness about his uncertain future. Árpi’s acute focus on perceivable sensory fragments from the world beyond his reach conveys his hope and desperation for freedom: ‘Immer wieder befühlte er seinen Knöchel und hörte dabei auf die Geräusche im Hof and auf der Straße, auf Stimmen, auf einen Motor, auf das Schlagen einer Tür, auf die Räder eines Wagens, auf das Bellen eines Hundes’ (S, 148) [‘Again and again he felt his ankle as he listened to the noises from the yard and the street – voices, a motor, a door being slammed, screeching of wheels, a barking dog’ (Sw, 140)].

Even after surviving a brutal encounter with border guards, making it safely to the other side of the border and reuniting with his brother, Pál, Árpi feels as though he is crying out inside:

Er legte seine Hände an die Schläfen und drehte und wendete den Kopf, als könne er sich so von diesem Schmerz befreien, als könne er ihn so aus seinem Kopf pressen. Es hörte nicht auf, in ihm zu schreien, sagte Árpi, und meine Mutter fragte Vali später, weißt du jetzt, was mit diesem Árpi ist?, und Vali antwortete, ja, jetzt weiß ich es. (S, 152, italics added)

[He put his hands up to his temples and turned and twisted his head as if that motion would rid him of the pain, as if he could squeeze it out. It would not stop screaming in him, Árpi said, and my mother later asked Vali, ‘Now do you know what’s wrong with Árpi?’ And Vali replied, ‘Yes, I do.’ (Sw, 144, italics added)]

Although the unspecified personal pronoun ‘es’ obfuscates the reason for his profound anguish, Árpi’s flight from Hungary and his sleepless nights in a foreign country insinuate that the ‘es’ might allude to the irreversible separation from everything familiar to him since childhood. Moreover, governed by a dative case, the personal pronoun ‘er’ coupled with proposition ‘in’ (‘Es hörte nicht auf, in ihm zu schreien’) suggests that the source of these tormenting sensory emanations and the organ of perception are the same, rendering it impossible for the subject to address the cause of their pain. In fact, the desperate movements of touch (placing his hands on his temples) and the twisting and turning of Árpi’s head evoke the inarticulable pain he experiences after being forced to leave the familiarity of his homeland behind. On the metaphorical level, the (unspecified) personal pronoun ‘es’ in the linguistic phrase ‘in ihm’, might refer to the character’s soul, heart, body or all of them. This, in turn, suggests that the soul, heart or body of the subject translates its scars into a metaphorical inner cry and then becomes its victim all the same.

In addition, the use of the auditory verb schreien, with its emotive associations, allows us to apprehend the verbal encoding of this instance more deeply. One resorts to ‘screaming’ under exceptional circumstances, when one’s perceived world order has been upset or destroyed. Full of sensuous intensity, this act of producing loud vocal messages is a subject’s aggressive response to the disappointment when a need goes unmet or to the disintegration of unity with the external world. In Árpi’s case, overpowered by the interminable pain, the subject’s inner self avails itself of a disconcerting cry to draw attention to a void within it. However, unable to find a cure, the victim finds himself powerless in the face of incomprehensible pain and so it persists and continues to inflict suffering on him.

In this manner, the literary articulation of the scream that Árpi struggles to squeeze out hints at another subtle dimension of his plight. The external circumstances of a seemingly peaceful and safe host country fail to subdue the inner anguish which is grounded in an aggregate of despair. The author strategically relates this suffering to his ceaseless attachment to an ‘etwas’: ‘und jetzt, sagte er, wache er jede Nacht mit demselben Gedanken auf, mit dem Gedanken, etwas habe ihn nicht weglassen wollen’ (S, 152) [‘and now, he said, he woke up every night thinking the same thing: Something in him hasn’t wanted to leave’ (Sw, 144)]. In Árpi’s story, this ‘something’ might imply a yearning for a lost homeland and nostalgia for familiar kinships back home. It could also stand for humiliating memories related to the violation of one’s basic human dignity by official state machinery on the border, or an abiding concern about the uncertain future.

For Árpi, memory of this home, of this ‘etwas’ is likely to be characterized by ‘the loss of the object of identification’.⁴¹ Reflecting on the concepts of identity, memory and melancholy as the structural bases of the emigratory experience, Zofia Rosińska explains that

the object of identification is not an actual physical object but rather a bundle of varied experiences and impressions. It is the smells, the views, the sounds, the intonations, warmth and cold, desires, hopes, disappointments, and finally, safety: home in the broad sense of the word.⁴²

This object of identification manifests itself temporarily in the melody of the national anthem for Árpi that one of his refugee friends starts to whistle on their migratory route: ‘Einer fing an, die Nationalhymne zu pfeifen, dann sang er sie, erst im Scherz, dann ein wenig ernster, Gott segne undsoweiter, und mit dieser Stimme, mit dieser Melodie an seinem Ohr schlief Árpi ein’ (S, 146) [‘One of them started whistling our national anthem, then sang it, first in jest and then a little more seriously: “God bless…etc.”, and with that voice and that melody in his ears Árpi fell asleep’ (Sw, 139)].

Intriguingly, the figurative meaning of the screaming inside Árpi’s head becomes more clearly legible when contrasted with the soothing whistling of his home country’s national anthem. The sounds of the anthem transport him from the ‘displaced’ life in the present into a temporary realm of ‘emplacement’ in the past. While an inner cry in a foreign land deprives Árpi of his peace und disrupts his equanimity, the comforting impact of familiar sonic impulses helps him to restore his peace for a while and fall asleep. In this manner, Bánk uses the contrast between auditory sensations to covey the transformation within Árpi’s anguished psyche as he moves between the realm of familiar sensations (home) and a foreign territory associated with trepidation, fear and violence.

Familiar sounds from home offer Árpi an assurance of security and comfort: a sense of ‘emplacement’. The sonic verb pfeifen also underscores the subjects’ strong affinity with the sonic registers of a melody. The sound of the national anthem is not only an integral part of Árpi’s identity and that of his friends, but is also so deeply carved into their mnemonic map that they can effortlessly recall it by means of playful whistling. On the contrary, the screaming inside Árpi’s head indicates a discordant state of consciousness which is consistent with a deep and painful ‘melancholy of no return’, as expounded by Rosińska in her reflections on the element of melancholy in the emigratory experience.⁴³ In the context of Árpi’s displaced self, his sense of melancholy seems to be rooted in the knowledge that it will be impossible to return, and that he will therefore remain ‘unmoored’, alienated and searching for the meaning of life in a foreign place. Whilst Árpi chooses to leave his home country in the wake of political repression and seems to be convinced by his decision, he also occasionally doubts his actions: ‘Er fragte sich, was es gewesen war, das ihn dazu gebracht hatte, es wieder und wieder mit dieser Grenze zu versuchen, mit diesem Strich Land, diesem flachen Grab zwischen Ost und West’ (S, 147) [‘He wondered what it was that had made him try to cross the border, that strip of land, that flat ditch between the East and the West’ (Sw, 140)]. Thus, the lingering pain, expressed through his inner cry and contrasted with the soothing melody of the national anthem, mirrors the psychological upheavals experienced by Árpi’s ‘displaced’ character after leaving his home.

Similarly, an existential upheaval induced by the experience of migration is reflected in Katalin and Vali’s lives in Austria. Every time some olfactory, oral or visual cue conjures up memories of a lost ‘something’, it brings tears to their eyes. For instance, while working in a restaurant, they are frequently overcome by the vehemence of these memories:

Sobald die ersten Gäste kamen, […] verschwanden Vali und meine Mutter in der Küche, […] und schnitten Zwiebeln, was ihnen nichts ausmachte – so hatten sie wenigsten eine Ausrede, jedesmal wenn sie weinen mußten, weil ein Geruch, ein Geräusch, manchmal bloß der Gang eines Fremden sie an etwas erinnerte. (S, 157, italics added)

[As soon as the first guests had come, […] Vali and my mother would disappear into the kitchen, […]. They didn’t mind chopping the onions – it gave them an excuse for the tears that came to their eyes every time a smell, a sound, or even the footsteps of a stranger reminded them of something. (Sw, 149–50, italics added)]

When sensory cues abruptly trigger recollections of this ‘something’, an event emblematic of the Proustian phenomenon of ‘involuntary memory’ disrupts Katalin’s and Vali’s efforts to uphold a smokescreen of normality in their current reality.⁴⁴ The persistent reminders of a lost home coupled with the knowledge of not feeling at home in a foreign place instil in them a sense of devastating sadness. To borrow Milan Kundera’s words, ‘an unappeased yearning’, most probably for a home, dawns on both friends.⁴⁵ Here again, Bánk opts for the non-specific pronoun ‘etwas’. When extended into the metaphorical realm, it accounts for the mnemonic traces of their previous life. This something cannot be anything but the lost object of identification, their home. Since the sensory impressions of the immediate proximity in the West impel Katalin’s and Vali’s minds to wander to the lost reality of home, they remain ‘psychically both in the former home and the new host country, as well as in the past and the present’, as Madelaine Horn puts it when talking about the trauma of ‘displacement’.⁴⁶ This ambiguous situation of temporo-spatial disorientation corresponds to the phenomenon of ‘double absence’ as formulated by Abdelmalek Sayad with reference to the suffering of immigrants.⁴⁷ It evokes an unsettling feeling of being stranded in an ‘in-between’, at a threshold of non-existence, impotence and helplessness, a state reminiscent of Howes’s concept of ‘displacement’.⁴⁸ Circumstances of ‘double-absence’ create a space of ‘unmoored’ existence, in which the subject’s agency and freedom of movement are heavily compromised.⁴⁹

The alienation and mental chaos of ‘double absence’ and ‘displacement’ are frequently alluded to in Katalin’s and Vali’s experiences in Austria. The endeavour to navigate a foreign territory sometimes equips them with the disheartening knowledge of a (seemingly) unbridgeable gulf to their host country. Dejected, they seek refuge in the memories of their previous lives. During a Christmas celebration at a colleague’s home, for example, they find themselves unable to enjoy the festive melodies, either because they are not acquainted with the songs or because they have not acquired the necessary linguistic competence to understand the lyrics. In response to this alienating situation, they summon up memories of familiar songs (S, 161). While the memory of their ‘own’ melodies alleviates the estrangement, their deeply fragmented mental state denies them an opportunity to build an emotional connection or a sense of ‘emplacement’ within the current environment. Consequently, they end up in a liminal space between two worlds: they are neither here nor there and embark on a journey of ‘double absence’. Árpi’s agony and Katalin’s and Vali’s disoriented dispositions in these specific instances allow the reader to explore the micro-realities of migratory movements that are usually submerged underneath the broader discourses of migration, memory and trauma.

Concluding remarks

My reading of Der Schwimmer reveals that characters’ sense perceptions function as aesthetic devices and anchor the themes of memory, trauma and migration on the narrative level. Bánk uses different sensory registers both to bring their memories to life and to indicate how individuals encounter their current world. Against the background of perpetual flight coupled with the trauma of loss, sensory tropes do not always function as unambiguous markers of positive belongings and ‘embodied connections’.⁵⁰ Rather, the overwhelming encounter with negative experiences, textual cues inform us, suspends the normality of characters’ sensory responses to their physical reality and transforms the sensory poetics of ‘emplacement’, as defined by Howes, into that of ‘displacement’: non-belonging and disorientation. Sensory elements in such cases are either an inner repository of memories for a lost ‘home’ or triggers for a melancholic response that impels the subjects into a variety of liminal states. Augmenting the connections between memories, senses and emotions, these elements come to shape the conditions of ‘unmoored’ existence in the literary universe. In this context, the interface between characters’ inner and outer reality, as defined by their sensory perceptions, provides the writer with creative tools to invent a nuanced poetic language for subject-specific tragedies. Delving beneath the linguistic design of these wandering characters’ intimate encounters with their sensory reality thus enables us to map out the complex working of their memory and the magnitude of their trauma.

Endnotes