AT THE BORDER OF TWO WORLDS

Role options of the “distantiated spectator” in Vadoma by Anna Vörös

Abstract

The debut volume of Anna Vörös is a unique and solitary voice in contemporary Hungarian literature referring to the representation of refugees. The author is actively practicing psychology and worked as a volunteer in hot zones of the migrant crisis, so she had the chance to learn about different aspects of the crisis from the inside. By collecting experiences, she built out a literary universe with an authentic voice. Her narrative can be defined as close to the triple structure of distant suffering theory by Luc Boltanski. The model of Boltanski features three categories of which the third is the “distantiated spectator”: who instead of playing the role of furious and delivering justice, rather interprets and experiences mediatized suffering in its historical context and process. The cycle of prose featuring the Syrian heroine in its metaphors and symbols avoids the traps of topoi and common places of storytelling based on “contentless pathos” and “colonizing, colonial and postcolonial point of view”. Anna Vörös in a revealing and documentarist tone approaches the arrival experience of masses coming to Europe – this experience may be described by sociological, cultural anthropological, and spatial theories while using various topics and situations. In her model motifs like the moment of spotting the sea or land, crossing them, and winning the battle over physical barriers, are melted into contemporary European refugee literature as well as tendencies in film, fine art, as well as media representations of the topic. The paper is an attempt to discover this question in its complexity.