László Végel and the ‘stateless localpatriotism’

Abstract

The study focuses on the diary entries, diary volumes and essay collections written by László Végel during the 1990’s Balkan war and NATO bombings, which allow us to unravel the experience of the writer’s stateless localpatriotism. The future image, the anxious prediction and the uncertainty of linguistic erosion, linguistic endangerment and language loss are subversively conveyed in his poetics, starting from the radical language use in the Egy makró emlékiratai [Memoirs of a Pimp] (diary) novel to the later adopted (Deleuzean) stuttering language of ‘végelean’ cultural discourse. This language, possessed by the minority author in a seemingly wrong manner (in relation to the late Wittgensteinian concept of language philosophy), leads to the statelessness in Végel’s art. The historical‐political dimension, as well as social determination, marginality, minority existence and the notion of the ‘European bastard’ are all interesting and significant categories for interpretation from the aspect of how they jointly construct the loss of Europe and, eventually, the world itself as the terrain of homelessness.