The correlation of body and power in School at the Frontier

Abstract

Perception and bodily impressions have a major role in Géza Ottlik’s prose. One of the main questions his novel School at the Frontier is dealing with is the conciliation of living in bodies and attaining internal freedom: those moments of distress and suffering when the body seems to detach itself from the unity of the soul inside of it, those moments of grace when they find the way back to themselves through certain techniques of the body. This paper is not the first that approaches the novel by observing corporeal aspects, since László Sári B. has already analysed its homosocial relations, but there are still many questions waiting to be discussed. Based on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, the current paper observes the military education that supresses the children’s body and the individual gestures that preserve the self in an obeying body. We use the term ‘techniques of the body’ according to the studies of Marcel Mauss and Erhard Schüttpelz, considering a ‘technique of the body’ any social or individual practice realised through the body, like standing at attention or wearing a uniform in a traditional or in an individual way (like Medve wears his cap). We also know from phenomenological approaches that our mind is embodied, so beyond the children’s gestures, actions and self-reflective bodily representations, their sensations, their perception of the world and their interpretation of reality are worthy of observation as well.