Is the ultimate message of Ottlik’s School really stoic? Revisiting the Jakus-Hévizi Hypothesis

Abstract

The basic hypothesis of the paper is that the interpretation given to Ottlik’s novel by Ildikó Jakus and Ottó Hévizi deserves more attention than it’s been given to by Ottlik-philologists. The main idea of this interpretation is that the novel doesn’t have a reconciling stoic message, it is more a novel of questions, debates and investigations than that of comforting answers. This interpretation states that the famous and beautiful meditations of Bébé in Lukács Spa at the beginning of the novel about the inner stability and freedom achieved in the military school of the characters’ adolescence are not to be taken at their face value. Bébé is trying to avoid answering Szeredy’s question about staying with Magda, his lover or going back to his wife, i. e. whether re-establishing the connection between his present and the deepest layer of his life rooted in his childhood prior to the school years or returning to his everyday life. Hévizi’s idea is that the three protagonists are looking for the answer – and themselves – in Medve’s manuscript. The question is whether the years of the school, the knowledge and behaviour pattern, the alluvia or sedimentation gained there and everything since were just „superfluous vicissitudes” or the real centre of their personality. The authors of Ottlik-veduta suggest that Medve rewrites certain parts of his novel and his school experiences because of the new experiences of the 1956 revolution. Perhaps he doesn’t think any more than one shouldn’t overthrow the chess table of human society’s sophisticated rules. He doesn’t accept the unchangeable reality in a stoic way anymore. The paper tries to analyse parts of the text to support or confute the JakusHévizi hypothesis.