Controlling Attention and Production in Péter Esterházy's A Production Novel

Abstract

Focusing on Péter Esterházy's A Production Novel, the paper reviews some possible implications of attention for the theory of literature and reading. The analysis departs from reading of a passage that can be easily understood as a satire of a system of literary expectations that foregrounds socialist-realist, or more broadly mimetic codes. The passage taken from a scene in a production management environment can also be read as a clash between an ideological conception of literature, which takes the ‘ideological message' as a given, and a novel and complex ‘parametric’ conception, which is not based on the principle of reflecting a preconceived reality, but on the literary ‘modelling’ of a dynamic, changing, difficult-to-know or unpredictable reality. The paper analyses the possible literary and critical-theoretical connotations of the term ‘parametric programming’, which features prominently in the text, and their relation to the poetics of Esterházy's novel, by means of a close analysis of some relevant passages. The article examines the specific acts of attention that Esterházy's novel prompts the reader to perform in order to respond to the text as a meaningful aesthetic experience.