Producing Bodies: Interpreting Attila Veres's Short Story Transistor

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the short story „Transistor” from Attila Veres's collection titled The Restoration of Reality (Agave, 2022) and its intertextual links with another short story in the collection, titled “Person Assigned to Keep in Touch.” Veres's short stories question the notion of reality, presenting competing or parallel realities and multiple Hungaries with the tool of the literary fantastic. In this multiplied (textual) world, the „Transistor” exposes the vulnerable situation of the marginalised, economically exploited people and the (almost) impossible option of breaking out. The characters living in poverty are forced to „work” in factories where the workers are eating a mud-like substance, which is transformed by the metabolism of their bodies into some substance used for creating a link between different worlds. The protagonist is a woman who is not only producing the substance but is also capable of creating connections between different worlds. In my analysis, I focus on the ways in which the woman protagonist's body is exploited and I discuss the transformative possibilities for breaking out of the vulnerable world of poverty. I will use the second short story to show how the power machine obscures forms of collective and self-exploitation the processes of transformations of the subject into a machine in the interest of capitalism.