What's Past is Prologue: Imagining the Socialist Nation in Cuba and in Hungary

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 1 (1999) Issue 1 Article 3 What's Past is Prologue: Imagining the Socialist Nation in Cuba and in Hungary Patricia D. Fox University of Indiana Bloomington Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Recommended Citation Fox, Patricia D. "What's Past is Prologue: Imagining the Socialist Nation in Cuba and in Hungary." 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This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Volume 1 Issue 1 (March 1999) Article 3 Patricia D. Fox, "What's Past is Prologue: Imagining the Socialist Nation in Cuba and in Hungary" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol1/iss1/3> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.1 (1999) <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol1/iss1/> Abstract: Patricia D. Fox's article, "What's Past is Prologue: Imagining the Socialist Nation in Cuba and in Hungary," examines the symbolic mooring of Cuban and Hungarian identity, recuperated Caliban from William Shakespeare's The Tempest and an ever conflicted Faustus/Adam from Imre Madách's Az ember tragédiája, respectively. Despite serial cosmological fragmentations and political upheaval, the present analysis holds that production and reproduction of these founding figures in the process of imagining the socialist nation represent an ongoing litigation of meaning. This process then conserves a marked thematic continuity through temporal conceptions, totality of exegesis, the mix of rational and mythical, and the recoding of past symbols to serve the present reality and to indirectly realign the past and prophesy the future. Beyond the formative and transformative points of similarity between the two cases, the essay discusses culturally specific divergences and the impact of differing experience and mentalities on literary and filmic expression. In conclusion, the study first offers a tentative model of socialist nation, positing a framework within which to understand and complicate Cuban and Hungarian sui generis patterns and then describes in the more universal context of narrating the nation those practices and characteristics common to that genre. Patricia D. Fox, "What's Past is Prologue: Imagining the Socialist Nation in Cuba and in Hungary" page 2 of 11 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.1 (1999): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol1/iss1/3> Patricia D. FOX What's Past is Prologue: Imagining the Socialist Nation in Cuba and in Hungary Franz Boas proposes "that mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered again, and that new worlds have been built from the fragments" (qtd. in Levi-Strauss 206; Teit 18). In a more popular examination, Joseph Campbell observes that "with every new advance ... man's knowledge and control of the powers of earth and nature alter, old cosmologies lose their hold and new come into being" (144). In my present study i assume that, even while "new" worlds are built and "new" cosmologies come into being, the fragments of former mythologies never completely lose their hold. Consequently, i suggest that, whatever its circumstance -- technological advance, social, or political revolution -- every transformation may alter, but seemingly does not erase, the reigning cultural conception of the universe. Recalling Roland Barthes' conception of mythical speech as an example of discourse -- a system of signification, a cosmology -- i contend that every group, community, society creates meaning, needs to create a system of signification proper to their own reality, while always relying on the constancy and the continuity of that created meaning. In other words, the interplay between national and socialist fictions suggests that History does not begin -- (...truncated)