Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

BOOK REVIEWS - Csaba Czeglédi: Endre Vázsonyi: Túl a Kacegárdán, Culmet-vidéki amerikai magyar szótár [Beyond Castle Garden: An American Hungarian Dictionary of the Calumet Region]. Edited and introduction by Miklós Kontra. A Magyarország-kutatás könyv-tára XV. Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány, 1995. 242 pp

protagonist is a traumatized self, someone who had suffered from something some time "

before the opening sentence of the story or the novel"

(228). That something in his past could easily explain his reactions in the present, but the writer is not willing to tell us all about that. Still, this hero "actually is an undiminished personality whom the reader meets in a phase of his life when something decisive has already happened to him" (228). The reader sees as much of the "phenomenological man," the second type, as he sees of others in real life. 'The minimalist character is a casual acquaintance" (231) whose internal reactions we might guess from his gestures. This way it is again the minimalist author who reduces the character by not showing more of it. 'This method of retaining information about the character produces a feeling in the reader that the hero has a reduced self, and that is what I call 'phenomenological'

" (231). There is no longer an "omniscient author who could tell us what we cannot see"

(232). But if the reader watches carefully "few things can mean a lot" (232). Abádi Nagy quotes Annie Dillard's book, Living by Fiction, when describing the minimalist author's attitude to his/her character: "We no longer examine the interior lives of characters much like ourselves. Instead, we watch from afar a caravan of alien grotesques" (230—231). With the third type of self reduction we enter the realm of the reduced selves in a proper psychological sense. Abádi Nagy calls it the "anesthetized self'. "This is where the literary self-reduction gets closest to the sociological phenomenon of the minimal self'

(234). This type of self-reduction is a "sheer fact of social-psychology. It is a fact of the psychology of the character and not an illusion caused by the character-painting device of the writer" (234). The minimalist hero is not just vulnerable, "but most often is a wounded man" (235) and uses all kinds of narcosis. This narcosis is "an escapist reaction" (234) says Abádi Nagy. The "inarticulate man" is the last of the four types. S/he is the one who is "incapable of communicating the basic problems of his/her life. Perhaps even incapable of verbalizing them for himself/herself' (237). 190