Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ISTVÁN D. RÁCZ Memory, Writing, Politics: the Poetry of Peter Reading
Memory, Writing, Politics: the Poetry of Peter Reading 13 we hear the voice of a news editor, who considers various ways of reporting about a most appalling crime: a gang cutting the face of a young child to get the mother's cash. Facts may become either a headline or a Greek distich. Neither of them changes the tragedy, but the reader can face the facts only through the text. The variety of texts is visually represented in Perduta Gente. This is a book consisting of poems, photocopies of diary entries and photos of torn documents, on 56 unnumbered pages. The title is from Dante's Inferno , and the volume shows a 20 t h century hell, in which unimaginable wealth and poverty, rationality and ignorance add up to chaos. The story shining through the textual fragments can be summed up like this: a homeless person, while fumbling in the rubbish, finds some documents, torn into pieces, which analyse the possible effects of an expected nuclear accident. The police detect the documents, labelled as strictly confidential, in his pockets or bag, and arrest him as a supposed dangerous thief. This volume, too, can be read as a poem of memory. The establishment of the country does not want to remember the possibility of a nuclear accident and the documents have presumably been thrown away because they are not needed any more. The forgetfulbiess of the establishment has the same function as the drug abuse of the homeless man. Losing memory, an artificially caused amnesia, is deliberate and collective in both cases. The book represents an inferno in which the only collective act is getting rid of memory, which also means getting rid of thinking. The question is whether it is possible to forget facts. We are surrounded with texts, even the dustbins are full of them, and all these texts work against amnesia. To represent this, Perduta Gente imitates the physical appearance of fragmented texts. The book is like the skeleton of a pseudodocumentary novel: the reader sees the documents that can become the corpus delicti for both sides at a future trial. These two sides, the establishment and the homeless man, are linked with their points of view as both sides see the damaged documents as evidence against the other. In addition, the boundary between the two classes is blurred. A recurrent sentence in the book is: "Don't think it couldn't be you." As Peter Barry remarks: "Reading insists that new post-industrial patterns have meant a radical extension of socially coercive anxiety. The dispossessed 'other' could, after all, easily become none other than ourselves" (88). Consequently, Perduta Gente can be read as a political poem, moreover, as a literary indictment. Its two central symbols, the fragments of texts thrown away and classic meter, are two signs of the same social chaos. This has been caused by the erasure of order from people's memories, and serves
