Katalin G. Kállay
Katalin G. Kállay teaches American literature at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest, Central European Literature at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna and used to offer summer courses in both fields at the University of California in Santa Cruz. She took an M.A. at L. Eötvös University in Budapest and defended her Ph.D. at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Her first book on nineteenth-century American short stories, Going Home Through Seven Paths to Nowhere: Reading Short Stories by Hawthorne, Poe, Melville and James was published in 2003 by the Hungarian Academy of Science. Her forthcoming book, entitled Sudden Sparks: Questions of Surprising Coincidences, Communication, and Mystery While Reading Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers is going to be published by L’Harmattan Publishing House in 2026. Her fields of research include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction, especially Southern women writers, Hungarian and Central European literature in English, literary responses to the Holocaust, and the relationship between philosophy and literature.
Is There No Place Like Home?
(Going Home Through Literary Paths to Nowhere)
Well-known and all too often heard expressions like ”There is no place like home” or ”Home, sweet home” call attention to contradicting overtones. Can such a word as home, so much used and abused, overloaded with several layers of meaning make any sense in a world of general homelessness? To what extent should one welcome or be afraid of the ambiguities this word suggests? How can one circumscribe the literal activity of going home? And under what circumstances can such an activity serve as a metaphor for the process of reading? The main directions of my investigations are marked out and signposted by question marks.
In this presentation, inspired by Stanley Cavell’s idea of ”a good encounter” with a literary work of art, I wish to argue for a mode of reading in which the reader’s aim is to. establish an intimate relationship with the special arrangement of words in a text, governed by a trust in a happy coincidence of moments in which one might recognize the words’ relevance to one’s life. I connect the reading process with the literal process of going home, in which three successive turns occur: turning toward, turning around in, and turning away from the desired destination (i.e. one’s dwelling place or the ideal reading experience). The openness for surprising home truths and the recognition of some kind of familiarity are essential in both cases. In order to make the connection between the two processes, it is not necessary, but helpful to look at texts which thematize the concept of home.
I intend to start with iconic images from the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), and a one-minute story by the Hungarian writer István Örkény, entitled ”Home Sweet Home” (1968, translated by Judith Sollosy, 1994). Both pieces perform and challenge the above mentioned cliché-like expressions.
In the main part of the lecture, I will focus on Eudora Welty’s ”Death of a Traveling Salesman” (1936). In this story, Bowman, a traveling salesman loses his way on the road, and after his car slips into a ravine, he asks for help at an odd house nearby from a strange shapeless woman. While waiting for Sonny, the woman’s relative who pulls out the car, Bowman becomes aware of his heartbeats, which might indicate his growing ability to reflect on his emotions. As the evening comes and he is invited for dinner, it turns out that the mystery going on in the house is nothing but ”A marriage, a fruitful marriage”. As he cannot fully be part of this mystery, he leaves at night, but most probably gets a heart attack before he reaches his car. The journey ends up in the middle of nowhere – still, it might be interpreted as bringing the protagonist to a spiritual place of self-recognition, i.e. home.
To what extent might such a spiritual place of self-recognition, a sense of home be offered for the reader through a good encounter with the text?
Keywords: Homecoming, The Wizard of Oz, István Örkény, Eudora Welty, and Self-recognition.