Experiences of Presence in the Novel School at the Frontier by Géza Ottlik

Abstract

Several studies dealing with Ottlik’s novel School at the Frontier have attempted to describe the spiritual development of its characters and the journey of their attaining inner freedom. Our starting point in this paper is the dramatic and rationally unexplainable shift of planes of existence, a certain breakthrough which precedes the experience of reaching spiritual freedom as described in the twin narratives of the characters Bébé and Medve. Our hypothesis is that such spiritual liberation always stems from a very intensive experience of presence. In this experience, one leaves one’s ’Character-Self’ and assumes the ’Spectator-Self’, that is, a radical change of perspectives and the liberating expansion of the horizon where one’s life events are interpreted. This is so because a strong awareness of presence and being, in other words, the experience of mere existence is a reality superior to rational concepts which aim to interpret it but become silent on encountering such presence. The life that has become meaningless due to the traumatizing experiences of the military school, regains a new meaning by experiencing presence. This paper surveys the presence-experiences presented by the novel and explores the ways such fundamentally ungraspable experiences may be captured by language and the artistic devices of literature.