(Dis)orientation

8Budai does not know where he is. He has absolutely no idea. Karinthy covered all possible issues by putting Budai into a deep sleep during the flight and depriving him of his watch, thus making it impossible for him to estimate the distance covered. He does not know if the plane went north, the south or elsewhere. He only imagines that he has to be “in the northern hemisphere for he was pretty sure the Plough could not be seen in the southern one. But if he was on earth, at what longitude and latitude?” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 88)

9Where is this city? In which country is it? Budai, the scholar, the linguist, uses his knowledge but everything is confused. However, a number of signs make sense, but these are contradictory and mixed; some seem to indicate an architectural style or a human type, others disprove it. He cannot deduce anything from the physical appearance of the persons he meets because here, some are “white, some colored […], a pale yellow woman […], some tall Germanic types, one tubby Mediterranean…” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 12) and others whose features indicate mixed origins: “that Japaneselooking, slant-eyed, young woman with light blonde hair and slightly Negroid lips” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 49). He cannot deduce anything from the architecture, which mixes times and places as well as Moorish, roman, medieval or Chinese references. Karinthy strives to blur all the possibilities, makes this place, not one with a radical otherness that cannot be understood because of lack of references but one with too many references, a sort of fusion, which combines what the distinctions in the world separate. Budai is on the earth, with several echoes of a common humanity, but it is also outside the World, outside the World connected through a fabric of symbols that indicate globality. When he observes the advertisements, he is disoriented: “He didn’t see any advertisements for goods and services generally available in Europe.” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 146).

10And this city, how is it organized? Where is the hotel within it? Every day, his main activity along with the attempt to decipher the language is heading off to explore it. Carefully first, making ripple-like rounds around the hotel, then a little further, and increasingly further away searching for the boundaries of the urbanized space. This unknown city, which is incomprehensible at first, he will gradually get a hang of it; he has to, if only to get back to the hotel. His Ariadne’s thread for walking around includes a few unique places: a skyscraper under construction, a self-service buffet where he eats sometimes, a metro station.

11Where should one look in a city to work out its structure and organize one’s own daily life? The city-center. Budai first uses his references and a European model of urban space organization [3], but soon, he starts having doubts: “the historic center might not be the center of the city […]. Was there an even older quarter somewhere? Or maybe there were other inner cities?” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 51-52). In fact, the city seems to be polycentric and the logic that a European would use is not operational here.

12What should one look for in a city when one wants to get out of it? Railway stations, rails, major highways, a waterway. These escape lines orient a large part of the quest, of Budai’s investigation. One day, he decides to walk straight ahead, as straight as possible, away from what he identified as the city center. He takes the metro till the terminus and then tries, with difficulty, to stay the course. He will at least get an idea of the size of the city. What follows is a long, uneasy wandering in a space without any gradient that could allow him to build clarity, a space without any unequivocal signal. It is first and foremost “like all outer suburbs with endless stone walls, fences, chimneys, gasometers, wide and muddy streets, row on row of dull brick houses […]” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 91), further away, once again, streams of humans, heavy traffic, new traces of centrality: “He seemed to have arrived in an area that felt more central: the roads narrowed” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 101). Is it another city? Is he going around in circles? He gets lost, drifts, roams around without any fixed points of reference and seems to forget the objective for the day. Then he enters a church with a very tall bell tower and a new hope builds up: reaching the top. Using stairs and ladders, he advances, reaches the top and soon beholds a vast “panorama” (Karinthy, 2008, p.111). With his eyes wide open, he looks in vain for railways, a river, a breach in this “labyrinth” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 92), this jungle, which has “imprisoned” him (Karinthy, 2008, p. 113). But as night falls, he has to go back home.

13The unknown city is overpopulated; it is a city of crowds; a moving stream of people which prevents any attempt at a prolonged stop in one place. Sometimes Budai struggles but mostly, he “joined the black flood of pedestrians” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 26). When one day, he sees a faint sign, which makes sense: an old Hungarian weekly, Theatrical Life, that a stranger has in his hands, it is once more the thick and impenetrable human tide which envelops him and takes him away from his potential savior.

14If Budai comes regularly back to a metro station close to the hotel, it is also because he has found what the reader and even more so the geographer may imagine to be his lifeline: a map. This metro map is “his only fixed point of certainty” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 45). It could be the weak link of the Machiavellian trap elaborated by Karinthy. But a map can become an unknown language when the codes are ineffective. Characteristically, Budaï proceeds methodically when he goes underground to decipher the map, well aware however that what is useful underground does not necessarily correspond to anything above ground; he identifies the station he is in because of the indicator ring encircled in red, which is a bit more worn out as compared to the others, but he draws very little information from it: “it was located near the bottom left hand corner of the map […] in other words that he was in one of the south-westerly suburbs”. But immediately afterwards, he has a doubt: “if he could safely assume that north was on the top and so forth.” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 27-28). And then, there are the words. The graphic code is not everything, a map is also a verbal space and this one is impenetrable for Budai. When, later, he finds other maps, they don’t help him in any way as he is incapable of “discovering the hotel on this map” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 122) and, at another scale, to situate this city in a country and this country in familiar areas of reference: Europe and the World.

15When the novel finishes, till the last lines, till the discovery which gives him hope again, Budai hardly seems to have progressed as compared to the day he got off the bus in front of the hotel: he is in a big unknown city somewhere on the earth. However, he struggles daily, methodically, by putting some protocols in place to try to decipher and then synthesize the little information that he has. Every day, a new map, the right one this time; but everything slips by, everything races past, everything escapes him, nothing is tangible; at the risk of foundering. It is a “tepid slough of feeling when there was nothing to cling to, no firm ground on which to set his feet” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 150).

Communication

16If Budai had to call upon these various resources and practices (maps, wanderings, patterns, observations, his knowledge) to try to find his bearings, it is because he cannot use the simple, the most evident, the most natural means for a human being: verbal communication. A paradox of a city with an extremely high density in which the linguist who is like a poorly shod shoemaker cannot enter into communication with anyone.

17By inhabiting the world, we also inhabit a language [4] and, unable to communicate, Budai is initially confronted with the impossibility of inhabiting. This constraint is one of the mainsprings of the novel, in the light of the unending repeated quest for landmarks. Karinthy narrates at length the details of this quest in words and sentences, in sounds, letters, this search for connections, for this primary thread which makes it possible to unwind the ball of significations. But Budai has a tough time: “What was he to do then, stuck without any help, all by himself, faced with the unfamiliar script of an unfamiliar language? What assumptions could he make, what range of data should he match up with another when he had nothing to go on, at least nothing so far, and was able to associate neither this or that group of characters with a particular word nor any particular word with any meaning?” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 39)

18The solution would be to meet someone, to share a moment with another human being that would be long enough. But how does one proceed? Budai’s social space is all about anonymous moving crowds, individuals that he meets briefly, and no interaction that could require him to use language.

19Consequently, he meets Epepe and the novel reaches a possible shifting point. She takes clients from floor to floor in the hotel. Her job keeps her in perpetual motion. Budai and she, they meet each other, sometimes downstairs, sometimes on the 9th floor, on which he has his room, sometimes for a short vertical ride; the door opens, closes, Epepe is in charge, Budai goes up, goes down, they recognize each other, exchange a small sign. It reminds us of Jacques Tati’s film, Playtime (1967), in which the entire first part is based on the theme of the impossible encounter. In this film also, the characters run into each other, exchange a look, sometimes a smile, before being led away by non-human mechanisms (escalators or lifts). Individuals are confronted with a highway interchange model, that is, a place built in such a way that moving flows pass by one other without any contact rather than a crossroads model (Augé, 1992).

20The second part of Tati’s film transcends these uninhabitable spatialities with the crazy subversion of the restaurant The Royal Garden, which becomes, within one evening, a magnificent place of life and encounters (Clerc, 2003-2004).

21While the modalities are different, a similar rupture occurs in the novel when Budai and Epepe meet. A breach opens in the perpetual motion; a pause, they go to the hotel’s roof. Epepe smokes a cigarette. These are the first moments shared by them, a place takes shape. Budai is not alone. Epepe is his link to this city, this language. She is going to teach him, he is going to master the words. He hopes; she will be “the thread […] to follow out of this monstrous swarming labyrinth” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 90-91).

22But Epepe is not called Epepe. Epepe is only three syllables that he thinks he hears when she tells him her name. From the emitter to the receiver, the distance widens as when a child plays “Chinese whispers”. The message is transformed till it loses all its meaning. Budai and the young girl from the lift do not understand each other. Body language will not suffice; she disappears.

Inhabitation

23Inhabiting is to get into habits – the etymology is common. But Budai does not want to, he does not want to get used to this city in which everything displeases him, he does not want to inhabit it. He is going to leave, it is certain. Inhabit/getting into a habit, would mean he has “given up, surrendered the one hope that remained, the hope that he was different from the natives, a visitor, someone who did not belong here, someone who, by the same token, could not be detained” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 79-80).

24However, he inhabits, how can he do otherwise? At first, he inhabits the hotel room. His meager belongings are all there, it accommodates his transient love life, he finds a semblance of peace there. It is a refuge where he gathers his ideas, soothes his pain at being the exiled. When Budai is in the room, Karinthy’s writing softens, eases up, takes on a different rhythm, distances itself from the populous agitation of the city. Every day, back from his expeditions, Budai picks up “his key” (the expression appears very early in the text, on page 16, though he has just arrived). He goes back home, a poor home but a home all the same, to organize his quest, look for an exit to the labyrinth, decipher the language. From the second evening onwards, he settles down and “having refreshed himself a little, he sat down comfortably at the writing table in his pyjamas and slippers” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 37), the clothing meant for intimacy and private space.

25Inhabiting is also forging bonds with other human beings, which is difficult for Budai: first the language, the fusion of individuals into anonymous crowds, this perpetual motion which does not leave any room for forms of co-presence that last long enough to permit a relationship. But Sunday evening onwards (he has been there since Friday), the festive atmosphere on this public holiday combined with a mild intoxication draws him to others; while it is true that it is “as if from a distance, not as part of the proceedings” but “he felt himself to be one of them and he wanted to be in their company” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 57), to belong finally to something, anything.

26Budai does not want to get into a habit and yet he takes his bearings, organizes for himself, a territory, a network of places, a fabric of habits, little daily practices that allow him to keep standing and gradually go beyond discovery towards recognition. The days that follow are as much accumulated practices, repeated routes which get stratified and shape an inhabited territoriality. Budai “developed an interim regime for himself. He ate twice, in the morning and in the afternoon, usually in the same selfservice buffet near the skyscraper” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 67). It scares him: “He took some tea in the self-service buffet and was already sipping at his oversweet drink when he realised that he had picked up his breakfast without noticing that he had had to queue for everything” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 79), so he got into the habit of doing so. How could he do otherwise? How could he live somewhere, how could he live, without inhabiting, even in a small way, even if it is without any enthusiasm? Budai becomes accustomed; he becomes accustomed to the sweetish taste of the food, he becomes accustomed to the crowd, he is constantly in a queue in this city, just to remain alive.

27And yet, in the last part of the novel, when he is driven out of the hotel, after a period of wandering and deadly detachment, the homeless tramp that Budai has become, he is going to reconstruct a living territoriality, restructure a space around a fixed point; it will not be his room but the function is the same: the place where he sleeps, the place where he abandons his body to sleep with an inevitable trust in the close environment.

28The difficulty to inhabit, to build ties with places and people, amplifies the nostalgia, this melancholic state, this suffering of what he does not have anymore, this homesickness that certain circumstances of rootlessness foment painfully, this desire for Nostos: the homeward journey. Some days, Budai succumbs to this melancholic state: “Back home [in summer], he used to canoe on the Danube” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 63) and Karinthy continues, describing these simple moments of mental peace that Budai has lost in these hostile places: the islands, the ducks on the river, the willows on the banks, etc. On another day, it is his dog, his “old dachshund would look for old paths in the snow” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 174). Budai’s nostalgia is a form of “geographic sadness” (Gervais-Lambony 2012, p. 2); it is the nostalgia of an exiled person, it manifests itself sporadically when a sign, a word, a spatial form etc. reminds him of the forsaken place. Subsequently, close to the climax, when money starts running short, a new nostalgia appears, an offbeat nostalgia, a nostalgia of all that used to make him nostalgic, of the time when he still had a bit of money “to take a boat out, to have a few drinks, and enjoy a pancake” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 149), of the time when he was living at the hotel, this “lost paradise” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 199). His wanderings, the repeated routes, the issues dwelled upon, the little miracles sometimes when he forgets his condition, the habits picked up, come to his mind against or almost against his will. Time passes by; this city, “he was almost in love with it” (Karinthy, 2008, p.113) till the point of asking himself if he wanted “to leave now or not” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 179). He inhabits, he is at home.

The individual and his extimacy

30Geography is a science of societies. It focuses on large groups: Brazilians, periurban areas, tourism professionals, etc. When the individual is used in the singular, it is as a major spatial player or the equivalent of the “great man” in history, a politician, a developer or a major capitalist entrepreneur, who, in one way or the other, through legislation, through development, by setting up a manufacturing facility, modifies the organization of a space. Let us leave aside the essentialist illusion, particularly frequent in classical geography, which invents generic beings under the guise of a misleading term such as the Berber or the Arab. For the rest, the ordinary individual, Mr. or Mrs. “Everybody”, is perceived only as a part of the collective he or she is referred to. It is the human being and not the individual who helps in the production of geographic discourse [6]. It is not about pitting the individual against the collective but about affirming that studying the individual in geography is interesting in that it throws light on the collective and the society.

31Contrary to the geographic discourse, the literary text is made up first and foremost of individuals: women and men who think and speak, who act, travel and settle down, who suffer or marvel. The unknown city of the novel Epepe, we explore it with Budai, through him, through his thoughts, his little joys and his moments of deep despair, through his body in spaces and his sensations. The novel offers access to the intimate, the private and above all, as far as geographic knowledge is concerned, the extimate defined as the relationship with the others and with the other places, a way to turn one’s intimate outwards (towards to the public sphere) and open it up to the others. Because finally, the intimate, which is interiority, an encounter with oneself, does not seem to reveal any spatial dimension. The extimate appears to be an exposure of one’s self to the world, which is not a revelation of the intimate, according to another definition proposed by Serge Tisseron (L’Intimité surexposée, 2001). Annie Ernaux speaks about her Journal du dehors (1993) as an outward projection of the self. Journal extime (2002) by Michel Tournier is punctuated only by the months of the year, which represents changing weather, seasons, and the effect of meteorology on the individual; more precisely speaking, a way for M. Tournier to bring his self face to face with the meteorological exteriority. The extimate could also be defined as a style of writing about the relationship between the individual and the outside, the contact of the self with the physical world and the social world. Extimate writing is a centrifugal motion. This motion is what makes a part of fictional writing significant for geography: it is neither a closed reflection on “moods” nor a de-subjectified description of the landscape’s exteriority. It represents the connection between the individual and the world with the self as a starting point.

32But referring to the extimate is not sufficient because fictional writing also integrates another motion, a centripetal one this time, from the world to the individual: what the world, “bringing into the world” does to the individual, for example, this deep despair or this intense jubilation (there is a fine line between the two) which results in the protagonist dropping down from the plane straight to his arrival in an unknown place. Fictional writing from this perspective makes the outside enter into the writing of the self.

33Fictional poetics allows this form of movement between the inside and the outside: on one hand, a confrontation of the self with the external world, an apprehension of the external world by the individual; on the other hand, an influence of the exterior on the self. The various possibilities of fictional writing allow it to give individuals a voice, to express their thoughts, to contemplate a subjective possession of the spaces. It is the notion of geographicity (as defined by Eric Dardel, a sensitive physical relationship between a human being and its terrestrial environment) that this fictional writing makes it possible to work upon. “The geographic space according to E. Dardel is thus mainly a lived space, that is, a tested and practiced space, a value-oriented space” (Besse, 2009). Traditionally this geography is often set in opposition to geographic science; it is also possible to reconcile the two by considering the former as a modality to elucidate the latter, the human experience of the earth as a path towards writing about the earth. When Budai is searching for clues to find his bearings, he helps to reflect on the notion of territory; when he moves into his hotel room, he examines inhabiting as a necessary practice for human existence.

Close to the ground

34Geographic knowledge can be apprehended as a point of view concerning the world, in the most literal sense, as the place from where things are seen and more metaphorically speaking, as an opinion on a given topic (Bouillon, Monnet, 2016). This point of view is frequently achieved by establishing a distance between the geographer and his topic of study. By thus putting the world at a distance, the geographer takes a step back, apprehends a space or a spatial situation in its entirety. The landscape photograph taken from a high point, illustrates rather well this manner of practicing geography (Desportes, 2005). It is a frequent reflex action (and one does not need to be a geographer for this) to wish to embrace an unknown city from a high point even before considering exploring it from below. Indeed, this is what Budai does when after having witnessed a strange service, he climbs up all the steps of a church to reach the top of a high tower. And, even though dusk prevents him from analyzing the surrounding landscape as effectively as he would have wished, he identifies a few landmarks, finds a few buildings that he had walked past during the day, and above all, makes a despairing observation that “the city spread over a plain into distances further than the eye could see. Whichever way he turned, there was no end to it” (Karinthy, 2008, p. 111).

35But it is the map, which probably expresses best how the reduction principle helps to put the world at a distance. The change of scale makes it possible to accommodate, a little like binoculars or a telescope, manage distance so that we gain more details to compensate for the loss of breadth of vision or vice versa. In this way, Budai also tries to build sense through distance. When during one of his wanderings, and more or less by chance, he finds himself in a room in the company of a prostitute, he is not looking for a paid relationship but for an exchange of maps: draw me a map of your country and I will draw you mine. He thus draws a few lines on a piece of paper, the outline of Europe, its major rivers, his native city on the banks of the Danube. But the girl does not understand, she does not speak the language of maps and more precisely, she does not need it.

36With his mapping project and his attempt to reach a high point, Budai practices geography; he wants to give a sense to this space. But most of the time, he lives it, he endures it; he is at the ground level. And it is perhaps this other point of view which is favored in fictional discourse and which may help to throw a different type of light on geographic knowledge. The Brazilian writer Luiz Ruffato writes: “The novelist’s topic of study is the Human Being immersed in the World.” [7] The novel is an alternative to the geographer’s dominant viewpoint, it reduces distance, goes to the heart of the beings in the world, of the individual immersed in the world. Budai wanders around in the city, writes about it in a chaotic manner through his wanderings, loses his way, finds it again, is carried away by moving crowds. The city space is then the city space according to Budai. It is his perspective, his spatial practice which, without any distance, at the level of the emotions, allows one to speak about his city.

A sensitive geography

37

He arrived in a wide square. A fine, cold rain was quietly falling, the sky just as murky here, just as impenetrable. Nor was the crowd thinner. He set out without any sense of where he was going and soon wandered into a market or shopping centre. There were people selling things everywhere, on stalls, on tables, even directly from the pavement. Salesmen were shouting, music playing, loudspeakers blaring. […] There was white fluffy candy-floss and little spicy sausages spluttering in fat but so many people were waiting to be served he thought he’d not get near enough to buy one.

38In a few lines, Karinthy mobilizes all the senses of his hero: the view of the opaque city, the unpleasant touch of the cold drizzle, the sound of hawkers’ voices and music at full volume, the smell and the taste of small grilled sausages. A city is a map, spaced apart views, descriptions, statistical data; it is also color, smells, sounds. Whatever we grasp through our senses shapes a city as clearly as its map.

39Geography invests the sensitive dimension of spaces prudently (Bochet, Racine, 2002) despite a “humanist” tradition of the discipline developed precisely by using literary texts. As is noted by Michel Collot, it is in literature that geographers find “the best expression for the concrete, affective and symbolic relationship which ties man to the places” (Collot, 2014, p. 10). For his part, Muriel Rosemberg focuses, by mentioning the narrator’s wanderings in Istanbul [8], on the “physical contact with the concreteness of the city” (Collot, 2012, p. 113). By doing so, she presents the market experience in a city, in particular, as the activity which puts the individual in contact with an environment in the most active and the most complex manner. The sociologist David Le Breton describes the walker as being “on the windward side of his intimate geographies” [9] (Collot, 2012, p. 49) by exposing his body to the elements, sounds, smells, textures, flavors and environments. Budai’s situation, his desire to get out of the urban labyrinth, forces him to visit the market frequently and it is through these senses that he draws a map of this city and tries to characterize the country in which it is situated. It is through these senses that he describes his environment, the sweetish flavor of the food, the almost always-grey skies, the cold humidity that penetrates him, the constant din of traffic jams, etc. The city is then apprehended as a sensitive environment depending on each one’s assessment. Apart from by measuring, mapping or writing about it in a scientific text, it would thus be possible to consider the city through the feelings that it inspires. We then shift from the senses to the emotions (Davidson et al., 2007). Liking a city, writes Paul B. Preciado, “is to fee the material borders between [one’s] body and its streets disappearing when we cross it” [10].