| Abstract | Sometimes, even the addition of a single syllable to public debate can have an explosive effect. In January 1989, Imre Pozsgay, the then Hungarian Minister of State, added the prefix nep- (popular) to the word felkeles (uprising) in a description of the Hungarian events of 1956. The previous official term had always been "counter-revolutionary events," though "uprising" had also been used. The uproar that followed his joining of these two terms was so powerful that a special meeting of the Hungarian Communist Party's Central Committee had to be called to restore calm. Before it was over, the "Pozsgay affair" had mobilized the entire populace and every political group over an historical definition and kicked reforms in that country into high gear. Rather than debate the merits of capitalism and communism, for two weeks the people of Hungary spoke of almost nothing else but "the meaning of 1956." It was during this time, in the dead of winter of 1989, that political debate boiled over some rim beyond which it could no longer be contained.
What this episode illustrates, I believe, is the manner in which political conflicts are often conflicts about memory as well as about "principle." Now some historiographers have gone so far as to suggest that "narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized `history,' has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority."(1) One need not agree with this extreme formulation to believe that these two topics are often connected. Hayden White draws this link through the reliance of narrative on the legal subject. But I think a more subtle, if less universal, link can be drawn through the action of narration itself. It is very hard to say how a particular story comes to have the social significance that, say, the Hungarian account of 1956 came to have. The hermeneutic tradition provides at least some clue with its suggestion that "Through its recitation, a story is incorporated into a community which it gathers together."(2) Here Paul Ricoeur is drawing on Martin Heidegger who suggests that narrative time is "from the outset, time of being-with-others."(3) A narrative supposes, at the very least, a speaker and a listener -- and more properly, a speaker and an audience. This implies that it is the narrative form itself that gathers listeners together, even if it is the substance of narrative which gives them a sense of, or reason for, being together. The communist account of 1956 gave the Party a sense of identity it would otherwise lack. But the non-communist account gave the people outside of the Party a story of themselves as the true inheritors of Hungarian political authority and allowed them to constitute themselves as an alternative to Party rule. The dissident narrative, besides being a challenge to authority, also served to gather together that "people" which would bring the challenge to authority. In exploring the role of historical memory in politics, then, we will also be exploring the power of narrative to gather together an audience that constitutes its identity through the narrative itself.
Pozsgay was ready for all such questions. He heaped criticism on almost the entire history of communist rule in Hungary for "narrow-mindedness," "sectarianism," "blunders" and the "rule of personality." Until this time, the Hungarian Party reformers had identified themselves with some tentative reforms that had begun in 1968 before being beaten back by conservatives. Now Pozsgay swept past that position with a broad indictment of the entire period of one-party rule from 1956 on:
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