Tarrying Between Speech and Silence: Deferment and Disruption in Story of a Stammer

Abstract

This article explores the ‘minor’ aesthetics and politics of the stammer that operates through narrative resistance in Gábor Vida’s autofictional bildungsroman Story of a Stammer (2022). Set within Nicolae Ceaușescu’s oppressive Romanian communist regime, the Hungarian protagonist Gábor’s tale recounts his struggles with speech, silence, and stammering. The article reads the novel alongside Joshua St. Pierre’s critical history of dysfluency, and Giles Deleuze’s idea of the minor. It considers the stammer as a means of personal and political resistance, a form of counter-archive to cultural scripts and political mechanisms of dominant ‘truth-making,’ and as a gesture that complicates pre-established notions of agency and passivity.