Mészöly’s Migrant Mice, or Calculating Guests

Often read as an allegory of the Holocaust, Miklós Mészöly’s 1958 short story “Report on Five Mice” indeed is a story of total warfare and systematic extermination. But it is also a story of migration and settling, of escape and refuge-seeking, of the “invasion” of uninvited guests ‒ and not necessarily in an allegorical sense, as a fable of human suffering. The present analysis attempts to outline this dimension of the narrative. The minutely detailed prosaic description and point-of-view presentation of animal life shed critical light on the expropriatory gesture of fables (their sacrificial structure), while also highlighting another type of expropriation, namely, the implicit symbolism of naturalistic descriptions. The latter threat is shown to be at work both in the characters’ acts of calculation and the narrator’s act of counting. With an emphasis on singularity (as inspired by British sentimentalist poetry), the conclusion makes an effort to indicate the ways in which the notion of hospitality might be rethought.

keywords: animal migration, hospitality, calculation, counting, singularity