Page 410 [410]
NATIONAL IDENTITY AS A LITERARY QUESTION
historicity and oral tradition. Henceforth I will call this version the factual
anecdote. It is a shorter narrative with characters living in historical memory,
using the form of a dialogue, ending with amusing conclusions and having no
author, rather just a collector. The other variety is a fictional component of
novels with a considerably more blurred connection to history, which came
to exist in Hungarian prosaic and poetic literature as “an episode of comic
modality”. For the sake of convenience, it will be called the fictional anecdote.
This interpretation is relatively unknown to Western scholars, so it is easier
for them to understand the type of Hungarian novel composed of fictional
anecdotes and classified as an “anecdotal novel” by comparing it with the
“composite novel”.®
In Hungarian culture the anecdote developed into a fundamental means of
expression approaching the status of a specific genre that had a major impact
on Hungarian fin de siécle literature. The dominant fictional prose of the
period can be characterised by the anecdote, a phenomenon giving rise to the
anecdotal novel. Such a novel mostly organises itself through episodes formed
anecdotally in an unaffected and playful tone, the plot being adventurous and
amusing, and related, one way or another, to history. Furthermore, it often
has some connection with national issues.
The composite novel differs from the anecdotal novel in that the story is less
organic, whereas the latter includes a mainline narrative to which minor stories
are linked, although not in a logical order with precedents or consequences.
The anecdotal novel is not necessarily related to national identity, although
anecdotes may have a factual character and strong historical references, in
which this connection is strong. However, the factual and fictional anecdote
frequently change position, so cultivating and affecting the national identity
as a function appears in the fictional variation, as will be illustrated in our
example.
It would appear Polish culture has created a similar formation, the gaweda.
The Poles, however, usually mention the Russian szkaz for comparison in
order to highlight the perceptional circle of this national literary genre*
3 The composite novel was accepted as a genre in the 20" century forming a conceptual
framework that can be applied tosimilar texts written before that time. The term comes from
Maggie Dunn - Ann Morris: The Composite Novel. The Short Story Cycle in Transition, New
York,Twayne Publishers, 1995, 2, who wanted to define the term short story cycle, relatively
popular in the 1970s, more precisely: “The composite novel is a literary work composed of
short texts that — thought individually complete and autonomous - are interrelated in a
coherent whole according to one or more organizing principles.”
Czeslaw Milosz (The History of Polish Literature, Berkely, Los Angeles, London, University
of California Press, 1983, 255.) wrote:
[The] Gaweda may be roughly defined as a loose, chatty form of fiction (not unlike
what the Russians call skaz) in which a narrator recounts episodes in highly stylized,
personal language. Both the language and the character of the storyteller are usually
those of an average, old-fashioned squire [...]. Episodic anecdotes taken from the life
+ 409 +