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NATIONAL IDENTITY AS A LITERARY QUESTION
or Polish-born writers making worldviews and stereotypes associated with
the gaweda compatible with modern thinking. Typically the writing styles
of Joseph Conrad? and Gombrowiczare paralleled to this 18 and 19*¬
century variety of Polish narrative. By comparison, in Hungarian literature a
move towards the anecdotal tradition can rather be discerned with authors
classified as postmodern, most notably in the case of Peter Esterhäzy (1950¬
2016).° At present, however, I am not focusing on the prosaic and poetic role
of this genre but, in line with the agenda of the conference, I will examine
the Hungarian anecdote as a builder and nurturer of national identity and
consciousness.
The anecdote, from this perspective, can easily be associated with a
form of expression evading modern literary forms, linked to the paradox
of conservative modernisation and, at the same time, highlighting the
connection between novels based on anecdotal episodes and postmodern
novels. A certain aspect of a literary transformation, more hidden than the
one in Poland, may spring to mind, demonstrating a variation of literary
modernisation evolving from the Hungarian tradition as an alternative
to following western patterns. In this way, the novels of Kalman Mikszath
(1847-1910) and Gyula Krtidy (1878-1933) may be more easily related to, for
example, those of Péter Esterhazy with his collection of anecdotes entitled
A Little Hungarian Pornography than to the style essentially regarded as
Hungarian modernity and represented by the first generation of Nyugat (Endre
Ady, Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi), whose ideal was the West-European
psychological novel. As a conseguence, this literary form, which was often
considered (especially by Ady) to be a reflection of a feudal, patriarchal world,
and the cultural traditions accompanying it can be placed beyond modernity,
in the world of a postmodern form of storytelling.
In our literary terminology, besides the term anecdote another word,
adoma (saying) may contribute to clarifying our definition. The term
adoma was coined by Janos Erdélyi in 1851, when he “translated”anecdote as
adoma in Hungarian in his study written for a collection entitled A Book of
Hungarian Proverbs.” In that period both terms were used simultaneously,
and were initially considered synonyms.
Marek Pacukiewicz: Cultural Aspects, ibid., 78.: “The digressive nature of much of Conrad’s
writing (fictional or otherwise) has often been linked to the traditional Polish gaweda, or
‘nobleman’s tale’, which ‘was particularly suited to the volatility of the Polish imagination’ —
an opinion shared by Polish writers for many, many years.”
Reviewing the position of the anecdote in Hungary and the history of its development:
Karoly Alexa: Anekdota, magyar anekdota (Anecdote, Hungararian Anecdote), in Bujdosé
mondatok (Exiled Sentences), Lakitelek, Antológia Kiadó, 2015.
János Erdélyi: Közmondásokrul (On Proverbs), in Nyelvészeti és népköltészeti, népzenei
írások (Writings on Linguistics, Folk Poetry and Folk Music), Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest,
1991, 180.
* All +