Page 414 [414]
NATIONAL IDENTITY AS A LITERARY QUESTION
While the English definition (“a narrative of a detached incident, or of
asingle event, told as being in itself interesting and striking”’’) is considerably
more general and may not imply a historical outlook, the factual anecdote
in the Hungarian usage is crystalized as a short narrative of comic modality
(being funny, having a punch line if you like) with clear reference to history
including real historical persons.
The term depends on the differences in meaning between anecdote and
adoma in the Hungarian language. In English, further differentiation is made
regarding fait divers, which is a brief story, such as those typically found in
some French newspapers, that is sensational and lurid. Hungarian, however,
is unable to interpret fait divers as an anecdote, and what is more, it cannot
accept it even as an adoma, precisely because it lacks a historical outlook.
The translator of Roland Barthes’s basic study in which fait divers is analysed
explained why he had kept this particular expression: it is “sometimes
translated by the journalist’s term filler. By retaining the French expression,
emphasis is placed onthe phenomenon itself than on its function for the
composition." For the Hungarian mind, however, it is much more connected
to the daily news sheet (filler). Ihe French expression, which appeared in the
middle of the 19" century, is becoming increasingly popular in European
languages as a synonym for anecdote.’ This is not the case in Hungarian,
as it cannot disregard historical references, and perhaps partly because the
terminological problem is made clearer by distinguishing the anecdote from
the adoma.
Fait divers is construed by Roland Barthes as a closed structure containing
intrinsic information, which accordingly does not fit into other contexts. He
functions of memory if it is related to a concept of identity. While knowledge has no form
and is endlessly progressive, memory involves forgetting. It is only by forgetting what lies
outside the horizon of the relevant that it performs an identity function.
2 Lionel Gossman quotes the headword of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Lionel
Gossman: Anecdote and History, History and Theory, Vol. 42, No. 2, May 2003, 148.
4 Roland Barthes: Structure of the Fait-Divers, in Critical Essays, translated by Richard
Howard, Northwest University Press, 1972, 185.
15 “The term fait-divers [...] appears to have no equivalent in other languages, which simply
borrow the French term. What is now understood by fait divers used to be designated in
French as ‘anecdotes’, ‘nouvelles curieuses, singuliéres’ or ‘canards’. Lionel Gossman:
Anecdote and History, Ibidem, 150; It is likely, however, that its meaning depends on different
contexts, so it can not always and everywhere be regarded as the equivalent of the anecdote.
Domonique Jullien, not so unanimously, refines the correlation between them: “the anecdote
and fait divers, while not identical (the fait divers belongs to a more specialized cultural
context, that of the daily press with its hierarchy of bigger vs. smaller news items), obviously
have significant overlap” (Dominique Jullien: Anecdotes, Fait Divers and the Literacy. Sub
Stence, A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, Issue 118, Vol. 39, No. 1 (The Anecdote),
2009, 66) Gossman presumes the French term appeared in 1863 (Lionel Gossman: Anecdote
and History, Ibid., 150), while Dominique Jullien puts it earlier, and referring to Dominique
Kalifa’s studies she names Theophile Gautier as the first user in 1838 (Dominique Jullien:
Anecdotes, Ibid., 75.).
* 413 +