HUNGARIAN STUDIES 15. No. 2. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [2001]

Sándor Hites: Reluctant Supplements: Historical Novel, Historiography, and Historiographical Metafiction

HISTORICAL NOVEL historical metafiction, no doubt, altered the way we treat historical discourses. However, the altered conditions also remove the vantage point from which the Romantic historical novel can be judged, understood or articulated. At this stage we are provided a framework within which new readings of the genre can take place. IV. A Short Genealogy of Genealogy Finally, as a conclusion to the article and in order to illustrate the continuities between the Romantic and the Postmodern versions of the genre, I shall compare one of the recent works of the contemporary Hungarian historical fiction and a novel of the romantic kind. The focus of this short analysis is reduced to a single aspect. The issues of genealogy as a subject matter and as a poetical structure are only relevant here. The recent novel of Péter Esterházy, one of the best-known contemporary Hun­garian writers, is Harmónia caelestis (2000). Some say, that it even introduces, as a literary manifestation of and a literary response, a new era in cultural conditions, reaching beyond Postmodernism. (See the excellent reviews recently written about the novel: Balassa, Szegedy-Maszák, Thomka.) Successfully synthesizing the microhistorical orientation of the 1970s-1980s and the achievements of the metahistorical approaches to the textuality of history of the 1990s, Esterházy jux­taposes the devices of the historical novel and those of the family novel to com­bine personal and national histories in quite exciting fictional processes. Rethink­ing family history has played a significant role in recent investigations concerning the micro-history of past events. To change the level of consideration from macro­history to the experience of everyday life has remarkably changed not merely the agents by whom history is made, but the very notion of what one might call his­tory has been altered as it is being told by voices never listened to before. How­ever, in the case of Harmónia caelestis, it is not merely a shift from macro to micro level that brings about a peculiar view of history. In the author's case, fam­ily stories have greater import. As it is known, Esterházy was born into a signifi­cant Hungarian aristocratic family. His family's history in the twentieth century, as the second part of the book {Egy Esterházy család vallomásai; Confessions of an Esterházy-family) depicts it, is characterized by the sometimes gradual, some­times sudden decrease and loss of the once gained power and influence. Esterházy, to prove that the loss of political power does not necessarily coincide with that of narrative skills, employs the narratives of, about, or by his once powerful ances­tors from the last four-five centuries to connect the history of Hungary with the narrator's personal life-story. One of the main characteristics of Esterházy's art is his devotion to implicit quoting. Intertextuality in historical writing always implies the question of au-

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