HUNGARIAN STUDIES 17. No. 2. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [2003]
Péter Hajdu: The Double Chronotope in Kálmán Mikszáth's Novel The Siege of Beszterce
THE DOUBLE CHRONOTOPE IN KÁLMÁN MIKSZÁTH'S NOVEL THE SIEGE OF BESZTERCE PÉTER HAJDÚ Institute of Literary Studies, HAS, Budapest Hungary The paper approaches to Mikszáth's novel as a dialogic structure, a kind of double plot novel. The plots of the first and second chapter with different setting and personage meet in the third chapter and start coalescing. But these different plots represent two different worlds where also the workings of time is different and the human activity has different dynamics. The paper discusses in some detail the possibility of the analysis of time in fiction, since the scholarly discourse on the topic seems to deny the possibility that time can work in different ways in fictional worlds and describes the specialities of fictional time as anomalies of narration. The encounter of the worlds in Mikszáth's novel is represented as a fight with no real winner, which can be regarded as a sort of dialogue. Keywords: Hungarian literature, nineteenth-century novel, Kálmán Mikszáth, narratology, time, multiplot novel, fictionality, dialogue Kálmán Mikszáth is nowadays regarded as a major representative of the beginning modernism in Hungarian prose writing. This is a rather new phenomenon, since his work was previously interpreted in terms of a late "critical realism" that not only preceded the modernist literary revolution of the journal Nyugat but also ran contrary to the main characteristics of the so-called precursors of Nyugat. Mikszáth's experiments in the parataxis of two stories, which he was doing both in shorter and longer texts in the 1880s and 1890s, also can be regarded as a modernist break with linear story telling and unitary plot. 1 I think his novels Beszterce ostroma [The Siege of Beszterce] and Szent Péter esernyője [St. Peter's Umbrella], which he wrote one after the other in 1894 and 1895, can be classified as such experiments. In both novels we find a shift in story telling at the end of the "First Part". With the beginning of the "Second Part" the whole story told in the "First Part" disappears, and a new story begins with different characters, in a different setting, and in a time one cannot relate to the time of the first story. This phenomenon might embarrass the readers; the paratext "Second Part" clearly suggests that what will follow is the continuation of the same novel, which raises ex- Hungarian Studies 17/2 (2003) 0236-6568/2003/S20M © 2003 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest