Mágia historickej narácie
The magic of historical narration

On the "pseudo-historical" contemporary Hungarian novel

Summary/Abstract: The contribution explores contemporary Hungarian novels that critics have called “pseudo -historical” and which feature magical-realist elements. A poetics inspired by magical realism characterizes the later works of Miklós Mészöly. My textual analysis approaches are based on Tamás Bényei’s understanding of magical realism as a writing mode. My reading of László Darvasi’s novel The Legend of the Tear Jugglers, 1999 and László Márton’s novel trilogy Bro¬therhood (2001–2003) analyses how the methods of the magical-realist mode of writing lead to the current genre form of the historical novel, which reacts to the “problem of history” established also by the theoretical discourse, i.e. the questions of faithfulness/verifiability, the problems of narrativization of historical material, the ideological elements of focalization, the feasibility of approaches that understand historical narratives as imaginary (especially nation -oriented) grand narratives about the past. Magical realism must in this sense be understood as an inspiration, a wide repertory of text-making approaches useful for the otherness of literary processing of historical material that destructs the generic model.

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