Abstract
Although Gérard Genette mentioned the possibility of a collective narrator as a version of the narrator as witness only in a footnote of his Narrative discourse, narrative theory started showing vivid interest in collective narratives and narration about two decades ago. This paper looks at a kind of Hungarian narrative tradition in this context. In that tradition the collective voice of a community is frequently heard, a voice that usually cannot be attached to any particular speaker, but expresses a collective knowledge, the collective interpretation and evaluation of events and persons. Herczeg (A modern magyar próza stílusformái [Stylistic forms in the Hungarian modernist prose], Tankönyvkiadó, Budapest, 1975) coined the expression “communis opinio” to describe this narrative tool, and it was welcomed by some Hungarian narratologists, criticised by others. This usage of “communis opinio” has nothing to do with common sense; it rather explains opinions that do not belong to just one person, but to a community. The paper discusses Herczeg’s ideas and describes the related phenomena in Kálmán Mikszáth’s The good people of Palocz, where the interplay of various collective voices creates not only the representation of a collective mind (although Palmer’s results can be very fruitfully applied here), but also the impression that the community disposes over a collective treasury of stories, any piece of which can be told by and to members of the community when the occasion of storytelling is given.
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Notes
The 2017 second issue of Narrative might be regarded as summarizing the recent research in this direction.
The other types are “multiperson narratives, in which the narration fluctuates between individual and plural references,” and proper we-narratives, in which collective subjectivity defines the dominant mode of narration” (ibid.).
Indexes of a collective narrative are as follows: title; repeated list of members of the group; collective verbs; the group being mentioned first, only then and accidentally the individuals; the individual appears only as a member of the group and individual actions are evaluated from the viewpoint of the collective (Margolin 2000, 495–496). Margolin's ideas of the representation of collective consciousness, which resulted in the statement that not marginal collective narratives are rare, has been severely criticised by Marcus (2008a, 48–52).
Frigyes Karinthy's (1917) short story “Barabbás” offers an excellent illustration of this. While all the individuals cry the name of Jesus, the crowd together cries Barrabas, and while Jesus recognises all the faces individually, the crowd's collective face is evil and arrogant.
In the case of authoritative discourse it seems a paradox, but after analysing one single example of real authoritative first-person-plural fiction, namely Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two thousand seasons (139–140), he turns to pseudo-authoritative narratives, like Zamyatin's We.
For a bibliography of discourse analyses of couples' narrative performance see Fludernik (2017, 156, n. 1).
Bekhta's survey of possible we-references is rather similar to the options Susan Lanser lists for “communal voice:” “a singular form in which one narrator speaks for a collective [I + they], a simultaneous form in which a plural ‘we’ narrates [we-narrative proper], and a sequential form in which individual members of a group narrate in turn [multiperson narratives]” (Lanser 1992, 21).
All the excerpts from Herczeg (and István Tömörkény quoted by Herczeg) are my translations. “Folkish writers” is a frustrated attempt in translating “népi írók,” which is the name of a loose group of Hungarian authors in the twentieth century who ventured to represent (both politically and stylistically) the lower class rural population. In this terminology the term “folk” is in opposition both to “elites” and “city dwellers”.
Herczeg does not make a difference between author and narrator.
The criterion of small town setting also applies to Middlemarch and the town of “A rose for Emily”, one of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County stories, which together represent the reality of a rather backward, rural area. A big city is not to be represented as having a social mind (pace Margolin 2001, 596–597).
Originally published in 1882 in Hungarian. A complete English translation was published in 1890 without any indication of the name of the translator(s) (Mikszáth 1890), a big format book with color pictures, which is hardly accessible nowadays. The name of the author was printed as Coloman Mikszáth. The title on the hard cover was The good peopla of Pawlocz, while inside The good poeple of Palöcz. Only six of the fifteen stories are printed in a relatively recent bilingual (German and English) edition (Mikszáth 1993), which is also available online; the title is The good people of Palocz.
Sophie Timár in “Sophie Timár's widowhood,” Joseph Bizi in “The little boots,” Stephen Filcsik in “Heathen Master Filcsik,” and Clara Vér in “The marvel of Bágy” and “The horses of poor John Gélyi”.
Translation modified.
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This work was supported by the National Research Development and Innovation Office of Hungary (Grant No. 112415).
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Hajdu, P. The collective in the Hungarian narrative tradition and narrative studies. Neohelicon 45, 431–443 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-018-0453-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-018-0453-x