The collective in the Hungarian narrative tradition and narrative studies

Abstract

Although Gerard 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 proza stilusformai [Stylistic forms in the Hungarian modernist prose], Tankonyvkiado, 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 Kalman Mikszath’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.