PÉTER HAJDU

HUNGARIANS’ NATIONAL FERVOURFOR ANECDOTES

Anecdotes play some role in the self-image or self-representation of Hungarians. This pa-per will analyse the history of Hungarian discourse on anecdotes. In the nineteenth cen-tury some theoreticians thought that not only do Hungarian anecdotes aptly characterisethe nation, but the Hungarians’ national fervour for anecdotes also forms an importanttrait of the national character. Some representatives of a “modernist” movement in Hun-garian literature regarded the anecdotal character of Hungarian literature as its decisiveshortcoming.

Anecdote, this notion plays a rather special role in Hungarian discourse both on litera-ture and national character. On the following pages I am going to investigate the de-velopment of this notion in nineteenth-century discourse.

Mór Jókai, who was the most popular novelist in nineteenth-century Hungary andwho can be considered as the founder of modern Hungarian prose style, had a greatimpact on the general views of Hungarian history and national character. By the 1850she was showing fervent interest in anecdotes. He undertook a wide-ranging effort tocollect anecdotes. People who sent him an anecdote would receive a free copy of hisjournal Üstökös [Comet], and by this means he was able to comb every region of thecountry for such stories (Dömötör 194–197; H. Törõ 838). After collecting for someyears he published several collections, among which the most important was The An-ecdotes of the Hungarian Nation, first published in 1856 in Pest, but only a year laterpublished again in a new edition “enlarged with 150 new anecdotes”. This book wasso popular that it had appeared in fifteen editions by 1914. Collections of anecdotesoccupied considerable space in Jókai’s occasional or temporary journals as well.1

This activity was so important for him that on the 30th of January 1860, when he be-came a member of the Hungarian Academy, he discussed the topic of anecdote in hisinaugural lecture A magyar néphumorról [On the folk humour of the Hungarians]. Al-though the lecture seems to summarise his experience of collecting anecdotes, Jókai

0324–4652/$20.00 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest© 2005 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Springer, Dordrecht

Neohelicon XXXII (2005) 1, 121–127

1 See A Nagy Tükör (1856–58) and Kokas Márton albuma (1858).

Péter Hajdu, Institute for Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Ménesi út 11-13,H-1118 Budapest, Hungary; E-mail: phajdu@iti.mta.hu

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later rewrote his life story, and he antedated both his membership in the Academy andthat lecture to 1850 (Jókai 1883, 132), to make the text seem the theoretical foundationof his later collecting activities.

A romantic attitude based on Herder’s insights impregnated the lecture: Jókai re-garded the anecdotes as manifestations of the Hungarian popular mind (volksgeist),and therefore they seemed worthy of critical attention. The central role of the prob-lems of national character in his reasoning was indicated by the very first sentence:“Humour is a characteristic of liberal and enlightened nations exclusively” (Jókai1968, 335). The first part of the lecture contained a historical overview, which sug-gested that humour had existed since very ancient times; liberalism and enlightenmenttherefore do not seem to appear historical phenomena in this context but eternal fea-tures belonging to the essence of a nation. Some nations “like to tell the truth” (Jókai,ibid.), and if it is not overtly possible, they make jokes. Consequently, there must alsobe other kinds of nations, which are not supposed to like to tell the truth. Such nationsare the Chinese and the Caribbean peoples, Jókai says. It is hardly surprising that Hun-garians belong to the enlightened nations.

If a demand that truth be pronounced is rooted in the mystic and unchangeabledepth of volksgeist, how can it be related to the contingencies of the political establish-ment? In the tales of the Thousand and One Nights some basic humoristic ideas mightbe detected, Jókai thinks; but only in the world of the nomadic Arabs, on the waste-lands that have no ruler. With a monarch around no trace of humour can be found:“easy leisure is not for those who are willing to prostrate themselves, and eunuchs donot know jokes” (Jókai 1968, 336). It is not, however, the political systems that influ-ence the national mind and therefore the faculties for humour. The causal connectiongoes the other way: the political establishment is a manifestation of the volksgeist, justlike the sense of humour. Nomads, who like freedom, live without rulers, and theyhave a sense of humour. Other nations prefer living in servitude; they have no demandof telling the truth; they like to tell flattering lies to their master. Such nations obvi-ously cannot have any sense of humour.

A characterisation of nations can hardly be neutral in terms of values. The systemof evaluation can be best seen in the example of the Arabs. The demand of freedom isnot only associated with manhood, but also with the wholeness of a man; the otherpole of the dichotomy is the mutilated, the one who is deprived of his virility. An over-view of the counter-examples suggests that humour is a European phenomenon; itshistory began with “the free nation of the Greeks”, and I have the suspicion that the ex-ceptional appearance of the nomadic Arabs in the list of nations with a sense of hu-mour can be explained by their similarity to the ancestors of the Hungarians. Jókaidoes not say explicitly that the intrinsic love of freedom, so characteristic of the Hun-garians, goes back to the times they were riding around in infinite wastelands; but hedoes declare that Attila the Hun had a sense of humour, and it is not a coincidence at allthat the Székely, a Hungarian ethnic group of Eastern Transylvania, who were tradi-tionally regarded as direct descendants of the Huns, “are the most witty people in ournation” (Jókai 1968, 344).

In Jókai’s opinion, however, a nation can be characterised not only by its sense ofor lack in humour, but also by the type of humour, if it has any. In the Romantic perioda volksgeist that had survived all the historical motions without any change was sup-posed to be found in the folklore, especially in folk songs and folk tales (cf. Bisztray225–228). Such pieces of oral literature were widely collected, and the ideologicalpresuppositions contributed to the high aesthetic evaluation of the collected material.Jókai extended this activity of collecting to the anecdotes, which he had defined as thegenre of the nation’s self-reflection. He thinks that an anecdote is a story that works asa synecdoche and characterises the life of the whole nation, or at least a part of it.

No description of a nation can draw so true a picture of its life, character and, most important,ideas as the picture a nation draws of itself in its anecdotes.

Every anecdote is a complete story that characterises an individual, a class, a race, a histori-cal age, and sometimes a whole nation. Travesty is possible in every literary genre, except theanecdote; if an anecdote is taken from the life of another nation, it is always obvious. It is alsoimpossible to transfer an anecdote to a different age. And to create a new one, which has notreally happened, is very difficult (Jókai 1968, 343).

Jókai does not seem to make any distinction between story and story telling. Col-lectors of folk songs and folk tales rarely discussed the problem, of how much thetexts were transformed during the process of writing down and editing, and how muchthey were adapted to the demands of high culture (Williams 32). In a similar way,Jókai completely disregarded the questions if the stylistic and narrative formations heinevitably added to the texts edited in his journals and collections influenced the directmanifestations of the volksgeist, or if there was any difference between something thathappened and the perception or narration of that happening. We can see the idea of thetransparent language working. Only what has really happened in the life of a nationcan become an anecdote, and when a nation draws a picture of itself in the anecdotes,it is both doing and telling. A nation can be characterised by everything that has hap-pened to it, which is not only a metonymy (history determines the present), but also asynecdoche because every action can figure for the whole history. And a narrativeguarantees a direct approach to the actions.

At first sight Jókai’s claim that anecdotes cannot be translated seems surprising be-cause it is a well-known fact that all around Europe collections of anecdotes containthe variations of the same set of stories since the Renaissance period (György 14–22and passim). However, he does not deny that translation is practically possible; heonly says that one will always notice the otherness or rather the strangeness of thetranslated anecdotes. Let us suppose that the Hungarian volksgeist or national charac-ter can be deduced from a complete collection of Hungarian anecdotes. In this case noforeign element can be noticed in the material that is the base of the deduction. There-fore, I think one can notice the foreign elements only by intuition: every member ofthe nation shares the volksgeist, and through that one can differentiate between famil-iar and alien.

On the basis of the Hungarian anecdotes Jókai formulated some general conclu-sions. He thought that Hungarians had an especially good sense of humour (probably

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because they loved freedom so much and they were very enlightened), and they wereextremely loveable.

So rich and so special a talent for humour, as the one the Hungarians have, is very rare amongthe nations of the world.

It is in these anecdotes where the spirit of the nation is most clearly manifested. And thosewho cannot come to know the Hungarians from the anecdotes have rather weak intelligence,and those who cannot come to love them have evil hearts (Jókai 1968, 347).

Jókai advertised such ideas in a country that was trying to face the failure of thegreat enterprise of establishing a nation state. In 1849 Hungary lost its constitution,political integrity and the traditional institutions of the local governments. In this situ-ation the idea that a valuable volksgeist exists eternally and independently from thehistorically changing political circumstances of the nation’s life can be considered asa cure for trauma and depression. One can understand why it is exactly the Germans inJókai’s reasoning who figure as the usual counter-example, or as the other of the na-tional character exemplified in the Hungarian anecdotes.

Reading Jókai’s declarations on the popular mind and on popular humour one caneasily have the impression that he associates anecdotes with the peasants. It is a com-monplace in nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalistic discourse that the villagesconserve the original characteristics of the nation, while the towns are exposed to for-eign influence. This idea seems connected with the idea of a national kind of humouralso in the title of a book by Kálmán Mikszáth: The Real Humorists. The book, pub-lished in 1879, during the early part of Mikszáth’s career, contains a collection of es-says and sketches on the various sources of popular humour. The real humour is thatof the people in the villages. In 1898 Béla Tóth started publishing the six volumes ofthe Treasury of Hungarian Anecdotes, and he approached the topic in a different way.He regarded the anecdote, which, however, might reach down to lower social strata, asthe intellectual achievement of the Hungarian gentry (Tóth 1,7). The idea that the an-ecdote actually rose from the middle classes became rather popular around the turn ofthe century, and Jókai’s text actually allows such an interpretation as well:

Those who work in the fields usually make the working hours shorter through mocking eachother; they have a clear judgement to see the weaknesses of the more powerful, and they liketo tell or hear innocuous jokes. – In middle class entertainment witty ideas follow each other;one anecdote attracts another; sometimes they flow until morning in an unbroken chain[mixed metaphors in the original]; serious political discussions have given birth to the mostwitty anecdotes (Jókai 1968, 347).

Popular humour, being a kind of manifestation of the volksgeist, imbues all the so-cial strata. In the case of peasants, however, we read phrases like mocking, jokes,making fun of each other, while anecdotes are mentioned exclusively in connectionwith the middle classes. In the period of lawless absolutism Jókai advertised extensivenational unity, as he interpreted the history of the revolution and the war of independ-ence through a narrative of the great national union. Therefore, the differences be-tween the social classes can appear only in implicit suggestions. Although he accepted

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many ideas of Jókai’s on the nature of anecdotes, Béla Tóth was to explain them in de-tail. He considered the anecdote as a manifestation of the volksgeist, and a synecdochethat expresses the nation’s historical experience. He thought that the synecdoche is aspecial characteristic of the worldview of an eastern nation.

We Hungarians are a nation that likes anecdotes. This is a feature of our eastern morals thathas remained intact (Tóth 1,5).

We look for the big in the small pieces, and we find it there: history in an anecdote, millionsin one particular, a century in one single person. This moral quality is our eastern heritage,which is imprinted in our soul (Tóth 1,6–7).

Béla Tóth considers the habit of telling anecdotes also a Hungarian speciality,while Jókai only thought that Hungarian anecdotes characterised the Hungarians.Therefore he finds the synecdoche a characteristically Hungarian strategy of cogni-tion; Hungarians (or easterners in general) do not think in abstract general schemes,but they consider the whole in every single portion.

The anecdotes contain our nation’s complete worldview; and our avidity for anecdotes is amost telling feature of our national character (Tóth 1,8).

Other nations use philosophical systems. We tell anecdotes […] We are an eastern nation:in a morsel we are able to find the whole, the truth, the power, the man (Tóth 1,8–9).

This extreme determinism that contradicts everyday experience explains that thesocial embedding of the anecdote “that it belongs to the ruling classes” cannot be acci-dental; it must be interpreted also as a manifestation of the volksgeist. In Tóth’s con-servative reasoning a basically hierarchical society with no transgression betweenpeople and gentlemen, which is legitimised by a fair and effective division of culturalactivities, is also an adequate manifestation of the Hungarian volksgeist, i.e., part ofthe eastern heritage.

The unity of the Hungarian volksgeist, unbroken in all the centuries, the Hungarian geniusmanifests itself in the strange reciprocity between our folk poetry and anecdotes. We gentle-men have admired the tales, the songs and the music of the people since the moment weopened our eyes and ears; the people, however, learn the anecdotes of those who know Latin(Tóth 1,7).

Béla Tóth’s ideas do not represent the totality of the turn-of-the-century Hungariandiscourse on anecdotes. An anonymous reviewer subjected them to very severe criti-cism. He found Tóth’s ideas comically exaggerated; he emphasised that other Euro-pean nations also like anecdotes, and he considered the social concept of the anecdotesas cultural productions of the upper classes basically false; he also pointed out that ahuge proportion of the texts in the Treasury of Hungarian Anecdotes are not anecdotesat all, which follows from the collection’s intention to tell the complete Hungarian his-tory (—l 151–153).

Not only the notion of anecdote is formed or transformed even during the twentiethcentury, but also the value judgements attached to it show extreme differences. BélaTóth’s collection has enjoyed terrific and enduring success. A series of enlarged,

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abridged, or re-elaborated editions, and also some continuations were published dur-ing the twentieth century. Many collectors believe in the cognitive potentials of theanecdotes. Géza Kenedi, for example, emphasised that his anecdotes had really hap-pened, and they had been accurately written down, and that they mirrored the wholehistorical period as synecdoche:

I would be pleased if my readers recognised the age they live in with me in the narrative of mychronicle (Kenedi 3).2

Many authors, however, tend to reject the anecdote. Endre Ady wrote an invectiveagainst anecdotic literature associated with Kálmán Mikszáth that is not interested inthe problems of the Hungarian society, and offers no more than superficial entertain-ment.

The patron of Hungary’s little literature is St. Anecdote. In the western countries the art of lit-erature has overcome the anecdote after weighty struggles. (…) A real writer must representthe wholeness of Human Life there. Funny morsels will do here (Ady 8).

Ady categorically denied the synecdoche that provided a base of estimation for theanecdote in the nineteenth century. The part cannot supply for the whole, and the lifeof a society cannot be displayed in a minor event. In Ady’s reasoning I consider thelack of the idea of national character as most important. There is nothing especiallyHungarian about the anecdote, since it must have been overcome also in the West, andit displays no volksgeist.

Due to his succinct formulations Ady’s paper has been quoted many times as repre-senting this counter-discourse on anecdotes. Zoltán Ambrus’s review article onMikszáth’s novel Saint Peter’s Umbrella advertised rather similar ideas more than tenyears earlier. Ambrus created an opposition between the representation of man and so-ciety in West-European literatures and the “naive” stories by Jókai and Mikszáth thathe calls “grandmother’s fairy tales” (Ambrus 822). He wants these authors to discussor explain the most important and urgent problems of their society because of theirpersonal authority. Ambrus wrote of “those who can discuss any topic with author-ity,” and Ady declared: “It is terribly important how a popular writer, who has influ-ence, explains society and human beings.”

Ambrus thought that these major authors selected playful subjects to sustain theirpopularity: “Seriousness and profundity are not popular. People do not want trage-dies; people want anecdotes.” The way Ambrus uses the word ‘people’ implies the re-jection of the whole Herderian discourse that was so characteristic of Jókai and his fol-lowers. The notion of the anecdote becomes a symbol of everything that the literatureof a modern Hungary has to break with: superficiality and frivolity on the one hand,and persistence in a provincial nationalism that seems dated in comparison with West-ern Europe on the other. As Endre Ady wrote: “This anecdotic literature fits in withfeudal Hungary anyway.”

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2 The title of this “chronicle” is Anecdotes from the Public Life in Hungary.

REFERENCES

—l (1900): “A magyar anekdotakincs” [The Tresaury of Hungarian Anecdotes] in Budapesti Szemle(101): 151–154.

Ady, Endre (1906): “Egy kis irodalom: Párisi levél” [Something about Literature: A Letter fromParis] in Budapesti Napló 11/24. August: 8.

Ambrus, Zoltán [“Tiborcz”] (1895): “Szent Péter, az esernyõje és még valami” [St. Peter, His Um-brella, and Something else] in A Hét (6): 821–822.

Bisztray, George (2002): “Awakening Peripheries: The Romantic Redefinition of Myth and Folk-lore” in Angela Esterhammer, ed. Romantic Poetry. Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins,225–248.

Dömötör, Sándor (1932): “Jókai adoma-gyûjtése” [Jókai Collecting Anecdotes] in DebreceniSzemle (6): 194–197.

György, Lajos (1934): A magyar anekdota története és egyetemes kapcsolatai: Kétszázötvenvándoranekdota – Az anekdota forrásai. [History and International Relations of the HungarianAnecdotes: 250 International Anecdotes and Their Sources] Budapest: Stádium.

H. Törõ, Györgyi (1968): “Jegyzetek” [Notes] in Jókai összes mûvei Cikkek és beszédek 5.1850–1860. II. [Jókai’s Complete Work, Essays 1850–1860], ed. H. Törõ Györgyi. Budapest:Akadémiai Kiadó, 449–702.

Jókai, Mór (1883): “Negyven év visszhangja” [Fourty Years] in A Jókai jubileum és a nemzetidíszkiadás története. Nemzeti Kiadás, vol. 100, Budapest: Révai, 118–133.

Jókai, Mór (1968): “A magyar néphumorról” [On the Hungarian Folk Humor] in Jókai összes mûveiCikkek és beszédek 5. 1850–1860. II. [Jókai’s Complete Work, Essays 1850–1860], ed. GyörgyiH. Törõ. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 335–351.

Kenedi, Géza (1913): Anekdoták a magyar közéletbõl [Anecdotes from the Public Life in Hungary].Budapest: Athenaeum.

Tóth, Béla (1898–1903): Magyar anekdotakincs 1–6 [The Treasury of Hungarian Anecdotes]. Bu-dapest: Singer és Wolfner.

Williams, G. A. (1988): “Romanticism in Wales” in Roy Porter and Mikulaš Teich eds, Romanti-cism in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 9–36.

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