Inventory of magic. Textual constructions of the unnatural in Hungarian postmodern fiction

Szolláth, Dávid (2018) Inventory of magic. Textual constructions of the unnatural in Hungarian postmodern fiction. Neohelicon. ISSN 0324-4652 (print), 1588-2810 (online)

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Abstract

Abstract This paper is about four contemporary Hungarian authors (Ádám Bodor, László Darvasi, Zsolt Láng, and Miklós Mészöly) whose novels are interpreted as magical realists by some critics due to the unnatural elements of story worlds and metafictional narrative techniques they use. The novels are comparable also in the way they create fictional worlds of a historical Central Europe depicting it as a borderland of cultural hybridity. The main objective is to discern various textual strategies and narrative procedures of “making magic” by using interpretative tools of magical realism, Todorov’s theory of the literature of fantastic, and concepts of unnatural narratology. It also aims to measure the capacity of resistance to naturalization of the different ways of making magic in narration, to assess the relation between the unnatural in fiction and the understanding of regional history, and to draw some more general insights regarding the novels’ modes of narration and generic structure.

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