Mór Jókai, a Contemporary of Pierre Ménard : Metafiction, Hypotyposis and Metalepsis in Jókai’s Prose of the 1880s

Hansági, Ágnes (2025) Mór Jókai, a Contemporary of Pierre Ménard : Metafiction, Hypotyposis and Metalepsis in Jókai’s Prose of the 1880s. DACOROMANIA LITTERARIA, 12. pp. 121-134. ISSN 2360-5189

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Abstract

In the world literary network of the second half of the 19th century, the Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai was a real “hub”, a node to which almost all the significant authors of the time were connected. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, for example, managed to reach the Russian literary audience with an imitation of Jókai. The plot of Jókaiʼs 1886 short story A ki holta után áll boszut [The One Who Takes Revenge After His Death] unfolds with the modern topic of the “burnt manuscript” also used by Ibsen, Hermann Broch, Mihail Bulgakov, Imre Kertész and Christoph Ransmayr. But this is not the only reason why it can be read as a 19th -century variant of Borgesʼ 1939 short story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. The narrator of Borgesʼs emblematic narrative sets himself the goal of reporting and bearing witness to Pierre Ménardʼs invisible oeuvre, since “there is not a single draft to bear witness to that yearslong labor”. Seven decades earlier, Jókaiʼs short novel was based on the same technique as Borgesʼ short story. The pseudo-summary, or “the simulated summary of an imaginary text” (Gérard Genette), makes the text of the short novel a hypertext whose hypotext is fictitious, i.e. a pseudo-hypotext. Jókaiʼs text is built from pseudo-hypotexts (letters, translations of poems), pseudosummaries which are embedded in hypotexts, self-quotations and identifiable cultural codes easily recognisable by the reader. The burnt manuscript, moreover, is already a device of metafiction in his short story A remete hagyománya [The Legacy of the Hermit], dated 1846, insofar as the embedded narrative is a pseudo-summary, the first-person narrator being the finder and annihilator of the hermitʼs manuscript. The embedded narrative is a re-scripturalisation. To relate Borges’ text to Jókai’s can be exonerated from the charge of readerly arbitrariness primarily by the fact that Jókai’s narrative is based on variations of metadiegetic transgressions, of fictional and figural forms of metalepsis, and of the metaleptic staging of the author. To quote Genette again, not only does “the author intervene in his own fiction”, but “his fiction also entangles itself in real life”.

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