Folklore stylized into a world view
Language and style in Áron Tamási’s incomplete trilogy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18349/MagyarNyelv.2018.3.302Keywords:
folklore-linguistics, magical realism, Transylvanian pawkiness, folklorisitic world view, extended realityAbstract
The paper centres on Áron Tamási’s Jégtörő Mátyás (Matthias the Icebreaker, 1935), a novel that both its writer and several contemporaries thought was his most significant work. After the success of his Ábel Trilogy, Tamási started writing another trilogy that remained incomplete, however: only Jégtörő Mátyás and Ragyog egy csillag (A Star is Shining, 1938) were completed. The two novels are linked to one another by their conception, background, and characters, but there are important differences, too, between Jégtörő Mátyás with its folkloristic nature and its reaching back to Asian influences (Buddhism) and Ragyog egy csillag centring around popular religiousness and ethics. Taken together, however, the two novels are characterised by a totally specific “magical realism”. The framework of the present folklore-linguistic analysis is given by (i) the folk-tale character and (ii) the vernacular parlance of the two novels, as well as (iii) the folklore tradition they follow, and (iv) the transcendence of folklore in them. More particularly, aspects like the following are traced down: spirits in animal form, speaking beasts, helpful spirits, popular religiousness; Transylvanian pawkiness, set similes, set phrases, proverbs, dialect words, eye dialect, grammatical constructions, name giving; witches, wisps, taboo words, nakedness (eroticism), objects. All these factors together make up an unparalleled folkloristic world view, an “extended reality” in Tamási’s own words, laden with the writer’s always positive sense of mission, the philosophy of serenity.
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