The Unbearable Lightness of the Impossible

“Münchhauseniads” in Seventeenth-Century Hungarian Oral Literature

Abstract

Szennay Kastélynak Könyve (The Book of the Szennay Castle) is an archival manuscript containing over 300 brief entries. Approximately two thirds of these date from 1683 to 1696, while the remaining third from 1777 to 1794. The manuscript was written by several hands and contains a diverse range of genres: for example, humorous sayings (dicta jocosa), tall tales, paradoxographical stories and even “Münchhauseniads”. Remarkably, most of the latter entered the “castle book” almost a century before their Western European versions were associated with the Baron, meaning that the texts eventually giving birth to the literary tradition of the Münchhauseniad were circulating in Hungarian orality as well. However, in Hungarian literature, these stories failed to transform into even an episodic narrative structure, as even at the end of the eighteenth century, absurd fiction remained hardly acceptable.