Meta-Borges: A Magyar Meditation on Masters, Maori and Meaning

ritic Tanacs Ferenc has described “Hajónapló” [Logbook] (1987), a short story written by Ottlik Géza, as “a Borgesian exercise in transfictionalizing certain obsessive paradoxes of national identity, authorship, writing and language” (168). Certainly, Ottlik seems to have faithfully adopted the skewed world vision, the penchant for linguistic invention and a mode of tongue-in-cheek historical (re)creation so characteristic of Borges. Despite these assurances, one might persist in asking what might Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the prolific master architect of fantastic literature, and the Hungarian author Ottlik Géza (1912-1990) whose most well-known work, the novel Iskola a hatáton [School on the Frontier] (1959) which dealt in much starker realities, have in common? I suggest that while extra-literary similarities certainly lay the groundwork for what will later be recognized by Tanacs as the stylistic affinity between the two writers, Ottlik will, in a Meta-Borgesian flight of fancy, move beyond the thematics of the master.