A Europe Full of Dunces : The Neo-Abderas in Central Europe or the Concession to Triviality
Une Europe pleine de ploucs, Les Nouvelles-Abdères en Europe centrale ou la concession à la trivialité
Résumé
European context. One of its exemplifications originates from German Aufklärung writer Christoph Martin Wieland, author of
The Abderites (1774), which argument was to be adapted in the first decades of the 19th century in other modern national contexts and languages : these ‘ Neo-Abderas’ are the German Krähwinkel, Hungarian Peleske, Czech Kocourkov, Polish Ciemnogród, and so forth. This article scrutinizes the constellation of these acclimatizations and variations in Vormärz Central Europe. It aims at delineating a corpus of texts, especially in the field of the farce (in German, of course, from Kotzebue to Nestroy, but also in the cases of the Slovak writer Ján Chalúpka and Serb Jovan Sterija Popović), and of the humorous writings from heroicomic poems to the proses to be found in the nascent satirical press, mainly in Hungarian (József Gvadányi and József Gaál), Polish (Ignacy Krasicki), Czech (Josef Jaroslav Langer and Josef Kajetán Tyl but also František Jaromír Rubeš). Modes and processes of caricatural representations are analyzed in connection with the Neo-Abderas, a significant step of the satirical tradition, which has been so far unfairly neglected by critics. They will be apprehended in two linked dimensions : as a socio-political ‘ anti-myth’, since the neoabderitan comic can be seen as the systemic counterpart to a ‘ serious’ discourse on national identities, but also as an aesthetical temptation : the triviality they carry compels writers to kick into their own romantic pathos, anticipating the taste for kitsch and plebeian style in literary practices.