Andras Albert, Hungarian Storyteller

In a first-season episode of “Castle,” Martha tells her son Richard, the bestselling mystery writer, “Research doesn’t pay the bills.”  She’s certainly correct, as publishers pay Fiction writers not for their research, but based upon sales figures.  Nor do readers care how much research a writer does.  Their sole concern is how entertaining they find his or her novels.  Yet writers need inspiration, and the stories they write need grounding.  So research, in one form or another, seems like an intrinsic part of the writing process, as necessary to the writer as it is for anyone who is paid based upon his knowledge as well as his skills. 

Nevertheless, I’ve often wondered if I have researched too much, and written too little.  Certainly it’s easy to lose oneself in research.  Occasionally research has only underlined all that I didn’t know about a given subject, and intimidated me into not writing. I’ve often wondered how much of the research I’ve conducted was absolutely necessary, and if it contributed to what I wrote in a meaningful way.  Or was research merely pandering to my insecurities?

In her notes on the story “Handsome Andras,” contained in her book Folktales of Hungary, Linda Degh describes the storyteller, Andras Albert, as “one of the most genuinely creative storytellers in Hungarian oral literature.”  She attributes this to the land in which he worked as a lumberjack, but she also mentions that his superior abilities arise from his unique mindset.  Unlike most of his contemporaries, he describes his life as a folktale, populated by supernatural beings, characters from his own tales, and the heroic journeys he undertook.  He described, in exacting detail, an airplane he built.  Unfortunately, it crashed in the forest, and he never found time to build another.  Still, he spent part of his life in a cabin by a lake, where a dragon lived along its shores.  

Life, they say, is full of compensations.

Linda Degh describes his story, “Handsome Andras,” as an example of “the gifted storyteller who can build a complete story around an incomplete episode.  The main topic turns on the hero’s wanderings.  Well-known tale elements are skillfully interwoven to thicken the plot before the final entanglement.  Thus a new story evolves.”  This story offers numerous episodes and fantastic elements, and utilizes motifs common to classic Hungarian folk literature.  “The long wandering of the hero is described with such dramatic sense that never for a moment does it become uninteresting.  The plot is cleverly intricate; a dazzlingly picturesque world unfolds itself before us, and in a fascinating manner the changing moods, the worries and anxieties of the hero are poignantly described.”

At first glance, Degh seems to suggest that research is unnecessary, that great stories arise solely from one’s ability to harness the imagination.  But a careful look at her notes underlines that Albert “remodels the old form in so ingenious a manner that instead of turning the tale into an individual literary composition, he abides by the accepted pattern of folk narrative.”  

Despite his extraordinary imagination, it appears that Andras Albert would not have met the expectations of his audience, had he not memorized the classic Hungarian folk tales, and understood why his listeners loved them so much.  So I guess I'll return to my research, even if the rewards of doing so are not immediately apparent.  At least I can occasionally glance out my window, and watch the dragon lounging in my backyard.

This weekend, maybe I'll get started on that airplane.

Dragon Dave