ABSTRACT
Fiction can—maybe stronger than other art forms—evoke peculiar experiences of time travel. The twisting of temporalities and the conflation of time seems to be almost indigenous to the novel. Upon his arrival in Pompeii in 1817, Stendhal stated that he felt “transported back to antiquity,” immediately “knowing more than a scholar.” The ruins and rubble induced a feeling of time travel and the place revealed a feeling of history of a sort more profound than what scholarly history could ever accomplish, the French novelist, bureaucrat and art critic claimed. Reading Stendhal, we may feel catapulted in time and place as well, if perhaps to the early nineteenth century rather than to antiquity. Importantly, Stendhal is hinting at the capacity of fiction to compete with, the scholarly discourses that saturates our thinking about architecture and history, in the depiction of place, space, of architecture in many guises: allowing us to read architecture—on paper and off site.
Art and literature however has other claims of truth than academic writing, and a very different epistemological basis. This chapter looks into a few recent short stories by the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, balancing on the borders of scholarship and fiction. Portraying historical events and the historicity of art works, buildings, and cities within discourses of preservation, Krasznahorkaiis doing exactly “more than a scholar” as Stendhal says, catapulting us, the readers, into a vertigo-evoking time travel where the act of the imagination makes mundane fragments of reality transgress the sum of the bits. Krasznahorkai displays the longing for the real in fiction, in yet a new screw of the old debate on the mimetical power of literature.
