Secrecy and the transcendental desire for order in drama and narrative

A secret in a literary text initiates a delicate interplay between narrators and readers, since the latter must be informed of existence, or even of the content of the secret. The paper analyses various samples from this viewpoint, starting with Euripides’ Hippolytus and Ion, where-due to the absence of any narrator-the interplay of secrecy develops between the agents, the chorus, the gods and the audience. The subsequent samples are taken from European novels (Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Jókai’s Friedrich Trenck and Franz Trenck). Secrecy functions many times as a hint at a secret order or a hidden entity that guarantees order. The order, or rather the impression of arrangement, may function as a suggestion of a secret sense. The meaning can be described as the secret of literary texts, which is always present in the form of a promise.