Ferenc Takács: Miklós Szenkuthy
If there is such a thing as a one-man literary movement, Miklós Szentkuthy has a very good claim to be called so. Now in his mid-seventies, he has been a furtive presence on the Hungarian literary scene since the publication of Prae, in 1934, when its author was twenty-six, and ever since then, he has been doing something no other Hungarian writer attempted to do in our century; also, doing something no Hungarian writer felt quite capable of following, imitating or elevating to the level of a literary school or “tradition”. Over the decades, Szentkuthy has become his own tradition, with himself as its only representative.
A furtive presence and a constant challenge: Prae was received, apart from a few favourable and intelligent reviews by critics such as Antal Szerb, László Németh and Gábor Halász, with blank incomprehension, painful embarrassment or downright hostility. His next work, Az egyetlen metafóra felé (Towards the One and Only Metaphor) in 1935 had to be publicly defended by its author against a variety of moral and political charges advanced by some of its earlier reviewers; later, from the late forties towards the end of the fifties, he was effectively barred from publishing his creative work and had to make do with translating; even in the mid-sixties, quite a few years after he had resumed publication, a general survey of twentieth-century Hungarian literature was content to take note of him as a rather insignificant literary oddity, an extreme case of irresponsible modernist decadence.
Some, to be sure, have responded more sympathetically. The bulky paperback copies of Prae became, over the years, collectors’ items, generating a small but distinguished readership quite ready, and able, to absorb his next literary venture, the Orpheus pamphlets; these were parts of a work in progress which appeared between 1939 and 1942. More recently, this readership, by a process of slow accumulation, has grown larger and seems to have found its voice: signs of some serious interest and more intelligent critical comment have been gathering around Szentkuthy’s work, both in Hungary and abroad, in the last fifteen years. (One should note especially István Vas’s spirited plea, in 1968, for a discovery and recognition of the author as the archetypal avantgarde Hungarian novelist or the December 1974 special issue of the Paris-based Magyar Műhely which presented a range of sympathetic and perceptive discussion of Szentkuthy’s work.)
Fortunately, this more serious interest in his work coincided with Szentkuthy’s own revival as a writer. After staging a somewhat long-drawn-out literary comeback which took the form of a series of quasi-historical novel-biographies (on Mozart, Luther, Haydn, Goethe, Tasso, Dürer and Händel) between 1957 and 1967, he published a collection of short stories in 1966, a selection of essays in 1969, and, after an interval of nearly thirty years, he resumed the Orpheus series by publishing II. Szilveszter második élete (The Second Life of Sylvester II) in 1972. The original project, dating back to the early forties, finally found a publisher when the earlier Orpheus pamphlets and their sequels from the early seventies came out in a three-volume edition in 1973-74, under the title Szent Orpheus breviáriuma (The Breviary of St Orpheus). In addition, the publication of the third volume coincided with the appearance of Szentkuthy’s translation of Joyce’s Ulysses, a significant achievement and in many ways an improvement on Endre Gáspár’s earlier Hungarian version.
Finally, Prae became available in a new edition in 1980. Rereading it with the critical hindsight of almost fifty years that elapsed since the year of its first, private edition, it compels one to recognize it as a serious contribution to modern “experimental” fiction; in its aspirations it is at least as ambitious as Ulysses or A la recherche du temps perdu, the two books with which it has been frequently and, in my view, quite mistakenly compared. It is certainly fiction, though not quite a novel, not even in a Joycean or Proustian sense of the term. A more accurate description of its fictional mode could be Northrop Frye’s “anatomy” or “Menippean satire”: the basic concern of the book is intellectual, its pervading mood is that of the comedy of ideas; ultimately, Prae is a huge mock-encyclopedia of whatever we know (or its author knows) about mind and matter, history and self, language and reality, fact and fiction, man and woman.
Its stance reveals a kind of Olympian irreverence: the writer here is the philosopher-clown, deeply and joyously sceptical about established intellectual divisions, philo-sophical systems, controlling and ordering constructs of every description; and the result, and embodiment, of this is a 1,225-page mock-essay where, in a relentless carnival dance of metaphor, allegory, analogy, pun and double entendre, practically every intellectual issue and position of our century is reviewed, revised, turned upside down and inside out, declassified and redivided, fused into some ultimate holistic meaning and, by the ever-present reverse of this “serious” impulse, dispersed into contingent Nothing at the same time.
Mock-essayism then, the paradoxical divide between the discursive and the fictional, with the writer preying on both of them, playing them out against each other; if we must insist on comparisons, Prae is much closer to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften than to anything in Joyce or Proust. At the same time, it is equally important to recognize an older tradition informing this apparently unorthodox work: mock-encyclopedic “anatomies” by Lucian, Rabelais, and, more particularly, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy provide a loose generic framework we can usefully apply. (This latter connection is perhaps the most important in its implications; Szentkuthy, with his sensibility always actively engaged with Late-Renaissance or Baroque art, is emphatically part of that already “classic” and fairly universal trend in the modern which sees significant affinities between the Baroque and surrealism, between metaphysical conceit and diaphoric collage or montage.)
Also, Prae, though not quite a novel, is certainly a sort of anti-novel or meta-novel, anticipating some of the strategies of the later nouveau roman and postmodernist fiction: it does have a plot, though the very ratio between its meager plot and elephantine non-plot sections make the book an implied criticism of the idea of plot in general; it has characters, for instance, Leville-Touqué, the youthful philosopher, provided by Szentkuthy with an impressive list of publications; Leatrice, the woman of the book; Halbert, an Englishman; and his father, a country parson in Exeter.
But these characters are playfully unreal and in any case serve as occasional masks for the omniscient writer. Also, more importantly, there is in Prae one highly significant line of mock-speculation concerning the “writability” of the modern novel.
Here, as in many other aspects, Szentkuthy opts for “virtuality”: a novel, once realized, preempts other possibilities for its realization, while a novel which is only “virtually” a novel, a book which is only a prae-paration for an unwritten (and unwritable) novel, can maintain, on the level of fictional illusion, the freedom and openness of its potentialities. As far as the form of Szentkuthy’s book is concerned, this line of speculation is self-reflexive: the text of Prae, with its daringly experimental complications of technique and quite unparallelled richness and flexibility of language, is itself such a “virtual” novel. If Prae was a youthful work, The Breviary of St Orpheus is Szentkuthy’s magnum opus. It has been slow in the making: the first Orpheus pamphlet, Széljegyzetek Casanovához (Notes on Casanova) appeared in 1939; this is now the first “book”
in the first volume of the 1973-74 edition, which, as it appears, is still far from complete. Szentkuthy is working on an additional fourth and fifth volume, sections of which have recently appeared in various magazines and anthologies. If completed, The Breviary will run to some 2,500 pages; certainly the longest fictional work ever written by a Hungarian in this century and, also, ironically, still a “breviary”, a short and convenient volume excerpting and condensing from some larger material.
In its ambitions, the book takes up an old and venerable literary challenge that has haunted Western literature for centuries: a late twentieth-century Dante or Rabelais, Szentkuthy attempts the task of summing up all human history in a single book That this in itself is a form of blasphemy Szentkuthy is quite aware and makes all sort of playfully ironical uses of: if the world exists pour aboutir à un livre (pace Mallarmé) then it is only God who can write this book. (As a matter of fact, He has written it, in his two-volume breviary of the World.) The challenge of the Book, then; also, that of the book in a more technical sense: the world, after all, exists already in books and summing it up in a single book means, of course, writing a book that will somehow contain all the books ever written. This is the “serious” ambition behind Szentkuthy’s project. But, being a writer of that engagingly Joycean “joco-seriousness”, there is a deeply “unserious” and joyously self-destructive side to the same project: Szentkuthy, by enclosing all the books of the world in a single book, manages to give the world back to itself, to cleanse, in the comedy of the text, the world of its encrusted bookness, or, at least, to demonstrate that the attempt of putting the world in a book is itself the most laughable of all human ambitions, a monstrously funny example of our comédie humaine of hubris.
How does he do it? Primarily through a central presence (terms like “protagonist” or “narrator” would be hopelessly inadequate here), that of Orpheus, omniscient, omnipresent and omnivorous poet, who moves freely through recorded history, myth, religion and literature, re-imagining all this, and metamorphizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants and artists of every description, all the while reading, writing, acting and speaking for them, through them or instead of them. He is also St Orpheus, pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, all history and mankind in one supra-person and a piece of nothing as well since he is only an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean “posthumanist” shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth and mentalité.
In St Orpheus’s method all history becomes synchronic and present. When he is Queen Elizabeth, the Queen is reading and interpreting The Tale of the Genji Drake brought from Japan; Andrew Marvell writes the notes on Casanova; Ghengis Khan contemplates Chinese silk paintings; a Mongol ambassador writes a despatch on Sappho and Pindar. This is a method of bold juxtaposition and telescoping: remote areas of history are juggled together to reveal, in a paradox, their mutual difference and essential similarity.
The overall effect of all this is, refreshingly, that of burlesque, quite in the early sense of the term: The Breviary of St Orpheus is a huge intellectual carnival, a joyous travesty of all human pursuits. It is also an assertion, in Szentkuthy’s own word, of a “demotic” confidence that after all there is some meaning in all this depressing richness and maddeningly absurd variety we like to call man and his history. If nothing else, the fact that Szentkuthy has been able to write a book (and such a book) about it, exonerates human history from the charge of futility and bodes well for our future.