Angyali Gigi! (Angelic Gigi!) Stories by Miklos Szentkuthy.
Budapest, 1996
This volume contains a selection composed of two parts. The first includes the title novelette and four other stories : this is the Gigi cycle, while the second one is the burlesque-comedyskit Végítélet a jelmezkölcsönzőben (Doomsday in the costumier’s shop). As though by accident, a historical work is sandwiched between the two parts: Rossz nap (Bad day), with Marcus Tullius Cicero as the chief character. In fact, it provides a most valuable orientation to the approach of Szentkuthy’s œuvre.
It is a historical fact that Cicero, after a long vacillation between supporting and forsaking Pompeius, when returning from his Kilika proconsulate, was waiting in Brundisium for the amnesty of the victorius Caesar. This is the core of the parable “de finibus bonorum et malorum”, about the limits of good and evil.
According to the nature of the genre, the subject loses its historical character. Irrespective of facts and of the results of scientific research, the author concentrates the events of months into a single day, adding events that never took place; in compliance with his literary intention and not with historical and epic authenticity, the characters are endowed with properties they never had and are placed amidst situations, expressions and objects belonging not to the Roman but to the present age. He thus creates a bizarre compound of past and present, resulting in an authentical, ironical criticism on intellectual conformism in general. As shown by this parable-type story, other historical and musicological novels of Szentkuthy cannot be fairly judged either according to well proved patterns of the analysis of realistic novels. In the specific sphere of his literary art, the conclusions to be drawn from history and from the life of great personalities are only employed for outlining a property, an attitude or a moral truth, fully elaborated in its inner details, but detached from its outer-historical and social-relationships. His historical aspect is not the same as that of writers who discover a moral lesson, an inspiring factor or a memento in some historical event or personality for the use of our age.
In Szentkuthy’s writings, history is the subject of judgment: it is but a variable scenery, while a human property or feature is “eternal”. Their constancy is even enhanced by the change of the scenes. And since he doesn’t acknowledge the real significance of historical evolution, his parables in historical disguise and those wearing contemporary costumes rightly fall under the same literary category.
This is how the Cicero story may be an equivalent and fitting partner to the grotesque portraits of a scatter-brained painter and of Gigi, the one representing the gawkiness of man and the intellect of an artist, and the other the inconsistent and illogical attitude of the eternal Eve. Next to the novelette dated 1957 there are some short stories from 1946-48 trying to interpret the same theme. Csendélet cigarettával (Still life with a cigarette) is an almost psychological, ethical and scientific description of the figures of Gigi and Sandor; the reader is given an unwanted advantage by receiving in a ready-made form what he ought to discover and formulate for himself. “Gigi was just floating about like a shapeless cloud, now here and now there, belonging to nothing and nobody. Private property, compassion, aim, work and even entertainment-all this was unknown to her; she was eating and dressing impossibly … She lied and got lost in lyricism; there was something nude, translucent and elusive in her. Beside her fairy-like volatility and her animal indifference, she was full of vulgar romanticism. The annoying nihilism emanating from her eyes left plenty of place for a large dose of trickery that belonged only too much to this world. Again, her trickery got on well with infantile blunders-approximately the same sins as those proliferating in Sándor, the outstanding representative of artists stuck fast in infancy; however … they became heavy-witted on account of analysis and conscience, the desire of expression and neurasthenia.” The “secret” of Gigi is also disclosed: Gigi is a “sphynx without any secret”.
“On the other hand, the sphynxes without secrets seem to be far more mysterious than those with … Perhaps, because the secret is only one thing, the solution of the riddle is again but one thing, if I solve it, it’s finished. But the nothingness, the emptiness, the amoeba-like hesitation of possibilities-that’s different: it still may or may not contain something. The chat of an illogical man may be more attractive in a certain respect than that of a logical one.” All the human relationships of the chief characters “are, from the very beginning, an impossible mixture of grotesque and paradoxical, just because they are human … “
So that’s the atmosphere of the book, but a particular feature deserves to be specially mentioned: the ironical and parodying way of looking at the things of this world. Szentkuthy is not possessed by the scourging passion to improve nor by brooding despair; he prefers the accessory and cynical smile of the wise, as if saying: “Things mustn’t be taken too seriously-the world has seen and is going to see others worth two of them.” His disputable attitude is made attractive by the abundance of irony and parody falling to the share of the author himself, of his works and art. This puts a gloss on the continuous disappointment of Sándor, the honest, foolish and naive artist, as well as on the stumblings of the chief character in Doomsday in the costumier’s shop-a work difficult to place in any literary genre. This oversized burlesque is founded basically on the experiences gathered throughout a quarter of a century of a pedagogical career, by characteristic types of school-masters and by the clear-cut observation of real symptoms in education.
Style and language represent a substantial source of humour. In Szentkuthy’s literary art, style is often equal to the work itself. Thoughts and feelings, the world of man in general, are illustrated by “epical illustrated supplements”.
Every minute detail is “analyzed by representation” and “represented by analysis”. The work consists of the swarm of these minute details, but they fail to be integrated into a socially significant entirety. They are in most important relationship to one another, but only to one another; so, where everything is important, actually nothing is so, and where everything is inevitable, real necessity is inscrutable.Thus, the writings of Szentkuthy are but literary jokes, without any immediate political or social meaning. But anybody who acknowledges the need for the existence of “relaxing literature” (provided it formulates “general human” contents at a really high artistic level, within the trenches of an outstanding erudition), will pass some most pleasant and useful hours on the extra-social playing-ground of Gigi and her like.
B. I. Szabó