Today, ambition lacks nuance. Perhaps influenced by Americanization,
world literary discourse traffics in gross superlatives, announces the next big
thing, the cathartic breakthrough, in a declarative way that, as Paul de Man
warned us in “Literary History and Literary Modernity, violates the way any true sense of innovation must exist in tense dialogue with the tradition it steps beyond.
Even when rediscovering works from the past, there is often
a frenetic, insistent quality on the greatness of these works, that they will
alter the canon, that just as, fifteen years or so ago, it was proposed that
Lake Champlain be considered the sixth Great Lake, so Proust, Joyce, Musil,
Faulkner, Woolf will have to welcome somebody else to the club. This language, seeming
to speak in the tones of aesthetics and culture, is merely hype and marketing veiled
with a velvet glove.
So I want to avoid this kind of hype when talking about the publication by Contra Mundum Press
of Tim Wilkinson’s translation of the first volume of Miklós Szentkuthy’s St. Orpheus Breviary, Marginalia on Casanova. But I think this is truly a
seminal work, both because of the breadth of its range and the nuance and
slyness whitch which it traverses this breadth. Szentkuthy reminds us that to
be intellectually omnivorous is a wasted asset without a sense of irony; he is,
in a sense, Arnold Toynbee as written by Henry James. He writes of the rise and
fall of civilizations as if they were extended drawing-room conversations—that
is to say in what James would consider a civilized way. Szentkuthy will unquestionably enter and alter the canon of twentieth-century literature as we know it.
Szentkuthy--often known by his fans as SzM, bearing in mind that, as in Japanese, in Hungarian the last name precedes the first and his name was in fact Szentkuthy Miklós--was one of the youngest of the successive generations
of Hungarian modernists that flourished between the wars. This period was no
utopia—no one would confuse the regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy with anything
resembling democracy or tolerance—but it was a time of true independence for
Hungary, no longer in the uneasy condominium with Austria as it had been in the
prewar years and infinitely more benign than the nearly half century of rigid
Communist control that succeeded the second war and also was laden with the
trauma of the Holocaust and its aftermath, which, as chronicled in the works of
writers such as Imre Kertész, nearly annihilated and irretrievably dispersed
the once-vibrant Hungarian Jewish community. In this era, Hungarian writers
were genuinely modernist, much as was the case in Czechoslovakia—fully
conversant with the Western European avant-garde and perhaps even exceeding them
in self-conscious experimentation. In a sense, that the best-known cultural
figures of this era from Hungary are composers like Bartók or Kodály who,
albeit in a very intellectual way, used folk-motifs in their music. Although
some Hungarian writers like Gyula Illyés were roughly analogous in their
refracted populism, there were also figures like Szentkuthy who were rigorously
intellectual, and highbrow even to the point of, as in the manner of Wallace Stevens,
risking dandyism. In his lifetime,
Szentkuthy was best known for his 1934 Prae, still perhaps one of the most
experimental works in the century, described by Zéno Bianu, in his introduction
to the Contra Mundum edition, as a “completely fragmented narrative.” St. Orpheus Breviary was Szentkuthy’s
epic riposte to this initial deconstruction, but as with all the truly worthwhile
writers these epic assertions were questioned, called into doubt by Szentkuthy’s
cognitive astute clowning, his deliberate refusal of his text’s overwhelming aspirations.
Another factor came in here, though: Communism, whose iron grip prevented
Szentkuthy from pursuing, or at least publishing, a work so obviously aesthetic
and inutile in any banal sense. After
doing five volumes of the Breviary in
quick sequence, Szektkuthy paused. Instead, Szentkuthy wrote what seemed to be novelistic
biographies, mainly of composers, but also of writers and artists. It is
interesting that this was also the recourse of the Russian Formalist critic
Boris Eikhenbaum who presumably under Stalinist pressure renounced his
linguistically provocative aesthetics and turned to a traditional biographical
project on Tolstoy. Communism on the one hand would seem an unlikely correlate
for the biographer, with its denial of individual agency in favor of the mass.
But Eikhenbaum and Szentkuthy both turned to the form in order to delude and
thwart their censors. Is there something Communist about biography?
The lead persona of the Breviary, St. Orpheus, (who presumably emerges more in the subsequent volumes) is so obviously a non-traditional object of biography—a
phantom, a composite, an untenable hybrid of classicism and Christianity, hagiography
and sensual song. The fact that St. Orpheus is a concept as much as a person makes the Breviary different from the other twentieth century examples of
the roman fleuve with which it might be compared—Proust, Robert Musil, Anthony Powell (who was
also interested in Casanova, Venice, and voyeurism). All of these, despite their intense intellectuality, tell the life story of one person. Szentkuthy’s
more essayistic approach uses different eras and motifs to illustrate fundamental,
constitutive tensions in his work and in European identity—between classicism
and Christianity, between Eastern and Western, European and Asian identities, between narcissism and altruism, Enlightenment and romanticism, between
a civilization and a barbarism that not only, as Walter Benjamin intuited,
potentially co-author documents but also share virtues and flaws alike.
The entire series does not focus on Casanova; only this
first volume. As such, it is difficult to tell the reader just what they might
be getting. Casanova is associated with sexuality, with promiscuity, even if
in a very intellectual mode. But this book is not at all titillating or
prurient. Indeed, Szentkuthy’s intellectual is, as a Venetian, somewhat like
Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach without the sex; a dilettante speculating on
himself. And yet, we miss a huge part of this book if we do not realize that, even
if Casanova puts the experience of sexuality several levels away from his
persona, it is always there, always a reservoir underneath or noumenon above,
the persona’s garrulous musings. He is (91) "life, not literature”. He is
just out of touch with reality. He is "aware of the essence of love” but does not
exemplify or embody it. He is “vegetative instinct” and “curious about variants in female
personality", a curiosity as probing, inquisitive, as it is merely
voyeuristic. Poised liminally between instinct and intellect, in Venice Casanova
is also poised between land and sea, continent and island. Rome and Byzantium.
(”'Venice in Byzantium’, that is as colorful a tautology as Venice in Venice”,
166). If to stand between pure sensuality and pure intellect is “the unluckiest
spot in the world” (252), especially in a twentieth century that insists on
annihilating all such independent stances that defy its insensate intellectual
currents—it is at the very least a productive one for author, character and
reader.
In this handsomely produced edition, the odd numbers are on
the left side, the even-numbered pages on the right. The book begins with zero, as if to say, in the spirit of de Man, every beginning must try to be a new beginning even if it knows it ultimately cannot, that encrusted expectations must be jettisoned with each new read. Without zero, nothing can exist. This can stand for how
genuinely innovative—without, again, merely participating in the rhetoric of
the large, the ambitious, or even the revived classic—that this remarkable book
is, and will be again and again on the many rereadings it merits.
