Hyperion Volume VIII, No. 1: an excerpt from Miklós Szentkuthy's Prae

The cover of the first edition of Prae (1934)
Picture source

Continuing on with articles from the current Hyperion issue (mentioned here, there is a lengthy excerpt of the third chapter of Contra Mundum Press' upcoming release of Miklós Szentkuthy's Prae, translated by Tim Willkinson. In a post last fall I highlighted another Hyperion article by Filip Sikorski titled “Introductory Remarks on Miklós Szentkuthy’s Prae”. Sikorski provides a synopsis of the novel, looks at its main themes, investigates how it can be read non-linearly, and explores Szentkuthy’s narrative technique. Here is Sikorski's summary of Volume 1's third chapter:

In chapter 3, Touqué continues the monologue but abandons the analysis of desire and looks back into his childhood. In a series of flashbacks, he reminisces about his parents, his mother’s boutique in Cannes, his mental illness and a stay in a clinic, a morning in Cannes when he was sent to fetch a dress from the boutique to the seamstress, and another morning when he observed the Riviera landscape from the window of his bathroom. Touqué’s memories are interrupted by one more italicized passage, the Third Non-Prae-diagonal, in which a woman named Yvonne calls her lover to cancel their rendezvous because she is going to confession.

Leville-Touqué is "a French philosopher, writer, and editor-in-chief of a periodical called Antipsyché." Not all of the summary makes it into the excerpt but most does and it provides fun, challenging reading. The Non-Prae-diagonals mentioned are italicized passages expressing inner experiences. Even though this is the third chapter, Sikorski argues "that the novel is composed out of loosely connected segments and therefore it can be read in a non-linear way." WIth the little bit of introduction in this post the reader should be able to follow along through most of the excerpt.

Additional reading of Sikorski's summary of the novel will help fill in a few gaps but I don't believe it's necessary for the full enjoyment of Szentkuthy's style, his inventive comparisons, and his encyclopedic references. If you have never read anything by Szentkuthy this would be a good introduction. Here's just one sentence, an aside, in case you need prodding to read it (or proof that you don't want to touch his work):

(Because clumsiness is just as important a factor as the Protean bogeyman of instinct or the contrary extreme of stylization: that ought to insert between a Parca-visaged automatism of sincerity and a goddess grown into a permanent mask a bit of ersatz mythology from the Guardian Spirit of Stupidity, who plays a role as a positive inspirer and stylistic creator in life, reaching such concrete boundaries that it is all but impossible to treat it merely as an internal mental property.)

If you are interested in Prae, be sure to read an excerpt from the 1983 interview Szentkuthy gave to literary historian Lóránt Kabdebó at Hungarian Literature Online. (These series of interviews were later published in book form.) The excerpt from the interview addresses some of Szentkuthy's sources and inspirations for the novel. Several snippets I wanted to share:

• During my university years, I read the German existentialist philosophers whom I… caricatured! let’s say. Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, and what have you. So I had a good chuckle at those who supposed (still suppose) that I am rooted in German philosophy of that kind. Quite the reverse: I was parodying real-life existentialist philosophers (and some I made up). For instance, I invented the title of one of those philosophical works: Einleitung in die reine Undheit (‘An Introduction to Pure And-ness’).
• He [Proust] had demonstrable influence here and there. I am a hypersuperultraimpressionist, and instead of writing short stories, essays, small-scale and grand drama, aphorisms, fragments of memoirs, short novels, etc., out of my fantasies: I had always wanted to weave the fantastic thoughts and thousand impressions of my ‘Proust trauma’ of 1926 into the composition of a single giant work.
• I read Joyce in 1931; I’ve already related the circumstances in which I did, so here let me just note that the essence of the Joyce connection was his most minute observation of the most mundane reality and, at the same time, the most pyrotechnical mythological games — that duality is flesh and blood to my own psyche and nature: hypernaturalism and simultaneously a luxuriance of fantasy.
• With regard to the style and stock of similes in Prae, the strongest influence was not Proust or even Joyce, but — my mathematical studies.
• Back then the Einsteinian view of the world and quantum mechanics were novelties for me and for others. Atomic physics was not so much in fashion as it became. I therefore did read through and study the works of authors who concerned themselves with it, and they had an extraordinary influence on Prae. Its stock of metaphors and logical progression would have been inconceivable without reading and experiencing the writings of those distinguished physicists and mathematicians.
• Continuing with the spurs for Prae. At the time I read a lot of the works of Paracelsus, particularly because the medicine of antiquity — to the great disdain of many practitioners nowadays — had a strong influence on my own thinking about natural science. The whole universe and living human organisms form a material entity: to me that is extraordinarily exciting. De facto, of course, it does not hold water: the kidneys correspond to some chemical element, and that corresponds to some star — or what do I know? What it expresses globally, though, is the idea that somewhere there is a link between each of my organs, a chemical element, and the remotest nebulae — somewhere they are related. It can be established spectroscopically that the same materials are present as in this or that organ. What I like about Paracelsus, let me repeat, is that somehow he knew how to put over that the cosmic unity of the world. The idea of the material unity of the world also went into Prae!
• One of the leitmotifs in Prae, partly on the basis of my travels, party gleaned from my readings, is Anglo-French rivalry. The difference between the two countries greatly exercised me. One of the protagonists is French: Leville-Touqué, the other an Englishman: Halbert. After the existentialist, sometimes nihilist, Latin-impish world of Leville-Touqué and Leatrice, etc., comes a humane, profoundly human meditation of Halbert’s father, an elderly English vicar. Prae’s lyricism is made perceptible through these two extremes.

"Witches Sabbath" (1510) by Hans Baldung Grien
Woodcut with tone block
Picture source at Web Gallery of Art
Used on the back cover of the second addition of Arc és álarc (Face and Mask), 1982

Miklós Szentkuthy: Black Renaissance, Doctor Haydn, and Prae

The cover of the first edition of Prae (1934)
Picture source

This will be my final post devoted to notes and quotes on the Hyperion issue devoted to Miklós Szentkuthy (pdf version is here)…

Filip Sikorski’s “Introductory Remarks on Miklós Szentkuthy’s Prae” provides a synopsis of the novel, looks at its main themes, investigates how it can be read non-linearly, and explores Szentkuthy’s narrative technique. “Miklós Szentkuthy: Prae” by Antal Szerb, was one of the few complimentary reviews of the novel at the time of its release. Szerb believed the novel to be a “curious stranger” causing bewilderment in the reader but also decided

There has not yet been a Hungarian book as intelligent as Prae. It skips lightly, playfully, ironically and in incomparably individual fashion around the highest intellectual peaks of the European mind. It will become one of the great documents of Hungarian culture that this book was written in Hungarian.

There are more articles in Hyperion on Prae in French and Slovakian. I’m not going into more detail on the articles in English, saving comments about them for the release of the novel over the next two years by Contra Mundum Press. I’m looking forward to those releases.

In my earlier post on Szentkuthy and masks one of the essays covered was on the Mozart biographical fantasy. Szentkuthy wrote four more of these self-portraits in masquerade, using Haydn, Goethe, Dürer, and Handel to explore themes of culture and history. The fragment from the end of Szentkuthy’s Doctor Haydn (translated by Tim Wilkinson) leaves me wanting more from the novel. It’s very short and well worth checking out. If this is representative of his biographical self-portraits, I hope they are planned for translation.

Fejezet a szerelemről (1936)
Black Renasissance
Picture source

Nicholas Birn’s article ”Startling Dryness: Szentkuthy’s Black Renaissance provides an introduction to the novel. Birn highlights the contradictions that fuel Szentkuthy’s writing as well as Hungarian history, at once both a part of and alien to Europe.

In Black Renaissance, the second volume of his massive mega-treatise-cum-roman flueve called the St. Orpheus Breviary, Szentkuthy explores two infrequently examined but constitutive ironies of European civilization: that its sources are the only partially compatible legacies of Athens and Jerusalem (a paradox perfectly captured in the very idea of “St. Orpheus”), that its sources were about equally from the Byzantine East and the Latin Catholic West of the former Greco-Roman world, and that the very centuries in which European culture was solidified were also centuries of instability, barbarism, and histories which the mainstream Eurocentric really prefers to avoid. (228)

The first part of Black Renaissance, as Birn describes it, lays out a 500-year progressions using Tiberius / Theodora / Dunstan, Sylvester, István (Stephen) / Brunelleschi / Szentkuthy (and us) as the stepping stones for the passage of time. Don’t worry if you don’t recognize all the names…Birn explains it well. The hinge is near the year 1000 CE, when Hungary “converted to Christianity under the leadership of its king, St. Stephen (Szent István) and as guided by Pope Sylvester II.” Birn doesn’t say it but I think it’s implied that the saint, a study of which is provided at the beginning of each volume in the Breviary, is Saint Dunstan (if anyone knows, please confirm or correct me if I’m wrong). Szentkuthy makes Dunstan, effectually a prime minister at times, much more of a sensual and rebellious figure than history describes. Before him is Tiberius and Theodora, Szentkuthy basing much of their stories on Robert Graves’ historical novels (I, Claudius for Tiberius, Count Belisarius for Theodora). Szentkuthy admired and met Graves and although he uses ancient figures, his fiction brings a modern approach and sensibility to their times. (As Birn puts it, “Szentkuthy’s Tiberius and Theodora are not only Gravesian but also above all British.”) He also notes “Szentkuthy portrays people, but they are personalities, not characters”.

This seems to hold true for the second section of the novel which centers on Filippo Brunelleschi, a long section of which can be found at this link, translation provided by Tim Wilkinson. A few more quotes from Birn’s essay before I turn to the excerpt:

Whereas the first section tries to formulate meaning in history, the black Renaissance of Brunelleschi finds at history’s heart naught but its inner meaninglessness. Brunelleschi, in his design and applicability, will not alienate his customer, who will not on the immediate level be able to see the pessimism Brunelleschi has ingrained into his creations. For them, the surface prettiness will be all. (238)

The third section of the novel turns to poetry for a scherzo-like finish, including a “long monologue of a tutor to Princess Elizabeth Tudor (the future Queen Elizabeth I),” resuming “the Hungary-England analogy, as well as indicating the English Renaissance, with its asymmetrical excellence in literature but not in art or music, as, in its unbalanced jaggedness, another kind of Black Renaissance.” This sounds like a study on art and power, too (something Szentkuthy would be acutely aware of in the late 1930s when he wrote this).

So let’s take a look at the second section that can be found at the above link. The vantage point rapidly changes at times, from a young Venetian to Brunelleschi to Pope Sixtus IV to an unidentified “I.” The young Venetian, Monteverdi, admires some of Brunelleschi’s work in Venice. Making matters more complicated is a sharing of names between some characters. The text quickly switches to Brunelleschi’s point of view and his fascination with a “mongrel Spanish-Arab boy” that was a fortune-teller, stargazer, and mathematician to the King of Naples. From this boy, Claudio, Brunelleschi learns many skills he will apply to his works. While this section is a pseudo-biography, it is more about fictional lessons and how he learned them rather than verifiable events in his life. For example, the stars that the Arab adolescent points out to him would find a reproduction in the cupolas of his chapels—the architecture of the universe was reproduced in Brunelleschi’s works. (“The point [star] was a symbolic marriage of mass and nothingness,” (256) something the young Venetian admires in one of Brunelleschi’s chapels.) Just as we can't fully grasp the universe when we look at it, so the artist harnesses his buildings to give the same feeling of inspired awe and difficult paradoxes.

Szentkuthy stresses a paradox of Brunelleschi’s art, weaving mathematical precision with instability and relativity to reflect a new reality. Geometric order and senseless acts coincide at the same time in the same place. “The expression of that duality is what in the Renaissance, above all in Florence, became commonplace.” (257) Paradoxes abound in Szentkuthy’s writing, where “boundless thirst and boundless gratification” (257) effortlessly coexist. My favorite section of this excerpt comes from a supposed letter from Brunelleschi to a patron that had asked him to illustrate Book One of Herodotus’ Histories. Brunelleschi struggles to describe the “essence” or “elements” that he is trying to depict versus what is happening on the surface. He demeans people that desire only reproduction: “But for anyone who likes reality above all else analysis is just a momentary adolescent illusion.” (264) The meaning lies beyond what happens as we see it. Brunelleschi's letter devotes a couple of paragraphs to the chair that Candaules’ wife would throw her clothes while Gyges looks on—how to depict such an insignificant detail so that it has meaning? It's absolutely beautiful.

I’ll include a few paragraphs that give a feel for Szentkuthy’s style and grace. Once again, from Brunelleschi’s supposed letter to the patron wishing to have Herodotus illustrated:

Herodotus is not history, not epic: Herodotus is picture, and Herodotus morality. If the catalogue of my plans tires you, throw it away; but I, my customer, am obliged to lay out on the counter the selection I can offer you.

I would like to paint on the ceiling of the domestic chapel a fresco depicting the excavations carried out by Pisistratus on the sacred island of Delos. For on Delos that Greek potentate announced a grand ‘purification,’ as prescribed by celestial portents, and he dug up the dead from the area around the temple and had them transported to quite another region. That is a topic! Resurrectionless resurrection, the hellish parade of “I don’t believe in the resurrection of the body”—all in a marvelous Delian landscape, a heap of previously dug-up dead bodies amid palms and parrots; carried in the arms of slaves like the abducted Sabine women; Hellene floozies on Saracen shoulders, Greek sages carried in the arms of Persian soldiers, Thracian despots on the backs of Jewish stall-keepers. Is that picture not to your taste?

I want to bore into the frescoes and statues of your villa to the very deepest of the inner meaninglessness of history. I want to formulate all my disappointments with startling dryness . Don’t worry! The connoisseurs will in any case fail to notice my pessimism in the picture—my disillusionment finds expression in such abstract formal tricks that they will not suspect my confession. This transport of the dead is an unforgettable historical lesson—all of that on an island: in a chosen nest of limitedness and narrow-mindedness. (269-270)

Since the patron Brunelleschi wrote this letter to was a friend of Sixtus IV the focus shifts to the thoughts of the (at the time) future Pope. Once again there are many contradictions and paradoxes that Szentkuthy applies in this section, appropriate for the changes Europe was undergoing in the Renaissance.

In an excerpt that has on its final page a mention of “a party rallying in Nuremberg” and a description of “the whole alkali-and-acid-Renaissance,” the question of what is meant by the use of “Black” in the title of the novel continually arises. Birn supplies his interpretation, which is supported throughout the excerpt. “Black” is meant

more as in the contemporary locution “black site”: something off-the-radar, sub toasa, illicit--the flip side of the official, neoclassicist, humanistic Renaissance. A more pessimistic Renaissance, a less officially classicist Renaissance, a more opulent one, one with medieval, Renaissance, baroque aspects, not simply rectilinear and perspectival?” (236)

Or, simpler put, “a more plural renaissance.”