Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Mária Kurdi: "Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain." On the Scholarly Heritage of Péter Egri (1932-2002)
Words I and Catastrophe, elaborating on points of interaction between drama and painting, but now approaching the subject from the angle of parallels. Like the other of his great Irish masters, Yeats, Beckett had a strong visual imagination, manifest in his portrayal of sensation as well as inner trauma on stage by an inventive composition and coordination of facial expression, gestures, and bodily movements. According to Egri, Act Without Words I dramatizes the genesis of the absurd drama by visualizing it, which is a hardly surprizing act from a playwright who had written insighful criticism on several painters including Jack Butler Yeats, the poet-playwright's brother (268-69). The discussion of Catastrophe , while it underscores its thematic concern with, and reflection on the political situation as well as the concomitant limitations of intellectual life in pre1989 Eastern Europe, points to parallel images in the sister arts. Dublin-born Francis Bacon is referred to as the first example, on account of some of his paintings carrying a Beckettian sense of claustrophobic isolation and nighmarish constraint in the distorted human faces portrayed. Next Henry Moore's sculptures are found to present similar effects of grotesque depersonalization to the humiliation suffered by the character called Protagonist in Beckett's drama Catastrophe — tellingly dedicated to Václav Havel at the time of its writing, in 1982 (270-73). To the question whether he cherished one as a favourite among his own books, in the already cited interview Egri answered that it had always been the last one (Kurdi 131). Looking at Text in Context with this in mind, we find the book dominated by an undoubtedly great favourite of the scholar, Shakespeare, whose poetry and drama feature in as many as seven essays of the volume. The one titled "One Man's Ambiguity Is Another's Ambivalence" stands out being a both sophisticated and witty scrutiny of Gothic and romantic re-presentations of certain Shakespearean figures and themes, demonstrating a keen sense of how the tone and poetic ambiguities call for their equivalent in the other arts. Egri highlights Henry Fuseli's deviation from Shakespeare in his painting The Three Witches, which "needed a specifically pictorial-spatial means to reach Shakespeare's group effect and to replace the poet-dramatist's magic metre," as well as attempted to match "the parallel phrases, and prophetic greetings of the witches" 32
