1988. július (161-183. szám) / HU_BFL_XIV_47_2
fi <íKU«eARIAI)( (§) OCTOBWU> ,1 fc'iSa ©IÉU£ Editor: György Krassó * 24/D Little Russell Street * London, WC1A 2HN * Tel. 01-430 2126 (írom abroad 441-430 2126) 176/1988 (E) 21st July, 1988 Miklós Szentkuthy Died - An Inventory of Unreal Reality His life was governed by his dreams and faith. The dream was Europe, nőt the national States which secluded themselves petty-mindedly and jealously, bút the Europe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The faith he believed in was the unifying power of Catholicism as affirmed before the Reformation. He was dreaming too when he began the sleep that knows no waking in the afternoon of 18th July, six weeks after his 80th birthday, in East-Central Europe, in a Hungary that by constant battering has been loosing in size and importance ever since Matthias, the renaissance king reigned. He taught in a secondary school fór 25 years as a teacher of Hungárián literature, English and French; he wrote his dissertation on Ben Jonson; and he was the greatest Hungárián novelist. That is, if one can regard as novels his riotous and unrestrained works which, including his translations of Swift, Dickens, Sterne, Austen and, most importantly, Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as his rádió plays, essays and reviews, amount to somé twenty thousand printed pages; his diary, which he kept fór fifty years, runs to a further two hundred thousand pages. Bút Szentkuthy himself declared that he applied a restrictive technique because the artist must piacé a number of characters intő a confined space. He referred to Greco’s painting where Hell, a gigántic sea-monster with the masses of the damned in its mouth, King Philip, the chorus of angels, trumpets, and the symbol of Jesus Christ are found in the same picture. Such are the writings of Miklós Szentkuthy. His first monumental work Prae (written in a Budapest pub at the age of 24 during the breaks between clas- ses at a secondary school) and The Breviary of Saint Orpheus published as a sequel in six volumes, as well as his 18 other works - including biographies of Mozart, Haydn, Dürer, Hándel and Goethe and an autobiography, Frivolities and Confessións, published in this year - all reveal the same idea; namely the greatness and fali of European culture, the follies that appear un dér the pretence of rationalism, and the inhumanity intő which mán will be plunged by irrationalism, the magnificence and tragic quality of life, "this condensed hell of world history". In this giant miracle play, based on an immense stock of experience and knowledge, time and space, reality and images, facts and fiction, events and their interpretations merge intő one another. Occasionally it turns out even in the course of the novels that the protagonists - whose sex, character and the age in which they live are continuously changing - do nőt exist at all, they embody rejected possibilities. The title Prae itself indicates the writer’s attempt to depict the preparations fór a növel that may be written at somé point bút, in fact, never gets under way; it describes the possibilities and the choices the author (mán as such) has at his disposal, as well as the chaos that should be arranged in an orderly fashion - and this is exactly what proves to be impossible. In his later works Szentkuthy abandons even this interpretation because he consciously professes that the task of art is to prepare the Cataloges Rerum - a full inventory of phenomena. He does nőt follow in Joyce’s and Proust’s steps and refuses to cunningly and consciously invent the chains of associations since the plot itself always involves falsification because there is no order and logic in the world and the possibilities are endless.Subscribers can use or quote the Hungárián October newsletters in totál or in detail as long as the source is acknowledged.
