– Psalmus Hungaricus –

László Szörényi and literature are companions. There is no grand recognition, no love affair; that was with teddy bears, geography, music, and faith. It simply happened – like a pebble dropping from a hillside into water. We do not pursue the reason; it simply falls in. That is one reading of the great connoisseur of Latin and Ancient Greek. The other – of the bibliophile academic with a library of thirty thousand volumes, who combines literary perspectives tested on many stages – is a blazing sense of vocation. For this reason, László Szörényi was never a neophyte philosopher: wholly, within and without, from the outset he ‘dwelt in the house of being, in the lodging of language’, and through his nuptials with literature he ennobled that house into a palace. He did so in Hungary and, for a time, in Rome as an ambassador. His local currency, within the dimensions of the intellectual universe, is literature’s innermost sanctity: the Hungarian language. László Szörényi’s milieu – his family, his friends – consisted entirely of deeply learned people. He has, all his life, stood at the very heart of astonishing intellectual content. Yet Szörényi is not defined solely by ‘textbook wisdom’: he travelled extensively. He never originally wished to teach, yet, on the one hand, he teaches through his books, articles, and publications – through his whole being, his habitus. Moreover, he taught at the Eötvös College from 1973 to 1991 and again in 1997/1998, and at the University of Szeged since 1973. He tells stories. He does not merely impart, assert, or officiate: he narrates.

Prose

The fundamental sources of his belles-lettres are events drawn from everyday life. The upward-leading arc of a fate assembled from a serious professional and official career, or simply from life’s minute tremors, continuously acquires a distinctly ‘Szörényian’ skew in the act of depiction; and what is projected before the reader is a world that, shaded into a wry, close-to-the-human tone, appears as documentary prose – written in a high style, yet also as a hasty paraphrase. Here, ‘hasty paraphrase’ points to the fleeting structure of these stories’ quasi-realities: they build, seem solid, yet are undermined by human foolishness. This is the moment when an élite posing with lofty pathos – or the person thrashing in the bureaucratic net of the communist system’s banal clichés – confronts the dilemmas of an unlived life, traced in a vigorous inertia. For all their lightness, these works – reinforced by a transfigured background of robust essence-seeking – often lead to an unresolvable sweet-bitter insolubility, which the author repeatedly loosens with intermezzi of amorous, erotic, comic, and ironic situational humour. László Szörényi’s stories are doors without rage: doors fixed with wedges, which, in the political arena or amid the games of everyday life, one keeps trying to slam in another’s face. Among the most famous are Éljen Kun Béla! Suzy nimfomán (lit. Long Live Kun Béla! Suzy is Nymphomaniac) and Hosszúlépés (lit. ‘Long Step’ Spritzer). The former compiles events from his period as ambassador in Rome into compact anecdotes and feuilleton-like short prose; the latter is broader in scope – diary-like life-situations, likewise cast in the anecdotal mode, that span his whole life. The latter volume is dedicated to his friends under the sobriquet ‘Horror Historian’. The epithet refers, on the one hand, to an empathetic reliving and recording of the human-made horrors of history, concentrated in the infernal dystopias of the two world wars; and, as a consequence, to the leaching-out of fate-experiences that have fallen upon the writer – a cathartic release. This release – set in a Zsigmond Móricz-like existential register and in a style that interrogates the system – becomes a guidebook for all who wish to experience freedom with qualitative intensity, even under the harshest oppressive regimes. “‘How so?’ asks the sceptical Péter, whose father was a Marxist philosopher, yet that did not make him a believer.” Recalling the Kafkaesque world of inner ruptures, the alternating stories – moving at a sharp pace – let their ironic voice penetrate to the kernel of events, carving out answers from within: explanatory theses that scatter the fog, helping us understand how our fate takes shape and how the individuals wandering within it might identify themselves. The language, enabling rapid reading, is light yet cultivated; embedded in personal narratives, it probes the layered meanings of different life situations. The author’s great merit lies in his open and frank handling of problems that contemporary readers tend to wince at – and then look away from, embarrassed. By contrast, László Szörényi wants the reader to wince: to grasp the perverse and frivolous ‘clauses’ of historical coercions that can culminate in a crisis of identity.

Poetry

László Szörényi’s first poem appeared only recently. He wrote it at the age of twenty-three. It is both the first and the last: the others were lost, but he found this one. János Dénes Orbán published it in Előretolt Helyőrség. Its title is Imitatio Christi.

Imitatio Christi

Bozótból ugrik rád az Isten,

még ily hatalmas tigris nincsen,

markában verdes életed.

Bordáid sorra mind betörnek,

székhelye gyásznak és örömnek:

ágyékod, gyomrod kész falat.

Végső veszélytől koponyádba

csuknád lelkedet, agyba-zárva

reszket e furcsa cimbora.

Ám a Tigris csak erre áhít,

körme csontodon rést nyit, tágít,

s falja gőzölgő lelkedet.

Hol van a bozót, zord, de biztos?

És hol a múltad, tompa, piszkos?

Fogak fényharsonája zeng.

Szürke táj gyúl vörösbe, kékbe

rőzse nyújtózik pálmába, égbe

büszke pillék suhannak át.

Itt már minden biztos és örök,

soha többé őrjítő körök!

A Szent Egyenes dudolász.

Mindent ölelsz óriás vágyban,

s azonosulsz az alkotásban,

tigrisszemed keskenyre szűkül.

Örökké zsákmány kívánsz lenni,

megtöretni és leöletni,

s ugorni, ölni, menteni!

Bozótunk sűrű, gyönge a térdünk,

semmit sem adtunk, botorul kértünk,

Megváltónk Anyja, könyörülj értünk!

(lit. “God springs on you from the thicket,
no tiger ever was so giant,
your life beats in His grip.

Your ribs, one by one, are broken –
seat of mourning and of joy:
your loins, your stomach, ready prey.

From final peril, you would shut
your soul into your skull – brain-locked –
this strange companion shivering.

But for this only does the Tiger yearn:
His claw in bone makes breach, makes room,
and He devours your steaming soul.

Where is the thicket, harsh but sure?
And where is your past, blunt, filthy?
A brass fanfare of teeth resounds.

Grey land ignites to red, to blue,
brushwood stretches into palms, into sky,
proud butterflies sweep through.

Now everything is sure and everlasting,
never again the maddening rounds!
The Holy Straight hums softly.

You embrace all in giant longing,
and, in the act of making, you become one;
your tiger-eyes narrow to a slit.

Forever you desire to be the prey –
to be broken and to be slain,
and to leap, to kill, to rescue!

Our thicket’s thick, our knees are weak,
we gave nothing, foolishly we begged –
Mother of our Redeemer, have mercy on us!”

Tudomány, publikációk (lit. Science, publications)

Kis magyar retorika (lit. A Brief Hungarian Rhetoric)

Scholarship, publications

Kis magyar retorika (lit. A Brief Hungarian Rhetoric)

The human capacity to process and transmit information at the level of words has, in most respects, long since lost its poetry. Everyday conversation, stripped of the Odyssean rank of crafted speech, is the queasy lees left at the bottom of our glass after a pleasant bout of drinking. In our time, science is the endless skimming of a foaming well-being – mere scientism – from the blunted, impoverished remnants of scientism. It seems strange that someone would want to see everyday vocabulary adorned with flourishes, thoughts presented in their oriental sacrament, and science in its bare form. Yet this is precisely how László Szörényi represents language in his Kis magyar retorika (lit. A Brief Hungarian Rhetoric), co-written with his recently deceased close friend, fellow student, and colleague, Zoltán Szabó G. Why might this be necessary? The Tower of Babel becomes an inverted Jacob’s ladder: the higher one climbs, the more one forgets the original meanings of words. Every word is semantically charged by the Logos – the Logos as corpus, as countless intuitive feelers: ‘sounding mathematics’, heavenly chemistry, sacred truth, cultivated frequency. By now, these sensory experiences have vanished – eternal ideas left behind in Paradise. Because, to borrow Heidegger’s phrase, “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells,” is no longer valid; one confronts secret meanings that are no longer interpretable; unmarked scripturae, hidden teachings, and the undecipherable hymns of being and everlastingness. But a writing is not ‘secret’, nor a speech ‘inscrutable’, merely because it is in a foreign language. It becomes so because the person cut off from creation’s arcana is, in most cases, no longer capable of extracting the primary essence of word and text – no longer able to discover an essential relation between expression and expressive intention. And yet the scientiae peritus once possessed the full range of linguistic expressivity. The adept driven from the ‘lodging of language’ – to return to a Heideggerian image – finds himself in the ever-thickening thicket of Babelian aberratio. To counter this, Szörényi and Szabó G. Zoltán turn to a discipline that dates back to antiquity: rhetoric. Knowledge of rhetoric is not merely the representation of a natural language’s sounds (alphabet) – that is, the grammatical structure of speech (syntax, semantics) – but a whole muster of expressive capacities (elocutio): sign-inventories, letter-combinations, vocabulary, morphology, phonetics, grammar, symbols, phonology (euphony), and so forth. In marshalling these, Szörényi and Szabó – with word-weaving faithful to the truth of being, and with the vocation-consciousness of de civitate Dei (The City of God) – confront false associative reflexes and harmful misattributions of meaning. The chronic pedantry of speech and writing, sophisticated vacuity, habits born of over-politicised centuries, and bureaucratism settling over vocabulary – all this has led to a warped rhetorical filth-parade before which a person of good faith cannot pass in silence. This ‘word’ – like language, and, at the meta-level, philology that points back to it – is marshy ground. Jean Cocteau said that “The greatest masterpieces of literature are nothing more than the alphabet in disorder.” A sign system that does not break down merely into syntax and semantics. One must add the entire arsenal of symbols: genetic codes, dance figures, the waggle-dance of bees, scent-signals in insects’ pheromone languages, smoke signals, Morse, gestures, metacommunication – every intention and mode of expression. More scientifically: the markers and modes of meaning, expression, formulation, transmission, and storage as information; the frequency of occurrence of information-bearing signs; the pragmatic usefulness of meaning; and the intention behind information – so-called apobetics. The subfields of linguistically represented information are framed by a single umbrella term: rhetoric. Poetry and free-associative prose cross conceptual boundaries (‘legally’) when sacral–metaphysical experience requires it. Accordingly, László Szörényi and Zoltán Szabó G. strive to restore language, achieve flawless sentence structure, and foster ‘clarity of speech’, particularly through poetry. “Poetic art, indeed, is not counted among the liberal arts, since, rising above all of them and encompassing them all, it stands out in complete eminence.” (Szörényi, Önfiloszhattyú [lit. Self-Philoswan]). He turns to poetry – to the prior primordial state in which meanings existed before even the inflation of words (“Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”) – to an exactness that overrides the meaning-corrupting manoeuvres of deliberate deception. The servile vassals of intentional sense-destruction – ideologies, ‘isms’, the slick toll-collectors of every stripe – have long been taxing the universal meaning of words. For that reason, in their conservative handbook of literary theory, Szörényi and his co-author, using ‘the Greek and Latin terminologies of rhetoric’s supranational system’, sharply designate the spiritual domain in which the foundations of Hungarian stand. With a wide-angle view of that domain, they write that “the whole of Hungarian literary literacy is built according to a canon that fits into the system formed from the 5th century BCE to the middle of the last century (the 19th century – the author), which the age of positivism indeed repudiated under the name ‘rhetoric’ and preserved only certain remnants as ‘stylistics’, yet both the perspective and the method have been rehabilitated by modern literary scholarship…” (Szabó G.–Szörényi, 1988, p. 7). They also specify what they mean by ‘conservative’: “Conservative in the sense that it conserves – that is, preserves – a literary-theoretical viewpoint thousands of years old, still valid today, and revived worldwide in recent decades.” (ibid.) In Aristotle’s sense, rhetoric is ‘the art of speech’; but he regards it not only as an art or craft (techné) but also as a capacity (dynamis), namely “a capacity which, in relation to each subject, perceives what may persuade to its acceptance” (ibid., p. 15).

Rhetoric, if we examine its subject and divisions, encompasses coercive argument (forensic speech), deliberative speech, and epideictic (demonstrative) speech. Yet it quickly becomes clear, on reading the book, that it is in fact a passport to every country of speech and writing – and whoever falsifies it, or lacks competence in it, cannot gain a complete picture, either in practical terms (in negotiis) or in artistic terms (in ostentatione positum), of this craft’s principle. Emphasising the importance of such high study, Béla Hamvas said: “The word judges – but the word itself also stands under judgement.” The scholarly ‘impact factor’ of Szörényi and Szabó G. Zoltán’s work is immense: it has been, and continues to be, widely cited. No wonder: the silenced, appropriated, and censored voices of rhetoric – under history’s coercive pressures – overcame, with greater force than ever, the harmful spirits of linguistic shrinking, by recalling the orators of antiquity and drawing on poetry’s ‘Book of Proverbs’. The reconstruction of knowledge once defeated, forbidden, and ‘secret’ was achieved by the two authors with unparalleled inventiveness, restoring to language its former nimbus.

“Huns and Jesuits”

One outstanding summit of László Szörényi’s oeuvre and life-path is his research into medieval Jesuit literature, more precisely, Hungary’s Latin heroic epic. His book Hunok és jezsuiták (lit. Huns and Jesuits) was based on his Candidate of Sciences dissertation [a former Soviet-bloc academic degree]. “Why must we become acquainted with these almost entirely forgotten Jesuit epics?” he asks in the preface. He answers that without a heroic epic – one conforming to antique norms yet new, Christian, and consciousness-forming – neither the literature that follows nor the embeddedness of national literatures can be understood. Neo-Latin literature is closely bound to the achievements of national literatures up to that point. It is therefore not accidental that Hungarian Latin poetry began experimenting with the heroic epic only after Miklós Zrínyi initiated the genre in Hungarian. Szörényi devotes three chapters to Zrínyi. In analysing Szigeti veszedelem (lit. The Peril of Sziget), he concludes that “Zrínyi is the equal of Camões, Tasso, Milton” – thereby indicating the Hungarian poet’s place in world literature. Among the Neo-Latin poets, he includes a Benedictine monk and an Austrian Jesuit, and his discussion extends to György Pray, with mention also of the Croatian–Hungarian Neo-Latin bucolic poet István Agyich. Beyond clarifying genre and generic apparatus, it becomes clear how the baroque heroic ideal is created: how the Aristotelian, Virgilian, and Ovidian traditions are transmuted within Latin poetry. Specific problems had to be solved: for instance, how does an antique cast of characters become Latin and Christian? The English Alexander Ross, in his Virgilian cento on the life of Jesus, offers a brilliant trick: he claims that the Greeks stole the mythological apparatus from the Jews’ sacred books. Jupiter is Jehovah; Adonis is Adonai; Vulcan is Tubal-cain; Musaeus is Moses himself (some Egyptologists have suggested that Moses may have been Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaten). Fifty years later, Bernardus Pannagle, in his epic Metamorphosis Metamorphoseos, Christianised the entirety of Ovid’s work. Who might be the heroes of the new epic? For example, Rudolf of Habsburg, the first holder of the Holy Roman imperial title from his dynasty. Hungarian national saints were also adopted as pious predecessors of the Habsburgs, yet they could ‘say’ nothing about Hungarian martial glory or Scythian virtues. Here, the antique ideal is itself modified: the poets argue that heroes need not be flawless. A saintly person can also be an epic hero. He may be modest, humble, and prayerful (Leopold is such), and these virtues can be as valuable as martial virtues. In a historical survey, we can trace the period’s ideological pressure on the Church and the imperial state. Step by step, an intention to make history (history-falsifying?) becomes visible: how power places a Church that transcends nation-states in its own service. Thus, we understand why, across Europe – and in America too – an enduring image of Attila and, through him, the Huns, as hateful, cruel conquerors have taken hold. With an excellent sense of proportion, Szörényi captures the turning point when Hungary’s Jesuits shift from Habsburg glorification to acceptance of Hungarian politics based on feudal ‘orders’. The praise of Hunnia increasingly gains ground; ‘Scythian’, ‘Hun’, and ‘Attila’ are no longer slurs. Heroes can once again be heroes: Miklós Zrínyi, János Hunyadi, or King Matthias…

“Önfiloszhattyú”

This work offers philological dissections of Dante’s Inferno and other primary texts, revealing the hidden contents that can be extracted from language through the interweaving of multiple disciplines. The author does not back his arguments with a flaming sword, as an unappealing authority; he merely offers a possible intellectual-historical reading to uncover the potential facts of enigmatic phenomena in the great classics that have not yet been fully explored. In this book, the complex worldview of one of Szörényi’s mentors, György Bánhegyi – a teacher who found correspondences, among other things, between Mihály Babits and Niels Bohr – returns. Having absorbed this capacity – “armed with the Bánhegyi habitus” – Szörényi presents similar correspondences, reinterpretations of meaning, and re-essentiations: verse-forms linking time-planes, biblical references validating plots, and legends recalling and citing the deeds of notable historical figures. Examples include mapping Petrarch’s and Dante’s connections to Hungary. Petrarch sets the destruction of Venice alongside that of Avignon, Babylon, and other biblical cities, through chains of analogical allusion. In Hungarian terms, is Zrínyi a good poet, and does he have a place on Parnassus? Does the political colouring of his poetry diminish the calibre of his work? Biblical (chiefly European) historical analogies, Ovidian correspondences, and – as explanatory theses – the use of the pillars of law, justice, and authenticity: all this, alongside the poetic reworking of events and the charting of networks between the thought-worlds of differing eras, gives this work of literary history a strikingly fresh flavour. Another strong current in the book is myth as allegory and symbol: as justification for a historical event, as prophecy of one, or as foresight. And since we are dealing with the philologically contextualised examination of historical events, Szörényi also presents the processing of documents and materials from the auxiliary sciences of history.

[2019]

László Szörényi

Selection of works