István Szőcs writer, critic, literary translator

His oeuvre is so wide-ranging that – although, taken as a whole, it bears witness to literary qualities – it cannot be described by the usual categories, whether on generic or thematic grounds. He also published imaginative literature: three novels appeared, and their critical reception was by no means negligible, yet his true creative power unfolded elsewhere.

His first period is characterised by the Kántor–Láng literary history, marked by the dominance of a sweeping, polemical force that affected the entirety of Transylvanian cultural life: “…his unceasing duels bring movement into the […] life of literature. In general, his main characteristics are intuitive sensitivity, analytical and associative ability, bluntness and inconsistency.” (Romániai magyar irodalom. [lit. Hungarian Literature in Romania.] Kriterion, Bucharest, 1971, p. 47.) In light of the complete oeuvre, it can now be stated that this apparent inconsistency is a consciously assumed role within a culturally closed region – an analogue of the socio-psychological attitude, frequently invoked by István Szőcs himself, known in rhetoric as the ‘devil’s advocate’. In connection with his work in the 1970s, the Bertha–Görömbei literary history (1981) also notes his inclination towards polemic, but already observes that he regards “universality […] as attainable not only through the assimilation of elements of Western, European culture, but also through solidarity with Eastern, ancient, mythical universality.” (A hetvenes évek romániai magyar irodalma. [lit. Hungarian Literature in Romania in the 1970s.] Budapest, n.d., p. 143.). This outlook increasingly permeates every area of his work and – particularly from the 1990s onwards – narrows his sphere of interest to some extent.

Although literary-historical surveys do not mention them, two of the three novels he wrote in midlife, in a sense, constitute a summation of his earlier essayistic, journalistic and critical practice and of the broad panorama of his intellectual worldview, while also prefiguring his later authorial expressions in other directions.

Kritikus holdtölte (lit. Critical Full Moon, 1965) begins with a premise typical of the period, yet veers away from its flat topic towards human, private conflicts that also reveal an exacting psychological attentiveness. Its protagonist, Gábor Mezei, heads the music criticism section at a county newspaper – the very title of which expresses the atmosphere of the age – Lobogó (lit. The Banner). His job exposes weaknesses in his personality: he is neither talented enough to be a composer nor committed enough to be a journalist. In fulfilment of another period-typical assignment, he undertakes a reporting trip to a small village in the Mezőség region with a mixed (Hungarian–Romanian) population to uncover the internal relations and production results of the collective farm. There, the married, two-child, big-city intellectual meets a young schoolteacher of extraordinary beauty and immediately falls into an overwhelming love. The thematic frame of the story – as noted – is penitentially ‘set’ like an assignment, yet the unfolding love triangle and private crisis elevate it beyond the schemata expected of literature at the time. Alongside the asserted validity of the ideology of collectivity (in the new type of agricultural cooperative, despite accusations, it emerges that the chair, Comrade Mitru, performs his work impeccably, in the spirit of the guidelines), an attempt is made to interpret the private crisis, the love triangle – almost a quadrangle – psychologically. Gábor’s concealed love, Johanna, of German nationality but Hungarian in feeling, undertakes to bear their child, yet enters into a formal marriage with a Romanian agronomist, who uses this official relationship to build his career. The protagonist engages in complex, psychologically probing conversations with his colleagues about the traditional family model, and would like to unite his wife, his beloved, and all his children into a single large family. His principles clash so conspicuously with the period’s moral value system that the outcome is inevitable: he must leave his position of responsibility and sink into the mediocrity of the teaching way of life. The editor-in-chief’s voice, in the manner of a raisonneur, formulates the guiding principles: “Gábor’s behaviour… cannot be reconciled with our ideal of the family. Gábor considers himself a communist. Yet he went into something like this. […] Lying is the first step towards every other filthy thing… A communist cannot live in a lie.”

In the composition of Üvegfedő (lit. Glass Lid, 1971), the temporarily freer intellectual climate of the period is already perceptible. The author’s game-theoretical prelude – in which he discusses with the reader the blurring of fiction and reality, and the alternation of various modes of speech – promises an essayistic novel. He places his protagonist, the teacher András Buttkai, in a similarly labyrinthine environment open to the most varied possibilities of fate, where anything may happen to him by the whim of chance. He is neither a self-portrait nor a raisonneur, yet he possesses all the knowledge the primary narrator has accumulated in his consciousness so far. The divorced teacher, living alone, lacks the capacity for self-assertion, and on his professional path, he is met with failures, now by accidental recognition. Yet even in his selfish, career-focused environment, his knowledge and talent are appreciated, and they manifest in literary creations as well: “People are characterised most of all by their actions and thoughts; writing is an action, especially when it contains thoughts.” This ironic and self-reflexive concentration of knowledge then somewhat overloads the novel’s narrative weaving. Inserted short stories, independent and extensive studies, and digressions into mythology, Sumerology, astronomy, Freudian psychology, linguistics, and Hungarian language history divert the proper plot-lines into side tracks – plot-lines which ultimately converge in a crime, elaborated in quasi-detective fashion (it concerns an artefact of ancient origin bearing cultural-historical value). At the same time, typical careerists of the era who trample over everyone are portrayed with vivid irony – among them the ‘decent informer’, decent because “he can arrange it so that even his conscience remains clean, since he reports only those who cheat”.

From his earliest publications in the mid-1950s onwards, for more than three decades, István Szőcs was present in literary life primarily through literary and theatre criticism and essays in literary history. He is less concerned with the aesthetic value of works conceived in a literary-theoretical sense; as a consequence of his training as a psychologist and his autodidactic studies in linguistics, psycholinguistics and etymology, he is far more interested in the human and community-addressing message of works. His thinking was strongly influenced by his former outstanding university teachers, Béla Gunda, Géza Entz, and, emphatically, Gyula László; his conception of literature, however, was determined for life by his tragically fated teacher, László Szabédi. Until the late 1980s, he followed and reflected upon, in his writings, not only the directions of Transylvanian and Hungarian literature but also those of world literature. Although his favourite writers (by his own admission) are “the know-it-alls […] from whom one can learn something”, such as Jókai, H. G. Wells, and Huxley, he also closely watches the emergence of the youngest generation and supports their gaining of ground in literary life through his reviews. He does not pit one group of writers against another; regardless of affiliation, he criticises every work that runs counter to his taste with the same provocative impetus. For he holds that: “Critics […] are not disliked because they are strict; far more often the critic is attacked and reviled for praising someone than for criticising them…. Criticism has no other role than, with ‘a certain stirring’, to serve intellectual fermentation […]. Intellectual life must not be allowed to settle.” (Helikon, 10 August 2008) István Szőcs’s impact lies not primarily in the irrefutable force of his criticism, but rather in the energy of provocation: he often points to the reverse side of the fixed, canonised image of cultural and literary phenomena, approaching them from an unusual perspective.

A significant strand of his multifaceted work is his contribution to the renewal of publishing. In Romanian–Hungarian publishing, he helped bring out classics that had been neglected for decades (in the 1960s and 1970s) through careful selection. He presented the lyric poetry of Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, and Jenő Dsida, and the prose of Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, and Dezső Kosztolányi, as well as the long-banned Sándor Makkai, to a broad readership, always accompanied by prefaces offering original perspectives and new interpretations. Except for a single book – a poetry anthology that was presumably a compelled “flag-lowering … before the Party…, before the Party-led struggles of our people […]. We have gathered the finest party-minded, patriotic, peace-fighting and life-affirming poems of the poets by the Socialist Republic of Romania…” (Zászlóhajtás (lit. Flag-Lowering), 1974).

From the 1990s onwards – by his own admission – he no longer follows the latest trends in either Hungarian or world literature with the same intensity of interest. He is alienated by the permissive mode of speech characteristic of postmodern literature and by its indifference to community and national values. The more open intellectual climate after 1990 also turns Szőcs against both tradition-preserving and tradition-uncovering approaches, guiding representatives of Transylvanian literary life. From the standpoint of the ‘non-chair-bound scholar’ – contradicting his earlier self – he expresses a doubt-ridden view of the functions of Transylvanian literature as a whole: “Such minority literatures belong far more to the clinical signs of life-processes than to the enrichment of world literature. One must not… fall into the error of believing that, even in a minority situation, we are able to create world literature.” (Interview by Zsolt Karácsonyi, Helikon, 10 August 2008) In a curious way, he becomes engaged in a two-front struggle against two phenomena of Transylvanian culture that are themselves in constant confrontation. On the one hand, he extends his critique of postmodernity to the theatre of Gábor Tompa in Cluj-Napoca; in a series of polemical articles, he attacks their high European standards and narrow, elite-oriented performances, demanding popular premieres that attract broad audiences. On the other hand, he regards as mere literary cult-making everything that “Edgár Balogh and his circle, Gyula Dávid and his circle, and Lajos Kántor and his circle edited” – that is, he dismisses as useless the now uncovered, published, and re-evaluated complete output of the interwar creators of Erdélyi Helikon, calling it “the loyal literature of a gentlemanly society […] with eyes bound” (Helikon, 10 August 2008). He sets against the entire panopticon of Transylvanian literature a few authors excluded from the canon (Róza Ignácz, Loránd Daday, Ferenc Balázs, György Bözödi) who, he claims, “understood the role of literature more tragically.”

The number of his articles and reviews concerned with (but not limited to) literature may be estimated in the hundreds, perhaps thousands; yet his extraordinary erudition and wide-ranging culture show particular vitality in another field. History and historical linguistics, protohistory, language psychology and etymology are inseparably intertwined within this special body of knowledge – and consequently within his cultural-historical writings as well. It is therefore no accident that he himself considers his major work to be Selyemsárhajó (lit. Silk-Mud Ship), a book that has seen several editions and thematic expansions, in which he impressively mobilises the protohistorical, archaeological, comparative linguistic, astronomical, mythological, and psychological knowledge he has systematised over decades. He begins by interpreting the ancient Hungarian concept named in the title, traces one piece of our most deeply rooted folk poetry, Selyemsárhajú Magyar Ilona (lint Hungarian Ilona of the Silk-Mud Hair), and offers its etymological interpretation: “…selyem sárhajú… Saly – in its extended form sajgó or salgó – originally means bright, fire-lit, fire-yellow.” With this line of thought, he turns to his central theme: a complex interpretation of Júlia szép leány (Julia, the Fair Maiden). His foundational thesis is that “our ballad beginning Júlia szép leány, belonging to the type of the ‘girl taken up to heaven’, is not of medieval origin, and is not of Christian conception at all, as several serious scholars have claimed so far, but is related to the ‘pagan’ mystery plays […], and beyond even those is rooted in the belief world and art of ancient Egypt”. He considers his own concept to be of paradigm-shifting significance in the history of scholarship: “It is not […] for the glory of discovery that I wish to date this ballad back to before the Middle Ages, but because, in analysing it, the fundamental errors of perspective in our entire cultural history and in a series of disciplines – for instance linguistics and historiography – are revealed.” In keeping with his novel approach, on the basis of the text’s suggestions, he constructs a kind of emblematic, drawable system of signs: “In our diagram […] at the centre, a female figure among ears of wheat; in her hand, perhaps on her head, a wreath of grain and flowers; before her, a ram-headed, star-garbed monster figure adorned with the signs of the main celestial bodies; in one ‘hand’ a key – a looped cross – and with the other it beckons towards the winding path behind it; the path leads to a bright gate opening high above; at the other edge of the image, an older woman bends over a smouldering little fire with a dramatic hand gesture, and above her a swarm of bees.” He subsequently interprets this diagram as an “astronomical formula, a description of a symbolic event taking place in the sky”, according to which “Julia is the constellation called Virgo in the belt of the zodiac, and the curly white lamb is that of Aries”. He links this astronomical perspective with name-etymological analyses, arriving at insights into religious ideology and the Hungarian world of belief, on the grounds that “in our folktales… there are secret marks on the princess’s body” – that is, zodiac signs. The Julia of the ballad is therefore “one constellation of the Zodiac, Virgo – in Hungarian, Aratószűz”. Setting the deduced and proven symbol system within this broad perspective, he refutes what he regards as the fundamental falsifications of previous protohistorical research, which holds that human civilisation can be counted only from the ‘Greek miracle’ and the texts of the Bible. István Szőcs advances countless proofs in favour of a Sumerian origin narrative. The conception of history he advocates could not prevail in scholarly life because “they denied the Ural–Altaic origin of the Sumerians, and, fearing that one day this might nevertheless be proven, they sought to demonstrate as many uncertain and insoluble moments as possible in the Sumerian question”. Among his many arguments, he cites “three tiny clay tablets” found in Tatárlaka (Tărtăria) in Transylvania as one of the most important pieces of evidence, which “strongly resembled […] Sumerian pictographic writing”, yet “proved to be 1,000 years older than the Sumerian clay tablets!” Tracing the formation of the four great ancient civilisational zones (Indo-European, Semitic, Hamitic, and Turanian), he concludes that our analysed ballad also shows kinship with Sumerian epics. “Our ballad therefore belongs to a pre-Christian cultural sphere, whose living space is the eastern Mediterranean coastline and the region between the Black Sea and the great Russian plain” – that is, it is part of the ‘Egyptian–Scythian’ cultural sphere. Few specialists responded to his sweeping study. Mihály Hoppál agrees with Szőcs’s more important theses: “For my part, I hold that one need not overemphasise the role of European elements in folklore, […] there are/can be Eastern elements in Hungarian culture that we brought and naturalised in Europe.”

In numerous other studies, Szőcs also addresses Hungarian protohistory and myths of origin; in general, he disputes the unshakable dogmas of Finno-Ugric linguists and chair-bound scholars. He himself supports research into the Sumerian language and its origins, yet urges careful comparison and methodological flexibility rather than exclusivism: “Finno-Ugricists have never attacked a direction of interest with such infantile hatred as that of Sumer.” (Félrejáró ingák (lit. Wayward Pendulums, 2005, p. 136) Elsewhere: “It is characteristic… in the case of Sumerian language comparison. Some are unable to acknowledge that it does not exclude Finno-Ugric linguistic kinship – indeed, it supports it.” (Ibid., p. 341.)

Like writers living in a minority situation in general, István Szőcs also took an active role in political and public affairs. Among other things, in his journalistic writings he argued firmly for the reinstatement of long-established Hungarian-language grammar schools (lycées) and protested against the extremely nationalist city leadership of Kolozsvár’s (Cluj-Napoca’s) mayor, Gheorghe Funar. The greatest political scandal, which swelled to a nationwide scale, he stirred up in a television broadcast, in which he refuted the theory of Daco-Roman continuity with rational facts.

All in all, István Szőcs’s oeuvre, although it sometimes appears in apparently distant subject areas, in reality bears witness to a holistic unity. The objective, sparsely fact-based study or treatise is alien to his temperament. His defining genres are vigorous literary journalism and the scholarly-ambitious essay, yet with a readable, subjective tone. This latter form he enriched precisely with the traits of a personality that penetrates its material and subject, with stylistic originality; one might say that he revives the atmosphere of Transylvanian polemical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the tradition of strongly rhetorical commemorative speeches established by Pál Gyulai (in texts of far looser cohesion than those of that great literary historian-critic), filling them with contemporary content.

Only in recent years has it emerged that he has also found another mode of self-expression: painting. Of this, however, we still know little for the time being.

[2012]