Talk on Budapest literature
On 16 March, Gwen Jones gave a talk on representations of Budapest in early twentieth-century Hungarian literature, the subject of her doctoral thesis.
The main theme running through her talk was the difficulty in finding a way in which to speak and write about Hungarian literature in English, avoiding the pitfalls of existing models. At one end of the spectrum, one needs to be wary of regurgitating the opacity of traditional Hungarian literary histories (exemplified by the six-volume MTA history of Hungarian literature, A magyar irodalom története, 1964-6, commonly referred to as Spenót, spinach, a reference to the dark green covers); at the other, much contemporary Western literary criticism proffers up little more than a theory-by-numbers approach, according to which one can mask the fact that one has nothing much to say by employing terms such as ’slippage’ or ‘boundary transgression’.
Gwen began her talk by asking participants to read a short excerpt written in the 1920s by Ferenc Molnár (1878-1952), which describes the late afternoon rush-hour traffic in Budapest, in typically wry fashion:
Egy külföldi társaságnak mutattam meg a várost. Fél hat lehetett. A városligetből jöttünk automobilon a Rákóczi út, a Kossuth Lajos utca és az Erzsébet-híd felé. Abban az időben nagy vízhiány volt, és nem öntözték az utcát. Sűrű porfelhő feküdt a városon, és a nap különösen szép színekkel ment Óbudára aludni. Nincs szebb, mint mikor a városi por, a füsttel keveredett felszíjja a nap színeit. Itt tüzes narancssárgák, kardinálvörösek, parasztkendő-rózsaszínek, és olyan enyhe és mégis égő zöldek sugároztak át a poron, aminőket még sohasem láttam. A Keleti pályaudvarnál pokoli lárma volt. Soha életemben, se Párizsban, se Londonban még ekkora, ilyen zavaros, ilyen hatalmasan tülekedő kocsiforgalmat nem láttam. Végig a hídon kavargó, ordító, vaszörgéses, csöngető élet tombolt, az autónak folyton tülkölnie kellett, a mellékutcák ontották az embereket és a kocsikat, és amikor kiértünk, a két Klotild-palota színházi díszletszerű tornyaival, a mélybe süllyesztett templom, a híd két égbe törő vasoszlopa s túlnan a nagy hegy, mindez leöntve, átitatva, besugározva azzal a földöntúli fényhatással, amit a porral és füsttel kevert lángoló napnyugta tud csak előidézni. A távolban már égett egy-két lámpa, a budai várpalota már sötétbárnán vált el a szó szoros értelmében bíbornokvörös égbolttól, lent a barna Dunán lánggal égő aranyhalak millióira oszlott az ég tükörképe, be kell vallanom – pillanatra megállt a lélegzetem … amikor az egyik külföldi hölgy, aki a kocsiban ült, felkiáltott:
- Milyen különös, milyen semmihez se hasonlítható, milyen magyar kép ez!
Molnár describes the splendid kaleidoscope of colours created by the rays of the setting sun mixing with exhaust fumes as if it were a scene of bucolic wonder; not even one of his foreign guests can hold back from noting ‘what an incomparable, what a Hungarian picture this is!’
The population of Budapest started to grow rapidly from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, increasing threefold from 1880 and reaching almost a million by 1925. Any self-respecting modern nation needs symbols of its national modernity. Hungarian liberals were determined that Budapest not only rival Vienna, but exert ‘an irresistible material and intellectual attraction over all parts of the country in order to further national development, and function as a pleasant rallying point for orderliness, culturedness, and elevated social principles’. The concentration of resources in the capital, and the Millennial celebrations of 1896, imbued an arrogant self-confidence on the young capital, and the explosion in population and productivity was documented by those writers conventionally regarded as nagyvárosi írók, big-city, metropolitan writers (Bródy Sándor, Krúdy Gyula, Molnár Ferenc, Szomory Dezső, Márai Sándor and so on), the latest standard-bearers of polgári irodalom.
Gwen argued that Budapest played too many roles or, rather, was overburdened by too many associations. She discussed literary depictions of the city written in a literary and broader culture pre-occupied with what the city was not. It is too simplistic to present Hungarian ideas about Budapest as simply pro- or anti-. Reading the strongest condemnations of the culture of the capital, she sensed that their authors wished not to destroy the bűnös város (sinful city), but to reform it, to cleanse and purify it and, often, to Hungarianise it, despite the fact that unlike, say, Prague or Warsaw, Budapest was by and large monoglot from around the turn of the twentieth century onwards. It Hungarianised its newcomers, and as such there was no significant body of literature written in German or Yiddish. In his 1923 poem ‘Átkozd meg a várost és menekülj!’, part of the Kalibán cycle, Szabó Lőrinc toyed with the imagery of cursing the city and fleeing to an unnamed pastoral location, whereupon man would proceed to build civilisation anew, except this time get it right. For all the authors concerned, the processes of becoming nagyvárosi, pesti went hand in hand with becoming a writer. Works discussed included novels, short stories and autobiographies by Ágai Adolf, Csáth Géza, Harsányi Kálmán, Herczeg Ferenc, Gárdonyi Géza, Kóbor Tamás, Kosztolányi Dezső, Molnár Ferenc, Móricz Zsigmond, Nagy Lajos, Németh László, Rejtő Jenő, Ritoók Emma, Szabó Dezső, Szerb Antal and Tormay Cécile.
The more Hungarian authors tried to marshal the word-city within monologic confines, the less successful their attempts. In other words, the city in a one-dimensional text slips away, and becomes instead a marker of Hungarian-ness, which paradoxically reinforces the role of Budapest in the formation of national consciousness.
Rather than get bogged down in the antecedents of the dreaded népi-urbánus vita, Gwen proposed a continuum of city narratives: (1) polgárosodás (embourgeoisement): the gradual replacement of the nobility in all spheres of culture by an emergent middle class; (2) térfoglalás (lit. occupation, but here rather usurpation, of space): the perceived physical and intellectual encroachment of the new middle class upon and into those spheres of Hungarian culture deemed most significant (the professions, literary production and criticism, etc.); (3) meghódítás (conquest) the proposed conquest, be it physical or symbolic, of the city, to reclaim and reform it in a more ‘authentic’ image; and (4) újjászületés (rebirth) the rebirth of a city which is to be without rivalry, the commodification of art, or utilitarian relations between people. Paradoxically, the city thus becomes the site of a spiritual revolution to synthesise Gemeinschaft with Gesellschaft. At the same time, suspicion of the city and its association with an alien modernity served to reinforce the power of the city in the literary consciousness. Hungarian narrative prose fiction showed a city as paradoxical as any other. Budapest liberated and imprisoned, spawned its own mythicisation, and frustrated all attempts at simplification.