Chapter on Love

by Miklós Szentkuthy

Written between Szentkuthy's first major work, Prae (1934), and the first book of the St. Orpheus Breviary (1939), Chapter on Love (publ. 1936) exemplifies well Szentkuthy's writing of excess. An attempt at polyphonic writing, it brings together the perspectives of an unlikely set of characters including the mayor of a doomed Italian city, given to debilitating "impressionism" - a penchant for observing and analyzing-apart the minutest shades of reality -, a nihilistic pope, a hanged brigand, a courtesan and her decadent pubertal adorer. They pass through the pages of this quixotic and compelling book under the threat of imminent catastrophe, filling chapter after chapter with passionate, self-generating theorizing and (mock-)philosophizing on the margins of Empedocles, life and death, female stockings, endingness and changeability, ethics and aesthetics, vitality and law, chaos and social order grounded in horror vacui, the forever elusive other person - all enmeshed with well-nigh self-parodic, idiosyncratic feats of ratiocination and theorizing driven ad absurdum, which proliferate on the analogy of (free) association.?The common denominator of their analytical furore and the yarns they spin is love, which touches not only on the human being, but the whole of nature, from the realm of plants to that of minerals. Szentkuthy's book may don the costume of a historical novel, but it stands under the sign of the pseudo: its deliberately vague setting, somewhere in Italy toward the end of the Renaissance, is in fact but a mask which allows for anachronism (of realia, ideas, data, and even terminology) to ooze through, as the characters and their observations are our contemporaries in every respect.?Baroque and exuberant, of a sweeping melancholia and at times savage humor, a (mock-)treatise written with an abundance of striking, distant associations that evoke Surrealist practices, this strange novel tantalizingly shows a path not taken by experimental modernism, of the contrapuntal use of point-of-view converted into a contrapuntal use of analytic, essayistic observations of reality, and points towards Szentkuthy's monumental meditations on history sub specie whatsit in the St Orpheus Breviary epic.

406 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

both easier and more difficult than the first volume of prae - easier because it's shorter, less ambitious, more narrow in its focus of topics and very slightly closer(but only very slightly) to a conventional novel. more difficult because it's less clear to me exactly what he's driving at here or if there is a particular argument being made. it revolves around a series of characters in an unnamed italian town at some point during the medieval conflict between the papacy and the holy roman emperor(it might specifically be in 1239 when barbarossa was preparing to march on rome, but i'm not very familiar with this period), where the potential destruction of the catholic church by imperial forces seems imminent. most of the book is essayistic impressions from the perspective of these different characters about love. these are written with a kind of free association of images, and repeated oscillation between dichotomies that didn't always follow logically to me. the writing is not quite as jawdropping as I found it to be in prae but there are still some standout sections, e.g

"The bed swallows us like some Moloch or a whirlpool: it is not we who strip by its side but the bed that pulls off our clothes with its magnetic eyes; it is not we who get into it but the bed that catches us as the candleight catches a moth. The bed does not, cannot belong to life: lying down in the bed is getting to a nunnery, renunciation, detachment from everything. There is something nauseating tragic in its clumsy anthropoid proportions: the pillow for the head, the spread for the body's skin (here the two are the "hat" and "clothes") - what a simplification, what a distortion comfort is. Because the bed is comfortable. One can move at ease in it, the mattresses, pillows, bedspreads are so obedient, so subserviently malleable. But who has never felt that comfort and freedom is the relaxation of death, of utter annihilation?"

"Death and realism belong together like the hands and the fingers: what an abstraction the female breasts that had undulated in our embrace like a leaping hare, how colourless and imperceptible in comparison to the breasts that death scoops aside in its onward march, like a snow-shovel scooping aside two worthless clogs. In this sense death is a birth: abstract girls, theory-women first get a truly human body in death. Although the mayor was by his wife's bedside, he could almost feel in his body how the dying woman was becoming more and more physical, how she was putting on herself, at breakneck speed, the divinifying cosmetics of "the human". All around, the world paled with its blooming lilac trees and doomed papal state - of the whole of existence there remained bony fingers, toenails, lips, armpit hairs, shell-like ears."

"And all of a sudden he realized how infinitely he hated this sister. He felt hatred under his chin like a glass cube: the cube was transparent like air, was like nothingness baked in a mold: the cube was sharp and precise, it was what it was: hard, unbreakable, heavy: nuptial-kiss on gravity's leaden lips. The amateurs loitering about would call hatred a whirling ocean, or gushing lava, but they didn't cover his case - his hatred was not a passion, not an "emotion", and not a "principle", but some mathematical intentionality of his whole young life, and abstract line. I will live in this dual world forever: to be inebriated by the beauty of my enemies, to look at my murderers as one looks at a flower, to listen to their curses as one would listen to a clavicembalo sonata: oblivious to the fact that they are humans, moral beings, and to sense them only as stains of colour, musical conceits, and delight in them. And then again to suddenly obey the glass-cube's punctual power, which had also been present in me throughout, distant and foreign, invisibly balancing the sweet frivolity of dehmanizing impressionism."

"I took one more look at the transparent mistress before taking the death news: let me feel for one last time love for what it is - a fleeting form's fleeting-by, the memory of an absurd psychological constellation, the blend of visual draft and anxiety-feeding destiny. Love is this: Japanese prints - lots of blank paper-space, here and there a blot of colour, a letter. How beautiful was this alternation: between the palpating-all of love-making and our souls' finicky impressionism. At this moment the whole woman was indeed a "breath" : if a flower, then one sole petal fading into green; if a pond, then one sole B-voiced wave; if a scent, then one single drop of perfume on the embroidered initials of yesterday's handkerchief."