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Next, I wish to demonstrate the explanatory power of the combination of a variety of principles considered hitherto in the present book, by having a closer look at the work of the great Hungarian poet Endre Ady. This poet is usually categorized as "Symbolist;" or "Expressionist". Here, I want to point to another, hopelessly evasive, quality of his poetry, a quality that many of his readers have intuitively felt: Ady's poetry is said to have an irresistible, magical, spell-weaving quality about it. My contention is that this quality is the result of the interaction of a variety of prosodic, figurative, and thematic elements, among which the grotesque plays a prominent part.
I shall begin with a relatively mild instance of the afore-mentioned quality, as illustrated in the first two stanzas of his poem "A muszáj-Herkules" ("The must-Hercules")[1]:
(4) Dőltömre Tökmag Jankók lesnek:
ògy szeretnék gyáván kihúnyni
S meg kell maradnom Herkulesnek.
Milyen híg fejüek a törpék:
Hagynának egy kicsit magamra,
Krisztusuccse, magam megtörnék.
(For my fall Pumpkin-Seed Jacks are lying in waiting:
I would like so much cowardly to expire,
Yet I must stay a Hercules.
How dilute-headed are the dwarfs:
Had they let me on my own for a little while,
So help me Christ, I would break down on my own.)
On the thematic level, we have got here an opposition of the high-mimetic Hercules, as opposed to the low-mimetic Pumpkin-Seed Jacks,[2] dwarfs, and cowardly to expire. On the lexical level, the high-mimetic words are opposed to a popular dialecticism such as Krisztusuccse ("So help me Christ") and substandard words like "must", muszáj. On the figurative level, there is the irrational quality related to the .x.oxymoron in the title, "A muszáj-Herkules" ("The must-Hercules"), as well as to the substitution of the modal particle must for an adjective. A similar, but less straightforward oxymoronic quality one may perceive in the line "I would like so much cowardly to expire". To this, another affective ingredient is added by the line "How dilute-headed are the dwarfs". Compare this verse-line to a possible paraphrase: "How idiotic are the dwarfs". What the predicate dilute-headed adds, is a vaguely grotesque quality, with a mild atmosphere of emotional disorientation. An intense affective ingredient is added by the phrase "I would like so much", and the interjection "So help me Christ". Now, all these more or less irrational oppositions and qualities are fused and intensified by two prosodic features of the poem, both related to rhyme and rhyme-pattern. The first is related to the asymmetrical shape of the stanza. Owing to an expectation for stable gestalts, as well as to past experience with stanza-forms, the reader is inclined to expect some symmetrical rhyme-pattern, presumably of the form abab. This odd-numbered structure with its asymmetrical rhyme pattern contributes to an unstable feeling or irrational quality, reinforcing the illogical qualities encountered on the other levels of the poem.[3]
Finally, there is the perceptual quality of the virtuoso anti-grammatical rhyme;. Consider the rhyme-pair lesnek~Herkulesnek. The first "rhyme-fellow" (Hopkins), lesnek ("are lying in waiting"), is a verb, consisting of a stem (les) and the suffix for the third person plural (nek). This word is entirely included in the other rhyme-fellow. Here, however, the same speech-sounds refer to completely different semantic and syntactic entities. The string of sounds les is the last syllable of the proper noun Herkules; whereas the string of sounds nek is the dative-suffix. Thus, the two rhyme-fellows are homonyms on the phonetic level, but at the same time, are most emphatically contrasted on the semantic, syntactical, and morphological levels. A similar story may be told of the second rhyme. The two rhyme-fellows törpék and megtörnék are near homonyms; phonetically, they are contrasted only in one consonant. Grammatically, however, törpe ("dwarf") is a noun; the sound sequence -ék results from the plural-suffix. In the second rhyme-fellow, tör ("break") is a verb; -nék is a complex of suffixes, indicating the conditional mode, as well as the first person singular. Here, too, the two rhyme-fellows are most emphatically contrasted on the semantic, syntactical, and morphological levels. As I have suggested in chapter 8, such rhymes are apt to intensify, and increasingly fuse, whatever qualities there may emerge from the interaction of the other elements on the various levels of the poem. This is one of the reasons, I submit, of the impetuous, "irresistible" quality and the magical character of the present poem. .x).anti-grammatical rhyme;
Next I will examine, at considerably greater length, a poem in which a haunting magical quality of a much more extreme degree has been perceived by generations of Ady-readers. The poem I mean is his "Battle with the Grand Lord", a literal translation of which is provided below:
(5) The swineheaded Grand Lord is going to kill me,
I felt, he's going to kill me, if I let him,
He grinned at me and was sitting stiff,
On the gold he was sitting, on the gold,
I felt, he's going to kill me, if I let him.
His swinish body, the loathsome one, I
Caressed. He trembled.
"Look here, who I am" (I whispered to him)
And cut open my skull,
He looked into my brain and laughed.
(Should you think me the wild adventurer
Of wild desires?) And I fell on my knees there.
On the shore of tumultuous Life we were,
There were the two of us, the sun was setting,
"Give your gold, your gold".
"A single second is enough to kill me,
I may not wait anymore,
I am called forth for voyage, for pleasure,
By mysterious, luring words,
I may not wait anymore."
"Your heart is protected by bristles,
My inside is ulcerous, guileful,
Still, my heart is blessed,
Corroded by Life, by Desire.
I need gold. I must go on.
The sea is awaiting my yacht,
A thousand tents are waiting for me,
An alien sun, alien balsam,
Alien intoxication, a new girl,
All are waiting for me, for me".
The entire life within me is panting,
Everything that is new, toward me is galloping,
My many dreams are a holy hurly-burly,
All of your dreams are deaf,
So, cleave your thorax of gold.
The mournful, blind evening has already fallen upon us,
I was groaning. The waves
Continually brought word:
We are waiting. Have you got gold yet?
The tumult of the waves, the waves.
And we clashed. The shore was shaking,
I thrust my hand into his flesh,
I rent it, ripped it. All in vain.
His gold rattled. He laughed.
I cannot go, I cannot go.
A thousand evenings passed upon a thousand evenings,
My blood is shedding, shedding, continually shedding,
They call me, lure me from afar,
And we are still battling wildly:
I and the swineheaded Grand Lord.
There is a considerable number of uncertainties in this poem, stemming from many sources. These uncertainties are greatly enhanced by a variety of means: the already mentioned devices of the anti-grammatical rhyme, and the asymmetrical stanza form, and, last but not least, the enormous energy involved in clashes on a cosmic scale, such as indicated, e.g., by "And we clashed. The shore was shaking".
As for the interpretation of this poem, some Marxist critics take their "clue" from the social status of the Grand Lord and from the fact that what he denies the speaker is gold, and interpret the poem as an .x.allegory of some kind of class struggle. A rival approach, which will be the one adopted here, attributes no absolute meaning either to the Grand Lord, or to gold, and relies rather on the relations obtaining between the Grand Lord, the speaker, and gold. This lack of "absolute meaning" is a possible source of the mysterious, magical quality of the poem. The Grand Lord does have social status, does have means in excess of what he seems to need; means which he does not even know how to put to fruitful use. He is stiff, senseless, insensitive, inhumane, even bestial, loathsome. There is also a suggestion of "something mechanical enforced upon the living" (Bergson) in a line such as "He grinned at me and was sitting stiff". The speaker is his opposite in most respects: enormous forces are active inside him, he has most intense feelings, he has no economic means whatever, but is called forth for all sorts of goals, ambitions, purposes, aspirations, desires. His goals are mysterious, exotic, of an unspecified nature.
In one, all-important respect, however, the speaker is not the unqualified opposite of his antagonist: he is not the simple opposite of loathsome, he merely has a different kind of loathsomeness. Consider the following lines: "Your heart is protected by bristles, / My inside is ulcerous, guileful, / Still, my heart is blessed, / Corroded by Life, by Desire". The Grand Lord's loathsomeness is fast and stable, passively powerful, incapable of action, whereas the speaker has loathsome, powerful, and destructive forces acting inside him. This typically post-Romantic attitude, very well-known from Baudelaire, contrasts stagnation, and lifelessness with outbursting life-forces, which are nevertheless destructive, loathsome, full of evil. This may explain the oxymoronic quality of the three lines "My inside is ulcerous, guileful, / Still, my heart is blessed, / Corroded by Life, by Desire". Now consider this: these lines do not just imply some logical contradiction; they arouse conflicting, intense emotional tendencies in response to the speaker's personality. The same kind of complexities we find in the two lines "My many dreams are a holy hurly-burly, / All of your dreams are deaf". There is a straightforward opposition between "my dreams" and "your dreams"; at the same time, "holy" and "hurly burly" are characterized by conflicting emotional tendencies. If such conflicting tendencies are reinforced by additional elements, they may lead to a sense of confusion and a feeling of emotional disorientation.
The reinforcements in question are amply provided by the grotesque elements in the poem. I have quoted, in the preceding section of the present chapter, two passages on the grotesque due to, respectively, Horace and St. Bernard de Clairvaux. Gombrich (from whose Sense of Order these passages are taken) comments on them:
What these texts have in common is the reaction of exasperated helplessness provoked by hybrid creatures, part plant, part human; part woman, part fish; part horse, part goat. There are no names in our language, no categories in our thought, to come to grips with this elusive, dream-like imagery in which "all things are mixed" (to quote Dürer again). It outrages both our "sense of order" and our sense of meaning. [É] The point is that there is no point. [É] Each of these "shapelessly shapely" motifs offers us surprise after surprise [É]; here we receive one shock after the other. Not only do the limbs of these composite creatures defy our classifications, often we cannot even tell where they begin or end. [É] Thus there is nothing to hold on to, nothing fixed, the deformitas is hard to "code" and harder still to remember, for everything is in flux. What is equally vital to our understanding of these effects is that the uncertainty of response carries over from the perceptual to the emotional sphere (Gombrich, 1984: 256).
The antagonist of Ady's poem is precisely such a "hybrid creature" that "defies our classification", with "the uncertainty of response carried over from the perceptual to the emotional sphere". Now, consider the following. The grotesque visual element could be attenuated or eliminated altogether, if "swineheaded" were understood in some metaphorical sense (perhaps, "pigheaded"?). The beginning of the second stanza, however, insists that "swineheaded" should be understood literally: "His swinish body, the loathsome one, I / Caressed. He trembled". What is more, these very lines strongly intensify the conflicting emotional tendencies: the loathsome body trembling with pleasure, when caressed by the speaker.
Figure 2. Master of the Die:
Grotesque. Early 16th century.
Kayser (quoted by Thomson, 1972: 18) suggests that "the grotesque is an attempt to control and exorcise ('zu bannen und zu beschwören') the demonic elements in the world". While this may be a correct observation, it should be kept in mind that in order to "control and exorcise", the grotesque must also conjure up "the demonic elements in the world". Gombrich's inspiring discussion of the grotesque would strongly support both claims. Still, I believe, Thomson's reservation is well-taken: "We may object also to the somewhat melodramatic over-emphasis on the 'demonic', which totally removes the fearsome aspect of the grotesque to the realm of the irrational—almost supernatural" (Thomson, 1972: 18-19). To this, I would like to add that the relegation of the grotesque to the supernatural is an all too easy way of handling it. The grotesque is so affective, precisely, because of its immediate ambiguity, even before questions may be raised concerning the possible existence of the creatures involved. My claim is, at any rate, that the strange, magical haunting quality of Ady's poem has its source, among other things, in the pervasive quality of emotional disorientation, generated by a variety of means, of which the grotesque is only one; this quality is further intensified by a variety of means (to be discussed below), residing in the prosodic organization as well as in certain over-all stylistic characteristics of the poem.
I am discussing here the grotesque as an aesthetic mode, as part of a poetics of disorientation. Now one of the most shocking aspects of this poem is that, while being powerfully disorienting, it is, at the same time, amply endowed with ingredients that are prominent in what I have called the "poetry of orientation" (chapter 14). Such ingredients include extensions of the immediate perception beyond the immediately perceptible horizon, as in "I am called forth for voyage, for pleasure, / By mysterious, luring words", "They call me, lure me from afar", or "The waves / Continually brought word". The effect is reinforced by the all-pervasive, low-differentiated, thing-free quality in "The mournful, blind evening has already fallen upon us", and by the clause "I was groaning", enclosed between the two immediately preceding "high-mimetic" quotations. By contrast, the verb for groan "én nyöszörögtem", would be felt by most readers of Hungarian as "low-mimetic", thus further reinforcing the quality of emotional disorientation. These elements of the poetry of orientation, as in so many instances of romantic nature poetry, introduce another aspect that typically lies beyond the scope of our ordinary consciousness, namely, a perception of the invisible powers active in the world.
Finally, the overall quality resulting from the interaction of the various elements discussed above is strongly enhanced by several prosodic elements, of which I should point out only two, already touched upon earlier, in my discussion of the poem "The must-Hercules", viz., .x.anti-grammatical rhyme, and irregular stanza form.
For a further elucidation of this point, I will quote the fourth and seventh stanzas of the poem in Hungarian (again italicizing the rhymes):
(6) "Engem egy pillanat megölhet,
Nekem már várni nem szabad,
Engem szólítnak útra, kéjre,
Titokzatos hívó szavak,
Nekem már várni nem szabad." (stanza 4)
("A single second is enough to kill me,
I may not wait anymore,
I am called forth for voyage, for pleasure,
By mysterious, luring words,
I may not wait anymore.")
"Az egész élet bennem zihál,
Minden mi új felém üget,
Szent zürzavar az én sok álmom,
Neked minden álmod süket,
Hasítsd ki hát aranyszügyed." (stanza 7)
(The entire life within me is panting,
Everything that is new, toward me is galloping,
My many dreams are a holy hurly-burly,
All of your dreams are deaf,
So, cleave your thorax of gold.)
The rhyme üget~süket is a virtuoso anti-grammatical rhyme; on the semantic level it contrasts the verb "gallop" with the adjective "deaf"; on the phonetic level, the last four speech sounds are contrasted only in one distinctive feature, [±voiced], in the sounds [g~k]. The rhyme süket~szügyed is peculiar in that each of the consonants is akin to its counterpart in one feature, but contrasts with it in one or two others. Thus, the pair [º~s] are akin as sibilants, but contrast as to their place of articulation (cerebral vs. dental) or, if one prefers, [±palatal]; the pair [t~d] have the same point of articulation, but contrast in the feature [±voice]; finally, [k~¢d] agree as to their quality of [–anterior] consonants, while they differ both as to the features [±voice] and [±palatal].[4]
One of Gombrich's stimulating insights into the nature of the grotesque is that when its effect is too audacious, it can be mitigated by symmetry. "The symmetry swallows up the curious creatures" (Gombrich, 1984: 279). "Symmetry itself, as we remember from the Kaleidoscope, has a masking effect" (ibid.). I suggest that the converse of this observation may also be true, thus accounting for some of Ady's favorite stanza forms. I have already mentioned the three-line long asymmetrical stanza in "The must-Hercules". In "Struggle with the Grand Lord", we find a five-line stanza, equally asymmetrical. The first four lines constitute a four-line stanza, the symmetry of which is emphasized by the rhyme at the end of the second and fourth lines. It is this symmetry that is overthrown by the addition of a fifth line, also rhyming with the preceding rhyme-pair.
A comparison of the two stanzas quoted above highlights an additional device, used for arousing a feeling of unpredictability. In the seventh stanza, the first and second lines express parallel, whereas the third and fourth lines express contrasting attitudes; thus, these lines exhibit a meticulously symmetrical structure. The fifth line overthrows this symmetry and leads to a logical conclusion from the preceding argument; as such, it tends to be perceived as different from the preceding lines, and perceptually isolated from them. In the fourth stanza, by contrast, no new information is given at all in the fifth line: it simply repeats verbatim the second line (a favorite device of Ady's). This has an illogical, emotional affect, as the different contexts highlight slightly different aspects in "I may not wait anymore": the line "A single second is enough to kill me" foregrounds a sense of urgency and danger, whereas the lines "I am called forth for voyage, for pleasure, / By mysterious, luring words" suggest some irresistible attraction.
The asymmetrical stanza form, or the unpredictable repetition of a rhymed line, or an anti-grammatical rhyme alone would hardly generate this emotional atmosphere of verbal magic; it requires their combined effect, further enhanced by the semantic and thematic elements discussed in the present section. Thus, the magic spell of Ady's poetry can be said to be an emergent regional quality. It should be noted that all these elements—antigrammatical rhyme, asymmetrical stanza form, unpredictability, illogically repeated whole verse lines, and differences in barely noticeable semantic (and sometimes phonetic) nuances—are means typically deployed by hypnotic poetry as well, for quite similar effects (see below, chapter 18).
