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Theses of the Doctoral (Phd) Dissertation Forms of the Self on The Theses of the doctoral (PhD) dissertation Forms of the Self on the Treshold of Modernity—Subjectivity and Reflective Poetics in Endre Ady’s Lyrical Poetry Ákos Herczeg Dissertation director: Dr. Péter Szirák UNIVERSITY OF DEBRECEN Doctoral School of Literature Debrecen, 2014. Objectives of the dissertation, delimiting the subject The dissertation attempts to reinvigorate—if not shed new light on—the oeuvre of Endre Ady, a key figure of early Hungarian modernism. In this case, rereading might be too ostentatious a term, as the author of the dissertation heavily relied on the reviving Ady reception at the turn of the twenty-first century in terms of his analytical perspective, direction of inquiry, and methodology. This new phase of reception had already dislodged some of the no longer readable poems from their state of suspended animation, which they were relegated to by institutionalized interpretations of a fundamentally ideological nature. There is still much at stake in the investigation at hand, however, as the mostly inspiring studies of the so-called “rereading” volume1 seem now, from the perspective of more than a decade, a series of promising, individually highly thought-provoking analyses rather than an attempt at systematic reinterpretation. This assessment is reinforced by the fact that the Ady poetry has generated little interest in shifting canonical readings in the past few years: instead of further actualizing the extensive oeuvre and revising inherited interpretations, most new publications are focused on keeping the Ady legend alive and hitherto undisclosed biographical trivia. This tendency would be no problem if it was not burying again those secrets of this poetry which had been previously concealed by overly popular ideological interpretations, once again ignoring a fundamental principle of modern poetry, namely that the life of the artist (and his biography) is not continuous with his art. This inquiry presupposes that, although one cannot be mapped onto the other, the two are still related. When investigating Ady’s originality and significance in Hungarian literary history, it is worth focusing on how he reconsidered the relationship of art(ist) and the individual work of art, the role of the artist, and how these reconsiderations are manifested in the poetic structure. In this respect, the question of subjectivity, that is, the different versions of the poetic persona are inescapable: for the first time in Hungarian literature, Ady not only suppressed the subject-dependency of the utterance with various techniques but systematically criticized the pragmatic position of the century-old naïve-sentimental diction of Romanticism by disconnecting the voice heard in the poem from the biographical author. He achieves this while keeping the hypertrophic positioning of the utterance with respect to the rhetoric of the poems unquestionable. But the issue of how the 1 Tanulmányok Ady Endréről [Studies of Endre Ady], Ed. KABDEBÓ Lóránt, KULCSÁR SZABÓ Ernő, KULCSÁR-SZABÓ Zoltán, MENYHÉRT Anna, Anonymus Kiadó, Bp., 1999. author is “present” in the poems must be faced, and it can reveal the partially undeciphered secret of Ady’s poetry. The contradiction just mentioned—that is, the fact that the magnified “I” continuously dismantles the possibilities of his own recognizability—is a significant principle for the author: the consistent rewriting of the persona’s ascertainability seems to be a valid point of departure for a systematic inquiry that might clarify the role of the author in shaping Modernism. Delineating the methods For this enterprise, at least a referential comparison with earlier dictions seemed to be in order. In what ways does Ady’s art continue or transcend the often disregarded fin-de-siècle poetry, which is alternately considered transitory, dead-end or “nameless”? The dissertation includes a brief outlook on the poetry of János Vajda, Jenő Komjáthy, and Minka Czóbel, which makes Ady’s “modernity” more visible. This modernity is characterized by making the poem’s rhetorical structure a question to reflect on, programmatically rewriting the personification of the lyrical utterance, and making the determination of the persona an interpretive challenge. A brief survey of the exceeded early volumes (Versek, Még egyszer) might prove to be an important supplement in this respect by virtue of demonstrating the shift. These new perspectives enable us to see the innovation of Ady’s poetry more clearly, delineating more precisely the kind of lyrical context into which New Poems arrived in 1906. From this basis the investigation focuses on the configurations and medium-related events through which the tradition of confessional poetry is evoked and the self-creating diction is decomposed, from making the poetically and anthropologically conceived past legible (written), through such rhetorical borderline situations of the persona as in the case of love poetry or the “kuruc” role, all the way to the various signals of the subject turning into a linguistic phenomenon. If we are seeking the reason for the withdrawal of the assertive modality in the poems after 1912 with reference to the poetic language rather than the cataclysm of the Great War, the viewpoints described above can constitute a starting point towards a new Ady image. What this new image can make manifest is the process whereby the persona of the textual construct that continues the romantic tradition on the level of rhetoric and tropology becomes, from the volume New Poems, a “textual element” of the playing field that he believes to control. And if the construction of the poetic “I” depends on the particular act of reading rather than on the creator, thus relegating the interpreter to listening for a continuously reconstituting voice and perceiving an emphatically visual text, then the poems leave behind not only the obviousness of a univocal poetry-based-on- experience but also the Romantic ideal of the self-sufficient work of art. Therefore the dissertation has a twofold objective. On the one hand, it volunteers to rescue the most widely known poems from the unproductive state of critical habits and oversimplifying biographic interpretations by analyzing the varied, poetically relevant articulation of the lyrical voice and to address hitherto uncanonical pieces by focusing on the textual realization of the figures of “I.” On the other hand, it strives to assess—from this modified perspective—the literary-historical significance of the oeuvre by taking into account the surrounding formations of lyrical language. Consequently the methodology of choice is similarly twofold: in order to overwrite the ideological nature of ossified meanings, it simultaneously attempts to scrutinize the texts’ indeterminacies and tropological-rhetorical paradoxes and maintain the contextual and biographical determinacy of the poems as factors in the creation of meaning by consciously playing art and biography into one another. This unusual joint application of these two methods yields a number of fresh insights in the Ady reception. Achievements and results As I also considered Ady’s role in the shift from Romanticism to Modernism, it seemed natural to foreground the dichotomy of tradition and innovation, the poetic encounter with literary and cultural conventions, with especial regard to the contemporary context in which the volume New Poems—which was retrospectively considered to have ushered in a new era—was born. Instead of an all-encompassing philological excavation, in this respect I contented myself with a broad overview of the modern-conservative clash (of which the poet himself was a major exponent), as the primary goal was to complicate the inherited modern status and to acknowledge Ady’s ambivalent relationship with the periodical Nyugat and modern authors. This much, however, was inescapable, not only because the poet and his volume became an issue in contemporary cultural politics, thus this collection of poems became inseparable from the context in which he started out, but also because with the inherited interpretive schemas it is difficult to account for Ady’s tendency to preserve conventions and his manifesto-like, simultaneously innovative and retrograde poetic debut. Without considering the social embeddedness of literature and its context, Ady’s programmatic poem Góg és Magóg fia vagyok… is difficult to understand, although the motif of looking west is not necessarily arranged into a coherent structure in the poem. It is precisely this lack of a synthesizing interpretation, the ambivalence of the simultaneous attraction of east and west (and poetically that of Romanticism and Symbolism) which characterize the poem I first turn to: the gesture of self-proclamation is always also invalidated by the parallel presence of these two polarities, while an important innovation of Ady’s poetry is manifested, that is, the conscious malleability of poetic tradition. The part of the confessional subject is transposed by the language-based memory of the historical past, and in a way that the notion of controlling language is no longer attached to the poetological principle of the traceability of a single subject, but this ideal dissolves in the multiplicative artistic play of “self-definitions bound to Hungarian language and history.” The formation of the poem’s meanings is largely determined by the construction and deconstruction of these tradition-defined first person positions, which are endowed by faces and voices and, in turn, are determined by the
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