Unique in Hungarian literature, at the time of its first appearance
in 1935, Towards the One & Only Metaphor was greeted with
plaudits by such leading Hungarian critics as Laszlo Nemeth, Andras
Hevesi, and Gabor Halasz, with Nemeth declaring: "Szentkuthy's
invention has the merit that he pries writing open in an entirely
original manner. . . Where everything was wobbling the writer
either joins the earth-shaping forces, or else he sets up his
culture-building laboratory over all oscillations. Seated in his
cogitarium, even in spite of himself, Szentkuthy is brother to the
bellicose on earth in the same way as a cloud is a relative to a
plow in its new sowing work." Szentkuthy referred to this nearly
unclassifiable text as a Catalogus Rerum, "an index that is of
entities and phenomena, a Catalogue of Everything in the Entire
World." In a sequence of 112 shorter and longer passages,
Szentkuthy has recorded his experiences and thoughts, reflected on
his reading matter as well as political, historical, and erotic
events, moving from epic subjectivity to ontological actualities:
"Two things excite me: the most subjective epic details and the
ephemeral trivialities of my most subjective life, in all their own
factual, unstylized individuality - and the big facts of the world
in their allegorical, Standbild-like grandiosity: death, summer,
sea, love, gods, flowers." Similar in kind to the ruminative waste
books of Lichtenberg and the journals of Joubert, while Towards the
One and Only Metaphor is a fragmentary text, at the same time, it
is ordered, like a group of disparate stars which, when viewed from
afar, reveal or can be perceived to form a constellation - they are
sculpted by a geometry of thought. Szentkuthy conjures up and
analyzes spectacle and thought past and present with sensitivity,
erudition, and linguistic force. As Andras Keszthelyi observed, the
text is essentially something of a manifesto, "an explicit
formulation of the author's intentions, his scale of values, or, if
you wish: his ars poetica." Through dehumanization, Szentkuthy
returns us to the embryo and the ornament, but so as to bring us
into the very particles of existence. Towards the One and Only
Metaphor is also a confessional, a laying bare of the heart, even
through masks, but in moving beyond the torpid self-obsession that
rules our age, Szentkuthy's revelations yield forth the x-ray of a
typus, and like Montaigne and Rousseau, he is equally revealing,
entertaining, and humorous. Now available in English for the first
time, Towards the One & Only Metaphor is destined to stand as
one of the principal works of world literature of the 20th century.
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