Marginalia on Casanova: St. Orpheus Breviary I
Mikl S. Szentkuthy
Language: English
Pages: 360
ISBN: 0983697248
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Marginalia on Casanova, the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, is Miklos Szentkuthy's synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthy's Virgil, an omniscient, poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, & mentalite. Through St. Orpheus' method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, their mutual difference and essential similarity. "Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions," says Szentkuthy, "is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems." Marginalia on Casanova relives the despiritualization of the main protagonist's sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life & more his intellectual mission, the sole determinant of his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th century and its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary on Casanova's memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy's very own philosophy of love. Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity and a taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and which is as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.
is written in the notes of the body and nature, neither more, nor less. That mathematical ‘point,’ that algebraically split-off ‘just,’ is the sublime, the Italian, the classical in him: the Florence! Eating soaked with good wine is a precondition for success in love, so let’s eat and drink if we embark on physical capers; the body has to be brought into good shape, that’s all. Here the Cyprus wine is also symbolic: Cyprus is crammed with Venus-underworld tree and boudoir-island associations;
most stylish, most elegant, and poetically the most convincing compromise of every myth, of course in the interest of a greater myth, not of sobriety. The gods are only tolerable in forms like ‘depths of nature’: in the form of a bit of park décor, a fleeting excitement, a kleiner daemon, a female dream (“ich bin überzeugt, es ist eine Gottheit...”),{79} salon zoologizing. That the snake gods were a degenerate race one can see with one’s own eyes; they had already become lousy even as poetry
real: daybreak, especially that of train windows, the morning, noon, afternoon, the twilight are none of them times but nightmares of general mood, completely unreliable, merely conditional and neurasthenic entities, but most of all the crazy Yugoslavian night in the rail-carriage, the Miramare{121} misprint morning, the stultifying Piave morning, and after all that the Venetian afternoon, swooping down on one, perhaps that is the most unreal of all. Venice starts in the afternoon, at a time that
the pure, musical tonality of the personality. — For that matter Casanova will assist everyone, sacrifice his last penny for another; he is prey to swindlers, blackmailers, cheats, gives away millions in gifts to gallows-birds, because he is incapable of saying a bad word, because his entire fantasy world is not set up in any other way than to imagine with Italianate extremism the pain of those suffering. Casanova is a ‘dupe,’ in the most tragic and most Christian sense: sometimes he is frankly
In cuddling not even by lamp do I find a possibility of either myth or epicureanism; of either intellectual or esthetic good or pleasure. My sole remark about it: if it does not happen, »spiritual life« commences, but that is such a purposeless luxury of rotting that I would even rather cuddle a woman.” In another place he dashed off in green chalk the two words: “corpus nolens,”{158} under which is the note: “How did I set about the whole thing? For what reason? In prime place was vanity. Of