HUNGARIAN STUDIES 11. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar ... - EPA

138 LÁSZLÓ K. GÉFINsome addressing the narrator, others commenting on some utterance, othersjust heckling or shouting cat-calls. Poetry is not heard; it is overheard, wroteJohn Stuart Mill. Mill appears not only to have had an inkling of the dialogicnature of poetry, but also voiding proleptically the charge of monologism andunivocity laid against it by Bakhtin. The chorus in Missa agnostica is mostlyreplaced by the narrator who is dialogical within his own discourse, at timesassuming the postmodern/old comic persona of the eiron, the crafty dissembler,the trickster, drawing in and playing off against one another theheterogeneous voices heard and overheard, including the voice of his owndouble. The crisscrossing plurality of voices, the transgression of fictiveboundary lines from either side creates a multilingual auditorium, or morecorrectly, a cathedral with the eiron celebrating a grey, not a black, mass, inwhich eironeia, in Latin the irónia of a coexistence-in-poliphony, will bedominant if not endemic. (It will have some bearing on what follows that in1797 Friedrich Schlegel gave a definition of irony as "a permanent parabasis,"a nonstop series of intrusions in ever shifting juxtapositions.)Missa agnostica, of course, is no auditorium, and a cathedral only in therealm of the imagination. It is first and foremost writing, the conglomerationof voices a series of allusions, quotations, paraphrases cited and recited,transgressing its porous discursive frontiers. What kind of writing is it,though? Since it literally includes within its frontiers the Latin mass, it is in asense a commentary; but precisely because the Latin text becomes, as set inthe midst of other writings, just another text, the customary relation betweenprimary and secondary text is annulled. Missa agnostica appears to begenerically unclassifiable; if this is the case, and as one critic put it, genre is"a family of texts," Missa agnostica is a literary orphan. Can such an orphanbe defined as permanent parabasis, in other words, does its irony trulyconstitute a sovereign mode? And if so, how can the poem be situated in theliterary tradition from which it inescapably springs?The following conjectures will throw light on some of these problems, andleave others in darkness. In the group of poets who succeeded in producingsignificant work after leaving Hungary in the wake of the crushed revolutionof 1956, sometimes labelled "the generation of 56," György Vitéz is unique inthat his work from the middle seventies onwards has become a composite fieldof voices/texts. However, in creating an endlessly oscillating poliphony ofindependent fragments, he has also introduced thematic/ideological elementsthat flow counter to unrestricted linguistic flux. Thus, on the one hand, Vitéz'sexperimentation with language and form has proliferated to such an extentthat these later texts bear little or no resemblance to some of his earlier verse,and no resemblance whatsoever to any of the strands of modern Hungarian