Ineluctable Modality of the Risible
"Once upon a time and a very good time it was therewas a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo..." (source)
Hopefully the title and that quote will have frightened off the riff-raff (came to us via Middle English riffe raffe, from rif and raf, meaning 'one and all').
There was some welcome news a few weekends back from my old hangout of Szombathely, a (small) city in the West of Hungary (population about 80,000). They finally inaugurated a statue to the memory of one of the town's literary geniuses Weöres Sándor.
For most people Weöres Sándor is known for his children's verse, that borders on nonsense, plays with sound, onomatopoeia and striking images. His was the first verse I learnt by heart in Hungarian after arriving here. It was, for me, the only way to get to grips with the language, but was utterly useless for everyday speech. Babbling like a child, reciting silly tongue twisters, 'if the whole world were a Blackbird...'. Yep, useless. But that was more than half the fun.
The great thing about Sándor's poetry is the liberties he takes with language and sounds. Recently I took a car journey with some friends that have a three year old girl. Listening to her talking to herself I couldn't help noticing how different her nonsense talk was from that of an English toddler. Over and over she practiced her long, elaborate rolled 'R's, then 'Zs', 'Dzs' and 'Gy' sounds. She was playing with the very sounds non-native speakers find hard to master. It was sound for sound's sake and pure enjoyment in speaking and making sub-language patterns. It was beyond language, or perhaps, more fundamental than it.
Child's speech tends to be stream-of-consciousness stuff. They try to say what they think or feel, without the filters of adult language. In literature, just like Picasso trying to recapture the essence of 'primitive' art, it took a while for writing to master the stream-of-consciousness writing technique.
An early master of this (a forerunner to Joyce) was the Hungarian writer Krúdy Gyula, demonstrated in many of his works such as Szindbád
But Joyce tends to get the credit for mainlining the technique. Which is fitting, as for some reason, Hungary and Hungarian is peppered throughout his works. You can't really understand parts of Finnegans Wake without some Hungarian:
it came straight from the noble white fat, jo, openwide sat, jo, jo, her why hide that, jo jo jo, the winevat, of the most serene magyansty az archdiochesse, if she is a duck, she's a douches, and when she has a feherboiir snot her fault (available online).
OK, so this might look like nonsense to you, but it is language of a different order, perhaps we're back to the child's speech. In amongst the (near) English are Hungarian words like 'jo' (good), 'magyar' (hungarian), 'feher' (white) and 'bor' (wine).
The Hungarian links in Joyce are even more prominent than this. Obviously the central character of Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, related to Virág Lipoti of Szombathely (see also Magyar Radio's piece for a wider discussion of some of the links to 'hungulash' (in Hungarian).
It's not just the use of the Hungarian language that link Joyce and Weöres, it's the way language is used and subverted.
Just take, for example, that first problematic word in Ulysses Chrysostomos, which "refers to a field of semantic possibilities rather than a single adjective". Put simply, its meaning defies simple analysis. It's babbling at a higher level. Nonsense for adults. It lies somewhere beyond our love of dictionaries and certainty. Beyond our ability to know and understand. It hints at something grander, endlessly more pleasurable to experience, because you keep having to come back to mull over these possibilities of meaning.
And so it is with child language. It's out there running its parallel course to conscious explicit thought. It's at the point when all those internal moods and ideas are looking for words to express themselves. It is the very same as Joyce continually try to grasp at in his exploration of the subconscious through language. Exposing that which "cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cut and dry grammar and goahead plot."
Joyce and Weöres remain two great favorites of mine, but I tend to keep them under wraps. In everyday conversation it's best not to show your enthusiasm for speech and language that should get you locked up. It is nonsense, but magnificent none-the-less.
Anyway, if Joyce isn't your thing and you have yet to learn Hungarian you can always read a parody by David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down (that's not a recommendation, though - far from it).
So, with all that I've just written you now know the answer to the puzzle: What connects Athenian frogs, a dislike of entrails (Joyce hated them despite them playing a part in Leopold Bloom's breakfast) and the Amber Road? Try it on someone else and see if they get close.
Useful words and phrases
- Virág: means flower, hence the name 'Bloom' in Ulysses.
- borostyánkő: 'amber road', this is the important Roman trade route that ran through Szombathely, connecting Italy to the Baltic States. Perhaps the basis for another post sometime.
- csőcselék: riff-raff
- paraszt származású: 'of peasant stock' which is what Krúdy Gyula was.
- konkordancia: 'concordance'
- impresszionisztikus: guess, it ain't hard
- realizmus: yep, another easy one
- szürrealizmus: not getting any harder
- groteszk: same again.
- abszurd: and again
n.b. A great way to explore many texts is through hypertext markups of literary corpora and concordances such as intratext.com. You can explore some of Krúdy Gyula's works there.
For some cheat sheet notes on the meaning of the title of this post refer to Cliff Notes on the Proteus chapter of Ulysses. I slightly changed the wording to match my own life philosophy. Others have also played around with the ideas.
You can enjoy reading a lot of Weöres Sándor online at the Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár
