Figurations of Foreignness in Gergely Péterfy’s The Stuffed Barbarian[1] (download pdf)
Judit Pieldner
Abstract. The present study approaches Gergely Péterfy’s novel entitled The Stuffed Barbarian (Kitömött barbár, 2014) from the point of view of foreignness, starting from the hypothesis that the novel’s true core whence the different layers of the narrated story unfold is foreignness itself. Focusing on Kazinczy’s friendship with Angelo Soliman and the stuffing of the black friend within Kazinczy’s life history is the invention of fiction which subverts the Kazinczy-image having existed before in the mind of the public. Instead, it offers a much more personal picture of the unflagging writer, translator and language reformer. The representation of his relationship with Soliman reshapes not only Kazinczy’s figure but also the image of the society at the time. In both cases, it is the uncanny, phantom-like otherness of Angelo Soliman that holds up a mirror, showing the contradictions and incompatibilities of the individual fate and of the era. By bequeathing his skin and his story to Kazinczy, Angelo defies the appropriating machinery of power, which can possess the body, the matter, yet, nevertheless, it cannot control this immaterial gesture, it cannot hinder making the story known for posterity. In this way Angelo’s stuffed body becomes a memento, a testimony and a complex symbol of otherness in the novel.
Keywords: Kazinczy, identity, foreignness, barbarian, the Other
The present study approaches Gergely Péterfy’s novel entitled The Stuffed Barbarian (Kitömött barbár, 2014) from the point of view of foreignness, starting from the hypothesis that the novel’s true core whence the different layers of the narrated story unfold is foreignness itself. The complex story of Ferenc Kazinczy[2] and Angelo Soliman’s[3] strange friendship unfolds before the reader’s eyes in the light of foreignness. The different forms of foreignness counterpoint each other as one engages in a dialogue with another within the polyphonic structure of the novel.
The novel and the separate episodes of its chapters start from the same thesis sentence formulated by Sophie Török,[4] the primary narrator of the novel: “as I was standing in the storeroom of the Natural History Museum in the attic, with the black body standing in front of me in a red cabinet, I remembered…” (Péterfy 2014, 9).[5] The foreignness felt by Sophie Török standing face to face with the black body and evoking the tragic events of her fate undertaken together with Kazinczy opens up like a prism in the retrospective process of remembering and disassembles into several components which meet again in the concluding statement of the novel: “I realized I was standing before myself” (Péterfy 2014, 448). Thus, the recalled episodes of the narrated story can be regarded as different stages of the process of self-discovery. However, I consider that an even higher importance can be attributed to the role Sophie Török’s narrative voice plays in fictionalizing the material on the history of literature and culture.
The writing of this novel was preceded by an extensive research, serving as a basis for a doctoral thesis (Péterfy 2007). The thesis, the novel and Kazinczy’s literary activity and correspondence which gave the idea, in the first place, to write the novel build up a special metatextual relation in which the discourses of memoir, research, scientific argumentation and the act of fictionalization meet and create an exciting playground, supporting and counterpointing each other. Gergely Péterfy’s research focuses on the relationship between Ferenc Kazinczy and Angelo Soliman, or on their Masonic names, Orpheus and Massinissa, identifying those textual locations in Kazinczy’s oeuvre where he makes reference to the black freemason of African origin. Further on, the thesis investigates those contemporary documents which contain passages related to Angelo Soliman, completing them with a survey of stereotypes present in the philosophy and public thinking of the time, related to human races and skin colour. The story of Angelo Soliman is summarised by Kazinczy himself in The Memory of My Career (Pályám emlékezete), as a diminutive mirror, a mise en abyme of the novel: “Upon Angelo’s death, the physicians gave order for the body not to be buried but to be brought back to them. They peeled his skin, stuffed it and put it on the back of the elephant standing in the Museum, and announced Vienna in a printed letter that it was Angelo’s skin that could be seen on the stuffed elephant. ‒ His rueful daughter thought she owed the respect to his father to go and beg the emperor to have his father taken down. ‒ I hear he was taken down eventually, but after much pressing” (qtd. in Péterfy 2007, 7).
Focusing on Kazinczy’s friendship with Angelo Soliman and the stuffing of the black friend within Kazinczy’s life history is the invention of fiction which subverts the image of Kazinczy that had previously existed in the mind of the public. Instead, it offers a much more personal picture of the unflagging writer, translator and language reformer. The representation of his relationship with Soliman reshapes not only Kazinczy’s figure but also the image of the society at the time; in both cases, it is the uncanny, phantom-like otherness of Angelo Soliman that holds up a mirror, showing the contradictions and incompatibilities of the individual fate and of the era. Sophie Török’s narrative perspective seems to be the most suitable to represent this intimate viewpoint, having access to everything that an (almost) all-knowing first-person narrator needs to know. At the same time, the female perception can ‘get under the skin’ of the patriarchal society, revealing fine nuances within. In the story Sophie Török is the one for whom the opportunity rises to enter the “walled-in room” of Kazinczy’s trauma (Péterfy 2014, 54), to be initiated into the story of the stuffing, partaking of the scandal and being ‘stuffed’ herself by this inexpressible story. The gesture of transmitting the story to the next generation follows the logic of bequeathing as the only way that can be opposed to the scandal: “[t]his is the reason why this story becomes a heritage which I cannot keep to myself – says Kazinczy as an intermediary, secondary narrator – for otherwise it loses its worth, all the suffering which befell upon us becoming useless, endured in vain” (Péterfy 2014, 361).
The parallel stories of Kazinczy’s and Angelo Soliman’s foreignness unfold in this narrative frame. In line with the Cartesian dualism, to make the spirit of the age perceivable, the novel is constructed along several oppositional pairs. Spirit and matter, word and reality, soul and body strain against each other as Sophie Török’s alchemist father tries to strike spirit from matter, as the master of words gets confronted with the dejecting reality, as the vast spiritual heritage of Ferenc Kazinczy is at odds with the fallibility of the body, with the destruction of the epidemic. The stuffed body of Angelo Soliman stands in the centre throughout the story. “This body, the story of this body is the organizing force of the narrative; the state of being enclosed in the body is what makes Kazinczy’s figure tragic” – says József Keresztesi in his review on the novel (2014).
In the first few chapters of the novel we meet the two protagonists as apparently embodying two completely different forms of foreignness. Angelo Soliman, being a black among the white, seems to be the representation of corporeal exoticism, while Kazinczy, a Hungarian among the ‘labanc’,[6] bears the stigma of cultural barbarism. Angelo’s stuffed skin exhibited in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, classified in a scientific manner – “according to the brass plate on the platform, he was a male belonging to the Galla type of the African race, having been part of the collection since 1796” (Péterfy 2014, 18) – testifies, as a grotesque caricature, the scandal of the scientific conception of the Enlightenment based on identification and classification. Contrary to this objectifying categorization, Kazinczy’s figure turns up in the novel as a linguistically unclassifiable, indescribable stranger who does not comply with the categorizing and standardizing constraints of the peasantry surrounding the Széphalom[7] estate: “He was different from anything their eyes were used to and though they had seen him several times they could not get accustomed to him. They could not find a word in their vocabulary which would unequivocally describe this phenomenon. Such a word should have simultaneously expressed a multitude of traits such as lord, scarecrow, wandering charlatan, tax-collector, revolutionist, travelling actor and scientist conspiring with the devil. However, as there was no such word in their vocabulary, they would rather laugh at him; the only sensible way for them to express this multitude of characteristics was to think of him as being ridiculously foreign” (Péterfy 2014, 30‒31). “He who dares to be different exposes himself to mortal danger” – says Sophie Török (Péterfy 2014, 46) as she recalls all the efforts invested into the implementation of foreign culture among the Hungarians and into the development of Hungarian society. There seems to be one single word in the vocabulary of the peasants suitable for defining that manifold strangeness that Kazinczy’s innovating and modernizing spirit represented in an environment lagging behind, reminiscent of the Middle Ages: “we were like that. Like that: we were most often described in this way. We were like that because they could not say what we were like” (Péterfy 2014, 31– emphasis in the original). The phrasing like that tries to fill the void created by the unfathomability of otherness, at the same time it signifies the distance, the impassive rejection, the discrimination of foreignness. “Let us not seek to solidify, to turn the otherness of the foreigner into a thing. Let us merely touch it, brush by it, without giving it a permanent structure” ‒ Julia Kristeva writes (1991, 3). The power mechanisms of language fail at the boundary of otherness, when the act of denomination can no longer harness, exert power over the denominated.
Angelo Soliman gets to Europe, then to the circles of the court in Vienna as a slave. He is the foreigner coming from afar who assimilates to the European culture, acquires high standard erudition.[8] However, the black skin, or as Kazinczy formulates, the “cordovan-coloured face” (qtd. in Péterfy 2007, 6) remains an eternal stigma, and the distorted attitudes to it lay bare the concept of man, the system of knowledge and ideas of the Enlightenment. Tímea N. Kovács writes that in the formation process of the self-image of European culture “the foreigners, the ʻsavages’ constituted an important means and element of the self-definition of the Europeans, as the ideas related to the superiority and exclusiveness of their own culture and lifestyle became interpretable only in correlation with the inferiority of exotic, ʻprimitive’ cultures” (N. Kovács 2007, 23). In his essay entitled The “Other” in Philosophy, Zoltán Gyenge points out that the notion of the race becomes the subject of culture-philosophical reflection in the 18th century; Kant distinguishes the fundamental races based on skin colour: “the first visible sign of the ʻother’ ‒ if I simply restrict it to the ʻnot yet seen’ and I do not regard it in the cultural sense yet ‒ is colour” (Gyenge 2015, 44). The black face becomes part of society as a reflecting surface, confusing the conceptual boundaries between the familiar and the foreign, the own and the other. The black skin turns out to be a contact surface – a contact zone – which, in its palpable sensoriality, carries the abstract, invisible contents that get filtered through its pores, facing the society with its own structural antagonisms, with the nature of power relations. “It is not the difference that makes one a foreigner but rather the institutionalization of the foreigner leading to the perception and dramatization of the difference” – Gabriella Hima writes in one of her studies (2003, 366).
As an erudite black Angelo Soliman is deviant and uncategorizable to the same extent as Kazinczy. It is the impossibility of his categorization that reinforces the schemes of stereotypical thinking aimed at his denomination, possession and oppression. According to the mentality of the age, “[t]he black is ultimately a white whose skin has turned black due to some kind of disease, his hair has curled and his nose was pushed in in infancy, but with a long treatment he can be cured from all his deficiencies” (Péterfy 2007, 48). Ágnes Heller writes that the negative views referring to the foreigner turned into prejudices in the age of the Enlightenment, as a result of the formation of the value concept of the universal Man (cf. Heller 2015, 12). Angelo Soliman “is himself the enemy, the animal, the foreigner” (Péterfy 2014, 169), he personifies the demonised image of the enemy, the subhuman level in the system of races as well as the visible, thus undeniable foreignness. Upon his arrival in the Habsburg capital, Angelo Soliman is forced to endure the widest range of attitudes to black skin, from incomprehension, exoticization and contempt, through the desire of touching, physical violence and prostitution, to being viewed as a spectacle, an icon, then to the final and definitive objectification being stuffed and exhibited in the museum: “he was stuffed like a monkey” (Péterfy 2014, 287).
Kazinczy’s foreignness gradually and irreversibly deepens after his release from prison; the story of his life related by Sophie Török traverses the stages of decline from the Great Plan formulated in the spirit of the ideal of classical erudition and the system of masonic ideas to its step-by-step failure, from the spoilt measure at building the Széphalom home, through rejection, impoverishment, family feuds and trials, loss of his role as a leading literary figure, to the final tragedy caused by the fatal cholera epidemic.
Kazinczy’s and Angelo Soliman’s fates, characterised, as Kazinczy says, by “the strange symmetry of our converse situations” (Péterfy 2014, 100), interlock on account of their very differences, or rather, singularities, their peculiar but converging alterities. “In that moment, I could not yet know, he [Ferenc] said, I could not know because I had not yet realized that we were both so peculiar and foreign to each other and to Vienna, our encounter so unique and extraordinary, our curiosity for each other so unusual in an environment where cool distance was the norm to be followed, that there was not a single event in the Habsburg Empire that could be more special than our conversation” (Péterfy 2014, 93). Angelo plays a key role in Kazinczy’s self-understanding; for Angelo Kazinczy is the closest friend to whom he can bequeath, together with his skin, the story of his humiliation. This friendship implies for both of them the identity-shaping role of otherness, the relationship with the Other in a sensory-ethical dimension. As Katalin Vermes writes, interpreting Lévinas, in a phenomenological approach: “[i]ntersubjectivity forms not only the universal, objective space but also the externality of sensoriality and practice ‒ of pottering around. The relationship with the Other is not perceptual or practical but sensorial-ethical. The Other is not the primordial experience, not an empirical contact as if the Other were the first object of perception or the first means that we have access to. Not only the I is the origo, the centre of perception. I ʻposition’ myself in relation with the other already before any phase of thinking. The I takes shape in the Other, through the Other” (Vermes 2006, 149).
It is in this context, in the sense of the fulfilment of the self in the Other, through the Other, that the concept of friendship, polished on classical, Platonic ideas, should be conceived. In the age of Enlightenment the antiquity’s notion of friendship implying spiritual – or even physical – attraction deepens in the direction of erudite contact and cultural transmission, one form of which is literary correspondence also pursued by Kazinczy. Kazinczy’s relationship with Angelo Soliman unfolds along scholarly interests and masonic ideas, but most of all, along their almost equal share of foreignness. The extension of the Self through the Other, the recognition of the sameness of the Self and the Other already belongs to the conceptual sphere of the alter ego. As we can read in the novel about this most noble human relationship conveyed by Kazinczy’s words: “I realized slowly and gradually what my feelings actually meant and what was the deeper, more serious, or if you like, more virile, reading of these significations. Then I still was years from the final account with myself and from understanding the moral in the fact that I discovered in him the alter ego of friendship, the other I identical with myself” (Péterfy 2014, 92 – emphasis mine, J. P.). The alter ego status, the carriedness of the Self by the Other manifests in the way in which Angelo’s foreignness becomes the signifier of a more profound experience of strangeness, discovered within the self.
The walk together in the Graben in Vienna is an emblematic moment of their friendship; they both demonstrate their foreignness with their flagrant clothes: Kazinczy arrives at the scene of encounter in a kuruc high fur hat and with a sword inherited from his father, while Angelo is wearing a caftan, turban and holds an ostrich feather fan; “so were we walking, he among the whites, I among the labanc” (Péterfy 2014, 354). In the lines inspiring the novel, Kazinczy relates the event as follows: “One day, wearing Hungarian clothes, I came across him in the Graben, and many eyes were staring at us. ‒ Look, he said, how they are looking at you in your short fur-lined coat and boots, and at me in my striped robe. Don’t they think that you are also the child of Africa?” (qtd. in Péterfy 2007, 8). The joint public demonstration takes place not only for the sake of lark; in the mirror of Angelo’s foreignness Kazinczy discovers his own homelessness. For the remembering Kazinczy the scene highlights the paradox of his own fate: he, who became a laughing stock once walking together with his father in the Graben, also wearing a kuruc coat and hat, and for whom the “Barbarious Hungarians!” stigmatization was the most painful childhood memory, was struggling throughout his life against barbarism in the spirit of education adjusted to foreign examples and a superior ideal of culture and beauty, and tried to root the foreign elements of Western culture in the Hungarian soil. In the mirror held by Angelo he realises the disquieting foreignness of his struggle that can never turn into a domestic comfort. The fact that his imprisonment and almost being sentenced to death together with the leaders of the Hungarian Jacobite movement by the very German language culture whose Goethe and Schiller he appreciates above all is the most painful for him. Kazinczy himself emphasised the “barbarism” of Hungarian language and culture as compared to the German; thus, barbarism is not only an external stigma but also an interiorised consciousness of otherness.
Both Angelo and Kazinczy try to rise above the cultural power relations by means of erudition and language. Angelo speaks several languages, he acquires the forms of erudite conversation, as a freemason he pursues scientific activity in the Natural History Museum from Vienna, where after his death, as an irony of fate, he will be stuffed, turning from the former scholar into an exhibited object. Kazinczy attempts personal revenge for the suffered wrongs through his language reform. Derrida writes about the Foreigner of Plato’s Sophist: “someone who doesn’t speak like the rest, someone who speaks an odd sort of language” (Derrida 2000, 5). In Gergely Péterfy’s novel Kazinczy’s separation through language, the intent of creating “an odd sort of language” acquires a secret signification. As a counter gesture of power manifesting through language, in his invented words the neologist Kazinczy deprives the things of their names, cuts the ground from under the feet of language users, with this immaterial gesture turning all those who exert power over him into barbarians without a language: “so there was one single revenge left for him: to take away the language from those who rose above him, who deprived him of his freedom, goods and body; to take away their language and to leave them as stammering barbarians in the swamp of their vulgarity” (Péterfy 2014, 65). The notion of the (Western, spiritual) emember[9] is set against the (Eastern, physical) barbarian; this is Kazinczy’s word invention for the ideal of the superior man that he has also set himself as a goal: “[t]he emember is the cultured man, the erudite man, the Western man, the emember is Ulysses and Faust and Don Giovanni. The emember is the reduplicated man who doubled himself, who did everything to become better, to become more – the emember is the freemason, the adept; the emember is the artist, the emember is the philosopher, the scientist, the poet” (Péterfy 2014, 135). The emember remains a utopia, just like the ideal of pluralism, which is formulated from an ironical worm’s-eye view, adapted to the child Josephina’s (Angelo’s daughter’s) perspective: “It is not possible to recolour the one who is born black, just as it is not possible to recolour the white to be, let’s say, green or blue. It would be probably funny to live in a world which is as colourful as the glass windows of the Stephansdom, in which the red, green, yellow and purple people would walk side by side” (Péterfy 2014, 331).
Who is the foreigner and who is the barbarian? Or, asking with Derrida: “Isn’t the question of the foreigner [l’etranger] the foreigner’s question?” (Derrida 2000, 11). What does Angelo’s stuffed body ask? The act of “discipline” carried out by stuffing his body, in Foucault’s sense of the term, acquires the signification of the power’s demonstration against enlightened ideas in an attempt to eliminate free thought: “On the part of the court the matter is obvious arrogance, luxuriating in the flush of power: their purpose is no other than humiliating, through Angelo’s person, everybody who have ever connected their lives with enlightened ideas, and exultantly demonstrating their power over our body” (Péterfy 2014, 431). By bequeathing his skin and his story to Kazinczy, Angelo defies the appropriating machinery of power, which can possess the body, the matter, yet, nevertheless, it cannot control this immaterial gesture, it cannot hinder making the story known for posterity. In this way Angelo’s stuffed body becomes a memento, a testimony and a complex symbol of otherness in the novel.
By the end of the novel the meanings of the words barbarian and foreigner are relativised, they fold upon each other. In the closure of the unspeakable story built into the multilayered narrative it is solidarity and interdependence that link the two and make them transgressable on a deeper, hermeneutical level: “It is perhaps only the barbarian that understands the foreigner and the foreigner that understands the barbarian” (Péterfy 2014, 435). The twofold story is in fact the story of parallel – and interwoven – failures. Nevertheless, the assumed solidarity, “something within each of us ‒ our essential humanity ‒ which resonates to the presence of this same thing in other human beings” (Rorty 1989, 189) carries the value, the dignity that can be opposed, beyond corporeal and material constraints, timelessly, through ages, to the ‒ also timeless ‒ barbarity and inhumanity of the world.
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[1] This work was supported by the Domus Hungarica Senior scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
[2] Ferenc Kazinczy (1759‒1831) Hungarian writer, poet and translator, was the leading figure of language reform in the period of the Enlightenment. As an organizer of literary life he intensely contributed to the advancement of the Hungarian literature, culture and nation. Accused of conspiracy with the Hungarian Jacobite movement, he was imprisoned in 1794 and spent seven years in prison. His account on the years of prison, Fogságom naplója (Diary of My Imprisonment), is one of his masterpieces, together with Pályám emlékezete (The Memory of My Career) and his vast literary correspondence.
[3] Angelo Soliman (c. 1721‒1796), of African origin, was taken captive as a child and brought to Europe; he became the valet and traveling companion of Prince von Lobkowitz, the imperial governor of Sicily. After Lobkowitz’s death, he entered into the possession of Prince of Liechtenstein in Vienna. Later he became a royal tutor, an erudite man and a freemason in Viennese circles.
[4] Zsófia Kazinczyné Török or Sophie Török (1780‒1842), Ferenc Kazinczy’s wife. She was an educated woman who supported her husband in his literary career and through the difficulties of life, gave birth to eight children the first of whom died in infancy, and took care of Kazinczy’s legacy after his death. In the novel she appears as the one to whom Kazinczy passes on Angelo Soliman’s story.
[5] The translations of fragments from the novel and quotes from Hungarian specialist literature are mine throughout the paper ‒ J. P.
[6] The word ‘labanc’ is used in opposition with ‘kuruc’, the two terms referring to opposing parts of several battles for independence in Royal Hungary between the anti-Habsburg rebels (kuruc) and the loyalist supporters of the Habsburg Empire (labanc) in the 17‒18th centuries.
[7] Széphalom, situated in the north-east of Hungary, where Kazinczy moved to in 1806 and had a mansion built for himself (the name of the settlement was also given by him), became the centre of Hungarian language reform movement.
[8] “Soliman was an amiable and erudite man, he possessed a great knowledge, especially in histories. He enjoyed free access to the houses of the aristocracy, and he was also welcome among the middle class. He knew Francis I and enjoyed his favour.” (Kazinczy qtd. in Péterfy 2007, 8)
[9] Word created by the duplication of the initial syllable inserted in the Hungarian word ember ‘man’. Unlike many other linguistic inventions, this word created by Kazinczy has not become part of Hungarian language.