Let Us Tame the Dragons of the Soul!
An article from BDZ Hangoló magazine, spring 2017. By Réka Ortutay.
We all have dreams about who we want to become, what we want to achieve in life, what we want to do. At the same time, we have our fears. We know what we want to avoid, what we do not want to become. But what happens if these feelings take on a life of their own and we lose control over them? What happens if, like a fish washed ashore, we flounder in the eternal cycle of dream and waking, light and shadow, glory and downfall? Few are likely to know how many waystations and countries the story of the king turned into a stork — the story that gives Babits’s novel its title — passed through before it met the Freudian psychology that became so popular at the end of the nineteenth century, Bergsonian philosophy, and the crime novel so dear to Babits; and how, in his capable hands, it would coalesce into a single, unified novel — a psychological crime story considered extremely modern and unusual even in its own time.
Almost a century later, this story served as the basis for Levente Gyöngyösi’s stunning opera, with a libretto by Zsófia Balla.
The fairy-tale motif — The Parrot King
The original version of the tale that gave Babits’s novel its title can be found in One Thousand and One Nights, under the title The Parrot King. If anyone is now thinking, ‘Right, I’ll just take One Thousand and One Nights off the shelf and have a look’, they will put the book back down in disappointment, saying: ‘There’s no such story in it!’ The Thousand and One Nights is not a collection of specific folk tales; its content varies with the date and place of publication, and its history is at least as adventurous as its content is diverse and wide-ranging. No early manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights survive. One reason is that in the Middle East the traditions of storytelling were tied to oral delivery; the tales were not written down, or only cursorily.
The other reason is that storytelling did not belong to high culture: the language of the tales was Middle Arabic, whereas the higher social classes spoke and wrote in Classical Arabic, so anything present in their culture in the vernacular fell outside their sphere of interest. Interestingly, this remains the case to this day: the collection became part of world literature without the higher strata of Arab society even taking notice of it. The tales are framed by the story of Scheherazade and Sultan Shahryar, a narrative familiar to all: Scheherazade escapes the execution awaiting the king’s concubines by telling such fascinating stories that they hold the ruler’s interest, leading him to postpone the execution again and again. These tales and their frame story are known to us today as the Thousand and One Nights.
The oldest manuscript dates from the 800s, but several versions containing different tales have since emerged. According to August Wilhelm Schlegel,1 the tales can be divided, by origin, into three categories: Arabic, Persian and Indian. The stories entered the European consciousness with the help of a few translations: Antoine Galland2 produced the first, which contained the tales of 282 nights, based on a fourteenth-century manuscript. Galland did not merely translate the stories, however; he also adapted them to the taste of the time. Many later translations were based on Galland’s French version, but some added newly translated tales, or were based on a different original — Arabic, or in some cases Turkish.
This is why we find different tales in different editions; the Hungarian translations familiar to us (the most complete is attributed to Csilla Prileszky, published in seven volumes by Atlantisz Kiadó at the turn of the millennium), for instance, do not include the story of the Parrot King. 1 August Wilhelm Schlegel (8 September 1767 – 12 May 1845): German poet, literary translator and art critic, one of the pioneers of German Romanticism. 2 Antoine Galland (4 April 1646 – 17 February 1715): French orientalist and numismatist. I myself found the story, which is of Indian origin, in a German edition, where Scheherazade tells it to the sultan on the eighteenth night. The story turns on intrigue and scheming; the transformation is a simple feat, not linked to any psychological change.
The sultan possesses a magic spell that lets him slip into the skin of dead animals or people, leaving his own form lifeless behind. The sultan’s vizier takes advantage of this: while the sultan assumes the form of a parrot, the vizier slips into the sultan’s skin and exploits every benefit that comes with the throne. The sultan eventually regains his form through a ruse and punishes the vizier.
Babits’s direct source — Wilhelm Hauff
Wilhelm Hauff,3 despite his youth, was one of the greatest German storytellers of the late Romantic era. From his pen came such tales as the well-known Little Muk (Der kleine Muk) and Snow White and Rose Red (Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot). One of the stories in his first collection — in which the passengers of a caravan tell one another tales within a framing narrative — is The Stork Caliph (Der Kalif Storch). The story is clearly based on the Parrot King from One Thousand and One Nights, but in this version the transformation is linked to a password (mutabor — Latin for ‘I shall change’), which the king forgets while in the form of a stork, and so remains trapped in the stork’s body until, with the help of a good friend, he is able to change back. There is a reference to this in Babits’s novel too: “Poor, poor stork caliph! Now it was Elemér Tábory who was the stork caliph.”
“It takes but a moment, a single word, to find the magic word of life.” 3 Wilhelm Hauff (1802–1827): German writer and author of fairy tales, a figure of the Biedermeier era.
The struggle between the conscious and the subconscious — psychoanalysis and dream interpretation
Babits was undoubtedly familiar with Freud’s work — for in The Stork Caliph he refers to a Viennese psychologist who specialises in dream interpretation — and he was certainly acquainted with other works on the subject, since in 1905 he published a paper on dreams in The American Journal of Psychology, a study that can now be read in the volume Essays and Studies. Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1900, and he attributed a significant role to it in psychoanalysis. Freud divided the state of consciousness into three parts. The ego (Ich) attempts to navigate between the realm of the unconscious (Es) and the superego (über-Ich). In this scheme the unconscious is the repository of repressed desires and feelings, while the superego acts as the censor, embodying social and moral norms.
Memories and motivations that are repressed, and so enter the unconscious, have a significant influence on a person’s behaviour. One of the most important domains of the ego — which seeks to satisfy both the unconscious and the superego — is the realm of dreams, where, by pushing the censor’s controlling function into the background, it can try to fulfil its repressed desires. This is evident in The Stork Caliph too: the higher the social expectations in Elemér Tábory’s life, and the less he is able or willing to meet them, the more his character merges with that of the fee-collector, and the more the fee-collector’s persona takes control of Elemér Tábory’s.
Imprisoned by space and time — the philosophy of Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson4 was one of the most significant philosophers of the nineteenth century. In Babits’s volume Essays and Studies there is a summary essay, ‘Bergson’s Philosophy’, on the philosopher’s work; we can therefore be certain that Babits was thoroughly familiar with Bergson’s oeuvre. According to Bergson, the primary means of cognition is intuition; reason plays a role only in scientific cognition. He saw the artist’s task as confronting the recipient with the reality grasped through intuition. His theory of time — according to which objective time (as measured by a clock) and subjective time (as perceived and experienced by us; durée, duration) are distinct from one another5 — had a major influence on artistic life at the turn of the century, particularly on literature, and so on Babits’s poetry as well (see his poem ‘Evening Question’, in which he expands a single objective moment into infinity in both space and time).
The central idea of his philosophy is the duality of the time of consciousness (duration) and the time of the intellect (time projected into space). In his work Matter and Memory he examines the relationship between soul and body. Babits alludes to this in The Stork Caliph: ‘For what is the body if not a mass of sensations, the sum of memories of a multitude of physical sensations?’ 4 Henri Bergson (1859–1941): French philosopher and Nobel laureate. 5 Bergson: Duration and Simultaneity (1922).
Mysticism and the doppelgänger
The Stork Caliph was thought novel and fashionable in turn-of-the-century literature not only for its choice of subject but also for its atmospheric elements, the story’s fantastical resolution, and the mystical air surrounding it. It is therefore essential to mention the work of Edgar Allan Poe,6 whose name is associated not only with mystical poems and short stories but also with the creation of the detective story as a genre. Babits knew Poe’s oeuvre thoroughly, for the first Hungarian edition of his short-story collection appeared in Babits’s translation, under the title Groteszk és arabeszk. 6 Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849): American poet, critic, short-story writer and editor. Poe’s death is as mysterious as his writings. On 3 October 1849 he was found on a street in Baltimore wearing another man’s clothes, babbling incoherently and in a very poor state.
He died after being taken to hospital. Before his death he repeatedly cried out the name of a certain Reynolds. Who this Reynolds was, and what caused Poe’s death, will likely remain an eternal mystery, as both his medical records and his death certificate have disappeared. The use of the doppelgänger is a favourite device of the horror genre. While modern horror films mainly evoke fear through an accumulation of brutal scenes, classical literary horror achieves its effect by intensifying the rhythm of chilling, suspicion-arousing scenes. The doppelgänger is the protagonist’s other self, their counterpart. Literally meaning ‘double’, it takes many forms in literature: a split personality, a divided consciousness, schizophrenia or mental disorder, but also the protagonist’s double life. We find numerous examples in literature (e.g. E.T.A.
Hoffmann’s The Sandman, or Dostoevsky’s novel The Double). We cannot know whether Babits was familiar with all such works, but we should like to present a few examples, to show how many writers’ imaginations this motif stirred, and in what ways.
Edgar Allan Poe: William Wilson
Poe’s short story William Wilson, published in 1839, uses the doppelgänger motif to dramatise the conflict between action and conscience. From the recollections of the narrator — William Wilson, who also reveals that this is a fictitious name, because someone else is using his real one — we learn that he had an alter ego, born on the same day as him, who looked exactly like him and started school on the same day. The narrator admits that things would have turned out much better in his life had he heeded the advice his doppelgänger whispered in his ear at the most critical moments. Yet the doppelgänger always appeared when he was at his happiest: gambling and cheating, or trying to make a move on a married woman.
During the latter incident the narrator inflicts a fatal wound on his opponent, but then a mirror appears before him in which he sees himself, and the reflection says the following, in his own voice (my own translation):
“I have lost, but from now on you too are dead — dead to the world, dead to the heavens, and dead to hope. You lived within me — and now I am dying; see in this picture, which is your own, how completely and perfectly you have killed yourself!”
Poe employs the doppelgänger motif in numerous other works, such as The Oval Portrait, The Black Cat, and Eleonora.
Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), the Scottish novelist, published his novel in 1886; it bears many parallels to Babits’s The Stork Caliph. We learn the protagonist’s story through the accounts of several characters: the lawyer Utterson outlines the events for us, and then, following the death of the protagonist, Dr Jekyll, the solution to the mystery is revealed through the letters of Dr Lanyon and Jekyll. The story in brief: Dr Jekyll discovers certain repulsive traits within himself that are struggling to break free. To this end he experiments with a formula which, when taken, transforms him into Mr Hyde. By his own account this transformation makes him feel much better, as he lives out his suppressed desires in another body, as Mr Hyde. As Jekyll, he is naturally tormented by guilt over the misdeeds committed in Hyde’s guise.
He wrestles at length between his two selves, and though he chooses Jekyll, he finds it ever harder to remain so. After a while, all it takes is for him to doze off or fall asleep for his other self to burst forth. After much deliberation he concludes that he can only rid himself of Hyde if Jekyll’s life ends too. This uniquely thrilling, mysterious psychological thriller thus features the ‘one soul in two bodies’ motif, the cycle of waking–sleep–waking, and the formula as a magic word that ceases to work after a while; and the resolution of the story is similar to that of The Stork Caliph: the two parts of the soul are inseparable, and we can only rid ourselves of the evil soul if we destroy the good one along with it.
Another interesting detail is the author’s choice of names: Jekyll (a combination of the French ‘je’ and the English ‘kill’ — ‘I kill’) and Hyde (from the English ‘hide’, to conceal). The names also allude to the nature of the soul’s manifestation: with his formula, Jekyll kills everything that society recognises and expects, so that he may live out his hidden, suppressed desires.
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900, Irish poet, writer and playwright) caused a major scandal; yet at the heart of the work that brought him immense fame lies the interaction between the beautiful young Dorian Gray and the portrait painted of him. When Dorian sees the portrait of himself, he realises his own beauty and its transience, and sells his soul to the painting. From then on — while his body matures and his beauty increases — the portrait ages in his stead. The more depravity and sin he commits, the uglier and more worn the painting becomes, a mirror of his true self. After committing a particularly cruel murder, however, his conscience speaks to him; he is repulsed by himself, and he plunges the dagger into the heart of the portrait. His servant finds the corpse of a wrinkled, shrivelled, hideous man beneath the portrait. The narrative faithfully follows Wilde’s ars poetica:
“All art is quite useless. It is not art that imitates life, but life that imitates art.”
Mihály Babits: The Stork Caliph
In Babits’s work the stork caliph — that is, the motif of metamorphosis — is shifted onto an entirely new plane: the world of the soul’s rupture and of psychoanalysis; and so the fairy-tale motif meets a favourite motif of nineteenth-century literature, the doppelgänger. The stork’s transformation becomes a symbol of the soul’s transformation. Yet this transformation is agonising, unwanted, filled with fear: “these were the most agonising moments of my life. The stork’s moments.” The story of the stork caliph resembles the works outlined so far in many ways. The protagonist, Elemér Tábory, is a young man of the upper classes, living in affluence, of brilliant intelligence and ability, with first-rate prospects; yet at night, when he falls asleep, he wakes in another life, in the guise of an uneducated boy from the urban underclass.
No matter how hard he tries to unravel the cause of his trouble with the help of books, the dreams simply will not go away; indeed, the life of the apprentice intrudes into his existence at ever shorter intervals, even during the briefest of rests. Although the dreams cease for a while, they resurface precisely during the happiest period of his life, just as he is thinking of marriage and building a future. From this point the novel’s pace intensifies; the lives of the two figures become ever more inseparable, until the figure of the fee-collector ultimately consumes Elemér’s life, leaving him no longer able to control his own existence. Finally, when the fee-collector strangles a prostitute — on his fiancée’s advice — Elemér decides to kill himself in his sleep, just as the fee-collector did, but this inevitably leads to Elemér’s own downfall.
The novel concludes with a chapter entitled ‘Letter to the Author’ (originally ‘Letter to Zsigmond Móricz’), which, as it were, authenticates the strange story by reporting the peculiar death of Elemér Tábory, who is found dead with a gunshot wound — yet the murder weapon cannot be found anywhere. If one looks for specialist literature on The Stork Caliph, one finds a vast array of works — enough to fill libraries — analysing the story from many perspectives. Of these I should like to outline three main strands in a few words.
The Stork Caliph and psychoanalysis
When examining The Stork Caliph, it becomes obvious that a consideration of the Freudian influence is unavoidable. In a study,8 László Kemenes Géfin7 sees Elemér Tábory’s tragedy in his repressed sexual desires and the attendant guilt. The erotic motif does indeed run through the novel, beginning with his successfully resolved Oedipus complex towards his mother — depicted as enchantingly beautiful — through his encounter with the prostitute, then his relationship with Szilvia, right up to his entirely non-erotic love for Etelka. The flip side of all this also appears in his life: Elemér recognises his mother in the mother of the apprentice in his dream; Szilvia’s counterpart is the cashier; and Etelka’s doppelgänger appears in the form of the prostitute whom the protagonist eventually strangles.
7 László Kemenes Géfin (1937–2022): Attila József Prize-winning writer, poet, literary translator and teacher.
8 László Kemenes Géfin: The Struggle Between the Conscious and the Unconscious in Mihály
Babits’s The Stork Caliph. In Jolanta Jastrzebska, Eroticism in the Twentieth-Century Hungarian Novel. Kortárs, Budapest, 1998, pp. 79–90. At the same time, Elemér’s inner conflict can be understood as the man (Ich — Elemér) navigating between two states of consciousness: on the one hand the tension between social expectations and moral norms (über-Ich — family, society), and on the other his repressed desires and sexuality (Es). For in his dream we find every figure from his waking life in distorted form, and the more the social expectations (marriage, a degree, shaping a vision of the future) grow, the more rapidly — and the more poorly — the daily life of the fee-collector intrudes into his existence. While Elemér believes he is in love with the Madonna-like Etelka, the moment the idea of marriage arises he strangles Etelka’s dream-double in his sleep.
We might also mention the two heroes’ rise through the ranks: while Elemér advances through much study and hard work, the fee-collector achieves his ends through scheming, cheating and embezzlement.
The Stork Caliph and Bergson’s philosophy
László Rónay9 (1937–2018, an Attila József Prize-winning literary historian, editor, critic and university lecturer), in his study The Stork Caliph — Babits, Bergson, Freud,10 seeks an explanation for the issues the work raises from the perspectives of philosophy and psychology. Drawing on Bergson’s essay Matter and Memory, he suggests that The Stork Caliph is “built upon the simultaneous interplay of experiential contents and memories”, of which the brain, in the course of its functioning, always brings to consciousness those that hold special significance for us in a given life situation. This is evident in the way the protagonist’s two selves become increasingly intertwined, and in the fact that almost every character in his waking life has a counterpart in his dreams.
9 László Rónay (1937–2018): Attila József Prize-winning literary historian, editor, critic and university lecturer. 10 Irodalomtörténet (Literary History), Vol. 16 (66), No. 3 (1984), pp. 666–676. At the same time, a constantly recurring problem in the novel is the absence of memory. For while Elemér remembers everything from his nocturnal life, the fee-collector — though he desires the life of his doppelgänger — is unable to recall what he has seen and heard in his daytime life. “The story of my second self is the story of forgotten words,” thinks the fee-collector. Bergsonian ideas are also linked here to Freud’s teaching: “The enemy we carry within us is truly invincible,” Babits declares through his hero.
In Freudian terms this essentially means that, however hard we struggle against the repressed thoughts in our subconscious (Es) that break into our daily lives, reshaping or even defining our personality, it is futile to try to overcome that something by our own means. Through the struggle we achieve precisely the opposite: we sink to the level of our adversary. This is what happens to Elemér Tábory too, who, after his trip to Venice, merely squanders his money, spending his days gambling and with a woman of dubious morals, Szilvia, while the fee-collector embezzles money and pines for the cashier. Elemér’s only chance would be to realise that his two selves cannot be separated; it is pointless to fight against either of them; he must live with them, integrating and understanding even the bad.
And here we can return to Bergson, who held that existence is not a succession of separate states, but a flowing continuity in which the various states of consciousness merge into one another.
The Stork Caliph and social criticism
In her essay ‘Some Structural Features of The Stork Caliph’,11 Andrea Bábics highlights the possibility of reading the novel as a work of social criticism. She refers to what Gusztáv Láng wrote in his foreword to the Romanian edition of the novel: that the narrative could even be a thought experiment — ‘what becomes of the same person if they find themselves in radically different, extremely unfavourable circumstances?’ The doppelgänger motif, or the depiction of schizophrenia, is in fact an excellent opportunity to reveal what lies beneath the surface, what we find on the other side of the coin. “This world is merely an occasion for the world to attain partial self-awareness,” Elemér reflects in the novel. On the one hand we see a young gentleman with good prospects and brilliant abilities; every character in his life has a name, a social standing and recognition.
On the other hand there is the city boy who rises from servant to labourer; everyone in his world is nameless, and, lacking opportunities, he does not follow the path of integrity. Both experience the same life situations, only the fee-collector at a much lower level of opportunity. In the novel the tension is created by the ever-quickening pace of the transformations, which inevitably drives the story towards a tragic conclusion. The worlds of the two protagonists intersect three times: the first is when Elemér recognises the man returning from America, whom he later comes to regard as his dream-master — this is where his dreams begin. The two realities meet for the second time when Elemér hears at school about a boy who stole someone’s school report and so wanted to live under another name.
Later, in the dream, it turns out that the boy who stole the certificate was the fee-collector himself. They converge a third time in the dénouement, when the fee-collector’s suicide effectively destroys Elemér as well — though even before this the two lives already seem increasingly to be merging. 11 Irodalomtörténet (Literary History), Vol. 23 (73), No. 1 (1992), pp. 40–55. We can see how many different interpretations the novel allows, and on how many levels it operates. The Stork Caliph is a masterful example of how the literary and philosophical phenomena of an era can be used to depict social and psychological reality.
Integrating the shadow — the opera
When I asked the composer, Levente Gyöngyösi, what he saw in this work that made him fall in love with it at once, he replied: “Elemér’s striving to remain good. And at the same time, the message of the piece — that we must ‘tame the dragons of the soul’: we must understand our ‘dark side’, not drive it away, not suppress it, not hate it, for we cannot rid ourselves of it — because then we would lose ourselves as well.”