Art and life in M. Meszoly's short novel “High school”

I focus my analysis on the relationship between art and play, life and death in Miklos Meszoly’s story High School. Much has already been written about the peculiarities of the poetics of the outstanding Hungarian writer of the second half of the 20th century, and interest in this is now growing. This story is one of a kind, as it was written after Meszoly’s return from the falcon farm, he visited to write a report. Instead of reporting the story alludes to different types of art expression, to discuss the question: what form would be best to represent life experience and living beings? Therefore, I argue that the metaphorization of art kinds fulfills a text-forming function. In the course of the analysis, I also consider the tropeization of some birds and animals in the story, which complicates this problem through inventing new semantics opposed to the logical structure of the statement. In the story, with the positions of the heroes, “art as a game” is presented, but the contradiction with real life, in which all living things must die, leads to a dead end of the reflective consciousness, marked with attempts to reinvent legends about falcons. Only with the tool of a linguistic act, conceptualized as a poetic word, it was possible to break with this collision in favor of existential recognition of self. Thus, the metaphors of art served both to establish personal participation in being and to substantiate a new poetic discourse.