The Weilian Concept of Attention and the “Autobiographies” of János Pilinszky

Abstract

In this study, I will analyse the aspects of the everyday practice of attention and of the creative imagination that recognise necessary events, relations and, in general, necessity in the Weilian sense (“nécessité”)—and that thereby create reality—on the basis of Simone Weil’s fragmentary oeuvre, the reconstruction attempt published in 2021, and the volume collected under the title János Pilinszky’s Önéletrajzaim (My Autobiographies). The prose texts are characterised by the absence of temporal and psychological relations, the image of a speaker as “decreated” (cf. décréation), multiplied in the characters. The study demonstrates that, in addition to the Weilian concept of attention, he was familiar with the Weilian connections between “necessity” (“nécessité”), misfortune (“malheur”) and love, as evidenced by the markings on his copy of Intuitions pré-chrétiennes in the legacy, and that these connections are also to be found in the draft volume Önéletrajzaim. (For the analysis I used the version edited and published by József Bende in 2021.) Nevertheless, it may be concluded that János Pilinszky was not aware of or did not consider important the social aspects of the Weilian concept of attention, or the utopian social vision based on it, since I have not found any reference to them in his oeuvre.