Originally published in 1935 and republished in 1985, Towards the One and Only Metaphor, Szentkuthy’s second book, is comprised of 112 numbered sections ranging in length from one sentence to several pages. The seeding ground out of which much of Szentkuthy’s future work would come, it is a text that defies classification, yet is perhaps most accurately thought of as literature in Blanchot’s expansive sense of the term, that which ‘ruins’ distinctions and limits in its creation of a unique and amorphous hybrid beyond the distinctions of a particular genre. As Dezső Baróti described when reviewing the book in 1935, it is comprised of “unconventional journal-like passages expanded into short essays, plans for novels, poetic meditations that have the effect of free verse, and paradoxical aphorisms,” all of which reveal a moral philosophy, a politics, an erotics. “Its predominant motifs (insofar as one can succinctly describe it in a few words) are most especially nature, love, eroticism, sex. All that, however, is constantly painted over by the vibration of the unconcealed presence of a writer constantly in search of himself, and rife with beguiling, stimulating, and ever-renewed surprises.”[16] This accords with Szentkuthy’s grandiose if not quixotic goal of creating what he repeatedly called “a Catalogus Rerum, a listing of entities and phenomena, a Catalogue of everything in the Entire World.”
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