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The Agitation of the Védegylet and the Iparvédegyleti dal by János Garay

Abstract

János Garay’s little-known poem Iparvédegyleti dal, written in the spring of 1845 has almost no significance in the history of Hungarian poetry. The poem, which propagated the so-called „Védegylet”, an association founded at the end of 1844 to defend and strengthen Hungarian industry, did not even attract the attention of the contemporaries, since it seemed to have been no more than a poetic restatement of the rhetorical clichés and well-kown arguments often repeated in contemporary political speeches, newspaper debates and in literary works too, in support of the movement. In a sense, however, the poem can also be seen as an attempt to renew the traditional poetic discourse on nation and homeland. The most important claim of this paper is that Garay, in line with the aims of the movement he propagated, tried to convince his audience to buy the products of Hungarian industry in a way that was quite unusual in the patriotic poetry of the time, using the rhetorical devices of commercial advertisement. In his poem, he presented the homeland to his readers as an object of sensual desires and individual pleasures, appealing much more to consumer self-interest than to the patriotic sense of duty. Far from being a successful work in terms of its aesthetic value, the Iparvédegyleti dal is not entirely uninteresting from the perspective of Hungarian literary history; it is a striking example of the challenges of a contemporary reinterpretation of the concepts of homeland, nation and patriotism that patriotic lyricism was confronted with, and which forced it to transform its traditional vocabulary and expand its rhetorical arsenal.