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HEUREKA!
Nobel Prize 2002 Speech
Imre Kertész
I must begin with a
confession, a strange confession perhaps, but a candid one. From the
moment I stepped on the airplane to make the journey here and accept
this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, I have been feeling the
steady, searching gaze of a dispassionate observer on my back. Even
at this special moment, when I find myself being the center of
attention, I feel I am closer to this cool and detached observer
than to the writer whose work, of a sudden, is read around the
world. I can only hope that the speech I have the honor to deliver
on this occasion will help me dissolve the duality and fuse the two
selves within me.
For now, though, I still have trouble understanding the gap that I
sense between the high honor and my life and work. Perhaps I lived
too long under dictatorships, in a hostile, relentlessly alien
intellectual environment, to have developed a distinct literary
consciousness; even to contemplate such a thing would have been
useless. Besides, all I heard from all sides was that what I gave so
much thought to, the "topic" that forever preoccupied me, was
neither timely nor very attractive. For this reason, and also
because I happen to believe it, I have always considered writing a
highly personal, private matter.
Not that such a matter necessarily precludes seriousness - even if
this seriousness did seem somewhat ludicrous in a world where only
lies were taken seriously. Here the notion that the world is an
objective reality existing independently of us was an axiomatic
philosophical truth. Whereas I, on a lovely spring day in 1955,
suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality,
and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an
uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces,
and circumscribed, marked up, branded - and which I had to take back
from "History", this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine
alone, and I had to manage it accordingly.
Needless to say, all this turned me sharply against everything in
that world, which, though not objective, was undeniably a reality. I
am speaking of Communist Hungary, of "thriving and flourishing"
Socialism. If the world is an objective reality that exists
independently of us, then humans themselves, even in their own eyes,
are nothing more than objects, and their life stories merely a
series of disconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder
at, but which they themselves have nothing to do with. It would make
no sense to arrange the fragments in a coherent whole, because some
of it may be far too objective for the subjective Self to be held
responsible for it.
A year later, in 1956, the Hungarian Revolution broke out. For a
single moment the country turned subjective. Soviet tanks, however,
restored objectivity before long.
I do not mean to be facetious. Consider what happened to language in
the twentieth century, what became of words. I daresay that the
first and most shocking discovery made by writers in our time was
that language, in the form it came down to us, a legacy of some
primordial culture, had simply become unsuitable to convey concepts
and processes that had once been unambiguous and real. Think of
Kafka, think of Orwell, in whose hands the old language simply
disintegrated. It was as if they were turning it round and round in
an open fire, only to display its ashes afterward, in which new and
previously unknown patterns emerged.
But I should like to return to what for me is strictly private -
writing. There are a few questions, which someone in my situation
will not even ask. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, devoted an entire
little book to the question: For whom do we write? It is an
interesting question, but it can also be dangerous, and I thank my
lucky stars that I never had to deal with it. Let us see what the
danger consists of. If a writer were to pick a social class or group
that he would like, not only to delight but also influence, he would
first have to examine his style to see whether it is a suitable
means by which to exert influence. He will soon be assailed by
doubts, and spend his time watching himself. How can he know for
sure what his readers want, what they really like? He cannot very
well ask each and every one. And even if he did, it wouldn't do any
good. He would have to rely on his image of his would-be readers,
the expectations he ascribed to them, and imagine what would have
the effect on him that he would like to achieve. For whom does a
writer write, then? The answer is obvious: he writes for himself.
At least I can say that I have arrived at this answer fairly
straightforwardly. Granted, I had it easier - I had no readers and
no desire to influence anyone. I did not begin writing for a
specific reason, and what I wrote was not addressed to anyone. If I
had an aim at all, it was to be faithful, in language and form, to
the subject at hand, and nothing more. It was important to make this
clear during the ridiculous and sad period when literature was
state-controlled and "engagé".
It would be more difficult to answer another, perfectly legitimate
though still rather more dubious question: Why do we write? Here,
too, I was lucky, for it never occurred to me that when it came to
this question, one had a choice. I described a relevant incident in
my novel Failure. I stood in the empty corridor of an office
building, and all that happened was that from the direction of
another, intersecting corridor I heard echoing footsteps. A strange
excitement took hold of me. The sound grew louder and louder, and
though they were clearly the steps of a single, unseen person, I
suddenly had the feeling that I was hearing the footsteps of
thousands. It was as if a huge procession was pounding its way down
that corridor. And at that point I perceived the irresistible
attraction of those footfalls, that marching multitude. In a single
moment I understood the ecstasy of self-abandonment, the
intoxicating pleasure of melting into the crowd - what Nietzsche
called, in a different context though relevantly for this moment
too, a Dionysian experience. It was almost as though some physical
force were pushing me, pulling me toward the unseen marching
columns. I felt I had to stand back and press against the wall, to
keep me from yielding to this magnetic, seductive force.
I have related this intense moment as I (had) experienced it. The
source from which it sprang, like a vision, seemed somewhere outside
of me, not in me. Every artist is familiar with such moments. At one
time they were called sudden inspirations. Still, I wouldn't
classify the experience as an artistic revelation, but rather as an
existential self-discovery. What I gained from it was not my art -
its tools would not be mine for some time - but my life, which I had
almost lost. The experience was about solitude, a more difficult
life, and the things I have already mentioned - the need to step out
of the mesmerizing crowd, out of History, which renders you faceless
and fateless. To my horror, I realized that ten years after I had
returned from the Nazi concentration camps, and halfway still under
the awful spell of Stalinist terror, all that remained of the whole
experience were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes. Like it
didn't even happen to me, as people are wont to say.
It is clear that such visionary moments have a long prehistory.
Sigmund Freud would trace them back to a repressed traumatic
experience. And he may well be right. I, too, am inclined toward the
rational approach; mysticism and unreasoning rapture of all kinds
are alien to me. So when I speak of a vision, I must mean something
real that assumes a supernatural guise - the sudden, almost violent
eruption of a slowly ripening thought within me. Something conveyed
in the ancient cry, "Eureka!" - "I've got it!" But what?
I once said that so-called Socialism for me was the petite madeleine
cake that, dipped into Proust's tea, evoked in him the flavor of
bygone years. For reasons having to do with the language I spoke, I
decided, after the suppression of the 1956 revolt, to remain in
Hungary. Thus I was able to observe, not as a child this time but as
an adult, how a dictatorship functions. I saw how an entire nation
could be made to deny its ideals, and watched the early, cautious
moves toward accommodation. I understood that hope is an instrument
of evil, and the Kantian categorical imperative - ethics in general
- is but the pliable handmaiden of self-preservation.
Can one imagine greater freedom than that enjoyed by a writer in a
relatively limited, rather tired, even decadent dictatorship? By the
nineteen-sixties, the dictatorship in Hungary had reached a state of
consolidation that could almost be called a societal consensus. The
West later dubbed it, with good-humored forbearance, "goulash
Communism". It seemed that after the initial foreign disapproval,
Hungary's own version quickly turned into the West's favorite brand
of Communism. In the miry depths of this consensus, one either gave
up the struggle or found the winding paths to inner freedom. A
writer's overhead, after all, is very low; to practice his
profession, all he needs are paper and pencil. The nausea and
depression to which I awoke each morning led me at once into the
world I intended to describe. I had to discover that I had placed a
man groaning under the logic of one type of totalitarianism in
another totalitarian system, and this turned the language of my
novel into a highly allusive medium. If I look back now and size up
honestly the situation I was in at the time, I have to conclude that
in the West, in a free society, I probably would not have been able
to write the novel known by readers today as Fateless, the novel
singled out by the Swedish Academy for the highest honor.
No, I probably would have aimed at something different. Which is not
to say that I would not have tried to get at the truth, but perhaps
at a different kind of truth. In the free marketplace of books and
ideas, I, too, might have wanted to produce a showier fiction. For
example, I might have tried to break up time in my novel, and
narrate only the most powerful scenes. But the hero of my novel does
not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his
time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He
doesn't remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the
dreary trap of linearity, and cannot shake off the painful details.
Instead of a spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has
to live through everything, which is oppressive and offers little
variety, like life itself.
But the method led to remarkable insights. Linearity demanded that
each situation that arose be completely filled out. It did not allow
me, say, to skip cavalierly over twenty minutes of time, if only
because those twenty minutes were there before me, like a gaping,
terrifying black hole, like a mass grave. I am speaking of the
twenty minutes spent on the arrival platform of the Birkenau
extermination camp - the time it took people clambering down from
the train to reach the officer doing the selecting. I more or less
remembered the twenty minutes, but the novel demanded that I
distrust my memory. No matter how many survivors' accounts,
reminiscences and confessions I had read, they all agreed that
everything proceeded all too quickly and unnoticably. The doors of
the railroad cars were flung open, they heard shouts, the barking of
dogs, men and women were abruptly separated, and in the midst of the
hubbub, they found themselves in front of an officer. He cast a
fleeting glance at them, pointed to something with his outstretched
arm, and before they knew it they were wearing prison clothes.
I remembered these twenty minutes differently. Turning to authentic
sources, I first read Tadeusz Borowski's stark, unsparing and
self-tormenting narratives, among them the story entitled "This Way
for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen". Later, I came upon a series of
photographs of human cargo arriving at the Birkenau railroad
platform - photographs taken by an SS soldier and found by American
soldiers in a former SS barracks in the already liberated camp at
Dachau. I looked at these photographs in utter amazement. I saw
lovely, smiling women and bright-eyed young men, all of them
well-intentioned, eager to cooperate. Now I understood how and why
those humiliating twenty minutes of idleness and helplessness faded
from their memories. And when I thought how all this was repeated
the same way for days, weeks, months and years on end, I gained an
insight into the mechanism of horror; I learned how it became
possible to turn human nature against one's own life.
So I proceeded, step by step, on the linear path of discovery; this
was my heuristic method, if you will. I realized soon enough that I
was not the least bit interested in whom I was writing for and why.
One question interested me: What have I still got to do with
literature? For it was clear to me that an uncrossable line
separated me from literature and the ideals, the spirit associated
with the concept of literature. The name of this demarcation line,
as of many other things, is Auschwitz. When we write about
Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least,
suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about
Auschwitz, or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial,
which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over. By which I mean
that nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or
refute Auschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be
present in the past tense.
It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as a
complaint - that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I
have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain
qualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of
libraries? Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust? One
does not have to choose the Holocaust as one's subject to detect the
broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades. I
will go so far as to say that I know of no genuine work of art that
does not reflect this break. It is as if, after a night of terrible
dreams, one looked around the world, defeated, helpless. I have
never tried to see the complex of problems referred to as the
Holocaust merely as the insolvable conflict between Germans and
Jews. I never believed that it was the latest chapter in the history
of Jewish suffering, which followed logically from their earlier
trials and tribulations. I never saw it as a one-time aberration, a
large-scale pogrom, a precondition for the creation of Israel. What
I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a
great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his
two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.
Now the only thing to reflect on is where we go from here. The
problem of Auschwitz is not whether to draw a line under it, as it
were; whether to preserve its memory or slip it into the appropriate
pigeonhole of history; whether to erect a monument to the murdered
millions, and if so, what kind. The real problem with Auschwitz is
that it happened, and this cannot be altered - not with the best, or
worst, will in the world. This gravest of situations was
characterized most accurately by the Hungarian Catholic poet János
Pilinszky when he called it a "scandal". What he meant by it,
clearly, is that Auschwitz occurred in a Christian cultural
environment, so for those with a metaphysical turn of mind it can
never be overcome.
Old prophecies speak of the death of God. Since Auschwitz we are
more alone, that much is certain. We must create our values
ourselves, day by day, with that persistent though invisible ethical
work that will give them life, and perhaps turn them into the
foundation of a new European culture. I consider the prize with
which the Swedish Academy has seen fit to honor my work as an
indication that Europe again needs the experience that witnesses to
Auschwitz, to the Holocaust were forced to acquire. The decision -
permit me to say this - bespeaks courage, firm resolve even - for
those who made it wished me to come here, though they could have
easily guessed what they would hear from me. What was revealed in
the Final Solution, in l'univers concentrationnaire, cannot be
misunderstood, and the only way survival is possible, and the
preservation of creative power, is if we recognize the zero point
that is Auschwitz. Why couldn't this clarity of vision be fruitful?
At the bottom of all great realizations, even if they are born of
unsurpassed tragedies, there lies the greatest European value of
all, the longing for liberty, which suffuses our lives with
something more, a richness, making us aware of the positive fact of
our existence, and the responsibility we all bear for it.
It makes me especially happy to be expressing these thoughts in my
native language: Hungarian. I was born in Budapest, in a Jewish
family, whose maternal branch hailed from the Transylvanian city of
Kolozsvár (Cluj) and the paternal side from the southwestern corner
of the Lake Balaton region. My grandparents still lit the Sabbath
candles every Friday night, but they changed their name to a
Hungarian one, and it was natural for them to consider Judaism their
religion and Hungary their homeland. My maternal grandparents
perished in the Holocaust; my paternal grandparents' lives were
destroyed by Mátyás Rákosi's Communist rule, when Budapest's Jewish
old age home was relocated to the northern border region of the
country. I think this brief family history encapsulates and
symbolizes this country's modern-day travails. What it teaches me,
though, is that there is not only bitterness in grief, but also
extraordinary moral potential. Being a Jew to me is once again,
first and foremost, a moral challenge. If the Holocaust has by now
created a culture, as it undeniably has, its aim must be that an
irredeemable reality give rise by way of the spirit to restoration -
a catharsis. This desire has inspired me in all my creative
endeavors.
Though I am nearing the end of my speech, I must confess I still
have not found the reassuring balance between my life, my works and
the Nobel Prize. For now I feel profound gratitude - gratitude for
the love that saved me and sustains me still. But let us consider
that in this difficult-to-follow life journey, in this "career" of
mine, if I could so put it, there is something stirring, something
absurd, something which cannot be pondered without one being touched
by a belief in an otherworldly order, in providence, in metaphysical
justice - in other words, without falling into the trap of
self-deception, and thus running aground, going under, severing the
deep and tortuous ties with the millions who perished and who never
knew mercy. It is not so easy to be an exception. But if we were
destined to be exceptions, we must make our peace with the absurd
order of chance, which reigns over our lives with the whim of a
death squad, exposing us to inhuman powers, monstrous tyrannies.
And yet something very special happened while I was preparing this
lecture, which in a way reassured me. One day I received a large
brown envelope in the mail. It was sent to me by Doctor Volkhard
Knigge, the director of the Buchenwald Memorial Center. He enclosed
a small envelope with his congratulatory note, and described what
was in the envelope, so, in case I didn't have the strength to look,
I wouldn't have to. The envelope contained a copy of the original
daily report on the camp's prisoners for February 18, 1945. In the "Abgänge",
that is, the "Decrement" column, I learned about the death of
Prisoner #64,921 - Imre Kertész, factory worker, born in 1927. The
two false data: the year of my birth and my occupation were entered
in the official registry when I was brought to Buchenwald. I had
made myself two years older so I wouldn't be classified as a child,
and had said worker rather than student to appear more useful to
them.
In short, I died once, so I could live. Perhaps that is my real
story. If it is, I dedicate this work, born of a child's death, to
the millions who died and to those who still remember them. But,
since we are talking about literature, after all, the kind of
literature that, in the view of your Academy, is also a testimony,
my work may yet serve a useful purpose in the future, and - this is
my heart's desire - may even speak to the future. Whenever I think
of the traumatic impact of Auschwitz, I end up dwelling on the
vitality and creativity of those living today. Thus, in thinking
about Auschwitz, I reflect, paradoxically, not on the past but the
future.
Imre Kertész
Translated by Ivan Sanders.
(Source : Tin Van
www.tanvien.net )
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