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Imre Kertesz and writing after the Holocaust

Europe's broken voice

BALAJI RAVICHANDRAN

Imre Kertesz

FIASCO

Translated by Tim Wilkinson 361pp. Melville House. Paperback, £13.99 (US $18.95).

978 I 935554295

Every year the Frankfurt Book Fair is dedicated to the literature of a different country, and in 1999 it was the turn of Hungary. In particular, the organizers focused on four writers of supposed Jewish origin: Peter Nadas, Gyorgy Konrad, Peter Esterhazy and Imre Kertesz. I say "supposed" because the last of those authors has long resisted such a direct identification. As an assimilated Hungarian Jew who was deported to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, Imre Kertesz, who was born in Budapest in 1929, was first rejected by the Hungarians, even though he did not identify himself as Jewish, and then, in the concentration camps, he was rejected by fellow Jews for, as he puts it, not being Jewish enough. "My subject is the freedom of self-definition", he wrote in 2002, "which entails the simple idea that each and every member of society has the right to be what he or she is." The Far Right in Hungary, unabashedly anti-Semitic, did not take kindly to the news from Frankfurt, and when further acknowledgement for Kertesz came from Sweden three years later, one critic went so far as to question whether this was the Nobel Prize for Auschwitz, while another asked, "When will the first [real] Hungarian receive the Nobel Prize in Literature?".

The novel for which Kertesz is best known, and on which his reputation as a writer rests, is Sorstalansag (1975; translated in 1992 as Fateless, then in 2004 as Fateless-ness), in which he follows his adolescent alter ego, Koves, from a bourgeois life in Budapest to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald and Zeitz, and eventually his return to a homeland occupied by the Soviets. Formally simple, yet suffused with irony, the book won him some admirers in Western Europe, but in Hungary it was virtually ignored, and it struggled to make its way across the North Sea and the Atlantic. It wasn't until 1992 that the first English version appeared in the United States, where, as in Britain later that year, it failed to attract much attention. Yet Fateless caused controversy, especially among its few readers in Budapest, who were irked by the following lines towards the end of the book: "in a certain sense, life was purer, simpler" in the concentration camps; "even back there, in the shadow of the chimneys, there was something resembling happiness".

Despite the apparent failure of his first work, Kertesz followed Fateless with two other books - A kudarc (1988, Fiasco) and Kaddis a meg nem szuletett gyermekert (1990, Kaddish for an Unborn Child) - which together make up the Koves trilogy.

It is the writing and reception of Fateless that form the first third of Fiasco: a prelude, seen through the eyes of an "old boy" (who, one imagines, is Kertesz himself), before Koves reappears and, after performing various duties randomly allocated by the State, decides to write a novel. This decision - the consequences of which, as Kertesz hints, Koves will not appreciate until much later - marks the end of Fiasco. Kaddish, on the other hand, is a lengthy monologue in the manner of Thomas Bernhard, which attempts to justify why Koves could not bear to bring another child into the world, a world where the Holocaust was, and is, a reality. One can only wonder why it was that his other books, including Kaddish, appeared in English before the second volume of the trilogy, Fiasco, given how crucially linked it is to the rest of his oeuvre.

The Nobel Prize provided enough of an incentive to commission fresh translations in English, not only of Fateless (this time, more correctly, as Fatelessness), but also of Kertesz's other books, such as Detective Story, Liquidation and The Union Jack. Several of them are by Tim Wilkinson, who, on reading Kaddish for the first time, gave up a job in the pharmaceutical industry to devote himself to literary translation. Occasional colloquialisms notwithstanding, he rises to the task admirably. In Fiasco, the prelude that glimpses into the mind of the "old boy" is a heavily punctuated narrative, with clauses upon clauses, framed within parentheses, vying for attention, distracting from the main text, and here the meticulousness of Wilkinson's translation comes through:

"But now I've gone and accepted it," he added (mentally) (as if there were no choice in the matter) (though we always have a choice) (even when there is none) (and we always chose ourselves as one may read in a French anthology) (which the old boy kept on the bookshelf on the wall above the armchair standing to the north of the tile stove that occupied the southeast corner of the room) (but then who chooses us, one might ask) (justifiably).

Yet, a hundred pages later, when one comes across, in the middle of a smooth account, an odd phrase such as "[why] had he lost his cool", it feels incongruous, grating.

Kertesz has often expressed his belief that, for him, there is only one subject worth writing about: the Holocaust. "One does not have to choose the Holocaust as one's subject", he said in his Nobel Lecture, "to detect the broken voice that has dominated European art for decades." He claimed that there can be "no genuine work of art that does not reflect this [very] break". That lecture was a postscript to the concerns he first articulated in Fiasco, in which he asks: what is a writer and how does a person become one? Why does one write, and for whom? Why should one continue to write? If these are familiar questions, Kertesz's inability to come up with a cogent answer marks the first fiasco (or failure) suggested in the title. The best answer that K6ves can provide is a modification of the proposition made by Camus in Le My the de Sisyphe: Sisyphus may have been condemned to a life of eternal labor, but, in accepting the utter absurdity of life, resignation dawns, and one must therefore imagine him happy. For Koves, writing can only be described in these absurdist terms, though he also predicts that, at some point in the future, his writing will wither, and he will have nothing left to do. (The Sisyphean boulder becomes weatherworn and turns into a mere stone.) The "old boy" in the first third of Fiasco also anticipates this conclusion, but, paradoxically, it then seems to act as the very spur that inspires the novel "proper", ie, the story of Koves.

Kertesz probably realized that the "rough hand-and-ready" reviewer who is only interested in spotting literary influences will not progress beyond this point. They will merely note that the "real" novel within the novel, containing the life of Koves, which begins only a third of the way through the book, is a scarcely disguised portrait of life as a writer in Communist Hungary, and conclude that the lengthy prelude, the ramblings of the "old boy", confined to his dungeon-like apartment, is either an exercise in formal invention or authorial apology or both. It is true that a fear of apocalyptic ends and paranoid bureaucracy runs through Hungarian literature, from Ferenc Karinthy to Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and it is this fear, expressed as social, political and even physical apathy, that informs the core of the novel "proper". Here, Koves lands in a state that looks identical to Hungary under Soviet rule, and works in a steel factory, as a journalist and as a prison-guard before deciding to "become a writer".

The central preoccupation of the work, however, is not so much the act of writing as how to write about the Holocaust and what writing should be like after it. Fateless was published in 1975, by which time several harrowing accounts, both scholarly and autobiographical, had been published throughout Europe, including some by Hungarian Jews. The publishers whom Koves approaches tell him that a lot has already been published on this "ghastly" subject, and that another book, of dubious morality, with questionable artistic expression, is unnecessary so late in the day. It is an open secret that Hungarian involvement in the Holocaust is something that the country, even its Jews, have never properly examined or emotionally expressed, and it is this that strikes Kertesz as an act of profound betrayal. Yet he musters the courage to ask, through the "old boy", the necessary but repugnant question: in the face of endless narratives, is there a danger that the horrors of the Shoah could become diluted? Could the average reader become bored? If so, how can the artist guard against this withering of emotion? One way suggested implicitly in the book, through its very structure, is formal diversity, a fragmentation of the narrative. This may be the reason why, even as the essence of the book is a reflexive look at the writerly self, occasioning an obsessive, highly punctuated, struggle-filled and parenthetical structure, Kertesz still resorts to a narrative involution to keep the reader "interested". Which is to say, I suspect that the story of Koves - a straightforward third-person narrative full of metaphors for living under authoritarian rule, of constantly moving and shifting in the face of evolving rules and abstract regulations - is in itself of secondary interest, a story within a story to keep the critics and the average reader reading. Thus is born the second fiasco, since the narrative is successful only insofar as it embodies the authorial struggle, the struggle  for the most apposite form of artistic expression, but fails because the story of Koves, while interesting on its own, is unoriginal in both content and structure. A curious parallel can be seen in the works of W. G. Sebald, that other chronicler of loss and memory, in whose books the Holocaust casts all omnipresent shadow. Sebald too resorted to formal invention, though he moved in the other direction, integrating multiple narratives within a single voice.

The finest moment in Fiasco - which has the emotional impact of the scene from The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan hands back the keys to Heaven - occurs when a minor character, Berg, reads out the preface to a novel yet to be written. The central questions of this preface, essentially, are, these: can any society claim to have a moral , compass with which to judge an executioner, who oversaw 30,000 deaths, when that society is itself complicit in the genesis of genocide and could be held as responsible for it as the perpetrators themselves? Equally, why should the executioner's words be any less credible, and his message any less morally relevant, than that of the victim?

When Berg says to Koves that he is unable to begin the novel itself, as he felt unable to explain what could engender the transition from national duty to moral monstrosity, Koves replies by recounting an incident from the time when he was a prison guard under the dictatorship. A single incident, such as an otherwise pacifist guard being induced to strike a prisoner because of the latter's refusal to eat, is enough to trigger the transition, Koves suggests. Berg's preface is a devastating call for a society to examine its conscience, in Hungary or anywhere. Even if Koves could explain how someone could be induced to commit murder, Berg's question remains unanswered, even unanswerable. This is the ultimate fiasco that haunts every artist who is forced to create in a world capable of tolerating the Holocaust, and that of supporting many a genocidal impulse since.