Nobel Laureate That Wrote About the Art of Self Discovery

Imre Kertész – Nobel Lecture

Imre Kertész delivering his Nobel Lecture

Imre Kertész delivering his Nobel Lecture.

Heureka!

I must begin with a confession, a foreign confession perhaps, but a candid i. 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 experience I am closer to this cool and discrete observer than to the writer whose work, of a sudden, is read around the world. I can but 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 accept trouble understanding the gap that I sense betwixt the high honor and my life and work. Possibly I lived besides long under dictatorships, in a hostile, relentlessly alien intellectual surround, to accept adult a singled-out literary consciousness; fifty-fifty to contemplate such a thing would take been useless. Besides, all I heard from all sides was that what I gave and 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 ever considered writing a highly personal, private affair.

Not that such a matter necessarily precludes seriousness – even if this seriousness did seem somewhat ludicrous in a globe where only lies were taken seriously. Here the notion that the world is an objective reality existing independently of united states of america was an axiomatic philosophical truth. Whereas I, on a lovely bound day in 1955, all of a sudden 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 conflicting forces, and circumscribed, marked upward, branded – and which I had to take dorsum 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 non objective, was undeniably a reality. I am speaking of Communist Republic of hungary, of "thriving and flourishing" Socialism. If the world is an objective reality that exists independently of us, then humans themselves, fifty-fifty in their ain eyes, are nothing more than objects, and their life stories simply a serial of disconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder at, simply which they themselves have nothing to practise with. It would make no sense to adapt the fragments in a coherent whole, because some of information technology may be far besides objective for the subjective Self to exist held responsible for it.

A year subsequently, in 1956, the Hungarian Revolution broke out. For a single moment the country turned subjective. Soviet tanks, yet, restored objectivity earlier long.

I practice not hateful to be facetious. Consider what happened to language in the twentieth century, what became of words. I daresay that the outset and most shocking discovery fabricated by writers in our time was that linguistic communication, in the form information technology came down to usa, a legacy of some primordial civilisation, had simply become unsuitable to convey concepts and processes that had once been unambiguous and real. Retrieve of Kafka, think of Orwell, in whose hands the old language just disintegrated. Information technology was as if they were turning it round and round in an open fire, simply to brandish its ashes after, in which new and previously unknown patterns emerged.

Simply I should like to render to what for me is strictly individual – writing. There are a few questions, which someone in my situation will not even enquire. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, devoted an entire petty book to the question: For whom do we write? It is an interesting question, just it tin as well be unsafe, and I thank my lucky stars that I never had to deal with information technology. Allow us come across what the danger consists of. If a writer were to pick a social grade or grouping that he would like, not only to delight only also influence, he would kickoff take to examine his manner to run into whether it is a suitable means past which to exert influence. He will soon be assailed past doubts, and spend his time watching himself. How can he know for sure what his readers want, what they actually like? He cannot very well ask each and every i. And fifty-fifty if he did, it wouldn't do whatsoever adept. He would have to rely on his image of his would-be readers, the expectations he ascribed to them, and imagine what would take the consequence on him that he would like to attain. For whom does a author write, so? The respond 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 non 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 nada more. Information technology was of import to make this articulate during the ridiculous and sad period when literature was state-controlled and "engagé".

It would be more than difficult to respond another, perfectly legitimate though nonetheless rather more dubious question: Why do we write? Here, as well, I was lucky, for it never occurred to me that when information technology came to this question, ane had a choice. I described a relevant incident in my novel Failure. I stood in the empty corridor of an office edifice, and all that happened was that from the direction of some other, intersecting corridor I heard echoing footsteps. A strange excitement took concord 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 downwardly 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 unlike context though relevantly for this moment too, a Dionysian experience. It was most every bit though some concrete force were pushing me, pulling me toward the unseen marching columns. I felt I had to stand back and press against the wall, to continue me from yielding to this magnetic, seductive strength.

I have related this intense moment equally I (had) experienced it. The source from which information technology sprang, like a vision, seemed somewhere outside of me, non in me. Every artist is familiar with such moments. At ane time they were called sudden inspirations. Still, I wouldn't classify the experience as an creative revelation, but rather equally an existential self-discovery. What I gained from information technology 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 than difficult life, and the things I have already mentioned – the need to step out of the mesmerizing crowd, out of History, which renders yous faceless and fateless. To my horror, I realized that x years after I had returned from the Nazi concentration camps, and halfway withal under the awful spell of Stalinist terror, all that remained of the whole feel were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes. Like it didn't even happen to me, as people are wont to say.

Information technology is clear that such visionary moments have a long prehistory. Sigmund Freud would trace them dorsum to a repressed traumatic experience. And he may well be right. I, too, am inclined toward the rational arroyo; mysticism and unreasoning rapture of all kinds are conflicting to me. So when I speak of a vision, I must hateful something real that assumes a supernatural guise – the sudden, about violent eruption of a slowly ripening thought inside me. Something conveyed in the ancient cry, "Eureka!" – "I've got information technology!" 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 flavour of bygone years. For reasons having to do with the linguistic communication I spoke, I decided, subsequently the suppression of the 1956 revolt, to remain in Hungary. Thus I was able to notice, not as a child this time only every bit an developed, how a dictatorship functions. I saw how an unabridged nation could exist made to deny its ethics, and watched the early, cautious moves toward adaptation. I understood that hope is an instrument of evil, and the Kantian chiselled imperative – ideals 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 xix-sixties, the dictatorship in Hungary had reached a country of consolidation that could almost be called a societal consensus. The West subsequently dubbed it, with good-humored abstinence, "casserole Communism". It seemed that afterwards the initial strange disapproval, Hungary's own version quickly turned into the Due west's favorite brand of Communism. In the miry depths of this consensus, ane either gave upward 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 newspaper and pencil. The nausea and depression to which I awoke each forenoon led me at once into the world I intended to depict. I had to find that I had placed a man groaning under the logic of i blazon of totalitarianism in some other totalitarian arrangement, and this turned the language of my novel into a highly allusive medium. If I expect back now and size upward honestly the situation I was in at the time, I have to conclude that in the West, in a free order, I probably would not have been able to write the novel known by readers today equally Fateless, the novel singled out by the Swedish Academy for the highest accolade.

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 costless marketplace of books and ideas, I, too, might have wanted to produce a showier fiction. For example, I might accept tried to break upwards time in my novel, and narrate just the most powerful scenes. But the hero of my novel does non live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his fourth dimension 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.

Simply the method led to remarkable insights. Linearity demanded that each state of affairs that arose exist completely filled out. It did not allow me, say, to skip cavalierly over twenty minutes of time, if only considering those twenty minutes were there before me, similar a gaping, terrifying black hole, like a mass grave. I am speaking of the xx minutes spent on the inflow platform of the Birkenau extermination army camp – the time information technology took people clambering down from the railroad train to reach the officer doing the selecting. I more or less remembered the xx 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 also chop-chop 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 plant themselves in front of an officer. He cast a fleeting glance at them, pointed to something with his outstretched arm, and before they knew information technology 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, amid them the story entitled "This Manner for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen". Afterwards, I came upon a series of photographs of human cargo arriving at the Birkenau railroad platform – photographs taken by an SS soldier and plant by American soldiers in a former SS barracks in the already liberated military camp at Dachau. I looked at these photographs in utter amazement. I saw lovely, grinning women and brilliant-eyed immature 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 manner for days, weeks, months and years on cease, I gained an insight into the machinery of horror; I learned how information technology became possible to turn human nature against one's ain life.

Then I proceeded, footstep by step, on the linear path of discovery; this was my heuristic method, if you will. I realized shortly enough that I was not the to the lowest degree chip interested in whom I was writing for and why. One question interested me: What have I still got to practise 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 proper name of this demarcation line, equally of many other things, is Auschwitz. When nosotros write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a sure sense at least, suspended literature. One tin only write a black novel about Auschwitz, or – you should excuse the expression – a cheap series, which begins in Auschwitz and is however not over. By which I mean that naught has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or abnegate 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 author today is not a writer of the Holocaust? One does not have to choose the Holocaust as one'south subject to observe the cleaved voice that has dominated modern European fine 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. Information technology is equally if, after a nighttime of terrible dreams, one looked around the world, defeated, helpless. I have never tried to run across the circuitous of problems referred to as the Holocaust merely equally the insolvable disharmonize between Germans and Jews. I never believed that it was the latest affiliate in the history of Jewish suffering, which followed logically from their before trials and tribulations. I never saw information technology as a one-time aberration, a large-scale pogrom, a precondition for the creation of Israel. What I discovered in Auschwitz is the man condition, the terminate point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived subsequently his 2-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.

Now the only thing to reverberate on is where we get from here. The problem of Auschwitz is non whether to depict a line under it, as information technology were; whether to preserve its retention or slip it into the advisable pigeonhole of history; whether to cock a monument to the murdered millions, and if and then, what kind. The real problem with Auschwitz is that it happened, and this cannot exist altered – non with the all-time, or worst, will in the earth. This gravest of situations was characterized well-nigh accurately by the Hungarian Catholic poet János Pilinszky when he called it a "scandal". What he meant by it, conspicuously, 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. Nosotros must create our values ourselves, mean solar day by day, with that persistent though invisible ethical piece of work that will give them life, and maybe plow them into the foundation of a new European civilisation. I consider the prize with which the Swedish University has seen fit to accolade 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 backbone, firm resolve fifty-fifty – for those who fabricated it wished me to come here, though they could have easily guessed what they would hear from me. What was revealed in the Concluding Solution, in l'univers concentrationnaire, cannot be misunderstood, and the simply 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 lesser of all great realizations, even if they are born of unsurpassed tragedies, at that place 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 being, and the responsibility we all bear for it.

It makes me peculiarly 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 nonetheless 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'due south Communist dominion, when Budapest's Jewish old age home was relocated to the northern edge region of the country. I recollect this brief family history encapsulates and symbolizes this country's modern-twenty-four hours travails. What it teaches me, though, is that there is non only bitterness in grief, merely also boggling moral potential. Being a Jew to me is once once again, offset and foremost, a moral claiming. If the Holocaust has past at present created a civilisation, as information technology 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 terminate of my speech, I must confess I all the same have not found the reassuring balance between my life, my works and the Nobel Prize. For at present I feel profound gratitude – gratitude for the honey that saved me and sustains me still. Just let usa consider that in this difficult-to-follow life journeying, in this "career" of mine, if I could so put information technology, at that place 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 cocky-deception, and thus running ashore, going under, severing the deep and tortuous ties with the millions who perished and who never knew mercy. Information technology is non and then easy to be an exception. Merely if we were destined to be exceptions, nosotros must make our peace with the absurd club of hazard, which reigns over our lives with the whim of a death squad, exposing usa to inhuman powers, monstrous tyrannies.

And all the same something very special happened while I was preparing this lecture, which in a way reassured me. I 24-hour interval I received a large brown envelope in the postal service. It was sent to me past Md Volkhard Knigge, the director of the Buchenwald Memorial Center. He enclosed a minor envelope with his congratulatory note, and described what was in the envelope, and so, in case I didn't take the strength to look, I wouldn't have to. The envelope contained a copy of the original daily report on the campsite's prisoners for February 18, 1945. In the "Abgänge", that is, the "Decrement" cavalcade, I learned about the expiry of Prisoner #64,921 – Imre Kertész, mill worker, built-in in 1927. The two false data: the year of my nativity 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 equally a child, and had said worker rather than student to appear more than useful to them.

In short, I died once, and then I could live. Peradventure 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 withal recollect them. Only, since nosotros are talking most literature, after all, the kind of literature that, in the view of your Academy, is also a testimony, my piece of work may nonetheless serve a useful purpose in the hereafter, and – this is my centre'southward want – may even speak to the future. Whenever I recollect of the traumatic impact of Auschwitz, I end up habitation on the vitality and inventiveness of those living today. Thus, in thinking about Auschwitz, I reverberate, paradoxically, non on the by but the time to come.

Translated by Ivan Sanders.