Péter Nádas

Imre Kertész's Work and His Subject

 

 

Imre Kertész's literary work, for the greater part, has always been obscured by his subject, and it will take a goodly lapse of time yet for that not to obscure it. The monstrous attempt at the total disfranchisement, dispossession and destruction of European Jewry is not the sort of story or subject that can be dealt with on a Tuesday and set aside on the Wednesday. The statute of limitations does not apply. It cannot be refashioned in hindsight, in line with the wishes of family histories, so as to be forgotten, along with other historical crimes regarded as pardonable. The collective attempt at the total disfranchisement, organised dispossession and systematic destruction of European Jewry was a consequence of the conscious intellectual efforts and coordinated mental conditioning of several European generations. Not even remotely can it be considered an operational hitch of either European or Hungarian history. There is no absolution for it, ecclesiastic or secular, nor will there be. And even if someone does not bear personal responsibility in this connection, that is not to say that he does not bear an enduring historical responsibility.
Over the past fifty-eight years, the reality of Auschwitz has become a universal touchstone for an ethical approach, for political thinking, and for legislation. It cannot be avoided even by nationalists and fascists, those who would have the greatest interest in doing so. They are obliged to dissociate themselves from the very thing they would wish to do all over again. Ethnic cleansing, mass murder and genocide no longer figure amongst legitimate national fantasies. The historical experience of Auschwitz acts as a high threshold against which every one of us, every day of the week, can individually measure off the degree and efficacy of his own personal ignorance, or the trustworthiness of his own good faith. Anyone not contemplating Auschwitz cannot contemplate God. No one can
contemplate the human dragon's brood and leave out Auschwitz. Neither state institutions nor churches, neither families nor private individuals may step over this high threshold of the collective conscious. Neither those born yesterday, nor those born today.
They may, at best, not intentionally step over into the adjoining room. Even then, however, they must reckon with the consequences of their isolation.
Without Auschwitz the human image limned by European culture cannot be drawn. We see it in the Mona Lisa's coolly ethereal smile; its corpses stick out from beneath the Isenheim Altar. God is not dead. But masks, make-up, painted images, finery and shrouds are no longer of assistance to man. The several millennia-old divine image of self-veneration and self-pity really and truly vanished definitively in the corpse-burning pits of Majdanek and Sobibor, the ovens of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, and in the goods yards of Szeged, Nyíregyháza, Debrecen, Miskolc, Pécs, Zalaegerszeg and Mohács. Christianity does not have some other, more ideal reality, a history that is separable from Auschwitz. There can no longer be a Christian theology without Auschwitz.
Oddly, Imre Kertész's literary work is obscured not only by his subject, but that enormous subject also obscures what might be called his more intimate subjects.
His subjects are internested like some ghastly Chinese puzzle.
He recognised Auschwitz as the most profound, essential reality of European culture by looking back from the continuity of dictatorships to the one and only, beautiful Auschwitz of his own childhood. It is the great structural insight of his literary work that Auschwitz cannot be seen when viewed from Auschwitz, but from the standpoint of the continuity of dictatorships it can be looked back on as if it were a treasured memory. In a dictatorship every content of consciousness is distorted from the start. It is a painful insight to see continuity where others wish, at best, to see only a short-circuit in civilisation, the inexplicable workings of evil, or a product of chance. This conception of historical reality, of the human endowment and condition, permits no sentimental illusions either in looking back or in looking ahead to the future. Neither has it any reference with the aid of which one might place a comforting equals sign between Red and Brown dictatorships and, ŕ la Ernst Nolte, excuse the criminal acts of one with the criminal acts of the other. What has happened today can also happen tomorrow. In the pause for thought whilst the execution squad reloads, Kertész identifies the connection, designates the points of intersection of dictatorships. He makes it clear how the Chinese puzzles of European history and human nature nest within one another.
This language, this culture, this state of order - none of this is accidental or arbitrary.
Just one - albeit indisputably a substantial - part of Imre Kertész's literary work that is obscured by his subjects is comprised of philosophical analysis. That might, in principle, have been carried out in any of the world's languages.
It is intriguing nevertheless that he has chosen to carry it out in the material of a language whose concepts have barely been scratched hitherto by any spadework of philosophical scrutiny. In a language which, at best, recognises the philosophical interpretations of other languages, but has no self-sufficient philosophy of its own. In his literary language Kertész has turned this drawback, a near-general absence of analysed and fixed conceptual substance, into an advantage. He has fashioned the surfaces of a dispassionate way of viewing things from the material of the Hungarian language. In hindsight, it can now be seen that the malleable sentence structure of Hungarian gives the language the ability to adopt a dispassionate view. In the pause of a feeling charged by two commonplaces, with a barely flinching gaze, Kertész's sentences take note of painful reality. He has thereby created a new quality for the Hungarian language's sense of reality.

 

Péter Nádas's
novels have been translated into several languages, including English.