Why Won't He Tell
a Proper Story?

Imre Kertész in Conversation with Zsigmond Sándor Papp

 

[...]

Do you find it easier or harder to write now?

I've had two books published since the Nobel, but in neither of them will you find anything that I wouldn't have written before. I don't represent anybody, don't speak on anyone's behalf. If I protest, then it's in my own name. I've always considered writing to be a private affair.

Still, you work with a different sense of responsibility.

There's no doubt about that! But generally it's best not to have to reckon with such a sense of responsibility. If I am asked for an opinion on a key political issue or a critical situation, that does carry a responsibility, but responsibility as a human being, not as a writer. There are circumstances when one's responsibility as a human being can assume a political dimension, but literature should not assume a political guise. It should be untrammelled and pure. I have never written for a target audience, and I have never adopted ideas that lay down how I am supposed to regard another person.

What comes harder for a writer: failure or success?

There are two kinds of failure. One is true failure, which really is disagreeable, when you cannot accomplish something you have taken on, or to put it another way: you acknowledge failure in what you stand for. The other is when you hit upon a truth, proclaim it and everybody denies it. That too is failure, yet you can feel sure that you have said something, that you have caused a slight tremor around yourself.

And success?

I have no idea what success is. If one of my books sells so-and-so-many thousand copies that is truly success, but it cannot be grasped. Someone coming over, like after a reading the other day, and saying that your books have changed their life-maybe that's success. The sort of success in which someone is praised to the skies repels me. I only ever had a few readers, but at least they read my books with the sense that I wrote them. In other words, they find their way from one existence to another; they articulate matters of vital importance and that is how readers experience them.

Writers no longer seem to create oeuvres on the scale of a Balzac or a Mór Jókai.

Writing was not so problematic in those days; one didn't have to put one's existence on the line, stories would just dash off by the pen. The same miraculous sense of delight in abundance simply bubbled over from Mozart too. A contemporary composer is doing well if he reaches his second symphony. Something happened to the world which seems to make art feel not natural, as if the natural forces and primeval springs have become clogged up. Maybe the stock of language has dried up.

With what consequences?

We have had to wake up to the fact that mankind is capable of things that were never imagined possible, and that produced what I would call atonal prose. Atonal music appeared around the time of the First World War, when composers felt that the language they had used earlier had become exhausted, hollowed. I call the new prose atonal because it has to reckon with the absence of a basic ethical and moral consensus-the equivalent of the tonic in tonal music. Words now mean something different in each and every mouth. If prose registers this, as it has to, then it loses its naturalness-the certainty that when I tell a tale the audience listens open-mouthed. If we do not express the essence of this loss, or turning-point if you prefer, then we are not writers. We have missed out on life, on our own times.

So what will become of this disenchanted art?

Struggle has its own charm-at least for a while. Trouble ensues if literature were to lose its guts, the courage to present what is new in new forms. Camus and Sartre had that courage after the Second World War; the problems they raised were of burning interest. But there were problems that could never have been formulated had there been no war. Two totalitarian regimes, Nazism and communism, ran their courses before my own eyes. If they had left no trace in my writings, boring or otherwise, I am not a writer. What would be the point of my wearing out ballpoint pens? It is also a problem of technique, by the way.

In what sense?

The question is in what way I am able to feed this into sentences. Naturally, this challenge complicates contemporary literature. People like to kid themselves that the world around them is rational, so if someone spotlights its irrationality, not everyone takes kindly to that. What's he messing around with? Why won't he tell a proper story?

A writer, in other words, stands on moral grounds?

He doesn't moralise, but his way of looking at things cuts across the instinct by which we set values on things. He pitches his readers into a world in which a stand has to be made. Just picture, if you will, what I was confronted with when writing Fatelessness. If I had painted a squalid world that disgusted people and made them loath to hear anything about it, then I would not have been doing my job well. It is up to me to generate the pleasure that will draw readers into the book. In spite of the fact that the topic is horrendous and the subject is not 'literary' at all. The whole thing is disgusting, but it had to be turned into an exciting read. That's what I mean by a problem of technique.

Are there any ideas or topics that you still want to deal with?

That's why I am still writing.

Are there many of them?

One book's worth for sure.

[...]

 

Sándor Zsigmond Papp
writes for the arts pages of the daily Népszabadság.
He has published four volumes of short stories and essays. The above interview was conducted in December 2007 in Budapest.