Tim Wilkinson

...

Given that just three of the novels, a couple of the shorter fiction pieces and a few extracts from the two journal-type works are accessible in English translation, which certainly impedes appraisal of Kertész's approach,¹ readers reliant on that language are hardly in a position to appreciate that there are several strands that run through all the writing. Impressive continuities are traceable over the last thirty years or more. In particular that Kertész's theme or 'message' is of much wider relevance than the ghetto of "Holocaust" literature to which, in view of the non-accessibility of important parts of the whole oeuvre, it has been all too easy to assign him. Apart from anything else, I would like to set Kertész in the mainstream of literature-and not just Hungarian literature, but (obviously, in translation) European, American, and indeed universal literature-where he truly belongs and which, moreover, shows why he was a well-merited recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.

On the face of it, the two novellas from 1977 have nothing to do with that subject or, for that matter, with each other. The Pathseeker recounts the seemingly opaque activities of a protagonist who is the implicit narrator but is known impersonally throughout, in the distinctly offhand third person, as the "commissioner" while he roots around for unspecified "clues", for an unspecified purpose, in an unidentified locality in a country that is not directly identified but may be inferred to be Germany. Closer examination, however, will show that this has organic links to important elements and loci of the 1975 novel. Even more strikingly, Detective Story, set in an anonymous Latin American banana republic, presents itself as the first-person-singular memoir of a secret police operative named Antonio R. Martens, compiled in prison shortly before what he accepts will be his inevitable execution. Nevertheless, links do exist.
It is very tempting to follow the Beckett lead, since there is no doubt that Kertész finds the Beckettian world-picture and mordant sense of humour very congenial. Kertész has elsewhere certainly acknowledged that influence, as well as those of a very eclectic mix of authors, including Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Thomas Bernhard, but possibly no writer has been so consistently drawn on for inspiration down the decades as the 1957 Nobel Laureate, Albert Camus.
That influence is intermittently evident in Kertész's first published novel, Fatelessness, being discernible from the opening lines to the point at the very end, where Gyuri Köves observes:

Over ahead, in the direction that I would need to take, where the street appeared to lengthen, expand, and fade away into infinity, the fleecy clouds over the indigo hills were already turning purple and the sky, a shade of claret... It was that peculiar hour, recognized even now, even here-my favourite hour in the [concentration] camp, and I was seized by a sharp, painful, futile longing for it: nostalgia, homesickness... For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness.

Camus's Meursault, on the other hand, noted:

For a few brief moments, as I left the Law Courts on my way to the van, I recognized the familiar smells and colours of a summer evening... I rediscovered one by one, as if arising from the depths of my fatigue, all the familiar sounds of a town that I loved and of a certain time of day when I sometimes used to feel happy.²

It is a direct quote from Camus, recorded in Galley-Boat Log during summer 1975 soon after Fatelessness was published, that offers perhaps the most lapidary perspective on Kertész's viewpoint: "Nothing for which totalitarianism has, in its opinion, found a cure is so bad as to be worse than totalitarianism itself," though this is far from an uncritical stance, as another quotation, entered shortly after his forty-sixth birthday towards the end of that year, shows:

Camus: "The strongest passion of the twentieth century: slavery." (Despite which he fails to understand Kafka and may even be incapable of understanding him; for Mediterranean countries even slavery is something else than what it is in East Europe.)

Not long after that (autumn 1975) is a telling diary entry which suggests that the idea for Detective Story must have been germinating by then:

Camus traces the justification for murder back to de Sade, Romanticism, Ivan Karamazov, etc. Whilst a half-witted police officer applies an electric current to your tongue, the colonels, dictators, General Secretaries or Grand Muftis who wield unlimited power have never in their lives so much as heard about a Karamazov, or God, or Kant, or a moral crisis; they merely do their job. Is there not some mistake in the theoretical foundation here? "If there is no God, then everything is permitted"-this is the sort of pathetic comment to which one can only respond with a shrug of the shoulders in a world where nothing is permitted and everything is possible... Maybe Camus believes that what is important are the ornaments and principles with which man prinks his mind in order to corral and enslave it, though all that is important here are the corralling and the enslavement: they are the real facts, the rest is nothing, just words, words, words-a game devised by executioners to enable them to carry on their work undisturbed in the meantime...

Another aspect that Kertész evidently brooded over for many years is raised, seemingly just in passing, in the pages of Galley-Boat Log as early as 1966:

A writer cannot create a more irrational world than God... The personality trap, psychology, passion. How much do we really have to do with our passions; exactly how big is our part in them?-Swann's story. Meursault's revolver shot.
Looked at more closely: show the individual psychological motives of deeds in the torture chambers of the totalitarian state. Futile, by the way, because here only the role is significant, the fact that people are capable of being executioner or victim, and how the cogwheels function in the machinery of death, taking no account at all of the individual case. Here individuality, if it finds expression in anyone at all, can at most only lament its past. In this respect, therefore, there is no multifaceted humanity, no complicated and many-layered characters, no extraordinary personalities, because the essence of totality is precisely uniformity.

Thus, arguably the linchpin in Kertész's view of the world is his refusal, despite his concentration-camp experience, to harbour a victim's grudge; his insistence that each of us individually holds responsibility for every step we take, even when those steps are taken under constraint. As Gyuri asserts on his return from camp:

"In any case," I added, "I didn't notice any atrocities," at which, I could see, they were greatly astounded. What were they supposed to understand by that, they wished to know, by 'I didn't notice'? To that, however, I asked them in turn what they had done during those 'hard times'? "Errm,... we lived," one of them deliberated. "We tried to survive," the other added. Precisely! They too had taken one step at a time, I noted. What did I mean by taking a 'step,' they floundered, so I related to them how it had gone in Auschwitz, by way of example... where I too was standing, you would [therefore] have to allow ten to twenty minutes before you reach the point where it is decided whether it will be gas immediately or a reprieve for the time being. Now, all the time the queue is constantly moving, progressing, and everyone is taking steps, bigger or smaller ones, depending on what the speed of the operation demands... "So what is it about, then?" they asked, almost losing patience, to which I replied, with growing anger on my part as well, I sensed: "It's about the steps." Everyone took steps as long as he was able to take a step; I too took my own steps, and not just in the queue at Birkenau, but even before that, here, at home. I took steps with my father, and I took steps with my mother, I took steps with Annamarie, and I took steps-perhaps the most difficult ones of all-with the older sister.

Meursault, Camus's protagonist in The Stranger (or as it is still best known under the somewhat perversely translated title of The Outsider in the UK, or Közöny ["Indifference"] in Hungary³), offers this observation: "What interests me at the moment is trying to escape from the mechanism, trying to find if there's any way out of the inevitable..." For Kertész's Martens the steps are "the logic" that he seeks from the beginning of the memoir he compiles in his prison cell:

And I finally grasped his [Diaz's] logic, or at least I believe I grasped it. I grasped that we had now cast away everything that bound us to the laws of man; I grasped that we could no longer place our trust in anyone except ourselves. Oh, and in destiny, in that insatiable, greedy and eternally hungry mechanism. Were we still spinning it, or was it spinning us? Now it all amounts to the same thing. You think you are being very clever in riding events out, as I say, and then you find that all you want to know is where the hell they are galloping off to with you. (Detective Story, p. 105)

Those steps are not so apparent in The Pathseeker, but the very concept of searching for clues implies there were "steps" that left clues in the first place. Nevertheless, another way of seeing the two 1977 novellas is as exemplifying an idea that had already drifted up unprompted in that 1966 entry but resurfaces a decade later, in a more focused fashion, in The Failure.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Detective Story is that it is not set in Europe, let alone Hungary, but in some anonymous Latin American banana republic. That might fleetingly tempt one to recall Mexico City, the bar in which judge-penitent Jean-Baptiste Clamence practices in The Fall, but in this case the Antonio R. Martens who narrates Detective Story is much closer to the Meursault of The Stranger. One important point to note is that although by the late Seventies, when Detective Story was published, Hungary, under Communist First Secretary János Kádár, had a comparatively relaxed attitude to criticism by writers (for instance, György Konrád had his implicitly hard-hitting first novel, The Case Worker, a thinly disguised account of his own experiences as a social worker published in 1969, while Péter Esterházy had by then given up his day job as a mathematician, had his first collection of short stories published, and was within an ace of delivering his first masterpiece, Production-Line Novel, a devastatingly funny critique of the socialist work ethic.) Any suggestion that the Hungarian secret police employed questionable methods, however, was quite beyond the pale until the end of the regime.
In retrospect, however, Detective Story can be seen as a sort of dry-run, however truncated, for the story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure of The Failure. Thus, Martens's narrative, which includes extracts from the diary of Enrique Salinas, the subject of the investigations that Martens leads as a new recruit to the Corps, is framed by a brief introduction from his unnamed defence lawyer which attests to the bona fides of Martens's memoir. The Failure, by contrast, opens as the story of an "Old Boy" (plausibly an alter ego of Kertész) who is living with his wife in a cramped bedsitter in Budapest, probably in the mid to late Seventies:

The Old Boy was standing before the filing cabinet. He was thinking. It was morning. (Relatively -getting on for ten.) Around this time the Old Boy was always in the habit of having a think. He had plenty of troubles and woes, so he had plenty to think about...

More specifically, the "Old Boy" is casting around his "bottom drawer" for inspiration for a follow-up to his last book (it is explicitly mentioned that he has already published a book, which is not specified but may be assumed to be Fatelessness). In the meantime, he (the "Old Boy", that is) has been making a living-supported by his wife's work as a waitress-out of translating Germanlanguage pieces, but while he leafs through his "bottom drawer" he comes across the kernel of a story called "The Failure", which takes up the rest of the book. This story-within-the-story is about György Köves, by now an adult (in fact a journalist at the start of the story), which plays out in a setting that is nominally an aircraftjourney away from Hungary, yet is uncannily reminiscent of Budapest under the grip of rampant Stalinism, in the early Fifties. A major element of the plot concerns the exotic denizens (they include characters known only by their nicknames: "The Uncrowned", "Pumpadour", "The Transcendental Concubine") of a restaurantcum- bar known as The South Seas, who are served by a waitress called Alice, who seems to be linked, possibly even married to a writer by the name of Berg. The latter vanishes one day but later, on being tracked down by Köves (with Alice's help), reads to him the opening pages of a singularly inflated piece of writing that he entitles "I, the Executioner...," which contains the following:

My book is the fruit of that wonderment, of the childish amazement, won back during the tranquil months of my arrest and detention, over what has been my life and what now, during the nebulously melancholy time of my captivity, affects me with such a peculiar magic...You have every right to... regard as sadly typical the brazen uninhibitedness with which I dare to construct a link with the aforementioned blessed geniuses, I, a jailbird, as it has become clear from what I have said; even if you know who I actually am, although I have already alluded to that in the book's title. And even if on top of all that you were to recognize my name, the rightly infamous name that I shall disclose to the Reader in one of the ensuing paragraphs!... I, who will stand before the court accused of causing the deaths of 30,000 people, am able to transcend my fate, and to my pleasant surprise-obviously to the world's surprise as well-I still feel that much responsible interest towards life as not to be ashamed of spending my last days and hours with moralizing-rather appropriately and not unskilfully, you have to admit.

The story then proceeds:

"At least give me an idea what happens over the course of the plot," Köves grumbled.
"Who is that fellow, anyway? Who did he take as his model?"
"Who could I take it from if it were foreign to me?" Berg responded to the question with a question.
"Do you mean to say," Köves was incredulous, "you are that fellow?"
"Let's just say that is one of the possibilities," Berg replied. "One possible path to grace."
"And what other paths might be possible?" Köves wanted to know.
"That of the victim," came the answer. [...]
"And writing?" Köves piped up again. "Isn't writing grace?"
"No," Berg's high voice snapped back as a curt yelp.
"Well what, then?"
"Postponement. Pretext. Pulling punches," Berg itemized. "The putting-off-impossible of course-of the election of grace."
"In other words," Köves asked, "you are either executioner or victim?"
"Both," Berg answered in a slightly impatient tone, like someone who is required to provide information on matters that have long been known. His glance skimmed over the table until it stopped on a slip of paper, which he now lifted up from among his papers. 'It might perhaps be pleasant,' he read off it, 'to be alternately victim and executioner.' Berg put the slip down and again glanced at Köves. "That's what the writing says, and I am its realizer," he said.
"What writing is that?" Köves inquired. "Did you write it?"
"No," Berg replied. "When it was written the time had not yet come. The time," his clear tone chimed out as if he were not speaking but singing, "the time is here now."

The quotation, in this instance, is not Camus but comes from Charles Baudelaire's diary notes My Heart Laid Bare (the quote forms almost the last bit of a short entry for 1978 in Galley-Boat Log). It is much more productive to think about the idea of providing witness, general though it may be, rather than in terms of executioners.

The Salinas affair soon intruded itself. Too early, damnably early... nothing that could be done about that; I have not been able to escape it since. I have to speak out, therefore, in order to leave behind some testimony before I go... before I am sent on my way. (Detective Story, p. 10)

A quote from The Pathseeker suggests that it and Fatelessness-novella and novel-are linked in time and possibly other respects:

...this time it was not a matter of him having to expose the sight, but of him having to expose himself to the sight; not of collecting evidence but of becoming the proof, a contrite yet implacable witness to the victory that would pulse up as proof

A bit later on, in an encounter with a strange woman who wears a black veil:

The commissioner all at once found the words he wanted, as if he could see them written down: "So that I should bear witness to everything I have seen." Then he added, slightly plaintively, as if he were only thinking aloud, "I would not have credited that my work here would be made so much more difficult."

First published fully 15 years later, Sworn Statement might seem a world apart from Detective Story, or even The Failure come to that, but the very title betrays its intended function. Quite apart from that, though, it should be viewed in the context of serving the certainly rare, if not unprecedented function of providing the foundation for a wonderful "double act" by which the above-mentioned Péter Esterházy, in a short story entitled Life and Literature that is dedicated to Imre Kertész, pays tribute to his older (but at the time still virtually unknown) compatriot by recycling the same broad story elements, indeed quoting many of Sworn Statement's words, in an exquisitely funny persiflage. Both stories are about a train journey to Austria, one (Kertész's) interrupted, the other (Esterházy's) successful, though both are almost called off before they are embarked upon (toothache in Kertész's case, backache in Esterházy's):

My back, down by the hips, had been aching for days-not a lot, not intolerably, but persistently. That is hard to tolerate or, to put it better, what may be ascertained with certainty, and without self-pity, is that I am hard to tolerate... the aches portended nothing at all; they were too slight, too insignificant, for that. No blood had flowed, no bones had been broken, no muscles torn, and nothing on me that might swell had swollen; the most that could be made out from the malaise was a vague hint that it might involve a periostitis or an ironic allusion, heralding, as in the best English novels, the presentation of a case of gout, 'as if' I were that English novel, this one here... I won't go- my mind made up, I was telephoning the people who had invited me-unless... At the other end of the line they knew with whom they were dealing. The idea did not so much as enter their heads to ask if that was a yes or a no; in my opinion, this is a publisher whose authors are quite incapable of answering with a straight yes or no, though they unabashedly nod their heads up and down at the idea of giving a book-reading: all yea, yea, nay, nay. A publisher will build upon that unless. Tu es Petrus, and me upon this quagmire...

And again, since English readers have been vouched only a fraction of Esterházy's total oeuvre, including less than one quarter of the 1985 masterpiece Introduction to Literature (or Introduction to Belles-Lettres as I would have it), and so will be unaware that the opening pages of the very first section (Scooting in Prose) prominently features a quotation from Matt. v, 37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever be more than these cometh of evil." (Nothing to do with the Beatles, then, although one of the shorter sections in the Introduction, which is largely pieced together from short extracts from the newspapers of Hungary's hardline Stalinist era of the early 1950s against which the 1956 uprising broke out, bears the title [in Hungarian, of course] A Hard Day's Night).
To return to Sworn Statement, Esterházy gives a splendid summary of the plot:

The man, who was the same age as me, smoothed his hair with a tired gesture and quietly spat back a sentence to the effect that he wished to inform me about the relevant currency and foreign-exchange regulations, the upper limit to the amounts of money that may be exported, and the obligation to obtain an official permit for the exportation of sums exceeding this limit. I quickly closed my eyes in order to find my way back to the end of the world: "Dearest Mummy, help! Help me just one more time, dearest Mummy." For that sentence had immediately evoked in me, accursed literature, the bloody vision of Imre Kertész's Sworn Statement, which happened to have elevated (or rather pushed, shoved) a customs story to his interpretation of life. More currency than permitted, forced to alight at Hegyeshalom, etc. It was not the image of my mother that came to life before my closed eyes but, far more hopeless, that of Imre Kertész. I saw him: his long, hunched, heavy figure, an anti-Michael Kohlhaas who is not in search of his truth, for his truth has already found him. I saw his sentences, each in itself, those long, hunched, heavy sentences and the way they totter, inexorably, towards the last naked insight, and in the meantime my colleague goes his own way. You see, he understands his life; he has avidly clutched at the aggression shown towards him like a dagger-for what else could he do?-and directed its blade towards himself: but this time the strength and bitter pleasure with which his thoughts laid their hand on him, as it were, had almost shocked him with their unfeigned ferocity. All things, all things, / all things I know, / all is clear to me now! / I hear the rustle / of your ravens' wings...-yes, the cup was full, he was unable, it seems, to bear any more wounds.

Why the preoccupation with customs officers? The Hungarian word for a customs officer (vámos) sounds very like (indeed only has an extra consonant), and therefore served as a widely understood coded reference to, the acronym ávós by which security operatives (spooks) of the State Security Department were known (The Failure is set in a state run by the customs department, like the ÁVO in Hungary or KGB in the Soviet Union). Aside from the above quote from Götterdämmerung, the eclectic list of references ranges over the likes of Plato ("Now it is time we were going, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God": The Last Days of Socrates), Rilke ("One of them with a sort of night-stand drawer slung on a white strap round his neck": The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), and Kafka ("Judgement does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgement": The Trial)-and does anyone need telling where Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate or Arbeit macht frei come from? In addition, there are at least four or five references to Camus's The Stranger: "Why, why did you fire at a dead body?"; "In any case, you're always partly to blame" (or is that Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground?: "The main thing is that, however you look at it, it always turns out that you are chiefly to blame for everything..."); and "Am I to be decapitated in a public square in the name of the French people?".
How does Sworn Statement lead back to the Kertész works described earlier? For one thing, immediately after the author's figure has been seen off the train at the main Hungarian border crossing into Austria (Hegyeshalom) for carrying unauthorised foreign currency, comes a direct quotation from The Failure:

I am not allowed to brood further as my name is called: "so he jumped up in order to follow the customs man into his office." They are all sitting there, the men in grey. "One was smoking a cigarette, the second was leafing through some kind of documents, the third scrutinising him-they so fused together in his blurred gaze that Köves saw them as a single three-headed, six-armed machine"-my own prophetic words from my novel The Failure. My man, the chief customs officer, puts some papers in front of me: I should read and sign them. What's this? The statement, he says. I start to read it. At the very first sentence, which takes up nearly three lines, I find myself gasping for breath. At this moment a flash of lucidity seizes, engulfs and enthrals me. At this moment I finally realise exactly what has befallen me. I could almost cry out Eureka! All things, all things, / all things I know, / all is clear to me now! / I hear the rustle / of your ravens' wings...-yes, those three lines state, in essence, that on the 16th day of April 1991, etc., having notified me of the relevant currency and foreign-exchange regulations, the upper limit to the amounts of money that may be exported, and the obligation to obtain an official permit for the exportation of sums exceeding that limit, he, the customs man, had enquired, etc. Yet the man had notified me of nothing. As far as enquiring goes, he had enquired, though certainly not in a proper manner, fully in accordance with the regulations, but more in a form of a snap cross-examination. With that the matter had already been decided, a specific mechanism was set in motion. For at least fifty years, ever since my country entered into war against the civilized world and, above all, against itself, ever since then- except for a break of, let's say, three years-every law of the land has invariably been unlawful. What my ears picked out behind the customs official's deceitful question, with its automatic presumption of guilt...

Camus's Meursault has the feeling: "In a way they seemed to be conducting the case independently of me. Things were happening without my even intervening. My fate was being decided without anyone asking my opinion."

...

¹ Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature, edited by Louise O. Vasvári & Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, brings together assessments by 20 academics from eight countries and includes a comprehensive bibliography of publications in major languages by or about the author.

² In her essay "The Novelness of Imre Kertész's Sorstalanság (Fatelessness)" in Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (pp. 258-270), Louise O. Vasvári points to this and several other intriguing parallels with The Stranger, from the opening sentence onwards.

³ This is strictly a side-issue, but the over-interpretation inherent in the word "outsider" makes for spurious difficulties when it comes to translating for UK readers, for instance, a recent book by the Hungarian writer András Petőcz which borrows directly on the French title of Camus' book, as evidenced by its unidentified epigraph ("Perhaps because of the shadows on his face, he seemed to be laughing"), only makes sense if rendered as The Strangers (or just possibly The Foreigners, but not The Outsiders or, for that matter "Indifference"). Kertész himself certainly first encountered the work under the title of "Indifference" during the 1957 Book Week in Budapest: "A yellow-backed little volume came to my hand, an unfamiliar book by a French author with a name that was unknown to me. While standing there I read a few sentences before looking at the jacket: it was priced at 12 forints... ...that was the second fatal blow for me. I didn't get over it for years" (The File on K., pp. 190-191).

Tim Wilkinson
Yorkshire bred, is the translator of a range of works on history and culture. Among his translations of literary works by contemporary Hungarian writers, five volumes by Imre Kertész have appeared in the USA and UK. His translation of Fatelessness was awarded the 43rd Annual PEN Club/Book of the Month Translation Prize for 2005.