Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Imre Kertesz / Raw Materials

Imre Kertesz

Raw Materials

Martin Kiker

9 August 2013

Two of the great pessimistic proclamations of 20th-century literature — Adorno’s “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” and Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — have at least one thing in common. They both address the inadequacy of language to articulate reality. Better to say nothing, they both say, or at least that’s the first half of what they say. If Adorno leaves off the productive half of the equation — “I’ll go on” — other writers have supplied it for him, in the form of a very large body of work concerned with the Holocaust that is not only ethically accountable but also incredibly rich and inventive. In fact it is not too much to claim, of Holocaust literature, that the struggle to say what is unsayable has paradoxically yielded some of the most extraordinary literary works we have.

There are the firsthand accounts by Levi, Wiesel, Borowski and others. There are the formally innovative novels of writers like Perec, Bernhard and Sebald, works written in the shadow of the Holocaust that take as their subjects memory, absence, how we perceive history and how our lives are continually reshaped by past events. More recently there are novels like Joshua Cohen’s “Witz,” a satirical attack on the kitschification of Jewish experience that can also be read as an earnest concern for the legacy of the Holocaust, as we quickly approach the time when there will no longer be any living witnesses.

What’s remarkable about the Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian author Imre Kertesz is that his body of work spans all of these subjects. In fact, if I need a common point to support the earlier comparison of Beckett and Adorno, Kertesz can provide that, too. A philosophically minded writer (and translator into Hungarian of Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein), Kertesz combines Beckett’s struggle with the limits of narration and Adorno’s skepticism toward the mythologizing powers of art. Over the past four decades, he has channeled these concerns into a series of brilliant, visionary novels that deal bluntly with questions of ethics, history, memory, art and authenticity — “an oeuvre,” as described by the Swedish Academy, “whose subject is an individual’s refusal to abandon his individual will by merging it with a collective identity.”

Those novels, and their relation to the biographical facts of Kertesz’s life, are the primary subjects of “Dossier K.,” published in Hungary in 2006 and now translated by Tim Wilkinson. It’s an unusual book for Kertesz — not that he has any usual ones — in that it is the only one written, he tells us, “more because of external prompting than out of any inner compulsion.” It’s also the only one of his books that does not call itself fiction. Nominally a memoir, “Dossier K.” takes the form of a dialogue between Kertesz and a nameless interlocutor who at times strongly resembles the author and at other times seems to be someone else. Like two old friends, these characters discuss Kertesz’s life, books and philosophical views, along with the literature that has mattered most to him. (Camus and Mann “truly did change my life,” he says, while he discovered Kafka’s “immeasurable greatness too late, at an age when one is less receptive to primary great experiences.”) The conversation is easy to follow, and anyone unfamiliar with Kertesz’s novels will find the relevant passages quoted along the way.

The book begins, philosophically enough, with a discussion of the relationship of fiction to reality. Asked why a particular scene from his deportation to Auschwitz was left out of his first novel, “Fatelessness” — which portrays Kertesz’s experiences, at 14, in Auschwitz and then Buchenwald — the author notes simply that “Fatelessness” is fiction, and is steered by fiction’s requirements rather than life’s. When his interlocutor cites Kertesz’s claim elsewhere that “Fatelessness” is “absolutely authentic” and based on “documented facts,” Kertesz rejoins:

“That’s not inconsistent with its being fictional. . . . An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.”

“But you can’t mean to say that you invented Auschwitz?”

“But in a certain sense that is exactly so. In the novel I did have to invent Auschwitz and bring it to life.”

The fiction-versus-reality debate pops up throughout the book, becoming a sort of refrain by which the conversation switches back and forth between Kertesz’s novels and his personal history. The speakers cover the major points of Kertesz’s early biography, starting with his childhood and schooling through his deportation to the camps, then turn to his later life under a totalitarian Communist regime, and the novels drawn from that time. They also speak in depth about Jewish experience and the legacy of the Holocaust, although Kertesz’s inner Adorno/Beckett complicates the conversation at every turn, qualifying such concepts as “truth” (“I don’t know what the truth is. . . . Truth-telling artists generally prove to be bad artists”); “doubt” (“I always doubt every sentence I utter, but I have never for a moment doubted that I have to write what I happen to be writing”); and “narrative,” including the narrative structure of the book we’re reading:

“But let’s get back to the chronological order.”

“That won’t be easy.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t signify anything. The device of a sequence, of linearity, won’t allow us to capture that darkest yet also most productive period of my life in the trap of narratability.”

What all of this adds up to is very loosely a memoir, but it might be better described as an energetic and thoughtful introduction (or companion) to Kertesz’s other books. Kertesz, for his part, seems to intend “Dossier K.” as a kind of catchall interview that will save him not simply from having to sit for more interviews, but also from having the complexity of his life’s experiences and ideas reduced by others to sound bites. You hear echoes of this concern toward the end of “Dossier K.,” in his comments on the social realities of being a Holocaust survivor:

“It is painful to carry the brand of surviving for some unaccountable reason. You remained here so you could spread the Auschwitz myth; you remained here as a sort of freak. You are invited to attend anniversaries; your irresolute face is video-recorded, your faltering voice, you hardly notice that you’ve become a kitsch supporting character in a fraudulent narrative, and you sell for peanuts your own story, which bit by bit you yourself understand least of all.”

On the heels of his winning the Nobel Prize in 2002 and all the public attention that resulted, it makes sense that Kertesz would take steps against being turned into a “kitsch supporting character in a fraudulent narrative” of his own life by producing an account of himself that is as original, complex and open to contradiction as the rest of his life’s work.