Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature

The Novelness of Imre Kertész’s Sorstalanság (Fatelessness)

258 The Novelness of Imre Kertész’s Sorstalanság (Fatelessness) Louise O. Vasvári Imre Kertész said that living in the West in a free society, he probably would have not been able to write Sorstalanság (Fatelessness) but would have tried to produce a “showier fiction,” by breaking up time and narrating only powerful scenes (see “Heureka!”; in this paper, while I quote from the Wilson and Wilson translation of Sorstalanság, Fateless, I am otherwise using the title of the correct translation by Tim Wilkinson, Fatelessness, a new translation that appeared after the writing of the present paper). Instead, he made his protagonist, György Köves (George Koves), who, like the author himself, returned to Budapest after the concentration camp to languish in the “dreadful trap of linearity,” and instead of spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he made him live through everything that is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself. Arguably the most shocking scene in the book is the description of the efficiently orchestrated selection process in Auschwitz, which took some twenty minutes. Kertész says that no matter how many survivors’ accounts he read, they all agreed that everything proceeded all too quickly, but he remembered them differently, and augmented his own memory with Tadeusz Borowski’s stark narrative, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (see “Heureka!”). The example of the selection process illustrates how Kertész, by deliberately perverting the “serious” values of Holocaust literary culture , has produced a work that is unreadable within its aesthetic conventions. Kertész is, rather, a social realist who has nevertheless produced experimental fiction , the understanding of whose novelness must be sought in its primary debt to existentialism and to the postmodern novel. In relation to Kertész’s debt to existentialism, György Spiró noted most cogently that Kertész presents a “philosophy of existence which almost explodes the boundaries” (Magániktató 381; all subsequent translations are mine unless noted otherwise). Kertész has commented himself that in the camps he realized he could be killed at any moment and that it was this existential moment that became crucial to him as a writer (qtd. in Szántó, “Editorial Comment” 5). Kertész’s fourteen-anda -half-year-old protagonist and alter-ego, György Köves (or Gyuri, his name’s diminutive ), is the embodiment of this existential attitude; when imprisoned in a con- The Novelness of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness 259 centration camp and attempting to become a model prisoner he comes somehow to feel that his imagination could remain free. This attitude is further exemplified in the last part of the book, when on returning to Budapest after liberation, Köves is even angered by the attitude of self-victimization of two old acquaintances who survived there, Steiner and Fleischmann. Kertész’s thematic debt to philosophical existentialism in Fatelessness can be expressed in the Heideggerian terminology zum Tode sein (to be destined for/delivered to death; see Wahl 45), but of more specific interest to me is his direct indebtedness to Albert Camus’s existentialism of psychological isolation and anguish, as exemplified in L’Étranger (1944). As Kertész was starting to work on Fatelessness, L’Étranger was not yet available in communist countries due to Camus’s anti-communism, but he apparently came upon a copy by chance in a Budapest second-hand shop and he has admitted it to have been one of the major influences on his own work (see Kertész, “A Sorstalans ágot” 8). In the following, I discuss the similarity of Fatelessness and L’Étranger as philosophical tracts masquerading as fiction as well as their startling degree of textual similarity, particularly at the very beginning and the very end of Fatelessness. In both novels everything is filtered exclusively through the consciousness of the first-person narrator. In my reading of Fatelessness, Köves is merely a younger model of Meursault, “the indifferent man,” who does not have the ability to experience communion with the world, who shows an utter lack of emotion at his mother’s death, and who accepts everything that happens to him with indifference (on this, see Daniel; Daruwalla 61). Features of the postmodern novel evident in Fatelessness include intertextuality , subversion, and the mixing of genres, as well as of notions of stable identity, truthful introspection, unified selfhood, authentic memory, and the translatability of experience into language, and, most importantly, the questioning of grand narratives...