Dossier K: A Memoir

by Imre Kertész

  That is probably how it was in fact.

  I rather feared as much. What, then, did it take for you to come to your senses from this, as it were, semidetached state?

  Maybe by first getting fully immersed in it, then, later on, simply recalling it and being duly astonished by it.

  As if by means of a time machine, you were to arrive at an unfamiliar—or perhaps familiar—place and uneasily watch what is happening to you?

  If you’re referring to the second part of Fiasco, then you’re on the wrong track. Köves knows exactly what is going to happen to him; indeed, he himself provokes the events.

  He is tormented by a Kafkaesque guilty conscience and forebodings.

  Not at all. I know that an interpretation along those lines was printed in a German newspaper …

  Which claims that you are trying to amplify on Kafka, raising the question of whether that is in fact possible.

  That’s not the point; the real issue is whether it is possible, in certain circumstances, not to amplify on Kafka. And here I don’t mean Kafka’s incomparable genius, but the fact that history has vindicated Kafka, and that has left its mark on the literature of succeeding generations. The language of the second part of Fiasco caused me quite a headache, i.e., how it is possible to cast the ephemeral ideological constructs of merely transitory closed regimes and dictatorships into the more durable form of a novel. I was looking for a usable metaphor, and it finally occurred to me that totalitarian dictatorships, including the Stalinist one, speak in the language of religion. Nor can it be otherwise, since their world was not a realm of logic but of the absurd. As a result, therefore, a degree of Kafkaesque stylization seemed glaringly obvious, for one thing because Fiasco ultimately deals with something entirely different from Kafka’s marvellous novels; for another thing, because what else is the intellectual domain that we call literature other than the handshaking of writers with one another ad infinitum? But that would take it too far. As far as Fiasco is concerned, it is a novel based on a fundamentally amusing notion. A writer bogged down in the intellectual swamp of the Seventies, the Brezhnev era, awakes to the realization that he is working counter to his own interest, because a creative life cannot be squared with the time in which he is living. That is when he embarks on a novel, which is nothing more than a process of the recapitulation of a fate: episode by episode, he recreates the existence of his young alter ego, Köves, looking more and more for where he lost his way, why he couldn’t disappear, submerge, into the anonymous mass of history. He is unlucky, however, and at the end of the book comes to the very same point—the L-shaped corridor—where he was once overtaken by his creative vision: the creative life proves to be an inescapable curse, its end product failure—the fiasco.

  It may well be that I am lacking something in the humour department when it comes to this, but I can now clearly see that the plot of the novel-in-the-novel which is “Fiasco” is not in the least the dream parable that it is usually interpreted as being.

  I could only give a response if I knew what, precisely, you think of as a “parable.” Can you give an example?

  Offhand, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four comes to mind as being a true parable.

  In that case, Fiasco cannot be one. It contains a different ratio of fiction and real life. Or rather, if one wants to see it as a parable, then it’s not a very good one. But there are other genres that Fiasco also does not belong to. To be brief and parabolic myself: it is not appropriate to use a nutcracker to peel a peach.

  Witticisms aside, obviously what you want to say is that the novel should be approached from the point of view of its own originality.

  Everything should be approached from the point of view of its own originality.

  Despite the fact that it is no simple task to get to grips with Fiasco: it is surrounded by as many defensive systems as a fortification. The moment you have managed to struggle past one you find yourself face-to-face with another. You have to fight your way past one parenthesized barbed-wire fence after another, past ever newer crevasses of novels-within-novels … until it finally dawns on you that that is exactly what the novel is about: intellectual brackets and mental barbed-wire entanglements. Am I assessing that correctly?

  The subject of the novel is enclosure, that’s for sure, and that has formal consequences. In essence, it’s a matter of a musical structure that is followed as a structural principle.

  You assign a big part to music in the construction, or I should say the composition, of your novels.

  I don’t think that can be of interest to anyone except myself, but it’s true that I like to conceive of my novels in terms of a musical composition.

  In other words, it’s not just a matter of the musicality of individual sentences …

  No, of the whole, of the complete composition. With Fiasco, for instance, the beginning and end of the novel overlap, but this is achieved with musical tools: the images of the “enlightenment” and the L-shaped corridor are snapped twice by the text, then the third time they come true … but those are just my own distinctly dubious private amusements and can only be boring to readers.

  Not to me, that’s for sure, because I would like to find my bearings in what is perhaps the most enigmatic of your novels. With Fatelessness you employed a simple linear technique …

  That was not exactly simple, either, but in that instance the linear technique expressed some important ideas. With Fiasco, on the other hand, I made a deliberate effort to “transcribe” the time-planes onto one another, and, just like music, the novel, too, unfolds over time, and in that way a circular novel structure came into being.

  A circle that encloses within itself both the Nazi concentration camp and the Communist jails.

  Yes, in the end I wanted to pluck out the danse macabre of the two regimes on a single string, despite the fact that I wrote and published Fiasco before the change in regime and therefore when censorship was still very much in force.

  Toward the end of Fiasco, Köves sends a letter to Berg, who is one of the most mysterious of all the novel’s figures, in which he relates his strange experiences. In addition, this is where Köves, for the first and only time in the novel, speaks in the first person singular, which lends an air of confessional authenticity to the text …

  So, we’re again mooring by the unfathomable relationship between fiction and reality, yet we already covered that at the very start of our conversation. Only now I get the impression that you are not quite so sure of yourself as you were then.

  Well, I’m frightened that you are going to tell the truth …

  Never doubt it!

  All right, then, let’s start off from the previous chapter of “Fiasco”, the novel-in-the-novel, where we learn that Köves has been in the army “because the same post as the dismissal letter from the ministry had also brought a demand that he immediately discharge his deferred military service.” When did that happen in your case?

  In November 1951 I was called up for regular military service, and after the three months of so-called “basic training” it turned out that the military command had singular plans for the unit to which I had been posted …

  “Yet what a filthy dream did I wake up to all at once! I am standing in a room by a desk behind which is seated an obese, hormonally challenged bonehead, with matted hair, rotting teeth, bags under his eyes, and a sneer on his face: a major, and what he wants is for me to put my signature at the bottom of a piece of paper and accept a post as a prison guard in the central military prison.” What that sounds like is that Köves, on the model of many other literary figures, is about to enter a contract with the Devil …

  It’s not a huge difference in principle.

  If I look on it as a literary game. But here, as it is said in one of Wedekind’s plays, “we’re not playing but living.” So, why does Köves sign the paper?

  Out of ignorance, curiosity, and, above all, existential apathy.

  “… my existence went to sleep, or was paralyz
ed inside me, or at any rate it gave no twinge of unease to warn me of the importance of the decision,” writes Köves, or is that you?

  I write “the Old Boy” who writes Köves, who in turn writes the letter addressed to Berg.

  “That was when I raised my hand and struck a defenceless prisoner in the face”—who writes that?

  Köves.

  And Köves is who, exactly?

  You can’t be serious. “I am Madame Bovary”—for any lesser risk it’s better if one doesn’t sit down to write a novel.

  It seems that I’m not only lacking something in the humour department but in the horror department as well. I don’t know you to be the sort of person who would strike somebody in the face.

  You can’t know, just as Köves does not know himself: we spoke about that earlier on when we talked about him being concealed in his insignificance. Here you, the reader, step with Köves into a world where the aimlessly stumbling personality has no foothold, and if your “existence has gone to sleep,” it is easy to make—or let’s say rather: it can easily happen—the first and decisive step, from which there is no turning back.

  If one accepts that argument, then it would be impossible to call any mass murderer to account.

  You are forgetting that as a writer I am not concerned with calling people to account but with accurate portrayal. In any case, I—and the “I” here is an unknown factor, a passivity—so, I was lucky and I was not exposed to any haunting moment like that.

  Do you really think it is just a matter of luck?

  I don’t know. On the basis of the experiences I gained in camps and dictatorships, the resilience of human nature is inexhaustible. When I wrote that novel—almost thirty years after the fact—I certainly had to ponder the possibility of such a moment. In the last analysis, the imagination is also a kind of reality, and if I really wished to respond to the issues raised in the novel, then I had to carry out in my imagination things that had not happened in reality if only in order that the fictional Köves should experience the “definitive act” and place it at Berg’s disposal.

  Before we began this conversation, I sat down to re-read “I, the Executioner,” the novel-in-the-novel-in-the-novel of Fiasco, which provides an apology for mass murder. Do I understand correctly that the state when a person is freed from his own personality and completely subsumes it to the executioner’s role is one that Berg calls grace?

  Or that of the victim. “It might perhaps be pleasant to be alternately victim and executioner,” Baudelaire remarks in My Heart Laid Bare on the basis of who knows what earlier experiences he may have had. The essence of both roles is a complete release from the burden of personality—that is why Berg is searching for a “definitive act” that would set the executioner on the “salvational” route of mass murder.

  What do you mean here by a “definitive act”?

  It’s an act which does not ensue from the propensities, character, or individuality of the person concerned but solely from the situation, which commands the terrain like a foreign power. The moment takes command, and you get out of it as best you can. You have to free yourself of the colossal tension: all of a sudden, you cave in and abandon any resistance—relinquish yourself to the line of least resistance, one could say.

  Is this not the same thing as what elsewhere you refer to as fatelessness?

  In essence the same thing; it’s just that the idiom employed in Fiasco is different.

  There it is referred to as “grace,” and it is given a positive connotation. Why is that?

  Because in Berg’s view, man has become superfluous in a dictatorship. The only way he can find the grace is by what he refers to as “service,” “serving the order.”

  In the form of either villain or victim … If we did not have the written records that were left behind by the various dictatorships, I would venture to say that we would have no idea what this man was talking about. Even as things are, his figure is fairly shrouded in mist. Who exactly is he?

  I suppose that in Berg’s figure I was constructing an imaginary representation of the “Old Boy” whom one gets to know in the frame novel. He’s a man of absolute theory, who is pondering “a plan for a dissertation, on a not-too-ambitious scale, concerning the possibilities for an aesthetic mediation of violence.”

  In other words, the figure of the “Old Boy” is replicated, as it were, in the Köves novel?

  Precisely—rather like a cinema film shot through a prismatic lens. The scenes with Köves and Berg, followed by Köves’s epistolary confession, are the culmination of the novel, the place where the entire burden of argument is brought to a terse climactic point around them.

  One in which Berg goes mad, whereas Köves carries on and then suddenly finds himself in the L-shaped corridor … which is where he is overtaken by a moment of rapture.

  Of enlightenment.

  My apologies for the loose language. In any event it is a matter of a mystical moment, an experience that one cannot recount in the language of rationality but which, one could say, abruptly changes one’s life. What in fact did happen to you in the corridor?

  I have already said this several times, and I fear that I shall be guilty of repeating myself. Or rather I fear that I won’t be able to put it like … like for example …

  Like you put it in Stockholm.

  Stockholm is several light years away from the place where we are holding this conversation. And it may well be that our path does not lead to Stockholm, anyway.

  What do you mean by that?

  That we have yielded to this flawed logic several times already. We are sitting here at total ease and safety at the endpoint of our story and contentedly chomping away about the splendid triumphal procession. We are divesting ourselves of any risk, because every step we take is another step toward the goal, and we can have complete confidence in each and every step: everything we do is correct, because we are progressing towards our goal. That is why we boarded the train that chuffed toward Auschwitz; that is why I was not shoved to the left by the doctor at the Birkenau selection; that is why kindly hands hauled me out from among the corpses at Buchenwald, and so on … in that way the story would come to pass, except it would not be a Job’s story of making atonement, as you might suppose, but of a vulgar kitsch, the career of a ridiculous buffoon. Every individual story is kitsch, because it evades the rules; every single survivor attests purely to a breakdown in the machinery that has occurred in an individual case. Truth belongs only to the dead, no one else.

  But the dead keep their counsel … the truth belongs to those who speak out. You yourself said that; I read it somewhere in Galley Boat-Log.16 Let me put rather the following question: What was the immediate outcome, or consequence if you prefer, of the enlightenment you underwent in the L-shaped corridor?

  That for weeks or months on end, or however long it was, I wrote and wrote a text that drove me to despair every day, because in no way would it assume any shape, coalesce into an organic whole. It bubbled out from somewhere deep inside me like scalding-hot lava and then spread out amorphously, destroying everything around.

  That sounds pretty alarming—rather as though you were recounting being possessed by a deleterious passion.

  Precisely. Every day I would write something that, when I read it over at the end of the day, I would find dispiriting. The next day, despite my ever-growing sense of dismay, I would nevertheless start all over again …

  What caused that “ever-growing sense of dismay”?

  The fact that I had to give way to the demands of the text. I had to recognize that the sentences that would appear under my hand would sometimes arrive unexpectedly: they knew more than I myself did; they would surprise me with secrets that I was unaware of; they would not tolerate my interventions but lived some sort of autonomous, alien life that it was up to me to understand rather than dominate … slowly the threatening thought dawned on me that I needed time, more time, in fact a great deal more time …

  In ord
er to prepare for your career?

  The word “career” is totally out of place here. My so-called career is at best the product of a construct in hindsight—that’s if anyone should seek to slip in the fallacy of logic into processes that are otherwise spontaneous and inexplicable. Forget the career and try instead to imagine a completely bewildered young man who, not knowing why, started to write, sharpened pencils, and spread sheets of blank paper in front of himself while noting with horror that there was nothing to justify his actions—indeed, what he was doing was frankly nonsensical.

  Despite that, every day you carried on with your apparently senseless experiments. Why?

  Out of an existential angst that may have silenced everything else inside me.

  Existential angst … could you label that any other way?

  A compulsive psychosis … categorical inner imperative … the fulfilment of a task … how should I know?

  Not a bad task. Did a sense of vocation awaken in you, perhaps?

  No way! I have many faults, but I never felt a sense of vocation.

  Maybe that was the way in which your talent manifested itself.

  Yes, talent is one of those words that is used, but no one knows what it means.