Nobel laureate speech excerpts

[pynchonoid]

http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2002/kertesz-lecture-e.html

" [...] But I should like to return to what for me is
strictly private - writing. There are a few questions,
which someone in my situation will not even ask.
Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, devoted an entire
little book to the question: For whom do we write? It
is an interesting question, but it can also be
dangerous, and I thank my lucky stars that I never had
to deal with it. Let us see what the danger consists
of. If a writer were to pick a social class or group
that he would like, not only to delight but also
influence, he would first have to examine his style to
see whether it is a suitable means by which to exert
influence. He will soon be assailed by doubts, and
spend his time watching himself. How can he know for
sure what his readers want, what they really like? He
cannot very well ask each and every one. And even if
he did, it wouldn't do any good. He would have to rely
on his image of his would-be readers, the expectations
he ascribed to them, and imagine what would have the
effect on him that he would like to achieve. For whom
does a writer write, then? The answer is obvious: he
writes for himself.

At least I can say that I have arrived at this answer
fairly straightforwardly. Granted, I had it easier - I
had no readers and no desire to influence anyone. I
did not begin writing for a specific reason, and what
I wrote was not addressed to anyone. If I had an aim
at all, it was to be faithful, in language and form,
to the subject at hand, and nothing more. It was
important to make this clear during the ridiculous and
sad period when literature was state-controlled and
"engagé". [...] 

For reasons having to do with the language I spoke, I
decided, after the suppression of the 1956 revolt, to
remain in Hungary. Thus I was able to observe, not as
a child this time but as an adult, how a dictatorship
functions. I saw how an entire nation could be made to
deny its ideals, and watched the early, cautious moves
toward accommodation. I understood that hope is an
instrument of evil, and the Kantian categorical
imperative - ethics in general - is but the pliable
handmaiden of self-preservation.

Can one imagine greater freedom than that enjoyed by a
writer in a relatively limited, rather tired, even
decadent dictatorship? [...] 

The nausea and depression to which I awoke each
morning led me at once into the world I intended to
describe. I had to discover that I had placed a man
groaning under the logic of one type of
totalitarianism in another totalitarian system, and
this turned the language of my novel into a highly
allusive medium. If I look back now and size up
honestly the situation I was in at the time, I have to
conclude that in the West, in a free society, I
probably would not have been able to write the novel
known by readers today as Fateless, the novel singled
out by the Swedish Academy for the highest honor.

No, I probably would have aimed at something
different. Which is not to say that I would not have
tried to get at the truth, but perhaps at a different
kind of truth. In the free marketplace of books and
ideas, I, too, might have wanted to produce a showier
fiction. For example, I might have tried to break up
time in my novel, and narrate only the most powerful
scenes. But the hero of my novel does not live his own
time in the concentration camps, for neither his time
nor his language, not even his own person, is really
his. He doesn't remember; he exists. So he has to
languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity,
and cannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a
spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has
to live through everything, which is oppressive and
offers little variety, like life itself. [...]

One question interested me: What have I still got to
do with literature? For it was clear to me that an
uncrossable line separated me from literature and the
ideals, the spirit associated with the concept of
literature. The name of this demarcation line, as of
many other things, is Auschwitz. When we write about
Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain
sense at least, suspended literature. One can only
write a black novel about Auschwitz, or - you should
excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins
in Auschwitz and is still not over. By which I mean
that nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could
reverse or refute Auschwitz. In my writings the
Holocaust could never be present in the past tense.

It is often said of me - some intend it as a
compliment, others as a complaint - that I write about
a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel
with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain
qualifications, the place assigned to me on the
shelves of libraries? Which writer today is not a
writer of the Holocaust? One does not have to choose
the Holocaust as one's subject to detect the broken
voice that has dominated modern European art for
decades. I will go so far as to say that I know of no
genuine work of art that does not reflect this break.
It is as if, after a night of terrible dreams, one
looked around the world, defeated, helpless. [...]
What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition,
the end point of a great adventure, where the European
traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral
and cultural history. [...] 

 I consider the prize with which the Swedish Academy
has seen fit to honor my work as an indication that
Europe again needs the experience that witnesses to
Auschwitz, to the Holocaust were forced to acquire.
The decision - permit me to say this - bespeaks
courage, firm resolve even - for those who made it
wished me to come here, though they could have easily
guessed what they would hear from me. What was
revealed in the Final Solution, in l'univers
concentrationnaire, cannot be misunderstood, and the
only way survival is possible, and the preservation of
creative power, is if we recognize the zero point that
is Auschwitz. Why couldn't this clarity of vision be
fruitful? At the bottom of all great realizations,
even if they are born of unsurpassed tragedies, there
lies the greatest European value of all, the longing
for liberty, which suffuses our lives with something
more, a richness, making us aware of the positive fact
of our existence, and the responsibility we all bear
for it. [...] "


Imre Kertész's whole speech is worth reading, imo.

-Doug










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