And the winner is ...

[Dave Monroe]

Svenska Akademien

The Permanent Secretary

Press Release
10 October 2002

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2002
Imre Kertész
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2002 is awarded to
the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész

"for writing that upholds the fragile experience of
the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of
history".

In his writing Imre Kertész explores the possibility
of continuing to live and think as an individual in an
era in which the subjection of human beings to social
forces has become increasingly complete. His works
return unremittingly to the decisive event in his
life: the period spent in Auschwitz, to which he was
taken as a teenage boy during the Nazi persecution of
Hungary’s Jews. For him Auschwitz is not an
exceptional occurrence that like an alien body
subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe.
It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in
modern existence. 

Kertész’s first novel, Sorstalanság, 1975 (Fateless,
1992), deals with the young Köves, who is arrested and
taken to a concentration camp but conforms and
survives. The novel uses the alienating device of
taking the reality of the camp completely for granted,
an everyday existence like any other, admittedly with
conditions that are thankless, but not without moments
of happiness. Köves regards events like a child
without completely understanding them and without
finding them unnatural or disquieting – he lacks our
ready-made answers. The shocking credibility of the
description derives perhaps from this very absence of
any element of the moral indignation or metaphysical
protest that the subject cries out for. The reader is
confronted not only with the cruelty of atrocities but
just as much with the thoughtlessness that
characterised their execution. Both perpetrators and
victims were preoccupied with insistent practical
problems, the major questions did not exist. Kertész’s
message is that to live is to conform. The capacity of
the captives to come to terms with Auschwitz is one
outcome of the same principle that finds expression in
everyday human coexistence.

In thinking like this, the author concurs with a
philosophical tradition in which life and human spirit
are enemies. In Kaddis a meg nem születetett
gyermekért, 1990 (Kaddish for a Child not Born, 1997),
Kertész presents a consistently negative picture of
childhood and from this pre-history derives the
paradoxical feeling of being at home in the
concentration camp. He completes his implacable
existential analysis by depicting love as the highest
stage of conformism, total capitulation to the desire
to exist at any cost. For Kertész the spiritual
dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to
life. Individual experience seems useless as soon as
it is considered in the light of the needs and
interests of the human collective. 

In his collection of fragments Gályanapló (“Galley
Diary”), 1992, Kertész demonstrates his full
intellectual scope. “Theoretical justifications are
merely constructions”, he writes, but nevertheless
conducts an untiring dialogue with the great tradition
of cultural criticism – Pascal, Goethe, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, Beckett, Bernhard. In
essence, Imre Kertész is a minority consisting of one
individual. He regards his kinship with the concept of
Jew as a definition inflicted on him by the enemy. But
through its consequences this arbitrary categorisation
has nevertheless been his initiation into the deepest
knowledge of humanity and the age in which he lives. 

The novels that succeeded Sorstalanság, 1975
(Fateless, 1992), A kudarc (“Fiasco”), 1988, and
Kaddis a meg nem születetett gyermekért, 1990 (Kaddish
for a Child not Born, 1997), can almost be
characterised as comments and additions to the first
and decisive work. This provides the theme of A
kudarc. While he waits for an expected refusal of his
real novel, the one about Auschwitz, the aging author
spends his days writing a contemporary novel in the
style of Kafka, a claustrophobic description of
socialist Eastern Europe. In the end, he is informed
that his previous book will, in spite of everything,
be published, but all he can feel is emptiness. On
display in the literary marketplace, his personality
is transformed into an object, his secrets into
banalities.

The refusal to compromise in Kertész’s stance can be
perceived clearly in his style, which is reminiscent
of a thickset hawthorn hedge, dense and thorny for
unsuspecting visitors. But he relieves his readers of
the burden of compulsory emotions and inspires a
singular freedom of thought.

The Swedish Academy

http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2002/press.html

http://www.nobel.se/

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