...and the winner is ... -(full text)

[Burns, Erik]

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.