Letters from Vienna #74
I’d originally intended to write about Karl Ove Knausgård for Letter #68 because the theme of art and reality interests me but after attending a fascinating talk about Imre Kertész at the Austrian Society of Literature, in Vienna’s Herrengasse, I decided to focus primarily on him instead.
Imre Kertész
The themes of Imre Kertész, of “functional man”, how we’re all guilty of collaboration with an intolerable system and how our conformity, whether to bourgeois morality or a totalitarian state is an anthropological “constant”, seem especially relevant today.
I couldn’t help but feel sad when I observed the masked conformity of the audience in the Herrengasse or the students I’d overheard talking excitedly about how well life was treating them and the successes they were enjoying; they’d all undoubtedly been jabbed.
Most telling was the remark of one student who preferred to pay an exorbitant rent rather than live with someone they considered “weird”. What, I asked myself, constituted that? Being somehow different, looking somewhat odd or being truly and radically eccentric? Was I considered “weird” in their eyes? Most probably.
The conformity of woman and mankind has long been a solid building block of the Deep State, long before it commenced transforming or exterminating (both by means of the jab) the human race; all would go down together, or nearly all that is.
Imre Kertész, the audience in the Herrengasse was told, was a humanist who’d struggled to claw back our common humanity and fought to make us more conscious of our everyday existence; the model for his novel “Fateless” was Thomas Mann’s “Zauberberg” (“Magic Mountain”).
I smiled when a member of the audience asked if Imre Kertész was concerned with forgetting; they’d understood nothing. I also smiled when a man took umbrage; Imre Kertész we were told wasn’t interested exclusively in either his Jewish heritage or the Holocaust. He’d used his experience as a captive of Auschwitz and Buchenwald in his work but what had concerned him had been fundamental and existential questions.
The audience was told that the prose of Imre Kertész was often a concentrated form of his diaries (In German “Verdichtung” (concentration) and “Dichtung” (poetry) are closely related) but, paradoxically, he’d always denied any relationship between his personal experience and carefully crafted fiction.
In his “Gályanapló” (“Galley Diary”) Kertész wrote: “The autobiographical in my biography is that there is nothing autobiographical in “Fateless”. It is autobiographical, inasmuch as I’ve left out everything autobiographical for the sake of a greater truthfulness. Out of a wrested lack of individuality, the epitome of the mute individual, in all his particularity, finally emerges victorious.”[1]
In his interview with Zoltán Hafner (K. dosszié) he stated: “It’s either autobiography or a novel. When it comes to autobiography, you conjure up the past, you try to stick to your memories as faithfully as possible, and it’s of the utmost importance that you describe everything as it really happened, that is, with nothing added to the facts. A good autobiography is like a document: a picture of an epoch you can “rely on”. In a novel, on the other hand, it’s not the facts that count but rather what’s added to them.”[2]
What Imre Kertész was primarily concerned with, the audience was told, was “structure”. When composing “Fateless”, the “key” of the novel was just as important as its specific questions: “First question: the “why”. – The answer to this is already given at the beginning of Chapter 2: the question is meaningless, there is no rational answer. Second question: the how – that’s what the middle part is about. Third question: is it possible to stay alive? Fourth question: Is it possible (permitted) to remain alive after staying alive?”
Kertész also made notes in his “Gályanapló” (“Galley Diary”) about “atonal novel composition”; sequences “drawn up from the “ideal twelve tones” and its variations up to the “development”. “Fateless”, he observed, was a “Structural Novel.” “Anton Webern expresses this…when he says that a series is not accidental, not arbitrary, but arranged on the basis of certain considerations. For me, the basis of every consideration was the similarity between the structure of the depicted object and the structural arrangement of the novel material.”[3]
Karl Ove Knausgård
Karl Ove Knausgård has also been vexed by the conflicting demands of autobiography and fiction: “I was a novelist, I wrote novels, and to the extent I made use of experiences from my own life, they were camouflaged, part of the fiction. The option of abandoning that had never existed for me as a writer. I could bring the events of the novel as close to reality as I had experienced them, but to take that final step and write, “I, Karl Ove”, “my brother, Yngve”, or “my father, Kai Åge”, was something that had never as much as occurred to me. It wouldn’t be literature any more, would it?”
“When finally, I did it, it felt like a huge transgression. And not in any good sense either, because writing about myself using my full name meant there no longer being anything to hide behind. Moreover, who would be interested in my life, in the things I had thought and done, or that had happened to me? I was a nobody, or anybody. This is a very fundamental doubt I think all writers know, because submitting a manuscript to an editor is in itself both transgressional and embarrassing: what do I have that could possibly make another person want to spend time and effort reading about it? A work of fiction wears a veil of generality, it takes its place in a society alongside a host of other fictions from which it draws legitimacy. But this manuscript had no such legitimacy. Who would want to know that I had stood and pissed up against a pile of snow while listening to Talking Heads on a Walkman one night in the 1980s? Why even write about it? It wasn’t that I decided to write about my actual life as such, nor even to tell the truth. It was more the fact that writing under my own name, about my own reality, had its own set of premises, and its own particular consequences. Using my own name propelled me headlong into my own world, dominated as it was by trifles and inconsequential detail. This tiny quotidian universe was not intrinsic to any story and provided no narrative drive, but it was a part of me, and therefore I had to write about it. Another premise that emerged was that I had to be true to what I actually believed. That’s not difficult in a fictional novel, the writer can put his words into the mouth of a character, but in a non-fictional novel it’s different, because everything in it becomes binding. Writing about my brother, who means so very much to me, meant also having to write about how in our student days I would feel ashamed of him in certain situations. Would I be able to do that, knowing that at some point he would read it himself? How would it make him feel? This was true for all the people I wrote about, but it felt worst in his case, and I had to force the writing into being. This was my only moral compass, the physical resistance I felt towards writing about others. When the qualms became too many, the inner turmoil of conscience too great, I refrained.”[4]
Marcel Proust
In the case of Marcel Proust one need be prudent and avoid, regardless of how persuasive and stunning the prose, confusing truth with fiction; one has to invariably disentangle the two:
“The event in Proust’s real life in which the eating of the madeleine in “A la Recherche” is based is not so much the actual occurrence of January 1909, as the moment of triumph in July when he realised that it was the key of his novel. “A la Recherche” would be a vast unconscious memory, embodying the whole of his past life, and extracting from it the truths which had been invisible in “Time Lost”.”
“In order to fit the incident for its new function as the gateway to his novel, he rearranged it. For the humble tea and rusk, which could only recall Auteuil and Nathé Weil, he substituted the lime-tea and madeleine which were associated with Illiers and would create Combray. Instead of Céline Cottin, as in real life, or Félicie Fitau, “my old cook”, as in “Contre Sainte-Beuve”, his own mother brought him the enchanted potion, atoning for the kiss which had destroyed him by the clue to a work of art which would save him.”[5]
Many however were and are unable to disentangle fact from fiction: “The publication of his latest two volumes had caused other and quite different imbroglios with Proust’s friends. Albufera had recognised in the quarrel with Saint-Loups and Rachel the memory of his own brawls with Louisa at the Théatre des Maturins in 1903, and severed relations with Marcel. Mme de Chevigné had been well pleased with her portrait in vol. 1, as the Duchesse de Guermantes with the cornflower hat and periwinkle eyes: “all my next volume is about you”, Proust had told her last summer, and “if you like the Duchesse half as much as the Narrator does, who in the book is mad about her, I am recompensed.” But, the second volume, the vast dinner-party in which the Duchesse displays her heartless vanity, the atrocious incident of Swann and the red shoes, and Proust’s suspicious delay in sending her a presentation copy, seemed a personal insult. Poor Mme de Chevigné did not realise that here the model had changed, and the Duchesse had temporarily become Mme Greffuhle, with a mixture, for her wit and her red shoes, of Mme Straus.”[6]
The moral of the tale is that one need be extremely cautious in order to avoid confusing fact with fiction. The creative writer sees the world through the prism of their own ideas, temperament and imagination; this is why any insult, nasty word or harsh judgement, however cruel, may be easily and indulgently ignored.
[1] p.185 Galeerentagebuch, Imre Kertész
[2] p.12 Dossier K., Imre Kertész
[3] pp.200-201 Galeerentagebuch Imre Kertész
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/26/karl-ove-knausgaard-the-shame-of-writing-about-myself
[5] p.147 Proust, The Later Years, George d. Painter
[6] p.314 Ibid