Imre Kertész - Fiasco

I believe I see it clearly now: you fear my confessions. That is of no interest to me, though; far from putting me off, if excites and stimulates me. I am familiar with the fear aroused in people by our appearance alone: that jackbooted, pistol-on-belt, formidably overpowering appearance, in which there was also, against your will, a trace of reluctant, nauseated pleasure, precisely because it was against your will — oh yes, I am familiar with that feeling, which set me off on my career, and which I subsequently, out of revenge for myself as it were, pursued with ever-growing passion, trembling from the desire that others should also experience it; that it should enslave others, eat deep into their souls and stir up in them a licentious freedom, the abominable, soul-destroying pleasure that they live through in their fear — as I say, I am familiar with the fear, which this time I wish to transplant into you as a moral lesson, not by means of my aggressively real but my magical appearance; that is, by the representation of myself through words and language.

And this is the point where I feel, distinctly feel, that I have no reason to blush before the aforementioned blessed souls as far as my intentions go; that in respect of its blessedness my self-revelation is in no way inferior to theirs, assuming you have the courage, in the course of unfolding my excessively and wildly individual career, to recognize what it is in me that is blessed for yourselves. Which is, first and foremost, the fact that it was me who went through my career, not you.

I have the feeling that this way of formulating what I have to say is somewhat abstruse and might give rise to misunderstandings that will then invite your deliberate misunderstanding. I need to speak clearly, like all those who have the aim of struggling against the stubborn resistance that the world has displayed to implacable truths. But then, why should I beat about the bush? My blessedness lies precisely in my implacability, in which all of us should spot our selfish motives, as you shall see later on. So, what was it that I wanted to say? Nothing other than that you should recognize your salvation in my excessively wild fate, inasmuch as it might have been your fate, and inasmuch as I lived it, not despite, but instead of you.

Now that I am saying these words — I first said them to myself before writing them down and then saying them again, to my liking, out loud, which I would suggest the Reader do as well — I am seized by an unprecedented excitement, because I feel that I have finally managed to capture the essence of the thoughts and emotions which are churning confusedly inside me; indeed, the essence of my fate, the essence of the feeling that basically determined my career, which has made me so responsive to the will of my surroundings and is so typical of my covertly intimate relationship with the world. Now, that last sentence of the preceding paragraph is what this strange sensitivity of mine dictated to me. Yes, when I committed my definitive act — the first act of murder, which subsequently proved to be an irrevocable choice, just because it had happened, and because it could have happened —that is, the opportunity was presented to do it, and in point of fact an opportunity was not presented to do anything else — so when, under pressure of external compulsion, I committed my definitive act, that pressure of external force, as you will see in the course of the ensuing plot, was not present at all — it did no more than simply accumulate within me, became an inner compulsion, which is to say that it returned to its original form. Because the external compulsion was merely secondary, nothing more than a projection of a genuine will, which comes true if reality favours it. And the loose strands of an external compulsion which were not the bonds of a genuine will could easily be torn asunder by the world. But no, the world did nothing; it awaited events with bated breath; it wanted to see what would happen, only then to be horrified by it — horrified by itself. When I set off on my career, and steadily worked my way through it, all that happened was that, with my extraordinary responsiveness, I had understood the will of the world, your will — or if you prefer: the will you have conceived against your consciences — and, by the reality of my acts and career, I redeemed and returned to you your consciences. You, however, with an inconsistency typical of the world, will not hear of it, and the more you recognize the vitality of the relationship between us, the more you will deny it, and all the more I shall be seen by you as loathsome. I, on the other hand, stick to my guns, and like a conductor who, at the end of a concert, will point to the orchestra with a sweeping gesture as a way of indicating that the source of the success is to be sought in their common effort, so I point to yourselves — but then, of course, you will know that it is actually me you must applaud; that is, me you must string up.

In itself, though, that would be in order; that is the role which has been reserved for me in the game and which I have taken on, albeit not without some reluctance, and not exactly with good grace, since, as a result of the foregoing, I have a refined sense for ceremonial games; and no charge would distress me more than to be called a spoilsport of such fastidious games, though you will have no reason to do so, I feel, given my performance. There is just one thing I bridle against, which is that people will try to ascribe the moral composure, to which my every word bears witness, to my depravity, though it is nothing other than true inner peace.

I can already hear the question: How can that be? Surely this can’t be someone who wishes to sing the praises of a career which flouted the general consensus so blatantly and deviated from the world so profligately that he has ended up before the tribunal of the court? Yet that is precisely my intention. Because if I were not to do that, I would be misleading the Reader, who otherwise would never understand the strange grace in which I partake.

Yes, grace, I said. Because if someone can look back on his life with composure — burnt-out and weary, immensely weary, maybe, but still with composure — that is grace and, in itself, a victory. For I have to admit that I am as amused as much as I am saddened by the world’s propensity, stemming partly from simple-mindedness, partly from deliberate prejudice, to interpret my career as a failure, as a failure primarily in a practical moral sense, and to force that notion on me with self-important fuss. At the same time, I sense an eager longing in this pushy attempt, an urgent but basically clumsy entreaty, as if it depended on me, on my keenly and anxiously awaited words, for the world to be given back its childish faith in its ideals. Everything here turns on one question, and in this the world now displays what for it is an unusually fine discriminatory power, and that is on whether I feel guilty. Because the fact of my guilt has already been decided, otherwise I would not be locked up in here, subjected to the hassles of interrogations. But that is not what is important here, and, to my greatest amazement, those who have undertaken to be my judges are on the right track when they make a distinction between crime and consciousness of guilt. Because the moral significance of a sentence, the liberating effect to which every sentence lays a claim, if it considers that it is founded on morality, in my case depends solely on me, stands or falls on me, on my endorsing it, on my transfiguring it, on my raising it to an intellectual plane through my consciousness of guilt. How great the sympathy, how great the compassion, and then again how great the contempt with which I view this unfortunate demand, which simply underlines now shaky the ground is on which the world’s moral balance rests!