Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

… straight to the open-air swimming pool, as I hoped — and was not disappointed — that the weather, being sunny but cool and windy, would deter the crowds from flocking to the pools that day, and I swam a twenty lengths with long, leisurely strokes in the cold water.”

“My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

Subsequently, a good two months later, I was sitting with a chap who was something or other at the publisher’s. I had already paid a visit on him a week previously since, according to the lady in the secretariat, “he will answer any enquires about your novel.” As it turned out, he had heard neither about me nor about my novel.

“When did you submit it?” he asked.

“Two months ago.”

“Two months is not so long,” he assured me. The chap was grey-faced, with a gaunt, harassed, neurotic look about him, and silvered sunglasses. On his desk there were piles of paper, books, an appointment diary, a typewriter, a manuscript bundle covered with scribbled corrections — manifestly a novel. I fled. For preference I would have gone straight to the open-air swimming pool …

“My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

… but now that it was the height of the heat wave I had no hope of being able to have a swim.

On the next occasion he showed himself to be more talkative. By now he had heard both about me and about my novel, though he personally had still not read it. He offered me a seat. Fascism, (he turned toward me and away from his typewriter, in which I could see he had inserted a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper) was a huge and ghastly subject about which there had already …

“Aha!” the old boy exclaimed aloud as he started to rummage agitatedly in the file until he spotted a sheet of headed letter paper among his papers.

It was an ordinary, neat business letter, with fields for date (27/JUL/1973), correspondent (unfilled), subject (unspecified), reference number (482/73), and no greeting:

“Your manuscript has been assessed by our firm’s readers,” the old boy started to read.

On the basis of their unanimous opinion … We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, while the subject itself is horrific and shocking. The fact that it nevertheless fails to become … the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions … While we find it understandable that the adolescent main protagonist does not immediately grasp what is happening around him (the call-up for forced labour, compulsory wearing of the yellow star, etc.), we think it inexplicable why, on arrival at the concentration camp, he sees … More passages in bad taste follow … It is also incredible that the spectacle of the crematoria evokes in him feelings of …“a kind of student jape,” as he knows he is in an extermination camp, and his being Jewish is sufficient reason for him to be killed. His behaviour, his gauche comments … annoyed … the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto … gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements …

“Aha!” the old boy commented aloud.

The old boy was now sitting in front of the filing cabinet and thinking.

“I ought to read the book again,” he was thinking.

“But then again,” he continued his thought, “why would I do that? I am not in the mood for reading about concentration camps.”

“It was dumb of me,” he mused, “to get out my papers,” he added (mentally).

Upon which the old boy sat in front of the filing cabinet and resumed reading:

… was a huge and ghastly subject … a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper …(he turned toward me and away from his typewriter, in which I could see he had inserted a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper) was a huge and ghastly subject about which there had already been much written by many authors. Yet, he added, as it were reassuringly, he was by no means suggesting that the subject had been completely exhausted. He then informed me that it was the publisher’s normal practice to have three readers assess a manuscript “before a decision is made about its fate.” He was a little coy: they were not in the habit of initiating authors into the publisher’s affairs, but he did not exclude the possibility that he might be the third reader for my novel. He fell silent.

“Isn’t it a trifle bitter?” he suddenly asked.

“What?”

“Your novel.”

“Oh, indeed,” I replied.

My response manifestly threw him into confusion.

“Don’t take what I said for granted; it’s not an opinion, as I haven’t even read your novel yet,” he explained.

It was now my turn to be confused: the indications were that, to the extent he might feel my novel was bitter, it would probably not be to his taste. This would obviously be a black mark and might set its publication back. Only then did I see that I was sitting opposite a professional humanist, and professional humanists would like to believe that Auschwitz had happened only to those to whom it had happened to happen at that time and place; that nothing had happened to the majority, to mankind — Mankind! — in general. In other words, the publishing man wanted to read into my novel that notwithstanding — indeed, precisely notwithstanding — everything that had happened to happen to me too at that time and place, Auschwitz had still not sullied me. Yet it had sullied me. I was sullied in other ways than were those who had transported me there, it’s true, but I had been sullied none the less; and in my view this is a basic issue. I have to recognize, however — how could it be otherwise? — that anyone who takes my novel in his hand in good faith and innocently starts to read it will thereby, it is to be feared, also be dragged a little bit into the mire.

I can therefore readily understand why my novel might irritate a professional humanist. But then, professional humanists irritate me because they seek to annihilate me with their cravings: they want to invalidate my experiences. Yet something had happened to those experiences through which, I was taken aback to perceive, they had suddenly turned to my disadvantage, for in the meantime — somehow or other — they had been transformed within me into an irrevocable aesthetic standpoint. The difference of views between me and this man plainly arose from differences in personal convictions between us; but the fact that my novel lay between us, at least symbolically, spoilt everything. I felt that my personal opinions, which my novel exposed utterly, were starting to look inauspicious from the viewpoint of my concerns. On top of which, those concerns, which happened to be embodied in the objective form of the novel, were attached to other factors, less prominent certainly but not negligible for all that — among which were my financial prospects …

“Aha,” the old boy brightened up.

… the question of my future, my social status, if I may put it that way.

“Ha-ha-ha,” the old boy chuckled.

I suddenly found myself in the fairly strange and — through my lack of foresight — surprising situation of having become a hostage to that two-hundred-and-fifty-page bundle of paper that I myself had produced.

“To be sure,” the old boy said aloud.

… I myself had produced.

“To be sure,” the old boy said aloud once more.

… I don’t believe that I saw distinctly then what even …

The telephone.

This time the old boy had no doubt about it. Nevertheless, he did not get up straight away but merely loosened the wax plug in one ear.

Indeed it was.

“No, of course you’re not disturbing me,” the old boy declared (by now into the telephone).

The old boy was standing in the southeast corner of the room, next to the child’s mini-table, 1st-class special ply of 1st-class sawn hardwood (which in regard to its actual function was more a kind of tiny smoker’s table), and holding a telephone conversation.