Heureka!

I must begin with a confession, a strange confession perhaps, but a candidone. From the moment I stepped on the airplane to make the journey here andaccept this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, I have been feeling the steady,searching gaze of a dispassionate observer on my back. Even at this specialmoment, when I find myself being the center of attention, I feel I am closer tothis cool and detached observer than to the writer whose work, of a sudden, isread around the world. I can only hope that the speech I have the honor todeliver on this occasion will help me dissolve the duality and fuse the twoselves within me.

For now, though, I still have trouble understanding the gap that I sensebetween the high honor and my life and work. Perhaps I lived too long underdictatorships, in a hostile, relentlessly alien intellectual environment, tohave developed a distinct literary consciousness; even to contemplate such athing would have been useless. Besides, all I heard from all sides was that whatI gave so much thought to, the "topic" that forever preoccupied me,was neither timely nor very attractive. For this reason, and also because Ihappen to believe it, I have always considered writing a highly personal,private matter.

Not that such a matter necessarily precludes seriousness - even if thisseriousness did seem somewhat ludicrous in a world where only lies were takenseriously. Here the notion that the world is an objective reality existingindependently of us was an axiomatic philosophical truth. Whereas I, on a lovelyspring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only onereality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for anuncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, andcircumscribed, marked up, branded - and which I had to take back from"History", this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone,and I had to manage it accordingly.

Needless to say, all this turned me sharply against everything in that world,which, though not objective, was undeniably a reality. I am speaking ofCommunist Hungary, of "thriving and flourishing" Socialism. If theworld is an objective reality that exists independently of us, then humansthemselves, even in their own eyes, are nothing more than objects, and theirlife stories merely a series of disconnected historical accidents, which theymay wonder at, but which they themselves have nothing to do with. It would makeno sense to arrange the fragments in a coherent whole, because some of it may befar too objective for the subjective Self to be held responsible for it.

A year later, in 1956, the Hungarian Revolution broke out. For a singlemoment the country turned subjective. Soviet tanks, however, restoredobjectivity before long.

I do not mean to be facetious. Consider what happened to language in thetwentieth century, what became of words. I daresay that the first and mostshocking discovery made by writers in our time was that language, in the form itcame down to us, a legacy of some primordial culture, had simply becomeunsuitable to convey concepts and processes that had once been unambiguous andreal. Think of Kafka, think of Orwell, in whose hands the old language simplydisintegrated. It was as if they were turning it round and round in an openfire, only to display its ashes afterward, in which new and previously unknownpatterns emerged.

But I should like to return to what for me is strictly private - writing.There are a few questions, which someone in my situation will not even ask. Jean-PaulSartre, for instance, devoted an entire little book to the question: Forwhom do we write? It is an interesting question, but it can also be dangerous,and I thank my lucky stars that I never had to deal with it. Let us see what thedanger consists of. If a writer were to pick a social class or group that hewould like, not only to delight but also influence, he would first have toexamine his style to see whether it is a suitable means by which to exertinfluence. He will soon be assailed by doubts, and spend his time watchinghimself. How can he know for sure what his readers want, what they really like?He cannot very well ask each and every one. And even if he did, it wouldn't doany good. He would have to rely on his image of his would-be readers, theexpectations he ascribed to them, and imagine what would have the effecton him that he would like to achieve. For whom does a writerwrite, then? The answer is obvious: he writes for himself.

At least I can say that I have arrived at this answer fairlystraightforwardly. Granted, I had it easier - I had no readers and no desire toinfluence anyone. I did not begin writing for a specific reason, and what Iwrote was not addressed to anyone. If I had an aim at all, it was to befaithful, in language and form, to the subject at hand, and nothing more. It wasimportant to make this clear during the ridiculous and sad period whenliterature was state-controlled and "engagé".

It would be more difficult to answer another, perfectly legitimate thoughstill rather more dubious question: Why do we write? Here, too, I waslucky, for it never occurred to me that when it came to this question, one had achoice. I described a relevant incident in my novel Failure. I stood inthe empty corridor of an office building, and all that happened was that fromthe direction of another, intersecting corridor I heard echoing footsteps. Astrange excitement took hold of me. The sound grew louder and louder, and thoughthey were clearly the steps of a single, unseen person, I suddenly had thefeeling that I was hearing the footsteps of thousands. It was as if a hugeprocession was pounding its way down that corridor. And at that point Iperceived the irresistible attraction of those footfalls, that marchingmultitude. In a single moment I understood the ecstasy of self-abandonment, theintoxicating pleasure of melting into the crowd - what Nietzsche called, in adifferent context though relevantly for this moment too, a Dionysian experience.It was almost as though some physical force were pushing me, pulling me towardthe unseen marching columns. I felt I had to stand back and press against thewall, to keep me from yielding to this magnetic, seductive force.

I have related this intense moment as I (had) experienced it. The source fromwhich it sprang, like a vision, seemed somewhere outside of me, not in me. Everyartist is familiar with such moments. At one time they were called suddeninspirations. Still, I wouldn't classify the experience as an artisticrevelation, but rather as an existential self-discovery. What I gained from itwas not my art - its tools would not be mine for some time - but my life, whichI had almost lost. The experience was about solitude, a more difficult life, andthe things I have already mentioned - the need to step out of the mesmerizingcrowd, out of History, which renders you faceless and fateless. To my horror, Irealized that ten years after I had returned from the Nazi concentration camps,and halfway still under the awful spell of Stalinist terror, all that remainedof the whole experience were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes. Like itdidn't even happen to me, as people are wont to say.

It is clear that such visionary moments have a long prehistory. Sigmund Freudwould trace them back to a repressed traumatic experience. And he may well beright. I, too, am inclined toward the rational approach; mysticism andunreasoning rapture of all kinds are alien to me. So when I speak of a vision, Imust mean something real that assumes a supernatural guise - the sudden, almostviolent eruption of a slowly ripening thought within me. Something conveyed inthe ancient cry, "Eureka!" - "I've got it!" But what?

I once said that so-called Socialism for me was the petite madeleine cakethat, dipped into Proust's tea, evoked in him the flavor of bygone years. Forreasons having to do with the language I spoke, I decided, after the suppressionof the 1956 revolt, to remain in Hungary. Thus I was able to observe, not as achild this time but as an adult, how a dictatorship functions. I saw how anentire nation could be made to deny its ideals, and watched the early, cautiousmoves toward accommodation. I understood that hope is an instrument of evil, andthe Kantian categorical imperative - ethics in general - is but the pliablehandmaiden of self-preservation.

Can one imagine greater freedom than that enjoyed by a writer in a relativelylimited, rather tired, even decadent dictatorship? By the nineteen-sixties, thedictatorship in Hungary had reached a state of consolidation that could almostbe called a societal consensus. The West later dubbed it, with good-humoredforbearance, "goulash Communism". It seemed that after the initialforeign disapproval, Hungary's own version quickly turned into the West'sfavorite brand of Communism. In the miry depths of this consensus, one eithergave up the struggle or found the winding paths to inner freedom. A writer'soverhead, after all, is very low; to practice his profession, all he needs arepaper and pencil. The nausea and depression to which I awoke each morning led meat once into the world I intended to describe. I had to discover that I hadplaced a man groaning under the logic of one type of totalitarianism in anothertotalitarian system, and this turned the language of my novel into a highlyallusive medium. If I look back now and size up honestly the situation I was inat the time, I have to conclude that in the West, in a free society, I probablywould not have been able to write the novel known by readers today as Fateless,the novel singled out by the Swedish Academy for the highest honor.

No, I probably would have aimed at something different. Which is not to saythat I would not have tried to get at the truth, but perhaps at a different kindof truth. In the free marketplace of books and ideas, I, too, might have wantedto produce a showier fiction. For example, I might have tried to break up timein my novel, and narrate only the most powerful scenes. But the hero of my noveldoes not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time norhis language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn't remember; heexists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity, andcannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a spectacular series of greatand tragic moments, he has to live through everything, which is oppressive andoffers little variety, like life itself.

But the method led to remarkable insights. Linearity demanded that eachsituation that arose be completely filled out. It did not allow me, say, to skipcavalierly over twenty minutes of time, if only because those twenty minuteswere there before me, like a gaping, terrifying black hole, like a mass grave. Iam speaking of the twenty minutes spent on the arrival platform of the Birkenauextermination camp - the time it took people clambering down from the train toreach the officer doing the selecting. I more or less remembered the twentyminutes, but the novel demanded that I distrust my memory. No matter how manysurvivors' accounts, reminiscences and confessions I had read, they all agreedthat everything proceeded all too quickly and unnoticably. The doors of therailroad cars were flung open, they heard shouts, the barking of dogs, men andwomen were abruptly separated, and in the midst of the hubbub, they foundthemselves in front of an officer. He cast a fleeting glance at them, pointed tosomething with his outstretched arm, and before they knew it they were wearingprison clothes.

I remembered these twenty minutes differently. Turning to authentic sources,I first read Tadeusz Borowski's stark, unsparing and self-tormenting narratives,among them the story entitled "This Way for the Gas, Ladies andGentlemen". Later, I came upon a series of photographs of human cargoarriving at the Birkenau railroad platform - photographs taken by an SS soldierand found by American soldiers in a former SS barracks in the already liberatedcamp at Dachau. I looked at these photographs in utter amazement. I saw lovely,smiling women and bright-eyed young men, all of them well-intentioned, eager tocooperate. Now I understood how and why those humiliating twenty minutes ofidleness and helplessness faded from their memories. And when I thought how allthis was repeated the same way for days, weeks, months and years on end, Igained an insight into the mechanism of horror; I learned how it became possibleto turn human nature against one's own life.

So I proceeded, step by step, on the linear path of discovery; this was myheuristic method, if you will. I realized soon enough that I was not the leastbit interested in whom I was writing for and why. One question interested me:What have I still got to do with literature? For it was clear to me that anuncrossable line separated me from literature and the ideals, the spiritassociated with the concept of literature. The name of this demarcation line, asof many other things, is Auschwitz. When we write about Auschwitz, we must knowthat Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can onlywrite a black novel about Auschwitz, or - you should excuse the expression - acheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over. By which I meanthat nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refuteAuschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the pasttense.

It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as acomplaint - that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have noquarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain qualifications, theplace assigned to me on the shelves of libraries? Which writer today is not awriter of the Holocaust? One does not have to choose the Holocaust as one'ssubject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art fordecades. I will go so far as to say that I know of no genuine work of art thatdoes not reflect this break. It is as if, after a night of terrible dreams, onelooked around the world, defeated, helpless. I have never tried to see thecomplex of problems referred to as the Holocaust merely as the insolvableconflict between Germans and Jews. I never believed that it was the latestchapter in the history of Jewish suffering, which followed logically from theirearlier trials and tribulations. I never saw it as a one-time aberration, alarge-scale pogrom, a precondition for the creation of Israel. What I discoveredin Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, wherethe European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and culturalhistory.

Now the only thing to reflect on is where we go from here. The problem ofAuschwitz is not whether to draw a line under it, as it were; whether topreserve its memory or slip it into the appropriate pigeonhole of history;whether to erect a monument to the murdered millions, and if so, what kind. Thereal problem with Auschwitz is that it happened, and this cannot be altered -not with the best, or worst, will in the world. This gravest of situations wascharacterized most accurately by the Hungarian Catholic poet János Pilinszkywhen he called it a "scandal". What he meant by it, clearly, is thatAuschwitz occurred in a Christian cultural environment, so for those with ametaphysical turn of mind it can never be overcome.

Old prophecies speak of the death of God. Since Auschwitz we are more alone,that much is certain. We must create our values ourselves, day by day, with thatpersistent though invisible ethical work that will give them life, and perhapsturn them into the foundation of a new European culture. I consider the prizewith which the Swedish Academy has seen fit to honor my work as an indicationthat Europe again needs the experience that witnesses to Auschwitz, to theHolocaust were forced to acquire. The decision - permit me to say this -bespeaks courage, firm resolve even - for those who made it wished me to comehere, though they could have easily guessed what they would hear from me. Whatwas revealed in the Final Solution, in l'univers concentrationnaire,cannot be misunderstood, and the only way survival is possible, and thepreservation of creative power, is if we recognize the zero point that isAuschwitz. Why couldn't this clarity of vision be fruitful? At the bottom of allgreat realizations, even if they are born of unsurpassed tragedies, there liesthe greatest European value of all, the longing for liberty, which suffuses ourlives with something more, a richness, making us aware of the positive fact ofour existence, and the responsibility we all bear for it.

It makes me especially happy to be expressing these thoughts in my nativelanguage: Hungarian. I was born in Budapest, in a Jewish family, whose maternalbranch hailed from the Transylvanian city of Kolozsvár (Cluj) and the paternalside from the southwestern corner of the Lake Balaton region. My grandparentsstill lit the Sabbath candles every Friday night, but they changed their name toa Hungarian one, and it was natural for them to consider Judaism their religionand Hungary their homeland. My maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust;my paternal grandparents' lives were destroyed by Mátyás Rákosi's Communistrule, when Budapest's Jewish old age home was relocated to the northern borderregion of the country. I think this brief family history encapsulates andsymbolizes this country's modern-day travails. What it teaches me, though, isthat there is not only bitterness in grief, but also extraordinary moralpotential. Being a Jew to me is once again, first and foremost, a moralchallenge. If the Holocaust has by now created a culture, as it undeniably has,its aim must be that an irredeemable reality give rise by way of the spirit torestoration - a catharsis. This desire has inspired me in all my creativeendeavors.

Though I am nearing the end of my speech, I must confess I still have notfound the reassuring balance between my life, my works and the Nobel Prize. Fornow I feel profound gratitude - gratitude for the love that saved me andsustains me still.