Heureka!

For now, though, I still have trouble understanding the gap that I sense between thehigh honor and my life and work. Perhaps I lived too long under dictatorships, in a hostile, relentlesslyalien intellectual environment, to have developed a distinct literary consciousness; even to contemplate sucha thing would have been useless. Besides, all I heard from all sides was that what I gave so much thought to,the "topic" that forever preoccupied me, was neither timely nor very attractive. For this reason,and also because I happen to believe it, I have always considered writing a highly personal, private matter.

Not that such a matter necessarily precludes seriousness - even if this seriousness didseem somewhat ludicrous in a world where only lies were taken seriously. Here the notion that the world is anobjective reality existing independently of us was an axiomatic philosophical truth. Whereas I, on a lovelyspring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, myown life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alienforces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded - and which I had to take back from "History", thisdreadful 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 of Communist Hungary, of "thriving andflourishing" Socialism. If the world is an objective reality that exists independently of us, then humansthemselves, even in their own eyes, are nothing more than objects, and their life stories merely a series ofdisconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder at, but which they themselves have nothing to dowith. It would make no sense to arrange the fragments in a coherent whole, because some of it may be far tooobjective for the subjective Self to be held responsible for it.

A year later, in 1956, the Hungarian Revolution broke out. For a single moment thecountry turned subjective. Soviet tanks, however, restored objectivity before long.

I do not mean to be facetious. Consider what happened to language in the twentiethcentury, what became of words. I daresay that the first and most shocking discovery made by writers in ourtime was that language, in the form it came down to us, a legacy of some primordial culture, had simply becomeunsuitable to convey concepts and processes that had once been unambiguous and real. Think of Kafka, think ofOrwell, in whose hands the old language simply disintegrated. It was as if they were turning it round andround in an open fire, only to display its ashes afterward, in which new and previously unknown patternsemerged.

But I should like to return to what for me is strictly private - writing. There are afew questions, which someone in my situation will not even ask. Jean-PaulSartre, for instance, devoted an entire little book to the question: For whom do we write? It is aninteresting question, but it can also be dangerous, and I thank my lucky stars that I never had to deal withit. Let us see what the danger consists of. If a writer were to pick a social class or group that he wouldlike, not only to delight but also influence, he would first have to examine his style to see whether it is asuitable means by which to exert influence. 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 eachand every one. And even if he did, it wouldn't do any good. He would have to rely on his image of hiswould-be readers, the expectations he ascribed to them, and imagine what would have the effect on himthat he would like to achieve. For whom does a writer write, then? The answer is obvious: he writes forhimself.

At least I can say that I have arrived at this answer fairly straightforwardly. Granted,I had it easier - I had no readers and no desire to influence anyone. I did not begin writing for a specificreason, and what I wrote was not addressed to anyone. If I had an aim at all, it was to be faithful, inlanguage and form, to the subject at hand, and nothing more. It was important to make this clear during theridiculous and sad period when literature was state-controlled and "engagé".

It would be more difficult to answer another, perfectly legitimate though still rathermore dubious question: Why do we write? Here, too, I was lucky, for it never occurred to me that whenit came to this question, one had a choice. I described a relevant incident in my novel Failure. Istood in the empty corridor of an office building, and all that happened was that from the direction ofanother, intersecting corridor I heard echoing footsteps. A strange excitement took hold of me. The sound grewlouder and louder, and though they 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 huge procession was pounding its waydown that corridor. And at that point I perceived the irresistible attraction of those footfalls, thatmarching multitude. In a single moment I understood the ecstasy of self-abandonment, the intoxicating pleasureof melting into the crowd - what Nietzsche called, in a different context though relevantly for this momenttoo, 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 the wall, to keep me from yieldingto this magnetic, seductive force.

I have related this intense moment as I (had) experienced it. The source from which itsprang, like a vision, seemed somewhere outside of me, not in me. Every artist is familiar with such moments.At one time they were called sudden inspirations. Still, I wouldn't classify the experience as an artisticrevelation, but rather as an existential self-discovery. What I gained from it was not my art - its toolswould not be mine for some time - but my life, which I had almost lost. The experience was about solitude, amore difficult life, and the things I have already mentioned - the need to step out of the mesmerizing crowd,out of History, which renders you faceless and fateless. To my horror, I realized that ten years after I hadreturned from the Nazi concentration camps, and halfway still under the awful spell of Stalinist terror, allthat remained of the whole experience were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes. Like it didn't evenhappen to me, as people are wont to say.

It is clear that such visionary moments have a long prehistory. Sigmund Freud wouldtrace them back to a repressed traumatic experience. And he may well be right. I, too, am inclined toward therational approach; mysticism and unreasoning rapture of all kinds are alien to me. So when I speak of avision, I must mean something real that assumes a supernatural guise - the sudden, almost violent eruption ofa slowly ripening thought within me. Something conveyed in the ancient cry, "Eureka!" - "I'vegot it!" But what?

I once said that so-called Socialism for me was the petite madeleine cake that, dippedinto Proust's tea, evoked in him the flavor of bygone years. For reasons having to do with the language Ispoke, I decided, after the suppression of the 1956 revolt, to remain in Hungary. Thus I was able to observe,not as a child this time but as an adult, how a dictatorship functions. I saw how an entire nation could bemade to deny its ideals, and watched the early, cautious moves toward accommodation. I understood that hope isan instrument of evil, and the 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 relatively limited,rather tired, even decadent dictatorship? By the nineteen-sixties, the dictatorship in Hungary had reached astate of consolidation that could almost be called a societal consensus. The West later dubbed it, withgood-humored forbearance, "goulash Communism". It seemed that after the initial foreign disapproval,Hungary's own version quickly turned into the West's favorite brand of Communism. In the miry depths of thisconsensus, one either gave up the struggle or found the winding paths to inner freedom. A writer's overhead,after all, is very low; to practice his profession, all he needs are paper and pencil. The nausea anddepression to which I awoke each morning led me at once into the world I intended to describe. I had todiscover that I had placed a man groaning under the logic of one type of totalitarianism in anothertotalitarian system, and this turned the language of my novel into a highly allusive medium. If I look backnow and size up honestly the situation I was in at the time, I have to conclude that in the West, in a freesociety, I probably would not have been able to write the novel known by readers today as Fateless, thenovel singled out by the Swedish Academy for the highest honor.

No, I probably would have aimed at something different. Which is not to say that I wouldnot have tried to get at the truth, but perhaps at a different kind of truth. In the free marketplace of booksand ideas, I, too, might have wanted to produce a showier fiction. For example, I might have tried to break uptime in my novel, and narrate only the most powerful scenes. But the hero of my novel does not live his owntime in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is reallyhis. He doesn't remember; he exists. 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 great and tragic moments, he has tolive through everything, which is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself.

But the method led to remarkable insights. Linearity demanded that each situation thatarose be completely filled out. It did not allow me, say, to skip cavalierly over twenty minutes of time, ifonly because those twenty minutes were there before me, like a gaping, terrifying black hole, like a massgrave. I am speaking of the twenty minutes spent on the arrival platform of the Birkenau extermination camp -the time it took people clambering down from the train to reach the officer doing the selecting. I more orless remembered the twenty minutes, but the novel demanded that I distrust my memory. No matter how manysurvivors' accounts, reminiscences and confessions I had read, they all agreed that everything proceeded alltoo quickly and unnoticably. The doors of the railroad cars were flung open, they heard shouts, the barking ofdogs, men and women were abruptly separated, and in the midst of the hubbub, they found themselves in front ofan officer. He cast a fleeting glance at them, pointed to something with his outstretched arm, and before theyknew it they were wearing prison clothes.

I remembered these twenty minutes differently. Turning to authentic sources, I firstread Tadeusz Borowski's stark, unsparing and self-tormenting narratives, among them the story entitled"This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen". Later, I came upon a series of photographs of humancargo arriving at the Birkenau railroad platform - photographs taken by an SS soldier and found by Americansoldiers in a former SS barracks in the already liberated camp at Dachau. I looked at these photographs inutter 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 of idleness and helplessness fadedfrom their memories. And when I thought how all this was repeated the same way for days, weeks, months andyears on end, I gained an insight into the mechanism of horror; I learned how it became possible to turn humannature against one's own life.

So I proceeded, step by step, on the linear path of discovery; this was my heuristicmethod, if you will. I realized soon enough that I was not the least bit interested in whom I was writing forand why. One question interested me: What have I still got to do with literature? For it was clear to me thatan uncrossable line separated me from literature and the ideals, the spirit associated with the concept ofliterature. The name of this demarcation line, as of many other things, is Auschwitz. When we write aboutAuschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only writea black novel about Auschwitz, or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins inAuschwitz and is still not over. By which I mean that nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverseor refute Auschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense.

It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as a complaint - that Iwrite about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certainqualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of libraries? Which writer today is not a writer ofthe Holocaust? One does not have to choose the Holocaust as one's subject to detect the broken voice that hasdominated modern European art for decades. I will go so far as to say that I know of no genuine work of artthat does not reflect this break. It is as if, after a night of terrible dreams, one looked around the world,defeated, helpless. I have never tried to see the complex of problems referred to as the Holocaust merely asthe insolvable conflict between Germans and Jews. I never believed that it was the latest chapter in thehistory of Jewish suffering, which followed logically from their earlier trials and tribulations. I never sawit as a one-time aberration, a large-scale pogrom, a precondition for the creation of Israel. What Idiscovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the Europeantraveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.

Now the only thing to reflect on is where we go from here. The problem of Auschwitz isnot whether to draw a line under it, as it were; whether to preserve its memory or slip it into theappropriate pigeonhole of history; whether to erect a monument to the murdered millions, and if so, what kind.The real 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 was characterized most accurately by the Hungarian Catholic poetJános Pilinszky when he called it a "scandal". What he meant by it, clearly, is that Auschwitzoccurred in a Christian cultural environment, so for those with a metaphysical turn of mind it can never beovercome.

Old prophecies speak of the death of God. Since Auschwitz we are more alone, that muchis certain. We must create our values ourselves, day by day, with that persistent though invisible ethicalwork that will give them life, and perhaps turn them into the foundation of a new European culture. I considerthe prize with which the Swedish Academy has seen fit to honor my work as an indication that Europe againneeds the experience that witnesses to Auschwitz, to the Holocaust were forced to acquire. The decision -permit me to say this - bespeaks courage, firm resolve even - for those who made it wished me to come here,though they could have easily guessed what they would hear from me. What was revealed in the Final Solution,in l'univers concentrationnaire, cannot be misunderstood, and the only way survival is possible, andthe preservation of creative power, is if we recognize the zero point that is Auschwitz. Why couldn't thisclarity of vision be fruitful? At the bottom of all great realizations, even if they are born of unsurpassedtragedies, there lies the greatest European value of all, the longing for liberty, which suffuses our liveswith something more, a richness, making us aware of the positive fact of our existence, and the responsibilitywe all bear for it.