Imre Kertesz and the use of metaphor
Imre Kertesz won the noble-price deservedly in 2002. He is best known for his writings that deal with either the Shoah or the aftermath thereof. Here, I will just give an example, of how, we can understand his writing as ‘creative’, how it is ‘metaphorical’ in the lacanian sense of creating something new.
In Fatelessness (1970), the 15 year old Györgi, is in Buchenwald, the concentration camp, when the camp is finally freed. He is in a kind of field hospital (the fact that there are hospitals in fact part of the very humiliation of the inmates). On the one hand everyone is there to be gassed, but the existence of ‘hospitals’ give the opposite suggestion, as a parallax view, that ‘if you are sick, you should get help’. The very existence of hospitals in the camps, is therefore contributing the message of adding “insult to injury”, and Kertesz description of such elements are precisely a way of bearing testimony to the Shoah. If I were to put Kertesz work in phrase, he shows that concentration camps are not “impossible to bear witness to”, but that the witness must also be about this “insult to injury”. Much Holocaust-scholarship and art claim (notably something like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, where we only see witnesses evoking an absence). Kertesz precisely insistently ‘represents’ it, but shows that you have to present, precisely the way that the inmates suffered “insult to injury”, that the very carnevalesque character of many things there, shows that there was no “one way”, or that it was not about “instrumentalizing”, simply.
But here I will talk about how such testimony is often give through the use of metaphor in the psychoanalytical (lacanian) sense. By this I mean, that Kertesz’s style often involve kind of surprising turns of phrase, precisely something that ‘tells us something new’. To take just one example, that of the “missing soup” which will immediately ring a bell to any reader of the novel. The only thing the narrator, Györgi, thinks about is the soup. We think this is because he is an inmate, having starved for months, but that precisely his deepest wish is to be freed from the camp. Of course it is, but such a ‘wish’ presuppose that there is still some ‘integrity’ left, some desire for freedom, a minimal of bare survival should already be met. What Kertesz descripes as a startling surprise, is, his wish for the missing soup, the day the camp is freed, paradoxically, he wishes himself also back to the day before, where ‘such things could not pass’. This, far of course from any ‘mitigating’ circumstances, show in a much more precise way, than even Primo Levi, the extend of subhuman level at the camps. Gyergi lies in bed, when a speaker announces that the SS-guards should leave the camp. He gets more and more uneasy about how they will get any food later (he is too weak to walk). Then, suddenly, later the day, the Lagerälteste, in a sublime moment, the box “announces, informed all of us that this was the Lagerältester, the camp senior inmate, speaking. ‘·Kameraden,” he said, audibly truggling with some choking emotion which caused his voice first to falter, then to shrill to an almost high-pitched whine, “wir sind frei!”-we are free”. This is the moment we have been waiting for the whole book, and we then get the announcement in different languages. Finally, we get the announcement in hungarian, Gyorgi’s own nationality.
“Figyelem, figyelem! A magyar Lagerbizotlsag … “-”Attention, this is the Hungarian camp committee … “- amazing, I thought to my elf, I never even suspected there was such a thing. However hard I listened, though, all I heard of from him, as from everyone before, was about freedom, but not a single word about or in reference to the missing soup. I was absolutely delighted, quite naturally, about our being free, but I couldn’t help it, if, from another angle, I fell to thinking, that yesterday, for instance, such a thing could not have happened.” (Kertesz: Fatelessness, 235–236).
Why are these lines so powerful? We get of course first the announcement of totality (comrades, we are free…), then the announcement in each language. There is even the moment of recognition, for the first time in the book, since being hungarian has not helped Gyorgi before, but rather caused him trouble, the constant non-belonging to any group, and now we get for the first time the sense of belonging (he too is addressed in his own language). But, then stylystically with great force put at the end of the phrase, as an absolute reversal, we get “but not a single word about or in reference to the missing soup”. This could be the way we could summarize Kertesz, there is freedom — yet what about “the missing soup”. We would think that ‘being free’ is the moment of precisely being free, whereas the sentence of missing soup, shows that precisely the events from the camp, the way his body has been treated is not ‘free’. I do not mean this in a common-sensical way, that he needs to build up his forces. It is clear that even when he gets food later, the wound of the “missing soup” will remain, not as this concrete soup, but the fact, that he has been so tortured that the thought when he receives freedom is still the soup. This moment, of having lived this, is what gives Kertesz’ literature this radical spark, that puts it apart from other ‘Shoah’-writers, like Primo Levi, great as they are. There is a radicality there.
We can say, that with this turn of phrase Kertesz use a metaphor in a lacanian sense. Not in the sense of that the soup is ‘metaphoric’, but the way that the signifier ‘cuts into the real’, that it brings the effect of the real. Lacan distinguishes between each signifier on the level of understanding. This is what sediments layers of signified. It means adding more information to what we already know, it does not bring about a radical change. We can understand why he would be delighted at being free, delighted at the hungarian voice, but not why he would be much more thinking of the soup. The effect is much stronger, than if he had put the phrase of the soup in the beginning of the sentence, “i was thinking of the missing soup, even as we were free”, for example. Instead, we get the violent reduction “However hard I listened, though, all I heard of from him, as from everyone before, was about freedom”, as though this precisely would be ‘less’ than the missing food: “but not a single word about or in reference to the missing soup.” — as though compared to freedom soup was much more important. The point is that Kertesz in this way, gives us a much more precise testimony of the horror of the camps, than the typical hollywood narrative of being an inmate and ‘free’. This precisely presumes “understanding”: “according to Lacan, something makes sense when it fits into the pre-existing chain. it may add something to the chain without fundamentally altering it or rocking the boat.” (Fink: 71) This is understanding as meaning, it makes sense. Metaphor on the other hand is precisely not meaning, but makes something radically new. We can say, that we don’t need anything new to understand why someone would desire freedom, but why they desire soup (even in the moment of the freedom) this we cannot understand.
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“Metaphor, on the other hand, brings about a new configuration of thoughts establishes a new combination or permutation, a new order in the signifying chain, shakedown of the old order. Connections between signifiers are definitely changed. That kind of modification cannot occur without implicating the subject.” (71).
In my view the “missing soup” is on the level of metaphor, as creating a new relation, making us see something in new ways, that mere understanding cannot. Lacan’s use of “modification” in the real implicating the subject, also makes clear, why, as most of us, get a kind of surge or surprise when reading the lines. I would say this is where language “hits home”, it precisely makes something new available to us.
I am even tempted to say, that Kertesz’ style, precisely by being singular gives us the universal as break with identification. if being interpellated as “free hungarian” is a kind of identification (finally belonging to the group of hungarians), being given an identity, Kertesz in much more radical way, points to the split with this identity, and that we need to establish a different ‘order’ of signifiers.
By assimilating something, you have the sense of being someone, or you imagine yourself as someone (an ego or self), who has accomplished a certain difficult task: you picture yourself as a thinker. “True understanding” — on the the other hand — which could perhaps be rendered in French using the expression se saisir de quelque chose, the emphasis being on the reflexive — is actually a process which goes beyond the automatic functioning of the symbolic order and involves an incursion of the symbolic into the real: the signifier brings forth something new in the real or drains off more of the real into the symbolic.” (Fink, 71).
What Kertesz does is precisely to verbalize the ‘trauma of the real’ of the camps, he ‘cuts into it’, and verbalize it. This does not mean some “mimetic” documentary, since simply showing footage of the camps, shows us nothing of how it is experienced as a trauma for the inmates. This we need precisely literature for, we need someone to ‘cut’ into the real, to drain the real and make it ‘work’ as signifiers. We then get many new signifiers. This means that a certain rigidity of the real is loosened. Instead of fixated on a trauma that prevents any kind of speaking, with Kertesz we have the opposite of ‘silence’, we have insistant speaking (but this speaking is a constant ‘verbalizing’ of the real, not a 1:1 description). Why not? this is because the ‘real’ is not reality. reality is what is already part of the the social and therefore signified, it is the status quo, whereas Shoah remained the trauma as such, that could not be talked about. It is precisely the acerbic style of Kertesz, it’s eloquent paradox, the “missing soup” on the day of freedom, that brings us a witness-situation, and witness means, precisely not simply ‘describing’, but paradoxically as it may sound, it means ‘creating’. It also means, that he does not fit in the identitarian interpellation (free hungarian), but instead in the way he relates to this ‘identity’, which he punctuates with the equivocal “missing soup”, that precisely points to something missing, that has not been made part of his experience, that is not socially recognized. This is also why Kertesz’ metaphor in the sense of making something new is always much more than a mere “insight”. It is what Fink calls “true understanding”, which is really not understanding, (which presuppose a pregiven state to understand):
“True understanding is, of course, a misnomer, in that understanding is precisely short-circuited, unnecessary, irrelevant to the process. What is really implied is that something changes, and that is the point of Lacanian analysis as well: something takes place at the border of the symbolic and the real which has nothing to do with understanding, as it is commonly understood. Hence the irrelevance of the term “insight” in the analytic process: the analysand’s subjective frustration of not understanding what is going on, how the analytic process is supposed to work, what is really at the bottom of his or her neurosis, and so on, in no way hinders the efficacy of psychoanalysis.” (71–72).
The point here, which I think readers can recognize, is that we are not really sure what is going on in Kertesz’ writing, but we precisely feel a ‘surge’, that something is radically new, precisely because it also feels so, it makes ‘effects in the real’. But effects in the real, in psychoanalysis and Kertesz, is precisely not something like “enough talk, we must live first, see things 1st hand”, but precisely “more talk” and “only talk” will loosen the hold of trauma. Yet, this talk is not on the level of understanding in the sense of “more of the same” — it is a “true understanding”, that is it changes precisely the way we think of what was before, we see the world “with new eyes”.
