The literary truth of moral testimony in Imre Kertesz's novels

The article discusses the heritage of the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. His creative work is considered in the context of the problem of testimony, which united around itself a variety of areas of human science, such as history, sociology, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, etc. at the end of the 20th century. Fiction can be included in this line as a special verbal space, in which traumatic experience that is not discussed in discursive-rational practices is expressed. The aim of this article is to show that literature not only represents moral testimony, but itself turns out to be true moral testimony, and thus is a well-known alternative to documentary chronicles, legal evidence or memoir prose. Given the material of the Hungarian author's novels, we demonstrate that four figures can act as a witness. Firstly, the author who was an eyewitness to the Holocaust. Secondly, it is the main character to whom the writer delegates his tragic experience. Thirdly, the reader involved in the textual continuum as a secondary witness. Finally, it is the language itself, which in "poetry after Auschwitz" (Adorno) undergoes radical changes. In the novel Fatelessness (1975), Kertesz trusts the description of events to a teenager, whose naive view of the world and the factual way of the first-hand account elevate fiction to the rank of live report from the scene of the accident. In the book Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990), the protagonist voluntarily chooses the Sisyphean labour of writing: he associates his craft with the mission of witnessing and abandons normal life in favor of the painful work of memory. Liquidation (2003), which is built as a narrative about a lost manuscript, problematizes the discourse of literary evidence, since, on the one hand, the word is endued here with the imaginal force of prophecy, and, on the other hand, it is doomed to an existential failure, in which, nevertheless, the inexpressible is captured. In addition, a distinctive feature of all Kertesz's novels remains their intertextuality, thanks to which the voices of other witness writers, with whom the author is in a constant dialogue, are heard in his works. To reconstruct the history of the creation of Kertesz's literary work his essays and diary notes were used (Gallery Diary (1992); "Holocaust as a Culture" (1993); "I is another" (1997); "Language in Exile" (2001)), which made it possible to supplement the fictitious plan of the testimony with theoretical reflections.