I write “the Old Boy” who writes Köves, who in turn writes the letter addressed to Berg.
“That was when I raised my hand and struck a defenceless prisoner in the face”—who writes that?
Köves.
And Köves is who, exactly?
You can’t be serious. “I am Madame Bovary”—for any lesser risk it’s better if one doesn’t sit down to write a novel.
It seems that I’m not only lacking something in the humour department but in the horror department as well. I don’t know you to be the sort of person who would strike somebody in the face.
You can’t know, just as Köves does not know himself: we spoke about that earlier on when we talked about him being concealed in his insignificance. Here you, the reader, step with Köves into a world where the aimlessly stumbling personality has no foothold, and if your “existence has gone to sleep,” it is easy to make — or let’s say rather: it can easily happen—the first and decisive step, from which there is no turning back.
If one accepts that argument, then it would be impossible to call any mass murderer to account.
You are forgetting that as a writer I am not concerned with calling people to account but with accurate portrayal. In any case, I — and the “I” here is an unknown factor, a passivity — so, I was lucky and I was not exposed to any haunting moment like that.
Do you really think it is just a matter of luck?
I don’t know. On the basis of the experiences I gained in camps and dictatorships, the resilience of human nature is inexhaustible. When I wrote that novel — almost thirty years after the fact — I certainly had to ponder the possibility of such a moment. In the last analysis, the imagination is also a kind of reality, and if I really wished to respond to the issues raised in the novel, then I had to carry out in my imagination things that had not happened in reality if only in order that the fictional Köves should experience the “definitive act” and place it at Berg’s disposal.
Before we began this conversation, I sat down to re-read “I, the Executioner,” the novel-in-the-novel-in-the-novel of Fiasco, which provides an apology for mass murder. Do I understand correctly that the state when a person is freed from his own personality and completely subsumes it to the executioner’s role is one that Berg calls grace?
Or that of the victim. “It might perhaps be pleasant to be alternately victim and executioner,” Baudelaire remarks in My Heart Laid Bare on the basis of who knows what earlier experiences he may have had. The essence of both roles is a complete release from the burden of personality — that is why Berg is searching for a “definitive act” that would set the executioner on the “salvational” route of mass murder.
What do you mean here by a “definitive act”?
It’s an act which does not ensue from the propensities, character, or individuality of the person concerned but solely from the situation, which commands the terrain like a foreign power. The moment takes command, and you get out of it as best you can. You have to free yourself of the colossal tension: all of a sudden, you cave in and abandon any resistance — relinquish yourself to the line of least resistance, one could say.
Is this not the same thing as what elsewhere you refer to as fatelessness?
In essence the same thing; it’s just that the idiom employed in Fiasco is different.
There it is referred to as “grace,” and it is given a positive connotation. Why is that?
Because in Berg’s view, man has become superfluous in a dictatorship. The only way he can find the grace is by what he refers to as “service,” “serving the order.”
In the form of either villain or victim … If we did not have the written records that were left behind by the various dictatorships, I would venture to say that we would have no idea what this man was talking about. Even as things are, his figure is fairly shrouded in mist. Who exactly is he?
I suppose that in Berg’s figure I was constructing an imaginary representation of the “Old Boy” whom one gets to know in the frame novel. He’s a man of absolute theory, who is pondering “a plan for a dissertation, on a not-too-ambitious scale, concerning the possibilities for an aesthetic mediation of violence.”
In other words, the figure of the “Old Boy” is replicated, as it were, in the Köves novel?
Precisely — rather like a cinema film shot through a prismatic lens. The scenes with Köves and Berg, followed by Köves’s epistolary confession, are the culmination of the novel, the place where the entire burden of argument is brought to a terse climactic point around them.
One in which Berg goes mad, whereas Köves carries on and then suddenly finds himself in the L-shaped corridor … which is where he is overtaken by a moment of rapture.
Of enlightenment.
My apologies for the loose language. In any event it is a matter of a mystical moment, an experience that one cannot recount in the language of rationality but which, one could say, abruptly changes one’s life. What in fact did happen to you in the corridor?
I have already said this several times, and I fear that I shall be guilty of repeating myself. Or rather I fear that I won’t be able to put it like … like for example …
Like you put it in Stockholm.
Stockholm is several light years away from the place where we are holding this conversation. And it may well be that our path does not lead to Stockholm, anyway.
What do you mean by that?
That we have yielded to this flawed logic several times already. We are sitting here at total ease and safety at the endpoint of our story and contentedly chomping away about the splendid triumphal procession. We are divesting ourselves of any risk, because every step we take is another step toward the goal, and we can have complete confidence in each and every step: everything we do is correct, because we are progressing towards our goal. That is why we boarded the train that chuffed toward Auschwitz; that is why I was not shoved to the left by the doctor at the Birkenau selection; that is why kindly hands hauled me out from among the corpses at Buchenwald, and so on … in that way the story would come to pass, except it would not be a Job’s story of making atonement, as you might suppose, but of a vulgar kitsch, the career of a ridiculous buffoon. Every individual story is kitsch, because it evades the rules; every single survivor attests purely to a breakdown in the machinery that has occurred in an individual case. Truth belongs only to the dead, no one else.
But the dead keep their counsel … the truth belongs to those who speak out. You yourself said that; I read it somewhere in Galley Boat-Log.16 Let me put rather the following question: What was the immediate outcome, or consequence if you prefer, of the enlightenment you underwent in the L-shaped corridor?