Homepage of Professor Botond Gaál

 FATELESSNESS*

By Professor Dr. Botond Gaál,

Debrecen Reformed Theological University

May 17, 2003

 

I happened to be listening to the radio when they announced the good news: Imre Kertész has been awarded the Nobel Prize for his work entitled “Fateless” / Fatelessness. At once I was overcome by true joy and genuine intrigue. I have not known him before either. I knew I had to make up for something. The following weeks I read “Fatelessness” and later the author’s acceptance speech in Stockholm, – I watched for this with even greater anticipation. I read slowly in order to enjoy the beautiful (Hungarian) language and to be able to integrate myself in the writer’s spiritual environment. I sincerely enjoyed reading the novel, and since I have contemplated many times its intended meaning, how did it go about it, and why did Imre Kertész chose this manner of expression to share his thoughts with humanity. I’ve read and heard opinions on the subject, but I could not fully identify with anyone’s thinking. I decided that I would put in writing what the novel precipitated in me. Surely there will be some who will accept my opinions, others will be prompted to think about what I’ve presented, and I count on a few to be accommodating, but of inherently differing views. I am not at all confident that Imre Kertész himself will agree with me, but I accept the consequences. The author might take interest in what has conceptualized in such a reader as I am; – not a literary professional, but someone who considered his writing merely as a professor of mathematics and physics and Reformed theologian. It is conceivable that along the reactions of the expert peers, he is more interested in precisely such opinions. I don’t know, – I am only hopeful.

 

The novel presents the fate of Gyuri (George, Georgie) Köves, a Jewish youngster. Barely fifteen when during the summer of 1944 his father is summoned for labor draft and he is taken to Auschwitz and then even further away. As a child he survives the inhumane ordeal; miraculously he makes it back home where he lives now. He remembers. His reminiscing prompts the ordinary person to wonder about the management of one’s own fate. Gyuri Köves is the writer himself, and his thoughts were rewarded with the Nobel Prize. It is worth pondering and seriously considering all that has compelled others to come to such a solemn decision.

 

Without a doubt, Imre Kertész through his novel “Fatelessness” wants to address the entire humanity by simultaneously hovering in the realms of the peculiar and universal. 

What takes place here is not documentation by means of a dry report of a period in someone’s life, yet as a matter of fact that is also, because the facts speak for themselves. This is a real life story even considering artistic freedom. In the mean time, this writer spiritually rises above the facts, yet he does not speak to humanity by elevating things into a fantasy world, where everyone may allow his or her imagination to run rampant, and forget about any bond with reality. Both are correct therefore: the writer depicts a real event, one near to us, tangible, while formulating eternal lessons, which keep us

 

* Generally used word in English for the title of the novel is Fateless. The title in Hungarian corresponds to Fatelessness.

preoccupied to our innermost. The peculiar and the universal! How could we ignore the reality of the Holocaust when nearly all of our Jewish brethren mourn a kin? Similarly the future we look forward to and try to shape, our general existence: our homeland, our people, our family, our fellow human beings and ultimately ourselves, are all part of our reality. Do we appreciate the gravity of this? What are our actions; how do we go about it? Are our consciences clear and our deeds wholesome? Focusing even closer I ask: are our everyday lives free of faults, sins, “minor Holocausts” and if not so, and being aware of this reality, how may we alter our destinies? What about someone else’s? With this we have arrived to this intricate task: we must decipher the meaning of “fatelessness”, which sounds odd and intriguing. Everybody comprehends it in a way. I do too. Imre Kertész in his novel has not provided the definition for it either. Maybe it will be beneficial to share our interpretation. Let’s be bold.

 

Firstly, let’s examine “fate”. Let’s ask: what is it? Everybody has a different take on. It is like an attempt by Augustine to define time. He said: “If they do not ask me what time is, I know it, if they do ask me, I do not”. “Fate” behaves in this manner also. We all try to understand it from our own points of view. By experience, most people refer to fate, as a set of circumstances affecting them personally, be those physical, psychological, spiritual, socio-economical or political. By this definition fate is detached from a person, and many are just thankful for their good fortune, or accept whatever fate may bring their way. This doom may be an entity that one needs to be grateful for, but one, which may deal a short hand, and there is no escaping its grip. Vörösmarty has personified it in  “Appeal” thusly: “let fortune bless or fortune curse”. – Others feel that our livelihood greatly depends on the fate we shape for ourselves. Hence the saying: we forge our own fortunes. Yet others see it as alternating domination of the former and the latter resulting in respective conclusions in our lives. Miklós Zrínyi may have thought of this in his slogan: “Sors bona, nihil aliud!” Meaning: a favorable outcome is solely dependent on good luck.

 

Does Imre Kertész perceive fate as simply as this? To a certain extent yes, to a certain extent no. He also states: “anyhow, I am thankful to destiny”. Later on, however, precisely contemplating the issue of fate he surpasses this simplistic formula and points to a dimension in life, which can only be fully understood in retrospect, looking back from the direction of Fatelessness. This explains the reason for the concept of escaping fate or fatelessness appearing only towards the end of the book. – It seems to me that the publisher’s (Magvető) recommendation text from the cover limits itself to the above mentioned, more basic definition of fate, and speaks of the involuntary suffering of external factors leading to loss of the individual fate. We might accept that as valid, however the issue is not that simple. We have to deal with another perspective which projects mankind’s situation differently. As we previously indicated, the novel’s hero is a fifteen year-old boy. Imre Kertész’ sole intention was to write that this youngster has been robbed of his fate? I do not believe so. It is indeed true, that he has been robbed, however a far greater human tragedy has transpired here than we can fathom. The travesty is that one person heavy-handedly created another’s fate. All those people who think that such is fate, or this is fate, have been caught up in this murky torrent of external manipulation of being allowed to determine not only their own, but someone else’s destiny also. Worst of all, by doing this I throw my own fate into this current which drifts it away. I will no longer have any sense of responsibility. The guard from Birkenau could have said in the novel: “this is not my doing, it is my fate”. Someone like that has lost himself but is not fateless yet. His fate dangles above his head, driving him on without his own determination, and thereby not having a destiny of his own after all, since he has no input in forming it. He lives in this awful paradox. He indeed lost his fate also. More precisely his fate perished in this huge undercurrent of fates. We are witnesses to fate stripping itself away from humanity. Behold the eternal human! In a different context the apostle Paul speaks in his epistle to the Romans of being mentally aware of what is right yet still do what is wrong. Such is a person Paul calls a sinner: someone unable to refrain from committing sin in step with the rules of sin. We have earlier mentioned this to mean fate, and now we encounter Paul refer to it in a negative implication as the rule of sin, because it forces men to knowingly ignore acting righteously, and doing the exact opposite, fully aware that is wrong. (Romans 7)

 

More and more challenging issues are coming. We may ask ourselves and others: is there no escape from this bind? Has Imre Kertész only gotten this far? No! Indeed he made it further, at least I feel he intended to, when he declares the “solution” with all his inherent primal attachment: fatelessness! This is the expression the writer employs to shout unto humanity not to elect wickedness but make righteous choices. It already knows what is right. By our initial definition fatelessness is just! At least that is the feel one gets reading the novel. It is worthwhile contemplating why that is so.

 

When the sixteen year-old returns home and discusses the tragic events behind him for the past almost one year, with his Jewish acquaintances in Budapest, he does not emphasize the awfulness. He leaves them with their outrage and goes to look for his mother. On his way he ponders the question of fate and fatelessness. At this point he declares that he does not want to have a “fate”. Fate is bad, for it carries a person somewhere he or she does not want go. In other words, what humanity considers as fate, or created for itself as fate is not well. Mankind was conceived to be free, that’s what it expects of its future. It rejects a haunting destiny created by others. Live, at last, without a fate! We could understand the writer’s intentions as such. His perspective to structure the future is not by way of the past evil, not via humanity’s wickedness, but projecting back from a happier future into the present fateless state. This explains that although as a flesh-and-blood human being he resents the tragic events, and experiences a generalized spite, the more dominant personality turns him towards the happy “fatelessness”. This is where the novel ends.

 

However nicely we try to see things in the novel, Imre Kertész has a different idea about fatelessness. Based on his Stockholm speech he understands fatelessness as a state, or life situation in which a human being has become depersonalized, floating in history’s deluge of fates, and wants a return to a life with a personality. He desires to re-establish himself in a state of liberty, where he may regain control of his own destiny. Fatelessness may be understood as that in our second approach, because that is how the author meant it too. However he also views this depersonalization or loss of fate as a consequence of a human on human interaction. This must be gotten away from, reclaiming life from history’s imprisonment, from fate, from the depersonalized state of fatelessness.

 

How can the reading of the novel lead to fatelessness being understood in such a controversial way? What is the message intended for humanity in general? Imre Kertész reveals that he was born a Jew but did not receive religious education. A family acquaintance, his step-uncle Lajos takes him to pray before his father’s labor-draft. They are all aware of the gravity of the situation, but are hopeful. They even pray. Imre Kertész later on recalls this prayer with pleasant emotions; still later at the labor camp in Buchenwald he regrets not being able to utter even a few words of prayer in Yiddish. This issue of religion does not surface any more. This fifteen year-old almost never assumes any inherent evil in the worst of people. He maintains his sense of humor for a while, but all along refrains from cursing and damning those who hurt him. He does not repay evil with evil, not even in thought. He remembers the toughest situations in life having a “silver lining”, which then and there meant something enormous, - it meant life. His human dignity didn’t allow his sense of righteousness to expire in the worst of circumstances. As far as I understand “camp-happy” is someone who is able to distinguish some goodness in the world. There is something good in the midst of all that is dreadful or cruel; we just haven’t been able to discover it yet. “Goodness” is not fully extinct in the world. He has lived and continues to live in this spirit. Although not a religious man, subconsciously he realized an important truth, one which has been well known to Scripture reading folks from the Old Testament. Fatelessness indicates something the Jewish people has been aware of and has proclaimed for thousands of years: it is inconceivable and unbearable to have one person legislate another, thereby determining someone else’s fate. This almost qualified as blasphemy, because Jewish life was governed by laws; however these originated from God, not men. This is the core of the Jewish religious belief system, and is also accepted by Christianity. In this aspect, therefore, fate is neither a set of circumstances, neither something moldable by a fellow human being, but a stage set up by God. This is a form of eternal freedom within the limits of the divine commandments of love. From this point forth we enter a new dimension again, one which extends beyond the intentions of Imre Kertész. Christianity can comment on “fatelessness”, so let’s not detour the issue. It could get interesting!

 

From this approach the issue of fatelessness contains the supposition that Earth would’ve been free of iniquity had mankind heed God’s commands and not commit evil against his fellow men. This was the purpose for our prior question: is there no escape for man from his miserable state? Do we really struggle in a prearranged situation of doom?

 

The writer, bound by intellectual neutrality, accentuates fleeing fatelessness as a solution, instilling this as liberty beyond words in the hearts of men. Christianity offers solutions also, in spite of the fact that the word fate is almost missing from its terminology. Apostle Paul already points to the availability of salvation in Christ. Through Christian fatefulness he formulates it as:”because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death”. (Romans 8:2, NIV). This, on the other hand means, that I do possess a fate, and this is the freedom of living in Christ. Imre Kertész’ “fatelessness” by Christian ideology is this kind of freedom; this is where it wants to draw our attention. This perception allows fatelessness to be a “good” thing and this may result in man’s happiness. His intended message for mankind is the same as Christianity’s, but by different modalities, in a different ideological and devotional dimension. We will not be able to eradicate fate, as such, from this world, - the two co-exist, essentially together even with sinful men. For a believer, in the mean time, fate has been conquered and “good fate” does exist in the world. We refer to this as Gospel, the good news, the guidelines for our living.  While others may use the term destiny, or refer to a return from fatelessness, we believe Christ’s good news! General life-experience presents dismal facts in this regard, since recovery of our destinies is nothing but a catchphrase, a fantasy or a swell idea. That’s how it stayed in the novel also. It is like the scene when the free Gyuri Köves on his way to meet his mother looks ahead, and “sees the space expanding and fading away in eternity, and beauty in the violet clouds in the purple sky above bluish hilltops”. I could restate this in terms of the fate envisioned by Imre Kertész, and the one defining his life, forcing him towards his peril, not be any more, but be replaced by the self-fulfilled person in his own infinitely free existence. The dilemma however, sadly realized by him also, is that this desired freedom has not come to fruition due to newer political factors shaping people’s destinies, including his. We are far from the previously detailed fate in the Christian sense. On the contrary, we are dealing with the Christianity-abhorring regime of Rákosi and Stalin, with its caged spirit of devilish fate-creations. He experienced the “objectivity” of this fate prior to and following the Revolution of 1956. We learned all this from his speech at the Royal Swedish Academy.

 

There is another important issue here not to be ignored from Christianity’s perspective. We must face the charge that the Holocaust happened within the Christian cultural domain. Imre Kertész makes a mention of this in his presentation in Stockholm. If Christianity had anything to do, in any shape or form, with the Holocaust, we must commence our discussion repentantly and apologetically. We must apologize even instead of those no longer alive. It is beneficial to pay attention how Christianity manifest itself on the subject of fate and fatelessness. Imre Kertész by fatelessness directs people’s attention to its desire for freedom, which could be imagined as an absolute personal autonomy. This literally would mean the possibility of mankind creating its own laws and rules, - to determine its own destiny, not be submissive to others. A Christian point of view does not permit the existence of such an absolute autonomy of complete self-governance. We made mention of this earlier. Such a situation is considered in the context of autonomy assuming heteronomy, the presumption of the existence of a different entity, who determines the laws and rules for us. This Different Entity for any Christian person is God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Examples of these heteronomic guidelines are the Ten Commandments or Jesus’ “Golden Rule”. Whoever faithfully accepts and adopts these, and along these the other Christian rules of conduct, is truly a Christian. Well then, such a person does shape another’s life in many ways. We may consider our children’s upbringing. Their autonomy has not reached a satisfactory level, and that is what qualifies them to be children, therefore in need of such nurturing. A responsible Christian parent indeed significantly defines his or her children’s lives, as does a schoolteacher, who by his activity alters his pupils’ fates. By who’s authority? From the Christian perspective the correct answer would be: by the authority of heteronomy! Accordingly, a Christian person acts on behalf of another, but never on the liberal basis of autonomy, not despotically, but always in step with the divine heteronomic rules.

 

Consequently, a Christian person does not have at his disposal absolute autonomy, since his actions are bound by these accepted divine heteronomic laws. He allows these to lead and guide his liable actions. It gets dangerous when mankind imagines and demands unlimited autonomy for himself, and accomplishes this by domineering over others. This is very distant from Christianity. Such a person has the delusion of being his own and the whole world’s ruler, not realizing that he sank back into a certain barbarism. Worst of all, by his barbarism he may extend his domination over people. That is what the German Nazis have done, and those religious leaders who supported them have perpetrated the same error. Unfortunately, we had our Arrow Cross party also. This is tragic, since heteronomy has been discarded, and the situation was only evaluated based on human autonomy. We have to be blunt: we cannot call them Christians. They were blind to the extent of attempting to explain Christian doctrines. In the mean time the Jews figured or believed that their miserable fates came from God, which could not be further from the truth, since the SS brigades and the Nazis could not have been executors of God’s will. For this reason the entire Holocaust exceeds human comprehension and its character is indescribable, because God’s chosen people have fallen victim to an ungodly fate. 

This could be referred to as Evil, - not an impersonal materialization of wickedness, but the irreparable sin of mankind, already far departed from and denouncing God. Therefore the Holocaust was the malicious deed of an entity denying Christianity, not a member of any cultural sphere, having shed all humane characteristics.

 

An intellectually honest Christian at this junction must recall multitudes of professing Christians. All faithful Sub-Carpathian Reformed ministers were sentenced to seven or eight or ten years of Gulag. Many perished, some survived. During the long years of hard labor in frigid temperatures were they yearning to escape fatelessness, to regain their autonomy? Hardly! Many admittedly prayed for their torturers and placed their trust in God. They were gladly prisoners for their faith in Christ, steadfastly believing even during this persecution. Further, they have not become depersonalized, didn’t feel fateless, but their true identities have come shining trough. Akin to the galley slaved ministers, they firmly believed that God was present with them then and there. Their faith has, if you will, elevated them above their fate and in the course of their harshest suffering they felt free in their souls. In comparison to ordinary wisdom this meant a class improvement, a historically unprecedented psychological and spiritual freedom, and certainly strength. Assurance of living in Christ rescued them from the human concept of fate or fatelessness, elevating them to a different level of being. Many of them are still alive and humbly work, as they have before. Their voices are almost inaudible because they serve Christ, their Lord and Savior, not men!

 

It is evident now that is not easy to conceptually understand the issues relating to fate, fatelessness and human liberty. In my opinion with Fatelessness Imre Kertész dared collective humanity and collective Christianity by prompting the senses of both believers and non-believers. It will remain and eternal question how wrapped our way of thinking is when it comes to allowing fate to determine our existence, what is the nature of this defining entity, and how may we broaden our views to the uninhibited acceptance of fate! This would be the culmination of human freedom. As Christians we profess that we have won this unrestrained fate in Christ Jesus! Had humanity lived and behaved accordingly, history could have flown differently, and we need not roam around seeking the solutions for fatelessness. In order to achieve this, Christianity should indeed live their fate-endurance in Christ, and consequently history also shall improve.