Read Online Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész - Free Book Online Page A

with my wife during our relationship and then at the beginning of our marriage, likewise taught me that this state, to wit that is to say happiness, also has an adverse effect on my work. So first of all I took a hard look at my work, as to what it really is and why it creates demands that are so oppressive, or at any rate tiring and often frankly unattainable, virtually suicidal; and even if I was then still groping far away—God, and how far—from true clear-sightedness, from a recognition of the true nature of my work, which is in essence nothing other than to dig, to keep on digging to the end, the grave that others have started to dig for me in the air; at any rate, I recognized that as long as I am working I am, and if I were not working, who knows, would I be? could I be? so in this way the most deadly serious associations are sustained between my continued sustenance and my work, one precondition of which, it seems, must be, I supposed (because, however sadly this may reflect on me, I was unable to suppose otherwise), unhappiness, though not of course unhappiness of the sort that would immediately deprive me of even the possibility of my working, such as illness, homelessness, poverty, to say nothing of prison and the like, but rather the sort of unhappiness that women alone can confer on me. As a result, and especially since at the time I happened to be reading Schopenhauer’s speculation “On the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual,” which can be found in one of the volumes of
Parerga and
Paralipomena
, a set of which I latched upon as plunder in an antiquarian bookshop during the period of library liquidations following the country’s great ethnic upheavals and wave of emigration, moreover so cheaply that even I was able to afford the four bulky black tomes, survivors of censorships, book burnings, pulpings, and all manner of other book-Auschwitzes, as a result I could not entirely rule out the possibility that, to avail myself of that most obsolete expression in wholly obsolete psychoanalysis, I am possibly subject to somewhat of an Oedipus complex, which, after all, taking into account the not exactly orderly circumstances of my younger days, would be little wonder, I supposed now, the only question I asked myself was whether the influence (albeit not the sole determinant, for the mere possibility of this self-analysis was in itself more than encouraging, I supposed) came from the father-son or the mother-son relationship, and the answer I gave myself was that it was most likely the role of the mother’s son, the mother’s rejected son, that manifests itself now and again in my behavior. I even went so far as to construct a hypothesis around this, as the jottings I made at the time testify. According to this, the father’s rejected son inclines more towards a transcendental problematic, whereas the mother’s rejected son, and that is what I had to postulate myself as being, tends towards a more sensory, pliable and impressionable material, towards plasticity, and I supposed ready examples of the former were to be found in Kafka, and of the second in Proust or Joseph Roth. And even though this hypothesis probably rests on an extremely shaky footing, and these days I would know better than not only not to write it down but even to bring it up as a topic for a flagging late-night discussion, all the more because it simply no longer interests me (oh, I’ve moved on a long way since then), and if I still have any recollection of it at all, then it is just as a brief, still aimless and hesitant step on the long, long, who could know how protracted path to true clear-sightedness, or, in other words, conscious self-liquidation; at any rate, it is a fact that the—how shall I put it?—benefit of this complex flowed from me into my work, its harm from my work into me, so I was able to deduce from the apparent deliberateness manifested, if not exactly in