Though various literary narrative theories disagree in several aspect and question each other’s statements through amendments, adjustments and involvement of new perspectives, there seems to be a certain consensus about three possible narrative perspectives: either an omnipotent and all-knowing author is telling a story or it is told from the personal perspective of a character or we have a self-narration where the narrator and a character (possibly in the main role) are one and the same person. It is a peculiar case evolved as a result of the very impact of the film: a neutral narrator giving an account of events as the object lens of the camera. The classic film telling is mostly expressed from the position of an „invisible observer”, which in addition to a neutral literary narrator mainly corresponds to the author’s perspective. The personal narrative position also has its counterpart on film when the objective camera becomes the subjective perspective of a character. Self-narration is, however, not possible on film, more accurately, film experiments aiming at the creation of this have so far remained interesting experiments yet with questionable results.
Imre Kertész’s Fateless is a self-novel in which the poetic role of the first person singular carries fundamental importance. The main character, the fourteen-year-old Gyuri Köves tells himself how he was upheld in Budapest in the fall of 1944 and taken to Auschwitz with several others, then to the concentration camps in Buchenwald and Zeitz. Gyuri Köves knows nothing about concentration camps or actually, about Nazism, he only has superficial and uninterpretable knowledge of his Jewish origin for which he is a condemned and possibly persecuted being. He is more or less unsuspectingly drifted towards deportation and even attaches certain illusions triggered by others to the civilisation-wise and technically advanced Germans. His story and naďve perspective getting himself into the story itself can be regarded as relatively renown today, owing the Imre Kertész’s Nobel Prize.
It is less renowned that this naďve self-perspective is actually not as naďve as it may seem, that is it may only be interpreted within certain limitations on a (child’s) psychological level. In plain words, Fateless is not only about Imre Kertész depicting deportation from the perspective of an immature teenager’s inscape and the sufferings within the camp, but also about a certain knowledge surplus engraved in his perspective through language devices, the knowledge surplus of a surviving adult on the holocaust, in a certain sense that of the reader. Kertész created a narrator through his self-hero in whose account of the events external considerations and possible interpretations related thereto are not uttered, yet his naivety is unavoidably confronted by the historic knowledge of the reader. Thus, narration is infiltrated by morbid and cruel irony leaning into the absurd. Inhumane and unutterably horrifying becomes „natural” and consequently necessary here. This narration carries an irresolvable conflict between limitations and arbitrariness of the survivor’s experiences and realisations following one another as if bound by fate, and the horizon of experiences in the post-Auschwitz period. The novel thus depicts the painful and disquieting impossibility of closing the holocaust discourse.
It should once again be stressed that all this is primarily achieved in the novel by using language devices. Not only by using the first person singular of the teenage hero’s speech but also by the syntactic units and sentences expressing guilelessness, curiosity, incomprehension, inability and mainly the expectations of fate developing in present tense from one moment to the other. So if one ventures into adapting Imre Kertész’s novel, Fateless for the big screen, then this originally and essentially language aspect shall (or should) be transformed onto film above all. Needless to say, this seems to be an impossible mission, though it may not be precluded that it is feasible through some genial invention, still it has to be pinpointed that Lajos Koltai’s film version did not succeed in this regard. What is more, not even traces of attempts can be found in the film.
Scattered fragments should definitely not be regarded as somewhat of an attempt where the camera presents wobbling, titubant upside-down images through the eyes of a nearly senseless Gyuri Köves hanging from the shoulders of a prisoner transporting the sick (or the dead?); or the frequently employed solution of the narrator hero’s voice uttered from outside the picture. A few brief fragments of the novel are told in the voice of Marcell Nagy in the main role from time to time „during” the images of Fateless, yet without much conviction, a possible reason being the acting-wise rather faint tone of voice and speech of the boy otherwise having a suggestive face. These may, of course, be possible solutions in any film, but not if arbitrary and random.
The off-commentaries of the hero in Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum, also based on a self-novel, express something from the worm's-eye-view of the novel already through the mere defiantly sharp and grotesquely screeching voice of the child actor.
Another severe difficulty in its adaptation for the screen is the lack of dialogs in Fateless. More precisely, there are a few, but only as parts of the self-voice as direct quotations in reported speech or in quotes-unquotes. This, in itself, has a sense of detachment, while the quotations are further relativised their structure made up of a single word or phrase as quasi authentic, characteristic fragments of the utterances. Gyuri Köves, for example, recalls the conversation between the „Expert” from the customs house and the German officer in the brick factory as someone not judging their reasoning but presenting „extracts” from it. This he does, if for nothing else, because he was not present, but the „Expert” gave an account of it. Upon reading the „quotation” from the „Expert’s” account carefully, it becomes clear that there was no dialog; the „Expert” presents his own, completely one-sided arguments thus proving to be strikingly absurd. The texts seeming to be „dialogs” carry on with the self-voice, the intermediary medium. Therefore, the direct utterances of characters, possibly their scene-bound appearance independent from Gyuri Köves’s perspective deprive the novel of its form of existence.
On the one hand, there is a novel, Imre Kertész’s Fateless, and on the other hand, there is a film shown across cinemas as the adaptation of this novel for the screen, while it is actually not. The ruling critical reception of the film consistently sees it as such. However, Lajos Koltai’s film follows the plot of the novel accurately, save for a few minor omissions and amendments rendering such narrative theoretical concerns to be pernickety critical niggling. The undisputed box-office success of the film may also argue that such nuisances „do not count”. From a certain perspective, they indeed do not count. They do no count if the film is seen as a historic lesson since it tells a true story of a serious matter of which audiences have insufficient knowledge. It depicts historical relations and human fates continuing to exert their latent impact even on our lives today. They do no count because the film version tells the „tale” of Imre Kertész’s Nobel Prize-winning novel to the masses „coaxing them” (?) into reading it. They do no count because Lajos Koltai’s film tells a filmic story with a grandiose crew and nicety, professional means in a beautiful, effective, „heart-reaching” and poignant manner that can be relived by most viewers. These are obviously cogent reasons from either a cultural policy or film distribution point of view relegating aesthetic considerations to criticism columns read by insiders only.
The situation is further complicated by the script of the film version being written by Imre Kertész himself. Thus, it seems as if he himself had given his blessing to tell his novel in another form. In a filmic form reconstructing the holocaust and the concentration camp as a „set”. There are concerns – uttered among others by Imre Kertész himself, but also by András Jeles or Ingmar Bergman – that the „shame” of war or the holocaust could not be depicted in a feature film, so what Spielberg, Benigni, Polanski and other have done are actually moral and aesthetic sacrileges, the suggestion of a false appearance that the realistic imitation of such horrors by the film industry may authentically represent the actual horrors themselves. Moreover, as György Báron pointed it out on his article on the film version of Fateless (Füstön áttörő fény - „Light breaking through smoke” In: Élet és Irodalom, 18 February 2005), according to Imre Kertész, the holocaust was not a historic event but a „passion-play brought to life”, the camp was not a historic film location but a sacral space. „A concentration camp may only be envisaged as a literary text and not as reality.” While the film version of Fateless involving and approved by Imre Kertész does indeed represent the concentration camp as reality, more accurately as the filmic imitation of reality. Whereas Fateless, as a „literary text”, is exactly about the fact that what happened to Gyuri Köves does not fit into the distinction between the guilty and the innocent presented well in common filmic schemata. „It cannot be, try to understand” – said by Gyuri Köves in reported speech (!) to his neighbours in Budapest at the end of the novel – „that I become neither a winner nor a loser, that I could not be right and that I could not have been wrong, that I could not be the cause or the effect of anything, just try to admit, I was nearly begging that I cannot digest the stupid bitterness that I only be innocent.” Gályanapló („Galley Diary”) reads: „God is Auschwitz, but also who brought me out from Auschwitz. And who obligated and even forced me to give an account because he wanted to hear and know what he did.” Auschwitz is the denial of the freedom of humanity; nevertheless, freedom is the most important question and essential individual mission of man, which „can be fulfilled here, just like anywhere else”.
Therefore it is not only a narrative theory question when we hold the film accountable for the essence, the novelty and the genuineness of Fateless, but also about the provocation through which Kertész placed the holocaust discourse in new light, actually a lot later then the publication of his novel. Accordingly, Auschwitz is a symbolic stage of C20 European civilisation; what happened there was not only outrageous, but also „natural” as attested by the absurd „passion-play” of Gyuri Köves. If its story is deprived of the irony and dismal serenity of the absurd view of the world, then its whole essence is lost. Therefore, it must be advocated in order to protect the masterpiece, the truth and the authenticity of Imre Kertész even if in opposition with Imre Kertész that the film version eradicates this, one could say, corrupts this.
Fateless is otherwise a film produced fairly and aptly, and with great mastery. It is what an exquisite and effective moving picture presentation of Imre Kertész’s story encompassed in a novel should be by the book of public consensus. If the approach of a less conventional viewer with somewhat educated sensitivity and taste is taken, then one, of course, may be repelled by Ennio Morricone’s emotional music, when a „magyarosch”, Franz Liszt-like motif is intonated on the cymbal with a view to the „Hungarian” (?) theme. This is definitely embarrassing, in other words, an attack on the film. It is incomprehensible why professional filmmakers forced this music in this film when there are sequences in which the unexpected, evidence-like impact is attributable to the lack of a musical accompaniment that simply happen almost without a sound. The film should be credited for the ample close-ups not yet highlighted by criticisms. There are beautiful long shots photographed in back-light „breaking through smoke”, the beauty of which presumably aims to illustrate the outrageous conclusions of the novel whereby even concentration camps had their beauty and happiness triggering homesickness later on; but the close-ups in which notable Hungarian actors depicted ugly and grotesque human creatures – such as Miklós Benedek or Ádám Rajhona representing the family members from Budapest, Sándor Zsótér as a German officer in Auschwitz, or Zoltán Bezerédy and Endre Harkányi in the concentration camp ‑ appealed to me more than the technical photographic beauty of the former. And the unknown faces as the boys from the customs house. And, of course, above all, Marcell Nagy in the main role, without whom this film would not be what we find it to be, and whose face – with excellent make-up artist help – plays a key aspect of the story out, which triggers deep emotions and accuses in a certain sense. However, these emotions, these accusations prevent what is an even more important aspect of Fateless: „In the world of murder organised into a system, fear is no longer valid. After Auschwitz, certain older laws of behaviour are not valid anymore. To discard – and to despise – complaining as the only legitimate form of objection. Fateless is a proud work, and for this it (or I) will never be forgiven.” (Gályanapló, 1975)
(Translated by Zsolt Kelemen)
