Title of the paper:
“Fiction as Healing: Memory, Trauma, and Forgetting in Imre Kertész’s work”
Abstract: In 1961, many years after his liberation, the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész started writing Fatelessness in an uncontrolled effort to rid himself of the burden of memory, although he was aware of the difficulty of representing his experience in Auschwitz. Kertész solved the paradox by presenting the past in the form of a novel with clearly autobiographical echoes, whose value nevertheless the author underrates. The desirable distance has been obtained by resorting to fiction in detriment of an exact account of the past. Rather than a recollection of past events, he set to work building and creating, as if producing images (W.Benjamin). For Kertész, resorting to creative imagination enables him to write about the Holocaust, and made transfiguring traumatic experience feasible. This depersonalisation of the past in a kind of “Verfremdungseffekt”, allowed the author to take on the role of an uninvolved and unemotional spectator of his own fate, ensuring the catharsis needed nevertheless.
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