Atonal Prose

Until this interview is translated from Hungarian, we'll have to suffice with the pullquote on Sign and Sight: Imre Kertesz, the Nobel Prize winner, on modern writing. I think he has a persuasive argument:

"Back then writing was unproblematic, because all of existence didn't hang in the balance and the stories literally gushed from these writers' pens. Mozart, too, was a well-spring of wondrous, joyful abundance. Today a contemporary composer can be happy if he makes it to his second symphony. Something has happened in the world that has made art unnatural. It's as if our natural powers were blocked at the source. Perhaps our linguistic reserves are depleted. We have been confronted with the fact that humans are capable of something unimaginable. That's how atonal prose came about. Atonal music appeared after World War I, when composers were confronted by the emptiness of the language they had used until then. I call the new prose atonal because it has to deal with the fact that the fundamental ethical and moral consensus – the keynote – is lacking. Today words mean something different in every mouth. Prose must also reflect this, but in doing so it loses its natural purpose: that I tell a story, while the audience listens in amazement. If you fail to express the essence of this turn of events, you're no longer a writer, and miss out on your own life and times."

He does not mention the other stylistic choice, irony, which also explodes the multivalence of language. Still, I think he is very much on to something here, but this is the kind of point of view that prevails more in continental Europe. We in the United States tend to look upon the 20th century as more of a triumphal story, and so I don't think we have much patience for this worldview. The fact that we Americans value "narrative" so much in both fiction and non- reflects this ideological gulf.