- نص محاضرة Imre Kertész في حفل تسلم جائزة نوبل للاداب 2002

Imre Kertész

Hungary
b. 1929


The Nobel Prize in Literature 2002




Eurêka !

Avant toute chose, je dois vous faire un aveu,un aveu peut-être étrange mais sincère. Depuis que je suis monté dans l'avion pour venir ici, à Stockholm, recevoir le prix Nobel qui m'a été décerné cette année, je sens dans mon dos le regard scrutateur d'un observateur impassible ; et en cet instant solennel qui me place au centre de l'attention générale, je m'identifie plutôt à ce témoin imperturbable qu'à l'écrivain soudain révélé au monde entier. Et j'espère seulement que le discours que je vais prononcer pour cette occasion m'aidera à mettre fin à cette dualité, à réunir ces deux personnes qui vivent en moi.


Pour l'instant, moi-même, je ne comprends pas assez clairement l'aporie que je sens entre cette haute distinction et mon œuvre, ou plutôt ma vie. J'ai peut-être vécu trop longtemps dans des dictatures, dans un environnement intellectuel hostile et désespérément étranger, pour pouvoir prendre conscience de mon éventuelle valeur littéraire : la question ne valait tout simplement pas la peine d'être posée. De surcroît, on me faisait comprendre de toutes parts que le « sujet » qui occupait mes pensées, qui m'habitait, était dépassé et inintéressant. Voilà pourquoi(,) j'ai toujours considéré l'écriture comme une affaire strictement privée, ce qui rejoignait d'ailleurs mes plus intimes convictions.


Dire qu'il s'agit d'une affaire privée n'exclut nullement le sérieux, même si ce dernier semblait quelque peu ridicule dans un monde où seul le mensonge était pris au sérieux. Or, l'axiome philosophique définissait le monde comme réalité existant indépendamment de nous. Mais moi, en 1955, par un beau jour de printemps, j'ai compris d'un coup qu'il n'existait qu'une seule réalité, et que cette réalité, c'était moi, ma vie, ce cadeau fragile et d'une durée incertaine que des puissances étrangères et inconnues s'étaient approprié, avaient nationalisé, déterminé et scellé, et j'ai su que je devais la reprendre à ce monstrueux Moloch qu'on appelle l'histoire, car elle n'appartenait qu'à moi et je devais en disposer en tant que telle.


En tout cas, cela m'opposait radicalement à tout ce qui m'entourait, à cette réalité qui n'était peut-être pas objective, mais certainement indéniable. Je parle de la Hongrie communiste, du socialisme qui promettait un avenir radieux. Si le monde est une réalité objective qui existe indépendamment de nous, alors l'individu n'est qu'un objet - y compris pour lui-même, et l'histoire de sa vie n'est qu'une suite incohérente de hasards historiques qu'il peut certes contempler, mais qui ne le concernent pas. Il ne lui sert à rien de les ordonner en un ensemble cohérent, car son moi subjectif ne saurait assumer la responsabilité des éléments trop objectifs qui pourraient s'y trouver.


Un an plus tard, en 1956, a éclaté la révolution hongroise. Pour un seul et bref instant, le pays est devenu subjectif. Mais les chars soviétiques ont bien vite rétabli l'objectivité.


S'il vous semble que je fais de l'ironie, alors pensez, je vous prie, à ce que sont devenus la langue et les mots au cours du 20e siècle. Selon moi, il est vraisemblable que la plus importante, la plus bouleversante découverte des écrivains de notre temps est que la langue, telle que nous l'avons héritée d'une culture ancienne, est tout simplement incapable de représenter les processus réels, les concepts autrefois simples. Pensez à Kafka, pensez à Orwell qui ont vu la langue ancienne fondre dans leurs mains, comme
s'ils l'avaient mise au feu pour ensuite en montrer les cendres où apparaissaient des images nouvelles et jusqu'alors inconnues.


Mais je voudrais revenir à mon affaire strictement personnelle, c'est-à-dire à l'écriture. Il y a là quelques questions que tout homme dans ma situation ne se pose même pas. Jean-Paul Sartre, par exemple, a consacré tout un opuscule à la question de savoir pour qui on écrit. La question est intéressante, mais elle peut également être dangereuse et je suis en tout cas reconnaissant à la vie de n'avoir jamais eu à y réfléchir. Voyons en quoi consiste le danger. Par exemple, si on vise une classe sociale qu'on voudrait non seulement divertir mais aussi influencer, il faut avant tout prendre en considération son propre style et se demander s'il est adapté à l'objectif qu'on s'est fixé. L'écrivain est bientôt assailli de doutes : le problème est qu'il est dès lors occupé à s'observer lui-même. De plus, comment pourrait-il savoir quelles sont les vraies attentes de son public, ce qui lui plaît vraiment ? Il ne peut tout de même pas interroger chaque individu. D'ailleurs, cela ne servirait à rien. En définitive, son seul point de départ possible est l'idée qu'il a lui-même de son public, les exigences que lui-même lui attribue, l'effet qu'aura sur lui-même l'influence qu'il souhaite exercer. Pour qui donc l'écrivain écrit-il ? La réponse est évidente : pour lui-même.


Moi au moins, je peux dire que j'étais arrivé à cette réponse sans aucun détour. Il est vrai que mon cas était plus simple : je n'avais pas de public et ne voulais influencer personne. Je n'avais pas de but précis quand j'ai commencé à écrire et ce que j'écrivais ne s'adressait à personne. Si mon écriture n'avait pas d'objectif clairement exprimable, elle consistait néanmoins à garder une fidélité formelle et linguistique à mon sujet, rien d'autre. Il importait de le préciser à cette époque ridicule mais triste où la littérature dite engagée était dirigée par l'Etat.


Il m'aurait en revanche été plus difficile de répondre à la question, posée à juste titre et non sans un certain scepticisme, de savoir pourquoi on écrit. A nouveau, j'ai eu de la chance, car je n'ai jamais eu l'occasion de trancher cette question. J'ai d'ailleurs relaté fidèlement cet événement dans mon roman intitulé Le refus. Je me trouvais dans le couloir désert d'un immeuble administratif et j'entendais des pas résonner dans un couloir perpendiculaire, c'est tout. J'ai été pris d'une sorte d'agitation particulière, les pas venaient dans ma direction, c'étaient ceux d'une seule personne que je ne voyais pas, et brusquement, j'ai eu l'impression d'en entendre marcher des centaines de milliers, une véritable colonne dont les pas retentissaient et alors j'ai saisi la force d'attraction de ce défilé, de ces pas.
Là, dans ce couloir, j'ai compris en une seule seconde l'ivresse de l'abandon de soi, le plaisir vertigineux de se fondre dans la masse, ce que Nietzsche - dans un autre contexte, certes, mais avec pertinence - nomme l'extase dionysiaque. Une force quasi physique me poussait et m'attirait dans les rangs, je sentais que je devais m'appuyer et m'aplatir contre le mur, pour ne pas céder à cette attraction.


Je rends compte de cet instant intense comme je l'ai vécu ; la source d'où il avait jailli telle une vision semblait se trouver en dehors de moi et non en moi-même. Tout artiste connaît de tels instants. Autrefois, on les s'appelait des inspirations soudaines. Mais je ne mettrais pas ce que j'ai vécu au nombre des expériences artistiques. Je parlerais plutôt d'une prise de conscience existentielle, laquelle ne m'a pas donné la maîtrise de mon art, car j'ai dû encore longtemps en chercher les outils, mais celle de ma vie, alors que je l'avais presque perdue. Il y était question de la solitude, d'une vie plus difficile, de ce dont j'ai parlé au début : il s'agissait de sortir du cortège enivrant, de l'histoire qui dépouille l'homme de sa personnalité et de son destin. J'avais constaté avec effroi que dix ans après être revenu des camps nazis et avec pour ainsi dire un pied dans la fascination de la terreur stalinienne, il ne me restait plus de tout cela qu'une vague impression et quelques anecdotes. Comme si c'était arrivé à quelqu'un d'autre.


Il est évident que ces instants visionnaires ont une longue histoire que Sigmund Freud déduirait peut-être du refoulement de quelque traumatisme. Qui sait, peut-être aurait-il raison.
Or moi aussi, je penche plutôt pour la rationalité et suis loin de tout mysticisme ou enthousiasme : quand je parle de vision, j'entends une réalité qui a pris la forme du surnaturel - à savoir la révélation soudaine, on pourrait dire révolutionnaire, d'une idée qui mûrissait en moi, une chose qu'exprime l'antique exclamation « eurêka ! ». « J'ai trouvé ! » Certes, mais quoi ?


J'ai dit un jour que pour moi, ce qu'on appelle le socialisme avait la même signification qu'eut pour Marcel Proust la madeleine qui, trempée dans le thé, avait ressuscité en lui les saveurs du temps passé. Après la défaite de la révolution de 1956, j'ai décidé, essentiellement pour des raisons linguistiques, de rester en Hongrie. Ainsi j'ai pu observer, non plus en tant qu'enfant, mais avec ma tête d'adulte, le fonctionnement d'une dictature. J'ai vu comment un peuple est amené à nier ses idéaux, j'ai vu les débuts de l'adaptation, les gestes prudents, j'ai compris que l'espoir était un instrument du mal et que l'impératif catégorique de Kant, l'éthique, n'étaient que les valets dociles de la subsistance.


Peut-on imaginer liberté plus grande que celle dont jouit un écrivain dans une dictature relativement limitée, pour ainsi dire fatiguée voire décadente ? Dans les années soixante, la dictature hongroise était arrivée à un point de consolidation qu'on peut appeler consensus social et auquel le monde occidental donnerait plus tard, avec condescendance, le petit nom de « communisme de goulache » : après l'animosité du début, le communisme hongrois était devenu d'un coup le communisme préféré de l'Occident.
Dans le bourbier de ce consensus, il ne restait qu'une alternative : ou bien renoncer définitivement au combat, ou bien chercher les chemins tortueux de la liberté intérieure. Un écrivain n'a pas de grands besoins, un crayon et du papier suffisent à l'exercice de son art. Le dégoût et la dépression avec lesquels je me réveillais chaque matin m'introduisaient vite dans le monde que je voulais décrire. Je me suis rendu compte que je décrivais un homme broyé par la logique d'un totalitarisme en vivant moi-même dans un autre totalitarisme, et cela a sans aucun doute fait de la langue de mon roman un moyen de communication suggestif. Si j'évalue en toute sincérité ma situation à cette époque-là, je ne sais pas si en Occident, dans une société libre, j'aurais été capable d'écrire le même roman que celui qui est connu aujourd'hui sous le titre d'Etre sans destin et qui a obtenu la plus haute distinction de l'Académie Suédoise.


Non, car j'aurais certainement eu d'autres préoccupations. Je n'aurais certes pas renoncé à chercher la vérité, mais c'eût été peut-être une autre vérité. Dans le marché libre des livres et des esprits, je me serais peut-être efforcé de trouver une forme romanesque plus brillante : j'aurais pu, par exemple, fragmenter la narration pour ne raconter que les moments frappants. Sauf que dans les camps de concentration, mon héros ne vit pas son propre temps, puisqu'il est dépossédé de son temps, de sa langue, de sa personnalité. Il n'a pas de mémoire, il est dans l'instant. Si bien que le pauvre doit dépérir dans le piège morne de la linéarité et ne peut se libérer des détails pénibles. Au lieu d'une succession spectaculaire de grands moments tragiques, il doit vivre le tout, ce qui est pesant et offre peu de variété, comme la vie.


Mais cela m'a permis de tirer des enseignements étonnants. La linéarité exige que chaque situation s'accomplisse intégralement. Elle m'a interdit, par exemple, de sauter élégamment une vingtaine de minutes pour la seule raison que ces vingt minutes béaient devant moi tel un gouffre noir, inconnu et effrayant comme une fosse commune. Je parle de ces vingt minutes qui se sont écoulées sur le quai du camp d'extermination de Birkenau avant que les personnes descendues des wagons ne se retrouvent devant l'officier qui faisait la sélection.


Moi-même, j'avais un souvenir approximatif de ces vingt minutes, mais le roman m'interdisait de me fier à mes réminiscences. Presque tous les témoignages, confessions et souvenirs de survivants que j'avais lus étaient d'accord sur le fait que tout s'était déroulé très vite et dans la plus grande confusion : les portes des wagons s'ouvraient violemment au milieu des cris et des aboiements, les hommes étaient séparés des femmes, dans une cohue démentielle ils se retrouvaient devant un officier qui leur jetait un rapide coup d'œil, montrait quelque chose en tendant le bras, puis ils se retrouvaient en tenue de prisonnier.


Moi, j'avais un autre souvenir de ces vingt minutes. En cherchant des sources authentiques, j'ai commencé par lire Tadeusz Borowski, ses récits limpides, d'une cruauté masochiste, dont celui qui s'intitule « Au gaz, messieurs-dames ! » Ensuite, j'ai eu entre les mains une série de photos qu'un SS avait prises sur le quai de Birkenau lors de l'arrivée des convois et que les soldats américains ont retrouvées à Dachau, dans l'ancienne caserne des SS. J'ai été sidéré par ces photos : beaux visages souriants de femmes, de jeunes hommes au regard intelligent, pleins de bonne volonté, prêts à coopérer. Alors j'ai compris comment et pourquoi ces vingt minutes humiliantes d'inaction et d'impuissance s'étaient estompées dans leur mémoire. Et quand en pensant que tout cela s'était répété jour après jour, semaine après semaine, mois après mois, durant de longues années, j'ai pu entrevoir la technique de l'horreur, j'ai compris comment on pouvait retourner la nature humaine contre la vie humaine.


J'avançais ainsi, pas à pas, sur la voie linéaire des découvertes ; c'était, si on veut, ma méthode heuristique. J'ai vite compris que les questions de savoir pour qui et pour quoi j'écrivais ne m'intéressaient pas. Une seule question me travaillait : qu'avais-je encore en commun avec la littérature ? Car il était clair qu'une ligne infranchissable me séparait de la littérature et de ses idéaux, de son esprit, et cette ligne - comme tant d'autres choses - s'appelle Auschwitz.
Quand on écrit sur Auschwitz, il faut savoir que, du moins dans un certain sens, Auschwitz a mis la littérature en suspens. A propos d'Auschwitz, on ne peut écrire qu'un roman noir ou, sauf votre respect, un roman-feuilleton dont l'action
commence à Auschwitz et dure jusqu'à nos jours.
Je veux dire par là qu'il ne s'est rien passé depuis Auschwitz qui ait annulé Auschwitz, qui ait réfuté Auschwitz. Dans mes écrits, l'Holocauste n'a jamais pu apparaître au passé.


On dit à mon propos - pour m'en féliciter ou pour me le reprocher - que je suis l'écrivain d'un seul thème, l'Holocauste. Je ne trouve rien à y redire, pourquoi n'accepterais-je pas, avec quelques réserves, la place qui m'a été attribuée sur l'étagère idoine des bibliothèques ? En effet, quel écrivain aujourd'hui n'est pas un écrivain de l'Holocauste ? Je veux dire qu'il n'est pas nécessaire de choisir expressément l'Holocauste comme sujet pour remarquer la dissonance qui règne depuis des décennies dans l'art contemporain en Europe. De plus : il n'y a, à ma connaissance, pas d'art valable ou authentique où on ne sente pas la cassure qu'on éprouve en regardant le monde après une nuit de cauchemars, brisé et perplexe. Je n'ai jamais eu la tentation de considérer les questions relatives à l'Holocauste comme un conflit inextricable entre les Allemands et les Juifs ; je n'ai jamais cru que c'était l'un des chapitres du martyre juif qui succède logiquement aux épreuves précédentes ; je n'y ai jamais vu un déraillement soudain de l'histoire, un pogrome d'une ampleur plus importante que les autres ou encore les conditions de la fondation d'un Etat juif. Dans l'Holocauste, j'ai découvert la condition humaine, le terminus d'une grande aventure où les Européens sont arrivés au bout de deux mille ans de culture et de morale.


A présent il faut réfléchir au moyen d'aller plus loin. Le problème d'Auschwitz n'est pas de savoir s'il faut tirer un trait dessus ou non, si nous devons en garder la mémoire ou plutôt le jeter dans le tiroir approprié de l'histoire, s'il faut ériger des monuments aux millions de victimes et quel doit être ce monument. Le véritable problème d'Auschwitz est qu'il a eu lieu, et avec la meilleure ou la plus méchante volonté du monde, nous ne pouvons rien y changer. En parlant de « scandale », le poète hongrois catholique János Pilinszky a sans doute trouvé la meilleure dénomination de ce pénible état de fait ; et par là, il voulait à l'évidence dire qu'Auschwitz a eu lieu dans la culture chrétienne et constitue ainsi pour un esprit métaphysique une plaie ouverte.


D'anciennes prophéties disent que Dieu est mort. Il ne fait aucun doute, qu'après Auschwitz, nous sommes restés livrés à nous-mêmes. Il nous a fallu créer nos valeurs, jour après jour, par un travail éthique opiniâtre mais invisible qui finira par produire les valeurs qui donneront peut-être naissance à la nouvelle culture européenne. Que l'Académie Suédoise ait jugé bon de distinguer précisément mon œuvre prouve à mes yeux que l'Europe éprouve à nouveau le besoin que les survivants d'Auschwitz et de l'Holocauste lui rappellent l'expérience qu'ils ont été obligés d'acquérir. A mes yeux, permettez-moi de le dire, c'est une marque de courage, voire d'une certaine détermination ; car on a souhaité me voir venir ici tout en se doutant de ce que j'allais dire. Mais ce qui a été révélé à travers la solution finale et « l'univers concentrationnaire » ne peut pas prêter à confusion, et la seule possibilité de survivre, de conserver des forces créatrices est de découvrir ce point zéro. Pourquoi cette lucidité ne serait-elle pas fertile ? Au fond des grandes découvertes, même si elles se fondent sur des tragédies extrêmes, réside toujours la plus admirable valeur européenne, à savoir le frémissement de la liberté qui confère à notre vie une certaine plus-value, une certaine richesse en nous faisant prendre conscience de la réalité de notre existence et de notre responsabilité envers celle-ci.


C'est pour moi une joie particulière de pouvoir exprimer ces pensées en hongrois, ma langue maternelle. Je suis né à Budapest, dans une famille juive, ma mère était originaire de Kolozsvár en Transylvanie, mon père, du sud-ouest du Balaton. Mes grands-parents allumaient encore les bougies le vendredi soir pour saluer le sabbat, mais ils avaient déjà changé leur nom pour lui donner une consonance hongroise et il était naturel pour eux d'avoir le judaïsme comme religion et de considérer la Hongrie comme leur patrie. Mes grands-parents maternels ont trouvé la mort durant l'Holocauste, mes grands-parents paternels ont été anéantis par le pouvoir communiste de Rákosi, après que la maison de retraite des Juifs a été transférée de Budapest vers la frontière du nord. Il me semble que cette brève histoire familiale résume et symbolise à la fois les souffrances récentes de ce pays. Tout cela m'apprend que le deuil ne recèle pas que de l'amertume, mais aussi des réserves morales extraordinaires. Etre juif : je pense qu'aujourd'hui, c'est redevenu avant tout un devoir moral. Si l'Holocauste a créé une culture - ce qui est incontestablement le cas - le but de celle-ci peut être seulement que la réalité irréparable enfante spirituellement la réparation, c'est-à-dire la catharsis. Ce désir a inspiré tout ce que j'ai jamais réalisé.


Bien que mon discours touche à sa fin, j'avoue sincèrement que je n'ai toujours pas trouvé d'équilibre apaisant entre ma vie, mon œuvre et le prix Nobel. Pour l'instant, je ne sens qu'une profonde reconnaissance - pour l'amour qui m'a sauvé et me maintient encore en vie. Mais admettons que dans le parcours à peine visible, la « carrière », si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi, qui est la mienne, il y a quelque chose de troublant, d'absurde ; une chose qu'on peut difficilement penser sans être tenté de croire en un ordre surnaturel, une providence, une justice métaphysique, c'est-à-dire sans se leurrer, et donc s'engager dans une impasse, se détruire et perdre le contact profond et douloureux avec les millions d'êtres qui sont morts et n'ont jamais connu la miséricorde. Il n'est pas simple d'être une exception ; et si le sort a fait de nous des exceptions, il faut se résigner à l'ordre absurde du hasard qui, pareil aux caprices d'un peloton d'exécution, règne sur nos vies soumises à des puissances inhumaines et à de terribles dictatures.


Pourtant, pendant que je préparais ce discours, il m'est arrivé une chose très étrange qui, en un certain sens, m'a rendu ma sérénité. Un jour, j'ai reçu par la poste une grande enveloppe en papier kraft. Elle m'avait été envoyée par le directeur du mémorial de Buchenwald, M. Volkhard Knigge. Il avait joint à ses cordiales félicitations une autre enveloppe, plus petite, dont il précisait le contenu, pour le cas où je n'aurais pas la force de l'affronter. A l'intérieur, il y avait une copie du registre journalier des détenus du 18 février 1945.
Dans la colonne « Abgänge », c'est-à-dire « pertes », j'ai appris la mort du détenu numéro soixante-quatre mille neuf cent vingt et un, Imre Kertész, né en 1927, juif, ouvrier. Les deux données fausses, à savoir ma date de naissance et ma profession, s'expliquent par le fait que lors de leur enregistrement par l'administration du camp de concentration de Buchenwald, je m'étais vieilli de deux ans pour ne pas être mis parmi les enfants et avais prétendu être ouvrier plutôt que lycéen pour paraître plus utile.


Je suis donc mort une fois pour pouvoir continuer à vivre - et c'est peut-être là ma véritable histoire. Puisque c'est ainsi, je dédie mon œuvre née de la mort de cet enfant aux millions de morts et à tous ceux qui se souviennent encore de ces morts. Mais comme en définitive il s'agit de littérature, d'une littérature qui est aussi, selon l'argumentation de votre Académie, un acte de témoignage, peut-être sera-t-elle utile à l'avenir, et si j'écoutais mon cœur, je dirais même plus : elle servira l'avenir.
Car j'ai l'impression qu'en pensant à l'effet traumatisant d'Auschwitz, je touche les questions fondamentales de la vitalité et de la créativité humaines ; et en pensant ainsi à Auschwitz, d'une manière peut-être paradoxale, je pense plutôt à l'avenir qu'au passé.



Traduction: Natalia et Charles Zaremba

V. S. Naipaul
United Kingdom
b. 1932 - in trinidad

Il s'agit pour moi d'une situation inhabituelle. S'il m'arrive de donner des lectures, je ne fais ni causeries ni discours. Je réponds toujours cela aux gens qui me demandent une conférence. Et c'est la pure vérité. Il peut paraître étrange qu'un homme qui depuis près de cinquante ans fait profession de manier les mots, les émotions et les idées n'ait rien à proposer, en quelque sorte. Mais tout ce que j'ai à dire de valable se trouve dans mes livres. Ou alors n'est pas encore entièrement formé. J'en suis d'ailleurs à peine conscient. Cela attend le prochain livre et, avec un peu de chance, me viendra en écrivant – par surprise. C'est cet élément de surprise que je cherche quand j'écris, et qui me permet – entreprise toujours délicate – de juger mon travail.
Dans Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust parle avec une grande pénétration de la différence entre l'écrivain et son être social. Sainte-Beuve croyait que pour comprendre un auteur il fallait en savoir le plus possible sur l'homme extérieur et sur les détails de sa vie. Éclairer l'œuvre par l'homme est une démarche séduisante et qui peut paraître inattaquable. Proust la démolit néanmoins de manière très convaincante. "Cette méthode", dit-il, "méconnaît ce qu'une fréquentation un peu profonde avec nous-mêmes nous apprend : qu'un livre est le produit d'un autre moi que celui que nous manifestons dans nos habitudes, dans la société, dans nos vices. Ce moi-là, si nous voulons essayer de le comprendre, c'est au fond de nous-mêmes, en essayant de le recréer en nous, que nous pouvons y parvenir."
Nous devrions avoir ces mots de Proust à l'esprit chaque fois que nous lisons la biographie d'un écrivain, ou de quiconque dépend de ce qu'on peut appeler l'inspiration. On aura beau nous exposer tous les détails de sa vie, ses bizarreries et ses amitiés, le mystère de l'écriture subsistera. Aucune quantité d'information, si passionnante soit-elle, ne saurait nous y conduire. La biographie d'un écrivain – ou même l'autobiographie – présentera toujours cette lacune.
Proust est un maître de l'amplification heureuse, et j'aimerais revenir brièvement à Contre Sainte-Beuve. "En réalité", poursuit-il, "ce qu'on donne au public, c'est ce qu'on a écrit seul, pour soi-même, c'est bien l'œuvre de soi. Ce qu'on donne à l'intimité, c'est-à-dire à la conversation [...] et ces productions destinées à l'intimité, c'est-à-dire rapetissées au goût de quelques personnes et qui ne sont guère que de la conversation écrite, c'est l'œuvre d'un soi bien plus extérieur, non pas du moi profond qu'on ne retrouve qu'en faisant abstraction des autres et du moi qui connaît les autres [...]."
Lorsqu'il écrivait ces mots, Proust n'avait pas encore trouvé le sujet qui allait le conduire au bonheur de son grand travail littéraire. Et vous pouvez conclure de ce que je viens de citer que c'était un homme qui se fiait à son intuition et guettait sa chance. J'ai déjà cité ces phrases en d'autres circonstances. Parce qu'elles définissent la manière dont je procède. Je m'en remets à l'intuition. Je le faisais au début. Je le fais encore aujourd'hui. Je ne sais absolument pas comment les choses vont tourner, où l'écriture va me mener ensuite. Je m'abandonne à l'intuition pour trouver mes sujets et j'écris intuitivement. Sans doute ai-je une idée, une forme, en commençant, mais il me faudra attendre des années avant de comprendre pleinement ce que j'ai écrit.
J'ai dit tout à l'heure que tout ce qu'il y a de valable en moi est dans mes livres. Je vais aller plus loin : je suis la somme de mes livres. Chacun d'eux, intuitivement senti et, dans le cas de la fiction, intuitivement élaboré, couronne les précédents et en procède. Il me semble qu'à n'importe quelle étape de ma carrière littéraire on aurait pu dire que le dernier ouvrage contenait tous les autres.
Cela s'explique par les circonstances, à la fois extrêmement simples et extrêmement compliquées, dans lesquelles j'ai grandi. Je suis né à Trinidad, petite île à l'embouchure de l'Orénoque, le grand fleuve vénézuélien. Trinidad n'appartient donc, à proprement parler, ni à l'Amérique du Sud ni aux Antilles. Cette colonie de plantation du Nouveau Monde comptait en 1932, année de ma naissance, quelque 400 000 habitants, dont environ 150 000 Indiens, hindous et musulmans, presque tous de souche paysanne et, dans leur immense majorité, originaires de la plaine du Gange.
Telle était ma minuscule communauté natale. L'essentiel de son immigration s'était déroulée après 1880. Aux conditions suivantes : les gens s'engageaient à travailler cinq ans dans les plantations et à la fin de cette période ils recevaient un lopin de terre, peut-être deux hectares, ou un billet de retour pour l'Inde. En 1917, à la suite de l'agitation de Gandhi et d'autres, ce système de contrat fut aboli. Et peut-être à cause de cela, ou pour d'autres raisons, nombre des derniers arrivés n'obtinrent pas les terres ou le rapatriement promis. Ces gens étaient totalement démunis. Ils dormaient dans les rues de Port of Spain, la capitale. Je les y ai vus, enfant. J'imagine qu'alors je ne les savais pas dans la misère – j'ai dû le comprendre beaucoup plus tard –, et ils ne m'ont pas laissé une impression particulière. Cela faisait partie de la cruauté de la colonie de plantation.
Je suis né à Chaguanas, une bourgade de l'intérieur, à quatre ou cinq kilomètres du golfe de Paria. Chaguanas était un nom étrange, par l'orthographe et la prononciation, et beaucoup d'Indiens – ils étaient majoritaires dans la région – préféraient lui donner le nom de caste indienne de Chauhan.
J'avais trente-quatre ans lorsque j'ai découvert d'où venait le nom du lieu de ma naissance. J'habitais à Londres et cela faisait seize ans que je vivais en Angleterre. J'étais en train d'écrire mon neuvième livre, une histoire de Trinidad qui s'efforçait de faire revivre les gens et leurs histoires. J'allais souvent au British Museum lire les documents espagnols sur la région. Ces documents avaient été recopiés dans les archives espagnoles pour le gouvernement britannique dans les années 1890, au moment d'une acerbe querelle frontalière avec le Venezuela. Ils commencent en 1530 et s'achèvent avec la disparition de l'Empire espagnol.
J'enquêtais sur l'absurde recherche de l'Eldorado et sur l'intrusion meurtrière du héros anglais, Sir Walter Raleigh. En 1595, il assaillit Trinidad, massacra tous les Espagnols qu'il attrapa et remonta l'Orénoque en quête de l'Eldorado. Il ne trouva rien, mais prétendit le contraire en regagnant l'Angleterre. Il avait à montrer une pépite d'or, extraite, assurait-il, d'une falaise sur les berges de l'Orénoque, et un peu de sable. La Monnaie royale dit que le sable qu'il lui demandait d'analyser ne valait rien, et d'autres insinuèrent qu'il avait acheté l'or auparavant en Afrique du Nord. Raleigh écrivit alors un livre pour prouver ses dires, et depuis quatre siècle on croit qu'il avait trouvé quelque chose. La magie du livre de Raleigh, d'une lecture vraiment ardue, repose dans son très long titre : La Découverte du grand, riche et bel Empire de Guyane, avec une relation de la grande cité dorée de Manoa (que les Espagnols appellent El Dorado) et des provinces d'Emeria, d'Aromaia, d'Amapaia et d'autres contrées, ainsi que des rivières avoisinantes. Que cela semble réel ! Alors qu'il s'était à peine aventuré sur le cours principal de l'Orénoque.
Puis, comme il arrive parfois aux escrocs, Raleigh fut rattrapé par sa propre affabulation. Vingt et un ans plus tard, vieux et malade, on le sortit de sa prison londonienne pour qu'il allât chercher en Guyane les mines d'or qu'il disait avoir découvertes. Son fils trouva la mort dans cette aventure frauduleuse. Le père, pour sauver sa réputation, pour ne pas désavouer ses mensonges, avait envoyé son fils à la mort. Ensuite, plein de chagrin, sans plus aucune raison de vivre, Raleigh retourna à Londres se faire exécuter.
L'histoire aurait pu s'arrêter là. Mais les Espagnols avaient la mémoire longue – sans doute parce que leur correspondance impériale était si lente : il fallait parfois deux ans pour qu'une lettre de Trinidad soit lue en Espagne. Huit ans après, les Espagnols de Trinidad et de Guyane réglaient encore leurs comptes avec les Indiens du Golfe. En témoigne cette lettre du roi d'Espagne au gouverneur de Trinidad, datée du 12 octobre 1625, que j'ai lue au British Museum : "Je vous ai demandé", écrivait le roi, "de m'éclairer sur certaine nation d'Indiens appelés Chaguanes, dont le nombre, disiez-vous, dépasse le millier, et qui sont en si mauvaises dispositions que c'étaient eux qui conduisaient les Anglais lorsque ceux-ci s'emparèrent de la ville. Leur crime n'a pas été puni parce qu'il n'y avait pas de forces disponibles à cet effet et parce que les Indiens ne connaissent d'autre maître que leur propre volonté. Vous avez décidé de les châtier. Suivez les règles que je vous ai tracées et faites-moi connaître le résultat de vos démarches."
Ce que fit le gouverneur, je l'ignore. Je n'ai pu trouver d'autre référence aux Chaguanes dans les dossiers du musée. Peut-être existait-il dans la montagne de papier conservée aux Archives de Séville d'autres documents sur les Chaguanes, que les doctes envoyés du gouvernement britannique laissèrent échapper ou ne jugèrent pas dignes de transcrire. Ce qui est certain, en tout cas, c'est que la petite tribu de plus d'un millier d'Indiens – qui devait vivre sur les deux rives du golfe de Paria – disparut si totalement que nul dans la ville de Chaguanas ou de Chauhan ne savait quoi que ce fût à son propos. Et je me suis dit, ce jour-là au British Museum, que j'étais la première personne depuis 1625 pour qui cette lettre du roi d'Espagne signifiait réellement quelque chose. Et celle-ci n'avait été exhumée des archives qu'en 1896 ou 1897. Une disparition, puis des siècles de silence.
Nous vivions sur les terres des Chaguanes. Tous les jours de l'année scolaire – je commençais tout juste à fréquenter l'école –, je quittais la maison de ma grand-mère et longeais les deux ou trois magasins de la Grand-rue, la buvette chinoise, le théâtre du Jubilé et la petite usine portugaise aux puissantes odeurs qui fabriquait du savon bleu et jaune à bon marché, longues barres mises le matin dehors à sécher et à durcir dès le matin. Chaque jour je passais devant ces choses qui me paraissaient éternelles pour me rendre à l'école publique de Chaguanas. Par delà l'école, des plantations de canne à sucre s'étendaient jusqu'au golfe de Paria. Les Indiens dépossédés avaient leur propre genre d'agriculture, leur calendrier, leurs codes et leurs lieux sacrés. Ils comprenaient intimement les courants que trace l'Orénoque dans le golfe de Paria. Or toutes leurs connaissances et tout ce qui les concernait avait été anéanti.
Le monde est toujours en mouvement. Partout, à un moment ou à un autre, des gens sont spoliés. J'ai été bouleversé en 1967 par cette découverte à propos de ma ville natale parce que j'en ignorais tout. Mais c'était ainsi que la plupart d'entre nous vivions dans la colonie agricole : aveuglément. Non que les autorités aient médité de nous maintenir dans nos ténèbres. Je crois tout simplement que les connaissances mêmes étaient absentes. Ce genre d'information sur les Chaguanes n'aurait pas été jugé important et n'aurait pas été facile à exhumer. Ils formaient une petite tribu, et c'étaient des aborigènes. Nous avions entendu parler de leurs semblables sur le continent, dans ce qu'on appelait B.G., British Guiana, la Guyane britannique, et ils faisaient l'objet de plaisanteries. À Trinidad, et je crois dans toutes les communautés, on qualifiait de warrahoons les mauvais sujets tapageurs. Je croyais que c'était un mot forgé exprès, pour suggérer la sauvagerie. C'est seulement quand j'ai commencé à voyager au Venezuela, la quarantaine venue, que j'ai découvert que c'était le nom d'une tribu autochtone assez importante de l'endroit.
Quand j'étais enfant, il y avait une vague histoire – et c'est une histoire qui me bouleverse terriblement aujourd'hui – d'indigènes qui venaient parfois du continent en canot à certains moments, s'enfonçaient dans la forêt du sud de l'île et, à un endroit donné, cueillaient un fruit particulier ou faisaient une sorte d'offrande, puis retraversaient le golfe de Paria pour regagner l'estuaire détrempé de l'Orénoque. Ce rite devait avoir une énorme importance pour avoir survécu aux bouleversements de quatre siècles et à l'extinction des indigènes à Trinidad. Ou peut-être – bien que Trinidad et le Venezuela aient une flore commune – venaient-ils seulement cueillir un fruit particulier. Je ne sais pas. Personne ne s'en souciait, pour autant que je me le rappelle. Et maintenant le souvenir est entièrement perdu ; et ce lieu sacré, s'il existait, est désormais un terrain vague.
Le passé était passé. Je suppose que c'était l'attitude générale. Et nous autres Indiens, immigrés de l'Inde, nous avions cette attitude envers l'île. Nous menions pour l'essentiel des vies ritualisées et n'étions pas encore capables de l'auto-évaluation nécessaire pour commencer à apprendre. La moitié d'entre nous sur cette terre des Chaguanes prétendait – ou peut-être ne prétendait pas, mais sentait, sans jamais en formuler l'idée – que nous avions apporté une sorte d'Inde avec nous, que nous pouvions, pour ainsi dire, dérouler comme un tapis sur la plaine.
La maison de ma grand-mère à Chaguanes se divisait en deux parties. Celle de devant, en brique et en plâtre, était peinte en blanc. C'était une sorte de maison indienne, avec une grande terrasse à balustrade au premier et une salle de prière à l'étage au-dessus. La décoration se voulait ambitieuse : colonnes aux chapiteaux en fleur de lotus et sculptures de divinités indiennes, toutes réalisées par des gens pour qui l'Inde n'était plus qu'un souvenir. À Trinidad, c'était une bizarrerie architecturale. À l'arrière de cette demeure, et reliée à celle-ci par une galerie supérieure, s'élevait une construction en bois de style français des Antilles. L'entrée était sur le côté, entre les deux maisons. Son haut portail de tôle ondulée aux montants de bois signifiait une intimité farouche.
Enfant, j'avais donc ce sentiment de deux mondes, le monde à l'extérieur du haut portail de tôle ondulée, et le monde de chez moi – ou du moins de chez ma grand-mère. C'était un reste de notre sentiment de caste, la chose qui excluait et isolait. À Trinidad, où, nouveaux arrivants, nous formions une communauté désavantagée, cette idée d'exclusion était une sorte de protection, qui nous permettait – pour un moment seulement - de vivre à notre manière et selon nos propres règles, de vivre dans notre propre Inde en train de s'effacer. D'où un extraordinaire égocentrisme. Nous regardions vers l'intérieur ; nous accomplissions nos journées ; le monde extérieur existait dans une sorte d'obscurité ; nous ne nous interrogions sur rien.
Il y avait une échoppe musulmane juste à côté. La petite loggia de la boutique de ma grand-mère butait contre son mur aveugle. L'homme s'appelait Mian. C'était tout ce que je savais de lui et de sa famille. J'imagine que nous devions le voir, mais il ne me reste de lui aucune image mentale. Nous ne savions rien des musulmans. Cette idée de l'étranger, de ce qu'il faut contenir à l'extérieur, s'étendait même aux autres hindous. Par exemple, nous mangions du riz au milieu de la journée et du blé le soir. Or il existait des gens très bizarres qui inversaient cet ordre naturel et mangeaient du riz le soir. Pour moi ces gens étaient des étrangers – il faut m'imaginer, gamin de moins de sept ans, parce que j'avais sept ans lorsque cette vie dans la maison de ma grand-mère à Chaguanas prit fin pour moi. Nous avons déménagé dans la capitale, puis dans les collines au nord-ouest.
Mais les habitudes mentales engendrées par cette existence de confinement et d'exclusion ont longtemps persisté. Sans les nouvelles qu'écrivait mon père, je n'aurais pratiquement rien su de la vie générale de notre communauté indienne. Ces histoires m'ont donné plus que des connaissances, une sorte de solidité : un point d'appui dans le monde. Je ne peux imaginer ce que mon univers mental aurait été sans ces nouvelles.
Le monde extérieur existait dans une sorte d'obscurité ; et nous ne nous interrogions sur rien. J'étais juste assez grand pour connaître un peu les épopées indiennes, le Ramayana en particulier. Les enfants arrivés quelque cinq ans après nous dans notre famille élargie n'ont pas eu cette chance. Personne ne nous enseignait l'hindi. Parfois quelqu'un écrivait l'alphabet pour que nous l'apprenions, et c'était tout ; nous étions censés faire le reste tout seuls. Aussi, à mesure que s'infiltrait l'anglais, nous avons commencé à perdre notre langue. La maison de ma grand-mère était pleine de religion ; il y avait toute sorte de cérémonies et de lectures, certaines se prolongeant des jours entiers. Mais personne n'expliquait ou ne traduisait pour nous, qui ne pouvions plus suivre la langue. Notre foi ancestrale s'est donc dissoute, est devenue mystérieuse, sans écho dans notre vie quotidienne.
Nous ne cherchions pas à nous renseigner sur l'Inde ou sur les familles que les gens avaient laissées là-bas. Quand notre manière de penser eut changé et que nous avons voulu le savoir, il était trop tard. Je ne sais rien de ma branche paternelle ; je sais seulement que quelques-uns venaient du Népal. Il y a deux ans, un aimable Népalais, à qui mon nom plaisait, m'a envoyé quelques pages recopiées dans un répertoire géographique anglais de 1872 sur l'Inde, Castes et tribus hindoues à Bénarès. On y trouvait, parmi une multitude d'autres noms, une liste de Népalais résidant dans la ville sainte de Bénarès qui portaient le nom de Naipal. C'est tout ce que j'ai.
Loin de ce côté de chez ma grand-mère, où nous mangions du riz au milieu de la journée et du blé le soir, s'étendait le vaste inconnu – dans cette île de seulement 400 000 habitants. Il y avait les Africains et les métis d'Africains, qui formaient la majorité. Ils étaient policiers, maîtres d'école. Telle ma première institutrice à l'école publique de Chaguanas ; je me suis souvenu d'elle avec adoration des années durant. Il y avait la capitale, où très bientôt nous allions tous devoir aller pour faire nos études et trouver du travail, et où nous nous installerions définitivement, parmi des étrangers. Il y avait les Blancs, pas tous anglais ; et les Portugais, et les Chinois, immigrés autrefois comme nous. Et, les plus mystérieux de tous, ceux que nous appelions les 'pagnols, gens mélangés au teint chaud et brun venus du temps de l'Espagne, avant que l'île fût détachée du Venezuela et de l'Empire espagnol – un genre d'histoire qui dépassait totalement ma compréhension d'enfant.
Pour vous donner cette idée de mes racines, j'ai dû faire appel à un savoir et à des idées qui me sont venus bien après, et d'abord de l'écriture. Enfant, je ne savais presque rien, rien au-delà de ce que j'avais appris chez ma grand-mère. Tous les enfants, j’imagine, viennent au monde comme ça, sans savoir qui ils sont. Mais le petit Français, par exemple, ce savoir l'attend. Il est tout autour de lui. Il lui vient indirectement de la conversation des adultes. Il se trouve dans les journaux et à la radio. Et à l'école, les travaux de générations de savants, simplifiés pour les manuels scolaires, vont lui donner une certaine idée de la France et des Français.
À Trinidad, si brillant sujet que je fusse, j'étais environné de zones d'obscurité. L'école n'élucidait rien pour moi. J'étais gavé de faits et de formules. Tout devait être appris par cœur ; tout était abstrait pour moi. Là encore, je ne crois pas qu'il y avait un plan ou un complot pour rendre nos cours semblables. Ce que nous recevions, c'était le savoir scolaire standard. Dans un autre cadre, il aurait eu un sens. Et du moins une partie de l'échec m'eût été imputable. Avec mon expérience sociale limitée, il m'était difficile d'entrer par l'imagination dans d'autres sociétés, proches ou lointaines. J'adorais l'idée des livres, mais j'avais du mal à les lire. J'étais le plus à l'aise avec des choses comme Andersen et Ésope, hors du temps, hors de l'espace, sans exclusive. Et quand enfin en terminale j'ai fini par aimer certains de nos textes littéraires – Molière, Cyrano de Bergerac –, j'imagine que c'est parce qu'ils avaient quelque chose du conte de fée.
Quand je suis devenu écrivain, ces zones de ténèbres qui m'environnaient enfant sont devenus mes sujets. Le pays, les aborigènes, le Nouveau Monde, la colonie, l'histoire, l'Inde, le monde musulman – auquel je me sentais aussi lié –, l'Afrique, puis l'Angleterre, où j'écrivais mes livres. C'est ce que j'avais à l'esprit en disant que mes livres se dressent l'un sur l'autre et que je suis la somme de mes livres. Et en disant que mes origines, source et aiguillon de mon œuvre, étaient à la fois extrêmement simples et extrêmement compliquées. Vous avez vu à quel point tout était simple dans la petite ville de Chaguanas. Et je crois que vous comprendrez combien ce fut compliqué pour l'écrivain. Surtout au début, quand les modèles littéraires dont je disposais – les modèles donnés par ce que je ne peux qu'appeler mon faux savoir – traitaient de sociétés entièrement différentes. Peut-être aurez-vous néanmoins l'impression que le matériau était si riche qu'il n'y avait aucune difficulté à commencer et à continuer. Mais ce que j'ai dit de mes origines vient du savoir que j'ai acquis en écrivant. Et vous devez me croire quand je dis que la structure de mon œuvre ne m'apparaît clairement que depuis deux ou trois mois. On m'a lu des passages de mes premiers livres et j'ai vu les connexions. Jusqu'alors, le plus difficile pour moi était de décrire mon travail aux gens, d'expliquer ce que j'avais fait.
J'ai dit que j'étais un écrivain d'intuition. C'était le cas, et il en va encore ainsi aujourd'hui que je suis si près de la fin. Je n'ai jamais eu de plan. Je n'ai suivi aucun système. J'ai travaillé intuitivement. Mon but à chaque fois était de faire un livre, de créer quelque chose de facile et d'intéressant à lire. À chaque étape, il me fallait travailler dans les limites de mes connaissances, de ma sensibilité, de mon talent et de ma vision du monde. Tout cela s'est développé livre après livre. Et il me fallait écrire ces livres, parce qu'il n'en existait aucun sur ces sujets qui me donnât ce que je voulais. Je devais défricher mon univers, l'élucider, pour moi-même.
J'ai dû aller consulter les documents au British Museum et ailleurs, pour trouver la sensation juste de l'histoire de la colonie. Il m'a fallu aller en Inde, parce qu'il n'y avait personne pour me dire à quoi ressemblait l'Inde dont mes grands-parents étaient venus. Il y avait certes les textes de Nehru et de Gandhi ; et curieusement, ce fut Gandhi, et son expérience sud-africaine, qui m'a apporté le plus, mais pas suffisamment. Il y avait Kipling ; et des auteurs anglo-indiens comme John Masters (très en vogue dans les années 1950, et qui annonçait, projet abandonné par la suite, je le crains, une fresque en trente-cinq romans sur l'Inde britannique) ; il y avait les romancières. Les rares auteurs indiens qui avaient percé à l'époque étaient des gens des classes moyennes, des citadins ; ils ne connaissaient pas l'Inde dont nous venions.
Et quand ce besoin indien fut satisfait, d'autres devinrent apparents : l'Afrique, l'Amérique du Sud, le monde musulman. Le but a toujours été d'étoffer mon image du monde, et la raison en vient de mon enfance : me rendre plus à l'aise avec moi-même. On me demande parfois d'aller en Allemagne, par exemple, ou en Chine, pour écrire un livre. Mais il y a beaucoup de bons livres sur ces endroits ; je suis tout à fait disposé à m'en remettre à la littérature existante. D'ailleurs, ce sont des sujets pour d'autres gens. Ce ne sont pas les zones de ténèbres que je sentais autour de moi, enfant. Par conséquent, de même qu'il y a un développement dans mon œuvre, un développement de la technique narrative, du savoir et de la sensibilité, il existe également une sorte d'unité, un point de mire, même si je peux donner l'impression d'aller dans de multiples directions.
Quand j'ai commencé, je ne savais pas du tout où j'allais. Je voulais seulement faire un livre. J'essayais d'écrire en Angleterre, où j'étais resté après mes années d'université, et j'avais l'impression que mon expérience était très mince, n'était pas vraiment de l'étoffe des livres. Dans aucun livre je ne pouvais trouver quoi que ce fût qui approchât ce que j'avais connu enfant. Le jeune Français ou le jeune Anglais qui avait envie d'écrire aurait trouvé d'innombrables modèles pour le mettre sur la voie. Je n'en avais aucun. Les histoires de mon père sur notre communauté indienne appartenaient au passé. Mon univers était très différent. Plus urbain, plus mélangé. Les détails physiques de l'existence chaotique de notre famille élargie – chambres à coucher ou emplacements pour dormir, heures des repas, le nombre même des gens – semblaient impossibles à manier. Il y avait trop de choses à expliquer, à la fois sur ma vie familiale et sur le monde extérieur. Et en même temps il y avait aussi trop de choses sur nous – comme nos propres ancêtres et notre propre histoire – que j'ignorais.
Enfin j'eus un jour l'idée de commencer par la rue de Port of Spain où nous avions emménagé après Chaguanas. Pas de grand portail en tôle ondulée pour exclure le monde. La vie de la rue m'était ouverte. C'était pour moi un plaisir intense que de l'observer depuis la véranda. C'est cette vie de la rue que j'ai commencé à raconter. Je voulais écrire vite, pour éviter trop d'introspection, et j'ai donc simplifié. J'ai supprimé l'histoire personnelle du jeune narrateur, j'ai ignoré les complexités raciales et sociales de la rue. Je n'ai rien expliqué. Je suis resté au ras du sol, pour ainsi dire. Je ne présentais les gens que tels qu'il apparaissaient dans la rue. J'écrivais une nouvelle par jour. Les cinq premières étaient très courtes, et je commençais à me demander si j’aurais suffisamment de matière. Puis la magie de l'écriture a opéré. Les matériaux ont commencé à affluer de tous côtés. Les histoires sont devenues plus longues ; impossible de les écrire en une seule journée. Enfin l'inspiration, qui un moment avait paru très facile, m'emportant sur sa vague, s'est tarie. Mais un livre avait été écrit, et j'étais devenu, pour moi en tout cas, un écrivain.
La distance entre l'écrivain et son matériau s'est creusée dans les deux livres suivants ; la vision était plus large. Puis l'intuition m'a conduit à entreprendre un gros volume sur notre vie familiale. Mon ambition d'écrivain grandissait. Mais quand il a été terminé, j'ai eu le sentiment que j'avais tiré tout ce que je pouvais de mon île. J'avais beau réfléchir, aucune autre histoire ne me venait.
Le hasard, alors, est venu à mon secours. Je suis devenu voyageur. J'ai voyagé aux Antilles et j'ai bien mieux compris le mécanisme colonial dont j'avais fait partie. Je suis allé en Inde, la patrie de mes ancêtres, pendant un an ; ce voyage a brisé ma vie en deux. Les livres que j'ai écrits sur ces deux voyages m'ont hissé vers de nouveaux domaines d'émotion, m'ont donné une vision du monde que je n'avais jamais eue, m'ont élargi techniquement. Le roman qui m'est venu ensuite m'a permis de cerner l'Angleterre en même temps que les Antilles – et que ce fut difficile ! J'y suis également parvenu à appréhender tous les groupes raciaux de l'île, ce que je n'avais jamais encore pu faire.
Ce nouveau roman parlait de la culpabilité et des phantasmes coloniaux, de la façon, en fait, dont les faibles mentent sur eux-mêmes et se mentent à eux-mêmes, puisque c'est leur seule ressource. Intitulé The Mimic Men ("Les Imitateurs"), ce livre évoquait les hommes des colonies qui singent la condition d'adultes, ces hommes qui ont fini par n'avoir plus confiance en rien qui les concerne. On m'a lu quelques pages de ce livre l'autre jour – je ne l'avais pas ouvert depuis plus de trente ans – et j'ai compris que j'avais écrit de la schizophrénie coloniale. Mais je ne m'en étais pas rendu compte alors. Je ne me suis jamais servi de mots abstraits pour décrire aucun de mes projets littéraires. Sinon, je ne serais jamais arrivé à faire ce livre. Il a été écrit intuitivement, et seulement à partir de l'observation la plus minutieuse.
J'ai présenté cette brève description de mes débuts littéraires pour essayer de montrer par quelles étapes, en tout juste dix ans, le lieu de ma naissance s'est transformé ou développé dans mon écriture : de la comédie de la vie de la rue à une étude d'une sorte de schizophrénie générale. Ce qui était simple était devenu compliqué.
Ce sont la fiction et le récit de voyage qui m'ont donné ma manière de voir ; et vous ne vous étonnerez pas que pour moi toutes les formes littéraires aient valeur égale. J'ai compris, par exemple, en entreprenant mon troisième livre sur l'Inde – vingt-six ans après le premier – que le plus important dans un récit de voyage ce sont les gens parmi lesquels se promène l'écrivain. Il faut que les gens se définissent eux-mêmes. Idée fort simple, mais qui exigeait une nouvelle forme de livre, une nouvelle manière de voyager. Et c'est la même méthode dont je me suis servi ensuite, lorsque je suis allé, pour la deuxième fois, dans le monde musulman.
Je suis toujours mû par la seule intuition. Je n'ai pas de système, littéraire ou politique. Je n'ai pas de principe politique directeur. Sans doute à cause de mon ascendance. L'écrivain indien R. K. Narayan, mort cette année, n'avait pas d'idées politiques. Mon père, qui écrivait ses histoires à une époque très sombre, et sans la moindre récompense, non plus. Peut-être parce que nous sommes restés loin de l'autorité pendant des siècles. Cela nous donne un point de vue particulier. J'ai le sentiment que nous sommes plus enclins à voir l'humour et la pitié des choses.
Il y a près de trente ans, je suis allé en Argentine. C'était l’époque de la guerilla. Les gens attendaient le retour d'exil de l'ancien dictateur Perón. Le pays débordait de haine. Les péronistes attendaient de régler de vieux comptes. L'un d'eux m'a dit : "Il y a une bonne torture et une mauvaise torture." La bonne torture était ce que vous faisiez aux ennemis du peuple. La mauvaise ce que vous faisaient les ennemis du peuple. Les gens de l'autre côté disaient la même chose. Aucun débat véritable sur quoi que ce soit. Il n'y avait que la passion et le jargon politique emprunté à l'Europe. "Là où", écrivais-je, "le jargon transforme les problèmes vivants en abstractions, et où les jargons finissent par s'affronter, les gens n'ont pas de causes. Ils n'ont que des ennemis." Et les passions continuent de se donner libre cours en Argentine, anéantissant toute raison et détruisant des vies. Aucune solution n'est en vue.
J'approche maintenant de la fin de mon travail. Je suis heureux d'avoir fait ce que j'ai fait, heureux de m'être avancé dans la création aussi loin que j'ai pu. Grâce à la manière intuitive dont j'écris, et aussi à la nature déconcertante de mon matériau, chaque livre s'est révélé une bénédiction. Chaque livre m'a éberlué ; jusqu'au moment d'écrire je ne savais jamais qu'il était là. Mais le plus grand miracle pour moi c'était de commencer. J'ai le sentiment – et l'angoisse est toujours présente pour moi – que j'aurais aisément pu échouer avant d'avoir commencé.
Je vais finir comme j'ai débuté, par l'un de ces merveilleux essais de Proust dans Contre Sainte-Beuve : "Les belles choses que nous écrirons si nous avons du talent sont en nous, indistinctes, comme le souvenir d'un air, qui nous charme sans que nous puissions en retrouver le contour [...]. Ceux qui sont hantés de ce souvenir confus des vérités qu'ils n'ont jamais connues sont les hommes qui sont doués. [...] Le talent est comme une sorte de mémoire qui leur permettra de finir par rapprocher d'eux cette musique confuse, de l'entendre clairement, de la noter [...]."
Le talent, dit Proust. Je dirais la chance, et beaucoup de travail.

Gao Xingjian
France
b. 1940
(in Ganzhou, China)
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2000

See a Video of the Nobel Lecture
Chinese, with English subtitles 37 min. »

I have no way of knowing whether it was fate that has pushed me onto this dais but as various lucky coincidences have created this opportunity I may as well call it fate. Putting aside discussion of the existence or non-existence of God, I would like to say that despite my being an atheist I have always shown reverence for the unknowable.

A person cannot be God, certainly not replace God, and rule the world as a Superman; he will only succeed in creating more chaos and make a greater mess of the world. In the century after Nietzsche man-made disasters left the blackest records in the history of humankind. Supermen of all types called leader of the people, head of the nation and commander of the race did not baulk at resorting to various violent means in perpetrating crimes that in no way resemble the ravings of a very egotistic philosopher. However, I do not wish to waste this talk on literature by saying too much about politics and history, what I want to do is to use this opportunity to speak as one writer in the voice of an individual.

A writer is an ordinary person, perhaps he is more sensitive but people who are highly sensitive are often more frail. A writer does not speak as the spokesperson of the people or as the embodiment of righteousness. His voice is inevitably weak but it is precisely this voice of the individual that is more authentic.

What I want to say here is that literature can only be the voice of the individual and this has always been so. Once literature is contrived as the hymn of the nation, the flag of the race, the mouthpiece of a political party or the voice of a class or a group, it can be employed as a mighty and all-engulfing tool of propaganda. However, such literature loses what is inherent in literature, ceases to be literature, and becomes a substitute for power and profit.

In the century just ended literature confronted precisely this misfortune and was more deeply scarred by politics and power than in any previous period, and the writer too was subjected to unprecedented oppression.

In order that literature safeguard the reason for its own existence and not become the tool of politics it must return to the voice of the individual, for literature is primarily derived from the feelings of the individual and is the result of feelings. This is not to say that literature must therefore be divorced from politics or that it must necessarily be involved in politics. Controversies about literary trends or a writer’s political inclinations were serious afflictions that tormented literature during the past century. Ideology wreaked havoc by turning related controversies over tradition and reform into controversies over what was conservative or revolutionary and thus changed literary issues into a struggle over what was progressive or reactionary. If ideology unites with power and is transformed into a real force then both literature and the individual will be destroyed.

Chinese literature in the twentieth century time and again was worn out and indeed almost suffocated because politics dictated literature: both the revolution in literature and revolutionary literature alike passed death sentences on literature and the individual. The attack on Chinese traditional culture in the name of the revolution resulted in the public prohibition and burning of books. Countless writers were shot, imprisoned, exiled or punished with hard labour in the course of the past one hundred years. This was more extreme than in any imperial dynastic period of China’s history, creating enormous difficulties for writings in the Chinese language and even more for any discussion of creative freedom.

If the writer sought to win intellectual freedom the choice was either to fall silent or to flee. However the writer relies on language and not to speak for a prolonged period is the same as suicide. The writer who sought to avoid suicide or being silenced and furthermore to express his own voice had no option but to go into exile. Surveying the history of literature in the East and the West this has always been so: from Qu Yuan to Dante, Joyce, Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn, and to the large numbers of Chinese intellectuals who went into exile after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. This is the inevitable fate of the poet and the writer who continues to seek to preserve his own voice.

During the years when Mao Zedong implemented total dictatorship even fleeing was not an option. The monasteries on far away mountains that provided refuge for scholars in feudal times were totally ravaged and to write even in secret was to risk one’s life. To maintain one’s intellectual autonomy one could only talk to oneself, and it had to be in utmost secrecy. I should mention that it was only in this period when it was utterly impossible for literature that I came to comprehend why it was so essential: literature allows a person to preserve a human consciousness.

It can be said that talking to oneself is the starting point of literature and that using language to communicate is secondary. A person pours his feelings and thoughts into language that, written as words, becomes literature. At the time there is no thought of utility or that some day it might be published yet there is the compulsion to write because there is recompense and consolation in the pleasure of writing. I began writing my novel Soul Mountain to dispel my inner loneliness at the very time when works I had written with rigorous self-censorship had been banned. Soul Mountain was written for myself and without the hope that it would be published.

From my experience in writing, I can say that literature is inherently man’s affirmation of the value of his own self and that this is validated during the writing, literature is born primarily of the writer’s need for self-fulfilment. Whether it has any impact on society comes after the completion of a work and that impact certainly is not determined by the wishes of the writer.

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write? As in the case of Shakespeare, even now it is difficult to ascertain the details of the lives of the four geniuses who wrote China’s greatest novels, Journey to the West, Water Margin, Jin Ping Mei and Dream of Red Mansions. All that remains is an autobiographical essay by Shi Naian and had he not as he said consoled himself by writing, how else could he have devoted the rest of his life to that huge work for which he received no recompense during life? And was this not also the case with Kafka who pioneered modern fiction and with Fernando Pessoa the most profound poet of the twentieth century? Their turning to language was not in order to reform the world and while profoundly aware of the helplessness of the individual they still spoke out, for such is the magic of language.

Language is the ultimate crystallisation of human civilisation. It is intricate, incisive and difficult to grasp and yet it is pervasive, penetrates human perceptions and links man, the perceiving subject, to his own understanding of the world. The written word is also magical for it allows communication between separate individuals, even if they are from different races and times. It is also in this way that the shared present time in the writing and reading of literature is connected to its eternal spiritual value.

In my view, for a writer of the present to strive to emphasise a national culture is problematical. Because of where I was born and the language I use, the cultural traditions of China naturally reside within me. Culture and language are always closely related and thus characteristic and relatively stable modes of perception, thought and articulation are formed. However a writer’s creativity begins precisely with what has already been articulated in his language and addresses what has not been adequately articulated in that language. As the creator of linguistic art there is no need to stick on oneself a stock national label that can be easily recognised.

Literature transcends national boundaries — through translations it transcends languages and then specific social customs and inter-human relationships created by geographical location and history — to make profound revelations about the universality of human nature. Furthermore, the writer today receives multicultural influences outside the culture of his own race so, unless it is to promote tourism, emphasising the cultural features of a people is inevitably suspect.

Literature transcends ideology, national boundaries and racial consciousness in the same way as the individual’s existence basically transcends this or that -ism. This is because man’s existential condition is superior to any theories or speculations about life. Literature is a universal observation on the dilemmas of human existence and nothing is taboo. Restrictions on literature are always externally imposed: politics, society, ethics and customs set out to tailor literature into decorations for their various frameworks.

However, literature is neither an embellishment for authority or a socially fashionable item, it has its own criterion of merit: its aesthetic quality. An aesthetic intricately related to the human emotions is the only indispensable criterion for literary works. Indeed, such judgements differ from person to person because the emotions are invariably that of different individuals. However such subjective aesthetic judgements do have universally recognised standards. The capacity for critical appreciation nurtured by literature allows the reader to also experience the poetic feeling and the beauty, the sublime and the ridiculous, the sorrow and the absurdity, and the humour and the irony that the author has infused into his work.

Poetic feeling does not derive simply from the expression of the emotions nevertheless unbridled egotism, a form of infantilism, is difficult to avoid in the early stages of writing. Also, there are numerous levels of emotional expression and to reach higher levels requires cold detachment. Poetry is concealed in the distanced gaze. Furthermore, if this gaze also examines the person of the author and overarches both the characters of the book and the author to become the author’s third eye, one that is as neutral as possible, the disasters and the refuse of the human world will all be worthy of scrutiny. Then as feelings of pain, hatred and abhorrence are aroused so too are feelings of concern and love for life.

An aesthetic based on human emotions does not become outdated even with the perennial changing of fashions in literature and in art. However literary evaluations that fluctuate like fashions are premised on what is the latest: that is, whatever is new is good. This is a mechanism in general market movements and the book market is not exempted, but if the writer’s aesthetic judgement follows market movements it will mean the suicide of literature. Especially in the so-called consumerist society of the present, I think one must resort to cold literature.

Ten years ago, after concluding Soul Mountain which I had written over seven years, I wrote a short essay proposing this type of literature:

"Literature is not concerned with politics but is purely a matter of the individual. It is the gratification of the intellect together with an observation, a review of what has been experienced, reminiscences and feelings or the portrayal of a state of mind."

"The so-called writer is nothing more than someone speaking or writing and whether he is listened to or read is for others to choose. The writer is not a hero acting on orders from the people nor is he worthy of worship as an idol, and certainly he is not a criminal or enemy of the people. He is at times victimised along with his writings simply because of other’s needs. When the authorities need to manufacture a few enemies to divert people’s attention, writers become sacrifices and worse still writers who have been duped actually think it is a great honour to be sacrificed."

"In fact the relationship of the author and the reader is always one of spiritual communication and there is no need to meet or to socially interact, it is a communication simply through the work. Literature remains an indispensable form of human activity in which both the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses."

"This sort of literature that has recovered its innate character can be called cold literature. It exists simply because humankind seeks a purely spiritual activity beyond the gratification of material desires. This sort of literature of course did not come into being today. However, whereas in the past it mainly had to fight oppressive political forces and social customs, today it has to do battle with the subversive commercial values of consumerist society. For it to exist depends on a willingness to endure the loneliness."

"If a writer devotes himself to this sort of writing he will find it difficult to make a living. Hence the writing of this sort of literature must be considered a luxury, a form of pure spiritual gratification. If this sort of literature has the good fortune of being published and circulated it is due to the efforts of the writer and his friends, Cao Xueqin and Kafka are such examples. During their lifetimes, their works were unpublished so they were not able to create literary movements or to become celebrities. These writers lived at the margins and seams of society, devoting themselves to this sort of spiritual activity for which at the time they did not hope for any recompense. They did not seek social approval but simply derived pleasure from writing."

"Cold literature is literature that will flee in order to survive, it is literature that refuses to be strangled by society in its quest for spiritual salvation. If a race cannot accommodate this sort of non-utilitarian literature it is not merely a misfortune for the writer but a tragedy for the race."

It is my good fortune to be receiving, during my lifetime, this great honour from the Swedish Academy, and in this I have been helped by many friends from all over the world. For years without thought of reward and not shirking difficulties they have translated, published, performed and evaluated my writings. However I will not thank them one by one for it is a very long list of names.

I should also thank France for accepting me. In France where literature and art are revered I have won the conditions to write with freedom and I also have readers and audiences. Fortunately I am not lonely although writing, to which I have committed myself, is a solitary affair.

What I would also like to say here is that life is not a celebration and that the rest of the world is not peaceful as in Sweden where for one hundred and eighty years there has been no war. This new century will not be immune to catastrophes simply because there were so many in the past century, because memories are not transmitted like genes. Humans have minds but are not intelligent enough to learn from the past and when malevolence flares up in the human mind it can endanger human survival itself.

The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress, and here I make reference to the history of human civilisation. History and civilisation do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilised.

Using some scientific -ism to explain history or interpreting it with a historical perspective based on pseudo-dialectics have failed to clarify human behaviour. Now that the utopian fervour and continuing revolution of the past century have crumbled to dust, there is unavoidably a feeling of bitterness amongst those who have survived.

The denial of a denial does not necessarily result in an affirmation. Revolution did not merely bring in new things because the new utopian world was premised on the destruction of the old. This theory of social revolution was similarly applied to literature and turned what had once been a realm of creativity into a battlefield in which earlier people were overthrown and cultural traditions were trampled upon. Everything had to start from zero, modernisation was good, and the history of literature too was interpreted as a continuing upheaval.

The writer cannot fill the role of the Creator so there is no need for him to inflate his ego by thinking that he is God. This will not only bring about psychological dysfunction and turn him into a madman but will also transform the world into a hallucination in which everything external to his own body is purgatory and naturally he cannot go on living. Others are clearly hell: presumably it is like this when the self loses control. Needless to say he will turn himself into a sacrifice for the future and also demand that others follow suit in sacrificing themselves.

There is no need to rush to complete the history of the twentieth century. If the world again sinks into the ruins of some ideological framework this history will have been written in vain and later people will revise it for themselves.

The writer is also not a prophet. What is important is to live in the present, to stop being hoodwinked, to cast off delusions, to look clearly at this moment of time and at the same time to scrutinise the self. This self too is total chaos and while questioning the world and others one may as well look back at one’s self. Disaster and oppression do usually come from another but man’s cowardice and anxiety can often intensify the suffering and furthermore create misfortune for others.

Such is the inexplicable nature of humankind’s behaviour, and man’s knowledge of his self is even harder to comprehend. Literature is simply man focusing his gaze on his self and while he does a thread of consciousness which sheds light on this self begins to grow.

To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

The new century has already arrived. I will not bother about whether or not it is in fact new but it would seem that the revolution in literature and revolutionary literature, and even ideology, may have all come to an end. The illusion of a social utopia that enshrouded more than a century has vanished and when literature throws off the fetters of this and that -ism it will still have to return to the dilemmas of human existence. However the dilemmas of human existence have changed very little and will continue to be the eternal topic of literature.

This is an age without prophecies and promises and I think it is a good thing. The writer playing prophet and judge should also cease since the many prophecies of the past century have all turned out to be frauds. And there is no need to manufacture new superstitions about the future, it is much better to wait and see. It would be best also for the writer to revert to the role of witness and strive to present the truth.

This is not to say that literature is the same as a document. Actually there are few facts in documented testimonies and the reasons and motives behind incidents are often concealed. However, when literature deals with the truth the whole process from a person’s inner mind to the incident can be exposed without leaving anything out. This power is inherent in literature as long as the writer sets out to portray the true circumstances of human existence and is not just making up nonsense.

It is a writer’s insights in grasping truth that determine the quality of a work, and word games or writing techniques cannot serve as substitutes. Indeed, there are numerous definitions of truth and how it is dealt with varies from person to person but it can be seen at a glance whether a writer is embellishing human phenomena or making a full and honest portrayal. The literary criticism of a certain ideology turned truth and untruth into semantic analysis, but such principles and tenets are of little relevance in literary creation.

However whether or not the writer confronts truth is not just an issue of creative methodology, it is closely linked to his attitude towards writing. Truth when the pen is taken up at the same time implies that one is sincere after one puts down the pen. Here truth is not simply an evaluation of literature but at the same time has ethical connotations. It is not the writer’s duty to preach morality and while striving to portray various people in the world he also unscrupulously exposes his self, even the secrets of his inner mind. For the writer truth in literature approximates ethics, it is the ultimate ethics of literature.

In the hands of a writer with a serious attitude to writing even literary fabrications are premised on the portrayal of the truth of human life, and this has been the vital life force of works that have endured from ancient times to the present. It is precisely for this reason that Greek tragedy and Shakespeare will never become outdated.

Literature does not simply make a replica of reality but penetrates the surface layers and reaches deep into the inner workings of reality; it removes false illusions, looks down from great heights at ordinary happenings, and with a broad perspective reveals happenings in their entirety.

Of course literature also relies on the imagination but this sort of journey in the mind is not just putting together a whole lot of rubbish. Imagination that is divorced from true feelings and fabrications that are divorced from the basis of life experiences can only end up insipid and weak, and works that fail to convince the author himself will not be able to move readers. Indeed, literature does not only rely on the experiences of ordinary life nor is the writer bound by what he has personally experienced. It is possible for the things heard and seen through a language carrier and the things related in the literary works of earlier writers all to be transformed into one’s own feelings. This too is the magic of the language of literature.

As with a curse or a blessing language has the power to stir body and mind. The art of language lies in the presenter being able to convey his feelings to others, it is not some sign system or semantic structure requiring nothing more than grammatical structures. If the living person behind language is forgotten, semantic expositions easily turn into games of the intellect.

Language is not merely concepts and the carrier of concepts, it simultaneously activates the feelings and the senses and this is why signs and signals cannot replace the language of living people. The will, motives, tone and emotions behind what someone says cannot be fully expressed by semantics and rhetoric alone. The connotations of the language of literature must be voiced, spoken by living people, to be fully expressed. So as well as serving as a carrier of thought literature must also appeal to the auditory senses. The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person’s existence.

Borrowing from Descartes, it could be said of the writer: I say and therefore I am. However, the I of the writer can be the writer himself, can be equated to the narrator, or become the characters of a work. As the narrator-subject can also be he and you, it is tripartite. The fixing of a key-speaker pronoun is the starting point for portraying perceptions and from this various narrative patterns take shape. It is during the process of searching for his own narrative method that the writer gives concrete form to his perceptions.

In my fiction I use pronouns instead of the usual characters and also use the pronouns I, you, and he to tell about or to focus on the protagonist. The portrayal of the one character by using different pronouns creates a sense of distance. As this also provides actors on the stage with a broader psychological space I have also introduced the changing of pronouns into my drama.

The writing of fiction or drama has not and will not come to an end and there is no substance to flippant announcements of the death of certain genres of literature or art.

Born at the start of human civilisation, like life, language is full of wonders and its expressive capacity is limitless. It is the work of the writer to discover and develop the latent potential inherent in language. The writer is not the Creator and he cannot eradicate the world even if it is too old. He also cannot establish some new ideal world even if the present world is absurd and beyond human comprehension. However, he can certainly make innovative statements either by adding to what earlier people have said or else starting where earlier people stopped.

To subvert literature was Cultural Revolution rhetoric. Literature did not die and writers were not destroyed. Every writer has his place on the book****f and he has life as long as he has readers. There is no greater consolation for a writer than to be able to leave a book in humankind’s vast treasury of literature that will continue to be read in future times.

Literature is only actualised and of interest at that moment in time when the writer writes it and the reader reads it. Unless it is pretence, to write for the future only deludes oneself and others as well. Literature is for the living and moreover affirms the present of the living. It is this eternal present and this confirmation of individual life that is the absolute reason why literature is literature, if one insists on seeking a reason for this huge thing that exists of itself.

When writing is not a livelihood or when one is so engrossed in writing that one forgets why one is writing and for whom one is writing it becomes a necessity and one will write compulsively and give birth to literature. It is this non-utilitarian aspect of literature that is fundamental to literature. That the writing of literature has become a profession is an ugly outcome of the division of labour in modern society and a very bitter fruit for the writer.

This is especially the case in the present age where the market economy has become pervasive and books have also become commodities. Everywhere there are huge undiscriminating markets and not just individual writers but even the societies and movements of past literary schools have all gone. If the writer does not bend to the pressures of the market and refuses to stoop to manufacturing cultural products by writing to satisfy the tastes of fashions and trends, he must make a living by some other means. Literature is not a best-selling book or a book on a ranked list and authors promoted on television are engaged in advertising rather than in writing. Freedom in writing is not conferred and cannot be purchased but comes from an inner need in the writer himself.

Instead of saying that Buddha is in the heart it would be better to say that freedom is in the heart and it simply depends on whether one makes use of it. If one exchanges freedom for something else then the bird that is freedom will fly off, for this is the cost of freedom.

The writer writes what he wants without concern for recompense not only to affirm his self but also to challenge society. This challenge is not pretence and the writer has no need to inflate his ego by becoming a hero or a fighter. Heroes and fighters struggle to achieve some great work or to establish some meritorious deed and these lie beyond the scope of literary works. If the writer wants to challenge society it must be through language and he must rely on the characters and incidents of his works, otherwise he can only harm literature. Literature is not angry shouting and furthermore cannot turn an individual’s indignation into accusations. It is only when the feelings of the writer as an individual are dispersed in a work that his feelings will withstand the ravages of time and live on for a long time.

Therefore it is actually not the challenge of the writer to society but rather the challenge of his works. An enduring work is of course a powerful response to the times and society of the writer. The clamour of the writer and his actions may have vanished but as long as there are readers his voice in his writings continues to reverberate.

Indeed such a challenge cannot transform society. It is merely an individual aspiring to transcend the limitations of the social ecology and taking a very inconspicuous stance. However this is by no means an ordinary stance for it is one that takes pride in being human. It would be sad if human history is only manipulated by the unknowable laws and moves blindly with the current so that the different voices of individuals cannot be heard. It is in this sense that literature fills in the gaps of history. When the great laws of history are not used to explain humankind it will be possible for people to leave behind their own voices. History is not all that humankind possesses, there is also the legacy of literature. In literature the people are inventions but they retain an essential belief in their own self-worth.

Honourable members of the Academy, I thank you for awarding this Nobel Prize to literature, to literature that is unwavering in its independence, that avoids neither human suffering nor political oppression and that furthermore does not serve politics. I thank all of you for awarding this most prestigious prize for works that are far removed from the writings of the market, works that have aroused little attention but are actually worth reading. At the same time, I also thank the Swedish Academy for allowing me to ascend this dais to speak before the eyes of the world. A frail individual’s weak voice that is hardly worth listening to and that normally would not be heard in the public media has been allowed to address the world. However, I believe that this is precisely the meaning of the Nobel Prize and I thank everyone for this opportunity to speak.

- خطاب صاحب الطبل الصفيح Günter Grass في حفل تسلم جائزة نوبل للاداب 1999

Günter Grass
Federal Republic of Germany
b. 1927- in Danzig
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1999

Honoured Members of the Swedish Academy, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Having made this announcement, nineteenth-century works of fiction would go on and on. Magazines and newspapers gave them all the space they wished: the serialized novel was in its heyday. While the early chapters appeared in quick succession, the core of the work was being written out by hand, and its conclusion was yet to be conceived. Nor was it only trivial horror stories or tearjerkers that thus held the reader in thrall. Many of Dickens' novels came out in serial form, in instalments. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was a serialized novel. Balzac's time, a tireless provider of mass-produced serializations, gave the still anonymous writer lessons in the technique of suspense, of building to a climax at the end of a column. And nearly all Fontane's novels appeared first in newspapers and magazines as serializations. Witness the publisher of the Vossisiche Zeitung, where Trials and Tribulations first saw print, who exclaimed in a rage, "Will this sluttish story never end!"

But before I go on spinning these strands of my talk or move on to others, I wish to point out that from a purely literary point of view this hall and the Swedish Academy that invited me here are far from alien to me. My novel The Rat, which came out almost fourteen years ago and whose catastrophic course along various oblique levels of narration one or two of my readers may recall, features a eulogy delivered before just such an audience as you, an encomium to the rat or, to be more precise, the laboratory rat.

The rat has been awarded a Nobel Prize. At last, one might say. She's been on the list for years, even the short list. Representative of millions of experimental animals – from guinea pig to rhesus monkey – the white-haired, red-eyed laboratory rat is finally getting her due. For she more than anyone – or so claims the narrator of my novel – has made possible all the Nobelified research and discoveries in the field of medicine and, as far as Nobel Laureates Watson and Crick are concerned, on the virtually boundless turf of gene manipulation. Since then maize and other vegetables – to say nothing of all sorts of animals – can be cloned more or less legally, which is why the rat-men, who increasingly take over as the novel comes to a close, that is, during the post-human era, are called Watsoncricks. They combine the best of both genera. Humans have much of the rat in them and vice versa. The world seems to use the synthesis to regain its health. After the Big Bang, when only rats, cockroaches, flies, and the remains of fish and frog eggs survive and it is time to make order out of the chaos, the Watsoncricks, who miraculously escape, do more than their share.

But since this strand of the narrative could as easily have ended with "To Be Continued ..." and the Nobel Prize speech in praise of the laboratory rat is certainly not meant to give the novel a happy end, I can now – as what might be called a matter of principle – turn to narration as a form of survival as well as a form of art.

People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies. And there were those among them who found artful ways of stemming the peaceful flow of their tales and diverting it into a tributary, that, far from drying up, turned suddenly and amazingly into a broad bed, though now full of flotsam and jetsam, the stuff of sub-plots. And because these primordial storytellers – who were not dependent upon day or lamp light and could carry on perfectly well in the dark, who were in fact adept at exploiting dusk or darkness to add to the suspense – because they stopped at nothing, neither dry stretches nor thundering waterfalls, except perhaps to interrupt the course of action with a "To Be Continued ..." if they sensed their audience's attention flagging, many of their listeners felt moved to start telling tales of their own.

What tales were told when no one could yet write and therefore no one wrote them down? From the days of Cain and Abel there were tales of murder and manslaughter. Feuds – blood feuds, in particular – were always good for a story. Genocide entered the picture quite early along with floods and droughts, fat years and lean years. Lengthy lists of cattle and slaves were perfectly acceptable, and no tale could be believable without detailed genealogies of who came before whom and who came after, heroic tales especially. Love triangles, popular even now, and tales of monsters – half man, half beast – who made their way through labyrinths or lay in wait in the bulrushes attracted mass audiences from the outset, to say nothing of legends of gods and idols and accounts of sea journeys, which were then handed down, polished, enlarged upon, modified, transmogrified into their opposites, and finally written down by a storyteller whose name was supposedly Homer or, in the case of the Bible, by a collective of storytellers. In China and Persia, in India and the Peruvian highlands, wherever writing flourished, storytellers – whether as groups or individuals, anonymously or by name – turned into literati.

Writing-fixated as we are, we nonetheless retain the memory of oral storytelling, the spoken origins of literature. And a good thing too, because if we were to forget that all storytelling comes through the lips – now inarticulate, hesitant, now swift, as if driven by fear, now in whisper, to keep the secrets revealed from reaching the wrong ears, now loudly and clearly, all the way from self-serving bluster to sniffing out the very essence of life – if our faith in writing were to make us forget all that, our storytelling would be bookish, dry as dust.

Yet how good too that we have so many books available to us and that whether we read them aloud or to ourselves they are permanent. They have been my inspiration. When I was young and malleable, masters like Melville and Döblin or Luther with his Biblical German prompted me to read aloud as I wrote, to mix ink with spit. Nor have things changed much since. Well into my fifth decade of enduring, no, relishing the moil and toil called writing, I chew tough, stringy clauses into manageable mush, babble to myself in blissful isolation, and put pen to paper only when I hear the proper tone and pitch, resonance and reverberation.

Yes, I love my calling. It keeps me company, a company whose polyphonic chatter calls for literal transcription into my manuscripts. And there is nothing I like more than to meet books of mine – books that have long since flown the coop and been expropriated by readers – when I read out loud to an audience what now lies peacefully on the page. For both the young, weaned early from language, and the old, grizzled yet still rapacious, the written word becomes spoken, and the magic works again and again. It is the shaman in the author earning a bit on the side, writing against the current of time, lying his way to tenable truths. And everyone believes his tacit promise: To Be Continued ...

But how did I become a writer, poet, and artist – all at once and all on frightening white paper? What homemade hubris put a child up to such craziness? After all, I was only twelve when I realized I wanted to be an artist. It coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, when I was living on the outskirts of Danzig. But my first opportunity for professional development had to wait until the following year, when I found a tempting offer in the Hitler Youth magazine Hilf mit! (Lend a Hand). It was a story contest. With prizes. I immediately set to writing my first novel. Influenced by my mother's background, it bore the title The Kashubians, but the action did not take place in the painful present of that small and dwindling people; it took place in the thirteenth century during a period of interregnum, a grim period when brigands and robber barons ruled the highways and the only recourse a peasant had to justice was a kind of kangaroo court.

All I can remember of it is that after a brief outline of the economic conditions in the Kashubian hinterland I started in on pillages and massacres with a vengeance. There was so much throttling, stabbing, and skewering, so many kangaroo-court hangings and executions that by the end of the first chapter all the protagonists and a goodly number of the minor characters were dead and either buried or left to the crows. Since my sense of style did not allow me to turn corpses into spirits and the novel into a ghost story, I had to admit defeat with an abrupt end and no "To Be Continued ...". Not for good, of course, but the neophyte had learned his lesson: next time he would have to be a bit more gentle with his characters.

But first I read and read some more. I had my own way of reading: with my fingers in my ears. Let me say by way of explanation that my younger sister and I grew up in straitened circumstances, that is, in a two-room flat and hence without rooms of our own or even so much as a corner to ourselves. In the long run it turned out to be an advantage, though: I learned at an early age to concentrate in the midst of people or surrounded by noise. When I read I might have been under a bell jar; I was so involved in the world of the book that my mother, who liked a practical joke, once demonstrated her son's complete and utter absorption to a neighbour by replacing a roll I had been taking an occasional bite from with a bar of soap – Palmolive, I believe – whereupon the two women – my mother not without a certain pride – watched me reach blindly for the soap, sink my teeth into it, and chew it for a good minute before it tore me away from my adventure on the page.

To this day I can concentrate as I did in my early years, but I have never read more obsessively. Our books were kept in a bookcase behind blue-curtained panes of glass. My mother belonged to a book club, and the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy stood side by side and mixed in with novels by Hamsun, Raabe, and Vicky Baum. Selma Lagerlöf's Gösta Berling was within easy reach. I later moved on to the Municipal Library, but my mother's collection provided the initial impulse. A punctilious businesswoman forced to sell her wares to unreliable customers on credit, she was also a great lover of beauty: she listened to opera and operetta, melodies on her primitive radio, enjoyed hearing my promising stories, and frequently went to the Municipal Theatre, even taking me along from time to time.

The only reason I rehearse here these anecdotes of a petty bourgeois childhood after painting them with epic strokes decades ago in works peopled by fictitious characters is to help me answer the question "What made you become a writer?" The ability to daydream at length, the job of punning and playing with language in general, the addiction to lying for its own sake rather than for mine because sticking to the truth would have been a bore – in short, what is loosely known as talent was certainly a factor, but it was the abrupt intrusion of politics into the family idyll that turned the all too flighty category of talent into a ballast with a certain permanence and depth.

My mother's favourite cousin, like her a Kashubian by birth, worked at the Polish post office of the Free City of Danzig. He was a regular at our house and always welcome. When the War broke out the Hevelius Square post office building held out for a time against the SS-Heimwehr, and my uncle was rounded up with those who finally surrendered. They were tried summarily and put before a firing squad. Suddenly he was no more. Suddenly and permanently his name was no longer mentioned. He became a non-person. Yet he must have lived on in me through the years when at fifteen I donned a uniform, at sixteen I learned what fear was, at seventeen I landed in an American POW camp, at eighteen I worked in the black market, studied to be a stone-mason and started sculpting in stone, prepared for admission to art school and wrote and drew, drew and wrote, fleet-footed verse, quizzical one-acts, and on it went until I found the material unwieldy – I seem to have an inborn need for aesthetic pleasure. And beneath the detritus of it all lay my mother's favourite cousin, the Polish postal clerk, shot and buried, only to be found by me (who else?) and exhumed and resuscitated by literary artificial respiration under other names and guises, though this time in a novel whose major and minor characters, full of life and beans as they are, make it through a number of chapters, some even holding out till the end and thus enabling the writer to keep his recurrent promise: To Be Continued ...

And so on and so forth. The publication of my first two novels, The Tin Drum and Dog Years, and the novella I stuck between them, Cat and Mouse, taught me early on, as a relatively young writer, that books can cause offence, stir up fury, even hatred, that what is undertaken out of love for one's country can be taken as soiling one's nest. From then on I have been controversial.

Which means that like writers banished to Siberia or suchlike places I am in good company. So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk involved in choosing the profession. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.

The ill humour of the powers-that-be forced Socrates to drain the cup of hemlock to the dregs, sent Ovid into exile, made Seneca open his veins. For centuries and to the present day the finest fruits of the western garden of literature have graced the index of the Catholic church. How much equivocation did the European Enlightenment learn from the censorship practised by princes with absolute power? How many German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese writers did fascism drive from their lands and languages? How many writers fell victim to the Leninist-Stalinist reign of terror? And what constraints are writers under today in countries like China, Kenya, or Croatia?

I come from the land of book-burning. We know that the desire to destroy a hated book is still (or once more) part of the spirit of our times and that when necessary it finds appropriate telegenic expression and therefore a mass audience. What is much worse, however, is that the persecution of writers, including the threat of murder and murder itself, is on the rise throughout the world, so much so that the world has grown accustomed to the terror of it. True, the part of the world that calls itself free raises a hue and cry when, as in 1995 in Nigeria, a writer like Ken Saro-Wiwa and his supporters are sentenced to death and killed for taking a stand against the contamination of their country, but things immediately go back to normal, because ecological considerations might affect the profits of the world's number one oil colossus ****l.

What makes books – and with them writers – so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them? Silencing and worse are seldom the result of direct attacks on the reigning ideology. Often all it takes is a literary allusion to the idea that truth exists only in the plural – that there is no such thing as a single truth but only a multitude of truths – to make the defenders of one or another truth sense danger, mortal danger. Then there is the problem that writers are by definition unable to leave the past in peace: they are quick to open closed wounds, peer behind closed doors, find skeletons in the cupboard, consume sacred cows or, as in the case of Jonathan Swift, offer up Irish children, "stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled", to the kitchens of the English nobility. In other words, nothing is sacred to them, not even capitalism, and that makes them offensive, even criminal. But worst of all they refuse to make common cause with the victors of history: they take pleasure milling about the fringes of the historical process with the losers, who have plenty to say but no platform to say it on. By giving them a voice, they call the victory into question, by associating with them, they join ranks with them.

Of course the powers-that-be, no matter what period costume they may be wearing, have nothing against literature as such. They enjoy it as an ornament and even promote it. At present its role is to entertain, to serve the fun culture, to de-emphasize the negative side of things and give people hope, a light in the darkness. What is basically called for, though not quite so explicitly as during the Communist years, is a "positive hero". In the jungle of the free market economy he is likely to pave his way to success Rambo-like with corpses and a smile; he is an adventurer who is always up for a quick fuck between battles, a winner who leaves a trail of losers behind him, in short, the perfect role model for our globalized world. And the demand for the hard-boiled he-man who always lands on his feet is unfailingly met by the media: James Bond has spawned any number of Dolly-like children. Good will continue to prevail over evil as long as it assumes his cool-guy pose.

Does that make his opposite or enemy a negative hero? Not necessarily. I have my roots, as you will have noticed from your reading, in the Spanish or Moorish school of the picaresque novel. Tilting at windmills has remained a model for that school down through the ages, and the picaro's very existence derives from the comic nature of defeat. He pees on the pillars of power and saws away at the throne knowing full well he will make no dent in either: once he moves on, the exalted temple may look a bit shabby, the throne may wobble slightly, but that is all. His humour is part and parcel of his despair. While Die Götterdämmerung drones on before an elegant Bayreuth audience, he sits sniggering in the back row, because in his theatre comedy and tragedy go hand in hand. He scorns the fateful march of the victors and sticks his foot out to trip them, yet much as his failure makes us laugh the laughter sticks in our throat: even his wittiest cynicisms have a tragic cast to them. Besides, from the point of view of the philistine, rightist or leftist, he is a formalist – even a mannerist – of the first order: he holds the spyglass the wrong way; he sees time as a train on a siding: he puts mirrors everywhere; you can never tell whose ventriloquist he is; given his perspective, he can even accept dwarfs and giants into his entourage. The reason Rabelais was constantly on the run from the secular police and the Holy Inquisition is that his larger-than-life Gargantua and Pantagruel had turned the world according to scholasticism on its head. The laughter they unleashed was positively infernal. When Gargantua stooped bare-arsed on the towers of Notre-Dame and pissed the length and breadth of Paris under water, everyone who did not drown guffawed. Or to go back to Swift: his modest culinary proposal for relieving the hunger in Ireland could be brought up to date if at the next economic summit the board set for the heads of state were groaning with lusciously prepared street children from Brazil or southern Sudan. Satire is the name of the art form I have in mind, and in satire everything is permitted, even tickling the funny bone with the grotesque.

When Heinrich Böll gave his Nobel Lecture here on 2 May 1973, he brought the seemingly opposing positions of reason and poetry into closer and closer proximity and bemoaned the lack of time to go into another aspect of the issue: "I have had to pass over humour, which, though no class privilege, is ignored in his poetry as a hiding place for resistance." Now Böll knew that Jean Paul, the poet in question, had a place in the German Culture Hall of Fame, little read though he is nowadays; he knew to what extent Thomas Mann's literary oeuvre was suspected – by both the right and the left – of irony at the time (and still is, I might add). Clearly what Böll had in mind was not belly-laugh humour but rather inaudible, between-the-lines humour, the chronic susceptibility to melancholy of his clown, the desperate wit of the man who collected silence, an activity, by the way, that has become quite the thing in the media and – under the guise of "voluntary self-control" on the part of the free West – a benign disguise for censorship.

By the early fifties, when I had started writing consciously, Heinrich Böll was a well-known if not always well-received author. With Wolfgang Koeppen, Günter Eich, and Arno Schmidt he stood apart from the culture industry. Post-war German literature, still young, was having a hard time with German, which had been corrupted by the Nazi regime. In addition, Böll's generation – but also the younger writers like myself – were stymied to a certain extent by a prohibition that came from Theodor Adorno: "It is barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz, and that is why it has become impossible to write poetry today ..."

In other words, no more "To Be Continued ..." Though write we did. We wrote by bearing in mind, like Adorno in his Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), that Auschwitz marks a rift, an unbridgeable gap in the history of civilization. It was the only way we could get round the prohibition. Even so, Adorno's writing on the wall has retained its power to this day. All the writers of my generation did public battle with it. No one had the desire or ability to keep silent. It was our duty to take the goose step out of German, to lure it out of its idylls and fogged inwardness. We, the children who had had our fingers burned, we were the ones to repudiate the absolutes, the ideological black or white. Doubt and scepticism were our godparents and the multitude of gray values their present to us. In any case, such was the asceticism I imposed on myself before discovering the richness of a language I had all too sweepingly pronounced guilty: its seducible softness, its tendency to plumb the depths, its utterly supple hardness, not to mention the sheen of its dialects, its artlessness and artfulness, its eccentricities, and beauty blossoming from its subjunctives. Having won back this capital, we invested it to make more. Despite Adorno's verdict or spurred on by it. The only way writing after Auschwitz, poetry or prose, could proceed was by becoming memory and preventing the past from coming to an end. Only then could post-war literature in German justify applying the generally valid "To Be Continued ..." to itself and its descendants; only then could the wound be kept open and the much desired and prescribed forgetting be reversed with a steadfast "Once upon a time".

How many times when one or another interest group calls for considering what happened a closed chapter – we need to return to normalcy and put our shameful past behind us – how many times has literature resisted. And rightly so! Because it is a position as foolish as it is understandable; because every time the end of the post-war period is proclaimed in Germany – as it was ten years ago, with the Wall down and unity in the offing – the past catches up with us.

At that time, in February 1990, I gave a talk to students in Frankfurt entitled "Writing After Auschwitz". I wanted to take stock of my works book by book. In The Diary of a Snail, which came out in 1972 and in which past and present crisscross, but also run parallel or occasionally collide, I am asked by my sons how I define my profession, and I answer, "A writer, children, is someone who writes against the current of time." What I said to the students was: "Such a view presumes that writers are not encapsulated in isolation or the sempiternal, that they see themselves as living in the here and now, and, even more, that they expose themselves to the vicissitudes of time, that they jump in and take sides. The dangers of jumping in and taking sides are well known: The distance a writer is supposed to keep is threatened; his language must live from hand to mouth; the narrowness of current events can make him narrow and curb the imagination he has trained to run free; he runs the danger of running out of breath."

The risk I referred to then has remained with me throughout the years. But what would the profession of writer be like without risk? Granted, the writer would have the security of, say, a cultural bureaucrat, but he would be the prisoner of his fears of dirtying his hands with the present. Out of fear of losing his distance he would lose himself in realms where myths reside and lofty thoughts are all. But the present, which the past is constantly turning into, would catch up to him in the end and put him through the third degree. Because every writer is of his time, no matter how he protests being born too early or late. He does not autonomously choose what he will write about, that choice is made for him. At least I was not free to choose. Left to my own devices, I would have followed the laws of aesthetics and been perfectly happy to seek my place in texts droll and harmless.

But that was not to be. There were extenuating circumstances: mountains of rubble and cadavers, fruit of the womb of German history. The more I shovelled, the more it grew. It simply could not be ignored. Besides, I come from a family of refugees, which means that in addition to everything that drives a writer from book to book – common ambition, the fear of boredom, the mechanisms of egocentricity – I had the irreparable loss of my birthplace. If by telling tales I could not recapture a city both lost and destroyed, I could at least re-conjure it. And this obsession kept me going. I wanted to make it clear to myself and my readers, not without a bit of a chip on my shoulder, that what was lost did not need to sink into oblivion, that it could be resuscitated by the art of literature in all its grandeur and pettiness: the churches and cemeteries, the sounds of the shipyards and smells of the faintly lapping Baltic, a language on its way out yet still stable-warm and grumble-rich, sins in need of confession, and crimes tolerated if never exonerated.

A similar loss has provided other writers with a hotbed of obsessive topics. In a conversation dating back many years Salman Rushdie and I concurred that my lost Danzig was for me – like his lost Bombay for him – both resource and refuse pit, point of departure and navel of the world. This arrogance, this overkill lies at the very heart of literature. It is the condition for a story that can pull out all the stops. Painstaking detail, sensitive psychologizing, slice-of-life realism – no such techniques can handle our monstrous raw materials. As indebted as we are to the Enlightenment tradition of reason, the absurd course of history spurns all exclusively reasonable explanations.

Just as the Nobel Prize – once we divest it of its ceremonial garb – has its roots in the invention of dynamite, which like such other human headbirths as the splitting of the atom and the likewise Nobelified classification of the gene has wrought both weal and woe in the world, so literature has an explosive quality at its root, though the explosions literature releases have a delayed-action effect and change the world only in the magnifying glass of time, so to speak, it too wreaking cause for both joy and lamentation here below. How long did it take the European Enlightenment from Montaigne to Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Lessing, and Lichtenberg to introduce a flicker of reason into the dark corners of scholasticism? And even that flicker often died in the process, a process censorship went a long way towards inhibiting. But when the light finally did brighten things up, it turned out to be the light of cold reason, limited to the technically doable, to economic and social progress, a reason that claimed to be enlightened but that merely drummed a reason-based jargon (which amounted to instructions for making progress at all costs) into its offspring, capitalism and socialism (which were at each other's throats from the word go).

Today we can see what those brilliant failures who were the Enlightenment's offspring have wrought. We can see what a dangerous position its delayed-action, word-detonated explosion has hurled us into. And if we are trying to repair the damage with Enlightenment tools, it is only because we have no others. We look on in horror as capitalism – now that his brother, socialism, has been declared dead – rages unimpeded, megalomaniacally replaying the errors of the supposedly extinct brother. It has turned the free market into dogma, the only truth, and intoxicated by its all but limitless power, plays the wildest of games, making merger after merger with no goal than to maximize profits. No wonder capitalism is proving as impervious to reform as the communism that managed to strangle itself. Globalization is its motto, a motto it proclaims with the arrogance of infallibility: there is no alternative.

Accordingly, history has come to an end. No more "To Be Continued ...", no more suspense. Though perhaps there is hope that if not politics, which has abdicated its decision-making power to economics, then at least literature may come up with something to cause the "new dogmatism" to falter.

How can subversive writing be both dynamite and of literary quality? Is there time enough to wait for the delayed action? Is any book capable of supplying a commodity in so short supply as the future? Is it not rather the case that literature is currently retreating from public life and that young writers are using the internet as a playground? A standstill, to which the suspicious word "communication" lends a certain aura, is making headway. Every scrap of time is planned down to the last nervous breakdown. A cultural industry vale of tears is taking over the world. What is to be done?

My godlessness notwithstanding, all I can do is bend my knee to a saint who has never failed me and cracked some of the hardest nuts. "O Holy and (through the grace of Camus) Nobelified Sisyphus! May thy stone not remain at the top of the hill, may we roll it down again and like thee continue to rejoice in it, and may the story told of the drudgery of our existence have no end. Amen."

But will my prayer be heard? Or are the rumours true? Is the new breed of cloned creature destined to assure the continuation of human history?

Which brings me back to the beginning of my talk. Once more I open The Rat to the fifth chapter, in which the laboratory rat, representing millions of other laboratory animals in the cause of research, wins the Nobel Prize, and I am reminded how few prizes have been awarded to projects that would rid the world of the scourge of mankind: hunger. Anyone who can pay the price can get a new pair of kidneys. Hearts can be transplanted. We can phone anywhere in the world wire-free. Satellites and space stations orbit us solicitously. The latest weapon systems, conceived and developed, they too, on the basis of award-winning research, can help their masters to keep death at bay. Anything the human mind comes up with finds astonishing applications. Only hunger seems to resist. It is even increasing. Poverty deeply rooted shades into misery. Refugees are flocking all over the world accompanied by hunger. It takes political will paired with scientific know-how to root out misery of such magnitude, and no one seems resolved to undertake it.

In 1973, just when terror – with the active support of the United States – was beginning to strike in Chile, Willy Brandt spoke before the United Nations General Assembly, the first German chancellor to do so. He brought up the issue of worldwide poverty. The applause following his exclamation "Hunger too is war!" was stunning.

I was present when he gave the speech. I was working on my novel The Flounder at the time. It deals with the very foundations of human existence including food, the lack and superabundance thereof, great gluttons and untold starvelings, the joys of the palate and crusts from the rich man's table.

The issue is still with us. The poor counter growing riches with growing birth rates. The affluent north and west can try to screen themselves off in security-mad fortresses, but the flocks of refugees will catch up with them: no gate can withstand the crush of the hungry.

The future will have something to say about all this. Our common novel must be continued. And even if one day people stop or are forced to stop writing and publishing, if books are no longer available, there will still be storytellers giving us mouth-to-ear artificial respiration, spinning old stories in new ways: loud and soft, heckling and halting, now close to laughter, now on the brink of tears.

Gao Xingjian's speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 2000 (in French


Vos Majestés, Vos Altesses royales, Mesdames, Messieurs,

L'homme qui est devant vous se souvient encore qu'à l'âge de huit ans, sa mère lui avait demandé de tenir un journal. II s'est ainsi consacré à l'écriture jusqu'à l'âge adulte.
II se souvient encore qu'à son entrée au lycée, un vieux professeur de rédaction avait accroché au tableau une peinture sans en révéler le titre et avait demandé aux élèves de faire une rédaction à son sujet. L'homme qui est devant vous n'aimait pas cette peinture, et il avait écrit des critiques contre elle. Non seulement le vieux maître ne s'était pas mis en colère, mais il lui avait donné une bonne note assortie du commentaire : "Plume vigoureuse." Et c'est ainsi que cet homme n'a plus cessé d'écrire, d'abord des contes pour enfants, puis des romans, de la poésie et du théâtre, et ce jusqu'à ce que la révolution renverse la culture. Là, pris de peur, il a tout brûlé.
Ensuite, il est parti cultiver les rizières pendant de nombreuses années. Mais il écrivait encore en secret et cachait ses manuscrits dans des pots de terre quite qu'il enterrait.
Ce qu'il a écrit ensuite a été interdit.
Plus tard encore, arrivé en Occident, il a continué à écrire, mais sans se soucier d'être édité. Et même quand il fut édité, il ne se soucia pas de connaître les réactions. Soudain, le voilà dans cette brillante salle, qui reçoit cette précieuse récompense des mains de Sa Majesté le Roi.
Alors, il ne peut s'empêcher de demander : Votre Majesté, est-ce la réalité ou un conte ?


, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 2001

خطاب José Saramago في حفل تسلم جتئزة نوبل للاداب 1998

José Saramago

Portugalb. 1922
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1998

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife. My mother's parents lived on this scarcity, on the small breeding of pigs that after weaning were sold to the neighbours in our village of Azinhaga in the province of Ribatejo. Their names were Jerónimo Meirinho and Josefa Caixinha and they were both illiterate. In winter when the cold of the night grew to the point of freezing the water in the pots inside the house, they went to the sty and fetched the weaklings among the piglets, taking them to their bed. Under the coarse blankets, the warmth from the humans saved the little animals from freezing and rescued them from certain death. Although the two were kindly people, it was not a compassionate soul that prompted them to act in that way: what concerned them, without sentimentalism or rhetoric, was to protect their daily bread, as is natural for people who, to maintain their life, have not learnt to think more than is needful. Many times I helped my grandfather Jerónimo in his swineherd's labour, many times I dug the land in the vegetable garden adjoining the house, and I chopped wood for the fire, many times, turning and turning the big iron wheel which worked the water pump. I pumped water from the community well and carried it on my shoulders. Many times, in secret, dodging from the men guarding the cornfields, I went with my grandmother, also at dawn, armed with rakes, sacking and cord, to glean the stubble, the loose straw that would then serve as litter for the livestock. And sometimes, on hot summer nights, after supper, my grandfather would tell me: "José, tonight we're going to sleep, both of us, under the fig tree". There were two other fig trees, but that one, certainly because it was the biggest, because it was the oldest, and timeless, was, for everybody in the house, the fig tree. More or less by antonomasia, an erudite word that I met only many years after and learned the meaning of... Amongst the peace of the night, amongst the tree's high branches a star appeared to me and then slowly hid behind a leaf while, turning my gaze in another direction I saw rising into view like a river flowing silent through the hollow sky, the opal clarity of the Milky Way, the Road to Santiago as we still used to call it in the village. With sleep delayed, night was peopled with the stories and the cases my grandfather told and told: legends, apparitions, terrors, unique episodes, old deaths, scuffles with sticks and stones, the words of our forefathers, an untiring rumour of memories that would keep me awake while at the same time gently lulling me. I could never know if he was silent when he realised that I had fallen asleep or if he kept on talking so as not to leave half-unanswered the question I invariably asked into the most delayed pauses he placed on purpose within the account: "And what happened next?" Maybe he repeated the stories for himself, so as not to forget them, or else to enrich them with new detail. At that age and as we all do at some time, needless to say, I imagined my grandfather Jerónimo was master of all the knowledge in the world. When at first light the singing of birds woke me up, he was not there any longer, had gone to the field with his animals, letting me sleep on. Then I would get up, fold the coarse blanket and barefoot - in the village I always walked barefoot till I was fourteen - and with straws still stuck in my hair, I went from the cultivated part of the yard to the other part, where the sties were, by the house. My grandmother, already afoot before my grandfather, set in front of me a big bowl of coffee with pieces of bread in and asked me if I had slept well. If I told her some bad dream, born of my grandfather's stories, she always reassured me: "Don't make much of it, in dreams there's nothing solid". At the time I thought, though my grandmother was also a very wise woman, she couldn't rise to the heights grandfather could, a man who, lying under a fig tree, having at his side José his grandson, could set the universe in motion just with a couple of words. It was only many years after, when my grandfather had departed from this world and I was a grown man, I finally came to realise that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: "The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die". She didn't say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.

Many years later, writing for the first time about my grandfather Jerónimo and my grandmother Josefa (I haven't said so far that she was, according to many who knew her when young, a woman of uncommon beauty), I was finally aware I was transforming the ordinary people they were into literary characters: this was, probably, my way of not forgetting them, drawing and redrawing their faces with the pencil that ever changes memory, colouring and illuminating the monotony of a dull and horizonless daily routine as if creating, over the unstable map of memory, the supernatural unreality of the country where one has decided to spend one's life. The same attitude of mind that, after evoking the fascinating and enigmatic figure of a certain Berber grandfather, would lead me to describe more or less in these words an old photo (now almost eighty years old) showing my parents "both standing, beautiful and young, facing the photographer, showing in their faces an expression of solemn seriousness, maybe fright in front of the camera at the very instant when the lens is about to capture the image they will never have again, because the following day will be, implacably, another day... My mother is leaning her right elbow against a tall pillar and holds, in her right hand drawn in to her body, a flower. My father has his arm round my mother's back, his callused hand showing over her shoulder, like a wing. They are standing, shy, on a carpet patterned with branches. The canvas forming the fake background of the picture shows diffuse and incongruous neo-classic architecture." And I ended, "The day will come when I will tell these things. Nothing of this matters except to me. A Berber grandfather from North Africa, another grandfather a swineherd, a wonderfully beautiful grandmother; serious and handsome parents, a flower in a picture - what other genealogy would I care for? and what better tree would I lean against?"

I wrote these words almost thirty years ago, having no other purpose than to rebuild and register instants of the lives of those people who engendered and were closest to my being, thinking that nothing else would need explaining for people to know where I came from and what materials the person I am was made of, and what I have become little by little. But after all I was wrong, biology doesn't determine everything and as for genetics, very mysterious must have been its paths to make its voyages so long... My genealogical tree (you will forgive the presumption of naming it this way, being so diminished in the substance of its sap) lacked not only some of those branches that time and life's successive encounters cause to burst from the main stem but also someone to help its roots penetrate the deepest subterranean layers, someone who could verify the consistency and flavour of its fruit, someone to extend and strengthen its top to make of it a ****ter for birds of passage and a support for nests. When painting my parents and grandparents with the paints of literature, transforming them from common people of flesh and blood into characters, newly and in different ways builders of my life, I was, without noticing, tracing the path by which the characters I would invent later on, the others, truly literary, would construct and bring to me the materials and the tools which, at last, for better or for worse, in the sufficient and in the insufficient, in profit and loss, in all that is scarce but also in what is too much, would make of me the person whom I nowadays recognise as myself: the creator of those characters but at the same time their own creation. In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be.

Now I can clearly see those who were my life-masters, those who most intensively taught me the hard work of living, those dozens of characters from my novels and plays that right now I see marching past before my eyes, those men and women of paper and ink, those people I believed I was guiding as I the narrator chose according to my whim, obedient to my will as an author, like articulated puppets whose actions could have no more effect on me than the burden and the tension of the strings I moved them with. Of those masters, the first was, undoubtedly, a mediocre portrait-painter, whom I called simply H, the main character of a story that I feel may reasonably be called a double initiation (his own, but also in a manner of speaking the author's) entitled Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, who taught me the simple honesty of acknowledging and observing, without resentment or frustration, my own limitations: as I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world's, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition. It's not up to me, of course, to evaluate the merits of the results of efforts made, but today I consider it obvious that all my work from then on has obeyed that purpose and that principle.

Then came the men and women of Alentejo, that same brotherhood of the condemned of the earth where belonged my grandfather Jerónimo and my grandmother Josefa, primitive peasants obliged to hire out the strength of their arms for a wage and working conditions that deserved only to be called infamous, getting for less than nothing a life which the cultivated and civilised beings we are proud to be are pleased to call - depending on the occasion - precious, sacred or sublime. Common people I knew, deceived by a Church both accomplice and beneficiary of the power of the State and of the landlords, people permanently watched by the police, people so many times innocent victims of the arbitrariness of a false justice. Three generations of a peasant family, the Badweathers, from the beginning of the century to the April Revolution of 1974 which toppled dictatorship, move through this novel, called Risen from the Ground, and it was with such men and women risen from the ground, real people first, figures of fiction later, that I learned how to be patient, to trust and to confide in time, that same time that simultaneously builds and destroys us in order to build and once more to destroy us. The only thing I am not sure of having assimilated satisfactorily is something that the hardship of those experiences turned into virtues in those women and men: a naturally austere attitude towards life. Having in mind, however, that the lesson learned still after more than twenty years remains intact in my memory, that every day I feel its presence in my spirit like a persistent summons: I haven't lost, not yet at least, the hope of meriting a little more the greatness of those examples of dignity proposed to me in the vast immensity of the plains of Alentejo. Time will tell.

What other lessons could I possibly receive from a Portuguese who lived in the sixteenth century, who composed the Rimas and the glories, the shipwrecks and the national disenchantments in the Lusíadas, who was an absolute poetical genius, the greatest in our literature, no matter how much sorrow this causes to Fernando Pessoa, who proclaimed himself its Super Camões? No lesson would fit me, no lesson could I learn, except the simplest, which could have been offered to me by Luís Vaz de Camões in his pure humanity, for instance the proud humility of an author who goes knocking at every door looking for someone willing to publish the book he has written, thereby suffering the scorn of the ignoramuses of blood and race, the disdainful indifference of a king and of his powerful entourage, the mockery with which the world has always received the visits of poets, visionaries and fools. At least once in life, every author has been, or will have to be, Luís de Camões, even if they haven't written the poem Sôbolos Rios... Among nobles, courtiers and censors from the Holy Inquisition, among the loves of yester-year and the disillusionments of premature old age, between the pain of writing and the joy of having written, it was this ill man, returning poor from India where so many sailed just to get rich, it was this soldier blind in one eye, slashed in his soul, it was this seducer of no fortune who will never again flutter the hearts of the ladies in the royal court, whom I put on stage in a play called What shall I do with this Book?, whose ending repeats another question, the only truly important one, the one we will never know if it will ever have a sufficient answer: "What will you do with this book?" It was also proud humility to carry under his arm a masterpiece and to be unfairly rejected by the world. Proud humility also, and obstinate too - wanting to know what the purpose will be, tomorrow, of the books we are writing today, and immediately doubting whether they will last a long time (how long?) the reassuring reasons we are given or that are given us by ourselves. No-one is better deceived than when he allows others to deceive him.

Here comes a man whose left hand was taken in war and a woman who came to this world with the mysterious power of seeing what lies beyond people's skin. His name is Baltazar Mateus and his nickname Seven-Suns; she is known as Blimunda and also, later, as Seven-Moons because it is written that where there is a sun there will have to be a moon and that only the conjoined and harmonious presence of the one and the other will, through love, make earth habitable. There also approaches a Jesuit priest called Bartolomeu who invented a machine capable of going up to the sky and flying with no other fuel than the human will, the will which, people say, can do anything, the will that could not, or did not know how to, or until today did not want to, be the sun and the moon of simple kindness or of even simpler respect. These three Portuguese fools from the eighteenth century, in a time and country where superstition and the fires of the Inquisition flourished, where vanity and the megalomania of a king raised a convent, a palace and a basilica which would amaze the outside world, if that world, in a very unlikely supposition, had eyes enough to see Portugal, eyes like Blimunda's, eyes to see what was hidden... Here also comes a crowd of thousands and thousands of men with dirty and callused hands, exhausted bodies after having lifted year after year, stone-by-stone, the implacable convent walls, the huge palace rooms, the columns and pilasters, the airy belfries, the basilica dome suspended over empty space. The sounds we hear are from Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord, and he doesn't quite know if he is supposed to be laughing or crying... This is the story of Baltazar and Blimunda, a book where the apprentice author, thanks to what had long ago been taught to him in his grandparents' Jerónimo's and Josefa's time, managed to write some similar words not without poetry: "Besides women's talk, dreams are what hold the world in its orbit. But it is also dreams that crown it with moons, that's why the sky is the splendour in men's heads, unless men's heads are the one and only sky." So be it.

Of poetry the teenager already knew some lessons, learnt in his textbooks when, in a technical school in Lisbon, he was being prepared for the trade he would have at the beginning of his labour's life: mechanic. He also had good poetry masters during long evening hours in public libraries, reading at random, with finds from catalogues, with no guidance, no-one to advise him, with the creative amazement of the sailor who invents every place he discovers. But it was at the Industrial School Library that The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis started to be written... There, one day the young mechanic (he was about seventeen) found a magazine entitled Atena containing poems signed with that name and, naturally, being very poorly acquainted with the literary cartography of his country, he thought that there really was a Portuguese poet called Ricardo Reis. Very soon, though, he found that this poet was really one Fernando Nogueira Pessoa, who signed his works with the names of non-existent poets, born of his mind. He called them heteronyms, a word that did not exist in the dictionaries of the time which is why it was so hard for the apprentice to letters to know what it meant. He learnt many of Ricardo Reis' poems by heart ("To be great, be one/Put yourself into the little things you do"); but in spite of being so young and ignorant, he could not accept that a superior mind could really have conceived, without remorse, the cruel line "Wise is he who is satisfied with the spectacle of the world". Later, much later, the apprentice, already with grey hairs and a little wiser in his own wisdom, dared to write a novel to show this poet of the Odes something about the spectacle of the world of 1936, where he had placed him to live out his last few days: the occupation of the Rhineland by the Nazi army, Franco's war against the Spanish Republic, the creation by Salazar of the Portuguese Fascist militias. It was his way of telling him: "Here is the spectacle of the world, my poet of serene bitterness and elegant scepticism. Enjoy, behold, since to be sitting is your wisdom..."

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ended with the melancholy words: "Here, where the sea has ended and land awaits." So there would be no more discoveries by Portugal, fated to one infinite wait for futures not even imaginable; only the usual fado, the same old saudade and little more... Then the apprentice imagined that there still might be a way of sending the ships back to the water, for instance, by moving the land and setting that out to sea. An immediate fruit of collective Portuguese resentment of the historical disdain of Europe (more accurate to say fruit of my own resentment...) the novel I then wrote - The Stone Raft - separated from the Continent the whole Iberian Peninsula and transformed it into a big floating island, moving of its own accord with no oars, no sails, no propellers, in a southerly direction, "a mass of stone and land, covered with cities, villages, rivers, woods, factories and bushes, arable land, with its people and animals" on its way to a new Utopia: the cultural meeting of the Peninsular peoples with the peoples from the other side of the Atlantic, thereby defying - my strategy went that far - the suffocating rule exercised over that region by the United States of America... A vision twice Utopian would see this political fiction as a much more generous and human ****phor: that Europe, all of it, should move South to help balance the world, as compensation for its former and its present colonial abuses. That is, Europe at last as an ethical reference. The characters in The Stone Raft - two women, three men and a dog - continually travel through the Peninsula as it furrows the ocean. The world is changing and they know they have to find in themselves the new persons they will become (not to mention the dog, he is not like other dogs...). This will suffice for them.

Then the apprentice recalled that at a remote time of his life he had worked as a proof-reader and that if, so to say, in The Stone Raft he had revised the future, now it might not be a bad thing to revise the past, inventing a novel to be called History of the Siege of Lisbon, where a proof-reader, checking a book with the same title but a real history book and tired of watching how "History" is less and less able to surprise, decides to substitute a "yes" for a "no", subverting the authority of "historical truth". Raimundo Silva, the proof-reader, is a simple, common man, distinguished from the crowd only by believing that all things have their visible sides and their invisible ones and that we will know nothing about them until we manage to see both. He talks about this with the historian thus: "I must remind you that proof-readers are serious people, much experienced in literature and life, My book, don't forget, deals with history. However, since I have no intention of pointing out other contradictions, in my modest opinion, Sir, everything that is not literature is life, History as well, Especially history, without wishing to give offence, And painting and music, Music has resisted since birth, it comes and goes, tries to free itself from the word, I suppose out of envy, only to submit in the end, And painting, Well now, painting is nothing more than literature achieved with paintbrushes, I trust you haven't forgotten that mankind began to paint long before it knew how to write, Are you familiar with the proverb, If you don't have a dog, go hunting with a cat, in other words, the man who cannot write, paints or draws, as if he were a child, What you are trying to say, in other words, is that literature already existed before it was born, Yes, Sir, just like man who, in a manner of speaking, existed before he came into being, It strikes me that you have missed your vocation, you should have become a philosopher, or historian, you have the flair and temperament needed for these disciplines, I lack the necessary training, Sir, and what can a simple man achieve without training, I was more than fortunate to come into the world with my genes in order, but in a raw state as it were, and then no education beyond primary school, You could have presented yourself as being self-taught, the product of your own worthy efforts, there's nothing to be ashamed of, society in the past took pride in its autodidacts, No longer, progress has come along and put an end to all of that, now the self-taught are frowned upon, only those who write entertaining verses and stories are entitled to be and go on being autodidacts, lucky for them, but as for me, I must confess that I never had any talent for literary creation, Become a philosopher, man, You have a keen sense of humour, Sir, with a distinct flair for irony, and I ask myself how you ever came to devote yourself to history, serious and profound science as it is, I'm only ironic in real life, It has always struck me that history is not real life, literature, yes, and nothing else, But history was real life at the time when it could not yet be called history, So you believe, Sir, that history is real life, Of course, I do, I meant to say that history was real life, No doubt at all, What would become of us if the deleatur did not exist, sighed the proof-reader." It is useless to add that the apprentice had learnt, with Raimundo Silva, the lesson of doubt. It was about time.

Well, probably it was this learning of doubt that made him go through the writing of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. True, and he has said so, the title was the result of an optical illusion, but it is fair to ask whether it was the serene example of the proof-reader who, all the time, had been preparing the ground from where the new novel would gush out. This time it was not a matter of looking behind the pages of the New Testament searching for antitheses, but of illuminating their surfaces, like that of a painting, with a low light to heighten their relief, the traces of crossings, the shadows of depressions. That's how the apprentice read, now surrounded by evangelical characters, as if for the first time, the description of the massacre of the innocents and, having read, he couldn't understand. He couldn't understand why there were already martyrs in a religion that would have to wait thirty years more to listen to its founder pronouncing the first word about it, he could not understand why the only person that could have done so dared not save the lives of the children of Bethlehem, he could not understand Joseph's lack of a minimum feeling of responsibility, of remorse, of guilt, or even of curiosity, after returning with his family from Egypt. It cannot even be argued in defence that it was necessary for the children of Bethlehem to die to save the life of Jesus: simple common sense, that should preside over all things human and divine, is there to remind us that God would not send His Son to Earth, particularly with the mission of redeeming the sins of mankind, to die beheaded by a soldier of Herod at the age of two... In that Gospel, written by the apprentice with the great respect due to great drama, Joseph will be aware of his guilt, will accept remorse as a punishment for the sin he has committed and will be taken to die almost without resistance, as if this were the last remaining thing to do to clear his accounts with the world. The apprentice's Gospel is not, consequently, one more edifying legend of blessed beings and gods, but the story of a few human beings subjected to a power they fight but cannot defeat. Jesus, who will inherit the dusty sandals with which his father had walked so many country roads, will also inherit his tragic feeling of responsibility and guilt that will never abandon him, not even when he raises his voice from the top of the cross: "Men, forgive him because he knows not what he has done", referring certainly to the God who has sent him there, but perhaps also, if in that last agony he still remembers, his real father who has generated him humanly in flesh and blood. As you can see, the apprentice had already made a long voyage when in his heretical Gospel he wrote the last words of the temple dialogue between Jesus and the scribe: "Guilt is a wolf that eats its cub after having devoured its father, The wolf of which you speak has already devoured my father, Then it will be soon your turn, And what about you, have you ever been devoured, Not only devoured, but also spewed up".

Had Emperor Charlemagne not established a monastery in North Germany, had that monastery not been the origin of the city of Münster, had Münster not wished to celebrate its twelve-hundredth anniversary with an opera about the dreadful sixteenth-century war between Protestant Anabaptists and Catholics, the apprentice would not have written his play In Nomine Dei. Once more, with no other help than the tiny light of his reason, the apprentice had to penetrate the obscure labyrinth of religious beliefs, the beliefs that so easily make human beings kill and be killed. And what he saw was, once again, the hideous mask of intolerance, an intolerance that in Münster became an insane paroxysm, an intolerance that insulted the very cause that both parties claimed to defend. Because it was not a question of war in the name of two inimical gods, but of war in the name of a same god. Blinded by their own beliefs, the Anabaptists and the Catholics of Münster were incapable of understanding the most evident of all proofs: on Judgement Day, when both parties come forward to receive the reward or the punishment they deserve for their actions on earth, God - if His decisions are ruled by anything like human logic - will have to accept them all in Paradise, for the simple reason that they all believe in it. The terrible slaughter in Münster taught the apprentice that religions, despite all they promised, have never been used to bring men together and that the most absurd of all wars is a holy war, considering that God cannot, even if he wanted to, declare war on himself...

Blind. The apprentice thought, "we are blind", and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures. Then the apprentice, as if trying to exorcise the monsters generated by the blindness of reason, started writing the simplest of all stories: one person is looking for another, because he has realised that life has nothing more important to demand from a human being. The book is called All the Names. Unwritten, all our names are there. The names of the living and the names of the dead.

I conclude. The voice that read these pages wished to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don't have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.
Translated from the Portuguese: Tim Crosfield and Fernando Rodrigues

Dario Fo
Italy
b. 1926
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1997

December 7, 1997

Listen to a Sound Recording
Italian, with Swedish interpretation 11 min. »
Against Jesters Who Defame and Insult

"Against jesters who defame and insult". Law issued by Emperor Frederick II (Messina 1221), declaring that anyone may commit violence against jesters without incurring punishment or sanction.
The drawings I'm showing you are mine. Copies of these, slightly reduced in size, have been distributed among you.
For some time it's been my habit to use images when preparing a speech: rather than write it down, I illustrate it. This allows me to improvise, to exercise my imagination - and to oblige you to use yours.
As I proceed, I will from time to time indicate to you where we are in the manuscript. That way you won't lose the thread. This will be of help especially to those of you who don't understand either Italian or Swedish. English-speakers will have a tremendous advantage over the rest because they will imagine things I've neither said nor thought. There is of course the problem of the two laughters: those who understand Italian will laugh immediately, those who don't will have to wait for Anna [Barsotti]'s Swedish translation. And then there are those of you who won't know whether to laugh the first time or the second. Anyway, let's get started.

Ladies and gentlemen, the title I've selected for this little chat is "contra jogulatores obloquentes", which you all recognize as Latin, mediaeval Latin to be precise. It's the title of a law issued in Sicily in 1221 by Emperor Frederick II of Swabia, an emperor "anointed by God", who we were taught in school to regard a sovereign of extraordinary enlightenment, a liberal. "Jogulatores obloquentes" means "jesters who defame and insult". The law in question allowed any and all citizens to insult jesters, to beat them and even - if they were in that mood - to kill them, without running any risk of being brought to trial and condemned. I hasten to assure you that this law no longer is in vigour, so I can safely continue.

Ladies and gentlemen,
Friends of mine, noted men of letters, have in various radio and television interviews declared: "The highest prize should no doubt be awarded to the members of the Swedish Academy, for having had the courage this year to award the Nobel Prize to a jester." I agree. Yours is an act of courage that borders on provocation.
It's enough to take stock of the uproar it has caused: sublime poets and writers who normally occupy the loftiest of spheres, and who rarely take interest in those who live and toil on humbler planes, are suddenly bowled over by some kind of whirlwind.
Like I said, I applaud and concur with my friends.
These poets had already ascended to the Parnassian heights when you, through your insolence, sent them toppling to earth, where they fell face and belly down in the mire of normality.
Insults and abuse are hurled at the Swedish Academy, at its members and their relatives back to the seventh generation. The wildest of them clamour: "Down with the King ... of Norway!". It appears they got the dynasty wrong in the confusion.
(At this point you may turn the page. As you see there is an image of a naked poet bowled over by a whirlwind.)

Some landed pretty hard on their nether parts. There were reports of poets and writers whose nerves and livers suffered terribly. For a few days thereafter there was not a pharmacy in Italy that could muster up a single tranquillizer.
But, dear members of the Academy, let's admit it, this time you've overdone it. I mean come on, first you give the prize to a black man, then to a Jewish writer. Now you give it to a clown. What gives? As they say in Naples: pazziàmme? Have we lost our senses?
Also the higher clergy have suffered their moments of madness. Sundry potentates - great electors of the Pope, bishops, cardinals and prelates of Opus Dei - have all gone through the ceiling, to the point that they've even petitioned for the reinstatement of the law that allowed jesters to be burned at the stake. Over a slow fire.
On the other hand I can tell you there is an extraordinary number of people who rejoice with me over your choice. And so I bring you the most festive thanks, in the name of a multitude of mummers, jesters, clowns, tumblers and storytellers.
(This is where we are now [indicates a page].)

And speaking of storytellers, I mustn't forget those of the small town on Lago Maggiore where I was born and raised, a town with a rich oral tradition.
They were the old storytellers, the master glass-blowers who taught me and other children the craftsmanship, the art, of spinning fantastic yarns. We would listen to them, bursting with laughter - laughter that would stick in our throats as the tragic allusion that surmounted each sarcasm would dawn on us. To this day I keep fresh in my mind the story of the Rock of Caldé.

"Many years ago", began the old glass-blower, "way up on the crest of that steep cliff that rises from the lake there was a town called Caldé. As it happened, this town was sitting on a loose splinter of rock that slowly, day by day, was sliding down towards the precipice. It was a splendid little town, with a campanile, a fortified tower at the very peak and a cluster of houses, one after the other. It's a town that once was and that now is gone. It disappeared in the 15th century.
"'Hey', shouted the peasants and fishermen down in the valley below. 'You're sliding, you'll fall down from there'.
"But the cliff dwellers wouldn't listen to them, they even laughed and made fun of them: 'You think you're pretty smart, trying to scare us into running away from our houses and our land so you can grab them instead. But we're not that stupid.'
"So they continued to prune their vines, sow their fields, marry and make love. They went to mass. They felt the rock slide under their houses but they didn't think much about it. 'Just the rock settling. Quite normal', they said, reassuring each other.
"The great splinter of rock was about to sink into the lake. 'Watch out, you've got water up to your ankles', shouted the people along the shore. 'Nonsense, that's just drainage water from the fountains, it's just a bit humid', said the people of the town, and so, slowly but surely, the whole town was swallowed by the lake.
"Gurgle ... gurgle ... splash ... they sink .... houses, men, women, two horses, three donkeys ... heehaw ... gurgle. Undaunted, the priest continued to receive the confession of a nun: 'Te absolvi ... animus ... santi ... guurgle ... Aame ... gurgle ...' The tower disappeared, the campanile sank with bells and all: Dong ... ding ... dop ... plock ...
"Even today", continued the old glass-blower, "if you look down into the water from that outcrop that still juts out from the lake, and if in that same moment a thunderstorm breaks out, and the lightning illuminates the bottom of the lake, you can still see - incredible as it may seem! - the submerged town, with its streets still intact and even the inhabitants themselves, walking around and glibly repeating to themselves: 'Nothing has happened'. The fish swim back and forth before their eyes, even into their ears. But they just brush them off: 'Nothing to worry about. It's just some kind of fish that's learned to swim in the air'.
"'Atchoo!' 'God bless you!' 'Thank you ... it's a bit humid today ... more than yesterday ... but everything's fine'. They've reached rock bottom, but as far as they're concerned, nothing has happened at all."

Disturbing though it may be, there's no denying that a tale like this still has something to tell us.
I repeat, I owe much to these master glass-blowers of mine, and they - I assure you - are immensely grateful to you, members of this Academy, for rewarding one of their disciples.
And they express their gratitude with explosive exuberance. In my home town, people swear that on the night the news arrived that one of their own storytellers was to be awarded the Nobel Prize, a kiln that had been standing cold for some fifty years suddenly erupted in a broadside of flames, spraying high into the air - like a fireworks finale - a myriad splinters of coloured glass, which then showered down on the surface of the lake, releasing an impressive cloud of steam.
(While you applaud, I'll have a drink of water. [Turning to the interpreter:] Would you like some?
It's important that you talk among yourselves while we drink, because if you try to hear the gurgle gurgle gurgle the water makes as we swallow we'll choke on it and start coughing. So instead you can exchange niceties like "Oh, what a lovely evening it is, isn't it?".
End of intermission: we turn to a new page, but don't worry, it'll go faster from here.)

Above all others, this evening you're due the loud and solemn thanks of an extraordinary master of the stage, little-known not only to you and to people in France, Norway, Finland ... but also to the people of Italy. Yet he was, until Shakespeare, doubtless the greatest playwright of renaissance Europe. I'm referring to Ruzzante Beolco, my greatest master along with Molière: both actors-playwrights, both mocked by the leading men of letters of their times. Above all, they were despised for bringing onto the stage the everyday life, joys and desperation of the common people; the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the high and mighty; and the incessant injustice. And their major, unforgivable fault was this: in telling these things, they made people laugh. Laughter does not please the mighty.
Ruzzante, the true father of the Commedia dell'Arte, also constructed a language of his own, a language of and for the theatre, based on a variety of tongues: the dialects of the Po Valley, expressions in Latin, Spanish, even German, all mixed with onomatopoeic sounds of his own invention. It is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I've learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the grammelot.
Allow me to dedicate a part of this prestigious prize to Ruzzante.

A few days ago, a young actor of great talent said to me: "Maestro, you should try to project your energy, your enthusiasm, to young people. You have to give them this charge of yours. You have to share your professional knowledge and experience with them". Franca - that's my wife - and I looked at each other and said: "He's right". But when we teach others our art, and share this charge of fantasy, what end will it serve? Where will it lead?
In the past couple of months, Franca and I have visited a number of university campuses to hold workshops and seminars before young audiences. It has been surprising - not to say disturbing - to discover their ignorance about the times we live in. We told them about the proceedings now in course in Turkey against the accused culprits of the massacre in Sivas. Thirty-seven of the country's foremost democratic intellectuals, meeting in the Anatolian town to celebrate the memory of a famous mediaeval jester of the Ottoman period, were burned alive in the dark of the night, trapped inside their hotel. The fire was the handiwork of a group of fanatical fundamentalists that enjoyed protection from elements within the Government itself. In one night, thirty-seven of the country's most celebrated artists, writers, directors, actors and Kurdish dancers were erased from this Earth.
In one blow these fanatics destroyed some of the most important exponents of Turkish culture.
Thousands of students listened to us. The looks in their faces spoke of their astonishment and incredulity. They had never heard of the massacre. But what impressed me the most is that not even the teachers and professors present had heard of it. There Turkey is, on the Mediterranean, practically in front of us, insisting on joining the European Community, yet no one had heard of the massacre. Salvini, a noted Italian democrat, was right on the mark when he observed: "The widespread ignorance of events is the main buttress of injustice". But this absent-mindedness on the part of the young has been conferred upon them by those who are charged to educate and inform them: among the absent-minded and uninformed, school teachers and other educators deserve first mention.
Young people easily succumb to the bombardment of gratuitous banalities and obscenities that each day is served to them by the mass media: heartless TV action films where in the space of ten minutes they are treated to three rapes, two assassinations, one beating and a serial crash involving ten cars on a bridge that then collapses, whereupon everything - cars, drivers and passengers - precipitates into the sea ... only one person survives the fall, but he doesn't know how to swim and so drowns, to the cheers of the crowd of curious onlookers that suddenly has appeared on the scene.

At another university we spoofed the project - alas well under way - to manipulate genetic material, or more specifically, the proposal by the European Parliament to allow patent rights on living organisms. We could feel how the subject sent a chill through the audience. Franca and I explained how our Eurocrats, kindled by powerful and ubiquitous multinationals, are preparing a scheme worthy the plot of a sci-fi/horror movie entitled "Frankenstein's pig brother". They're trying to get the approval of a directive which (and get this!) would authorize industries to take patents on living beings, or on parts of them, created with techniques of genetic manipulation that seem taken straight out of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".
This is how it would work: by manipulating the genetic make-up of a pig, a scientist succeeds in making the pig more human-like. By this arrangement it becomes much easier to remove from the pig the organ of your choice - a liver, a kidney - and to transplant it in a human. But to assure that the transplanted pig-organs aren't rejected, it's also necessary to transfer certain pieces of genetic information from the pig to the human. The result: a human pig (even though you will say that there are already plenty of those).
And every part of this new creature, this humanized pig, will be subject to patent laws; and whosoever wishes a part of it will have to pay copyright fees to the company that "invented" it. Secondary illnesses, monstrous deformations, infectious diseases - all are optionals, included in the price ...
The Pope has forcefully condemned this monstrous genetic witchcraft. He has called it an offence against humanity, against the dignity of man, and has gone to pains to underscore the project's total and irrefutable lack of moral value.
The astonishing thing is that while this is happening, an American scientist, a remarkable magician - you've probably read about him in the papers - has succeeded in transplanting the head of a baboon. He cut the heads off two baboons and switched them. The baboons didn't feel all that great after the operation. In fact, it left them paralysed, and they both died shortly thereafter, but the experiment worked, and that's the great thing.
But here's the rub: this modern-day Frankenstein, a certain Professor White, is all the while a distinguished member of the Vatican Academy of Sciences. Somebody should warn the Pope.

So, we enacted these criminal farces to the kids at the universities, and they laughed their heads off. They would say of Franca and me: "They're a riot, they come up with the most fantastic stories". Not for a moment, not even with an inkling in their spines, did they grasp that the stories we told were true.
These encounters have strengthened us in our conviction that our job is - in keeping with the exhortation of the great Italian poet Savinio - "to tell our own story". Our task as intellectuals, as persons who mount the pulpit or the stage, and who, most importantly, address to young people, our task is not just to teach them method, like how to use the arms, how to control breathing, how to use the stomach, the voice, the falsetto, the contracampo. It's not enough to teach a technique or a style: we have to show them what is happening around us. They have to be able to tell their own story. A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

Recently, I took part in a large conference with lots of people where I tried to explain, especially to the younger participants, the ins and outs of a particular Italian court case. The original case resulted in seven separate proceedings, at the end of which three Italian left-wing politicians were sentenced to 21 years of imprisonment each, accused of having murdered a police commissioner. I've studied the documents of the case - as I did when I prepared Accidental Death of an Anarchist - and at the conference I recounted the facts pertaining to it, which are really quite absurd, even farcical. But at a certain point I realized I was speaking to deaf ears, for the simple reason that my audience was ignorant not only of the case itself, but of what had happened five years earlier, ten years earlier: the violence, the terrorism. They knew nothing about the massacres that occurred in Italy, the trains that blew up, the bombs in the piazze or the farcical court cases that have dragged on since then.
The terribly difficult thing is that in order to talk about what is happening today, I have to start with what happened thirty years ago and then work my way forward. It's not enough to speak about the present. And pay attention, this isn't just about Italy: the same thing happens everywhere, all over Europe. I've tried in Spain and encountered the same difficulty; I've tried in France, in Germany, I've yet to try in Sweden, but I will.

To conclude, let me share this medal with Franca.
Franca Rame, my companion in life and in art who you, members of the Academy, acknowledge in your motivation of the prize as actress and author; who has had a hand in many of the texts of our theatre.

(At this very moment, Franca is on stage in a theatre in Italy but will join me the day after tomorrow. Her flight arrives midday, if you like we can all head out together to pick her up at the airport.)
Franca has a very sharp wit, I assure you. A journalist put the following question to her: "So how does it feel to be the wife of a Nobel Prize winner? To have a monument in your home?" To which she answered: "I'm not worried. Nor do I feel at all at a disadvantage; I've been in training for a long time. I do my exercises each morning: I go down on my hand and knees, and that way I've accustomed myself to becoming a pedestal to a monument. I'm pretty good at it."
Like I said, she has a sharp wit. At times she even turns her irony against herself.
Without her at my side, where she has been for a lifetime, I would never have accomplished the work you have seen fit to honour. Together we've staged and recited thousands of performances, in theatres, occupied factories, at university sit-ins, even in deconsecrated churches, in prisons and city parks, in sunshine and pouring rain, always together. We've had to endure abuse, assaults by the police, insults from the right-thinking, and violence. And it is Franca who has had to suffer the most atrocious aggression. She has had to pay more dearly than any one of us, with her neck and limb in the balance, for the solidarity with the humble and the beaten that has been our premise.

The day it was announced that I was to be awarded the Nobel Prize I found myself in front of the theatre on Via di Porta Romana in Milan where Franca, together with Giorgio Albertazzi, was performing The Devil with Tits. Suddenly I was surrounded by a throng of reporters, photographers and camera-wielding TV-crews. A passing tram stopped, unexpectedly, the driver stepped out to greet me, then all the passengers stepped out too, they applauded me, and everyone wanted to shake my hand and congratulate me ... when at a certain point they all stopped in their tracks and, as with a single voice, shouted "Where's Franca?". They began to holler "Francaaa" until, after a little while, she appeared. Discombobulated and moved to tears, she came down to embrace me.
At that moment, as if out of nowhere, a band appeared, playing nothing but wind instruments and drums. It was made up of kids from all parts of the city and, as it happened, they were playing together for the first time. They struck up "Porta Romana bella, Porta Romana" in samba beat. I've never heard anything played so out of tune, but it was the most beautiful music Franca and I had ever heard.
Believe me, this prize belongs to both of us.
Thank you.

Dario Fo's speech of thanks at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1997
(Translation)

Even though I don't hold a glass in my hand, I'd like to raise a toast to a great Queen, a Queen of your past: Kristina.
Kristina arrived in Italy in the late 17th century. As someone already mentioned, she came to Rome and there, obviously, she got to know the Pope, Alexander VII. He was a man seeking to restore the city's ruined cultural fabric. The reaction to the Counter-Reformation had peaked a few years earlier. Alexander sought the return to Italy of the men of the theatre that had been driven away by the Counter-Reformation, and through his efforts Queen Kristina became acquainted with Italy's greatest comedians, as they returned to their homeland.
She already loved the theatre; through these actors she became enthralled with it. During a visit to France, she got to know Molière, with whom she began a correspondence on her return to Italy. At one point Molière sent her one of his comedies, Tartuffe. It was only a draft.
Kristina asked Molière if she could stage it in Italy, and got the consent of the Pope. The Pope, who had a great sense of humour, said: "What are you trying to do, ruin my reputation with this comedy? These... the cardinals will fire me."
But Molière couldn't give the play to Kristina because the King wanted it for himself.
This play, Tartuffe, was played for the first time... it wasn't completed yet. It was a vicious comedy that with great irony took to task the hypocrisy of the day, in particular the hypocrisy of the Catholics and especially as it expressed itself within the family.
It led to a disaster. It was censured. It was banned for three years in a row. It was played again for a while and then was again banned for several years.
It may be safe to assume that if Molière had given in to Kristina, and had she arranged for it to be played in Rome, no one would have dared to censure it. Kristina enjoyed the protection of the Pope, and who could touch the Pope?
So, I beg You, Queen, and you Princesses that are here this evening: if you love the theatre, give it your support, as Kristina did.
I know...? Did you tell your joke? Eh? You've stolen my punch line! Not yet, not yet? All the better, all the better!
As I was saying, when the theatre is ironic, grotesque, it's above all then that you have to defend it, because the theatre that makes people laugh is the theatre of human reason.
And if you have any problems, seek the support of the Pope. You will no doubt succeed.
Here's to Kristina!

- خطاب Wislawa Szymborska قي حفل تسلم جائزة نوبل للاداب 1996

Wislawa Szymborska

Poland - b. 1923
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1996

Personne n'a de routine de recevoir le Prix Nobel. De même personne n'a de routine d'en exprimer sa reconnaissance. Dans ma langue maternelle, comme dans chaque langue d'ailleurs, il y a beaucoup de mots jolis au choix. Mais il me semble qu'à cette occasion le mot le plus simple a le plus de sérieux et de sens: Merci, dziêkujê, tack.

Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1996

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway. But I have a feeling that the sentences to come - the third, the sixth, the tenth, and so on, up to the final line - will be just as hard, since I'm supposed to talk about poetry. I've said very little on the subject, next to nothing, in fact. And whenever I have said anything, I've always had the sneaking suspicion that I'm not very good at it. This is why my lecture will be rather short. All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself ... When filling in questionnaires or chatting with strangers, that is, when they can't avoid revealing their profession, poets prefer to use the general term "writer" or replace "poet" with the name of whatever job they do in addition to writing. Bureaucrats and bus passengers respond with a touch of incredulity and alarm when they find out that they're dealing with a poet. I suppose philosophers may meet with a similar reaction. Still, they're in a better position, since as often as not they can embellish their calling with some kind of scholarly title. Professor of philosophy - now that sounds much more respectable.
But there are no professors of poetry. This would mean, after all, that poetry is an occupation requiring specialized study, regular examinations, theoretical articles with bibliographies and footnotes attached, and finally, ceremoniously conferred diplomas. And this would mean, in turn, that it's not enough to cover pages with even the most exquisite poems in order to become a poet. The crucial element is some slip of paper bearing an official stamp. Let us recall that the pride of Russian poetry, the future Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky was once sentenced to internal exile precisely on such grounds. They called him "a parasite," because he lacked official certification granting him the right to be a poet ...
Several years ago, I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Brodsky in person. And I noticed that, of all the poets I've known, he was the only one who enjoyed calling himself a poet. He pronounced the word without inhibitions.
Just the opposite - he spoke it with defiant freedom. It seems to me that this must have been because he recalled the brutal humiliations he had experienced in his youth.
In more fortunate countries, where human dignity isn't assaulted so readily, poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind. And yet it wasn't so long ago, in this century's first decades, that poets strove to shock us with their extravagant dress and eccentric behavior. But all this was merely for the sake of public display. The moment always came when poets had to close the doors behind them, strip off their mantles, fripperies, and other poetic paraphernalia, and confront - silently, patiently awaiting their own selves - the still white sheet of paper. For this is finally what really counts.
It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative process that led to important scientific discoveries or the emergence of a masterpiece. And one can depict certain kinds of scientific labor with some success. Laboratories, sundry instruments, elaborate machinery brought to life: such scenes may hold the audience's interest for a while. And those moments of uncertainty - will the experiment, conducted for the thousandth time with some tiny modification, finally yield the desired result? - can be quite dramatic. Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting's evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician's ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naive and doesn't explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to.
But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?
I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself.
When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."
There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.
And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
At this point, though, certain doubts may arise in my audience. All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they "know." They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments' force. And any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.
This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.
Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their "oeuvre" ...
I sometimes dream of situations that can't possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least. That done, I would grab his hand. "'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress that you're sitting under hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I'd also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you're planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you've already expressed? Or maybe you're tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy - so what if it's fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt you'll say, 'I've written everything down, I've got nothing left to add.' There's no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself."
The world - whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing.
But "astonishing" is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We're astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn't based on comparison with something else.
Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events"... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.
It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.
Translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

- خطاب Seamus Heaney في حفل تسلم جائزة نوبل للاداب 1995

Seamus Heaney

Irelandb. 1939
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1995

Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1995
Listen to a Sound Recording
51 min. »
In order to hear the sound you need RealPlayer.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome was not just beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception. In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house - but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.

But it was not only the earth that shook for us: the air around and above us was alive and signalling too. When a wind stirred in the beeches, it also stirred an aerial wire attached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it swept, in through a hole bored in the corner of the kitchen window, right on into the innards of our wireless set where a little pandemonium of burbles and squeaks would suddenly give way to the voice of a BBC newsreader speaking out of the unexpected like a deus ex machina. And that voice too we could hear in our bedroom, transmitting from beyond and behind the voices of the adults in the kitchen; just as we could often hear, behind and beyond every voice, the frantic, piercing signalling of morse code.

We could pick up the names of neighbours being spoken in the local accents of our parents, and in the resonant English tones of the newsreader the names of bombers and of cities bombed, of war fronts and army divisions, the numbers of planes lost and of prisoners taken, of casualties suffered and advances made; and always, of course, we would pick up too those other, solemn and oddly bracing words, "the enemy" and "the allies". But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. If there was something ominous in the newscaster's tones, there was something torpid about our understanding of what was at stake; and if there was something culpable about such political ignorance in that time and place, there was something positive about the security I inhabited as a result of it.

The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its way. Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker. But it was still not the news that interested me; what I was after was the thrill of story, such as a detective serial about a British special agent called Dick Barton or perhaps a radio adaptation of one of Capt. W.E. Johns's adventure tales about an RAF flying ace called Biggles. Now that the other children were older and there was so much going on in the kitchen, I had to get close to the actual radio set in order to concentrate my hearing, and in that intent proximity to the dial I grew familiar with the names of foreign stations, with Leipzig and Oslo and Stuttgart and Warsaw and, of course, with Stockholm.

I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot. And yet the platform here feels more like a space station than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of walking on air.
*
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. I credit it immediately because of a line I wrote fairly recently instructing myself (and whoever else might be listening) to "walk on air against your better judgement". But I credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind's centre and its circumference, between the child gazing at the word "Stockholm" on the face of the radio dial and the man facing the faces that he meets in Stockholm at this most privileged moment. I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.
*
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even as a schoolboy, I loved John Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an ark of the covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations which were also equations for a rapture and an ache I didn't fully know I knew until I read him; I loved Robert Frost for his farmer's accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness; and Chaucer too for much the same reasons. Later on I would find a different kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century's barbarism. Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell's and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I encountered further reasons for believing in poetry's ability - and responsibility - to say what happens, to "pity the planet," to be "not concerned with Poetry."

This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century. No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration. So, partly as a result of having internalized these attitudes through growing up with them, and partly as a result of growing a skin to protect myself against them, I went for years half-avoiding and half- resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot. And these more or less costive attitudes were fortified by a refusal to grant the poet any more license than any other citizen; and they were further induced by having to conduct oneself as a poet in a situation of ongoing political violence and public expectation. A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

*
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue. It should have come early, as the result of the ferment of protest on the streets in the late sixties, but that was not to be and the eggs of danger which were always incubating got hatched out very quickly. While the Christian moralist in oneself was impelled to deplore the atrocious nature of the IRA's campaign of bombings and killings, and the "mere Irish" in oneself was appalled by the ruthlessness of the British Army on occasions like Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, the minority citizen in oneself, the one who had grown up conscious that his group was distrusted and discriminated against in all kinds of official and unofficial ways, this citizen's perception was at one with the poetic truth of the situation in recognizing that if life in Northern Ireland were ever really to flourish, change had to take place. But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Nevertheless, until the British government caved in to the strong-arm tactics of the Ulster loyalist workers after the Sunningdale Conference in 1974, a well-disposed mind could still hope to make sense of the circumstances, to balance what was promising with what was destructive and do what W.B. Yeats had tried to do half a century before, namely, "to hold in a single thought reality and justice." After 1974, however, for the twenty long years between then and the ceasefires of August 1994, such a hope proved impossible. The violence from below was then productive of nothing but a retaliatory violence from above, the dream of justice became subsumed into the callousness of reality, and people settled in to a quarter century of life-waste and spirit- waste, of hardening attitudes and narrowing possibilities that were the natural result of political solidarity, traumatic suffering and sheer emotional self-protectiveness.
*
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here". As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
*
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. I remember, for example, shocking myself with a thought I had about that friend who was imprisoned in the seventies upon suspicion of having been involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by thinking that even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be helping the future to be born, breaking the repressive forms and liberating new potential in the only way that worked, that is to say the violent way - which therefore became, by extension, the right way. It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. The very gunfire braces us and the atrocious confers a worth upon the effort which it calls forth to confront it. We are rightly in awe of the torsions in the poetry of Paul Celan and rightly enamoured of the suspiring voice in Samuel Beckett because these are evidence that art can rise to the occasion and somehow be the corollary of Celan's stricken destiny as Holocaust survivor and Beckett's demure heroism as a member of the French Resistance. Likewise, we are rightly suspicious of that which gives too much consolation in these circumstances; the very extremity of our late twentieth century knowledge puts much of our cultural heritage to an extreme test. Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art.

Which is why for years I was bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture. Blowing up sparks for meagre heat. Forgetting faith, straining towards good works. Attending insufficiently to the diamond absolutes, among which must be counted the sufficiency of that which is absolutely imagined. Then finally and happily, and not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in despite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous. And once again I shall try to represent the import of that changed orientation with a story out of Ireland.

This is a story about another monk holding himself up valiantly in the posture of endurance. It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough, a monastic site not too far from where we lived in Co. Wicklow, a place which to this day is one of the most wooded and watery retreats in the whole of the country. Anyhow, as Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledglings grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
*
St. Kevin's story is, as I say, a story out of Ireland. But it strikes me that it could equally well come out of India or Africa or the Arctic or the Americas. By which I do not mean merely to consign it to a typology of folktales, or to dispute its value by questioning its culture bound status within a multi-cultural context. On the contrary, its trustworthiness and its travel-worthiness have to do with its local setting. I can, of course, imagine it being deconstructed nowadays as a paradigm of colonialism, with Kevin figuring as the benign imperialist (or the missionary in the wake of the imperialist), the one who intervenes and appropriates the indigenous life and interferes with its pristine ecology. And I have to admit that there is indeed an irony that it was such a one who recorded and preserved this instance of the true beauty of the Irish heritage: Kevin's story, after all, appears in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, one of the Normans who invaded Ireland in the twelfth century, one whom the Irish-language annalist Geoffrey Keating would call, five hundred years later, "the bull of the herd of those who wrote the false history of Ireland." But even so, I still cannot persuade myself that this manifestation of early Christian civilization should be construed all that simply as a way into whatever is exploitative or barbaric in our history, past and present. The whole conception strikes me rather as being another example of the kind of work I saw a few weeks ago in the small museum in Sparta, on the morning before the news of this year's Nobel Prize in literature was announced.

This was art which sprang from a cult very different from the faith espoused by St. Kevin. Yet in it there was a representation of a roosted bird and an entranced beast and a self-enrapturing man, except that this time the man was Orpheus and the rapture came from music rather than prayer. The work itself was a small carved relief and I could not help making a sketch of it; but neither could I help copying out the information typed on the card which accompanied and identified the exhibit. The image moved me because of its antiquity and durability, but the description on the card moved me also because it gave a name and credence to that which I see myself as having been engaged upon for the past three decades: "Votive panel", the identification card said, "possibly set up to Orpheus by local poet. Local work of the Hellenistic period."
*
Once again, I hope I am not being sentimental or simply fetishizing - as we have learnt to say - the local. I wish instead to suggest that images and stories of the kind I am invoking here do function as bearers of value. The century has witnessed the defeat of Nazism by force of arms; but the erosion of the Soviet regimes was caused, among other things, by the sheer persistence, beneath the imposed ideological conformity, of cultural values and psychic resistances of a kind that these stories and images enshrine. Even if we have learned to be rightly and deeply fearful of elevating the cultural forms and conservatisms of any nation into normative and exclusivist systems, even if we have terrible proof that pride in an ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade into the fascistic, our vigilance on that score should not displace our love and trust in the good of the indigenous per se. On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space. In spite of devastating and repeated acts of massacre, assassination and extirpation, the huge acts of faith which have marked the new relations between Palestinians and Israelis, Africans and Afrikaners, and the way in which walls have come down in Europe and iron curtains have opened, all this inspires a hope that new possibility can still open up in Ireland as well. The crux of that problem involves an ongoing partition of the island between British and Irish jurisdictions, and an equally persistent partition of the affections in Northern Ireland between the British and Irish heritages; but surely every dweller in the country must hope that the governments involved in its governance can devise institutions which will allow that partition to become a bit more like the net on a tennis court, a demarcation allowing for agile give-and-take, for encounter and contending, prefiguring a future where the vitality that flowed in the beginning from those bracing words "enemy" and "allies" might finally derive from a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary.
*
When the poet W.B. Yeats stood on this platform more than seventy years ago, Ireland was emerging from the throes of a traumatic civil war that had followed fast on the heels of a war of independence fought against the British. The struggle that ensued had been brief enough; it was over by May, 1923, some seven months before Yeats sailed to Stockholm, but it was bloody, savage and intimate, and for generations to come it would dictate the terms of politics within the twenty-six independent counties of Ireland, that part of the island known first of all as the Irish Free State and then subsequently as the Republic of Ireland.

It is a proof that poetry can be equal to and true at the same time, an example of that completely adequate poetry which the Russian woman sought from Anna Akhmatova and which William Wordsworth produced at a corresponding moment of historical crisis and personal dismay almost exactly two hundred years ago.
*

But there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry. This has to do with the "temple inside our hearing" which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called "the steadfastness of speech articulation," from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet's ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.

Which is a way of saying that I have never quite climbed down from the arm of that sofa. I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it. But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact straining towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds. As if the ripple at its widest desired to be verified by a reformation of itself, to be drawn in and drawn out through its point of origin.

I also strain towards this in the poetry I read. And I find it, for example, in the repetition of that refrain of Yeats's, "Come build in the empty house of the stare," with its tone of supplication, its pivots of strength in the words "build" and "house" and its acknowledgement of dissolution in the word "empty". I find it also in the triangle of forces held in equilibrium by the triple rhyme of "fantasies" and "enmities" and "honey-bees", and in the sheer in-placeness of the whole poem as a given form within the language. Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

Banquet Speech

Seamus Heaney's speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1995

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today's ceremonies and tonight's banquet have been mighty and memorable events. Nobody who has shared in them will ever forget them, but for the laureates these celebrations have had a unique importance. Each of us has participated in a ritual, a rite of passage, a public drama which has been commensurate with the inner experience of winning a Nobel Prize. The slightly incredible condition we have lived in since the news of the prizes was announced a couple of weeks ago has now been rendered credible. The mysterious powers represented by the words Nobel Foundation and Swedish Academy have manifested themselves in friendly human form. For me, it has been a great joy and a great reassurance to come to Stockholm and to meet at every turn people of such grace, such intelligence and such good will. Which is another way of saying that the whole week has not only been ceremonially impressive: it has also felt emotionally true, and it is that sense of something personally trustworthy at the centre of the great event that I finally value most, and cherish and give you thanks for. It has helped more than anything else to bring home to me the reality of the great honour I have received. Oscar Wilde once said that the only way to survive temptation was to yield to it. So here and now, I happily and gratefully yield to the temptation to believe that I am indeed the winner of a Nobel Prize. Thank you very much.

- خطاب Kenzaburo Oe في حفل تسلم جاتئزة نوبل للاداب 1994

Kenzaburo Oe

Japan

b. 1935

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1994
Nobel Lecture

Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1994
Listen to a Sound Recording
46 min. »
In order to hear the sound you need RealPlayer.

During the last catastrophic World War I was a little boy and lived in a remote, wooded valley on Shikoku Island in the Japanese Archipelago, thousands of miles away from here. At that time there were two books by which I was really fascinated: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. The whole world was then engulfed by waves of horror. By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors. The protagonist of The Adventures of Nils is transformed into a little creature, understands birds' language and makes an adventurous journey. I derived from the story sensuous pleasures of various kinds. Firstly, living as I was in a deep wood on the Island of Shikoku just as my ancestors had done long ago, I had a revelation that this world and this way of life there were truly liberating. Secondly, I felt sympathetic and identified myself with Nils, a naughty little boy, who while traversing Sweden, collaborating with and fighting for the wild geese, transforms himself into a boy, still innocent, yet full of confidence as well as modesty. On coming home at last, Nils speaks to his parents. I think that the pleasure I derived from the story at its highest level lies in the language, because I felt purified and uplifted by speaking along with Nils. His worlds run as follows (in French and English translation):

"Maman, Papa! Je suis grand, je suis de nouveau un homme!" cria-t-il.

"Mother and father!" he cried. "I'm a big boy. I'm a human being again!"

I was fascinated by the phrase 'je suis de nouveau un homme!' in particular. As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century. I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel. In that process I have found myself repeating, almost sighing, 'je suis de nouveau un homme!' Speaking like this as regards myself is perhaps inappropriate to this place and to this occasion. However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world. I hope you will forgive me for talking about my personal matters a little further.

Half a century ago, while living in the depth of that forest, I read The Adventures of Nils and felt within it two prophecies. One was that I might one day become able to understand the language of birds. The other was that I might one day fly off with my beloved wild geese - preferably to Scandinavia.

After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped. We named him Hikari, meaning 'Light' in Japanese. As a baby he responded only to the chirps of wild birds and never to human voices. One summer when he was six years old we were staying at our country cottage. He heard a pair of water rails (Rallus aquaticus) warbling from the lake beyond a grove, and he said with the voice of a commentator on a recording of wild birds: "They are water rails". This was the first moment my son ever uttered human words. It was from then on that my wife and I began having verbal communication with our son.

Hikari now works at a vocational training centre for the handicapped, an institution based on ideas we learnt from Sweden. In the meantime he has been composing works of music. Birds were the originators that occasioned and mediated his composition of human music. On my behalf Hikari has thus accomplished the prophecy that I might one day understand the language of birds. I must say also that my life would have been impossible but for my wife with her abundant female force and wisdom. She has been the very incarnation of Akka, the leader of Nils's wild geese. Together with her I have flown to Stockholm and the second of the prophecies has also, to my utmost delight, now been realised.

Kawabata Yasunari, the first Japanese writer who stood on this platform as a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, delivered a lecture entitled Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself. It was at once very beautiful and vague. I have used the English word vague as an equivalent of that word in Japanese aimaina. This Japanese adjective could have several alternatives for its English translation. The kind of vagueness that Kawabata adopted deliberately is implied in the title itself of his lecture. It can be transliterated as 'myself of beautiful Japan'. The vagueness of the whole title derives from the Japanese particle 'no' (literally 'of') linking 'Myself' and 'Beautiful Japan'.

The vagueness of the title leaves room for various interpretations of its implications. It can imply 'myself as a part of beautiful Japan', the particle 'no' indicating the relationship of the noun following it to the noun preceding it as one of possession, belonging or attachment. It can also imply 'beautiful Japan and myself', the particle in this case linking the two nouns in apposition, as indeed they are in the English title of Kawabata's lecture translated by one of the most eminent American specialists of Japanese literature. He translates 'Japan, the beautiful and myself'. In this expert translation the traduttore (translator) is not in the least a traditore (betrayer).

Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed ****ls. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed ****ls of those words.

Why did Kawabata boldly decide to read those extremely esoteric poems in Japanese before the audience in Stockholm? I look back almost with nostalgia upon the straightforward bravery which he attained towards the end of his distinguished career and with which he made such a confession of his faith. Kawabata had been an artistic pilgrim for decades during which he produced a host of masterpieces. After those years of his pilgrimage, only by making a confession as to how he was fascinated by such inaccessible Japanese poems that baffle any attempt fully to understand them, was he able to talk about 'Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself', that is, about the world in which he lived and the literature which he created.

To tell you the truth, rather than with Kawabata my compatriot who stood here twenty-six years ago, I feel more spiritual affinity with the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature seventy one years ago when he was at about the same age as me. Of course I would not presume to rank myself with the poetic genius Yeats. I am merely a humble follower living in a country far removed from his. As William Blake, whose work Yeats revalued and restored to the high place it holds in this century, once wrote: 'Across Europe & Asia to China & Japan like lightnings'.

As someone living in the present would such as this one and sharing bitter memories of the past imprinted on my mind, I cannot utter in unison with Kawabata the phrase 'Japan, the Beautiful and Myself'. A moment ago I touched upon the 'vagueness' of the title and ******* of Kawabata's lecture. In the rest of my lecture I would like to use the word 'ambiguous' in accordance with the distinction made by the eminent British poet Kathleen Raine; she once said of William Blake that he was not so much vague as ambiguous. I cannot talk about myself otherwise than by saying 'Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself'.

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity. I too am living as a writer with this polarisation imprinted on me like a deep scar.

This ambiguity which is so powerful and penetrating that it splits both the state and its people is evident in various ways. The modernisation of Japan has been orientated toward learning from and imitating the West. Yet Japan is situated in Asia and has firmly maintained its traditional culture. The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia. On the other hand, the culture of modern Japan, which implied being thoroughly open to the West or at least that impeded understanding by the West. What was more, Japan was driven into isolation from other Asian countries, not only politically but also socially and culturally.

In the history of modern Japan literature the writers most sincere and aware of their mission were those 'post-war writers' who came onto the literary scene immediately after the last War, deeply wounded by the catastrophe yet full of hope for a rebirth. They tried with great pains to make up for the inhuman atrocities committed by Japanese military forces in Asian countries, as well as to bridge the profound gaps that existed not only between the developed countries of the West and Japan but also between African and Latin American countries and Japan. Only by doing so did they think that they could seek with some humility reconciliation with the rest of the world. It has always been my aspiration to cling to the very end of the line of that literary tradition inherited from those writers.

The contemporary state of Japan and its people in their post - modern phase cannot but be ambivalent. Right in the middle of the history of Japan's modernisation came the Second World War, a war which was brought about by the very aberration of the modernisation itself. The defeat in this War fifty years ago occasioned an opportunity for Japan and the Japanese as the very agent of the War to attempt a rebirth out of the great misery and sufferings that were depicted by the 'Post-war School' of Japanese writers. The moral props for Japanese aspiring to such a rebirth were the idea of democracy and their determination never to wage a war again. Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries. Those moral props mattered also to the deceased victims of the nuclear weapons that were used for the first time in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for the survivors and their off-spring affected by radioactivity (including tens of thousands of those whose mother tongue is Korean).

In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and restoration of peace in various parts of the world. Our heart sinks whenever we hear these criticisms. After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution. The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

I trust that the principle can best be understood in the West with its long tradition of tolerance for conscientious rejection of military service. In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of pressures from abroad. But to obliterate from the Constitution the principle of eternal peace will be nothing but an act of betrayal against the peoples of Asia and the victims of the Atom Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not difficult for me as a writer to imagine what would be the outcome of that betrayal.

The pre-war Japanese Constitution that posited an absolute power transcending the principle of democracy had sustained some support from the populace. Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters. If Japan were to institutionalise a principle other than the one to which we have adhered for the last fifty years, the determination we made in the post-war ruins of our collapsed effort at modernisation - that determination of ours to establish the concept of universal humanity would come to nothing. This is the spectre that rises before me, speaking as an ordinary individual.

What I call Japan's 'ambiguity' in my lecture is a kind of chronic disease that has been prevalent throughout the modern age. Japan's economic prosperity is not free from it either, accompanied as it is by all kinds of potential dangers in the light of the structure of world economy and environmental conservation. The 'ambiguity' in this respect seems to be accelerating. It may be more obvious to the critical eyes of the world at large than to us within the country. At the nadir of the post-war economic poverty we found a resilience to endure it, never losing our hope for recovery. It may sound curious to say so, but we seem to have no less resilience to endure our anxiety about the ominous consequence emerging out of the present prosperity. From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.

To define a desirable Japanese identity I would like to pick out the word 'decent' which is among the adjectives that George Orwell often used, along with words like 'humane', 'sane' and 'comely', for the character types that he favoured. This deceptively simple epithet may starkly set off and contrast with the word 'ambiguous' used for my identification in 'Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself'. There is a wide and ironical discrepancy between what the Japanese seem like when viewed from outside and what they wish to look like.

I hope Orwell would not raise an objection if I used the word 'decent' as a synonym of 'humanist' or 'humaniste' in French, because both words share in common qualities such as tolerance and humanity. Among our ancestors were some pioneers who made painstaking efforts to build up the Japanese identity as 'decent' or 'humanist'.

One such person was the late Professor Kazuo Watanabe, a scholar of French Renaissance literature and thought. Surrounded by the insane ardour of patriotism on the eve and in the middle of the Second World War, Watanabe had a lonely dream of grafting the humanist view of man on to the traditional Japanese sense of beauty and sensitivity to Nature, which fortunately had not been entirely eradicated. I must hasten to add that Professor Watanabe had a conception of beauty and Nature different from that conceived of by Kawabata in his 'Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself. '

The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic. In ways different from, yet partly corresponding to, that process Japanese intellectuals had tried to bridge the gap between the West and their own country at its deepest level. It must have been a laborious task or travail but it was also one that brimmed with joy. Professor Watanabe's study of François Rabelais was thus one of the most distinguished and rewarding scholarly achievements of the Japanese intellectual world.

Watanabe studied in Paris before the Second World War. When he told his academic supervisor about his ambition to translate Rabelais into Japanese, the eminent elderly French scholar answered the aspiring young Japanese student with the phrase: "L'entreprise inouie de la traduction de l'intraduisible Rabelais" (the unprecedented enterprise of translating into Japanese untranslatable Rabelais). Another French scholar answered with blunt astonishment: "Belle entreprise Pantagruélique" (an admirably Pantagruel-like enterprise). In spite of all this not only did Watanabe accomplish his great enterprise in a poverty-stricken environment during the War and the American Occupation, but he also did his best to transplant into the confused and disorientated Japan of that time the life and thought of those French humanists who were the forerunners, contemporaries and followers of François Rabelais.

In both my life and writing I have been a pupil of Professor Watanabe's. I was influenced by him in two crucial ways. One was in my method of writing novels. I learnt concretely from his translation of Rabelais what Mikhail Bakhtin formulated as 'the image system of grotesque realism or the culture of popular laughter'; the importance of material and physical principles; the correspondence between the cosmic, social and physical elements; the overlapping of death and passions for rebirth; and the laughter that subverts hierarchical relationships.

The image system made it possible to seek literary methods of attaining the universal for someone like me born and brought up in a peripheral, marginal, off-centre region of the peripheral, marginal, off-centre country, Japan. Starting from such a background I do not represent Asia as a new economic power but an Asia impregnated with ever-lasting poverty and a mixed-up fertility. By sharing old, familiar yet living ****phors I align myself with writers like Kim Ji-ha of Korea, Chon I and Mu Jen, both of China. For me the brotherhood of world literature consists in such relationships in concrete terms. I once took part in a hunger strike for the political freedom of a gifted Korean poet. I am now deeply worried about the destiny of those gifted Chinese novelists who have been deprived of their freedom since the Tienanmen Square incident.

Another way in which Professor Watanabe has influenced me is in his idea of humanism. I take it to be the quintessence of Europe as a living totality. It is an idea which is also perceptible in Milan Kundera's definition of the spirit of the novel. Based on his accurate reading of historical sources Watanabe wrote critical biographies, with Rabelais at their centre, of people from Erasmus to Sébastien Castellion, and of women connected with Henri IV from Queen Marguerite to Gabrielle Destré. By doing so Watanabe intended to teach the Japanese about humanism, about the importance of tolerance, about man's vulnerability to his preconceptions or machines of his own making. His sincerity led him to quote the remark by the Danish philologist Kristoffer Nyrop: "Those who do not protest against war are accomplices of war." In his attempt to transplant into Japan humanism as the very basis of Western thought Watanabe was bravely venturing on both "l'entreprise inouïe" and the "belle entreprise Pantagruélique".

As someone influenced by Watanabe's humanism I wish my task as a novelist to enable both those who express themselves with words and their readers to recover from their own sufferings and the sufferings of their time, and to cure their souls of the wounds. I have said I am split between the opposite poles of ambiguity characteristic of the Japanese. I have been making efforts to be cured of and restored from those pains and wounds by means of literature. I have made my efforts also to pray for the cure and recovery off my fellow Japanese.

If you will allow me to mention him again, my mentally handicapped son Hikari was awakened by the voices of birds to the music of Bach and Mozart, eventually composing his own works. The little pieces that he first composed were full of fresh splendour and delight. They seemed like dew glittering on grass leaves. The word innocence is composed of in - 'not' and nocere - 'hurt', that is, 'not to hurt'. Hikari's music was in this sense a natural effusion of the composer's own innocence.

As Hikari went on to compose more works, I could not but hear in his music also 'the voice of a crying and dark soul'. Mentally handicapped as he was, his strenuous effort furnished his act of composing or his 'habit of life' with the growth of compositional techniques and a deepening of his conception. That in turn enabled him to discover in the depth of his heart a mass of dark sorrow which he had hitherto been unable to identify with words.

'The voice of a crying and dark soul' is beautiful, and his act of expressing it in music cures him of his dark sorrow in an act of recovery. Furthermore, his music has been accepted as one that cures and restores his contemporary listeners as well. Herein I find the grounds for believing in the exquisite healing power of art.

This belief of mine has not been fully proved. 'Weak person' though I am, with the aid of this unverifiable belief, I would like to 'suffer dully all the wrongs' accumulated throughout the twentieth century as a result of the monstrous development of technology and transport. As one with a peripheral, marginal and off-centre existence in the world I would like to seek how - with what I hope is a modest decent and humanist contribution - I can be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind.