The Nobel Prize in Literature 1978
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Presentation Speech by Professor Lars
Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy
Translation from the Swedish text
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
"Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be
rooted out and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream
while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid from
unspun threads, unspun nets." These words from one of Isaac
Bashevis Singer's stories in the collection The Spinoza of
Market Street (1961) say quite a lot about the writer himself
and his narrative art.
Singer was born in a small town or village in eastern Poland and
grew up in one of the poor, over-populated Jewish quarters of
Warsaw, before and during the First World War. His father was a
rabbi of the Hasid school of piety, a spiritual mentor for a
motley collection of people who sought his help. Their language
was Yiddish - the language of the simple people and of the
mothers, with its sources far back in the middle ages and with an
influx from several different cultures with which this people had
come in contact during the many centuries they had been scattered
abroad. It is Singer's language. And it is a storehouse which has
gathered fairytales and anecdotes, wisdom, superstitions and
memories for hundreds of years past through a history that seems
to have left nothing untried in the way of adventures and
afflictions. The Hasid piety was a kind of popular Jewish
mysticism. It could merge into prudery and petty-minded, strict
adherence to the law. But it could also open out towards
orgiastic frenzy and messianic raptures or illusions.
This world was that of East-European Jewry - at once very rich
and very poor, peculiar and exotic but also familiar with all
human experience behind its strange garb. This world has now been
laid waste by the most violent of all the disasters that have
overtaken the Jews and other people in Poland. It has been rooted
out and reduced to dust. But it comes alive in Singer's writings,
in his waking dreams, his very waking dreams, clear-sighted and
free of illusion but also full of broad-mindedness and
unsentimental compassion. Fantasy and experience change shape.
The evocative power of Singer's inspiration acquires the stamp of
reality, and reality is lifted up by dreams and imagination into
the sphere of the supernatural, where nothing is impossible and
nothing is sure.
Singer began his writing career in Warsaw in the years between
the wars. Contact with the secularized environment and the
surging social and cultural currents involved a liberation from
the setting in which he had grown up - but also a conflict. The
clash between tradition and renewal, between other-worldliness
and pious mysticism on the one hand and free thought, doubt and
nihilism on the other, is an essential theme in Singer's short
stories and novels. Among many other themes, it is dealt with in
Singer's big family chronicles - the novels The Family
Moskat, The Manor and The Estate, from the
1950s and 1960s. These extensive epic works depict how old Jewish
families are broken up by the new age and its demands and how
they are split, socially and humanly. The author's apparently
inexhaustible psychological fantasy and insight have created a
microcosm, or rather a well-populated micro-chaos, out of
independent and graphically convincing figures.
Singer's earliest fictional works, however, were not big novels
but short stories and novellas. The novel Satan in Goray
appeared in 1935, when the Nazi terror was threatening and just
before the author emigrated to the USA, where he has lived and
worked ever since. It treats of a theme to which Singer has often
returned in different ways - the false Messiah, his seductive
arts and successes, the mass hysteria around him, his fall and
the breaking up of illusions in destitution and new illusions or
in penance and purity. Satan in Goray takes place in the
17th century after the cruel ravages of the Cossacks with
outrages and mass murder of Jews and others. The book anticipates
what was to come in our time. These people are not wholly
evil, not wholly good - they are haunted and harassed by things
over which they have no control, by the force of circumstances
and by their own passions - something alien but also very
close.
This is typical of Singer's view of humanity - the power and
fickle inventiveness of obsession, the destructive but also
inflaming and creative potential - of the emotions and their
grotesque wealth of variation. The passions can be of the most
varied kinds - often sexual but also fanatical hopes and dreams,
the figments of terror, the lure of lust or power, the nightmares
of anguish. Even boredom can become a restless passion, as with
the main character in the tragicomic picaresque novel The
Magician of Lublin (1961), a kind of Jewish Don Juan and
rogue, who ends up as an ascetic or saint. In a sense a
counterpart to this book is The Slave (1962), really a
legend of a lifelong, faithful love which becomes a compulsion,
forced into fraud despite its purity, heavy to bear though sweet,
saintly but with the seeds of shamefulness and deceit. The saint
and the rogue are near of kin.
Singer has perhaps given of his best as a consummate storyteller
and stylist in the short stories and in the numerous and
fantastic novellas, available in English translation in about a
dozen collections. The passions and crazes are personified in
these strange tales as demons, spectres and ghosts, all kinds of
infernal or supernatural powers from the rich storehouse of
Jewish popular belief or of his own imagination. These demons are
not only graphic literary symbols but also real, tangible forces.
The middle ages seem to spring to life again in Singer's works,
the daily round is interwoven with wonders, reality is spun from
dreams, the blood of the past pulsates in the present. This is
where Singer's narrative art celebrates its greatest triumphs and
bestows a reading experience of a deeply original kind, harrowing
but also stimulating and edifying. Many of his characters step
with unquestioned authority into the Pantheon of literature where
the eternal companions and mythical figures live, tragic - and
grotesque, comic and touching, weird and wonderful - people of
dream and torment, baseness and grandeur.
Dear Mr. Singer, master and magician! It is my task and my great
pleasure to convey to you the heartiest congratulations of the
Swedish Academy and to ask you to receive from the hands of His
Majesty the King the Nobel Prize for Literature 1978.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1978, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1979
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1978
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