Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1991
In the beginning was the Word.
The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was
Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has
taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have
the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with
prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuasion, to have
Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well
as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it
is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to
the heaven from which it was believed to have come. But its most
significant transformation occurred for me and my kind long ago,
when it was first scratched on a stone tablet or traced on
papyrus, when it materialized from sound to spectacle, from being
heard to being read as a series of signs, and then a script; and
travelled through time from parchment to Gutenberg. For this is
the genesis story of the writer. It is the story that wrote her
or him into being.
It was, strangely, a double process, creating at the same time
both the writer and the very purpose of the writer as a mutation
in the agency of human culture. It was both ontogenesis as the
origin and development of an individual being, and the
adaptation, in the nature of that individual, specifically to the
exploration of ontogenesis, the origin and development of the individual being. For we writers are evolved for that task. Like
the prisoners incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges'
story1,
'The God's Script', who was trying to read, in a ray of light
which fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the marking
on the creature's pelt, we spend our lives attempting to
interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies,
the world of which we are part. It is in this sense, this
inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and
at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual
and collective being.
Being here.
Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with
this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
And this is not just the great ontological question of why we are
here at all, for which religions and philosophies have tried to
answer conclusively for various peoples at various times, and
science tentatively attempts dazzling bits of explanation we are
perhaps going to die out in our millennia, like dinosaurs, without
having developed the necessary comprehension to understand as a
whole. Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as
well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation,
death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun
and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors,
the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these
mysteries, using the elements of daily life - observable reality
- and the faculty of the imagination - the power of projection
into the hidden - to make stories.
Roland Barthes2 asks, 'What is characteristic of myth?'
And answers: 'To transform a meaning into form.' Myths are
stories that mediate in this way between the known and unknown.
Claude Levi-Strauss3 wittily de-mythologizes myth as a genre
between a fairy tale and a detective story. Being here; we don't
know who-dun-it. But something satisfying, if not the answer, can
be invented. Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy - gods,
anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical
creatures - that posits out of the imagination some sort of
explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures
were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos
Kazantzakis4 once wrote, 'Art is the representation not
of the body but of the forces which created the body.'
There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and
there are new questions of being arising out of some of the
answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been
entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as
archaic. If it dwindled to the children's bedtime tale in some
societies, in parts of the world protected by forests or deserts
from international megaculture it has continued, alive, to offer
art as a system of mediation between the individual and being.
And it has made a whirling comeback out of Space, an Icarus in
the avatar of Batman and his kind, who never fall into the ocean
of failure to deal with the gravity forces of life. These new
myths, however, do not seek so much to enlighten and provide some
sort of answers as to distract, to provide a fantasy escape route
for people who no longer want to face even the hazard of answers
to the terrors of their existence. (Perhaps it is the positive
knowledge that humans now possess the means to destroy their
whole planet, the fear that they have in this way themselves
become the gods, dreadfully charged with their own continued
existence, that has made comic-book and movie myth escapist.) The
forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct
from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as
myth in its ancient form attempted to do.
How writers have approached this engagement and continue to
experiment with it has been and is, perhaps more than ever, the
study of literary scholars. The writer in relation to the nature
of perceivable reality and what is beyond - imperceivable reality
- is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting
concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized
microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary
historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and
entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for
breathing-space in the mind. Yet from what is regarded as old-hat
psychological analysis to modernism and post-modernism,
structuralism and poststructuralism, all literary studies are
aimed at the same end: to pin down to a consistency (and what is
consistency if not the principle hidden within the riddle?); to
make definitive through methodology the writer's grasp at the
forces of being. But life is aleatory in itself; being is
constantly pulled and shaped this way and that by circumstances
and different levels of consciousness. There is no pure state of
being, and it follows that there is no pure text, 'real' text,
totally incorporating the aleatory. It surely cannot be reached
by any critical methodology, however interesting the attempt. To
deconstruct a text is in a way a contradiction, since to
deconstruct it is to make another construction out of the pieces,
as Roland Barthes5 does so fascinatingly, and admits to, in
his linguistic and semantical dissection of Balzac's story,
'Sarrasine'. So the literary scholars end up being some kind of
storyteller, too.
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of
being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what
they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon
on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of
writing but to make an image out of the intense inner
concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the
aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a
flag. Yeats' inner 'lonely
impulse of delight' in the pilot's solitary flight, and his
'terrible beauty' born of mass uprising, both opposed and
conjoined; E. M. Forster's modest 'only connect'; Joyce's chosen,
wily 'silence, cunning and exile'; more contemporary, Gabriel García Márquez's
labyrinth in which power over others, in the person of Simon
Bolivar, is led to the thrall of the only unassailable power,
death - these are some examples of the writer's endlessly varied
ways of approaching the state of being through the word. Any
writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of
light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the
bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of
being.
Anthony Burgess6 once gave a summary definition of
literature as 'the aesthetic exploration of the world'. I would
say that writing only begins there, for the exploration of much
beyond, which nevertheless only aesthetic means can
express.
How does the writer become one, having been given the word? I do
not know if my own beginnings have any particular interest. No
doubt they have much in common with those of others, have been
described too often before as a result of this yearly assembly
before which a writer stands. For myself, I have said that
nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my
fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in
the tension between standing apart and being involved that the
imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of
myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I
did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the
beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a
child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses - the
look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions
that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found
some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written
word. There is a little Kafka7 parable that goes like this; 'I have three
dogs: Hold-him, Seize-him, and Nevermore. Hold-him and Seize-him
are ordinary little Schipperkes and nobody would notice them if
they were alone. But there is Nevermore, too. Nevermore is a
mongrel Great Dane and has an appearance that centuries of the
most careful breeding could never have produced. Nevermore is a
gypsy.' In the small South African gold-mining town where I was
growing up I was Nevermore the mongrel (although I could scarcely
have been described as a Great Dane ...) in whom the accepted
characteristics of the townspeople could not be traced. I was the
Gypsy, tinkering with words second-hand, mending my own efforts
at writing by learning from what I read. For my school was the
local library. Proust, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, to name only a few
to whom I owe my existence as a writer, were my professors. In
that period of my life, yes, I was evidence of the theory that
books are made out of other books . . . But I did not remain so
for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could.
With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness
through the drive of sexuality. For most children, from then on
the faculty of the imagination, manifest in play, is lost in the
focus on day dreams of desire and love, but for those who are
going to be artists of one kind or another the first life-crisis
after that of birth does something else in addition: the
imagination gains range and extends by the subjective flex of new
and turbulent emotions. There are new perceptions. The writer
begins to be able to enter into other lives. The process of
standing apart and being involved has come.
Unknowingly, I had been addressing myself on the subject of
being, whether, as in my first stories, there was a child's
contemplation of death and murder in the necessity to finish off,
with a death blow, a dove mauled by a cat, or whether there was
wondering dismay and early consciousness of racism that came of
my walk to school, when on the way I passed storekeepers,
themselves East European immigrants kept lowest in the ranks of
the Anglo-Colonial social scale for whites in the mining town,
roughly those whom colonial society ranked lowest of all,
discounted as less than human - the black miners who were the
stores' customers. Only many years later was I to realize that if
I had been a child in that category - black - I might not have
become a writer at all, since the library that made this possible
for me was not open to any black child. For my formal schooling
was sketchy, at best.
To address oneself to others begins a writer's next stage of
development. To publish to anyone who would read what I wrote.
That was my natural, innocent assumption of what publication
meant, and it has not changed , that is what it means to me
today, in spite of my awareness that most people refuse to
believe that a writer does not have a particular audience in
mind; and my other awareness: of the temptations, conscious and
unconscious, which lure the writer into keeping a corner of the
eye on who will take offense, who will approve what is on the
page - a temptation that, like Eurydice's straying glance, will
lead the writer back into the Shades of a destroyed talent.
The alternative is not the malediction of the ivory tower,
another destroyer of creativity. Borges once said he wrote for
his friends and to pass the time. I think this was an irritated
flippant response to the crass question - often an accusation -
'For whom do you write?', just as Sartre's admonition that there are times
when a writer should cease to write, and act upon being only in
another way, was given in the frustration of an unresolved
conflict between distress at injustice in the world and the
knowledge that what he knew how to do best was write. Both Borges
and Sartre, from their totally different extremes of denying
literature a social purpose, were certainly perfectly aware that
it has its implicit and unalterable social role in exploring the
state of being, from which all other roles, personal among
friends, public at the protest demonstration, derive. Borges was
not writing for his friends, for he published and we all have
received the bounty of his work. Sartre did not stop writing,
although he stood at the barricades in 1968.
The question of for whom do we write nevertheless plagues the
writer, a tin can attached to the tail of every work published.
Principally it jangles the inference of tendentiousness as praise
or denigration. In this context, Camus8 dealt with the question best. He said that
he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that
do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at
all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be
done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty
which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in
and talent in one's work.' And Márquez9 redefined tender
fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to
write as well as he can.
I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of
us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come,
and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they
state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the
face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason
to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human,
acting, like any other, within a social context.
Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the
existential position with particular implications for literature.
Czeslaw Milosz10 once wrote the
cry: 'What is poetry which does not serve nations or people?' and
Brecht 11
wrote of a time when 'to speak of trees is almost a crime'. Many
of us have had such despairing thoughts while living and writing
through such times, in such places, and Sartre's solution makes
no sense in a world where writers were - and still are - censored
and forbidden to write, where, far from abandoning the word,
lives were and are at risk in smuggling it, on scraps of paper,
out of prisons. The state of being whose ontogenesis we explore
has overwhelmingly included such experiences. Our approaches, in
Nikos Kazantzakis'12 words, have to 'make the decision which
harmonizes with the fearsome rhythm of our time.'
Some of us have seen our books lie for years unread in our own
countries, banned, and we have gone on writing. Many writers have
been imprisoned. Looking at Africa alone - Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jack
Mapanje, in their countries, and in my own country, South Africa,
Jeremy Cronin, Mongane Wally Serote, Breyten Breytenbach, Dennis
Brutus, Jaki Seroke: all these went to prison for the courage
shown in their lives, and have continued to take the right, as
poets, to speak of trees. Many of the greats, from Thomas Mann to Chinua Achebe, cast out
by political conflict and oppression in different countries, have
endured the trauma of exile, from which some never recover as
writers, and some do not survive at all. I think of the South
Africans, Can Themba, Alex la Guma, Nat Nakasa, Todd Matshikiza.
And some writers, over half a century from Joseph Roth to Milan
Kundera, have had to publish new works first in the word that is
not their own, a foreign language.
Then in 1988 the fearsome rhythm of our time quickened in an
unprecedented frenzy to which the writer was summoned to submit
the word. In the broad span of modern times since the
Enlightenment writers have suffered opprobrium, bannings and even
exile for other than political reasons. Flaubert dragged into
court for indecency, over Madame Bovary, Strindberg
arraigned for blasphemy, over Marrying, Lawrence's Lady
Chatterley's Lover banned - there have been many examples of
so-called offense against hypocritical bourgeois mores, just as
there have been of treason against political dictatorships. But
in a period when it would be unheard of for countries such as
France, Sweden and Britain to bring such charges against freedom
of expression, there has risen a force that takes its appalling
authority from something far more widespread than social mores,
and far more powerful than the power of any single political
regime. The edict of a world religion has sentenced a writer to
death.
For more than three years, now, wherever he is hidden, wherever
he might go, Salman Rushdie has existed under the Muslim
pronouncement upon him of the fatwa. There is no asylum
for him anywhere. Every morning when this writer sits down to
write, he does not know if he will live through the day; he does
not know whether the page will ever be filled. Salman Rushdie
happens to be a brilliant writer, and the novel for which he is
being pilloried, The Satanic Verses, is an innovative
exploration of one of the most intense experiences of being in
our era, the individual personality in transition between two
cultures brought together in a post-colonial world. All is
re-examined through the refraction of the imagination; the
meaning of sexual and filial love, the rituals of social
acceptance, the meaning of a formative religious faith for
individuals removed from its subjectivity by circumstance
opposing different systems of belief, religious and secular, in a
different context of living. His novel is a true mythology. But
although he has done for the postcolonial consciousness in Europe
what Gunter Grass did for the post-Nazi one with The Tin
Drum and Dog Years, perhaps even has tried to approach
what Beckett did for our
existential anguish in Waiting For Godot, the level of his
achievement should not matter. Even if he were a mediocre writer,
his situation is the terrible concern of every fellow writer for,
apart from his personal plight, what implications, what new
threat against the carrier of the word does it bring? It should
be the concern of individuals and above all, of governments and
human rights organizations all over the world. With dictatorships
apparently vanquished, this murderous new dictate invoking the
power of international terrorism in the name of a great and
respected religion should and can be dealt with only by
democratic governments and the United Nations as an offense against
humanity.
I return from the horrific singular threat to those that have
been general for writers of this century now in its final,
summing-up decade. In repressive regimes anywhere - whether in
what was the Soviet bloc, Latin America, Africa, China - most
imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as
citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the
general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned
by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as
they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive
when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with
the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest
in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and
characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions
of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the
power of the sea.
There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer
sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and
the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment. As
a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean
'balance'. The devil always has lead in his shoes, when placed on
his side of the scale. Yet, to paraphrase coarsely Márquez's
dictum given by him both as a writer and a fighter for justice,
the writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both
the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for
the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges
towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.
In literature, from life,
we page through each other's faces
we read each looking eye
... It has taken lives to be able to do so.
These are the words of the South African
poet and fighter for justice and peace in our country, Mongane
Serote.13
The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer
uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the
state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its
complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound
together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to
yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final
word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it
out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic
sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of
racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of
destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.
1. "The God's
Script" from Labyrinths & Other Writings by Jorge Luis
Borges. Translator unknown. Edited by Donald H. Yates & James
E. Kirby. Penguin Modern Classics, page 71.
2. Mythologies by Roland
Barthes. Translated by Annette Lavers. Hill & Wang, page
131.
3. Historie de Lynx by
Claude Lévi-Strauss.'... je les situais à mi-chemin
entre le conte de fées et le roman policier'. Plon, page
13.
4. Report to Greco by Nikos
Kazantzakis. Faber & Faber, page 150.
5. S/Z by Roland Barthes.
Translated by Richard Miller. Jonathan Cape.
6. London Observer review.
19/4/81. Anthony Burgess.
7. The Third Octavo Notebook from
Wedding Preparations in the Country by Franz Kafka.
Definitive Edition. Secker & Warburg.
8. Carnets 1942-5 by Albert
Camus.
9. Gabriel Gárcia
Márquez. In an interview; my notes do not give the journal
or date.
10. 'Dedication' from
Selected Poems by Czeslaw Milosz. The Ecco Press.
11. "To Posterity' from
Selected Poems by Bertolt Brecht. Translated by H. R.
Hays. Grove Press, page 173.
12. Report to Greco by
Nikos Kazantzakis. Faber & Faber.
13. A Tough Tale by
Mongane Wally Serote. Kliptown Books.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1991
Nadine Gordimer
