I would just like to tell you how lucky I am to be here and how moved I am with the honor you have bestowed on me by awarding me this Nobel Prize in Literature.
This is the first time I have to give a speech to so many people and I am apprehensive about it. One would be tempted to believe that for a writer, it is natural and easy to engage in this exercise. But a writer - or at least a novelist - often has difficult relationships with speech. And if one remembers this academic distinction between the written and the oral, a novelist is more gifted for the written than the oral. He has the habit of keeping quiet and if he wants to penetrate an atmosphere, he must blend in with the crowd. He listens to the conversations without seeming to, and if he intervenes in them, it is always to ask a few discreet questions to better understand the women and men around him. He has a hesitant speech, because of his habit of scratching his writings.
Of course, after multiple erasures, his style may seem limpid. But when he speaks, he no longer has the resource to correct his hesitations. And I belong to a generation where children were not allowed to speak, except on rare occasions and if they asked permission. But we did not listen to them and often they were cut off. This explains the difficulty of speech of some of us, sometimes hesitant, sometimes too fast, as if they feared every moment to be interrupted. Hence, no doubt, this desire to write that took me, like many others, out of childhood. You hope the adults will read you. They will be obliged to listen to you without interrupting you and they will know once and for all what you have on your heart.
The announcement of this prize seemed unreal and I was eager to know why you had chosen me. That day, I think I have never felt so strongly how a novelist is blind to his own books and how much readers know more than he does about what he wrote. A novelist can never be his reader, except to correct mistakes in his manuscript, repetitions, or to delete one paragraph too much. He has only a confused and partial representation of his books, like a painter busy making a mural on the ceiling and who, lying on a scaffolding, works in the details, too closely, without an overall vision.
Curious lonely activity than writing. You go through moments of discouragement when you write the first pages of a novel. You have every day the impression of going wrong. And then, the temptation is great to go back and engage in another way. We must not succumb to this temptation but follow the same path. It's a bit like driving a car, at night, in the winter and riding on the ice, without any visibility. You do not have a choice, you can not go back, you have to keep going, telling yourself that the road will eventually be more stable and that the fog will dissipate.
On the verge of completing a book, it seems to you that he is beginning to break away from you and that he is already breathing the air of freedom, like children, in the classroom, on the eve of the summer holidays. They are distracted and noisy and do not listen to their teacher anymore. I would even say that when you write the last paragraphs, the book shows you some hostility in its haste to free yourself from you. And he leaves you scarcely have you drawn the last word. It's over, he does not need you anymore, he's already forgotten you. It is the readers now who will reveal it to himself. You feel at that moment a great emptiness and the feeling of having been abandoned. And also a kind of dissatisfaction because of this link between the book and you, which was decided too fast. This dissatisfaction and feeling of something uncompleted pushes you to write the next book to restore balance, without you ever reaching it. As the years go by, the books follow each other and the readers will speak of a "work". But you will have the feeling that it was only a long flight forward.
Yes, the reader knows more about a book than its author himself. It happens, between a novel and its reader, a phenomenon similar to that of the development of photos, as it was practiced before the digital era. At the time of its drawing in the dark room, the photo was gradually becoming visible. As one moves forward in reading a novel, the same chemical process unfolds. But for there to be such an agreement between the author and his reader, it is necessary that the novelist never force his reader - in the sense that a singer is said to force his voice - but the imperceptibly and leaves a sufficient margin for the book to permeate it little by little, and that by an art that looks like acupuncture where it is enough to prick the needle in a very precise and the flow is spread in the the nervous system.
This intimate and complementary relationship between the novelist and his reader, I think we find the equivalent in the musical field. I always thought that writing was close to music but much less pure than this and I always envied musicians who seemed to me to practice an art superior to the novel - and the poets, who are closer to the musicians as novelists. I started to write poems in my childhood and it is without doubt thanks to that that I understood better the reflection that I read somewhere: "It is with bad poets that one makes of "And then, as far as music is concerned, it's often a novelist's job to train all people, landscapes, the streets he could observe in a musical score where we find the same melodic fragments from one book to another, but a musical score that seems imperfect to him. There will be, in the novelist, the regret of not having been a pure musician and not having composed "The Nocturnes" of Chopin.
The lack of lucidity and critical distance of a novelist vis-à-vis all of his own books is also a phenomenon that I noticed in my case and in that of many others: each new book at the time of writing, erases the previous one to the point that I have the impression of having forgotten it. I thought I wrote them one after the other in a discontinuous way, with successive mistakes, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences come back from one to the other, like the patterns of a tapestry woven into a half-sleep. A half-sleep or a waking dream. A novelist is often a somnambulist, so much he is penetrated by what he has to write, and one may fear that he will be crushed when he crosses a street. (...)
It also happens that a writer of the twenty-first century feels, at times, prisoner of his time and that the reading of the great novelists of the nineteenth century - Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - inspires him a certain nostalgia. At that time, time was running slower than today, and this slowness was in keeping with the novelist's work because he could concentrate his energy and attention better. Since then, time has accelerated and moved by jerks, which explains the difference between the great Romanesque massifs of the past, the architectures of cathedrals, and the discontinuous and fragmented works of today.
In this perspective, I belong to an intermediate generation and I would be curious to know how the following generations that are born with the internet, the laptop, emails and tweets will express by literature this world to which everyone is "connected" in permanence and where "social networks" begin the part of intimacy and secrecy that was still our good until recently - the secret that gave depth to people and could be a great novelistic theme. But I want to remain optimistic about the future of literature and I am convinced that the writers of the future will take over as each generation has since Homer ...
And, moreover, a writer, like any other artist, may be so closely bound to his time that he can not escape it and that the only air he breathes is what is called "The air of the times", he always expresses something timeless in his works. In the staging of Racine's or Shakespeare's plays, it does not matter whether the characters are dressed in antique style or that a director wants to dress them in bluejeans and leather jackets. These are unimportant details. We forget, while reading Tolstoy, that Anna Karenina wears dresses of 1870 as she is close to us after a century and a half. And then some writers, like Edgar Poe, Melville or Stendhal, are better understood two hundred years after their death than by those who were their contemporaries. (...)
It is the role of the poet and the novelist, and also of the painter, to unveil this mystery and this phosphorescence which are at the bottom of each person. I think of my distant cousin, the painter Amedeo Modigliani whose most moving paintings are those where he chose as models anonymous, children and street girls, maids, small farmers, young apprentices. He has painted them with a sharp line reminiscent of the great Tuscan tradition, that of Botticelli and the Sienese painters of Quattrocento. He gave them - or rather he revealed - all the grace and nobility that was in them in their humble appearance.
The work of the novelist must go in that direction. His imagination, far from distorting reality, must penetrate deeply and reveal this reality to itself, with the power of infrared and ultraviolet to detect what is hidden behind appearances. And I would not be far from believing that in the best case the novelist is a kind of seer and even a visionary. And also a seismograph, ready to record the most imperceptible movements.
This is the first time I have to give a speech to so many people and I am apprehensive about it. One would be tempted to believe that for a writer, it is natural and easy to engage in this exercise. But a writer - or at least a novelist - often has difficult relationships with speech. And if one remembers this academic distinction between the written and the oral, a novelist is more gifted for the written than the oral. He has the habit of keeping quiet and if he wants to penetrate an atmosphere, he must blend in with the crowd. He listens to the conversations without seeming to, and if he intervenes in them, it is always to ask a few discreet questions to better understand the women and men around him. He has a hesitant speech, because of his habit of scratching his writings.
Of course, after multiple erasures, his style may seem limpid. But when he speaks, he no longer has the resource to correct his hesitations. And I belong to a generation where children were not allowed to speak, except on rare occasions and if they asked permission. But we did not listen to them and often they were cut off. This explains the difficulty of speech of some of us, sometimes hesitant, sometimes too fast, as if they feared every moment to be interrupted. Hence, no doubt, this desire to write that took me, like many others, out of childhood. You hope the adults will read you. They will be obliged to listen to you without interrupting you and they will know once and for all what you have on your heart.
The announcement of this prize seemed unreal and I was eager to know why you had chosen me. That day, I think I have never felt so strongly how a novelist is blind to his own books and how much readers know more than he does about what he wrote. A novelist can never be his reader, except to correct mistakes in his manuscript, repetitions, or to delete one paragraph too much. He has only a confused and partial representation of his books, like a painter busy making a mural on the ceiling and who, lying on a scaffolding, works in the details, too closely, without an overall vision.Curious lonely activity than writing. You go through moments of discouragement when you write the first pages of a novel. You have every day the impression of going wrong. And then, the temptation is great to go back and engage in another way. We must not succumb to this temptation but follow the same path. It's a bit like driving a car, at night, in the winter and riding on the ice, without any visibility. You do not have a choice, you can not go back, you have to keep going, telling yourself that the road will eventually be more stable and that the fog will dissipate.
On the verge of completing a book, it seems to you that he is beginning to break away from you and that he is already breathing the air of freedom, like children, in the classroom, on the eve of the summer holidays. They are distracted and noisy and do not listen to their teacher anymore. I would even say that when you write the last paragraphs, the book shows you some hostility in its haste to free yourself from you. And he leaves you scarcely have you drawn the last word. It's over, he does not need you anymore, he's already forgotten you. It is the readers now who will reveal it to himself. You feel at that moment a great emptiness and the feeling of having been abandoned. And also a kind of dissatisfaction because of this link between the book and you, which was decided too fast. This dissatisfaction and feeling of something uncompleted pushes you to write the next book to restore balance, without you ever reaching it. As the years go by, the books follow each other and the readers will speak of a "work". But you will have the feeling that it was only a long flight forward.
Yes, the reader knows more about a book than its author himself. It happens, between a novel and its reader, a phenomenon similar to that of the development of photos, as it was practiced before the digital era. At the time of its drawing in the dark room, the photo was gradually becoming visible. As one moves forward in reading a novel, the same chemical process unfolds. But for there to be such an agreement between the author and his reader, it is necessary that the novelist never force his reader - in the sense that a singer is said to force his voice - but the imperceptibly and leaves a sufficient margin for the book to permeate it little by little, and that by an art that looks like acupuncture where it is enough to prick the needle in a very precise and the flow is spread in the the nervous system.
This intimate and complementary relationship between the novelist and his reader, I think we find the equivalent in the musical field. I always thought that writing was close to music but much less pure than this and I always envied musicians who seemed to me to practice an art superior to the novel - and the poets, who are closer to the musicians as novelists. I started to write poems in my childhood and it is without doubt thanks to that that I understood better the reflection that I read somewhere: "It is with bad poets that one makes of "And then, as far as music is concerned, it's often a novelist's job to train all people, landscapes, the streets he could observe in a musical score where we find the same melodic fragments from one book to another, but a musical score that seems imperfect to him. There will be, in the novelist, the regret of not having been a pure musician and not having composed "The Nocturnes" of Chopin.
The lack of lucidity and critical distance of a novelist vis-à-vis all of his own books is also a phenomenon that I noticed in my case and in that of many others: each new book at the time of writing, erases the previous one to the point that I have the impression of having forgotten it. I thought I wrote them one after the other in a discontinuous way, with successive mistakes, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences come back from one to the other, like the patterns of a tapestry woven into a half-sleep. A half-sleep or a waking dream. A novelist is often a somnambulist, so much he is penetrated by what he has to write, and one may fear that he will be crushed when he crosses a street. (...)
It also happens that a writer of the twenty-first century feels, at times, prisoner of his time and that the reading of the great novelists of the nineteenth century - Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - inspires him a certain nostalgia. At that time, time was running slower than today, and this slowness was in keeping with the novelist's work because he could concentrate his energy and attention better. Since then, time has accelerated and moved by jerks, which explains the difference between the great Romanesque massifs of the past, the architectures of cathedrals, and the discontinuous and fragmented works of today.
In this perspective, I belong to an intermediate generation and I would be curious to know how the following generations that are born with the internet, the laptop, emails and tweets will express by literature this world to which everyone is "connected" in permanence and where "social networks" begin the part of intimacy and secrecy that was still our good until recently - the secret that gave depth to people and could be a great novelistic theme. But I want to remain optimistic about the future of literature and I am convinced that the writers of the future will take over as each generation has since Homer ...
And, moreover, a writer, like any other artist, may be so closely bound to his time that he can not escape it and that the only air he breathes is what is called "The air of the times", he always expresses something timeless in his works. In the staging of Racine's or Shakespeare's plays, it does not matter whether the characters are dressed in antique style or that a director wants to dress them in bluejeans and leather jackets. These are unimportant details. We forget, while reading Tolstoy, that Anna Karenina wears dresses of 1870 as she is close to us after a century and a half. And then some writers, like Edgar Poe, Melville or Stendhal, are better understood two hundred years after their death than by those who were their contemporaries. (...)
It is the role of the poet and the novelist, and also of the painter, to unveil this mystery and this phosphorescence which are at the bottom of each person. I think of my distant cousin, the painter Amedeo Modigliani whose most moving paintings are those where he chose as models anonymous, children and street girls, maids, small farmers, young apprentices. He has painted them with a sharp line reminiscent of the great Tuscan tradition, that of Botticelli and the Sienese painters of Quattrocento. He gave them - or rather he revealed - all the grace and nobility that was in them in their humble appearance.
The work of the novelist must go in that direction. His imagination, far from distorting reality, must penetrate deeply and reveal this reality to itself, with the power of infrared and ultraviolet to detect what is hidden behind appearances. And I would not be far from believing that in the best case the novelist is a kind of seer and even a visionary. And also a seismograph, ready to record the most imperceptible movements.
by Patrick Modiano, LeMonde | Read more:
Image: Nicola Lo Calzo for The New York Times via
