{"id":685,"date":"2008-12-08T05:17:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-08T13:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=685"},"modified":"2008-12-08T05:17:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-08T13:17:00","slug":"jmg-le-clezios-nobel-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/jmg-le-clezios-nobel-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"JMG Le Cl\u00e9zio's Nobel Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
Below the opening paragraphs of JMG Le Cl\u00e9zio’s Nobel (I first wrote “Novel”) lecture. You can read the whole thing here<\/a> in English.<\/p>\n

\n
December 7, 2008<\/p>\n

Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection.
If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write\u2013and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy\u2013I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war. Not war in the sense of a specific time of major upheaval, where historical events are experienced, such as the French campaign on the battlefield at Valmy, as recounted by Goethe on the German side and my ancestor Fran\u00e7ois on the side of the arm\u00e9e r\u00e9volutionnaire. That must have been a moment full of exaltation and pathos. No, for me war is what civilians experience, very young children first and foremost. Not once has war ever seemed to me to be an historical moment. We were hungry, we were frightened, we were cold, and that is all. I remember seeing the troops of Field Marshal Rommel pass by under my window as they headed towards the Alps, seeking a passage to the north of Italy and Austria. I do not have a particularly vivid memory of that event. I do recall, however, that during the years which followed the war we were deprived of everything, in particular books and writing materials. For want of paper and ink, I made my first drawings and wrote my first texts on the back of the ration books, using a carpenter\u2019s blue and red pencil. This left me with a certain preference for rough paper and ordinary pencils. For want of any children\u2019s books, I read my grandmother\u2019s dictionaries. They were like a marvellous gateway, through which I embarked on a discovery of the world, to wander and daydream as I looked at the illustrated plates, and the maps, and the lists of unfamiliar words. The first book I wrote, at the age of six or seven, was entitled, moreover, Le Globe \u00e0 mariner. Immediately afterwards came a biography of an imaginary king named Daniel III\u2014could he have been Swedish?\u2014and a tale told by a seagull. It was a time of reclusion. Children were scarcely allowed outdoors to play, because in the fields and gardens near my grandmother\u2019s there were land mines. I recall that one day as I was out walking by the sea I came across an enclosure surrounded by barbed wire: on the fence was a sign in French and in German that threatened intruders with a forbidding message, and a skull to make things perfectly clear.
It is easy, in such a context, to understand the urge to escape\u2014hence, to dream, and put those dreams in writing. My maternal grandmother, moreover, was an extraordinary storyteller, and she set aside the long afternoons for the telling of stories. They were always very imaginative, and were set in a forest\u2014perhaps it was in Africa, or in Mauritius, the forest of Macchab\u00e9e\u2014where the main character was a monkey who had a great talent for mischief, and who always wriggled his way out of the most perilous situations. Later, I would travel to Africa and spend time there, and discover the real forest, one where there were almost no animals. But a District Officer in the village of Obudu, near the border with Cameroon, showed me how to listen for the drumming of the gorillas on a nearby hill, pounding their chests. And from that journey, and the time I spent there (in Nigeria, where my father was a bush doctor), it was not subject matter for future novels that I brought back, but a sort of second personality, a daydreamer who was fascinated with reality at the same time, and this personality has stayed with me all my life\u2014and has constituted a contradictory dimension, a strangeness in myself that at times has been a source of suffering. Given the slowness of life, it has taken me the better part of my existence to understand the significance of this contradiction.
Books entered my life at a later period. When my father\u2019s inheritance was divided, at the time of his expulsion from the family home in Moka, in Mauritius, he managed to put together several libraries consisting of the books that remained. It was then that I understood a truth not immediately apparent to children, that books are a treasure more precious than any real property or bank account. It was in those volumes\u2014most of them ancient, bound tomes\u2014that I discovered the great works of world literature: Don Quijote<\/span>, illustrated by Tony Johannot; La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes<\/span>; the Ingoldsby Legends; Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/span>; Victor Hugo\u2019s great, inspired novels Quatre-vingt-treize, Les Travailleurs de la Mer,<\/span> and L\u2019Homme qui rit<\/span>. Balzac\u2019s Les Contes dr\u00f4latiques<\/span>, as well. But the books which had the greatest impact on me were the anthologies of travellers\u2019 tales, most of them devoted to India, Africa, and the Mascarene islands, or the great histories of exploration by Dumont d\u2019Urville or the Abb\u00e9 Rochon, as well as Bougainville, Cook, and of course The Travels of Marco Polo. In the mediocre life of a little provincial town dozing in the sun, after those years of freedom in Africa, those books gave me a taste for adventure, gave me a sense of the vastness of the real world, a means to explore it through instinct and the senses rather than through knowledge. In a way, too, those books gave me, from very early on, an awareness of the contradictory nature of a child\u2019s existence: a child will cling to a sanctuary, a place to forget violence and competitiveness, and also take pleasure in looking through the windowpane to watch the outside world go by.<\/p>\n

Shortly before I received the\u2014to me, astonishing\u2014news that the Swedish Academy was awarding me this distinction, I was re-reading a little book by Stig Dagerman that I am particularly fond of: a collection of political essays entitled Ess\u00e4er och texter.<\/em> It was no mere chance that I was re-reading this bitter, abrasive book. I was preparing a trip to Sweden to receive the prize which the Association of the Friends of Stig Dagerman had awarded to me the previous summer, to visit the places where the writer had lived as a child. I have always been particularly receptive to Dagerman\u2019s writing, to the way in which he combines a child-like tenderness with na\u00efvet\u00e9 and sarcasm. And to his idealism. To the clear-sightedness with which he judges his troubled, post-war era\u2014that of his mature years, and of my childhood. One sentence in particular caught my attention, and seemed to be addressed to me at that very moment, for I had just published a novel entitled Ritournelle de la faim. That sentence, or that passage rather, is as follows: \u201cHow is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as if nothing on earth were more important than literature, and on the other fail to see that wherever one looks, people are struggling ag
\nainst hunger and will necessarily consider that the most important thing is what they earn at the end of the month? Because this is where he (the writer) is confronted with a new paradox: while all he wanted was to write for those who are hungry, he now discovers that it is only those who have plenty to eat who have the leisure to take notice of his existence.\u201d (<\/span>The Writer and Consciousness<\/span><\/em>)<\/div>\n
This \u201cforest of paradoxes\u201d, as Stig Dagerman calls it, is, precisely, the realm of writing, the place from which the artist must not attempt to escape: on the contrary, he or she must \u201ccamp out\u201d there in order to examine every detail, explore every path, name every tree. It is not always a pleasant stay. He thought he had found shelter, she was confiding in her page as if it were a close, indulgent friend; but now these writers are confronted with reality, not merely as observers, but as actors. They must choose sides, establish their distance. Cicero, Rabelais, Condorcet, Rousseau, Madame de Sta\u00ebl, or, far more recently, Solzhenitsyn or Hwang Sok-yong, Abdelatif La\u00e2bi, or Milan Kundera: all were obliged to follow the path of exile. For someone like myself who has always\u2014except during that brief war-time period\u2014enjoyed freedom of movement, the idea that one might be forbidden to live in the place one has chosen is as inadmissible as being deprived of one\u2019s freedom.<\/div>\n
But the privilege of freedom of movement results in the paradox. Look, for a moment, at the tree with its prickly thorns that is at the very heart of the forest where the writer lives: this man, this woman, busily writing, inventing their dreams\u2014do they not belong to a very fortunate and exclusive happy few<\/em>? Let us pause and imagine an extreme, terrifying situation\u2014like the one in which the vast majority of people on our planet find themselves. A situation which, long ago, at the time of Aristotle, or Tolstoy, was shared by those who had no status\u2014serfs, servants, villeins in Europe in the Middle Ages, or those peoples who during the Enlightenment were plundered from the coast of Africa, sold in Gor\u00e9e, or El Mina, or Zanzibar. And even today, as I am speaking to you, there are all those who do not have freedom of speech, who are on the other side of language. I am overcome by Dagerman\u2019s pessimistic thoughts, rather than by Gramsci\u2019s militancy, or Sartre\u2019s disillusioned wager. The idea that literature is the luxury of a dominant class, feeding on ideas and images that remain foreign to the vast majority: that is the source of the malaise that each of us is feeling\u2014as I address those who read, who write. Of course one would like to spread the word to all those who have been excluded, to invite them magnanimously to the banquet of culture. Why is this so difficult? Peoples without writing, as the anthropologists like to call them, have succeeded in inventing a form of total communication, through song and myth. Why has this become impossible for our industrialized societies, in the present day? Must we reinvent culture? Must we return to an immediate, direct form of communication? It is tempting to believe that the cinema fulfils just such a role in our time, or popular music with its rhythms and rhymes, its echoes of the dance. Or jazz and, in other climes, calypso, maloya, sega. (…)<\/div>\n

\u00a9\u00ae THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2008
General permission is granted for the publication in newspapers in any language after December 7, 2008, 5:30 p.m. (Swedish time). Publication in periodicals or books otherwise than in summary requires the consent of the Foundation. On all publications in full or in major parts the above underlined copyright notice must be applied.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below the opening paragraphs of JMG Le Cl\u00e9zio’s Nobel (I first wrote “Novel”) lecture. You can read the whole thing here in English. December 7, 2008 Why do we write? I imagine that each...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}