Tag: <span>Nobel</span>

Aleksandra Majak is currently working on her DPhil in English and Slavonic literature of the twentieth and twentieth-first century. In her project she looks on how the influx of Central Eastern European poetry in translation has galvanized a new, more ‘direct’ mode of poetic expression in the Anglo-American lyric of late modernism. In this post she shares some thoughts on the work of the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk.

Poster: Bartek Bałut
Photography: Łukasz Giza

‘Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves,’ said Olga Tokarczuk in a deep, calm voice as she addressed the audience during her Nobel acceptance speech. In 2018, the Swedish academy honored her work for ‘a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life’. That – after Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladyslaw Reymont, Czeslaw Milosz, and Wislawa Szymborska – made Tokarczuk the fifth Polish author to receive Nobel Prize in literature, and quite possibly the coolest one.

Tokarczuk is a feminist, activist and ethical vegetarian. Still, the most intriguing thing about this author is the way her at once intricate and disturbing books encourage readers to consider the boundaries between the real and the imagined; how, perhaps somewhere on the verge of both, we live in the world of stories yet untold. Indeed, she believes that ‘a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes’. Much of her work muses on an ostensibly simple but ultimately rather complex question: why does storytelling matter?

Since her 1993 debut, The Journey of the Book-People, Tokarczuk’s works have explored stories of borderlands; often occurring at the intersections of languages, flowing between literary genres, and taking place botheverywhere and nowhere at once. Early responses to Tokarczuk’s work often focused on its peripheral status vis-a-vis more mainstream tendencies within Polish mid-1990s fiction, until her Primeval and Other Times (1996) – in which a fictitious village evolves into a microcosm of turbulent twentieth-century history and the lives of its eccentric characters intertwine – became her first widely appreciated novel.

Olga Tokarczuk and translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones during New Horizons festival, Wrocław, 2018, Photo: Maciej Kulczyński

Written in Polish, her books have been translated into over 37 languages, each translation offering a subtly new interpretation of the original. Here, meaning is not – as Robert Frost’s oft-quoted line asserts – ‘lost’ in translation. Instead, it is through translation that literature otherwise ‘foreign’ to some audiences comes to matter. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, an alumna of MML at Oxford and now an award-winning translator of Polish literature into English (including Tokarczuk’s novels), sees a rising interest in contemporary literature in translation but also hopes to see more lost or forgotten classics revived: ‘postwar Polish literature is full of neglected gems.’

So what exactly do critics – most of whom read Tokarczuk in languages other than Polish – have in mind when they esteem the writer for her ‘narrative imagination’ and ‘crossing the boundaries as a form of life’? Part of the answer has to do with the writer’s fascination with the possibilities of telling the same story in multiple ways. Her most complex novels are narrated with unusual ease but in purposefully fragmentary threads – told by unreliable or eccentric characters, or emerging in moments of narrative breaks and silences.

In fact, the author’s keenness for decentralised, maze-like, and box-within-a-box plotlines took is rooted in her interest in psychology, which she went on to study at the University of Warsaw. The novelist once told The Guardian that reading Freud in her youth was her first step towards becoming a writer. Exploring his works on psychoanalysis brought her to the realisation that there are countless ways to interpret our experience – that storytelling, akin to the human psyche, is made up of constellatory rather than linear structures. This excerpt from the English translation of her Nobel lecture captures her desire to challenge narrative linearity (this is at 48:08-50:09 of the online recording of the lecture):

I keep wondering if these days it’s possible to find the foundations of a new story that’s universal, comprehensive, all-inclusive, rooted in nature, full of contexts and at the same time understandable.
Could there be a story that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self, revealing a greater range of reality and showing the mutual connections? That would be able to keep its distance from the well-trodden, obvious and unoriginal center point of commonly shared opinions, and manage to look at things ex-centrically, away from the center?
I am pleased that literature has miraculously preserved its right to all sorts of eccentricities, phantasmagoria, provocation, parody and lunacy. I dream of high viewing points and wide perspectives, where the context goes far beyond what we might have expected. […]
I also dream of a new kind of narrator―a “fourth-person” one, who is not merely a grammatical construct of course, but who manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time.

In all its contradictions, the concept of ‘a fourth-person narrator’ is both odd and fascinating. It combines as well as transgresses the well-known forms of narration that we first got to know in school: first or third person narrator; omniscient or limited perspective; direct address or the detached observer. Here the dream for ‘a fourth-person’ narrator, imagined as a tender and curious observer, is not only about the actual narrator but about the dream itself. Its potency, rhetoric, and creative power is able to transcend all the boundaries of traditional narrative. And if the project is intentionally left unfinished, why do you think that might be?

Her polyphonic vision of narration is also important if we consider the political situation of contemporary Poland. In this climate, literature has had a long-standing patriotic obligation towards promoting a monolithic idea of the country and its culture, which – as the noted historian Norman Davies, who works on Central Eastern Europe, has remarked – allows ‘myth to flourish’. Many of these myths have left their mark and much of the Anglo-American accounts of Poland became homogeneous in responding to this.

When the popularity of translation increased rapidly in the mid 1960s, commentaries promoted a naive belief that East Central European literature might be characterised by a few political clichés, prizing its universal aesthetics, and offering the reader an interpretation typically full of loose references to turbulent history or the poetry of witness or survival. It would be tempting though ultimately trite to look on the phosphorescent structures of Tokarczuk’s plots as a counter-balance to the daily reality of a country now overshadowed (and gradually damaged) by the politics of the ruling homophobic Law and Justice (PIS) party.

Tokarczuk’s polyphonic narration resounds ever more meaningfully in the growing popularity of autobiographical writing, particularly the type of one-season celebrity-authored work which has little to offer beyond self-promotion. One of Tokarczuk’s concerns about today’s printing market is the dominance of tales that ‘narrowly orbit the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself’, thus creating an paradoxical and alienating opposition between the ‘I’ and reality. For Tokarczuk, this presents yet another potentially fruitful opportunity for her to cross the boundary.

Still, if reading Tokarczuk is an exercise in boundary-crossing, it is not without a certain paradox, for to cross the boundaries is to admit that they do exist. The author references this contradiction in a scene from her untranslated book Final Stories (2015), where one of the characters tells the story of an undefined borderland moved during the night to some entirely different place, leaving the people ‘on the wrong side’; as the speaker adds with irony: ‘as humans cannot live without borders, we set off to find one’.

Other than readily available online resources, such as the full version of her Nobel acceptance speech, for a first read of Tokarczuk’s somewhat challenging work I would recommended Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of a Dead in the translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. This riveting novel toys with the genre of crime-fiction in its witty but dark quest to solve a mystery troubling the local community. Comparing the narrative to its film adaptation Spoor (2017) directed by Agnieszka Holland might spark a fruitful debate, especially in considering how the atmosphere and humour of the novel is translated into the visual language.

by Aleksandra Majak

You may have heard last week that the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the French novelist, Patrick Modiano. It’s the fifteenth time a French writer has won the prize since its inauguration in 1901, putting France at the very top of the Nobel league table, with more prizes for literature than all the countries of Africa, Asia and South America put together. How far this demonstrates something exceptional about French literary culture, and how far it’s a matter of the personal tastes of the Swedish jurors who award the prize, remains open to debate…

The very first Nobel Prize for Literature went to a Frenchman, the poet Sully Prudhomme in 1901. Next up were the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, writing in the Occitan language (1904), serial novelist Romain Rolland (1915), and Anatole France (1921), who followed the Nobel with the further ‘distinction’ (in his words) of having his entire literary output condemned by the Catholic Church the following year. The philosopher Henri Bergson and novelist Roger Martin du Gard complete the pre-war line-up. It’s probably fair to say that none of these first six is very widely read these days, although Bergson’s essays about consciousness are enjoying something of a revival in the era of cognitive science. During this period, the prize committee managed to miss both Émile Zola (who died in 1902) and Marcel Proust, although we should forgive the latter oversight, since Proust died before the later volumes of his masterpiece were in print.

Post-war, the Nobel jury have a better record of picking winners who last. The novelists André Gide (1947), François Mauriac (1952), Albert Camus (1957) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1964) who turned it down, plus the slightly more left-field choice of the poet Saint-John Perse (1964), make up the next generation. Samuel Beckett (1969) is counted by the Nobel organization for the Ireland of his birth rather than his adopted homeland, otherwise the French total would be sixteen. Avant-garde New Novelist Claude Simon won the prize in 1985, followed by Chinese émigré, Gao Xingjian (2000). Lastly, J. M. G. Le Clézio, who writes about colonisation, immigration, and the confrontation of cultures, won the prize in 2008.

All the French winners have been men, as you can see, and this in a period when such luminaries as Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras were writing. The Nobel prize for literature didn’t have a great record through the twentieth century in recognizing women writers of note from any nation, although it’s now getting better. Perhaps Marie NDiaye or the French-Algerian writer, Assia Djebar, will catch their eye soon and make good this failing by providing French literature with its first female laureate.

Modiano, the new Nobel laureate, is a writer whose work I know well and like a lot. I’ve written about him a couple of times, and he features prominently in the undergraduate option I teach about French representations of the Second World War, the Occupation and the Holocaust. He’s a prolific writer, with over thirty novels published, along with the screenplays to several films. His novels are short, accessible, and are usually variations on the same theme of troubling and faded memory, a struggle to capture an identity (the character’s own or someone else’s), and a dark and secret past that often connects to the Nazi Occupation of France. A few years ago, when I read a dozen Modiano novels in the space of a few months, I did get the feeling that he sometimes comes close to writing the same story over and over again, but he does it so well, in such haunting and moving style, that we can forgive him a certain, shall we say, specialization in his work.

A lot has been written online about Modiano in the past few days. You can read introductions to the man and his work in English here and here, and in French here or here, plus a guide to the five ‘most essential’ Modiano novels here. He’s an excellent writer to take on as your first attempt on a French novel in the original language. Rue des boutiques obscures is probably his best known novel, about an amnesiac detective attempting to uncover his own missing past. My favourite, though, is the non-fiction Dora Bruder, about Modiano’s discovery of an advertisement placed in a 1941 Paris newspaper by worried parents looking for their missing daughter, and about his subsequent efforts to uncover her story. Dora Bruder will be making an appearance in our book club early next year, when we’ll talk a little more about French literature’s reluctant new global celebrity.

Adventures on the Bookshelf

Tag Archives: Nobel

Olga Tokarczuk’s Storytelling

Nobel Prize Number Fifteen

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