tokarczuk-Nobel lecture-english-2.pdf

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Nobel Lecture by Olga Tokarczuk
Nobel Laureate in Literature 2018
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The Tender Narrator
1.
The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my
mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it’s a black-and-
white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost,
turning into nothing but gray shapes. The light is soft, and rainy, likely a
springtime light, and definitely the kind of light that seeps in through a
window, holding the room in a barely perceptible glow. My mom is sitting
beside our old radio, and it’s the kind with a green eye and two dials—one
to regulate the volume, the other for finding a station. This radio later
became my great childhood companion; from it I learned of the existence
of the cosmos. Turning an ebony knob shifted the delicate feelers of the
antennae, and into their purview fell all kinds of different stations—
Warsaw, London, Luxembourg and Paris. Sometimes, however, the sound
would falter, as though between Prague and New York, or Moscow and
Madrid, the antennae’s feelers stumbled onto black holes. Whenever that
happened, it sent shivers down my spine. I believed that through this radio
different solar systems and galaxies were speaking to me, crackling and
warbling and sending me important information, and yet I was unable to
decipher it.
When as a little girl I would look at that picture, I would feel sure that my
mom had been looking for me when she turned the dial on our radio. Like a
sensitive radar, she penetrated the infinite realms of the cosmos, trying to
find out when I would arrive, and from where. Her haircut and outfit (a big
boat neck) indicate when this picture was taken, namely, in the early
sixties. Gazing off somewhere outside of the frame, the somewhat
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hunched-over woman sees something that isn’t available to a person
looking at the photo later. As a child, I imagined that what was happening
was that she was gazing into time. There’s nothing really happening in the
picture—it’s a photograph of a state, not a process. The woman is sad,
seemingly lost in thought—seemingly lost.
When I later asked her about that sadness—which I did on numerous
occasions, always prompting the same response—my mother would say
that she was sad because I hadn’t been born yet, yet she already missed me.
“How can you miss me when I’m not there yet?” I would ask.
I knew that you miss someone you’ve lost, that longing is an effect of loss.
“But it can also work the other way around,” she answered. “Missing a
person means they’re there.”
This brief exchange, someplace in the countryside in western Poland in the
late sixties, an exchange between my mother and me, her small child, has
always remained in my memory and given me a store of strength that has
lasted me my whole life. For it elevated my existence beyond the ordinary
materiality of the world, beyond chance, beyond cause and effect and the
laws of probability. She placed my existence out of time, in the sweet
vicinity of eternity. In my child’s mind, I understood then that there was
more to me than I had ever imagined before. And that even if I were to say,
“I’m lost,” then I’d still be starting out with the words “I am”—the most
important and the strangest set of words in the world.
And so a young woman who was never religious—my mother—gave me
something once known as a soul, thereby furnishing me with the world’s
greatest
tender narrator.
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2.
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information,
discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes. Today the purview of
these looms is enormous—thanks to the internet, almost everyone can take
place in the process, taking responsibility and not, lovingly and hatefully,
for better and for worse. When this story changes, so does the world. In this
sense, the world is made of words.
How we think about the world and—perhaps even more importantly—how
we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore. A thing that happens
and is not told ceases to exist and perishes. This is a fact well known to not
only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician
and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge.
Today our problem lies—it seems—in the fact that we do not yet have
ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the
ultra-rapid transformations of today’s world. We lack the language, we lack
the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables. Yet we do see
frequent attempts to harness rusty, anachronistic narratives that cannot fit
the future to imaginaries of the future, no doubt on the assumption that an
old something is better than a new nothing, or trying in this way to deal
with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we lack new ways of
telling the story of the world.
We live in a reality of polyphonic
first-person narratives,
and we are met
from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the
kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly
just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this
type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most
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