4
O
viedo
| C
ampoamor
T
heatre
| 22
nd
O
ctober
1999
Much of the literature I am capable of springs from some loss or other. When systems shatter
against their own history, as recently happened to the Soviet system, when power structures
come to nothing, when the stupidity of the victors cries to Heaven, when freedom brings misery,
joined by the waves of refugees from the latest mass migration of people; when once again history
founders catastrophically, and capitalism, the only remaining ideology, fades into a world-wide
irrationalism, when only the stock market makes sense, and everything can start to slide along
with it, when finally the guild of historians, tired of fighting for footnotes to the page, lose their
way in the uncertainty of Post-History, then literature increases in value. It lives on crises. It flowers
amidst the rubble. It hears the faint noise of the woodworm. Its function is to desecrate corpses.
At a price, or for free, it keeps watch over the deceased and tells the survivors the old stories over
and over again.
However, if you glance through the literary supplements or listen to the murmurings of the
world of culture, whenever secondary concerns impertinently displace primary ones, literature is
also displaced. At best, once it has been tidied up, it serves as an event, or it is fed onto the Internet.
According to the publicity, it even promotes consumerism in marginalised groups.
However, I refuse to believe all this. I am a self-confessed ignoramus. The kind of progress
that would have me go faster is of no interest to me. I exercise an old-fashioned profession
in an old-fashioned way. I have no computer, I do not fumble my way around the Internet. I
still handwrite my manuscripts; I type the second and third versions with the aid of a rickety old
typewriter —I do so daily— standing next to a desk, and walking up and down; I whisper to myself,
and chew over sentences until they are all —whether spoken or written— honed down to the limit
and become rounded at the ends. Nevertheless, I am certain that history is still epileptic, and with
it, forever in contradiction, that literature has a future.
Pushed aside, the book will once again become subversive. And readers will be found for whom
books are a means of survival. I imagine children, fed up with television and bored by computer
games, becoming completely absorbed in a book and abandoning themselves to the attraction
of the narrated story, who imagine over a hundred pages, and read something very different to
what is on the printed page. Because that is what characterizes the human being. There is no more
beautiful sight than that of a child reading. Totally lost in the counter-world set between two book
covers, he is still there, but does not wish to be disturbed.
If one day in the near or distant future the human race —as anything is possible—were to wipe
itself out in some sophisticated way, I am sure —distinguished ladies and gentlemen, dear Prince
of Asturias— that Literature will have the final word even, if only in the guise of a pamphlet.
Günter Grass
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Literature
1999
Excerpt from the speech given on
the occasion of receiving the Prince
of Asturias Award for Literature
on 22/10/1999.
