“All writers belong to the class of non-orators,” Thomas Mann warned his audience at the outset, accepting the Nobel prize for literature in 1929 in a self-described state of “festive intoxication”. In a paradox the 2017 laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro must be keenly aware of as he undergoes this week’s induction process, the Nobel honours authors for their books but asks them to appear in person (though some, such as Bob Dylan last year, refuse) and morph into celebrity performers expert in the very different art of rhetoric.
The contrast was starkly exemplified 20 years after Mann by William Faulkner, whose brief speech (calling for writers to return to the anguish of “the old verities ... of the heart”) was little understood even by anglophone listeners when delivered – he had a heavy southern accent and zero microphone technique – but once it appeared as a text was hailed as an inspirational classic.
It’s a formidable challenge, and one winners have to undergo twice (usually, as with Ishiguro, delivering a lecture and a “banquet speech” three days later). But most attempts include at least three of the following elements: profuse thanks to the Swedish Academy; equally lavish expressions of humility and unworthiness (but don’t overdo this passive-aggressively, like Luigi Pirandello); confessing a personal debt to Scandinavian literature (WB Yeats’s entire speech, for example, consisted of tributes to Swedenborg and Ibsen); a potent childhood memory and a recent anecdote showing how grounded in mundane reality you are. (William Golding talked of being given a parking ticket and congratulations by the same policeman on the day of the prize announcement).
Evocations of the heroic torment of a writer’s life, exemplified by Faulkner and Hemingway’s speeches, are out of fashion, as is lofty prophesying about the future of humanity and literature’s role in shaping it that mid-20th century laureates (such as Albert Camus) went in for. But taking up the cudgels on behalf of your own stigmatised ethnic group, or nation, or region (Gabriel García Márquez urged his audience not to view Latin America through a European lens) is still fine, though the fact that so many non-white and/or developing world winners chose that option in the 1980s and 90s might explain why there have been fewer such laureates of late.
What about tone? Political anger has been voiced (eg by John Steinbeck) but comes across as incongruous if winners actually turn up in white tie and collect their enormous cheque from a Swedish royal (Harold Pinter denounced George W Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals, but did so on video due to ill health). More successful is being intelligently insolent about Sweden, the prize itself, or the dynamite magnate behind it, if discernible behind the cheek is a larger point. “First you give the prize to a black man, then a Jewish writer, and now a clown – what gives?” asked Dario Fo; while Wole Soyinka mocked Alfred Nobel in one speech and the “racist condescension” of the prize his legacy funds in another.
Several recent laureates have told stories, cannily aligning their speeches with their fiction: an allegory about a blind woman (Toni Morrison); a Crusoe fable (JM Coetzee); a naughty tale of a lab rat awarded a Nobel (Günter Grass). To be avoided is succumbing, as many do, to grandiloquence, led on by the purple prose of the Academy’s citations; and Elfriede Jelinek took the speech-as-literature ploy to its limit with her submission of a video recording of an esoteric monologue about an evasive writer, her readers and her language, in which she resembled a Samuel Beckett heroine after taking a critical theory module.
Never inclined to be predictable, Ishiguro in the first of his speeches on Thursday deviated markedly from the standard template: no thanks, no feigned bafflement at being chosen, and no profession of love for Swedish culture (though those might all come later in his banquet speech).
Instead he majored on the anecdotes showing him as embedded in non-esoteric experience and resonant memories; a series of such scenes traced his life from childhood in a Japanese family in Surrey, via young adulthood and marriage, to decisive moments (ranging from going to Auschwitz to a Howard Hawks movie) and cultural touchstones – music and cinema as well as books – that have shaped his writing life.
His lecture also ended unexpectedly, with a more tentative, less rhetorical version of the kind of perorations on writing’s importance that western laureates went in for either side of the second world war and non-white or non-western ones delivered in the 80s and 90s. Ishiguro suggested that literature would best play a role in the future by “becoming more diverse” in both the voices included in it, and in openness to “today unknown literary cultures” and “new, sometimes bewildering ways of telling stories”.
