Hour 2

Part 1

Nobel Prize Acceptance speech

Today we are going to learn the depth of the Nobel Prize Acceptance speech delivered by
Nadine Gordimer on Dec 7th, 1991.

She titles her speech – Writing and Being

What do these two words mean to you ?

All of us know writing – it is the art or system of signs that represents the utterances of a
language. The skill of expressing in words…

But what is Being ? – it is explained as the state of having life or existence, a living human….

So how can we connect these two words …. Writing and Being

1) Because we exist we write

2) We write and so it is proof that we exist

3) We are and therefore we need to express ourselves and a powerful medium is

writing

4) For writers – if you stop writing, you cease to exist

5) Writing is being, as long as they write they are….

We can keep guessing many more, but let us see what Gordimer has to say.

Gordimer begins the speech quoting from the Bible. The Bible is the sacred book of the
Christians and it contains 66 books and is divided into Old testament with 39 books and the
New testament with 27 books. These are divided to signify the records Before Christ and the
Birth & teachings of Christ in the New testament. Gordimer has quoted from the New
Testament written by a disciple of Christ by name John, so we refer to it as from St John
Chapter 1 and vs 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. The Bible begins with the first book Genesis that talks about creation.

In Genesis Chapter 1 – the creation came into being with the word – We read about it “And
God said, Let there be light……. And God said, Let there be a firmament…… And God said,
Let the earth bring forth grass….. etc., This was the word of God.
Gordimer explains how though word referred to God’s word in the beginning. Later the
meaning of the word became multiple and Gordimer brings in a few –

Word may signify 1)ultimate authority, 2)may denote prestige or arousing admiration and
respect, 3)with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuasion, - people can be easily persuaded
or dissuaded with word 4) to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, 5) to have the gift of the gab
– to convince, encourage or lift up and 5) of speaking in tongues ( this is also from the Bible –
after the crucifixion, the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, the disciples had gathered
together to pray. There was a "mighty rushing wind" and "tongues as of fire" appeared. The
gathered disciples were "filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues as
the Spirit gave them utterance. When people from outside heard the noise and rushed inside
they were amazed to see the disciples all who were Galileans talking in the language of those
who had come to investigate and they included Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the
dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and
Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews
and proselytes,Cretes and Arabians, and they exclaimed how they all heard them speak in
their languages of the wonderful works of God.

Having said this Gordimer goes on to say how the word is now transmitted through satellite
and thus again appears closer to God. But what excited her was how the spoken word took
shape on to papyrus ( a plant used as a surface to write on ) to the printing press by
Gutenberg.This she claims is the origin and growth story of the writer, but Gordimer says it
thus -It is the story that wrote her or him into being ( not that she wrote but it was the story
that brought in life.) This will be clear when we complete the speech.

Gordimer says that there is a mutation of the human culture. Mutation -the changing of the
structure of a gene . This she explains is because 1) the writer creating a work with a purpose
2) creating the writer. She also calls itOntogenesis - the development of an
individual organism or anatomical or behavioural feature from the earliest stage to maturity.
Because 1) to the nature and being of man 2) and specifically into the nature and creation of
that individual being – not just the writer but the reader too, for whom the writer writes.

So writing is self identity, living life fully, helping others see through the darkness into the
light and this is explained more through the story.
‘The God’s Script’, sometimes translated under the title ‘The Writing of the God’, is a 1949
short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The story concerns a
Mayan priest who is imprisoned with a jaguar; the priest comes to realise that his god has
hidden magic writing within the jaguar’s skin.

The story is narrated by Tzinacán, who was a Mayan magician at the pyramid of the god
Qaholom before Pedro de Alvarado devastated the pyramid with fire. Tzinacán has been
imprisoned in a stone cell, with a jaguar placed in the adjacent cell.

When he was captured, Tzinacán had been tortured ting to learn where the pyramid’s treasure
was hidden. The torturers broke and deformed him but he refused to give up the location of
the treasure; when he fell unconscious, he was thrown into this cell. Despite all this, he
believes his god has not abandoned him.

Over the years Tzinacán recollected an old tradition that his god, Qaholom, had written a
magical piece of text somewhere, that would save the world from destruction, but where it
was concealed, nobody knew. But Tzinacán, knowing he is the last surviving priest of his
god, believes that he may be able to locate it.

Tzinacán comes to realise that the skin of the jaguar would be the ideal place for his god to
have concealed this divine script, because it would survive as the jaguars reproduced, one
generation giving way to the next, over thousands of years. He devotes years to studying the
jaguar’s fur and looking for signs of the God’s script, until eventually he has a dream in
which he imagines himself drowning in sand, grains of which had started to multiply on the
floor of his cell.

When he wakes up, he sees the light above him, coming through the hole in the roof through
which his food and water are delivered. But then he sees an enormous wheel which was
everywhere at once, and made of both water and of fire. Tzinacán has an epiphany, and
believes he understands all of the workings of the universe – and he can now read the god’s
script written into the jaguar’s skin.

The script, he tells us, is a formula comprising fourteen random words which, if he spoke
them aloud, would make him all-powerful. His prison would disappear, he would be young
again (and immortal), and the jaguar would pounce upon Alvarado and devour him.
Tzinacánbelieves he would be able to reconstruct the lost Mayan empire and destroy the
Spanish invaders.

However, he claims that he will not utter those fourteen words, because he can no longer
remember who he was now he has read the god’s script. He is content to let ‘Tzinacán’ die in
prison, because Tzinacán is but one man, and anyone who has seen the universe cannot be
concerned with the trivial fate of one individual. (Wikipedia)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGTIIHsn14Q

Hour 2

Part 2

Moving on to the second part of the essay Being Here

Gordimer begins this part by stating how humans always want to know why ? This is not just
a spiritual or transcendental question as why do I live, its just the curiosity about the many of
common phenomenon like birth, death, wind, sun, stars and moon. And to quench this
curiosity our ancestors gave answers based on 1) observable reality 2)imagination. The oral
story tellers of the past used myth and mystery to explain the hidden truths of life.

What is myth ?According to Barthes, Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist,
essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician, myth is based on humans' history, and myth
cannot naturally occur. There are always some communicative intentions in myth. Created by
people, myth can easily be changed or destroyed. Also, myth depends on the context where it
exists. By changing the context, one can change the effects of myth.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in
the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. A myth,
according to Levi-Strauss, is both historically specific--it's almost always set in some time
long ago--and ahistorical, meaning that its story is timeless. As history, myth is parole; as
timeless, it's langue. He says it’s a genre between a fairy tale and a detective story – mystery
and fantasy and includes gods, anthropomorphized - attribute human characteristics or
behaviour to animals and birds, chimera- an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous
parts or fabrication of the mind and phantasmagorical - a constantly shifting complex
succession of things seen or imagined, a bizarre or fantastic creatures.
Nikos Kazantzakis author of poems, novels, essays, plays, and travel books, was arguably
the most important and most translated Greek writer and philosopher of the twentieth
century. ‘Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.’

The genre of myth – not abandoned though archaic - children’s bedtime tale in some
societies, by forests or deserts (where international mega culture has not influenced) art -
mediation between the individual and being.

Eg - an Icarus in the avatar of Batman

new myths - not to enlighten and provide some sort of answers but to distract, to provide a
fantasy escape route away from the terrors of their existence - that has made comic-book and
movie myth escapist. The writer, as myth in its ancient form expresses the forces of BEING -
distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker.

The writer has perceivable reality and imperceivable reality – whoever the writer is -
microfiles writers stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality- constructed
out of elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and unexpressed

Yet from psychological analysis to modernism and post-modernism, structuralism and

poststructuralism, all literary studies are aimed to a consistency - to understand the writer’s
grasp at the forces of being

But life is aleatory in itself; constantly pulled and shaped this way and that by
circumstances. There is no pure e text, ‘real’ text & it cannot be reached by any
critical methodology.

To deconstruct a text is in a way a contradiction - to make another construction out

of the pieces, as Roland Barthes does so fascinatingly, and admits to, in his
5

linguistic and semantical dissection of Balzac’s story, ‘Sarrasine’. So the literary

scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.
Balzac’s story, ‘Sarrasine’

Around midnight during a ball the narrator is sitting at a window, out of sight, admiring the
garden. He overhears the conversations of passers-by regarding the origins of the wealth of
the mansion's owner, Monsieur de Lanty. There is also the presence of an unknown old man
around the house, to whom the family was oddly devoted, and who frightened and intrigued
the partygoers. When the man sits next to the narrator's guest, Beatrix de Rochefide, she
touches him, and the narrator rushes her out of the room. The narrator says he knows who the
man is and says he will tell her his story the next evening.
The next evening, the narrator tells Mme de Rochefide about Ernest-Jean Sarrasine, a
passionate, artistic boy, who after having trouble in school became a protégé of the
sculptor Bouchardon. After one of Sarrasine's sculptures wins a competition, he heads to
Rome where he sees a theatre performance featuring Zambinella. He falls in love with her,
going to all of her performances and creating a clay mold of her. After spending time together
at a party, Sarrasine attempts to seduce Zambinella. She is reticent, suggesting some hidden
secret or danger of their partnership. Sarrasine becomes increasingly convinced that
Zambinella is the ideal woman. Sarrasine develops a plan to abduct her from a party at the
French embassy. When Sarrasine arrives, Zambinella is dressed as a man. Sarrasine speaks to
a cardinal, who is Zambinella's patron, and is told that Zambinella is a castrato. Sarrasine
refuses to believe it and leaves the party, seizing Zambinella. Once they are at his studio,
Zambinella confirms that she is a castrato. Sarrasine is about to kill him as a group of the
cardinal's men barge in and stab Sarrasine. The narrator then reveals that the old man around
the household is Zambinella, Marianina's maternal great uncle. The story ends with Mme de
Rochefide's expressing her distress about the story she has just been told.

Roland Barthes
Thus Sarrasine, the story is an individual item in a larger structure of the system of codes,
which according to Barthes, generates all possible actual narratives, just as the grammatical
structures of a language generate all possible sentences which can be written or spoken in it.
understanding of being best is through art
Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; it will be like to look down while crossing a
canyon on a tightrope. For the intense inner concentration the writer must cross the chasms of
the aleatory (random choice)

Eg .
Yeats’ inner ‘lonely impulse of delight’ in the pilot’s solitary flight, and his ‘terrible beauty’
An Irish Airman foresees his Death
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
he claims that it was “a lonely impulse of delight” which “drove” him to enlist in the air
force. Perhaps in a moment of loneliness, the Irish Airman thought it would be nice to be up
in the clouds. The speaker reveals that it was an impulse that drove him to fight in a war that
he cared nothing about.
Easter, 1916
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

This is the concluding part of W.B.Yeats’s patriotic poem Easter 1916. After paying his
eulogy to the great Irish patriots who stood, fought, and died to liberate their land from the
British occupation, the poet here asserts that everything is brought to an utter change by that
great sacrifice of Easter 1916.

“A terrible beauty is born” – Repeated three times to reinforce a powerful message, this
line signifies the battle for independence between the people of Ireland and the British
government. Many of those Irish rebels died for the cause.

E. M. Forster’s modest ‘only connect’

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion,
and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no
longer.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End
he was encouraging the reader to make the connection between the head and the heart,
between thought and feelings. Only then, so his argument goes, can we live a life of purpose
and become a force for good.
Joyce’s chosen, wily ‘silence, cunning and exile’;

By a strange coincidence, James Joyce in his famous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, wrote a few lines that are echoed in Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, “Ekla chalo”
— “Tread the lonely path” —written at about the same time. Joyce’s lines run as follows:
“‘Look here, Cranly’, he said. ‘You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do.
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer
believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express
myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my
defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.’
 Silence is ace card of the observant being. Exile is the elixir. Cunning is the necessary evil.
these are the three Deathly hallows(using a Harry Potter reference sorry). James Joyce here
provides a brilliant insight into the mind of a cerebral being.
It's foolish to try radical escape from who we are, where we are from, the relationships that
Divine Providence has chosen for us.
Gabriel García Márquez’s labyrinth

The General in His Labyrinth

Novel by Gabriel García Márquez

The themes of The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez are politics, love,
fate, death, and memory. This novel tells a partially fictionalized story of the last seven
months of Simon Bolivar's life.
Like the mythical labyrinth, this prison has no way out: The General cannot get away from
what he has done in the past, nor can he forget the times he failed to act. The violence
associated with a military uprising, such as executions and torture, has left an indelible
imprint on his mind. Similarly, he remembers the women he might have loved, had he
allowed himself to be emotionally vulnerable with them. These actions and inactions forge
together to create a labyrinth of regret which, as his death approaches, overwhelms the
General and tortures his increasingly feverish mind.
The labyrinth is an important symbol in the novel because it addresses the tension between
the General's legacy and his happiness.

Simon Bolivar, is led to death

5 Interesting Facts about Simon Bolivar
• Two Countries Are Named After Simon Bolivar: Bolivia & Venezuela. ...
• He Came from One of the Wealthiest Families in the Region. ...
• He Was a Great Leader, Though at Times Quite Ruthless. ...
• Some of His Friends & Allies Eventually Became His Enemies. ...
• Simon Bolivar Did Not Die from Conflict.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through
genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of
being.
Anthony Burgess once gave a summary definition of literature as ‘the aesthetic exploration of
the world’. I would say that writing only begins there, for the exploration of much beyond,
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, 25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) who published
under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer.
How does the writer become one, having been given the word?
I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become
one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of
the joy of apprehending life through my senses – the look and scent and feel of things; and
soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found
some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.
There is a little Kafka parable that goes like this; ‘I have three dogs:

Hold-him, Seize-him, and Nevermore.

Hold-him and Seize-him are ordinary little Schipperkes (pronunciation: "skip per kee")

Nevermore is a mongrel Great Dane

South African gold-mining town - Springs

Gordimer was Nevermore the mongrel

I was the Gypsy, tinkering with words second-hand, mending my own efforts at writing by
learning from what I read -my school was the local library. Proust, Chekhov and Dostoevsky
-were my professors. I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books.

Next stage -adolescence - the drive of sexuality- For most children, but for those
who are going to be artists - the imagination gains range and extends - new and
turbulent emotions- new perceptions. The writer begins to be able to enter into
other lives. The process of standing apart and being involved has come.
Gordimer’s first stories, - a child’s contemplation of death and murder eg a dove
mauled by a cat

early consciousness of racism - walk to school, storekeepers, themselves East

European immigrants kept lowest in the ranks of the Anglo-Colonial social scale
for whites in the mining town, roughly those whom colonial society ranked lowest
of all, discounted as less than human – the black miners who were the stores’
customers.

if she had been a black child she might not have become a writer at all – only had
library, no formal schooling

To address oneself to others begins a writer’s next stage of development.

To publish - no particular audience in mind; of the temptations, conscious and

unconscious, - who will take offense,

like Eurydice’s straying glance, will lead the writer back into the Shades of a
destroyed talent.
Eurydice's glance is the love that every individual has behind them, the one that watches over them, the
same one that everyone is hesitant to acknowledge

Apollo gave his son Orpheus a lyre and taught him how to play. It had been said that "nothing could resist
Orpheus's beautiful melodies, neither enemies nor beasts." Orpheus fell in love with Eurydice, a woman of
beauty and grace, whom he married and lived with happily for a short time. However, when Hymen was
called to bless the marriage, he predicted that their perfection was not meant to last.
A short time after this prophecy, Eurydice was wandering in the forest with the Nymphs. In some versions
of the story, the shepherd Aristaeus saw her, and beguiled by her beauty, made advances towards her and
began to chase her. Other versions of the story relate that Eurydice was merely dancing with the Nymphs.
While fleeing or dancing, she was bitten by a snake and died instantly. Orpheus sang his grief with his lyre
and managed to move everything, living or not, in the world; both humans and gods learnt about his sorrow
and grief.
At some point, Orpheus decided to descend to Hades by music to see his wife. Any other mortal would
have died, but Orpheus, being protected by the gods, went to Hades and arrived at the Stygian realm,
passing by ghosts and souls of people unknown. He also managed to attract Cerberus, the three-headed
dog, with a liking for his music. He presented himself in front of the god of the Greek
underworld, Hades and his wife, Persephone.
Orpheus played with his lyre a song so heartbreaking that even Hades was moved to compassion. The god
told Orpheus that he could take Eurydice back with him, but under one condition: she would have to follow
behind him while walking out from the caves of the underworld, and he could not turn to look at her as they
walked.
Thinking it a simple task for a patient man like himself, Orpheus was delighted; he thanked Hades and left
to ascend back into the living world. Unable to hear Eurydice's footsteps, however, he began to fear the
gods had fooled him. Eurydice might have been behind him, but as a shade, having to come back into the
light to become a full woman again. Only a few feet away from the exit, Orpheus lost his faith and turned to
see Eurydice behind him, sending her back to be trapped in Hades' reign forever.
Orpheus tried to return to the underworld but was unable to, possibly because a person cannot enter the
realm of Hades twice while alive. According to various versions of the myth, he played a mourning song
with his lyre, calling for death so that he could be united with Eurydice forever. He was killed either by
beasts tearing him apart, or by the Maenads, in a frenzied mood. His head remained fully intact, and still
sang as it floated in the water before washing up on the island of Lesbos. According to another
version, Zeus decided to strike him with lightning knowing Orpheus might reveal the secrets of the
underworld to humans. In this telling, the Muses decided to save his head and keep it among the living
people to sing forever, enchanting everyone with his melodies. They additionally cast his lyre into the sky
as a constellation.

Some writers write with theMalediction of the ivory tower, another destroyer of creativity

Jorge Luis Borges said he wrote for his friends and to pass the time.

Jean Paul Sartre - there are times when a writer should cease to write act upon
being only. But the unresolved conflict between distress at injustice in the world
and the knowledge that what he knew how to do best was write – then cannot take
part but write. Both writers though they denied that literature had a social purpose
still-

Borges was not writing for his friends, for he published. Sartre did not stop writing,
although he stood at the barricades in 1968.

For whom do we write - plagues the writer, a tin can attached to the tail of every
work published

Albert Camus

a. One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all.
b. And if man needs bread and justice, he also needs pure beauty which is the
bread of his heart.’
c. ‘Courage in and talent in one’s work.’

Gabriel García Márquez - Colombian novelist

The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.

The writer should be a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social
context.

Part 3

Being here
Czeslaw Milosz Polish-American poet wrote: ‘What is poetry which does not serve
nations or people?’
Bertolt Brecht German theatre practitionerwrote of a time when ‘to speak of trees is almost a crime’
Writers are – censored and forbidden to write, lives were and are at risk in
smuggling it, on scraps of paper, out of prisons.

Nikos Kazantzakis’ words, have to ‘make the decision which harmonizes with the
fearsome rhythm of our time.’

Some books lie for years banned, in own countries,

Many writers have been imprisoned

Africa alone – Soyinka, Ngugi waThiong’o, Jack Mapanje,

South Africa- Jeremy Cronin, Mongane Wally Serote, Breyten Breytenbach,

Dennis Brutus, Jaki Seroke: all these went to prison for the courage shown in their
lives, poets, to speak of trees.

Thomas Mann to Chinua Achebe, exile by political conflict and oppression

South Africans, Can Themba, Alex la Guma, Nat Nakasa, Todd Matshikiza.

Joseph Roth to Milan Kundera, have had to publish new works first in a foreign
language.

1988 writer was summoned to submit the word.

Gustave Flaubert French novelist dragged into court for indecency, over Madame
Bovary,
for blasphemy, Marrying
August Strindberg Swedish playwright arraigned
D H Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover banned
Even in France, Sweden and Britain. The edict of a world religion has sentenced a
writer to death.
Salman Rushdie has existed under the Muslim pronouncement upon him of
the fatwa.

The Satanic Verses, is an innovative exploration of one of the most intense

experiences of being in our era, the individual personality in transition between two
cultures brought together in a post-colonial world.

All is re-examined through the refraction of the imagination; the meaning of sexual
and filial love, the rituals of social acceptance.
In Europe what Gunter Grass did for the post-Nazi one with The Tin
Drum and Dog Years, perhaps same as Beckett did for our existential anguish
in Waiting For Godot,

With dictatorships apparently vanquished, this murderous new dictate invoking the
power of international terrorism in the name of a great and respected religion
should and can be dealt with only by democratic governments and the United
Nations as an offense against humanity.

From the horrific singular threat to – whether in what was the Soviet bloc, Latin
America, Africa, China – most imprisoned writers

then the writer’s themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and
distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of
the sea.

As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean ‘balance’. To

be Manichean is to follow the philosophy of Manichaeism, which is an

old religion that breaks everything down into good or evil. It also means

“duality,” so if your thinking is Manichean, you see things in black and

white.

The devil always has lead in his shoes, when placed on his side of the

scale.

Paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both

the state’s indictment of treason, and the liberation forces’ complaint of lack of

blind commitment.
Yet, to paraphrase coarsely Márquez’s dictum given by him both as a writer

and a fighter for justice, the writer must take the right to explore, warts and all,

(including features or qualities that are not appealing or attractive) a try for the
truth edges towards justice

just ahead of

Yeats’s beast slouching to be born. The poem is alluding to the Book of

Revelation. The "rough beast" is the Anti-Christ. The scene is set for the final
showdown and the Second Coming - the poem at least gives humankind the
possibility of redemption.

In literature, from life,

we page through each other’s faces

we read each looking eye

… It has taken lives to be able to do so.

Mongane Serote. South African poet and fighter for justice and peace The writer is
of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or
her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, never changed by lies by the dirtying of
the word for the purposes of racism, sexism,prejudice, domination, the glorification
of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.