The beauty of Literature, do read this:
2002 NSW Literary Awards Address On Readers' Rewards and Writers' Awards by Pierre Ryckmans
As you may perhaps remember, some time ago, the English actor Hugh Grant was arrested by the police in Los Angeles: he was performing a rather private activity in a public place, with a lady of the night. For less famous mortals, such a mishap would have been merely embarrassing; but for such a famous film star, the incident proved quite shattering. For a while, it looked as if his professional career might sink - not to mention the damage inflicted upon his personal life. In this distressing circumstance, he was interviewed by an American journalist, who asked him a very American question:"Are you receiving any therapy or counselling?" Grant replied: "No. In England, we read novels". Half a century earlier, the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung developed the other side of this same observation. He phrased it in more technical terms: "Man's estrangement from the mythical realmand the subsequent shrinking of his existence to the mere factual - that is the major cause of mental illness". In other words: people who do not read fiction or poetry are in permanent danger of crashing against facts and being crushed by reality. And then, in turn, it is left to Dr Jung and his colleagues to rush to the rescue and attempt mending the broken pieces.
Do psychotherapists multiply when novelists and poets become scarce? There may well be a connection between the development of clinical psychology on the one hand, and the withering of the inspired
> >imagination on the other - at least, this was the belief of some eminent practitioners. Rainer Marie Rilke once begged Lou Andreas Salome to psychoanalyse him. She refused; she explained to him: "If the analysis is successful, you may never write poetry again." (And just imagine: had a skilful shrink cured Kafka of his existential anxieties, our age - and modern man's condition - could have been deprived of its most perceptive interpreter).
Many strong and well-adjusted people seem to experience little need for the imaginative life. Thus, for instance, Saints do not write novels, as Cardinal Newman observed (and he ought to have known, since he came quite close to being a saint, and he wrote a couple of novels).
Especially, practical-minded people and men of action are often inclined to disapprove of literary fiction. They consider reading creative literature as a frivolous and debilitating activity. In >this respect, it is quite revealing that, for example, the great Polar explorer Mawson - one of our own national heroes - gave to his
children the stern advice not to waste their time reading novels: instead, he instructed them to read only works of history and biography, in order to grow into healthy individuals.
Allow me to dwell one short moment over this particular advice, for it reflects two very common fallacies. The first fallacy consists in failing to see that, by its very definition, all literature is in fact imaginative literature. Distinctions between genres - novels and history, poetry and prose, fiction and essay, etc - are
essentially artificial; these conventional classifications are of practical use mostly for booksellers and librarians who have to compile catalogues or arrange books on crowded shelves; otherwise, above a certain level of literary quality, they present little relevance. For the perceptive reader, indeed, Proust's great novel is in fact a philosophical essay; Montaigne's essays are more diverse and surprising than any novel: Gibbon and Michelet's histories remain alive first and foremost as great literature; and, of course it would be ludicrous to reduce a polymorphous giant such as Shakespeare to the absurdly minor and narrow craft of playwrighting. As to the art of fiction, we have already learned that its aim is nothing less than "to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe",* whereas the mission of the historian is to imagine the past - since history is believed only when a talented writer has invented it well. Novelists are the historians of the present; historians are the novelists of the past.
The second Mawsonian fallacy results from a mistaken notion of what "health" is. On this subject, I think that Laurence Sterne provided the correct perspective in his description of a visit he made to his doctor:
> >"- Sir, the doctor told me, your health is perfectly normal. - On hearing this, I began to rejoice, when the doctor pursued: - Such a condition is exceedingly rare; it is a cause for concern and calls for extreme caution".
Since Mawson just took us to Antarctica, before leaving this particular field, I might also add that, to his example, I have always preferred that of Shackleton - a much greater man: in the darkest depth of disaster, when all members of his expedition had to discard every piece of superfluous luggage, he refused to abandon his beloved copy of Browning's collected poems. One day, some scholar should write a doctoral thesis on "The Role of Poetry in Polar Exploration" - but right now, I ought better not wander too far away from my subject. My point was simply this: whatever fragile harmony we may have been able to achieve within ourselves is exposed every day to dangerous challenges and to ferocious batterings, and the issue of our struggle remains forever uncertain. A character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa gave (what seems to me) the best image for this common predicament of ours: "Life is a shitstorm, in which Art is our only umbrella".
This observation, in turn, brings us to the very meaning of tonight's function - the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Any well-ordered State must naturally provide for Public Education, Public Health, Public Transports, Public Order, the administration of justice, the collection of garbage, etc.. Beyond these essential services and responsibilities, a truly civilised State also ensures that, in the pungent squalls of their daily lives, citizens are not left without umbrellas - and therefore, it encourages and supports the Arts. The Premier's Literary Awards are one important aspect of this enlightened policy.
The beauty of all literary awards is that they produce only winners - there can be no losers here. For this is not a competition, and in this respect, actually it resembles more a lottery. When we buy a lottery ticket in support of some charity, we expect nothing in return. Yet, if one day, we were to receive a phone call informing us that our number just won a sports car or a holiday in Tahiti, we would be surprised - and delighted. We would be delighted precisely because of our surprise. Though it may be pleasant to obtain something after a long and hard struggle, to be given it without even having had to ask - this is pure bliss.
Without doubting the quality of his own work, a writer who receives a literary award is perfectly aware that he is being very lucky indeed. Not only he knows that this honour could have gone to any other writer on the short list, but he also knows that there are many writers not on the short list, who might have deserved it equally well; and furthermore, it is quite conceivable that the writer who should have deserved it most did not even succeed in having his manuscript accepted for publication - it was rejected by twelve different publishers, and may have to wait another twenty years before having its true worth duly recognised.
Yet these considerations should not tarnish in the least the happiness of the winners. Ultimately lotteries are designed to benefit not their winners, but Handicapped Children, or Guide Dogs for the Blind, or whatever good cause is sponsoring them. And it is the same with the literary awards: year after year, they have only one true and permanent winner, always the same - and it is Literature itself, our common love, which we have all gathered here tonight to support and celebrate.
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* These are the words of Joseph Conrad, in what remains the classic manifesto of the art of the novel - his famous Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. The first sentence reads in full: "Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect".
Pierre Ryckmans was born in Brussels in 1935 and obtained a PhD from the University of Louvain. In 1970 he came to Australia and taught at the Australian National University, and then was, from 1987-93, pofessor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Academie Royale de Litterature Francaise (Belgium). He delivered the 1996 Boyer Lectures.
Dr Ryckmans, who writes under the pen-name Simon Leys, also has a distinguished publishing career. He is the author of The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (1977), Chinese Shadows (1977), The Burning Forest (1985), The Death of Napoleon (1991), The Analects of Confucius (1997), Essais sur la Chine (1998), The Angel and the Octopus (1999), and ProtÈe (2001). His awards include The Independent (UK) Foreign Fiction Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Victorian Premier's Prize for Literary Translation, and Prix Renaudot (essai); he is Officier (Ordre de Leopold), Commandeur, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France).
