Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

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.