Peer Hultberg's speech of thanks on receiving the Nordic Council's prize for literature

By : Peer Hultbergs

After being told that I had been awarded the Nordic Council Prize for Literature this year, it became clear to me how important it was for me to have some thoughts on myself and my relationship to Scandinavia. This formulation might perhaps sound a little strange, but as some readers will be aware, I am permanently resident outside the confines of Scandinavia, and as a consequence of this particular event it has been brought to me that I have lived altogether 31 of my 57 years, that is to say by far the greater part of my adult life and more than half of my life in purely numerical terms, outside Denmark and outside Scandinavia. Nevertheless, I feel myself as a Dane. It is a long time since I took the firm and - for an author who has any possibility at all of making this choice - important decision that the language which is my mother tongue should also be the language I employed as a means of artistic expression. On the other hand, at the same time as feeling myself to be a Dane, I also feel a European. But, it might be asked, do these two concepts, Dane and European, stand in opposition to each other as some kind of contradiction in terms? Should we not view the polarity sometimes postulated as artificial and simply as a general result of recent decades´ world-wide neo-nationalism not to say neo-chauvinism. And these in their turn are perhaps the result of modern Man´s difficulties in coping with large political units and hence the fear of them. As we all know, for the individual today it is almost impossible to form a comprehensive view of the broad political spectrum. The world has become too complex, and consequently the world has also become fragmented, and we can only comprehend it in fragments. The totality is something we leave to the specialist. It is he who is the distinctive representative of our time, where the polyhistor was perhaps the ideal of an earlier age. But is this specialist who can cope with the whole not himself precisely a contradictio in adjecto? Are we not all ultimately left with a fragmented view of the world and life? However, at the same time as being a Dane and a European, I am also an author, and it is in this capacity I am standing here this evening. To be an author implies two things. It is first and foremost to be an artist, and I very definitely consider myself to be an artist. But at the same time the author is also the artist who uses the word as his means of expression. And thereby arises the dilemma that has been that of the author, or which the author has made his own, at least since the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment - that the word, to a far greater extent than colour, sound, blocks of stone, plaster, metal, is never neutral. The word is the vehicle of meaning. Meaningless words linked together in a meaningless sequence might possibly be of interest as word or sound paintings, but the interest generally evaporates very quickly indeed, usually first of all in the word painter himself. And the meaning of the word can be utilised in many different ways. The word can be exploited. And the word can be compromised. Even by the author who deems it his most sacred means of expression. The tradition that the author, at the same time as working artistically on his oeuvre, should also take part in the public debate is deeply rooted in our culture. It is perhaps Voltaire who first spontaneously springs to mind, but the line of noble personalities is long, and although it might possibly not actually culminate here in Norway - the name of Ibsen is among the most distinguished. And many authors have seen it as their immediate task to continue this tradition. Not only here in Scandinavia, although it is perhaps a typical characteristic of cultural life in some of the Scandinavian countries. At the same time, however, this tradition has gradually become stretched to its utmost. Nor has this only happened in societies where, if he is to survive as an author at all, it is, or has been, the author´s silent and bounden duty to use his art either to serve so-called public opinion or to place it in the direct service of a state apparatus. This has led to a great deal of very noisy discussion in recent times of the bankruptcy of the intellectual. We know. We know them. We have heard of the intellectuals who were offered group excursions to the Soviet Union in the thirties and came back with their enthusiastic and ardent accounts of the new Jerusalem. We have read of Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote Le DeuxiFme Sexe at the same time as masochistically setting about acquiring young mistresses for Sartre. The distrust of the author as a self-appointed castigator of society and a specialist on society might seem to be justified. Only too often does he venture into areas that palpably lie well outside his competence and expertise. He uses his artistic medium as a genuine and ardent publicist rather than as an artist. Ultimately, however, he is usually distinctly inferior to the gifted professional journalist. But while this so-called committed author arouses ever stronger distrust, can the author who sees himself primarily as an artist on the other hand avoid exposing himself to the cruel old accusation of producing art for art´s sake? Is l´art pour l´art in our European culture for ever and inalterably be seen in contrast to Zola´s J´accuse? Is there a middle way? A third solution? I think there is. Otherwise I would not be standing here. I would have stopped writing. And, incidentally, I have once experienced this conflict in relation to myself. That was the reason for the long pause I had in my writing. It seems to me that the author´s task in our day, both as an artist and as a human being, is to turn his attention to the area where he is the true expert - the nature of Man. And this does not in any way mean that an author merely writes literature for literature´s own sake, or that he narcissistically walls himself up in an ivory tower. The "gnosi se auton" above the Temple of Apollo in Delphi does not mean that the path only leads inwards: it ultimately also leads out again. How many of the problems we face today are not the direct result of a lack of self-knowledge and self-insight? And this does not only apply to problems of a personal nature: how many of the hostile images erected on an international level spring from a personal inner enemy which is not recognised and must therefore be opposed outwardly. I am often, if not accused of being a pessimist, nevertheless seen as having a sombre view of life. I have always found it difficult to accept this view. I am much more inclined to the belief that my task, the task of literature and of an author, is as far as possible to reach a view of humanity and produce a human portrait without illusion. But that is not in itself the same as being a misanthropist, although it might possibly seem so to those who seek to retain their illusions; and although twentieth-century Europe and twentieth-century global developments in their entirety scarcely give us any reason whatever to consider with any great degree of optimism the species which - rather misleadingly, it might appear at times - has been called homo sapiens. Yet perhaps it is possible if one has courage enough to undertake the daring task of exposing the illusions, of after all digging down to something that might give a glimpse of what could be denoted as human dignity. This glimpse may perhaps turn out to be the quite small act of love which in a small way shows that one human being has had his eyes opened to a fellow human being, truly seen him as a human being and as a fellow human being, a "neighbour", that one human being respects another human being and thereby gains respect for himself as a human being. Perhaps it is this little glimpse that finally makes it possible to live life. You must respect your neighbour as yourself. But conversely it also applies that by loving his neighbour, by respecting his neighbour in the broadest sense of the word, a human being might perhaps be able to regain what humanity in the twentieth century so sadly seems to have lost - self-respect and human dignity.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones