"Sans un idéal inaccessible, point de vocation authentique".
Marcel Bénabou

"The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home".
T.W. Adorno

The conferring of a prize creates an unusual situation. Those who award the prize must believe that they have made an optimal choice. Those who accept the prize must believe that they deserve it. Both beliefs can, in a particular instance, be challenged.

These questionable beliefs become even more subject to doubt when the prize being conferred is not for activities where merit can be measured more or less objectively, as in sport and science, but in the domains of culture, of the arts and of thought.

There, merit seems to resist objective measurement. Indeed, it seems that, in the arts, the only sure judgment is the judgment of posterity, by which I mean the judgment made two or three generations after the work is completed and its maker gone.

It is humbling to realize that, out of all the acclaimed books, books thought to be genuinely part of literature, that have been published in, say, a given decade --never more than five or ten percent of the novels and poetry and serious essays published in that period-- surely no more than one percent of that work will actually survive; that is, will be of enduring interest, seem valuable, continue to give pleasure to future generations, will be worth reading and rereading.

No one can predict the judgment of posterity --- which is, finally, the only judgment that counts --- on a specific body of work in literature and the arts. So in that sense all prize-giving in the domain of culture can only express a conditional approbation --- which waits future confirmation or disconfirmation. But such prizes seem less problematic if we think of them as doing something more than expressing faith in or approval of the achievement of a given writer or artist. They express faith in the activity itself.

Thus, an important literary prize seems to me best regarded as an affirmation of the importance, the glory (if I may be permitted so grandiose a word) of literature itself. At least, those are the thoughts which occur to me on this distinguished occasion, in which I have been chosen to be one of the two recipients of the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature.

When I think of literature, of this infinitely varied adventure of working with language to tell stories and convey deep knowledge to which I have been pledged, anchored, for the whole of my life as a conscious, moral being, I think of a wide set of values that are really goals or standards by which I judge my own activity as a writer and as a person.
In one sense, the empiric or factual sense, literature is simply the sum of everything that has been written and is considered to be literature. In another sense, the ideal sense, literature is the sum of everything that improves and exalts and makes more necessary the activity of literature.

In this second, to me more valuable understanding, literature honors --- and embodies --- goals which are, in the strict sense, ideal. That is, they are never fully realized. But they are all the more compelling and authoritative, as ideals, because they are so difficult to maintain.

What I am proposing to praise here may be dismissed, by some, as an endearing form of folly. This is not my view at all. These moral standards, these ideals, are not an illusion.

Let us imagine literature as a utopia ... a place where exalted, largely inaccessible standards reign. From a certain reading of literature --- from the literature that matters, that continues to matter, over decades, generations, in a few instances, centuries --- a number of standards can be deduced.

Here is my utopia. That is, here are the standards I infer from, or find supported by, the enterprise of literature.

One. That the activities of literature (writing, reading, teaching) are an ideal vocation, a privilege, rather than simply a career, a profession, subject to the usual ideas of "success" and financial reward. Literature is, first of all, an essential form of nourishment to consciousness. It plays a vital role in the creation of inwardness and the enlarging and deepening of our sympathies and our sensitivities --- to other human beings, and to language.

Two. That literature is an arena of individual achievement, of individual merit. This means not awarding prizes and honors because of what the writer represents --- for example, weak or marginalized communities. This means not using of literature or literary prizes to support extra-literary goals: for example, feminism. (I speak as a feminist). This means not apportioning rewards to writers as a way of serially paying tribute to the diversity of national identities. (Thus, if all the three best writers in the world are all, say, Hungarian, then, ideally, the juries of literary prizes should not worry that Hungarians are receiving too many prizes.)

Three. That literature is a fundamentally cosmopolitan enterprise. The great writers are part of world literature. We should be reading across national and tribal boundaries: great literature should transport us. Writers are citizens of a world community, in which we all read and learn from one another. Considering each major literary achievement as, finally, part of world literature is to make us more open to the foreign, to what is not "us." The distinctive power of literature is to inspire in us a feeling of strangeness. Of wonder. Of disorientation. Of being somewhere else.

Four. That the variety of kinds of literary excellence, within literatures in any given language and across the spectrum of world literature, is a primary lesson in the reality and desirableness of a world which remains irreducibly plural, diverse, varied. Such a pluralistic world today depends upon the prevalence of secular values.

What are called standards can, of course, be phrased more vigorously (and perhaps more controversially) as antipathies, as refusals. So, to rephrase what I have just said:

One. Contempt for mercenary values.

Two. Aversion to making a principally instrumental use of writers --- for example, celebrating writers primarily as the representatives of communities felt to be marginalized, in order to express solidarity with those communities.

Three. Vigilance against cultural philistinism masking as the application of democratic values in matters of literature. Permanent suspicion of nationalist affirmations and tribal loyalties.

Four. Eternal antagonism toward the forces of repression, censorship.

These are indeed utopian values. They have not been realized. But literature, literature as a whole, continues to embody them. Writers continue to be goaded by them. Readers, real readers, continue to be nourished by them. And they are what every important literary prize also celebrates.

On behalf of these values, I am honored to have been singled out by the Prince of Asturias Foundation as a recipient of this distinguished prize.

Susan Sontag ©