The Conscience of Words
By SUSAN SONTAG
Los Angeles Times Sunday June 10, 2001
(L.A.Times Editor's Note: Since 1963, the Jerusalem Prize has been awarded at the biennial Jerusalem International Book Fair to a writer whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society. Past recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Simone de Beauvoir, Zbigniew Herbert, Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, and Don DeLillo. This year the award was given to Susan Sontag, who delivered the following remarks on May 9 in Jerusalem. )
We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. There can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.
What do we mean, for example, by the word "peace"? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean a forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor?
It seems to me that what most people mean by "peace" is victory. The victory of their side. That's what "peace" means to them, while to the others peace means defeat.
If the idea takes hold that peace, while in principle to be desired, entails an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate claims, then the most plausible course will be the practice of war by less than total means. Calls for peace will be felt to be, if not fraudulent, then certainly premature. Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. Peace has to be re-settled. Re-colonized ....
And what do we mean by "honor"?
Honor as an exacting standard of private conduct seems to belong to some faraway time. But the custom of conferring honors--to flatter ourselves and one another--continues unabated.
To confer an honor is to affirm a standard believed to be held in common. To accept an honor is to believe, for a moment, that one has deserved it. (The most one should say, in all decency, is that one is not unworthy of it.) To refuse an honor offered seems boorish, unconvivial, pretentious.
A prize accumulates honor--and the ability to confer honor--by the choice it has made in previous years of whom to honor.
By this standard, consider the polemically named Jerusalem Prize, which, in its relatively short history, has been awarded to some of the best writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Though by any obvious criteria a literary prize, it is not called The Jerusalem Prize for Literature but The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.
Have all the writers who have won the prize really championed the Freedom of the Individual in Society? Is that what they--now I must say "we"--have in common?
I think not.
Not only do they represent a large spectrum of political opinion. Some of them have barely touched the Big Words: freedom, individual, society ....
But it isn't what a writer says that matters, it's what a writer is.
Writers--by which I mean members of the community of literature--are emblems of the persistence (and the necessity) of individual vision.
I prefer to use "individual" as an adjective, rather than as a noun.
The unceasing propaganda in our time for "the individual" seems to me deeply suspect, as "individuality" itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising "individuality" and "freedom"--which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.
I don't believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.
As a writer, a maker of literature, I am both a narrator and a ruminator. Ideas move me. But novels are made not of ideas but of forms. Forms of language. Forms of expressiveness. I don't have a story in my head until I have the form. (As Vladimir Nabokov said: "The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.") And--implicitly or tacitly--novels are made out of the writer's sense of what literature is or can be.
Every writer's work, every literary performance is, or amounts to, an account of literature itself. The defense of literature has become one of the writer's main subjects. But, as Oscar Wilde observed, "A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true." Paraphrasing Wilde, I would say: A truth about literature is that whose opposite is also true.
Thus literature--and I speak prescriptively, not just descriptively--is self-consciousness, doubt, scruple, fastidiousness. It is also--again, prescriptively as well as descriptively--song, spontaneity, celebration, bliss.
Ideas about literature--unlike ideas about, say, love--almost never arise except in response to other people's ideas. They are reactive ideas.
I say this because it's my impression that you--or most people--are saying that.
Thereby I want to make room for a larger passion or different practice. Ideas give permission--and I want to give permission to a different feeling or practice.
I say this when you're saying that, not just because writers are, sometimes, professional adversaries. Not just to redress the inevitable imbalance or one-sidedness of any practice which has the character of an institution--and literature is an institution--but because literature is a practice which is rooted in inherently contradictory aspirations.
My view is that any one account of literature is untrue--that is, reductive; merely polemical. While to speak truthfully about literature is necessarily to speak in paradoxes.
Thus: Each work of literature that matters, that deserves the name of literature, incarnates an ideal of singularity, of the singular voice. But literature, which is an accumulation, incarnates an ideal of plurality, of multiplicity, of promiscuity.
Every notion of literature we can think of--literature as social engagement, literature as the pursuit of private spiritual intensities; national literature, world literature--is, or can become, a form of spiritual complacency, or vanity, or self-congratulation.
Literature is a system--a plural system--of standards, ambitions, loyalties. Part of the ethical function of literature is the lesson of the value of diversity.
Of course, literature must operate within boundaries. (Like all human activities. The only boundless activity is being dead.) The problem is that the boundaries most people want to draw would choke off the freedom of literature to be what it can be, in all its inventiveness and capacity to be agitated.
We live in a culture committed to unifying greeds, and one of the world's vast and glorious multiplicity of languages--the one in which I speak and write--is now the dominant language. English has come to play, on a world scale and for vastly larger populations within the world's countries, a role similar to that played in mediaeval Europe by Latin.
But as we live in an increasingly global, transnational culture, we are also mired in increasingly fractionalized claims by real or newly self-constituted tribes.
The old humanistic ideas--of the republic of letters, of world literature--are under attack everywhere. They seem, to some, naive, as well as tainted by their origin in the great European ideal--some would say Eurocentric ideal--of universal values.
The notions of "liberty" and of "rights" have undergone a striking degradation in recent years. In many communities, group rights are given greater weight than individual rights.
In this respect, what makers of literature do can, implicitly, bolster the credibility of free expression, and of individual rights. Even when makers of literature have consecrated their work to the service of the tribes or communities to which they belong, their accomplishment as writers depends on transcending this aim.
The qualities that make a given writer valuable or admirable can all be located within the singularity of the writer's voice.
But this singularity, which is cultivated in private and is the result of a long apprenticeship in reflection and in solitude, is constantly being tested by the social role writers feel called on to play.
I do not question the right of the writer to engage in debate on public matters, to make common cause and practice solidarity with like-minded others.
Nor is my point that such activity takes the writer far from the reclusive, eccentric inner place where literature is made. So do almost all the other activities that make up having a life.
But it's one thing to volunteer, stirred by the imperatives of conscience or of interest, to engage in public debate and public action. It's another to produce opinions--moralistic sound-bites--on demand.
Not: Been there, done that. But: For this, against that.
But a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine. As a black poet in my country put it, when reproached by some fellow African-Americans for not writing poems about the indignities of racism, "A writer is not a jukebox."
The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.
It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.
I am haunted by that "something else."
I am haunted by the conflict of rights and of values I cherish. For instance that--sometimes--telling the truth does not further justice. That--sometimes--the furthering of justice may entail suppressing a good part of the truth.
Many of the twentieth century's most notable writers, in their activity as public voices, were accomplices in the suppression of truth to further what they understood to be (what were, in many cases) just causes.
My own view is, if I have to choose between truth and justice--of course, I don't want to choose--I choose truth.
Of course, I believe in righteous action. But is it the writer who acts?
These are three different things: speaking, what I am doing now; writing, what gives me whatever claim I have to this incomparable prize, and being, being a person who believes in active solidarity with others.
As Roland Barthes once observed: " ... who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is."
And of course I have opinions, political opinions, some of them formed on the basis of reading and discussing, and reflecting, but not from first-hand experience. Let me share with you two opinions of mine--quite predictable opinions, in the light of public positions I've taken on matters about which I have some direct knowledge.
I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. I mean the use of disproportionate firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes and destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and their right to employment, schooling, medical services, untrammeled access to neighboring towns and communities ... all as a punishment for hostile military activity which may or may not even be in the vicinity of these civilians.
I also believe that there can be no peace here until the planting of Israeli communities in the Territories is halted, and is followed--sooner rather than later--by the dismantling of these settlements and the withdrawal of the military units amassed there to guard them.
I wager that these two opinions of mine are shared by many people here in this hall. I suspect that--to use an old American expression--I'm preaching to the choir.
But do I hold these opinions as a writer? Or do I not hold them as a person of conscience and then use my position as a writer to add my voice to others saying the same thing? The influence a writer can exert is purely adventitious. It is, now, an aspect of the culture of celebrity.
There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive first-hand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion-mongering.
I say this, to return to the beginning, as a matter of honor. The honor of literature. The project of having an individual voice. Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn't just express themselves differently than does the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.
The problem with opinions is that one is stuck with them. And whenever writers are functioning as writers they always see ... more.
Whatever there is, there is always more. Whatever is happening, something else is also going on.
If literature itself, this great enterprise that has been conducted (within our purview) for nearly three millennia, embodies a wisdom--and I think it does, and is the root of the importance we give to literature--it is by demonstrating the multiple nature of our private and our communal destinies. It will remind us that there can be contradictions, sometimes irreducible conflicts, among the values we most cherish. (This is what is meant by "tragedy.") It will remind us of the "also" and "the something else."
The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. "Nothing is my last word about anything," said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions--whenever asked--cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to perceive complexity.
Information will never replace illumination. But something that sounds like, except that it's better than, information--I mean the condition of being informed; I mean concrete, specific, detailed, historically dense, first-hand knowledge--is the indispensable prerequisite for a writer to express opinions in public.
Let the others, the celebrities and the politicians, talk down to us; lie. If being both a writer and a public voice could stand for anything better, it would be that writers would consider the formulation of opinions and judgments to be a difficult responsibility.
Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change.
As Cardinal Newman said, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."
And what do I mean by the word "perfection"? That I shall not try to explain but only say, Perfection makes me laugh. Not cynically, I hasten to add. With joy.
I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I accept it as an honor to all those committed to the enterprise of literature. I accept it in homage to all the writers and readers in Israel and in Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truths. I accept the prize in the name of peace and the reconciliation of injured and fearful communities. Necessary peace. Necessary concessions and new arrangements. Necessary abatement of stereotypes. Necessary persistence of dialogue. I accept the prize--this international prize, sponsored by an international book fair--as an event that honors, above all, the international republic of letters.
By SUSAN SONTAG
Los Angeles Times Sunday June 10, 2001
We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. There can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.
What do we mean, for example, by the word "peace"? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean a forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor?
It seems to me that what most people mean by "peace" is victory. The victory of their side. That's what "peace" means to them, while to the others peace means defeat.
If the idea takes hold that peace, while in principle to be desired, entails an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate claims, then the most plausible course will be the practice of war by less than total means. Calls for peace will be felt to be, if not fraudulent, then certainly premature. Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. Peace has to be re-settled. Re-colonized ....
And what do we mean by "honor"?
Honor as an exacting standard of private conduct seems to belong to some faraway time. But the custom of conferring honors--to flatter ourselves and one another--continues unabated.
To confer an honor is to affirm a standard believed to be held in common. To accept an honor is to believe, for a moment, that one has deserved it. (The most one should say, in all decency, is that one is not unworthy of it.) To refuse an honor offered seems boorish, unconvivial, pretentious.
A prize accumulates honor--and the ability to confer honor--by the choice it has made in previous years of whom to honor.
By this standard, consider the polemically named Jerusalem Prize, which, in its relatively short history, has been awarded to some of the best writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Though by any obvious criteria a literary prize, it is not called The Jerusalem Prize for Literature but The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.
Have all the writers who have won the prize really championed the Freedom of the Individual in Society? Is that what they--now I must say "we"--have in common?
I think not.
Not only do they represent a large spectrum of political opinion. Some of them have barely touched the Big Words: freedom, individual, society ....
But it isn't what a writer says that matters, it's what a writer is.
Writers--by which I mean members of the community of literature--are emblems of the persistence (and the necessity) of individual vision.
I prefer to use "individual" as an adjective, rather than as a noun.
The unceasing propaganda in our time for "the individual" seems to me deeply suspect, as "individuality" itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising "individuality" and "freedom"--which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.
I don't believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.
As a writer, a maker of literature, I am both a narrator and a ruminator. Ideas move me. But novels are made not of ideas but of forms. Forms of language. Forms of expressiveness. I don't have a story in my head until I have the form. (As Vladimir Nabokov said: "The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.") And--implicitly or tacitly--novels are made out of the writer's sense of what literature is or can be.
Every writer's work, every literary performance is, or amounts to, an account of literature itself. The defense of literature has become one of the writer's main subjects. But, as Oscar Wilde observed, "A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true." Paraphrasing Wilde, I would say: A truth about literature is that whose opposite is also true.
Thus literature--and I speak prescriptively, not just descriptively--is self-consciousness, doubt, scruple, fastidiousness. It is also--again, prescriptively as well as descriptively--song, spontaneity, celebration, bliss.
Ideas about literature--unlike ideas about, say, love--almost never arise except in response to other people's ideas. They are reactive ideas.
I say this because it's my impression that you--or most people--are saying that.
Thereby I want to make room for a larger passion or different practice. Ideas give permission--and I want to give permission to a different feeling or practice.
I say this when you're saying that, not just because writers are, sometimes, professional adversaries. Not just to redress the inevitable imbalance or one-sidedness of any practice which has the character of an institution--and literature is an institution--but because literature is a practice which is rooted in inherently contradictory aspirations.
My view is that any one account of literature is untrue--that is, reductive; merely polemical. While to speak truthfully about literature is necessarily to speak in paradoxes.
Thus: Each work of literature that matters, that deserves the name of literature, incarnates an ideal of singularity, of the singular voice. But literature, which is an accumulation, incarnates an ideal of plurality, of multiplicity, of promiscuity.
Every notion of literature we can think of--literature as social engagement, literature as the pursuit of private spiritual intensities; national literature, world literature--is, or can become, a form of spiritual complacency, or vanity, or self-congratulation.
Literature is a system--a plural system--of standards, ambitions, loyalties. Part of the ethical function of literature is the lesson of the value of diversity.
Of course, literature must operate within boundaries. (Like all human activities. The only boundless activity is being dead.) The problem is that the boundaries most people want to draw would choke off the freedom of literature to be what it can be, in all its inventiveness and capacity to be agitated.
We live in a culture committed to unifying greeds, and one of the world's vast and glorious multiplicity of languages--the one in which I speak and write--is now the dominant language. English has come to play, on a world scale and for vastly larger populations within the world's countries, a role similar to that played in mediaeval Europe by Latin.
But as we live in an increasingly global, transnational culture, we are also mired in increasingly fractionalized claims by real or newly self-constituted tribes.
The old humanistic ideas--of the republic of letters, of world literature--are under attack everywhere. They seem, to some, naive, as well as tainted by their origin in the great European ideal--some would say Eurocentric ideal--of universal values.
The notions of "liberty" and of "rights" have undergone a striking degradation in recent years. In many communities, group rights are given greater weight than individual rights.
In this respect, what makers of literature do can, implicitly, bolster the credibility of free expression, and of individual rights. Even when makers of literature have consecrated their work to the service of the tribes or communities to which they belong, their accomplishment as writers depends on transcending this aim.
The qualities that make a given writer valuable or admirable can all be located within the singularity of the writer's voice.
But this singularity, which is cultivated in private and is the result of a long apprenticeship in reflection and in solitude, is constantly being tested by the social role writers feel called on to play.
I do not question the right of the writer to engage in debate on public matters, to make common cause and practice solidarity with like-minded others.
Nor is my point that such activity takes the writer far from the reclusive, eccentric inner place where literature is made. So do almost all the other activities that make up having a life.
But it's one thing to volunteer, stirred by the imperatives of conscience or of interest, to engage in public debate and public action. It's another to produce opinions--moralistic sound-bites--on demand.
Not: Been there, done that. But: For this, against that.
But a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine. As a black poet in my country put it, when reproached by some fellow African-Americans for not writing poems about the indignities of racism, "A writer is not a jukebox."
The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.
It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.
I am haunted by that "something else."
I am haunted by the conflict of rights and of values I cherish. For instance that--sometimes--telling the truth does not further justice. That--sometimes--the furthering of justice may entail suppressing a good part of the truth.
Many of the twentieth century's most notable writers, in their activity as public voices, were accomplices in the suppression of truth to further what they understood to be (what were, in many cases) just causes.
My own view is, if I have to choose between truth and justice--of course, I don't want to choose--I choose truth.
Of course, I believe in righteous action. But is it the writer who acts?
These are three different things: speaking, what I am doing now; writing, what gives me whatever claim I have to this incomparable prize, and being, being a person who believes in active solidarity with others.
As Roland Barthes once observed: " ... who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is."
And of course I have opinions, political opinions, some of them formed on the basis of reading and discussing, and reflecting, but not from first-hand experience. Let me share with you two opinions of mine--quite predictable opinions, in the light of public positions I've taken on matters about which I have some direct knowledge.
I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. I mean the use of disproportionate firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes and destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and their right to employment, schooling, medical services, untrammeled access to neighboring towns and communities ... all as a punishment for hostile military activity which may or may not even be in the vicinity of these civilians.
I also believe that there can be no peace here until the planting of Israeli communities in the Territories is halted, and is followed--sooner rather than later--by the dismantling of these settlements and the withdrawal of the military units amassed there to guard them.
I wager that these two opinions of mine are shared by many people here in this hall. I suspect that--to use an old American expression--I'm preaching to the choir.
But do I hold these opinions as a writer? Or do I not hold them as a person of conscience and then use my position as a writer to add my voice to others saying the same thing? The influence a writer can exert is purely adventitious. It is, now, an aspect of the culture of celebrity.
There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive first-hand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion-mongering.
I say this, to return to the beginning, as a matter of honor. The honor of literature. The project of having an individual voice. Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn't just express themselves differently than does the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.
The problem with opinions is that one is stuck with them. And whenever writers are functioning as writers they always see ... more.
Whatever there is, there is always more. Whatever is happening, something else is also going on.
If literature itself, this great enterprise that has been conducted (within our purview) for nearly three millennia, embodies a wisdom--and I think it does, and is the root of the importance we give to literature--it is by demonstrating the multiple nature of our private and our communal destinies. It will remind us that there can be contradictions, sometimes irreducible conflicts, among the values we most cherish. (This is what is meant by "tragedy.") It will remind us of the "also" and "the something else."
The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. "Nothing is my last word about anything," said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions--whenever asked--cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to perceive complexity.
Information will never replace illumination. But something that sounds like, except that it's better than, information--I mean the condition of being informed; I mean concrete, specific, detailed, historically dense, first-hand knowledge--is the indispensable prerequisite for a writer to express opinions in public.
Let the others, the celebrities and the politicians, talk down to us; lie. If being both a writer and a public voice could stand for anything better, it would be that writers would consider the formulation of opinions and judgments to be a difficult responsibility.
Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change.
As Cardinal Newman said, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."
And what do I mean by the word "perfection"? That I shall not try to explain but only say, Perfection makes me laugh. Not cynically, I hasten to add. With joy.
I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I accept it as an honor to all those committed to the enterprise of literature. I accept it in homage to all the writers and readers in Israel and in Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truths. I accept the prize in the name of peace and the reconciliation of injured and fearful communities. Necessary peace. Necessary concessions and new arrangements. Necessary abatement of stereotypes. Necessary persistence of dialogue. I accept the prize--this international prize, sponsored by an international book fair--as an event that honors, above all, the international republic of letters.
蘇珊·桑塔格：文字的良心
( 黃燦然譯 )
文學是一座細微差別和相反意見的屋子，而不是簡化的聲音的屋子。作家的職責是使人們不輕易聽信於精神搶掠者。作家的職責是讓我們看到世界本來的樣子。
作家的職責是描繪各種現實：各種惡臭的現實、各種狂喜的現實。文學提供的智慧之本質（文學成就之多元性）乃是幫助我們明白無論發生什麼事情，都永遠有一些別的事情在繼續著。
我們為文字苦惱，我們這些作家。文字有所表。文字有所指。文字是箭。插在現實的厚皮上的箭。文字愈有預示力，愈普遍，就愈是又像一個個房間或一條條隧道。它們可以擴張，或塌陷。它們可以變得充滿霉味。它們會時常提醒我們其他房間，我們更願意住或以為我們已經在住的其他房間。它們可能是一些我們喪失居住的藝術或居住的智慧的空間。最終，那些精神意圖的容積，會由於我們再也不知道如何去居住，而被棄置、用木板釘上、封死。
例如，我們所說的“和平”是指什麼？是指沒有爭鬥嗎？是指忘記嗎?是指寬恕嗎?或是指無比的倦意、疲勞、徹底把積怨宣洩出來？
我覺得，大多數人所說的“和平”，似乎是指勝利。他們那邊的勝利。對他們來說，這就是“和平”； 而對其他人來說，和平則是指失敗。
原則上，和平是大家所渴望的，但是，如果大家都接受一種看法，認為和平意味著必須令人難以接受地放棄合法權利，那麼最貌似有理的做法將是訴諸少於全部手段的戰爭。這樣一來，呼籲和平就會讓人覺得如果不是騙人的，也肯定是過早的。和平變成一個人們再也不知道該如何居住的空間。和平必須再移居。再開拓殖民地......
而我們所說的“榮譽”又是指什麼呢？
榮譽作為檢驗個人行為的嚴厲標準，似乎已屬於某個遙遠的年代。但是授予榮譽的習慣一討好我們自己和討好彼此一卻繼續盛行。
授予某個榮譽，意味著確認某個被視為獲普遍認同的標準。接受一個榮譽意味著片刻相信這是一個人應得的。（一個人應說的最體面的話，是自己不敢受之有愧。）拒絕人家給予的榮譽，似乎是粗魯、孤僻和虛偽的。
通過歷年來選擇授予哪些人，一個獎會積累榮譽一以及積累授予榮譽的能力。
不妨根據這個標準，考慮一下其名字備受爭議的“耶路撒冷獎”，它在相對短的歷史中，曾授予二十世紀下半葉一些最好的作家。雖然根據任何明顯的標準，這個獎都是一個文學獎，但它卻不叫做“耶路撒冷文學獎”，而叫做“社會中的個人自由耶路撒冷獎”。
獲得這個獎的所有作家都曾真正致力於“社會中的個人自由”嗎？這就是他們──我現在必須說“我們”──的共同點嗎？
我不這樣想。
他們代表著一個覆蓋面很廣的政治意見的光譜，不僅如此，他們之中有些人幾乎未曾碰過這些“大字”：自由、個人、社會……
但是，一個作家說什麼並不重要，重要的是那個作家是什麼。
作家──我指的是文學界的成員──是堅守個人視域的象徵，也是個人視域的必要性的象徵。
我更願意把“個人”當成形容詞來使用，而不是名詞。
我們時代對“個人”的無休止的宣傳，在我看來似乎頗值得懷疑，因為“個性”本身已愈來愈變成自私的同義詞。一個資本主義社會讚揚“個性”和“自由”，是有其既得利益的。“個性”和“自由”可能只不過是意味著無限擴大自我的權利，以及逛商店、採購、花錢、消費、棄舊換新的自由。
我不相信在自我的培養中存在任何固有的價值。我還覺得，任何文化（就這個詞的規範意義而言）都有一個利他主義的標準，一個關心別人的標準。我倒是相信這樣一種固有的價值，也即擴大我們對一個人類生命可以是什麼的認識。如果文學作為一個計劃吸引了我（先是讀者，繼而是作家），那是因為它擴大我對別的自我、別的範圍、別的夢想、別的文字、別的關注領域的同情。
作為一個作家，一個文學的創造者，我既是敘述者又是反复思考者。各種理念牽動我。但長篇小說不是由理念而是由形式構成的。語言的各種形式。表述的各種形式。我未有形式之前，腦中是沒有故事的。（誠如納博科夫所言：“事物的樣式先於事物。”）還有──不言明或默認──長篇小說是由作家對文學是什麼或可以是什麼的認識構成的。
每位作家的作品，每種文學行為，都是或等於是對文學本身的闡述。捍衛文學已成為作家的主要目標之一。但是，誠如王爾德所說，“藝術的一個真理是，其對立面也是真理。”我想套用王爾德這句話說：文學的真理是，其反面也是真理。
因此，文學──我是用約定俗成的說法，而不單是描述性的說法──是自覺、懷疑、顧忌、挑剔。它還是一再次，既是約定俗成的說法，又是描述性的說法──歌唱、自發、頌揚、極樂。
有關文學的各種理念──與有關譬如愛的理念不同──幾乎總是在對別人的理念作出反應時才提出來。它們是反應性的理念。
我說這，是因為我覺得你們──或大多數人──說那。
因此我想讓出一個空間，給一種更大的熱情或不同的實踐。理念發出許可──而我想許可一種不同的感情或實踐。
我說這而你們說那，不僅因為作家們有時是專業抬槓者。不僅要糾正難以避免的不平衡或一邊倒或任何具有製度性質的實踐──文學是一種制度──還因為文學是這樣一種實踐，它根植於各種固有地互相矛盾的願望。
我的觀點是，對文學作出任何單一的闡釋，都是不真實的──也即簡化的；只不過愛爭辯罷了。要真實地談文學，就必須看似矛盾地談。
因此：每一部有意義的文學作品，配得上文學這個名字的文學作品，都體現一種獨一無二的理想，要有獨一無二的聲音。但文學是一種積累，它體現一種多元性、多樣性、混雜性的理想。
我們可以想到的每一個文學概念──作為社會參與的文學，作為追求私人精神強度的文學，民族文學，世界文學──都是，或有可能變成，一種精神自滿或虛榮或自我恭喜的形式。
文學是一個由各種標準、各種抱負、各種忠誠構成的系統──一個多元系統。文學的道德功能之一，是使人懂得多樣性的價值。
當然，文學必須在一些界限內運作。（就像所有人類活動。唯一沒有界限的活動是死亡。）問題是，大多數人想劃分的界限，會窒息文學的自由：成為它可以成為的東西的自由，也即它的創新性和它那令人激動不安的能力。
我們生活在一種致力於使貪婪一致化的文化中，而在世界廣闊而燦爛的繁複多樣的語言中，我講和寫的語言現已成為主導語言。在世界範圍內，以及在世界眾多國家數量龐大得多的人口中，英語扮演了拉丁語在中世紀歐洲所扮演的角色。
但是，隨著我們生活在一個日益全球化、跨國界的文化中，我們也陷於真正的群體或剛剛自命的群體日益分化的要求中。那些古老的人文理念──文學共和國、世界文學──正到處受攻擊。對某些人來說，它們似乎太天真了，還受到它們的源頭的玷污。那源頭就是歐洲那個關於普遍價值的偉大理想──某些人會說是歐洲中心論的理想。
近年來，“自由”和“權利”的概念已遭到觸目驚心的降級。在很多社會中，集團權利獲得了比個人權利更大的重量。
在這方面，文學的創造者所做的，可以無形中提高言論自由和個人權利的可信性。即使當文學的創造者把他們的作品用於服務他們所屬的群體或社會，他們作為作家所取得的成就也有賴於超越這個目標。
使某一作家變得有價值或令人讚賞的那些品質，都可以在該作家獨一無二的聲音中找到。
但這種獨一無二是私自培養的，又是在長期反省和孤獨中訓練出來的，因此它會不斷受到作家被感召去扮演的社會角色的考驗。
我不質疑作家參與公共問題辯論、與其他志趣相投者追求共同目標和團結一致的權利。
我也不覺得這種活動會使作家遠離產生文學的那個隱遁、怪癖的內在場所。同樣地，幾乎所有構成過豐盛人生的其他活動，也都無可非議。
但受良心或興趣的必要性驅使，自願去參與公共辯論和公共行動是一回事，按需求製造意見──被截取片言只語播放出來的道德說教──則是另一回事。
不是：在那兒，做那個。而是：支持這，反對那。
但作家不應成為生產意見的機器。誠如我國一位黑人詩人被其他美國黑人責備其詩作不抨擊可恥的種族主義時所說的：“作家不是投幣式自動唱機。”
作家的首要職責不是發表意見，而是講出真相……以及拒絕成為謊言和假話的同謀。文學是一座細微差別和相反意見的屋子，而不是簡化的聲音的屋子。作家的職責是使人們不輕易聽信於精神搶掠者。作家的職責是讓我們看到世界本來的樣子，充滿各種不同的要求、部分和經驗。
作家的職責是描繪各種現實：各種惡臭的現實、各種狂喜的現實。文學提供的智慧之本質（文學成就之多元性）乃是幫助我們明白無論發生什麼事情，都永遠有一些別的事情在繼續著。
我被“別的事情”纏擾著。
我被我所珍視的各種權利的衝突和價值的衝突纏擾著。例如──有時候──講出真相並不會促進正義。再如──有時候──促進正義可能意味著壓制頗大部分的真相。
有很多二十世紀最矚目的作家，在充當公共聲音的活動中，為了促進他們認為是（在很多情況下曾經是）正義的事業，而成為壓制真相的同謀。
我自己的觀點是，如果我必須在真相與正義之間作出選擇──當然，我不想選擇──我會選擇真相。
當然，我相信正當的行動。但那個行動的人是作家嗎？
有三樣不同的東西：講，也即我此刻正在做的；寫，也即使我獲得這個無與倫比的獎的東西，不管我是否有資格；以及做人，也即做一個相信要積極地與其他人團結一致的人。
就像羅蘭-巴特曾經說過：“…… 講的人不是寫的人，寫的人不是那個人本人。”
當然，我有各種意見，各種政治意見，其中一些是在閱讀和討論以及反省的基礎上形成的，而不是來自直接經驗。讓我跟你們分享我的兩個意見──鑑於我對某些我有一定直接見聞的問題所持的公開立場，因此我這兩個意見是頗可預料的。
我認為，集體責任這一信條，用作集體懲罰的邏輯依據，絕不是正當理由，無論是軍事上或道德上。我指的是對平民使用不成比例的武器；拆掉他們的房屋和摧毀他們的果園或果林；剝奪他們的生計和他們就業、讀書、醫療服務、不受妨礙地進入鄰近城鎮和社區的權利… …全都是為了懲罰也許甚至不是發生於這些平民周遭的敵意軍事活動。
我還認為，除非以色列人停止移居巴勒斯坦土地，並儘快而不是推遲拆掉這些移居點和撤走集結在那裡保護移居點的軍隊，否則這裡不會有和平。
我敢說，我這兩個意見獲得這個大廳裡很多人士的認同。我懷疑──用美國一句老話──我是在對教堂唱詩班佈道。①
①譯註：意為多此一舉。
但我是作為一位作家持這些意見嗎？或我不是作為一個有良心的人持這些意見，然後利用我的作家身份，為持相同意見的其他聲音添上我的聲音嗎？一位作家所能產生的影響純粹是附加的。它如今已成為名人文化的一個方面。
就一個人未直接廣泛體驗過的問題散播公開意見，是粗俗的。如果我講的是我所不知道或匆促知道的，那我只是在兜售意見罷了。
回到開頭，我這樣說是基於一種榮譽。文學的榮譽。這是一項擁有個人聲音的事業。嚴肅作家們，文學的創造者們，都不應只是表達不同於大眾傳媒的霸權論述的意見。他們應反對新聞廣播和脫口秀的集體噪音。
輿論的問題在於，你會緊跟著它。而每當作家行使作家的職責，他們永遠看到……更多。
無論有些什麼，總有更多的東西。無論發生什麼事情，總有別的事情在繼續發生。
如果文學本身，如果這項進行了（在我們視野範圍內）近三千年的偉大事業體現一種智慧──而我認為它是智慧的體現，也是我們賦予文學重要性的原因──那麼這種智慧就是通過揭示我們私人和集體命運的多元本質來體現的。它將提醒我們，在我們最珍視的各種價值之間，可能存在著互相矛盾，有時可能存在著無法克服的衝突。（這就是“悲劇”的意思。）它會提醒我們“還有”和“別的事情”。
文學的智慧與表達意見是頗為對立的。“我說的有關任何事情的話都不是我最後的話，”亨利·詹姆斯說。提供意見，即使是正確的意見──無論什麼時候被要求提供──都會使小說家和詩人的看家本領變得廉價，他們的看家本領是省思，是追求復雜性。
信息永遠不能取代啟迪。但是有些聽起來像是信息的東西（如果不是比信息更好的東西）卻是作家公開表達意見的不可或缺的前提，我指的是被告知消息的條件，我指的是具體、詳細、具有歷史厚度、親身經歷的知識。
讓其他人，那些名人和政客，居高臨下對我們說話吧；讓他們撒謊吧。如果既做一位作家又做一個公共的聲音可以代表任何更好東西的話，那就是作家會把確切表達意見和判斷視為一項困難的責任。
輿論的另一個問題。輿論是固步自封的經銷處。作家要做的，則應是使我們擺脫束縛，使我們振作。打開同情和新興趣的場所。提醒我們，我們也許，只是也許，希望使自己變得跟現在不同或比現在更好。提醒我們，我們可以改變。
就像紅衣主教紐曼所說的：“在一個更高的世界，那是不一樣的，但是在我們這下面，要活著就要改變，要完美就要經常改變。”
我所說的“完美”又是指的什麼?我不想嘗試解釋，只想說，完美讓我笑。我必須立即補充，這不是諷刺，而是懷著喜悅。
我很高興能夠獲得“耶路撒冷獎”。我接受它，是把它當成給予所有那些致力於文學事業的人士的榮譽。我接受它，是向以色列和巴勒斯坦所有爭取創造由獨一無二的聲音和繁複多樣的真相構成的文學的作家和讀者致敬。我接受這個獎，是以受傷和受驚的社群的和平與和解的名義。必要的和平。必要的讓步和新安排。必要地放棄陳規俗套。必要地堅持對話。我接受這個獎──由一個國際書展贊助的國際獎──是把它當成一項尤其是向國際文學共和國表示敬意的活動。
選自蘇珊·桑塔格《同時：隨筆與演說》，黃燦然譯，上海譯文出版社，2009
預讀/校對：許蕊、夏陽、陳濤、三帛、蔚宇
整理：陳濤
執編：鄭春嬌
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