Sir, Madam, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In receiving the distinction with which your free Academy has so generously honoured me,
my gratitude has been profound, particularly when I consider the extent to which this recompense
has surpassed my personal merits. Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants
to be recognized. So do I. But I have not been able to learn of your decision without
comparing its repercussions to what I really am. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts
and with his work still in progress, accustomed to living in the solitude of work or in the
retreats of friendship: how would he not feel a kind of panic at hearing the decree that
transports him all of a sudden, alone and reduced to himself, to the centre of a glaring
light? And with what feelings could he accept this honour at a time when other writers in
Europe, among them the very greatest, are condemned to silence, and even at a time when
the country of his birth is going through unending misery?
I felt that shock and inner turmoil. In order to regain peace I have had, in short, to come
to terms with a too generous fortune. And since I cannot live up to it by merely resting
on my achievement, I have found nothing to support me but what has supported me through
all my life, even in the most contrary circumstances: the idea that I have of my art and of the
role of the writer. Let me only tell you, in a spirit of gratitude and friendship, as
simply as I can, what this idea is.
For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything.
If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men,
and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. To me, art is not a solitary rejoicing.
It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of
common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most
humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because
he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his
difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the
others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear
himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand
rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps
side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge
but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.
By the same token, the writer's role is not free from difficult duties. By definition
he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service
of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art.
Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will free him from his isolation, even
and particularly if he falls into step with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner,
abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer
out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages
not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by the means of art.
None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity
or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself,
the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition
that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness
of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to
unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and
servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be,
the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to
maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.
For more than twenty years of an insane history, hopelessly lost like all the men of my generation
in the convulsions of time, I have been supported by one thing: by the hidden feeling that to
write today was an honour because this activity was a commitment - and a commitment not only
to write. Specifically, in view of my powers and my state of being, it was a commitment
to bear, together with all those who were living through the same history, the misery
and the hope we shared. These men, who were born at the beginning of the First World War,
who were twenty when Hitler came to power and the first revolutionary trials were beginning,
who were then confronted as a completion of their education with the Spanish Civil War,
the Second World War, the world of concentration camps, a Europe of torture and prisons -
these men must today rear their sons and create their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction.
Nobody, I think, can ask them to be optimists. And I even think
that we should understand - without ceasing to fight it - the error of those who in an excess of despair
have asserted their right to dishonour and have rushed into the nihilism of the era.
But the fact remains that most of us, in my country and in Europe, have refused this nihilism
and have engaged upon a quest for legitimacy. They have had to forge for themselves an art
of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly
against the instinct of death at work in our history.
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will
not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world
from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions,
technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can today destroy
all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become
the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation has had, both within and without,
re-establish, starting from its own negations, a little of that which constitutes the dignity
of life and death. In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors
run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane
race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and
culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this
generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising
everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary,
knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged,
particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval,
it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.
At the same time, after having outlined the nobility of the writer's craft, I should have
put him in his proper place. He has no other claims but those which he shares with his
comrades in arms: vulnerable but obstinate, unjust but impassioned for justice, doing
his work without shame or pride in view of everybody, not ceasing to be divided between
sorrow and beauty, and devoted finally to drawing from his double existence the creations
that he obstinately tries to erect in the destructive movement of history. Who,
after all this, can expect from him complete solutions and high morals? Truth is mysterious, elusive,
always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating.
We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our
failings on so long a road. What writer would from now on in good conscience dare set himself up
as a preacher of virtue? For myself, I must state once more that I am not of this kind.
I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom
in which I grew up. But although this nostalgia explains many of my errors and my faults,
it has doubtless helped me toward a better understanding of my craft. It is helping me still
to support unquestioningly all those silent men who sustain the life made for them in the world
only through memory of the return of brief and free happiness.
Thus reduced to what I really am, to my limits and debts as well as to my difficult creed,
I feel freer, in concluding, to comment upon the extent and the generosity of the honour
you have just bestowed upon me, freer also to tell you that I would receive it as an
homage rendered to all those who, sharing in the same fight, have not received any privilege,
but have on the contrary known misery and persecution. It remains for me to thank you
from the bottom of my heart and to make before you publicly, as a personal sign of my gratitude,
the same and ancient promise of faithfulness which every true artist repeats to himself in silence every day.