from Rhian Sasseen, Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk: The Nobel laureate on her new novel

The Yale Review. January 2022.

RS In your Nobel lecture, you observe that the internet has fundamentally changed our approach to literature, noting that, “Fiction has lost the readers’ trust since lying has become a dangerous weapon of mass destruction, even if it is still a primitive tool.” How can the novel today respond to this breach of trust and navigate new anxieties concerning fact versus fiction?

OT Yes, I have observed a kind of flight from fiction, as if fiction were somehow frivolous, as if it were fairytales to be told to children. Men in particular despise fiction and often brag that they read only biographies. Often when men ask me to inscribe my books, they explain it’s for their wives. “Serious people” definitively prefer autobiographies or reportage in Poland, unaware that fiction is secretly governing these genres as well. Judgments about the superiority of nonfiction over fiction are generally pronounced by those who are not the closest readers and who haven’t fully realized the true power of fiction, naively conflating it with untruth, with fabrication. But the Truth of a good novel is of a completely different order. It belongs to that part of our experience that is closer to the reality of a myth or to some other “eternal story” (which is what I call narratives that don’t really have an author but are collectively reproduced in cultures and are ceaselessly adapting to new realities, somehow remaining immortal). Participation in a novel, in literature, has nothing to do with the work of a purely rational mind (insofar as this exists); there is no banal distinction between truth and untruth there. Is Anna Karenina real? What about Goethe’s Werther, on whose account hundreds of young people committed suicide?

I believe in a definition of truth that says that what is real is what exercises an influence. In this sense Gulliver’s adventures in strange lands are real, since for three centuries they have provoked ideas, inspired, and impacted people’s lives, becoming paintings and films. Sometimes this reality of literature frightens me: We remember Anna Karenina or Gulliver better than Jan Kowalski and Maria Nowak (or, in the English-speaking world, John and Jane Doe) of whom there is essentially nothing left. At most, some barely legible entry in the parish records.

In any case, we don’t read a novel for “truth.” In our quest for truth it is better to head for some reliable website, buy a trustworthy newspaper, read a scholarly article, attend a lecture at a university. The task of the novel is to convey human experience on many levels: sensual, metaphorical, psychological, historical, symbolic . . . The novel is an extremely sophisticated communication tool and another historical manifestation of the same—the human need to recount and understand the world. I don’t insist that the novel will always take the same form. The kind of novel we know—printed with the author’s name on the cover—is a product of our times and our Gutenberg technique. But stories told with tenderness will find some way of remaining.