Patrick Modiano accepts Nobel prize, confident of literatures future

Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel prize for literature this autumn, has stated his conviction that
tomorrows novelists will safeguard the succession [of literature] just as every generation has done since
Homer.
Speaking as he accepted the 8m kroner (710,000) award, the French novelist appeared at odds with
writers such as Will Self and Tim Parks who earlier this year predicted the end of the literary novel, Parks
blaming the state of constant distraction we live in.
Modiano, whose prize was awarded for his evocations of the past, for the art of memory with which he
has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the [Nazi] occupation,
did say in his Nobel lecture that unfortunately I do not think that the remembrance of things past can be
done any longer with Marcel Prousts power and candidness.
This is because, he believes, the society [Proust] was describing was still stable, a 19th-century society,
and Prousts memory causes the past to reappear in all its detail, like a tableau vivant.
Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle
against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can
only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human
destinies, said Modiano, who spoke in French, with the lecture translated by James Hardiker. Yet it has
to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded
words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.
Modiano expressed to his audience a certain nostalgia for the world of the 19th-century novelists such as
Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, saying that in those days, time passed more slowly than
today, and this slowness suited the work of the novelist because it allowed him to marshal his energy and
his attention.
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Time has speeded up since then and moves forward in fits and starts, he said, explaining the difference
between the towering literary edifices of the past, with their cathedral-like architectures, and the
disjointed and fragmented works of today.
Modiano feels that his own generation of writers is a transitional one, and he spoke of his curiosity
about how future generations, born with the internet, mobile phones, emails and tweets, will express
through literature this world in which everyone is permanently connected and where social networks
are eating into that part of intimacy and secrecy that was still our own domain until quite recently the
secrecy that gave depth to individuals and could become a major theme in a novel.
But unlike Parks and Self, who wrote in May of how the literary novel as an artwork and a narrative
artform central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes, Modiano said that he will remain
optimistic about the future of literature.