Doris Lessing on reading and writing in the Internet age

Last Saturday Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was read by her UK publisher Nicholas Pearson at the award ceremony in Stockholm. Lessing, 88, could not attend the ceremony because of a bad back, according to the BBC. Her acceptance speech wanders from issue to issue without ever really taking a position, which has not hindered some of the main stream media in interpreting her words as “Internet makes people stoopid,” which is a lovely self-referential twist. You have to admire an author who can cause such an effect with a mere speech.

In the speech, Lessing looks for a short while at the changes the “revolution” of the Internet has wrought.

[…] I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. “You know how it is,” one of the teachers says. “A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.”

[…]

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing […].

But the bulk of her speech is about the importance of stories and story telling to human beings. She particularly sees hope that the cultures of underdeveloped countries are still about knowledge rather than discourse (my choice of words). I fear the OLPC project’s disruptive technology may change the outcomes of her hopes in ways that few can foresee.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is—we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.

The entire speech can be found here in four languages, and as a video recording of the reading.

See also: Robert Nagle’s introduction to Lessing.