Who do you write for? That is the question.
Here's an article by Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most internationally celebrated novelist and this year's winner of the Nobel prize for literature.
Readers with interest in postcolonial literature would appreciate Pamuk's observations on the jagged link between nationalism and writing in a global era.
Who do you write for? That is the question (excerpts)
To understand the significance of this question, we must remember that the rise of the novel as an art form coincided with the emergence of the nation state.
Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy wrote for the emerging middle classes of their nations. Behind their narrative voices one can sense an observer troubled by the nation's state of health. By the end of the 19th century, to read and write novels was to join a national discussion that was closed to the outside.
In the age of global media, literary writers are no longer people who need address only the middle classes in their own countries, but people who can address - and address immediately - readers of "literary novels" all the world over.
Today's literary readers await a new book by Gabriel García Márquez, J.M. Coetzee or Paul Auster the same way their predecessors awaited the new Dickens novel - as the latest news. The world readership for literary novelists such as these is far larger than the readership their books reach in their countries of origin.
Writers write for their ideal reader, for their loved ones, for themselves or for no one. All this is true. But it is also true that today's literary writers also write for those who read them. From this we might infer that today's literary writers are gradually writing less for their own national majorities (who do not read them) than for the small minority of literary readers in the world who do.
So the needling questions, and the suspicions about these writers' true intentions, reflect a disquiet about this new cultural order that has come into being over the past 30 years.
The people who find it most disturbing are the representatives of non- Western nations and their cultural institutions. Crisis-ridden non-Western states that are anxious about national identity - and reluctant to face up to the black marks in their histories - are suspicious of creative novelists who view history and nationalism from a non-national perspective.
In their view, novelists who do not write for national audiences are exoticizing that country for foreign consumption and inventing problems that have no basis in reality.
There is a parallel suspicion in the West, where many readers believe that local literatures should remain local, pure and true to their national roots: Their secret fear is that a writer who addresses an international readership and draws from traditions outside his own culture will lose his authenticity.
It is because all writers have a deep desire to be authentic that even after all these years I still love to be asked for whom I write. But while a writer's authenticity does depend on his ability to open his heart to the world in which he lives, it depends just as much on his ability to understand his own changing position in that world.
Link to the original article: here
Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy wrote for the emerging middle classes of their nations. Behind their narrative voices one can sense an observer troubled by the nation's state of health. By the end of the 19th century, to read and write novels was to join a national discussion that was closed to the outside.
In the age of global media, literary writers are no longer people who need address only the middle classes in their own countries, but people who can address - and address immediately - readers of "literary novels" all the world over.
Today's literary readers await a new book by Gabriel García Márquez, J.M. Coetzee or Paul Auster the same way their predecessors awaited the new Dickens novel - as the latest news. The world readership for literary novelists such as these is far larger than the readership their books reach in their countries of origin.
Writers write for their ideal reader, for their loved ones, for themselves or for no one. All this is true. But it is also true that today's literary writers also write for those who read them. From this we might infer that today's literary writers are gradually writing less for their own national majorities (who do not read them) than for the small minority of literary readers in the world who do.
So the needling questions, and the suspicions about these writers' true intentions, reflect a disquiet about this new cultural order that has come into being over the past 30 years.
The people who find it most disturbing are the representatives of non- Western nations and their cultural institutions. Crisis-ridden non-Western states that are anxious about national identity - and reluctant to face up to the black marks in their histories - are suspicious of creative novelists who view history and nationalism from a non-national perspective.
In their view, novelists who do not write for national audiences are exoticizing that country for foreign consumption and inventing problems that have no basis in reality.
There is a parallel suspicion in the West, where many readers believe that local literatures should remain local, pure and true to their national roots: Their secret fear is that a writer who addresses an international readership and draws from traditions outside his own culture will lose his authenticity.
It is because all writers have a deep desire to be authentic that even after all these years I still love to be asked for whom I write. But while a writer's authenticity does depend on his ability to open his heart to the world in which he lives, it depends just as much on his ability to understand his own changing position in that world.
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