托尼·莫里森诺贝尔奖致辞
Autumn 1998 (6.3)
Pages 46-50aisle
The Bird in Our Hand: Is It Living or Dead?
Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
1993
Toni Morrison, American writer and 1993 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (1997).
cradleMorrison's speech was delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 1993. An audio version of the speech read by the author herlf is available from Random Hou Audio (RH 348).
A hardbound print version is available from Alfred A. Knopf (ISBN 0-679-43437-2). For more information about the Nobel Prizes, visit the official Nobel Committee site in Sweden at &bel.>. A mirrored site is located in San Diego (USA) at
<nobel.sdsc.edu>. In commemoration of a Century of Nobel Prizes, an Electronic Nobel Muum will be inaugurated in 2001. Global, open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, this flexible, cost efficient Muum using the medium of the Internet will be just one more legacy of some of that oil that was produced at the turn of last century in Baku.
Once upon a time . . .
Members of the Swedish Academy, ladies and gentlemen, narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge. I hope you will understand then why I begin the remarks with the opening phra of what must be the oldest ntence in the world and the earliest one we remember
from childhood, "Once upon a time."
"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wi." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of veral cultures.
"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wi."
In the version I know, the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small hou outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question.
Among her people, she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amument.
One day the woman is visited by some young people who em bent on disprovin g her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her hou and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: he r blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says.
whittier"Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead."
She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?"
Still she does not answer. She is blind and cannot e her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not专业学位什么意思
know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.
The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.
Finally she speaks, and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know," she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."
Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive is your decision. Whatever the ca, it is your responsibility.
For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from asrtions of power to the instrument through which that power is exerci d.
Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird in the hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now, thinking as I have been about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choo to read the b ird asboner
"language" and the woman as a "practiced writer."
She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into rvice, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purpos. Being a writer, she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control.
But mostly as agency - as an act with conquences. So the question the children put to her, "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal, becau she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead, the custodians are responsible for the corp.
For her, a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like status language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpo other than to maintain the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.
However moribund, it is not without effect, for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppress human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheried to sanction ignorance and prerve privilege is a suit of armor, polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is; dumb, predatory, ntimental.emotiona
Exciting reverence in schoolchildren,
providing shelter for despots,
summoning fal memories of stability,
harmony among the public.
She is convinced that when language
dies, out of carelessness, disu,
indifference, and abnce of esteem, or
killed by fiat, not only she herlf but
all urs and makers are accountable for its demi.
The first oil tanker, the Zoroaster, which belonged to the Nobel Brothers (late 1800s). In her country, children have bitten their tongues off and u bullets instead to iterate the void of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or
expressing love.
But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants who evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts, for they speak only to tho who obey, or in order to force obedience.
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its urs to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties, replacing them with menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than reprent violence; it is violence; does more than reprent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
derve的用法Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities; hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and expod.
It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks it s fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and can not, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary or insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue, no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is, and will be, rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the ma
odllls, courthous, postoffices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death.
镀铬英文There will be more diplomatic languge to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is, and will be, more ductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing gee with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguid as rearch; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.
Underneath the eloquence, the glamour, the scholarly associations, however stirring or ductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all - if the bird is already dead.
She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and reprentations of dominance required - lethal discours of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.
The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collap was a misfortune. That it was the distraction or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Who heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradi was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.
She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poi is sometimes in displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it.
It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States [Abraham Lincoln] thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said [at his address at Gettsyburg in 1863],"The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words were exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties becau they refud to encapsulate the reality of 600,000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war.
中高级口译Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word," the preci "summing up," acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract," his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word or the chon silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned becau it is interrogative; discredited becau it is critical; erad becau alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a lf-ravaged tongue?
Word-work is sublime, she thinks, becau it is generative; it makes meaning that cures
