‘I fear literature is on the wrong side of the fence in the battle over truth’
KAZUO ISHIGURO has admitted his confidence in the power of literature has “gone slightly shaky” because of the events of the past year and that he now doubts the argument he made in his Nobel prize speech in 2017.
“Are we on the wrong side of the fence in this battle of how you present the truth?” the author asked at an event last night.
Ishiguro, who lives in London, won the Nobel prize for literature in 2017 and gave a speech saying fiction was important because it has emotional truth. “I said it as I received my Nobel prize and I didn’t doubt that all these people would think ‘oh yes’,” he told a Guardian Live event, but said now just four years later he sees a parallel with Trump supporters. “I make people feel things and if I’m successful they come away with a conviction that there’s something authentic and true in there. Is that kind of like people who emotionally feel that Donald Trump won the election?”
He explained there has recently been a “head-on collision” between a scientific approach to truth and an emotional one, which had led to many Americans believing Donald Trump had the presidential election stolen from him. The idea that “it’s the emotion that matters and if you want to assert that your emotion says this then that can be the truth... makes me very uncomfortable”, he said.
Ishiguro now wonders “why give a Nobel prize to someone who’s just saying ‘I feel this, this is the emotional truth,’ alongside all these scientists?”