Olga Tokarczuk as a writer on history

By chance I found this insight into history in Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel Lecture: “In a word, we lack new ways of telling the story of the world.”

The common sense of confusion about the world crisis we are living through, which historian Adam Tooze labelled the “polycrisis”, springs from this lack. We sense the story of the world that we have inherited makes no sense anymore. Our heads spin while we watch events careen out of control everywhere all at once.

The chain of history is broken. We search for new ways of telling the story of the world. And the histories of the world.

That is why you can learn from Olga Tokarczuk how to make sense of a puzzling world with history, and literature. Even though Tokarczuk is not a historian. She holds no chair at a university. She speaks in metaphors and tales, not in dry as dust theories and methods. Yet she writes as profoundly on history as any tenured professor. She is not only a novelist; she is a great writer of history.

History is a genre of literature. It tells the story of the world in stories. Narrative is, so the cognitive scientists say, our human minds’ unique talent to hold tenderly the unbearable complexity of the world.

History, moreover, can be many genres, and cross the boundaries of the assumed forms of the scholarly paper, the historical novel, the documented narrative, the sociological fiction, myths of time, the essay, the film, the poem, or the political tract. Olga Tokarczuk crosses all these boundaries of the genres of history in her writing, most masterfully in The Books of Jacob.

In this way, Tokarczuk is a model for me as a writer on history. I call myself now and then an historian; but can I really claim to be a “professional historian”? I served my apprenticeship, and got my certificate, my PhD. But I do not belong to the academic guilds. I write history self-consciously as a form of literature. I push my writing on history across the borders of scholarly and journalistic genres into the strange forms of the poetic essay, inspired by an odd collection of masters: Walter Benjamin, Inga Clendinnen, Isaiah Berlin, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the poet Wislawa Szymborska, and the novelist, Olga Tokarczuk.

While I read Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel Lecture, “The Tender Narrator,” for my audio mini recently, I was struck by the connection between Olga Tokarczuk’s observation— “we lack new ways of telling the story of the world” —and what I aim to do on the Burning Archive. I am searching for those new ways of telling the story of the world so we can all live well and at peace together on this one fragile Earth.

Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel lecture is a beautiful reflection on story, history, the sense that something is wrong with the world, the confusion about what is wrong, and what we all can do about it. She wrote:

The flood of stupidity, cruelty, hate speech and images of violence are desperately counterbalanced by all sorts of “good news,” but it hasn’t the capacity to rein in the painful impression, which I find hard to verbalize, that there is something wrong with the world. Nowadays this feeling, once the sole preserve of neurotic poets, is like an epidemic of lack of definition, a form of anxiety oozing from all directions.

—Olga Tokarczuk, “The Tender Narrator”, 2018 Nobel Lecture

Literature and history, as a form of literature, are antidotes to this oozing anxiety, that others might call a world crisis and Adam Tooze dubbed the polycrisis.

Paid subscribers can listen to my reading of “The Tender Narrator” at the link below.

In the remainder of this post, I offer for paid subscribers some additional glimpses into how Olga Tokarczuk’s writing on history offers us an antidote to that oozing anxiety, especially in her genre-crossing masterpiece, The Books of Jacob.