In an event moderator Ted Koppel said was quintessentially American because it was "planned within an inch of its life," eight Nobel laureates in literature gathered in Atlanta for discussions that covered subjects that seemed anything but planned.
Indeed, if there was a theme to the two days of discussions this past week, it revolved around the virtues of uncertainty and the unpredictable, which many of these noted writers extolled, as they did the power of myth in both life and art."Articulation is about precision, and once you get precise you are uncertain," said the ever-enigmatic and epigrammatic Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-born poet who now lives in the United States and was this country's poet laureate in 1991.
Wole Soyinka, the alternately mystical and didactic exiled Nigerian writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, said, "Literature eschews absolutes and opens the human mind to the possibility of error."
Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobelist, described herself as "enchanted by enchantment."
But perhaps it was Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, the current Nobel winner, who summed up the interplay of myth and uncertainty in literature.
"It is the second job of literature to create myth," he said through an interpreter. "But its first job is to destroy that myth."
More than 1,000 people attended these freewheeling conversations on a stage at the Carter Presidential Center. This was the last event of a multiyear Cultural Olympiad sponsored by the Georgia Review and the Atlanta Committee on the Olympic Games as a lead-in to the 1996 Summer Olympics, which will be held in Atlanta. Its organizers said this was the largest gathering of Nobel literature laureates in the 94-year history of the prize.
Jeffrey Babcock, the director of the Olympic committee's cultural programs, noted that in recent years the cultural programs held by the host cities have centered on the performing arts. But Atlanta sought to create a four-year, multidisciplinary arts, entertainment and literature program to culminate with the Olympic Arts Festival, which is to coincide with the summer games.
Historically, culture was no stranger to the Olympics Games, said Rita Dove, the 1993 American poet laureate who helped to organize this event, which, in addition to the panel discussions, included afternoon and evening readings by the laureates. During the games in ancient Greece, she noted, there were music and literary competitions as well as appearances by writers looking for new and broader audiences for their work.
The gathering also included Czeslaw Milosz, the 83-year-old Polish-Lithuanian poet and 1980 Nobel Prize winner, who has lived in the United States for 35 years; French novelist Claude Simon, 81, who won in 1985; Mexican poet, essayist and diplomat Octavio Paz, 81, who won in 1990; and poet and playwright Derek Walcott, 65, of Trinidad, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992.
Koppel was on target as far as his comments on advance preparations were concerned. The rigid planning of the event could be seen in the squadrons of Cadillacs that chauffeured the laureates from place to place and the small army of Olympic committee staff members with walkie-talkies, who reported the movements of the writers minute by minute. The air at the conference crackled with radio static as well as the artful and finely tuned words of the participants.
One day they lingered over a private luncheon at which they staged a mock "revolt of the laureates" on Brodsky's behalf to win this taciturn chain smoker the right to smoke in the usually nonsmoking Carter Center dining room.
There were small kindnesses and evident pleasures in their encounters. Sitting on a panel discussion next to Brodsky, Morrison poured him a glass a water while he spoke. Milosz openly expressed an almost childlike joy at finally meeting Soyinka, whom he said he had long admired.