Language, Literature, and the Politics of Silence

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Lecture by Deborah Levy. Photo Courtesy from Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

"To become a writer I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all." - Deborah Levy from Things I Don’t Want to Know.

George Orwell published his brief autobiographical essay, Why I Write in 1946. In his essay, he identified four reasons for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. Establishing a dialogue with Orwell, Deborah Levy’s autobiographical work Things I Don’t Want to Know (in Spanish, Cosas que no quiero saber, Literatura Random House, 2019) is partly a homage to his essay and partly Levy’s own life story, told from the standpoint of a mature woman. A well-known figure in the English literary scene, Levy starts out from Orwell’s essay, revisiting it from the perspective of a woman writer. In this lecture, in which it coincides with the publication in Spanish of her two most recent books, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography (in Spanish, El coste de vivir, Literatura Random House, 2019), Deborah Levy talks about the political project as a motivation in her own writing.

In Catalan/English. 

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