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Contemporary literature is a "literature of despair," this year's Nobel Prize winner for literature Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio said in a 2001 interview.
Le Clezio, 68, said that writers today don't have the view that their writing can change the world and it would be the point of literature at this time to echo the chaos of ideas and images people confront.
"The role of literature today is perhaps to echo this chaos," he said.
"We no longer have the presumptuousness to believe, as they did in Sartre's day, that a novel can change the world," said in an interview with Label France. "Today, writers can only record their political impotence."
He noted that writers such as Sartre, Camus, Dos Passos or Steinbeck "had limitless confidence in the future of mankind and in the power of the written word."
"Can anyone conceivably imagine today that an editorial in a newspaper could help solve the problems that are ruining our lives? Contemporary literature is a literature of despair."
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