What's So Funny About the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Mon Oct 2 10:04:27 CDT 2006

Critics of the decreasingly influential award charge
that political agendas trump great writing, but maybe
it's always been thus.

By Susan Salter Reynolds
October 1, 2006

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There they are in all their glory, this year's
contenders for the world's most coveted writing award:
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (3-1 odds), Syrian poet
Adonis (4-1), Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski
(5-1), Joyce Carol Oates (6-1), followed (ouch) by
Philip Roth (10-1) and down into the nether regions of
Nobel hopefuls, a list that veers closer to the
sublime  South Korean poet Ko Un, Swedish poet Thomas
Transtromer, novelists Milan Kundera and Thomas
Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Julian Barnes,
Paul Auster and, last but not least, Bob Dylan at
500-1  than the ridiculous.

The winner will be named on an unspecified date not
long after all the other Nobel categories are
announced beginning this week. And of this you can be
sure: There will be grousing. The general consensus
over the last few years seems to be that the Nobel
Prize in literature has become, as Roger Straus,
co-founder of Farrar, Straus and Giroux once claimed,
a "joke," or as Charles McGrath, former editor of the
New York Times Book Review, has said more
diplomatically, a "great mystery." It's been a
difficult decade for the prize-to-end-all-prizes
(though the charm of the 10 million Swedish kronor 
or close to $1.4 million  remains indisputable).

Last year, London literary critic Robert McCrum
bemoaned the Nobel's loss of innocence. The 1997
selection of Italian communist anarchist playwright
Dario Fo, he wrote, caused "near universal dismay,"
and the 2000 award to Chinese novelist, playwright and
poet Gao Xingjian mere "bafflement." The 2004 choice
of Elfriede Jelinek, the belligerently unreadable
Austrian feminist, was even more controversial, and
caused Knut Ahnlund, one of the 18 members of the
Swedish Academy (whose members serve for life) to
walk. "Degradation, humiliation, desecration and
self-disgust, sadism and masochism are the main themes
of Elfriede Jelinek's work," he wrote in the
conservative paper Svenska Dagblat. "All other aspects
of human life are left out."

Ahnlund accused Horace Engdahl, who has been permanent
secretary of the committee since 1999, of "destroying
the moral nerve of the nation." The New Criterion
magazine chimed in with a conservative attack, calling
the selection of Jelinek "a new low" and, while it was
at it, saying Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel Prize served,
sniff, only to "cheapen" the prize.

Engdahl, a mere schoolboy at 57 compared with some of
his colleagues on the committee, enjoys a kind of
notoriety in Swedish literary circles that he often
refers to as hurtful. Why do they hate him so? While
Ahnlund likes a good human story, Engdahl is a
post-structuralist who believes in things like
"textual analysis." In his speech at the presentation
of the Nobel to Jelinek, he quoted Hegel (never
popular at parties): "Woman is society's irony."

"If literature is a force that leads to nothing,"
Engdahl pressed on, addressing Jelinek, "you are, in
our day, one of its truest representatives."
(Thunderous applause.)

Engdahl has said that he wants to broaden the scope of
the prize, "enlarge the mandate"; that it should
"develop as literature develops." Some prize-watchers
take this to mean a larger opening for journalists and
philosophers (like Bertrand Russell, who won in 1950,
or Winston Churchill, who won in 1953, or journalist
Ryszard "5-1" Kapuscinski).

But what does it all mean? Where is Derrida when you
need him? When Alfred Nobel, who died at 63 in 1896,
made provision for the prizes in his 1895 will, the
language delineating criteria for the literary prize
was, well, obscure. The prize, he said, should go "to
the person who shall have produced in the field of
literature the most outstanding work in an ideal
direction." Hmmm. But then this was a guy who, just a
few lines down, wrote that it was his "express wish
that following my death my veins shall be opened, and
when this has been done and competent Doctors have
confirmed clear signs of death, my remains shall be
cremated in a so-called crematorium."

Today, the overriding question is how much do the
writer's politics factor into the nomination and
award? Is the prize for literature or for politics?
(It's a dessert topping! No, it's a floor wax!) "It's
a literary prize," McCrum insists, "not a platform for
sending political messages."

But the people at the New Criterion certainly don't
think that it's being treated that way. More and more,
they say, the prize "has gone to a person who has the
correct sex, geographical address, ethnic origin and
political profile  'correct' being determined by the
commissars at the Swedish Academy."

Swedish literary critic Mats Gellerfelt, quoted in a
long New Yorker article on the prize in 1999, agreed:
"The ideal candidate for the Nobel Prize today," he
said, "would be a lesbian from Asia."

Close followers of the prize process refer to Polish
poet Czeslaw Milosz's win in 1980, the same year the
Solidarity movement formed, or William Butler Yeats'
win in 1923, a year after Ireland won independence (to
name just two) as proof that the prize has always been
politicized.

British playwright Harold Pinter, who said he was
amazed when he won last year's prize ("It never
occurred to me that I was a contender," he told the
Guardian), credited his politics  not just the
literary merits of his 29 plays. Pinter previously
turned down an offer of knighthood from John Major,
but he accepted the Nobel with relish, looking in
photos, after a fall in Ireland that left his face
bloody and scarred, like a happy pirate. His work is
unabashedly left-leaning, with recent references to
President Bush as a "mass murderer" and to Tony Blair
as "a deluded idiot," and condemnation of the war in
Iraq sprinkled generously throughout. (According to
Pinter, a British news channel, mistakenly thinking
that he had died after his fall, reported in the
morning that "Harold Pinter is dead," only to change
its mind later and announce, "No, he's won the Nobel
Prize.")

Whatever the criteria, there's no question that many
literary giants have failed to win the prize. Critics
point to the glaring omissions of Leo Tolstoy, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust,
among others (but then again, Gandhi was never awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize, so maybe there's some kind of
freakish reverse psychology thing happening). Boris
Pasternak and Jean-Paul Sartre both refused the prize,
though Sartre's relatives high-tailed it to Stockholm
after the writer died to demand the money, a demand
that was refused.

(Meanwhile, the entire nation of South Korea has
waited patiently for almost a decade for its
front-runner, Buddhist poet Ko Un  12-1 at Ladbroke's
 to win, each year expressing polite disappointment,
resignation and hopefulness for the coming decades.)

There is something smarmy (or perhaps merely pathetic)
about a writer who sets out to build his career around
hopes of winning the Nobel, something many American
writers, including Norman Mailer, Updike and Oates,
have been accused of. (Never mind that Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda wanted it so much that he reportedly
invited Swedish writers, critics and academics for
lavish vacations at his seaside villa on a regular
basis.) Roth, whose tireless campaigning to publish
the work of Eastern European writers has always seemed
out of sync with his usual subject matter (himself)
also has been accused of brown-nosing for the prize.
In the opening scenes of Mailer's 1971 book "The
Prisoner of Sex," he describes himself as a writer
who, after "twenty-one years of public life," longs
only for the chance to put the acronym "FNPW" (for
Famous Nobel Prize Winner) before his name.

Douglas Messerli, publisher of Green Integer, right
here in our own L.A. backyard, has had many writers
nominated for the Nobel over the years. This year he
has two poets fairly high up on the list: Adonis (Ali
Ahmad Said) and Ko Un. Adonis, who was born in 1930,
is one of the first Arab poets to write explicitly
about sex and love. He's an experimental writer, with
political statements embedded throughout his writing.

This is the third time he's been nominated for the
prize, and Messerli, over on Wilshire Boulevard, gears
up each year for an emergency print run, should either
Adonis or Ko Un win.

"We're talking another 1,000 or so copies," he said,
not the millions that tend to accompany the
announcement of the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most
prestigious literary prize. Why? Because of the highly
literary nature of the work, and because it's poetry.

Isn't this a sobering and lovely thought in these days
of greed? The Nobel Prize in literature, one of the
most lucrative prizes a writer can win, goes, more
often than not, to the least commercial work in the
world. Surely Alfred Nobel, whose lifelong tinkering
with nitroglycerin produced some of the most
destructive materials and deadliest weapons in the
world, and whose name is now synonymous with world
peace, would appreciate that small, triumphant irony.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-reynolds1oct01,0,820166.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

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