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

[Ya Sam]

The author is reading my thoughts.


>From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: What's So Funny About the Nobel Prize for Literature?
>Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 08:04:27 -0700 (PDT)
>
>What's So Funny About the Nobel Prize for Literature?
>
>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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>gaming/betting site. Below horses, greyhounds,
>hurling, snooker and even ladies football — click on
>"Nobel Literature Prize."
>
>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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