I have been trying to pull together my thoughts about the Nobel Prize for Literature ever since the denizens of Metafilter spent the night before the announcement placing their bets.
It was an interesting discussion, and one which brought to mind the perpetual use of such awards and lists and the like -- as sparks for a conversation which produce a rich yield of recommendations. Speculation on MeFi about possible American honorees ranged from the far out to the well-reasoned (if mistaken).
In the end, of course, the 2002 winner was Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian novelist little known in this country -- not known to me at all, though this is not particularly notable, as the wasteland of my own personal ignorance is vast. As a consequence of said ignorance, I have nothing to say about Kertesz or his work, and can only add it to the list of writers I need to read.
However, the occasion of the Nobel award itself (and not the committee's particular choice), does raise in me some questions, or at least one question. To wit: why exactly do we care about the Nobel Prize for Literature at all?
(Wait, don't go yet. No, please, sit down. Give me a second, here.)
The Nobel prizes, for the most part, reward something fairly measurable: the importance of an individual contribution to a field of science -- physics, chemistry, medicine, economics (this one's a johnny-come-lately, but still). The language, while lofty and of course leaving lots of room for intra-field politics, nevertheless focuses the prizes on significant advances in theory in a particular academic field or set of related fields. The territory, in each case, of the experts in that field. There are two prizes which are different: the Peace prize and the prize in Literature.
The Peace prize is overtly political. It is given out annually by a committee selected by the Norwegian parliament, and (as with this year) its choice is often designed to send some kind of a message to the community of power-wielding world politicians about what that group finds worthy of praise. Since it comes with a lot of prestige, it is a carrot dangled as an inducement to leaders to make or broker peace. And since having a dissident in your society get it brings a nation a kind of inverse prestige, it is also a kind of moral stick held out against repressive governments. The Peace prize is purely political, and takes its meaning in that arena openly. It's also completely subjective -- but no one would mistake it for anything else. I don't really know how useful it is on the whole, but at least I know what it is and isn't.
The Prize in Literature, however, is a harder thing to manage. Ostensibly rewarding the same "benefit to humanity" that the other prizes offer, it differs in that it is the only one which presumes to reward excellence in art. That itself seems rather strange -- why not a prize in painting? In sculpture? In acting? The answer is, of course, that old Alf Nobel only specified literature in his will, and the Nobel committee follows his instructions. But the prize for Economics was added without anyone consulting Nobel in the afterworld, so presumably these things aren't unchangeable. More to the point, the prestige of the prize (beyond it's monetary benefit) is enormous -- and depends on the world continuing to esteem Nobel's prize and his categories.
More curiously to me, we accept the Nobel as a "lifetime" award, a judgement laid down on the individual. Toni Morrison is a Nobelist. So is Gunter Grass. It is not that Beloved or The Tin Drum were rewarded with esteem, in the manner of the Booker and the Pulitzer. These prizes are fraught with their own insufficiencies, and of course their own politics. But the book can, as it were, stand alone in competition against other books. And the limitations (must have been published first in thus-and-so-country, between these given dates) lend a necessary constraint to the task of aesthetic judgement. Ask me "Who of the Romantic poets was the most valuable to humanity," and I (if honest) will have absolutely no answer for you. Ask me to compare the merits of Songs of Innocence and Experience with Lyrical Ballads and I might have something to say (not right now, though, really, but thanks for asking).
But the while the Nobel gestures at the excellence of a particular piece of work, it refuses the limitations that make aesthetic conversation possible by marching off into the transcendent empyrean of "benefit to humanity." This by itself maddens me -- it confers such a mantle of sainthood that to argue with it almost immediately puts us into the territory beyond argument. Is Toni Morrison as important to literature as Wole Soyinka? Are we talking about the art or the artist? Their whole body of work, or one significant document? Since almost all of the nominees are worthy of a considerable degree of praise, it becomes a question of hopelessly un-sortable aesthetic criteria. It's not comparing apples to oranges. It's comparing wonderfully delicious apples to exceptionally finely made Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
So how do the categories get sorted out? Politically, and with no great deal of sophistication. Everyone assumes now that the committee will rotate from country to country, giving each equal time. A sort of calculus seems to be undertaken, so that a kind of ideal parliament, representing various peoples, temperaments, and historical issues.
And a big part of me sees that as inevitable, and in truth laudable. I'd like to see that parliament meet. I'd like to see them break up into committees and read the minutes. I don't know what on earth one could expect them to do, but I think the minutes of their arguments alone might be worth the trouble of building them a nice-looking meeting hall. (Some, of course, would be incredibly self-serving and boring as hell. But some of the screaming matches would be priceless).
Yet there's another part that whispers, every year: It's a sham. It's a well-meant fraud. It's a benevolent distraction from the literature itself.
And then I feel horribly ashamed to run down anything, any part at all, of our embattled and increasingly marginalized (sub)culture of writers and readers.
So...ah...um... what do you think?
[Must... say... something... to... provide... moral... support.]
Like any artistic prize, the Nobel is trapped by the difficulty that there's usually more than one writer in any one year who hasn't won it yet and ought to. It's no different in that respect to the Booker, the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, the Grammies, or whatever. It only becomes objectionable when someone who doesn't deserve it wins it - but the Nobel committee has the advantage that it can award an obscure little-translated writer and sidestep the sort of scrunity the Academy would get for awarding Best Picture to Earnest Saves Christmas. Few people in the world will have read any particular author's entire collected works, so if we're not sure about the merits of a particular award - say, if we've read one of a Nobel winner's books and thought it dull - we assume that the rest must have been more impressive.
If they could add Economics, why not these:
The Nobel Prize for Cuisine
The Nobel Prize for Topiary
The Nobel Prize for Infomercials
The Nobel Prize for Amateur Dramatics
The Nobel Prize for Feng Shui
The Nobel Prize for Big Hair
The Nobel Prize for Prizes
I believe the Nobel Prize for Economics is not technically a Nobel Prize; it's a medal given out at the same time as the Nobels with a fuzzy name.
Posted by: Gavin on October 16, 2002 10:28 AMAs to the larger point of your essay, it seems to me that literary prizes are good insofar as they do either of two things:
1. Provide money to writers so they can keep writing.
2. Encourage reading.
The Booker Prize does an excellent job of the second (and I believe isn't shabby at #1). The Nobel choices are so hopscotch and random that they have only marginal effects on #2, but they do a marvelous job of handing out the dynamite money.
Posted by: Gavin on October 16, 2002 10:32 AMIf we subscribe to the notion that de gustibus non est disputandum, any prize handed to a single author becomes an arbitrary choice (the winner) made by an arbitrarily selected group (the committee), operating under arbitrary ground rules (spread it around the countries, genres, etc.). If that's a distraction from literature itself, it's not much of one, and if it's benevolent, then...shrug.
If on the other hand we believe that quality in literature is a thing we can recognize, if not define, then I propose next year's prize go to Robert M. Persig for his exposition of same in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Good post, Wombat sir. Hadn't given the matter much thought. I always envisioned the prize as nothing more or less than "Some People Think This is the Best Book of the Year." That plus, you know, politics, culture wars, fun stuff like that.
But, and not to derail, but can you elaborate on what this means: "our embattled and increasingly marginalized (sub)culture of writers and readers[?]"
Posted by: hackly_fracture on October 16, 2002 11:38 AMI promise a highly unsatisfactory continuation of the above in the morning.
In the meantime, although there are still some glitches (I seem to have lost the monthly file for June!), behold the glory of 99% functional archives, monthly and individual. Full-on permalinkability back through the weedy mess of uncorrected typos, expired links, and ephemeral noodling. Thanks, Rory, for the cleanup job.
Posted by: BT on October 17, 2002 12:29 AMThe solution is to counter the Nobel with a prize devoted to the trashiest, nihilistic, underground literature being created today. If literary pretensions cloud the Booker, if politics obfuscates the Nobel, if the evocation of time marks the Pultizer, then the time has come for us to embrace the urban wiseacre, the wormy, scurvy-ridden tale-teller unfolding his stories because, frankly, no one has the courage to dwell upon the unfashionable with such ardor.
In an age where awards -- even well-meaning prizes driven by philanthrophy and the best intentions -- it's time to stop being so clean about this nonsense. I want awards handed out to crumbling paperbacks, their musty pages stained with blood or semen, their stories evoking the realities that most perambulators will never tred in. How do we encourage the Terry Southerns, the Bill Plymptons, the Robert Crumbs or the Abe Pecks of our world?
Literature in particular has become a staid and sedate McSweeney's affair. Hip digressive nothingness flourishes. It is all dull entertainment for the masses, rather than tough and stylistic truth, or even narratives that challenge. (At a recent literary festival in San Francisco, I saw one McSweeney's sanctioned author get the crowd going over a restaurant named "Egg Scalibur." Such concept "literary" digressive humor is equivalent to the crappy knock knock jokes I endured in elementary school. This author could have taken the "Egg Scalibur" concept and turned it into a biting satire of the King Arthur legend or, even more interestingly, used it to juxtapose everyday life against the mythology the Western world is become more unschooled in. Instead, she took the Seinfield approach. Her "story" was no different than a Larry David blandfest. No doubt it would be read on NPR's "All Things Considered" just like the rest of its ilk.)
The mentality that has caused the safe choice to win awards and print space in New York magazines and newspapers is the same one that has discouraged the politically incorrect, the scatological, the arcane, the scintillating -- above all, the hard-boiled vagrants vomitting in the alleyway or the book that requires multiple readings to comprehend.
Posted by: Ed on October 17, 2002 02:20 AMA delayed follow-up:
First, I'll note how happy I am to pay host to an Ed-rant; clearly, sir, you're aching to re-open for business. (I'll address your point below).
Second, to Mr. Fracture's question. What I mean by a reference to "our embattled and increasingly marginalized (sub)culture of writers and readers" is this: that the community of people on this planet who care about the pleasures, insights, and complexities of reading books (not just newspapers or weblogs and so forth but sustained, involved narratives and analyses) is one which, as a proportion of the population of otherwise literate folk, shrinking rather than growing. Those of us who think there is something valuable and important about the act of reading are in the minority, even among the technologically competent class.
Many people I know who work in publishing -- and who survey with something close to despair the evaporating market for moderately thoughtful fiction and nonfiction -- have pointed out to me that spending one's energy arguing the uselessness of the Nobel prize for lit (or making similar cavils) is akin to bitching about the ugly carpet in a house which is rapidly burning to the ground. It doesn't matter if you're right, because soon it will be one of history's footnotes (metaphor used with every bit of irony I can muster). And your negativity might just convince the fire department, should they arrive, to say "This guy's right -- let the place burn!"
I don't agree. The existence of the Nobel Prize for Literature doesn't make more readers than there are. But, as I said, to argue against it seems on the surface to be an argument against the importance of books, writers, and literature. Hence my anxiety and tentativeness about making the point.
And yet, I believe it more now than I did last night. As Rory and Jonathan both point out, there's an inherent problem with literary awards in that (a) they come down to the judges taste and/or politics, and (b) even when they reflect a massive consensus about an achievement, they necessarily pass over work that's often equally good because, well, you can't always have ties (although the Booker has done this). But my point is simply this: I can accept them as legitimate -- even fun to debate and a valuable part of literary culture, with all of their shortcomings -- because they award novels or poems or biographies and so forth. They say at bottom, "good work." They say "We think this one was the best of its kind this year. Just our opinion, but there it is."
The Nobel, in effect, says "Good life." It says "You and your body of work represent Nobel-ness." It confers a kind of literary sainthood, which, disattached from an object, is hard to make sense of. I can say "Kavalier and Clay did not deserve the Pulitzer, because these other novels which came out in the same year, were better. Here's why." We can't, of course, get to facts about it, but we can get to the space of rational argument and discussion -- which may end in the throwing up of hands and the invoking of de gustibus, but may well change the minds of discussants.
I have never had nor heard a rational discussion about whether one writer deserves the Nobel over another, or at least not that focused on writing. I have seen plenty of handicapping of Nobel choices ("Atwood will get it because..."), but this is not the same. In general, the discussions are about the persona the writer has created, or the "influence" or "importance" the writer has (absolute guesses on anyone's part), or (worst of all) what will be symbolized, politically, by the choice of the writer.
I don't really object to the committee picking someone on the basis of long-term achievement and giving them a pot of money. Hell, that's what Nobel told them to do. But we should pay them no mind. What bugs me is the status and prestige the world has attached to this meaningless prize. Yes, the committee is always careful to pick its recipient from among writers who have done distinguished work, and so I don't begrudge the writer this arbitrary windfall. But that's what it is.
Now, to Ed's point: I don't really think that the Nobel would be any better if it rewarded the "outlaw spirit" of, say, Terry Southern, though I agree with you that in the current climate it's unlikely to pick anybody who seems dangerous. (It wasn't always so -- in 1951 they picked Par Lagerkvist, a novelist who wrote some of the most energetically scabrous and thoroughly nasty characters you'll ever find. -- more at http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1951/index.html). Where I would concur with you is that part of my problem is the odor of sanctity around the award; it does seem like that's the kind of thing that would keep it out of the hands of a brilliant, brilliant misanthrope/creep like R. Crumb. Which, if it were really an award about artistic achievement, would not be the case.
A final irony: I suspect that, of course, by ranting endlessly about how we should pay no mind to the foolish spectacle of the Nobel Prize, I have undoubtedly revealed a much greater emotional involvement with it than anyone else I know. It's probably just sour grapes, as a part of me hopes every year to get the call about new award for the Intended Literature.
(OK -- I'm done. Really.)
Posted by: BT on October 17, 2002 06:09 PMBill: I was a bit sloppy in my last comment, but I meant to imply that a few awards should be handed out: one to acknowledge the safe, one to acknowledge the down and dirty. After all, if we can discriminate actors by gender with the Oscars (a division that no one has seen fit to explain or question, despite quite a huff over race), then why not pursue a more fruitful literary-oriented mitosis by slick and sweat? Clearly, lists and awards encourage people to get excited about various mediums. The more distinction behind an award, the more feverish the observations. Why can't that same zeal apply to a more egalitarian take on this whole gambit?
In the meantime, I'm going to have to check out Par Lagerkvist. :)
Posted by: Ed on October 19, 2002 10:56 AMHmmm. A couple of things. One, I sort of like the Lifetime Achievement feel of the Nobel. It's nice. This brings me to Two: I don't really look at Lifetime Achievement Awards as sainthoods or sacrosanct.
For instance, when Jose Saramago won the Nobel, I bought Blindness because it happened to be new, it was built on a good premise, and it had that pretty Nobel sticker on it. I was so glad, afterward, that Nobel had pointed me toward Saramago. I later read and enjoyed another book of his, All the Names, which I nominated for a book group and initiated the demise of said group, since everyone but me hated it.
My point is, no one -- neither readers nor critics -- would hesitate to criticize a Nobel winner. I think the great thing about literature is, nothing can confer sainthood except the test of time. The author gets a hell of a PR ride out of the deal, but two years later, who (outside the publishing industry) remembers the author won (before the book jacket reminds them)? Would I buy the latest Saramago book just because he won the prize, like I did in 1998? Nope, but I sure am glad we were introduced. I was drawn to the literature by the prize, not distracted from it.
Gee. I had been headed for bed but I can never resist a chance to play devil's advocate.
Posted by: Christina on October 20, 2002 11:04 PMChristina! My old nemesis! I thought I had banished you -- and your accursed advocacy of the devil -- to the distant realm of the beltway!
You know, if you're going to be all *reasonable* about it...
Posted by: BT on October 21, 2002 10:32 PM